[Transcriber's notes]
This text is derived from
http://www.archive.org/details/catholicworld03pauluoft
Although square brackets [] usually designate footnotes or transcriber's notes, they do appear in the original text.
This text includes Volume III;
Number 1--April 1866
Number 2--May 1866
Number 3--June 1866
Number 4--July 1866
Number 5--August 1866
Number 6--September 1866
[End Transcriber's notes]

THE CATHOLIC WORLD.
Monthly Magazine
of
GENERAL LITERATURE AND SCIENCE.
VOL. III.
APRIL TO SEPTEMBER, 1866.

NEW YORK:
LAWRENCE KEHOE, PUBLISHER,
145 Nassau Street.
1866.

CONTENTS.

All-Hallow Eve; or The Test of Futurity, [97], [241].
Abbey, Glastonbury, [150].
Animal Life, Curiosities of, [232].
Alexandria, Christian Schools of, [354], [484].
Abbeville, a Day at, [590].
Asses, Dogs, Cats, etc., [688].
A Celtic Legend, [810].
Benedictines, Rise of, [150].
Buried Alive, [805].
Curiosities of Animal Life, [232].
Catholic Publication Society, The, [278].
Christian Schools of Alexandria, The, [354], [484].
Cuckoo and Nightingale, The, [543].
Cardinal Tosti, [851].
Dr. Spring, Reminiscences of, [129].
Dreamers and Workers, [418].
De Guérin, Eugénie, Letters from Paris, [474].
Eirenicon, Reply to, by Very Rev. Dr. Newman, [46].
Eirenicon, Pamphlets on the, [217].
Eve de la Tour d'Adam, [366].
Ecce Homo, [618].
Episcopal Church, Doctrine on Ordination, [721].
France, Two Pictures of Life in, [411].
Franciscan Missions on the Nile, [768].
Glastonbury Abbey, [150].
Gerbet, l'Abbe, [308].
God Bless You, [593].
Gipsies, The, [702].
Haven't Time, [92].
Hürter, Frederick, [115].
Heaven, Nearest Place to, [433].
Ireland and the Informers of 1798, [122].
Irish Folk Books of the Last Century, [679].
Jenifer's Prayer, [17], [183], [318].
Kilkenny, a Month in, [301].
Legend, a Celtic, [810].
Miscellany, [137], [421], [570], [853].
Madeira, Tinted Sketches in, [265].
Newman, Very Rev. Dr., Saints of the Desert, [16], [170], [334].
Newman, Very Rev. Dr., Reply to Dr. Pusey's Eirenicon, [46].
New York; Religion in, [381].
Necklace, the Pearl, [693].
Nile, Franciscan Missions on the, [768].
Nile, Solution of the Problem of the, [828].
Old Thorneley's Heirs, [404], [443], [599], [738].
Our Ancestors, Industrial Arts of, [549], [780].
Patriarchate of Constantinople, Present State of, [1].
Prayer, Jenifer's, [17], [183], [318].
Problems of the Age, [145], [289], [518], [577], [758].
Perico the Sad, [497], [660], [787].
Perreyve, Henri, [845].
Reminiscences of Dr. Spring, [129].
Religion In New York, [381].
Reading, Use and Abuse of, [463].
Rome the Civilizer of Nations, [638].
Saints of the Desert, The, [16], [170], [334]Steam-Engine, Proposed Substitutes for, [29].
St. Paul, Youth of, [531].
Sealskins and Copperskins, [557].
The Age, Problems of, [145], [289], [518], [577], [758].
Turkestan, A Pretended Dervish in, [198], [370].
Two Pictures of Life In France before 1848, [411].
Three Women of our Time, [834].
Tosti, Cardinal, [851].
Unconvicted, [404], [443], [599], [738].
Use and Abuse of Reading, [463].
Virtue, Statistics of, [731].
Weddings, East Indian, [635].

POETRY.

Bury the Dead, [379].
Banned and Blessed, [306].
Christine, [32], [171], [335].
Claims, [556].
Carols from Cancionero, [692].
Christian Crown, The, [736].
D«y-Dreams, [483].
Hymn, [548].
Holy Saturday, [634].
Lockharts, Legend of the, [127].
Lost for Gold, [826].
Mater Divinae Gratiae, [216]May Breeze, [442].
Our Neighbor, [317].
Our Mother's Call, [462].
Poor and Rich, [240].
Peace, [410].
Requiem AEternam, [263].
Shell, Song of the, [96].
Sapphics, [517].
Sacrilege, the Curse of, [656].
Sonnet, [850].
The King and the Bishop, [528].
Therein, [597].
The Martyr, [617].
Thy Will be Done, [778].
Words of Wisdom, [121]

{iv}

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

Archbishop Hughes, Life of, [140].
Apostleship of Prayer, [428].
Agnes, [431].
Appleton's Annual Cyclopaedia, [719].
Army of the Potomac, Medical Recollections of, [854].
Biology, Spencer's Principles of, [425].
Blessed Virgin, Devotion to in North America, [574].
Biographical Dictionary, [574]Books for Young People, [720].
Criterion, Tuckerman's, [143].
Christ the Light of the World, [144].
Christus Judex, [288].
Christian Examiner, [427].
Christine, [717].
Cosas de Espana, [858].
Dictionary, Webster's, [143].
Draper's Text Books of Chemistry, etc, [576].
Darras' Church History, [719].
Eirenicon, Dr. Pusey's, [283].
Eugénie de Guérin, Letters of, [859].
English Language, Practical Grammar of, [860].
Faber's New Book, [287].
Froude's History of England, [718].
Grahams, The, [288].
Grant, Headley's Life of, [575].
Hughes, Archbishop, Life of, [140].
Holy Childhood, Report of, [573].
Headley's Life of Grant, [575].
Homes without Hands, [860].
Kennett, Story of, [431].
Keating's Ireland, [432].
Mount Hope Trial, [430].
Marshall's Missions, [430].
May Carols, De Vere's, [432].
Marcy's Army Life, [716].
New-Englander, The, [855].
Prayer, Apostleship of, [428].
Priest and People, Good Thoughts for, [431].
Poetry of the Civil War, [576].
Queen's English, A Plea for the, [857].
Spencer's Principles of Biology, [425].
Spalding's Miscellanea, [571].
Shakespeare on Insanity, [860].
Wyoming, Valley of, [859].

[{1}]

THE CATHOLIC WORLD.
VOL. III., NO. 1.--APRIL, 1866.

[ORIGINAL.]

THE PRESENT STATE OF THE PATRIARCHATE OF CONSTANTINOPLE. [Footnote 1]

[Footnote 1: "L'Eglise Orientale, par Jaques G. Pitzipios, Fondateur de la Société Chrétienne Orientale." Rome: Imprimerie de la Propagande, 1855.]

In the year 1841, the bishops of the Protestant Episcopal dioceses of Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Missouri, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, professing to speak in the name of their church in the United States, addressed the following language to the schismatical Patriarch of Constantinople, whom they style "the venerable and right reverend father in God the Patriarch of the Greek Church, resident at Constantinople:"

"The church in the United States of America, therefore, looking to the triune God for his blessings upon its efforts for unity in the body of Christ, turn with hope to the Patriarch of Constantinople, the spiritual head of the ancient and venerable Oriental Church." [Footnote 2]

[Footnote 2: Quoted in the "Memoir of Rev. F.A. Baker," p. 47.]

This is by no means the only instance of overtures of this kind, looking toward a union between Protestant Episcopalians and Eastern schismatics, with the view of concentrating the opposition to the Roman See under a rival Oriental primacy. The Non-jurors, who were ejected from their sees at the overthrow of the Stuarts, proposed to the Synod of Bethlehem to establish the primacy in the patriarchate of Jerusalem; but their proposal was met by a decidedly freezing refusal. The American bishops who signed the letter from which the foregoing extract is taken show a remarkable desire to bow down before some ecclesiastical power more ancient and venerable than themselves; and in their extreme eagerness to propitiate the Eastern prelates, they acknowledge without scruple the most arrogant titles usurped by the Patriarch of Constantinople, although from their want of familiarity with the ecclesiastical language, they do it in a very unusual and peculiar style. Whatever may be at present the particular views of those who are seeking to bring about a union between the Protestant Episcopal churches and the Easterns, in regard to the order of hierarchical organization, they are evidently disposed to pay court to the successor of Photius and Michael Cerularius, and to espouse [{2}] warmly his quarrel against Rome. His figure is the foremost one in the dispute, and there is every disposition to take advantage as far as possible of the rank which the See of Constantinople has held since the fifth century, first by usurpation and afterward by the concession of Rome, as second to the Apostolic See of St. Peter. We do not accuse all those who are concerned in the union movement of being animated by a spirit of enmity against Rome. Some of them, we believe, are seeking for the healing of the schisms of Christendom in a truly Catholic spirit, although not fully enlightened concerning the necessary means for doing so. We may cherish the same hope concerning some of the Oriental prelates and clergy also, especially those who have manifested a determination not to compromise a single point of Catholic dogma for the sake of union with Protestants. We are quite sure, however, that the loudest advocates of union in the Protestant ranks, and their most earnest and hearty sympathizers in the East, are thoroughly heretical and schismatical in their spirit and intentions, and are aiming at the overthrow of the Roman Church, and a revolution in the orthodox Eastern communion, as their dearest object. While, therefore, we disclaim any hostile attitude toward men like Dr. Pusey and other unionists of his spirit, and would never use any language toward them which is not kind and respectful, we are compelled to brand the use which other ecclesiastics in high position have sought to make of this Greek question as entirely unprincipled. Their cringing and bowing before the miserable, effete form of Christianity at Constantinople, dictated as it is chiefly by hatred against Rome, is something unworthy of honest Christians and intelligent Englishmen and Americans. Many very sincere and well-disposed persons are no doubt misled by their artful misrepresentations. On that account it is very necessary to bring out as clearly as possible the true state of the case, as regards Oriental Christendom, that it may be seen how little support Anglicanism or any kind of Protestantism can draw from that quarter; and how strongly the entire system of Catholic dogma is sustained by the history and traditions of the Eastern Church.

We may possibly hereafter discuss more at large some of these important subjects relating to the Eastern Church and the schism which has desolated its fairest portions for so many centuries. On this occasion we intend merely to throw a little light on the present actual condition of the patriarchate of Constantinople, in order to dissipate any illusion that may have been created by high-sounding words, and to show how little reason there is to "turn with hope to the spiritual head of the Oriental Church" for any enlightening or sanctifying influences upon the souls which are astray from the fold of St. Peter. We waive, for the time, all consideration of past events, anterior to the period of Turkish domination, and all discussion of the remote circumstances which have brought the See of Constantinople into its present state of degradation, and of obstinate secession from the unity of the Church.

We take it as we find it, under the Mohammedan dominion, and will endeavor to show how it stands in relation to other churches of the East, and what are its claims on the respect and honor of Western Christians.

The Patriarch of Constantinople is not the Patriarch of the "Greek Church." There is no designation of this kind known in the East. The style there used is, the "Holy Eastern Church." The Greek rite, or form of celebrating mass and administering the sacraments in the Greek language, is only one of the rites sanctioned by the Catholic Church which are in use among those Christians who are not under the Latin rite. What is usually called in the West the Greek Church has several independent organizations. [{3}] The Patriarch of Constantinople, who very early subjugated the patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem to his dominion, now rules over the same patriarchates, which have dwindled to very insignificant dimensions, and over all the separated orthodox Christians of the Turkish empire. The Russian Church, which was erected into a distinct patriarchate by Ivan III., is under the supreme jurisdiction of the imperial governing synod. The Patriarch of Constantinople is treated with respect and honor, and referred to for advice and counsel, by the Russian authorities; but he has no more jurisdiction in Russia than the Archbishop of Baltimore has in the province of New York. The Church of Greece not only threw off all dependence on the See of Constantinople after the revolution, but renounced all communication with it, for reasons to be mentioned hereafter. The separated Greek Christians of the Austrian empire are governed by the Patriarch of Carlovitz, and there is at least one other separate jurisdiction in the Montenegrine provinces. The Patriarch of Constantinople possesses, therefore, an actual jurisdiction over a fraction only of the Eastern Church. Within the proper limits of his own patriarchate this jurisdiction is absolute, both in ecclesiastical and civil matters, subject only to the supreme authority of the sultan. Immediately after the capture of Constantinople by the Turks, the Sultan Mahomet II. conferred upon the Patriarch Grennadius the character of Milet-bachi, or chief of a nationality, giving him investiture by the pastoral staff and mantle with his own hands. The reason of his doing so was, that the Mohammedan law recognizes only Mohammedans as members of a Mohammedan nationality. In more recent times, the sultans, disgusted by the venal and tyrannical conduct of the patriarchs, have refused to confer this investiture in person, and it is now done by the grand vizier. Eight metropolitans, namely, those of Chalcèdon, Ephesus, Derendah, Heraclèa, Cyzicus, Nicomedia, Caesarèa, and Adrianople, form the supreme council of the patriarchate, and, with the patriarch, administer the ecclesiastical and civil government of the Christians of their communion throughout the Ottoman empire. They have the control of the common chest or treasury of the Oriental rite in Turkey, and of that of the provinces; two great funds established originally for helping poor Christians to pay the exactions levied on them by the Mussulmans, but at present diverted to quite other uses by their faithless and rapacious guardians. They are also exclusively privileged to act as ephori or financial agents and bankers for the other one hundred and thirty-four bishops of the Turkish provinces, each one of them having as many of these episcopal clients as he can get.

Possessed of such an amount of ecclesiastical and civil power as the patriarchate of Constantinople has been within the Ottoman empire for several centuries, it is plain that it might have become the centre of an incalculable influence for the spiritual, moral, and social good of its subjects. Everything would seem to have combined to throw into the hands of the patriarch and his subordinate bishops the power of being truly the protectors and fathers of their people, and to furnish them with the most powerful motives for being faithful to their trust. The oppressed, despised, and impoverished condition of their poor, miserable people, slaves of a fanatical, barbarous, anti-Christian despotism, was enough to have awakened every noble and disinterested emotion in their bosoms, had they been men; and to have aroused the most devoted, self-sacrificing charity and zeal in their hearts, had they been Christians worthy of the name or true Christian pastors. Moreover, if they had been true patriots, and really devoted to the interests of Christianity and the church, there was every inducement to avail themselves of their position [{4}] and to watch the opportunity of cultivating unity and harmony with the Catholic Church and the powerful Christian nations of the West, in order to secure their eventual deliverance from the detestable Moslem usurpation, and the restoration of religion among them to its ancient glory. All causes of misunderstanding and dissension had been done away at the Council of Florence. The perfect dogmatic agreement between the East and the West had been fully established. The Greek and other Oriental rites, and the local laws and customs, had been sanctioned. The patriarchs and hierarchy had been confirmed in their privileges. The Patriarch of Constantinople was even tacitly permitted to retain his high-sounding but unmeaning title of ecumenical patriarch without rebuke, and allowed to exercise all the jurisdiction which other patriarchs or metropolitans were willing to concede to him, subject to the universal supremacy of Rome. The remembrance of the gallant warfare of the Latin Christians against their common Moslem enemy, and especially of the heroic devotion of the cardinal legate and his three hundred followers, who had buried themselves under the walls of Constantinople at its capture, ought to have effaced the memory of former wrongs [Footnote 3] and subdued the stupid, fanatical, unchristian sentiment of national antipathy against Christians of another race. Everything concurred to invite them to play a noble and glorious part toward their own Christian countrymen and toward Christendom in general. We are compelled, however, to say, with shame and pain, that they have proved so recreant to every one of these trusts and opportunities, their career has been one of such unparalleled infamy and perfidy, as to cover the Christian name with ignominy, and to merit for themselves the character of apostates from Christianity--seducers, corruptors, oppressors, and robbers of their own people.

[Footnote 3: The Crusaders undoubtedly committed some great outrages, in revenge far the treachery of the Byzantines, and some Latin missionaries imprudently attacked the Oriental rites and customs, but these acts were always disapproved and condemned by the Popes.]

We will first give a sketch of the line of conduct they have pursued in relation to ecclesiastical matters, and afterward of their administration of their civil authority.

It is notorious that the schismatical bishops and clergy of Turkey neglect almost entirely the duty of preaching the word of God and giving good Christian instruction to their people. The sacraments are administered in the most careless and perfunctory manner, and real practical Christian piety and morality are in a very low state both among clergy and laity. The clergy themselves are grossly ignorant and unfit for the exercise of their office, taken from the lowest class of the people, without instruction or preparation for orders, and treated by their superiors as menial servants. The bishops and higher clergy do not trouble themselves to remedy this gross incapacity of their inferiors, or to supply it by their own efforts. Consequently, the common Christian people of their charge have fallen into a state of moral degradation below that of the Turks themselves, by whom they are despised as the outcasts of society. The striking contrast between the schismatical clergy, monasteries, and people, and the Catholic, is proverbial among the Turks, and an object of remark even by Protestant travellers. It is probable that there have been many exceptions to the general rule of incompetence and supine neglect; but, viewing the case as a whole, it must be said that the patriarchs of Constantinople and their subordinate prelates have completely failed to do their duty as pastors of their people and their instructors and guides in religion and virtue. Their unfortunate position furnishes no adequate excuse, as will be seen when we examine a little further into the enterprises they have actually been engaged in, and see how well [{5}] they have succeeded in accomplishing what they have really desired and undertaken, which is nothing else than their own selfish aggrandizement. Look at the contrast between their conduct and that of the Catholic hierarchies of Russia, Poland, and Ireland under similar circumstances of oppression, and every shadow of excuse will vanish. No doubt there were many causes making it difficult to elevate the character of the ordinary clergy and the people, and tending to keep them down to a low level of intelligence and knowledge. This would furnish an excuse for a great deal, if there had been an evident struggle of the hierarchy to do their best in remedying the evil. Instead of doing this, they are the principal causes of the perpetuation and aggravation of this degraded state. Since the decay of the Ottoman power commenced, the clergy have had it in their power to bid defiance in great measure to the Turkish government. They have been able to control immense sums of money and to wield a great commercial and financial influence. They might have employed the intervention of Christian powers, and especially of Russia, if they had been governed by enlightened and Christian motives, in order to gain just rights and the means of improvement for their people. The Ottoman government, itself, has come to a more just and liberal policy, in which it would have welcomed the aid of the Christian hierarchy, had there been one worthy of the name. Their complete apathy at all times to everything which concerns the spiritual and moral welfare of their subjects will warrant no other conclusion than that they have practically apostatized from the faith and church of Christ, and are mere intruders into the fold which they lay waste and ravage.

In their attitude toward the Catholic Church and the Holy See, the hierarchy of the patriaichate are ignorantly, violently, and obstinately schismatical, and even heretical. The public and official teaching of the Eastern Church is orthodox, and therefore no one is adjudged to be a heretic simply because he adheres to that communion. One who intelligently and obstinately adheres to a schism as a state of permanent separation from the See of St. Peter, is, however, at least a constructive heretic, and is very likely to be a formal heretic, on several doctrines which have been defined by the Catholic Church. The nature of the opposition of the clergy of Constantinople to the Roman Church, the grounds on which they defend their contumacious rebellion, and the dogmatic arguments which they employ in the controversy, are such as to place them in the position of the most unreasonable and contumacious schismatics, and as it appears to our judgment, in submission to that of more learned theologians, of heretics also. So far as their influence extends, and it is very great, they are chiefly accountable for the isolated condition of the entire non-united Eastern Church. As the ambition of the Patriarch of Constantinople was the original cause of the schism, so now the ignorant and violent obstinacy of the clergy of the patriarchate, and their supreme devotion to their own selfish and narrow personal and party interests, is, in connection with a similar though less odious spirit in the chief Muscovite clergy, and the worldly policy of the Russian czar, the chief cause of its perpetuation.

The clergy of Constantinople have not hesitated to resort to forgery in order to do away with the legal and binding force of the act of their own predecessors in subscribing and promulgating throughout their entire jurisdiction the act of union established at the Council of Florence. Gennadius, the first patriarch elected after the Turkish conquest, was one of the prelates who signed the decree of the Council of Florence, a learned and virtuous man, and is believed to have lived and died in the [{6}] communion of the Holy See. Actual communication between Constantinople and Rome was, however, rendered absolutely impossible by the deadly hostility of the conquerors to their principal and most dangerous foe. The slightest attempt at any intercourse with the Latin Christians would have caused the extermination of all the Christian subjects of the Ottoman empire. It is difficult to discover, therefore, when and how it was that the supremacy of the Roman Church, whose actual exercise was thus at first impeded by the necessity of the case, was again formally repudiated by the patriarchs. There is a letter extant, written in the year 1584 by the Patriarch Jeremiah to Pope Gregory XIII., in which he says that "it belonged to him, as the head of the Catholic Church, to indicate the measures to be employed against the Protestants," and requests him in virtue of this office to point out what measures can be taken to arrest the advance of Protestantism. This is the last official act of the kind of which there is any record. The patriarchs and their associates have relapsed into an attitude toward the Holy See which is equally schismatical and arrogant, though through their degraded condition far more ridiculous than that which was assumed by their predecessors before the Council of Florence. In order to nullify, as far as possible, the legal force of the act of union promulgated by that council, they have resorted to a forgery, and have published the acts of a pretended council under a patriarch who never existed and whom they call Athanasius. There is no precise date attached to these forged acts, but they are so arranged as to appear to have been promulgated soon after the return of the emperor and prelates from Italy, and before the Turkish conquest; and in them, some of the principal prelates what signed the decrees of the Council of Florence are represented as abjuring and begging pardon for what they had done. They are said to have been moved to this by the indignation of their people and a sedition in Constantinople in which the rejection of the act of union was demanded. The forgery is too transparent to be worthy of refutation, and could never have been executed and palmed off as genuine in any other place than in Constantinople. They have also put out a book called the "Pedalium," in which they revive all the frivolous pretexts on account of which the infamous Michael Cerularius and his ignorant ecclesiastical clique of the Bas Empire pretended to prove the apostacy of the Bishop of Rome and all Western Christendom from the faith and communion of the Catholic Church, and the consequent succession of the Bishop of Constantinople to the universal primacy. The clergy of the patriarchate have taken the position that the Catholic Church at present is confined to the limits of what we call the Greek Church. They claim for themselves, therefore, that place which they acknowledge formerly belonged to the See of Rome, and thus seek to justify and carry out the usurpation of supreme and universal authority indicated by the title of ecumenical patriarch. The absurdity of this is evident, from the very grounds on which the title was originally assumed, and the traditional maxims which directed the policy of the ambitions Byzantine prelates throughout the entire period of the Greek empire. The original and only claim of the bishops of Constantinople, who were merely suffragans of the Metropolitan of Heraclèa before their city was made the capital of the empire, to the patriarchal dignity, was the political importance of the city. Because Constantinople was new Rome, therefore the Bishop of Constantinople ought to be second to the Bishop of ancient Rome; and not only this, but he ought to rule over the whole East with a supremacy like that which the Bishop of Rome had always exercised over the whole [{7}] world. This false and schismatical principle is contrary to the fundamental principle of Catholic church organization, viz., that the subordination of episcopal sees springs from the divine institution of the primacy in the See of St. Peter, and is regulated by ecclesiastical canons on spiritual grounds, which are superior to all considerations of a temporal nature. The Patriarch of Constantinople has long ago lost all claim to precedence or authority based on the civil dignity of the city as the seat of an empire. According to the principles of his predecessors, the primacy ought to have been transferred to the Patriarch of Moscow, when the Russian patriarchate was established by Ivan III. Nevertheless, he still continues to style himself ecumenical patriarch, and the eight metropolitans who form his permanent synod continue to keep the precedence over all other bishops of the patriarchate, although their sees have dwindled into insignificance, and other episcopal towns far exceed them in civil importance. In point of fact, the baselessness of his claim to universal jurisdiction has been recognized by the Eastern Church. His real authority is confined to the Turkish empire, where it is sustained by the civil power. Russia has long been independent of him. The Church of Greece has completely severed her connection with him. The schismatical Greeks of the Austrian empire, and those of the neighboring provinces, are severally independent. The false principle that produced the Eastern schism in the first place thus continues to work out its legitimate effect of disintegration in the Eastern communion itself, by separating the national churches from the principal church of Constantinople, which would itself crumble to pieces if the support of the Ottoman power were removed. The privileges of the See of Constantinople have now no valid claim to respect, except that derived from ecclesiastical canons ratified by time, general consent, and the sanction of the Roman Church. The instinct of self-preservation ought to compel its rulers to fall back on Catholic principles, and submit themselves to the legitimate authority of the Roman Pontiff as the head of the Catholic Church throughout the world. They are following, however, the contrary impulse of self-destruction, to which they are abandoned by a just God as a punishment for their treason to Jesus Christ and his Vicar, and in every way seeking to strengthen and extend the barrier which separates them from the Roman Church.

This policy has led them to do all in their power to establish a dogmatic difference between the Oriental Church and the Church of Rome. Not only do they represent the difference in regard to the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Son, as expressed by the "Filioque" of the Creed, which was fully proved at the Council of Florence to be a mere verbal difference, as a difference in regard to an essential dogma, but they have brought in others to swell their list of Latin heresies. The principal dogmatic differences on which they insist are three: the doctrine of purgatory, the quality of the bread used in the holy eucharist, and the mode of administering baptism. Only the most deplorable ignorance and factiousness could base a pretence of dogmatic difference on such a foundation. In regard to purgatory, the Roman Church has defined or required nothing beyond that which is taught by the doctrinal standards of the Eastern Church. The difference in regard to the use of leavened or unleavened bread, and the mode of baptism, is a mere difference of rite. In regard to the last-mentioned rite, however, the clergy of Constantinople have even surpassed their usual amount of ignorance and effrontery. They pretend that no baptism except that by trine immersion is valid, and consequently that the vast majority of Western Christians are unbaptized. This position of theirs, which will no doubt be [{8}] very satisfactory to our Baptist brethren, makes sweeping work, not only with the Latin Church, but with Protestant Christendom. Where there is no baptism, there is no ordination, no sacrament whatever, no church. What will our Anglican friends say to this? The clergy of Constantinople rebaptize unconditionally every one who applies to be received into their communion, whether he be Catholic or Protestant, clergyman or layman. It would be folly to argue against this sacrilegious absurdity on Catholic grounds. It is enough to show their inconsistency with themselves, by mentioning the fact that the Russian Church allows the validity of baptism by aspersion, and that even their own book of canons permits it in case of necessity. But why look for any manifestation of the learning, wisdom, or Christian principle which ought to characterize prelates from men who have bought their places for gold, and who sell every episcopal see to the highest bidder? The simony and bribery which have been openly and unblushingly practised by the ruling clerical faction of the Turkish empire since the time when the monk Simeon bought the patriarchal dignity from the sultan, make this page of ecclesiastical history one of the blackest and most infamous in character. As we might expect under such a system, virtuous and worthy men are put aside, and the episcopate and priesthood filled up from the creatures and servile followers of the ruling clique. Such men naturally disgrace their holy character by their immoral lives, and bring opprobrium on the Christian name. The history of the patriarchate of Constantinople, therefore, since the period of Gennadius and the first few successors who followed his worthy example, has been stained with blood and crime, and darkened by scenes of tragic infamy and horror. We will relate one of the most recent of these, as a sufficient proof and illustration of the heavy indictment we have made against the patriarchal clergy.

At the time of the Greek revolution, the patriarch and principal clergy of Constantinople received orders from the sultan to use their power in suppressing all co-operation on the part of the Christians in Turkey with their brethren in Greece, and to denounce to the Ottoman government all who were suspected of conniving at the insurrection. Their political position no doubt required of them to remain passive in the matter, to refrain from positively aiding the revolutionists, and also to suppress all overt acts of the Christians under their jurisdiction against the government. Nevertheless, as a people unjustly enslaved by a barbarous, anti-Christian despotism, they owed nothing more to their masters than this exterior obedience to the letter of the law. They could not be expected to enter with a hearty and zealous sympathy into the measures of the government for suppressing the revolution; and, indeed, every genuine and noble sentiment of Christianity and patriotism forbade their doing so, and exacted of them a deep, interior sympathy with their cruelly oppressed brethren who were so nobly struggling to free their country from the hated yoke of the Moslem conqueror. The really high-minded Greeks of the empire did thus sympathize with their brethren. The ruling clergy, however, manifested a zeal for the interests of the Ottoman court so outré and so scandalous that it not only outraged the feelings of their own subjects, but, as we shall see, aroused the suspicions of the tyrants before whom they so basely cringed, and brought destruction on their own heads. They accused a great number of Christians of complicity in the insurrection, seizing the opportunity of denouncing every one who had incurred their hatred for any reason whatever, so that the prisons were soon crowded with their unfortunate victims, all of whom suffered the penalty of death. The patriarch pronounced a sentence of major excommunication against Prince Ypsilanti, and all the Greeks who [{9}] took part in the revolt. A few days afterward, on the first Sunday of Lent, during the solemnities of the pontifical mass, the patriarch, his eight chief metropolitans, and fifteen other bishops, pronounced the same sentence of excommunication, together with the sentence of deposition and degradation, against seven bishops of Greece, partisans of Prince Ypsilanti, and all their adherents, signing the decree on the altar of the cathedral church. Such a storm of indignation was raised by this nefarious act, that the prelates were obliged to pacify their people by pretending that they had acted under the compulsion of the government. A few days after, the patriarch and the majority of the bishops who had signed the decree were condemned to death and executed, on the charge of participating in the revolution. Even after the great powers of Europe had acknowledged the independence of Greece, the ruling clergy of Constantinople endeavored to curry favor at court by sending a commission, under the presidency of the metropolitan of Chalcèdon, to recommend to the Greeks a return to the Turkish dominion! It is needless to say that this invitation was declined, although we cannot but admire the self-control of the Greek princes and prelates when we are told that it was declined, and the ambassadors dismissed, in the most polite manner.

One more intrigue, the last one they have been left the opportunity of trying, closes the history of their relations with the Church of Greece. The clergy and people of the new kingdom were equally determined to throw off completely and for ever the ecclesiastical tyranny of Constantinople. At the same time they were disposed to act with diplomatic formality and ecclesiastical courtesy, as well as in conformity with the laws and principle of the orthodox church of the East. The second article of the constitutional chart of the kingdom defines in a precise and dignified manner the position of the national church. "The orthodox Church of Greece, acknowledging our Lord Jesus Christ as its head, is perpetually united in dogma with the great Church of Constantinople and every other church holding the same dogmas, preserving, as they do, immutably the holy canons of the apostles and councils, and the sacred traditions. Nevertheless, it is autocephalous, exercising independently of every other church its rights of jurisdiction, and is administered by a sacred college of bishops." This article was established in 1844. In 1850, the clergy obtained from the government the appointment of a commission, composed of one clergyman, the archimandrite Michael Apostolides, professor of theology in the University of Athens, and one layman, Peter Deligianni, chargé d'affaires at Constantinople, to establish concordats with the patriarchate and the governing synod of Russia, on the basis of the above cited article of the Greek constitution. In lieu of this proposed concordat, the Greek commissioners were duped by the patriarchal synod into signing a synodal act, in which the Patriarch of Constantinople, qualifying his see as the vine of which other churches are the branches, and styling himself and his associates

--"Watchful shepherds and scrupulous guardians of the canons of the church"--pretends by his own authority to grant independent jurisdiction to the Church of Greece as a privilege. At the same time he designates the Archbishop of Athens as the perpetual president of the synod, ordains that the holy chrism shall always be brought from Constantinople, and imposes other obligations intended to serve as signs of dependence on the Patriarchal Church. The Greek parliament, however, annulled this concordat, and the synod of Greek bishops at Athens determined that henceforth there should be no relation between the Church of Greece and that of Constantinople, subsequently even forbidding priests ordained out of [{10}] the kingdom to officiate in the priesthood. Although the Greek clergy had shown themselves so forbearing and patient, it seems that the arrogance and perfidy of the clergy of Constantinople had at last roused their just indignation. The learned archimandrite Pharmacides published a book against the synodal act and the policy of the Constantinopolitan clergy, entitled "Antitomos; or, Concerning the Truth," in which he ridicules the pompous pretensions which they make to pastoral vigilance and fidelity in these words:

"Since you obtained the sacerdotal dignity by purchase, if you had really the intention in becoming bishops to watch and to fatigue yourselves by guarding the Church, no one of you would be a bishop; for you would not have spent your money in buying vigils and labors."

Such being the nature of the solicitude of these watchful pastors and scrupulous guardians of the canons for the welfare of those over whom they claim a patriarchal authority, we need not be surprised at any amount of reckless contempt which they may show for the general interests of Christendom, and the admonitions they from time to time receive from the veritable pastor of the flock of Christ. Nevertheless, we cannot but wonder that the respectable portion of the Oriental episcopate should permit themselves to be compromised by an act which seems to cap the climax of even Byzantine stupidity and effrontery. We refer to the reply to the noble and paternal encyclical of Pius IX. to the Oriental bishops, put forth by Anthimus, the late patriarch. Anthimus himself was notorious throughout the city for his habits of drunkenness, which were so gross as to incapacitate him from all business and expose him to the most ignominious insults even from his own subordinates. The letter which he and several of his bishops subscribed and sent to the Holy Father was written by the monk Constantine OEconomus, and, in answer to the earnest and affectionate appeals of the Holy Father to return to the unity of the Catholic Church, makes the following astounding statement:

"The three other patriarchs, in difficult questions, demand the fraternal counsels of the one of Constantinople, because that city is the imperial residence, and this patriarch has the synodal primacy. If the question can be settled by his fraternal co-operation, very well. But if not, the matter is referred to the government (i.e., Ottoman), according to the established laws."

We think that the reason of the grave charge of schism, heresy, and apostacy from the fundamental, constitutive principles of the Catholic Church, which we have made against the higher clergy of Constantinople, will now be apparent to every candid reader. The history of their action in relation to the Church of Greece proves that their principles and policy tend to disintegrate within itself still more that portion of Christendom which they have alienated from the communion of Rome and the West, and thus to increase the force of the movement of decentralization, and to augment the number of separate, local, mutually independent, and hostile communions. That the natural tendency of this principle is to produce dogmatic dissensions, and to efface the idea of Catholic unity, is too evident from past history to need proof. It is only neutralized in the East by the stagnation of thought, and the consequent immobility of the Oriental mind from its old, long established traditions. The essentially schismatical virus of the principle is in the subordination of organic, hierarchical unity to the temporal power and the civil constitution of states, or the church-and-state principle in its most odious form, which was never more grossly expressed than in the letter above cited of Anthimus. This principle not only tends to increase disintegration in the church, but to bar the way to a reintegration in unity, and to destroy all desire of a return to unity, as is also amply proved by the acts of the clergy of Constantinople. A schismatical principle held [{11}] and acted on in such a way as to make schism a perpetual condition, and thus not merely to interrupt communion for a time but to destroy the idea of Catholic unity, becomes heretical. Moreover, when doctrinal forms of expressing dogmas of faith, or particular forms of administering the rites of religion, are without authority set forth as essential conditions of orthodoxy, and made the basis of a judgment of heresy against other churches, those who make this false dogmatic standard are guilty of heresy. This is the case with the clergy of Constantinople, who make the difference respecting the use of "Filioque" in the Creed the pretext for accusing the Latin Church of heresy, and who deal similarly with the doctrine of purgatory, and the questions respecting unleavened bread in the eucharist and immersion in baptism. They have constantly persisted in their effort to establish an essential dogmatic difference between the Latin and Greek Churches and to make the peculiarities of the Greek rite essential terms of Catholic communion, in order to widen and perpetuate the breach between the East and West, and to maintain their own usurped principality. They have been the authors of the schism, its obstinate promoters, the principal cause of thrusting it upon the other parts of the Eastern Church, and the chief instrument of thwarting the charitable efforts of the Holy See for the spiritual good of the Oriental Christians. They have done it in spite of the best and most ample opportunities of knowing the utter falsehood of all the grounds on which their schism is based, in the face of the example and the writings of the best and most learned of their own predecessors, and with a recklessness of consequences, and a disregard of the interests of their own people and of religion itself, which merits for them the name not only of heretics, but of apostates from all but the name and outward profession of Christianity.

This last portion of the case against them we must now prosecute a little further, by showing what has been their conduct in the exercise of their temporal power over their fellow-Christians in Turkey.

The reasons and extent of the civil authority conferred upon the Patriarch Gennadius by Mahomet II. have already been exposed. It is obvious that although this authority would have enabled the governing clergy to succor and console their unhappy people in their condition of miserable slavery, if they had been possessed of truly apostolic virtue, it opened the way to the most frightful tyranny and oppression, by presenting to the worst and most ambitious men a strong motive to aspire to the highest offices in the church. No form of government can be worse than that of privileged slaves of a despot over their fellow-slaves. Accordingly, but a short time elapsed before the unhappy Christians of Turkey began to suffer from the effects of this terrible system. Simoniacal bishops who bought their own dignity by bribing the sultans and their favorites, and sold all the inferior offices in their gift to the highest bidder; who were careless and faithless in the discharge of their spiritual duties; and who had apostatized from the communion of the Catholic Church, would, of course, exercise their civil functions in the same spirit and according to the same policy. They associated themselves intimately with the Janissaries, on whom they relied for the maintenance of their power; gave their system of policy the name of the "System of Cara-Casan," that is, "Ecclesiastical Janissary System;" enrolled themselves as members of the Ortas or Janissary companies, and bore their distinguishing marks tattooed on their arms. This redoubtable body found its most powerful ally in the clergy up to the time of its destruction by Mahmoud II. The author of the work whose title is placed at the head of this article, James G. Pitzipios, is a native Christian subject of the Sultan of Turkey, and was the secretary of an imperial commission appointed to examine into the [{12}] civil and financial administration of the Christian communities, as well as to hear their complaints against their rulers. His position and circumstances, therefore, have enabled him to investigate the matter thoroughly. His estimate of the civil administration of the clergy of the patriarchate from the time of Mahomet II. to that of Mahmoud II.-- that is, from the Turkish conquest to the projected reformation in the Ottoman government--is expressed in these words:

"We have seen why it was that the Sultan Mahomet II. delegated the entire temporal power over his Christian subjects to the Patriarch Gennadius and his successors; gave to the religious head of the Christians of his empire the title of Milet-bachi, and rendered him the absolute master of the lot of all his co-religionists, as well as responsible for their conduct and for their fulfilment of all duties and obligations toward the government. Such an arrangement was calculated to produce in its commencement some alleviations and even some advantages to these unfortunate Christians, as in point of fact it actually happened. But it was sure to degenerate sooner or later into a frightful tyranny, such as is naturally that of privileged slaves placed over those of their own race. Accordingly, as we have stated in several places already, the clergy of Constantinople made use of all the means of oppression, of vexation, and of pillage of which the cunning, the depraved conscience, and the rapacity of slaves in authority are capable. The clergy of Constantinople having become in this way the absolute arbiters of the goods, the conscience, the social rights, and indirectly even of the lives of all their Eastern co-religionists, continued to abuse this temporal power not only during the period of the old regime, but even after the destruction of the Janissaries, and, again, after the reform in Turkey, and up to the present moment" [Footnote 4] (1855).

[Footnote 4: "L'Eglise Orientale," p. iv., pp. 17, 18.]

The allusion to the reform in the lost clause of this extract requires a fuller explanation, and this explanation will furnish the most conclusive evidence of the degradation of the patriarchate, by showing that not only have its clergy submitted to be the tools of the Ottoman government when it was disposed to oppress the Christians in the worst manner, but that they have even resisted and thwarted the efforts of that government itself, when it was disposed to emancipate the Christians from a part of their bondage.

The Sultan Mahmoud I I., a man of superior genius and enlightened views, devoted all the energies of his great mind to the effort of restoring his empire, rapidly verging toward dissolution, to prosperity and splendor. He devised for this end a gigantic scheme of political reformation, one part of which was the abolition of all civil distinction between his subjects of different religions. He was unable to do more, during his lifetime, than barely to commence the execution of his grand project. His son and successor, Abdul-Medjid, continued to prosecute the same work, and, at the beginning of his reign, published a decree called the Tinzimat, enjoining certain reformations in the manner of administering law and justice in the provinces. The Christian inhabitants of Turkey were the ones who ought to have profited most by this decree. On the contrary, the very privileges which it accorded them, by withdrawing them in great measure from the authority of the local Mussulman tribunals, deprived them of their only resource against the oppressions and exactions of their own clergy, and rendered their condition worse. The bishops succeeded in getting a more exclusive control than ever over all cases of jurisdiction relating to Christians, and made use of their power to fleece their people more unmercifully than they had ever done before. Encouraged by the publication of die Tinzimat, these unhappy Christian communities ventured to send remonstrances to the Ottoman [{13}] government against their cruel and mercenary pastors. In consequence of these remonstrances, the Porte addressed the following official note, dated Feb. 4, 1850, to the Patriarch of Constantinople:

"Since, according to the Christian religion, the bishops are the pastors of the people, they ought to guide them in the right way, protect them, and console them, but never oppress them. As, however, many metropolitans and bishops commit actions in the provinces which even the most despicable of men would not dare to perpetrate, the Christian populations, crushed under this oppression, address themselves continually to the government, supplicating it to grant them its assistance and protection. Consequently, as the government cannot refuse to take into consideration these just complaints of its own subjects, it wills absolutely that these disorders cease. It invites, therefore, the patriarch to convoke an assembly of bishops and of the principal laymen of his religion, and, in concert with them, to consider fraternally of the means of doing away with these oppressions and the just complaints in regard to them, by regulating their ecclesiastical and communal administration in conformity with the precepts of their own religion and with the instructions the Tinzimat." [Footnote 5]

[Footnote 5: Ibid., p. iii., p. 144.]

A very edifying sermon this, from a Mohammedan minister of state to the "spiritual head of the ancient and venerable Oriental Church!" Like many other sermons, however, it did not produce a result corresponding to its excellence. The good advice it contained was followed up by levying a new tax. The patriarch sent immediately to all the bishops a circular in which he prescribed to them "to admonish the people, that since the government had imposed upon the church the obligation of conforming to the demands of certain dioceses, and applying everywhere the system of giving fixed salaries to the bishops, the most holy patriarch is obliged to conform himself to the orders of the government and to put them in execution as soon as possible. But since both the general commune of Constantinople and the particular ones of the several dioceses are burdened with debts which amount to about 7,000,000 of piastres, it is just that the people should previously pay off these debts; the bishops are, therefore, ordered to proceed immediately to an exact enumeration of all the Christian inhabitants of the cities, towns, and villages, without excepting either widows or unmarried persons. In this way the patriarchate, taking the census as its guide, can assign to each Christian the sum which he is bound to pay for the pre-extinction of the communal debts, and afterward apply the system of fixed episcopal revenues." [Footnote 6]

[Footnote 6: Ibid., p. 144., p. 145.]

The poor people, terrified by this enormous tax, and by the persecution which overtook the prime movers in the remonstrance, as the secretary of the commission on the Tinzimat informs us, "swallowed painfully their grievances and no longer dared to continue their just reclamations to the government." The Ottoman government, intimidated by the threats of the ecclesiastical Janissaries of the Cara-Casan, "was obliged to yield to the force of circumstances, as they were used to do in the time of their terrible confrères, and abandoned the question completely."

The Greek revolution has also in one way aggravated the lot of the Christians of Turkey, by causing the compulsory or voluntary removal from the capital of the principal merchants and other Christians of superior station and influence, who formed the greatest check upon the unworthy clerical rulers. Under the name of "primates of the nation," they had a share in the management of ecclesiastical finances and other temporal affairs, and as their compatriot, Mr. Pitzipios, affirms, "these good citizens, inspired by their charitable [{14}] sentiments, and encouraged by the influence which they had with the Ottoman government, repressed greatly the abuses of the clergy, and moderated, as far as they were able, the vexations of the people." [Footnote 7] The men of this class who remained in Constantinople were removed by the government, as foreigners, from all share in the administration of Christian' affairs, and their places filled with the creatures of the patriarchal clique, men of the lowest rank and character, who were ready tools for every nefarious work.

[Footnote 7: Ibid., p. 147.]

As a natural consequence of the faithless abuse of the sacred religious and civil trust committed to the higher clergy, they and their inferior clergy are detested and despised by their people, who are held in subjection to them only by physical coercion. Mr. Pitzipios assures us that there is among them a very strong predisposition to Protestantism. A form of deism, introduced by Theophilus Cairy, a Greek priest, who died in prison in the year 1851, made great progress before it was suppressed by the civil power, and is now secretly working with great activity in Greece and Turkey.

We cannot but think that the last and most degraded phase of the Byzantine Bas Empire, impersonated in the schismatical patriarchate of Constantinople, is destined soon to pass away. We hope and expect soon to see the end of the Ottoman power, which alone sustains this odious ecclesiastico-political tyranny. The signs of the political horizon appear to indicate that Russia is destined to gain possession of the ancient seat of the Greek empire. However this may be, if the Church of Constantinople, and the other far more ancient churches within her sphere of jurisdiction, are ever to be restored to a healthy Christian vitality, and made to reflourish as of old, it must be by a thorough ecclesiastical reformation, which shall sweep away the present dominant clique in the clergy and the whole policy which they have established.

The beginning of this reformation has already been inaugurated in the kingdom of Greece. The bishops of that kingdom, in recovering freedom from the odious yoke of Constantinople, have recovered the character of Christian prelates and pastors. The severe remarks which we have made respecting the Oriental hierarchy must be understood as applicable only to that particular clique who have heretofore made themselves dominant through intrigue and violence. There no doubt have been, and are, among the higher clergy of the Turkish empire, some exceptions to the general rule of incompetence and moral unworthiness. The Greek bishops themselves who were established in their sees under the old regime, manifested by their open or tacit concurrence in the revolution that virtue had not completely died out under the pressure of a long slavery. Since the establishment of Grecian independence, the measures they have taken, in concert with the other members of the higher secular and monastic clergy and the government, for the amelioration of religion, are such as to reflect honor on themselves, and to give great promise for the future. They live in a simple and frugal manner, and some of them, instead of leaving millions of piastres to their relatives, like their Turkish brethren, have not left behind them enough money to defray their own funeral expenses. They endeavor to select the best subjects for ordination to the priesthood and to give them a good theological and religious training. Professorships of theological science are established in the University of Athens. The catechism is carefully taught to the young people and children, and every year ten of the most competent among the clergy are sent at the public expense to preach throughout all the towns and villages of the kingdom. Such is the happy result of the successful effort of these noble Greeks, so endeared to every lover of learning, valor, and [{15}] religion for the memories of their glorious antiquity, to shake off the yoke of the sultans and the patriarchs of Constantinople. It is this miserable amalgam of Moslem despotism, and usurped or abused spiritual power in the hands of a degenerate clergy at Constantinople, which is the great obstacle in the way of the regeneration of the East. We have already seen that the ecclesiastical tyranny of the patriarchate is now confined to the one hundred and forty-two small bishoprics, and the few millions of people included in them, which are situated in Turkey. Nevertheless, the political views of the Russian emperors, and the traditional reverence of the Russian clergy, still maintain the patriarch and his synod in a modified spiritual supremacy over the Russian Church, to which two-thirds of the Oriental rite belong. If Constantinople should fall into the hands of any of the great powers of Western Christendom, of course the Cara-Casan, or system of mixed ecclesiastical and civil despotism, will be overturned, the patriarch will become a mere primate among the other metropolitans of the nation, and the patriarchate be reduced to a simply honorary dignity like that of the Western patriarchs of Venice and Lisbon. If the Czar becomes the master of European Turkey, the same result will take place, with this only exception, that the See of Constantinople will become the primatial see of the Russian empire, and the Russian hierarchy will take the place of the effete Byzantine clergy, which they are far more worthy, from their learning and strict morality, to occupy.

What is to be the political and ecclesiastical destiny of the East, and Russia, its gigantic infant, who can foretell, without prophetic gifts? If the Russian emperors prove that they are destined and are worthy to begin anew and to fulfil the grand design of Constantine, Theodosius, Justinian, Pulcheria, and Irene, by creating a thoroughly Christian empire of the East, we shall rejoice to see them enthroned in Constantinople. If they are destined to restore the cross to the dome of St. Sophia, and to renovate the ancient glory of that temple, desecrated by Christian infamy more than by the Moslem crescent, we shall exult in their achievement. If new Chrysostoms and Gregories shall rise up to efface the dishonor of their predecessors, we will forget the past, and give them the homage due to true and worthy successors of the saints. We have no desire to see the Church of Constantinople degraded, or the Eastern Church humiliated. The Oriental Church is orthodox and catholic in its faith, and its several great rites are fully sanctioned and protected by the Holy See. The heresies which are found among a portion of its clergy are personal heresies, and have never been established by any great synod, or incorporated into their received doctrinal standards. We do not condemn the great body of its people of even formal schism, but rather compassionate them as suffering from a state of schism which has been forced on them by a designing and unworthy faction, and is perpetuated in great part through misunderstanding, prejudice, and national antipathies. The causes and grounds of this unnatural state must necessarily come up among them very soon for a more thorough investigation. Study, thought, discussion, and contact with Western Catholicism, as well as Western Protestantism and rationalism, will compel them to place themselves face to face with their own hereditary and traditional dogmas; and either to be consistent with themselves, and submit to the supremacy of the Roman See, or to give up their orthodoxy and open the doors to a religious revolution. We cannot deny that the latter alternative is possible, although we are sure that Dr. Pusey, and men like-minded with him, would deplore it as a great calamity. We trust it will be otherwise. The Easter morning of resurrection, which [{16}] we are now celebrating, dawned for us in the East. It is the land, of Christ and his apostles, the birth-place of our religion. We hope the day of resurrection for its decayed and languishing churches may not be far distant.

From The Month.
SAINTS OF THE DESERT.
BY THE REV. J. H. NEWMAN, D.D.

1. Abbot Antony pointed out to a brother a stone, and said to him, "Revile that stone, and beat it soundly."

When he had done so, Antony said, "Did the stone say anything?" He answered, "No."

Then said Antony: "Unto this perfection shalt thou one day come."

2. When Abbot Arsenius was ill, they laid him on a mat, and put a pillow under his head, and a brother was scandalized.

Then said his attendant to the brother: "What were you before you were a monk?" He answered, "A shepherd." Then he asked again, "And do you live a harder or an easier life now than then?" He replied, "I have more comforts now." Then said the other, "Seest thou this abbot? When he was in the world he was the father of emperors. A thousand slaves with golden girdles and tippets of velvet waited on him, and rich carpets were spread under him. Thou hast gained by the change which has made thee a monk; it is thou who art now encompassed with comforts, but he is afflicted."

3. When Abbot Agatho was near his end, he remained for three days with his eyes open and steadily fixed.

His brethren shook him, sayings "Abbot, where are you?"

He replied, "I stand before the judgment seat."

They said, "What, father! do you you too fear? think of your works."

He made answer: "I have no confidence till I shall have met my God."

4. Abbot Pastor was asked, "Is it good to cloak a brother's fault?"

He answered: "As often as we hide a brother's sin, God hides one of ours, but he tells ours in that hour in which we tell our brother's."

5. The Abbot Alonius said: "Unless a man says in his heart, I and my God are the only two in the world, he will not have rest."

6. Abbot Pambo, being summoned by St. Athanasius to Alexandria, met an actress, and forthwith began to weep. "I weep," he said, "because I do not strive to please my God as she strives to please the impure."

7. An old monk fell sick and for many days could not eat, and his novice made him some pudding. There was a vessel of honey, and there was another vessel of linseed oil for the lamp, good for nothing else, for it was rancid. The novice mistook, and mixed up the oil in the pudding. The old man said not a word, but ate it.

The novice pressed him, and helped him a second time, and the old man ate again.

When he offered it the third time, the old man said, "I have had enough;" but the novice cried, "Indeed, it is very good. I will eat some with you."

When he had tasted it, he fell on his face and said: "Father, I shall be the death of you! Why didn't you speak?"

The old man answered: "Had it been God's will that I should eat honey, honey thou wouldst have given me."

[{17}]

From The Literary Workman.
JENIFER'S PRAYER.
BY OLIVER CRANE.
IN THREE PARTS.

I.

He and she stood in a room in an inn in the town of Hull--and how she wept! Crying as a child cries, with a woman's feelings joining exquisite pain to those tears; which tears, in a way wonderful and peculiar to beautiful women, scarcely disordered her face, or gave anything worse to her countenance than an indescribably pathetic tenderness.

He was older than she was by full ten years. He only watched her. And if the most acute of my readers had watched him, they would have been no wiser for their scrutiny.

At last she left the room; he had opened the door and offered his hand to her. It was night; and she changed her chamber-candle from her right hand to her left, and gave that right hand to him. He held it, while he said: "I spoke because I dread the influence of the house we are going to, and of those whom you will meet there."

"Thank you. Good night" And so she got to a great dark bed-room, and knelt down, like a good girl as she was, and cried no more, but was in bed and asleep before he had left the place he had taken by the side of the sitting-room fire, leaning thoughtfully against the mantel-shelf, when her absence had made the room lonely.

Then he ran down stairs and rushed out into the streets of the kingly Hull--Kingston of the day of Edward I. The man we speak of was no antiquary, and he troubled himself neither with the Kingston of the royal Edward nor the Vaccaria of the abbot from whom the place was bought; he walked at a quick pace through streets dim and streets lighted, toward the ships, or among the houses; to where he could see the great headland of Holderness, or behold nothing at all but the brick wall that prevented his going further, and told him by strong facts that he had lost his way. So he wandered, walking fast often--again, walking slowly; his head bowed down, his features working, and his eyes flashing--clenched hands, or hands clasped on his breast, as if to keep down the surging waves of memory, which carried on their crests many things which now he could only gnash his teeth at in withering vexation.

He and she had come from Scotland. I have said that she was beautiful--she was English, too; but he was Scotch born and bred, and not dark and stem, or really wild or poetic, as a Scotchman in a story ought to be. He was simply a strong, well-formed man, of dark, ruddy complexion, and fine, thick, waving brown hair. He might have been a nobleman, or a royal descendant of Hull's own king. He looked it all, without being downright handsome. But he was, in fact, only one of the many men who have come into a thousand a year too soon for the preservation of prudence. Between sixteen, when he succeeded to it, and twenty-one, when he could spend it, he had committed many follies, and found friends who turned out worse than declared enemies--since twenty-one he had fallen [{18}] in love more than once. He had been praised, blamed, accused, acquitted. But whether or not this man was good or bad, no living soul could tell. He was well off, well looking, well read, and in good company. He re-entered the inn at Hull that April night, stood by the fire smoking, asked for a cup of strong coffee, went to bed.

The next morning the two met at breakfast They were going south. No matter where. Whether to the dreamy vales of Devonshire, to verdant Somersetshire, or the gardens of Hampshire--no matter. They were going to what the north Britons call the south. And it did not mean Algeria. Railways were not everywhere then as railways are now. They had to travel nearly all day, then to "coach it" to a great town, in whose history coaches have now long been of the past. Then to get on a second day by the old "fast four-horse," and to arrive about five o'clock at a little quiet country town, where a carriage would take them to the friends and the house whose influence he dreaded.

In fact, that night, in the inn sitting-room, he had offered marriage to the girl whom he had in charge for safe guardianship on so long a journey to her far-off home where he was to be a guest. She had felt that he had abused his trust and taken an unfair advantage of her; also, she was in that peculiarly feminine state of mind which is neither expressed by no nor by yes. She had upbraided him. He, pleading guilty in his soul, was in a horror at the thought of losing her; losing her in that way too, because he had done wrong. Being miserable, he had shown his misery as a strong man may. He spoke, and self-reproachfully; but, as he pleaded, he betrayed all he felt. The girl saw his clasped hands, his bent form, as he leaned down from the chair on which he sat in the straggling attitude which expressed a disordered mind. He spoke, looking at the carpet, not loud nor long, but with a terrible earnestness that frightened the girl, and then she cried all the more, and seemed to shrink away as if in alarm, and yet almost angrily. Why would he speak so fiercely--why had he taken this advantage of her?

Then he had risen up quickly, and said, "Well, you know all now. We will talk of something else." But she only shook her head and moved away, and, as we have seen, went to bed.

The next morning they met calmly enough. On his side it was done with an effort; on hers without effort, yet with a little trembling fear, which went when she saw his calm, and she poured out tea, and he drank it, and only a rather extraordinary silence told of too much having being said the night before.

Now, why was all this? Why were this man and this young English girl travelling thus to the sweet south coast, and to expecting friends?

While they are travelling on their way, we, you and I, dear reader, will not only get on before them, but also turn back the pages of life's story, and read its secrets.

They were going to a great house in a fine park, where fern waved its tall, mounted feathers of green, and hid the dappled deer from sight-- where great ancestral oaks spread protecting branches; where hawthorn trees, that it had taken three generations of men to make, stood, large, thick, knotted, twisted--strange, dark, stunted looking trees they looked, till spring came, and no green was like their green, and the glory of their flower-wreaths people made pilgrimages to see. The place was called Beremouth.

A mile and a half off was a town; one of those odd little old places which tell of days and fashions past away. A very respectable place. There had lived in Marston the dowager ladies of old country families, in houses which had no pretensions to grandeur as you passed them in the extremely quiet street, but which on the other side broke out into bay windows, garden fronts, charming conservatories, and a [{19}] good many other things which help to make life pleasant. So the inhabitants of Marston were not all mere country-town's people. They knew themselves to be somebodies and they never forgot it.

Now, in this town dwelt a certain widow lady; poor she was, but she had a pedigree and two beautiful daughters. Mary and Lucia Morier were not two commonly, or even uncommonly, pretty girls; they were wonderfully beautiful, people said, and nothing less. So lovers came a courting. One married a Scotchman, a Mr. Erskine. They liked each other quite well enough, Lucia thought, when she made her promises, and received his; and so they did. They lived happily; did good; wished for children but never had any, and so adopted Mr. Erskine's orphan nephew--namely, the very man who behaved with such strange imprudence in the inn at Hull. Mr. Erskine the uncle was twenty years older than Mrs. Erskine the aunt. Mr. Erskine the younger was but a child when they adopted him. But he was their heir, as well as the inheritor of his father's' fortune, and they loved and cared for him.

Mary Morier did differently. She married at twenty, her younger sister having married the month before at eighteen. Mary did differently, for she did imprudently. They had had a brother who was an agent for certain mines thirty miles off; and there he lived; but he came home often enough, and made the house in the old town gay. A year before the sister married, in fact while that sister was away on a visit to friends in Scotland, the brother came home ill. He was ill for six months. It is wonderful how much expense is incurred by a mother in six months for a son who is sick. It made life very difficult. The money to pay for Lucia's journey home had to be thought of. To be sure, she was not there to eat and drink, but then her extra finery had cost something. George had only earned one hundred a year. It had not been more than enough to keep him. He came home ill with ten pounds in his pocket, beside his half-year's rent, which would be due the next month--certainly money at this time was wanted, for our friends were sadly pinched. But the one most exemplary friend and servant Jenifer was paid her wages, and tea and sugar money to the day; and the doctor got so many guineas that he grew desperate and suddenly refused to come--then repented, and made a Christian-like bargain, that he would go on coming on condition that he never saw another piece of any kind of money.

Mary and her mother looked each other in the face one day, and that look told all. There was some plate, and they had watches, and a little fine old-fashioned jewelry--yes, they must go. They were reduced to poverty at last--this was more than "limited means"--hard penury had them with a desperate grasp.

Fortune comes in many shapes, and not often openly, and with a flourish of trumpets--neither did she come in that way now; but shamefacedly, sneakingly, and ringing the door-bell with a meek, not to say tremulous pull; and her shape was that of a broad-built, short, wide-jawed, lanky-haired, pig-eyed, elderly man, with a curious quantity of waistcoat showing, yet, generally, well dressed. "Your mistress at home?" "Yes, Mr. Brewer." "Mr. George better?" "No. Never will be, sir." "Bless me! I beg your pardon!" "Granted before 'tis asked, sir." "Ah! yes; I have a little business to transact with your mistress. Can I see her alone?" Mr. Brewer was shown by Jenifer into the little right-hand parlor. He gravely took out a huge pocket-book, and then a small parchment-covered account-book appeared. I believe he had persuaded himself that he was really going to transact business, and not to perform the neatest piece of deception that a [{20}] respectable gentleman ever attempted. A lady entered the room. "Madam, jour son has been my agent for mines three years--my mine and land agent since Christmas. He takes the additional work at seventy-five pounds a year extra. The half of that is now due to him. I pay that myself. I have brought it" And thirty-seven pounds ten shillings Mr. Brewer put on the table, saying, "I will take your receipt, madam. Don't trouble Georges's head about business; for when you do speak of that you will have, I am sorry to say, to inform him that in both his places I have had to put another man. I have to give George three months' payment at the rate of one hundred and seventy pounds a year, as I gave him no quarter's warning. That is business, do you understand?" asked Mr. Brewer. "It is for my son to discharge himself, sir--since he cannot"--the mother's voice faltered. "Ah--only he didn't, and I did," said Mr. Brewer. "Your receipt? When your son recovers, let him apply to me. I am sorry to end our connexion so abruptly. But it is business. Business, you know"--and there Mr. Brewer stopped, for Mary Morier was in the room, and her beauty filled it, or seemed to do so. And Mr. Brewer departed muttering, as he had muttered before often, "the most beautiful girl in the world." Still, he had an uncomfortable sensation, for he felt he was an underhand sneak, and that Mary had found him out; and so she had. She knew that her brother had been "discharged" only to afford a pretext for giving the quarter's money; and she was sure that his being land agent, at an additional seventy-five pounds a year, was a pure unadulterated fiction.

Mr. Brewer was an extraordinary man. He had a turn for the supernatural. He would have liked above all things to have worked miracles. He did do odd things, such as we have seen, which he made, by means of the poetic quality that characterized him, a purely natural act. He was praising George for a saving, prudent, industrious young man, who had never drawn the whole of his last year's salary, before an hour was over. And his story looked so like truth that he believed it himself.

Mr. Brewer was what people call "a risen man." But then his father had been rising--and, for the matter of that, his grandfather too. All their fortunes had flowed into the life of the man who has got into this story; and he, having had a tide of prosperity exceeding all others, in height, and strength, and riches, had found himself stranded on the great shore of society, at forty years of age, with more thousands a year than he liked to be generally known. Could he have transformed himself into a benignant fairy he would have been very happy, and acts of mercy would have abounded on the earth. But no--Mr. Brewer was Mr. Brewer, and anything less poetic to look at--more impossible as to wands, and wings, and good fairy appendages, it is difficult to imagine. Mr. Brewer was a middle-aged man, with hands in his pockets; plain truth is always respectable. There it is.

But there was a Mrs. Brewer. Now Mrs. Brewer was an excellent woman, but not excellent after the manner of her husband. She was three years older. They had not been in love. They had married at an epoch in Mr. Brewer's life when public affairs occupied his time so entirely as to make it desirable to have what people call a "missus;" we are afraid that Mr. Brewer himself so called the article, a "missus, at home." Mrs. Brewer had been "a widow lady--young--of a sociable and domestic disposition" who "desired to be housekeeper--to be treated confidentially, and as one of the family--to a widower--with or without children." On inquiry, it was found that young Mrs. Smith had not irrevocably determined that the owner of the house that she was to keep should have been the husband of one wife, undoubtedly [{21}] dead; the widower was an expression only, a sort of modest way of putting the plain fact of a single man, or a man capable of matrimony--the expression meant all that; and when Mrs. Smith entered on the housekeeping, she acted up to the meaning of the advertisement, and married Mr. Brewer. Neither had ever repented. Let that be understood. Only, Mr. Brewer, when he knew he could live in a great house, dine off silver, keep a four-in-hand, or a pack of hounds, or enter on any other legitimate mode of spending money, did none of them; but eased his mind and his pocket by such contrivances as we have seen resorted to in the presence of the beautiful Mary Morier. He tried curious experiments of what a man would do with ten pounds. He had dangerous notions as to people addicted to certain villanies being cured of their moral diseases by the administration of a hundred a year. In some round-about ways he had put the idea to the proof, and not always with satisfactory results. He held as an article of faith--nobody could guess where he found it--that there were people in the world who could go straighter in prosperity than in adversity. He never would believe that adversity was a thing to be suffered. He had replied to a Protestant divine on that subject, illustrated in the case of a starving family, that that might be, only it was no concern of his, and he would not act upon the theory. And the result was a thriving, thankful family in Australia, to whom Mr. Brewer was always, ever after, sending valuable commodities, and receiving flower-seeds and skins of gaudy feathered birds in return.

Mr. Brewer had a daughter, Claudia was her name. "A Bible name," said Mr. Brewer, and bowed his head, and felt he had done his duty by the girl. What more could he do? She went to school, and was at school when he was paying money in Mrs. Morier's parlor. She was then ten years old; and being a clever child, she had, in the holidays just over, chosen to talk French, and nothing else, to a friend whom she had been allowed to bring with her. A thing that had caused great perturbation in the soul of her honest father, who prayed in a wordless, but real anxiety, that the Bible name might not be thrown away on the glib-tongued little gipsy. It will be perceived that Claudia was a difficulty.

Now, when Mr. Brewer was gone out of Mrs. Morier's house, the mother took up the money, wiped her eyes, and said, "What a good boy George was." And Mary said "Yes;" and knew in her heart that if there had been any chance of George living, Mr. Brewer would never have done that.

George died. There was money, just enough for all wants. Lucia came home engaged to the married to Mr. Erskine. And when she was gone there went with her a certain seven hundred pounds, her fortune, settled--what a silly mockery Mr. Erskine thought it--on her children. The loss made the two who were left very poor. Lucia sent her mother gifts, but the regular and to be reckoned on eight-and-twenty pounds a year were gone. She who had eaten, drank, and dressed was gone too--but still it was a loss; and Mary and her mother were poor. Also, Mary had long been engaged to be married to the son of a younger branch of a great county family house, Lansdowne Lorimer by name. He was in an attorney's office in Marston. In that old-world place, the attorney, himself of a county family, was a great man. It was hard to see Lucia marry a man of money and land, young Lorimer thought, so he advised Mary to assert their independence of all earthly considerations, and marry too. And they did so.

The young man had no father or mother. He had angry uncles and insolent aunts, and family friends, all to be respected, and prophets of evil, every one of them. He had, also, a place in the office, a clear head, a determined will, a handsome [{22}] person, a good pedigree, and a beautiful wife. She, also, had her eight-and-twenty pounds a year. But they gave it back regularly to Mrs. Morier; for, you know, they, the young people, were young, and they could work. Mrs. Morier never spent this money. She and Jenifer, the prime minister of that court of loyal love, put it by, against the evil day, and they had just enough for themselves and the cat to live upon without it.

The county families asked their imprudent kinsman to visit them with his bride. How they flouted her. How they advised her. How they congratulated her that she had always been poor. How they assured her that she would be poor for ever. How, too, they feared that Lansdowne would never bear hard work, nor anxiety, nor any other of those troubles which were so very sure to happen. How surprised they were at the three pretty silk dresses, the one plain white muslin, and the smart best white net. How they scorned when they heard that she and Jenifer, and her mother, and a girl at eightpence a day, had made them all. And, then, how they sunned themselves in her wonderful beauty, and accepted the world's praises of it, and kept the triumph themselves, and handed over to her the gravest warnings of its being a dangerous gift.

Dangerous, indeed! it was the pride of Lorimer's life. And Mary was accomplished, far more really accomplished than the lazy, half-taught creatures who had never said to themselves that they might have to play and sing, and speak French and Italian, for their or their children's bread. Mary had said it to herself many a time since her heart had been given to the man who was her husband. A true, brave, loving heart it was, and that which her common sense had whispered to it that heart was strong to do, and would be found doing if the day of necessity ever came. So, at that Castle Dangerous where the bride and bridegroom were staying, Mary outshone others, and was not the better loved for that; and one old Lady Caroline crowned the triumph by ordering a piano-forte for the new home at Marston, with a savage "Keep up what you know, child; you may be glad of it one day." Old Lady Caroline was generally considered as a high-bred privileged savage. But that was the only savage thing she ever said to Mary. She told Lorimer that he was a selfish, unprincipled brute for marrying anybody so perfect and so pretty. And Lorimer bore her misrepresentations with remarkable patience, only making her a ceremonious bow, and saying in a low voice, "You know better." "I know you will starve," and she walked off without an answer.

They did not starve. In fact, they prospered, till one sad day when Lorimer caught cold--and again and again caught cold--cough, pain, symptoms of consumption--a short, sad story; and then the great end, death. Mary was a widow three years after her wedding day, with a child of two years of age at her side, and an income from a life insurance made by her husband of one hundred a year. We have seen the child--grown to a beautiful girl of seventeen--we have seen her in the room with Mr. Erskine, at the inn at Hull.

Mrs. Lorimer went back to live with her mother, Jenifer, and the great white cat.

The year after this great change, Mrs. Brewer died, and Claudia at thirteen was a greater difficulty than ever. The first holidays after the departure of the good mother, the puzzled father had written to the two Miss Gainsboroughs to bring the child to Marston and stay at his house during the holidays. He entertained them for a week, and then went off on a tour through Holland. The next holidays he proposed that they should take a house at Brighton, and that he should pay all expenses. This, too, was done, and Mr. Brewer went to a hotel and there made friends with his precocious daughter in a way that surprised and pleased [{23}] him. He visited the young lady, and she entertained him. He hired horses, and they rode together. He took boxes at the theatre, and they made parties and went together. He gave the girl jewelry and fine clothes, and they really got to know each other, and to enjoy life together as could never have been the case had they not been thus left to their own way. The child no longer felt herself of a different world from that of her parents--the father had a companion in the child who could grace his position, and keep her own. They parted with love and anxious lookings forward to the summer meeting. They were both in possession of a new happiness. When Mr. Brewer got back to Marston, he led a dull, dreamy life--a year and a half of widowhood passed--then he went to Mrs. Morier's, saw Mary, and asked her to be his wife. It is not easy to declare why Mary Lorimer said--after some weeks of wondering-mindedness--why she said "Yes." She knew all Mr. Brewer's goodness. She preferred, no doubt, not to wound a heart that had so often sympathized with the wounded. She never, in her life, could have borne to see him vexed without great vexation herself. She liked that he should be rewarded. She was interested in Claudia. She liked the thought of two hundred a year settled on her mother. She liked to feel that her own little Mary might be brought up as grandly as any of those little saucy "county family" damsels, her cousins, who already looked down on her, and scorned her pink spotted calico frock.

Mary and Mr. Brewer walked quietly to church; Mrs. Morier still in astonishment, and Jenifer "dazed;" bat all the working people loved Mr. Brewer. And they walked back, man and wife, to her mother's house, and had a quiet substantial breakfast before they started for London. And when there Mr. Brewer told her that they were not to return to the respectable stone-fronted house facing the market-place in Marston, but that he had bought Lord Byland's property--and that Beremouth was theirs. Beremouth, with its spreading park, and river, and lake, its miles of old pasture-land, its waving ferns, and dappled deer; Beremouth, with its forest and gardens, royal oaks and twisted hawthorn trees; Beremouth, the finest place in the county. And all that Mary felt was, that he who had kept this secret, had had a true hero's delicacy, and had never thought to bribe her, or to get her by purchase into his home. I think she almost loved him then.

In due time, after perhaps six months of wandering, and of preparation, Mr. and Mrs. Brewer arrived at their new home, made glorious by all that taste and art could do, with London energy working with the power of gold. With them came Claudia. The child loved her new mother with an abandonment of heart and a perfect approval. She was still too young to argue, but she was not too young to feel. The mother she had now got, though not much more than ten years older than herself, was the mother to love, admire, delight in--is the mother who could understand her.

Then Beremouth just suited this young lady's idea of what was worth having in this world; and without any evil thought of the homely mother who had gone, there was a thought that "Mother-Mary," as Mrs. Brewer was called by her step-daughter, looked right at Beremouth, and that another class of person would have looked wrong there--so wrong that her father under such circumstances would never have put himself in the position of trying the experiment.

Minnie Lorimer was very happy in her great play-ground; for all the world, and all life, was play to little Minnie. She loved her new sister; and the new sister patronized and petted her, so all seemed right. It was, indeed, a great happiness for Claudia that her father had chosen Mary Lorimer. Claudia was a vixenish, little handsome gipsy; very clever, very [{24}] high-spirited, full of life, health, and fun--a girl who could have yielded to very few, and who brought the homage of heart and mind to "Mother-Mary," and rejoiced in doing it. These two grew to be great friends, and when after three years Claudia came home and came out, all parties were happy.

In the meantime Mr. Brewer's way in the world had been straight, plain, and rapidly travelled. The county was at his feet. Mary was no longer congratulated on having been brought up to poverty. Behind her back there were plenty of people to say that Mr. Brewer was happy in having for his wife a well connected gentlewoman. Her pedigree was told, her poverty forgotten. Her singing and playing, dancing and drawing, were none the worse for unknown thousands a year. And people wondered less openly at the splendor of velvets and diamonds than they had at the new muslin gown. To Mary herself life was very different in every way. Daily, more and more, she admired her husband, and approved of him. It was the awakening into life of a new set of feelings. She knew none of the love and devotion she had felt for her first husband. Mr. Brewer never expected any of it. But he intended that she should, in some other indescribable manner, fall in love with him, and she was doing it every day--which thing her husband saw, and welcomed life with great satisfaction in consequence.

It was when Claudia came out that the man we have seen, Horace Erskine, first came to them. He was just of age. Mary did not like him. She could give no reason for it. Her sister had always praised him--but Mary could not like him. He came to them for a series of gay doings, and Mr. Brewer admired him, and Claudia--poor little Claudia! She gave him that strong heart of hers; that spirit that could break sooner than bend was quite enslaved--she loved him, and he had asked for her love, and vowed a hundred times that he could never be happy without it. He asked her of her father, and Mr. Brewer consented. It was not for Mary to say no; but her heart went cold in its fear, and she was very sorry.

The Erskines in Scotland were delighted--all deemed doing well. But when Horace Erskine talked to Mr. Brewer about money, he was told that Claudia would have on her marriage five thousand pounds; and ten thousand more if she survived him would be forthcoming on his death-- that was all. "Enough for a woman," said Mr. Brewer; and Erskine was silent. It went on for a few weeks, Horace, being flighty and odd, Claudia, for the first time in her life, humble and endearing. Then he told her that to him money was necessary; then he asked her to appeal to her father for more; then she treated the request lightly, and, at last, positively refused. If she had not enough, he could leave her. If he left her, would she take the blame on herself? It would injure him in his future hopes and prospects to have it supposed to be his doing if they parted? Yes, she said. It was the easiest thing in the world. Who cared?--not he of course--and, certainly, not Claudia Brewer. It broke her heart to find him vile. But she was too discerning not to see the truth; her great thought now was to hide it. To hide too from every one, even from "Mother-Mary," that her heart felt death-struck--that the whole place was poisoned to her--that life at Beremouth was loathsome.

She took a strange way of hiding it.

A county election was going on. The man whom Mr. Brewer hoped to see elected was a guest at Beremouth. An old, grey-haired, worldly, statesmanlike man. A man who petted Claudia, and admired her; and who suddenly woke up one day to a thought--a question--a species of amusing suggestion, which grew into a [{25}] profound wonder, and then even warmed into a hope--surely that pretty bright young heiress liked him, had a fancy to be the second Lady Greystock. It was a droll thought at first, and he played with it; a flattering fancy, and he encouraged it. He was an honest man. He knew that he was great, clever, learned. Was there anything so wonderful in a woman loving him? He settled the question by asking Claudia. And she promised to be his wife with a real and undisguised gladness. Her spirit and her determination were treading the life out of her heart. She was sincere in her gladness. She thought she could welcome any duties that took her away from life at Beremouth, and gave her place and position elsewhere.

Mary suspected much, and feared everything. But Claudia felt and knew too much to speak one word of the world of hope and joy and love that had gone away from her. She declared that she liked her old love, and gloried in his grey hairs, and in the great heart that had stooped to ask for hers.

Now what are we to say of Horace Erskine? Was he wholly bad? First, he had never loved Claudia with a real devotion. He had admired her; she had loved him. He had gambled--green turf and green cloth--gambled and recklessly indulged himself till he had got upon the way to ruin, and had begun the downward path, and was glad to be stopped in that slippery descent by a marriage with an heiress. There was a sparkle, an originality, about Claudia. It was impossible not to be taken with her. But Claudia with only that fortune was of no use to him. He knew she was brave and true-hearted; so he boldly asked her to guard his name--in fact, to give him up, and not injure his next chance with a better heiress by telling the truth. He told her the truth; that he wanted money, and money he must have. She would not tell him that the worst part of her trial was the loss of her idol. It was despising him that broke her heart. But because he had been her idol she would never injure him--never tell.

So the day came, and at Marston church she married Sir Geoffrey Greystock, "Mother-Mary" wondering; Mr. Brewer believing, in the innocence of his heart, that the fancy for Horace Erskine had been a bit of the old wilfulness. "The last bit--the last," he said, as he spoke of it to her that very day, making her chilled heart knock against her side as he spoke, and kissed her, and sent her with blessings from the Beremouth that she had married to get away from.

To get away--it had more to do with her marrying than any other thought. To get away from the house, the spreading pastures, the bright garden, and above all from the old deer pond in the park--the most beautiful of all the many lovely spots that nature and art, and time and taste, had joined to create and adorn Beremouth. The old deer pond in the park! Sheltered by ancient oak; backed by interlacing boughs of old hawthorn trees; shadowed by tall, shining, dark dense holly, that glowed through the winter with its red berries, and contrasted with the long fair wreaths of hawthorn flowers in the sweet smiling spring. There, in this now dreaded place, Horace Erskine had first spoken of love; and there how often had he promised her the happiness that had gone out of her life--for ever. In the terrible nights, when her broken-hearted pains were strongest, this deer pond in the park had been before her closed eyes like a vision. In its waters she saw in her sleep her face and his, so happy, so loving, so trusting, so true. Then the picture in that water changed, and she watched it in her feverish dreams with horror, but yet was obliged to gaze, and the truth went out of his face, and the terror came into hers. And, worse and worse, he grew threatening--he was cold--he had never loved--he was killing her; and she fell, fell from her height of happiness; no protecting [{26}] arm stayed her, and the dark waters opened, and she heard the rushing sound of their deadly waves closing over her, as she sunk--sunk--again and again, night after night Oh, to get away, to get away! And she blessed Sir Geoffrey, and when he said he was too old to wait for a wife she was glad, for she had no wish to wait. Change, absence, another home, another life, another world--these things she wanted, and they had come. Is it any wonder that she took them as the man who is dying of thirst takes the longed-for draught, and drains the cup of mercy to the dregs?

It was a happy day to marry. Mr. Brewer had not only an excuse, but a positively undeniable reason for being bountiful and kind. For once he could openly, and as a matter of duty, make the sad hearts in Marston--and elsewhere--sing for joy. His blessings flowed so liberally that he had to apologize. It was only for once--he begged everybody's pardon, but it could never happen again; he had but this one child, and she was a bride, and so if they would forgive everything this once! And many a new life of gladness was begun that day; many a burden then lost its weight; many a record went up to the Eternal memory to meet that man at the inevitable hour.

Little Mary was the loveliest bridesmaid the world ever saw; standing alone like an angel by her dark sister's side. She was the only thing that Claudia grieved to leave. She was glad to flee away from "Mother-Mary." She dreaded lest those sweet wistful eyes should read her heart one day; and she could not help rejoicing to get away from that honest, open-hearted father's sight. Her poor, wrecked, shrunken heart--her withered life, could not bear the contrast with his free, kind, bounteous spirit that gave such measure of love, pressed down and running over, to all who wanted it. Her old husband, Sir Geoffrey, resembled that great good heart in whose love she had learnt to think all men true, more than did her young lover Horace Erskine--she could be humble and thankful to Sir Geoffrey; a well-placed approval was a better thing than an ill-placed love. So with that little vision of beauty, Minnie Lorimer, by her side, Claudia became Sir Geoffrey's wife.

Four months past, the bride and bridegroom were entertaining a grand party at their fine ancestral home, and Mr. Brewer was the father of a son and heir. Horace Erskine read both announcements in the paper one morning, and ground his teeth with vexation. He went to his desk and took out three letters, a long lock of silky hair, a small miniature--these things he had begged to keep. Laughing, he had argued that he was almost a relation. His uncle had married "Mother-Mary's" sister. She had had no strength to debate with him. She had chosen to wear the mask of indifference, too, to him. He now made these things into a parcel and sent them to Sir Geoffrey Greystock without one word of explanation. When they were gone he wrote to his uncle, begged for some money, got it, and started for Vienna. The money met him in London, and he crossed to France the same day.

In the midst of great happiness the strong heart of good Sir Geoffrey stood still. His wife sought him. She found him in his chair in a fit. On a little table by his side was the parcel just received. Claudia knew all. She took the parcel into the room close by, called her dressing room, rung for help, but in an hour Sir Geoffrey was dead; and Claudia had burnt the letters and the lock of silky hair.

The business of parliament, the excitement attendant on his marriage with that beautiful girl, the entertainment of that great house full of company--these reasons the world reckoned up, and found sufficient to answer the questions and the wonderings on Sir Geoffrey's death. But when those solemn walls no longer knew their master, Claudia, into whose new life the new things held but an [{27}] unsteady place, grew ill. First of all, sleepless nights: how could she sleep with the sound of those waters by the deer pond in her ears? How could she help gazing perpetually at the picture on the pond's still surface: Horace and Sir Geoffrey, and herself not able to turn aside the death-stroke, but standing, fettered by she knew not what, in powerless misery, only obliged to see the changing face of her husband till the dead seemed to be again before her, and Horace melted out of sight, and she woke, dreading fever and praying against delirium? She was overcome at last. Terrible hours came, and "Mother-Mary's" sweet face mingling with some strong, subduing, life-endangering dream, was the first thing that seemed to bring her back to better things, and to restore her to herself.

In fact, Claudia had had brain fever, and whether or not she was ever to know real health again was a problem to be worked out by time. Would she come back to her father's house? No! The very name of Beremouth was to be avoided. Would she go abroad? Oh, no; there was a dread of separation upon her. "Somewhere where you can easily hear of me, and I of you; where you can come and see me, for I shall never see Beremouth again." It was her own thought, and so, about five miles from Beremouth, in the house of a Doctor Rankin, who took ladies out of health into his family, Claudia determined to go. It was every way the best thing that could be done, for every day showed more strongly than the last that Claudia would never be what is emphatically called "herself" again. So people said.

Dr. Rankin was kind, learned, and wise; Mrs. Rankin warm-hearted and friendly. Other patients beside Lady Greystock were there. It was not a private asylum, and Claudia was not mad; it was really what it called itself, a home which the sick might share, with medical attendance, cheerful company, and out-door recreations in a well-kept garden and extensive grounds of considerable beauty. Claudia had known Dr. and Mrs. Rankin, and had called with her father at Blagden, where they lived. And there her father and "Mother-Mary" took her three months after her husband's death, looking really aged, feeble, and strangely sad.

After a time--it was a long time--Claudia was said to be well. "Perfectly recovered," said Dr. Rankin, "and in really satisfactory health." So she was when Minnie Lorimer stood in the room at the inn in Hull, talking to that very Horace Erskine, who was bringing her home from her aunt's in Scotland to her mother at Beremouth.

"Sweet seventeen!" Very sweet and beautiful, pleasing the eye, gratifying the mind, filling the heart with hope, and setting imagination at play--Minnie Lorimer was beautiful, and with all that peculiar beauty about her that belongs to "a spoilt child" who has not been spoilt after all.

Claudia--how old she looked! Claudia, with that one only shadow on her once bright face, was still living with Dr. and Mrs. Rankin. It was Lady Greystock's pleasure to live with them. She said she had grown out of the position of a patient, and into their hearts as a friend. "Was it not so?" she asked. It was impossible to deny that which really brought happiness to everybody. "Well, then, I shall build on a few rooms to the house, and I shall call them mine, and I shall add to the coach-house, and hire a cottage for my groom and his wife--I shall live here. Why not? You will take care of me, and feed me, and scold me, and find me a good guidable creature. You know I shall be ill if you refuse."

It all happened as she chose. Hers was the prettiest carriage in the county, the best horses, the most perfectly appointed little household--for she had her own servants. Among her most devoted friends were the good doctor and his wife. Lady Greystock was as positive and as much given to [{28}] govern as the clever little Claudia in school-girl days. But the arrangement was a success, and "Mother-Mary," who saw her constantly, was very glad. Only one trouble survived; Claudia would never go and stay at Beremouth. She would drive her ponies merrily to the door, and even spend an hour or two within the house, but never would she stay there--never! She used to say to herself that she dared not trust herself with the things that had witnessed her love, her sorrow, her marriage--with the things that told her of him who had ruined everything like a murderer--as he was.

And so, to save appearances, she used to say that she never stayed away from Blagden for a single night, and she never left off black. It was not that she wore a widow's dress, or covered up the glories of her beautiful hair. She was but twenty-nine at the moment recorded in the first page of this story. She was very thin and pale, but she was a strong woman, and one who required no more care than any other person; but she had determined never again to see Horace Erskine. What he had done had become known to her, as we have seen. She only bargained with life, as it were, in this way, that that man should be out of it for ever. And for this it was that she made her resolution and kept it.

Horace Erskine had been abroad for some years; but though she had felt safe in that fact, she had looked into the future and kept her resolution. And so she lived on at Blagden, doing good, blessing the poor, comforting the afflicted, visiting the sick, and beautifying all things, and adorning all places that came within her reach. Certain things she was young enough to enjoy greatly; the chief of these was the contemplation of Frederick Brewer, her half-brother, a fine boy of nine years old, for nine years of widowhood had been passed, and through all that time this boy, her dear father's son, had been Lady Greystock's delight. She loved "Mother-Mary" all the better for having given him to her father, and she felt a strong, unutterable thanksgiving that, his birth having been expected, the test of whether or not Horace Erskine loved her for herself had been applied before she had become chained to so terrible a destiny as that of being wife to a thankless, disappointed man. Terrible as her great trial had been, she might have suffered that which, to one of her temper, would have been far worse. So Fred Brewer would ride over to see his sister. Day after day the boy's bright face would be laid beside her own, and to him, and only to him, would she talk of Sir Geoffrey. Then they would ride together down to Marston to see Mrs. Morier and Jenifer, who was a true friend, and lived on those terms with the lady who loved her well; then to the market-place where the old home stood, now turned into an almshouse of an eccentric sort, with all rules included under one head, that the dear old souls were to have just whatever they wanted. Did Martha Gannet keep three parrots, and did they eat as much as a young heifer? and scream, too? ah, that was their nature--never go against a dumb creature's nature, Mr. Brewer said there was always cruelty in that--and did they smell, and give trouble, and would they be mischievous, and tear Mrs. Betty's cap? Indeed. Mr. Brewer was delighted. An excellent excuse for giving new caps to all the inmates, and to look up all troubles, and mend everybody's griefs--such an excellent thing it was that the fact of three parrots should lead to the discovery of so many disgraceful neglects that Mr. Brewer begged leave to apologize very heartily and sincerely while he diligently repaired them. It was a very odd school to bring up young Freddy in. But we are obliged to say that he was not at all the worse for it.

And here we must say what we have not said before. Mr. Brewer was a Catholic. He and Jenifer were [{29}] Catholics; Mrs. Brewer had not been a Catholic; and Claudia had been left to her mother's teaching. When Freddy was born, Mr. Brewer considered his ways. And what he saw in his life we may see shortly. He had been born of a Catholic mother who had died, and made his Protestant father promise to send him to a Catholic school. He had stood alone in the world, he had always stood alone in the world. He seemed to see nothing else. Three miles from Marston was a little dirty sea-port, also a sort of fishing place. A place that bore a bad character in a good many ways. Some people would have finished that character by saying that there were Papists there. To that place every Sunday Mr. Brewer went to mass. Many and many a lift he had given to Jenifer on those days. How much Jenifer's talk assisted his choice of Mary for his wife, we may guess. When Freddy was born Jenifer said her first words on the subject of religion to Mr. Brewer: "You will have him properly baptized:" "Of course." "Order me the pony cart, and I'll go to Father Daniels." "I must tell Mrs. Brewer." "Leave that to me--just send for the cart." It was left to Jenifer. By night the priest had come and gone. It had not been his first visit. He had been there many times, and had known that he was welcome. The Clayton mission had felt the blessing of Mr. Brewer's gold. He had seldom been at the house in the market-place in Marston, but at Beremouth Mary had plucked her finest flowers, and sent them back in the old gentleman's gig, and he had been always made welcome in her husband's house with a pretty grace and many pleasant attentions. Now, when Freddy was baptized, Mr. Brewer went to his wife and bent over her, and said solemnly, "Mary--my dear wife; Mary--I thank thee, darling. I thank thee, my love." And the single tear that fell on her cheek she never forgot.

Then Mr. Brewer met Jenifer at his wife's door. "It's like a new life, Jenifer." And the steady-mannered woman looked in his bright eyes and saw how true his words were.

"It's a steady life of doing good to everybody that you have ever led, sir. It was a lonely life once, no doubt. I was dazed when she married you. But, eh, master; I have that to think about, and that to pray for, that a'most makes me believe in anything happening to you for good, when so much is asked for, day and night, in my own prayer."

"Put us into it; let me and mine be in Jenifer's prayer," he said, and passed on.

TO BE CONTINUED.

From The Month.
PROPOSED SUBSTITUTES FOR THE STEAM-ENGINE.

The present year has been remarkable for the large number of machines invented for the purpose of superseding steam, in at least some of its lighter tasks. Many of these are due to French engineers; being further proofs, if any were required, of the great activity now displayed in France in all matters of mechanical invention.

Two of these new engines are especially interesting as illustrating that all-important law in modern physics, the correlation or convertibility of forces. By this is meant that the forces of inanimate nature, such as light, heat, electricity--nay, even the muscular and nerve forces of living beings--have such a mutual dependence and connection that each one is only produced or called into action by another, and only ceases to be manifest when it has given birth to a fresh force in its turn. Thus motion (in the [{30}] shape of friction) produces heat, electricity, or light; heat produces light or electricity; electricity, magnetism; and so on in an endless chain, which links together all the phenomena of this visible universe.

As a metaphysical principle, this is as old as Aristotle, and may be found dimly foreshadowed in the forcible lines of Lucretius:

"--Pereunt imbres, ubi eos pater aether
In gremium matris terrai praecipitavit;
At nitidae surgunt fruges, ramique virescunt,
Arboribus crescunt ipsae, fetuque gravautur,
Hinc alitar porro nostrum genus atque ferarum.
* * * * * *
Haud igitur penitus pereunt quaecumque videntur,
Quando aliud ex alio reflcit natura, nec ullam
Rem gigni patitur, nisi morte adjuta aliena." [Footnote 8]

[Footnote 8: Lucret. lib. i. 250-65.]

But the rediscovery of this law, as a result of experiment, is due to English physicists of our own day; and it is so invariably true, and the produced force is always so perfectly proportioned to the force producing it, that some [Footnote 9] have gone so far as to revive a very old hypothesis in philosophy, supposing that all the forces of nature are but differently expressed forms of the Divine Will.

[Footnote 9: Dr. Carpenter, Philos. Trans. 1840, vol. ii. ]

As a corollary to this law, it follows that many a force of nature, hitherto neglected because of its position or intractability, may be turned to practical account by using it to produce some new power, which may be either stored up or transmitted to a distance, and so can be employed wherever and whenever it is required. Thus, in the first machine we propose to notice, a M. Cazal has just hit upon a plan by which to use the power of falling water at a considerable distance. He employs a water-wheel to turn a magneto-electric machine (of the kind used for medical purposes, on a very large scale), and the electric force so obtained may be conveyed to any distance, and employed there as a motive power. In this way a mountain stream in the Alps or Pyrenees may turn a lathe, or set a loom in motion, in a workshop in Paris or Lyons; or even (as has been remarked), if a wire were laid across the Atlantic, the whole force of Niagara would be at our disposal.

The idea is at present quite in its infancy; but we are told that the few experiments hitherto made show that such an engine is not only very ingenious but perfectly feasible, and (most important of all) economical.

The second engine gave promise of considerable success when first brought out in Paris about eight months ago. It was invented by a M. Tellier, and proceeds on the principle of storing up force, to be used when wanted. It has long been well known to chemists that a certain number of gases (as chlorine, carbonic acid, ammonia, and sulphuretted hydrogen) can be condensed into liquids by cold or pressure, or both combined. Of all these gases, ammonia is the most easily liquefied, requiring for this purpose, at ordinary temperatures, a pressure only six and a half times greater than that of the atmosphere. A supply of liquid ammonia obtained in this manner is kept by M. Tellier in a closed vessel, and surrounded with a freezing mixture, so that it has but little tendency to return to the gaseous state. A small quantity is allowed to escape from this reservoir under the piston of the engine, and, the temperature there being higher than in the reservoir, the ammonia becomes at once converted into gas, increasing thereby to more than twelve hundred times its previous bulk, and so driving the piston with great force to the top of the cylinder. A little water is now admitted, which entirely dissolves the ammonia, a vacuum being thus created, and the piston driven down again by the pressure of the air without. M. Tellier employs three such cylinders, which work in succession; and the only apparent limit to the power to be obtained from this machine is the amount of liquid ammonia which would have to be used, about three gallons (or twenty-two pounds) being required for each horse-power per hour. There is no waste of material; for the water which has dissolved [{31}] the gas is saved, and the ammonia recovered from it by evaporation, and afterwards condensed into a liquid. M. Tellier proposed to use his engine for propelling omnibuses and other vehicles; but it would appear that it is too expensive and too cumbrous to be practically useful; there can, however, be very little doubt that the principle will be used with success in some new form. A patent has quite recently been taken out for such an engine in England. It will be perceived at once how the ammonia engine illustrates the law of storing up force. It originates no power of its own, but simply gives out by degrees the mechanical force which had been previously employed to change the ammonia from a gas to a liquid.

Lenoir's "gas-engine" has been more successful; for, although but a few months old, it has been already largely adopted in Parisian hotels, schools, and other large establishments, for raising lifts, making ices, and even--for what is not done now-a-days by machinery?--cleaning boots. In London, it was lately exhibited in Cranbourne Street, and is now used for turning lathes and for other light work.

This engine, like the ammonia-engine, is provided with an ordinary cylinder, into which coal-gas and air are admitted, under the piston, in the proportions of eleven parts of the latter to one of the former. The mixture is then exploded by the electric spark, and the remaining air, being greatly expanded, drives up the piston. When the top is reached the gas and air are again admitted, but this time above the piston, and the explosion is repeated, so that the piston is driven down again. The most ingenious part of the whole thing is the mechanism by which the electric spark is directed alternately to the upper and lower ends of the cylinder. This cannot be satisfactorily explained without a diagram, but is brought about (roughly speaking) by connecting either end of the cylinder with a semicircle of brass, which is touched by the "rotary crank" in the course of its revolution. The crank is already charged with electricity, and so communicates the electric spark to each of the semicircles in turn. The cylinder is kept plunged in water, so that there is no fear of its overheating by the constant explosions.

This engine has cheapness for its main recommendation. A half-horsepower gas-engine (the commonest power made) costs, when complete, £65, and consumes twopence worth of gas per hour; while the cost of keeping the battery active is about fourpence per week.

An engineer of Lyons, M. Millon, has since proposed to use, instead of coal-gas, the gases produced by passing steam over red-hot coke. These gases are found to explode rather more quickly than coal-gas, when mixed with common air, and fired by the electric spark. They will probably be found cheaper and more efficient when they can be obtained; but in many cases coal-gas will be the only material available.

A M. Jules Gros has recently invented an engine in which gun-cotton is exploded in a strong reservoir and air compressed in another, the compressed air being afterward employed to move the pistons of the machine. This sounds more dangerous than it perhaps really is, since gun-cotton is now known to be more tractable than gunpowder, when properly used; but we very much doubt whether the machine can be regular or economical enough to be more than a curiosity.

To close the list of French inventions of this kind, we may state that Count de Molin has lately patented an electro-magnetic machine, which, he states, will be more powerful than any previously made. It is too complicated for a mere verbal description to be of any use; but is apparently not free from the fault of all electro-magnetic engines, of costing too much to be of practical value.

[{32}]

[ORIGINAL]

CHRISTINE.
A TROUBADOUR'S SONG,
IN FIVE CANTOS,
BY GEORGE H. MILES. [Footnote 10]

[Footnote 10: Copyright secured.]

PRELUDE.

The Queen hath built her a fairy Bower
In the shadow of the Accursed Tower,
For the Moslem hath left his blood-stained lair,
And the banner of England waveth there.
Thither she lureth the Lion King
To hear a wandering Trovère sing;
For well she knew the Joyous Art
Was surest path to Richard's heart.
But the Monarch's glance was on the sea--
Sooth, he was scarce in minstrel mood,
For Philip's triremes homeward stood
With all the Gallic chivalry.
And as he watched the filmy sail
Upon the furthest billow fail,
He muttered, "Richard ill can spare
Thee and thy Templars, false and fair;
Yet God hath willed it--home to thee,
Death or Jerusalem for me!"
Then pressing with a knightly kiss
The peerless hand that slept in his,
"Ah, would our own Blondel were here
To try a measure I wove last e'en.
What songster hast thou caught, my Queen,
Whose harp may soothe a Monarch's ear?"
She beckoned, and the Trovère bowed
To many a Lord and Ladye fair
That gathered round the royal pair;
But most his simple song was vowed
To a sweet shape with dark brown hair,
Half hidden in the gentle crowd;
Pale as a spirit, sharply slender.
In maiden beauty's crescent splendor.
And never yet bent Minstrel knee
To Mistress lovelier than she.

[{33}]

THE FIRST SONG.

I.
Ye have heard of the Castle of Miolan
And how it hath stood since time began,
Midway to yon mountain's brow,
Guarding the beautiful valley below:
Its crest the clouds, its ancient feet
Where the Arc and the Isère murmuring meet
Earth hath few lovelier scenes to show
Than Miolan with its hundred halls,
Its massive towers and bannered walls,
Looming out through the vines and walnut woods
That gladden its stately solitudes.
And there might ye hear but yestermorn
The loud halloo and the hunter's horn,
The laugh of mailèd men at play.
The drinking bout and the roundelay.
But now all is sternest silence there.
Save the bell that calls to vesper prayer;
Save the ceaseless surge of a father's wail,
And, hark! ye may hear the Baron's Tale.
II.
"Come hither. Hermit!--Yestermorn
I had an only son,
A gallant fair as e'er was born,
A knight whose spurs were won
In the red tide by Godfrey's side
At Ascalon.
[{34}]
"But yestermorn he came to me
For blessing on his lance,
And death and danger seemed to flee
The joyaunce of his glance,
For he would ride to win his Bride,
Christine of France.
"All sparkling in the sun he stood
In mail of Milan dressed,
A scarf, the gift of her he wooed,
Lay lightly o'er his breast.
As, with a clang, to horse he sprang
With nodding crest
"Gaily he grasped the stirrup cup
Afoam with spicy ale,
But as he took the goblet up
Methought his cheek grew pale.
And a shudder ran through the iron man
And through his mail.
"Oft had I seen him breast the shock
Of squire or crownèd king,
His front was firm as rooted rock
When spears were shivering:
I knew no blow could shake him so
From living thing.
"'Twas something near akin to death
That blanched and froze his cheek,
Yet 'twas not death, for he had breath,
And when I bade him speak,
Unto his breast his hand he pressed
With one wild shriek.
"The hand thus clasped upon his heart
So sharply curbed the rein,
Grey Caliph, rearing with a start,
Went bounding o'er the plain
Away, away with echoing neigh
And streaming mane.
"After him sped the menial throng;
I stirred not in my fear;
Perchance I swooned, for it seemed not long
Ere the race did reappear,
And my son still led on his desert-bred.
Grasping his spear.
[{35}]
"Unchanged in look or limb, he came.
He and his barb so fleet,
His hand still on his heart, the same
Stem bearing in his seat,
And wheeling round with sudden bound
Stopped at my feet.
"And soon as ceased that wildering tramp
'What ails thee, boy?' I cried--
Taking his hand all chill and damp--
'What means this fearful ride?
Alight, alight, for lips so white
Would scare a Bride!'
"But sternly to his steed clove he,
And answer made he none,
I clasped him by his barbèd knee
And there I made my moan;
While icily he stared at me,
At me alone.
"A strange, unmeaning stare was that,
And a page beside me said,
'If ever corse in saddle sat,
Our lord is certes sped!'
But I smote the lad, for it drove me mad
To think him dead.
"What! dead so young, what! lost so soon,
My beautiful, my brave!
Sooner the sun should find at noon
In central heaven a grave!
Sweet Jesu, no, it is not so
When Thou canst save!
"For was he dead and was he sped,
When he could ride so well,
So bravely bear his plumèd head?
Or, was't some spirit fell
In causeless wrath had crossed his path
With fiendish spell?
"Oh. Hermit, 'twas a cruel sight.
And He, who loves to bless,
Ne'er sent on son such bitter blight.
On sire such sore distress,
Such piteous pass, and I, alas,
So powerless!
[{36}]
"They would have ta'en him from his horse
The while I wept and prayed,
They would have lain him like a corse
Upon a litter made
Of traversed spear and martial gear.
But I forbade.
"I gazed into his face again,
I chafed his hand once more,
I summoned him to speak, in vain--
He sat there as before,
While the gallant Grey in dumb dismay
His rider bore.
"Full well, full well Grey Caliph then
The horror seemed to know.
E'en deeper than my mailèd men
Methought he felt our woe;
For the barbed head of the desert-bred
Was drooping low.
"Amazed, aghast, he gazed at me,
That mourner true and good.
Then backward at my boy looted he.
As if a word he sued.
And like sculptured pile in abbey aisle
The train there stood.
"I took the rein: the frozen one
Still fast in saddle sate.
As tremblingly I led him on
Toward the great castle gate.
O walls mine own, why have ye grown
So desolate?--
"I led them to the castle gate
And paused before the shrine
Where throned in state from earliest date,
Protectress of our line.
Madonna pressed close to her breast
The Babe Divine.
"And kneeling lowly at her feet,
I begged the Mother mild
That she would sue her Jesu sweet
To aid my stricken child;
And the meek stone face flashed full of grace
As if she smiled.
[{37}]
"And methought the eyes of the Full of Grace
Upon my darling shone,
Till living seemed that marble face
And the living man seemed stone,
While a halo played round the Mother Maid
And round her Son.
"And there was radiance everywhere
Surpassing light of day,
On man and horse, on shield and spear
Burned the bright, blinding ray;
But most it shone on my only one
And his gallant Grey.
"A sudden clang of armor rang,
My boy lay on the sward.
Up high in air Grey Caliph sprang,
An instant fiercely pawed.
Then trembling stood aghast and viewed
His fallen lord.
"Then with the flash of fire away
Like sunbeam o'er the plain,
Away, away with echoing neigh
And wildly waving mane.
Away he sped, loose from his head
The flying rein.
"I watched the steed from pass to pass
Unto the welkin's rim,
I feared to turn my eyes, alas,
To trust a look at him;
And when I turned, my temples burned
And all grew dim.
"Sweet if such swoon could endless be,
Yet speedily I woke
And missed my boy: they showed him me
Full length on bed of oak.
Clad as 'twas meet in mail complete
And sable cloak.
"All of our race upon that bier
Had rested one by one,
I had seen my father lying there,
And now there lay my son!
Ah! my sick soul bled the while it said--
'Thy will be done!'
[{38}]
"Bright glanced the crest, bright gleamed the spur,
That well had played their part,
His lance still clasped, nor could they stir
His left hand from his heart;
There fast it clove, nor would it move
With all their art
"I found no voice, I shed no tear.
They thought me well resigned.
All else who stood around the bier
With weeping much were blind;
And a mourning voice went through the house
Like a low wind.
"And there was sob of aged man
And woman's wailing cry,
All cheeks were wan, all eyes o'erran,
Yon fair-haired maidens sigh.
And one apart with breaking heart
Weeps bitterly.
"But sharper than spear-thrust, I trow,
Their wailing through me went;
Stem silence suited best my woe,
And, howe'er well the intent.
Their menial din seemed half akin
To merriment
"For oh, such grief was mock to mine
Whose days were all undone.
The last of all this ancient line
To share whose grief was none!
Straight from the hall I barred them all
And stood alone.
"'Receive me now, thou bed of oak!'
I fell upon the bier.
And, Hermit, when this morning broke
It found me clinging there.
O maddening morn! That day dare dawn
On such a pair!
"I sent for thee, thou man of God,
To watch with me to-night;
My boy still liveth, by the rood,
Nor shall be funeral rite!--
But, Hermit, come: this is the room:
There lies the Knight!"
[{39}]
III.
But she apart
With breaking heart?--
That very yestermorn she stood
In the deepest shade of the walnut wood,
As a Knight rode by on his raven steed,
Crying, "Daughter mine, hast thou done the deed?
I gave thee the venom, I gave thee the spell,
A jealous heart might use them well."
But she waved her white arms and only said,
"On oaken bier is Miolan laid!"
"Dead!" laughed the Knight. "Then round Pilate's Peak
Let the red light burn and the eagle shriek.
When Miolan? heir lies on the bier,
Low is the only lance I fear:
I ride, I ride to win my Bride,
Ho, Eblis, to thy servant's side.
Thou hast sworn no foe
Shall lay me low
Till the dead in arms against me ride!"

THE SECOND SONG.

I.
They passed into an ancient hall
With oaken arches spanned.
Full many a shield hung on the wall,
Full many a broken brand.
And barbèd spear and scimetar
From Holy Land.
And scarfs of dames of high degree
With gold and jewels rich,
And many a mouldered effigy
In many a mouldering niche,
Like grey sea shells whose crumbling cells
Bestrew the beach.
[{40}]
The sacred dead possessed the place,
The silent cobweb wreathed
The tombs where slept that warrior race,
With swords for ever sheathed:
You seemed to share the very air
Which they had breathed.
Oh, darksome was that funeral room,
Those oaken arches dim,
The torchlight, struggling through the gloom,
Fell faint on effige grim,
On dragon dread and carvèd head
Of Cherubim.
Of Cherubim fast by a shrine
Whereon the last sad rite
Was wont for all that ancient line,
For dame and belted knight--
A shrine of Moan which death alone
Did ever light.
But light not now that altar stone
While hope of life remain,
Though darksome be that altar lone,
Unlit that funeral fane,
Save by the rays cast by the blaze
Of torches twain.
Of torches twain at head and heel
Of him who seemeth dead,
Who sleepeth so well in his coat of steel.
His cloak around him spread--
The young Knight fair, who lieth there
On oaken bed.
One hand still fastened to his heart.
The other on his lance,
While through his eyelids, half apart.
Life seemeth half to glance.
"Sweet youth awake, for Jesu's sake,
From this strange trance!"
But heed or answer there is none.
Then knelt that Hermit old;
To Mother Mary and her Son
Full many a prayer he told,
Whose wondrous words the Church records
In lettered gold:
[{41}]
And many a precious litany
And many a pious vow,
Then rising said, "If fiend it be,
That fiend shall leave thee now!"
And traced the sign of the Cross divine
On lips and brow.
As well expect yon cherub's wings
To wave at matin bell!
Not all the relics of the kings
Could break that iron spell.
"Pray for the dead, let mass be said,
Toll forth the knell!"
"Not yet!" the Baron gasped and sank
As if beneath a blow,
With lips all writhing as they drank
The dregs of deepest woe;
With eyes aglare, and scattered hair
Tossed to and fro.
So swings the leaf that lingers last
When wintry tempests sweep,
So reels when storms have stripped the mast
The galley on the deep,
So nods the snow on Eigher's brow
Before the leap.
Uncertain 'mid his tangled hair
His palsied fingers stray,
He smileth in his dumb despair
Like a sick child at play.
Though wet, I trow, with tears eno'
That beard so grey.
Oh, Hermit, lift him to your breast,
There best his heart may bleed;
Since none but heaven can give him rest,
Heaven's priest must meet his need:
Dry that white beard, now wet and weird
As pale sea-weed.
Uprising slowly from the ground,
With short and frequent breath.
In aimless circles, round and round,
The Baron tottereth
With trailing feet, a mourner meet
For house of death.
[{42}]
Till, pausing by the shrine of Moan,
He said, the while he wept,
"Here, Hermit, here mine only one,
When all the castle slept,
As maiden knight, o'er armor bright,
His first watch kept.
"This is the casque that first he wore,
And this his virgin shield.
This lance to his first tilt he bore,
With this first took the field--
How light, how lâche to that huge ash
He now doth wield!
"This blade hath levelled at a blow
The she-wolf in her den.
With this red falchion he laid low
The slippery Saracen.
God! will that hand, so near his brand,
Ne'er strike again?
"Frown not on him, ye men of old.
Whose glorious race is run;
Frown not on him, my fathers bold.
Though many the field ye won:
His name and los may mate with yours
Though but begun!
"Receive him, ye departed brave,
Unlock the gates of light.
And range yourselves about his grave
To hail a brother knight.
Who never erred in deed or word
Against the right!
"But is he dead and is he sped
Withouten scathe or scar?
Why, Hermit, he hath often bled
From sword and scimetar--
I've seen him ride, wounds gaping wide,
From war to war.
"And hath a silent, viewless thing
Laid danger's darling low,
When youth and hope were on the wing
And life in morning glow?
Not yonder worm in winter's storm
Perisheth so!
[{43}]
"Oh, Hermit, thou hast heard, I ween,
Of trances long and deep,
But, Hermit, hast thou ever seen
That grim and stony sleep.
And canst thou tell how long a spell
Such slumbers keep?
"Oh, be there naught to break the charm,
To thaw this icy chain;
Has Mother Church no word to warm
These freezing lips again;
Be holy prayer and balsams rare
Alike in vain? . . . .
"A curse on thy ill-omened head;
Man, bid me not despair;
Churl, say not that a Knight is dead
When he can couch his spear;
When he can ride--Monk, thou hast lied.
He lives, I swear!
"Up from that bier! Boy, to thy feet!
Know'st not thy father's voice?
Thou ne'er hast disobeyed . . . is't meet
A sire should summon thrice?
By these grey hairs, by these salt tears,
Awake, arise!
"Ho, lover, to thy ladye flee,
Dig deep the crimson spur;
Sleep not 'twixt this lean monk and me
When thou shouldst kneel to her!
Oh 'tis a sin, Christine to win
And thou not stir!
"Ho, laggard, hear yon trumpet's note
Go sounding to the skies,
The lists are set, the banners float.
Yon loud-mouthed herald cries,
'Ride, gallant knights, Christine invites.
Herself the prize!'
"Ho, craven, shun'st thou the melée,
When she expects thy brand
To prove to-day in fair tourney
A title to her hand?
Up, dullard base, or by the mass
I'll make thee stand!" . . . .
[{44}]
Thrice strove he then to wrench apart
Those fingers from the spear.
Thrice strove to sever from the heart
The hand that rested there.
Thrice strove in vain with frantic strain
That shook the bier.
Thrice with the dead the living strove,
Their armor rang a peal,
The sleeping knight he would not move
Although the sire did reel:
That stately corse defied all force,
Stubborn as steel.
"Ay, dead, dead, dead!" the Baron cried;
"Dear Hermit, I did rave.
O were we sleeping side by side! . .
Good monk, I penance crave
For all I said .... Ay, he is dead,
Pray heaven to save!
"Betake thee to thy crucifix,
And let me while I may
Rain kisses on these frozen cheeks
Before they know decay.
Leave me to weep and watch and keep
The worm at bay.
"Thou wilt not spare thy prayers, I trust;
But name not now the grave--
I'll watch him to the very dust! ....
So, Hermit, to thy cave.
Whilst here I cling lest creeping thing
Insult the brave!"
------
Why starts the Hermit to his feet,
why springs he to the bier,
Why calleth he on Jesu sweet,
Staying the starting tear.
What whispereth he half trustfully
And half in fear?
[{45}]
"Sir Knight, thy ring hath razed his flesh--
'Twas in thy frenzy done;
Lo, from his wrist how fast and fresh
The blood-drops trickling run;
Heaven yet may wake, for Mary's sake,
Thy warrior son.
"Heap ashes on thy head, Sir Knight,
In sackcloth gird thee well,
The shrine of Moan must blaze in light,
The morning mass must swell;
Arouse from sleep the castle keep,
Sound every bell!"
They come, pale maid and mailèd man
They throng into the hall,
The watcher from the barbican,
The warder from the wall.
And she apart, with breaking heart,
The last of all.
"Introibo! Introibo!"
The morning mass begins;
"Mea culpa! mea culpa!"
Forgive us all our sins;
And the rapt Hermit chaunts with streaming eyes,
That seem to enter Paradise,
"Gloria! Gloria!"
The shrine of Moan had never known
That gladdest of all hymns.
------
II.
The fair-haired maiden standeth apart
In the chapel gloom, with breaking heart.
But a smile broke over her face as she said,
"The draught was well measured, I ween;
He liveth, thank Allah, but not to wed
His beautiful Christine.
No lance hath Miolan couched to-day:
Let the bride for the bridegroom watch, and pray.
Till the lists shall hear the shriek
Of the Dauphin's daughter borne away
By the Knight of Pilate's Peak."

TO BE CONTINUED.

[{46}]

A LETTER TO THE REV. E. B. PUSEY, D.D., ON HIS RECENT EIRENICON.
BY JOHN HENRY NEWMAN, D.D., OF THE ORATORY.

Veni, Domine, et noli tardare,
relaxa facinora plebi tuae;
et rovoca dispersos in terram suam.

No one who desires the union of Christendom, after its many and long-standing divisions, can have any other feeling than joy, my dear Pusey, at finding from your recent volume that you see your way to make definite proposals to us for effecting that great object, and are able to lay down the basis and conditions on which you could co-operate in advancing it. It is not necessary that we should concur in the details of your scheme, or in the principles which it involves, in order to welcome the important fact that, with your personal knowledge of the Anglican body, and your experience of its composition and tendencies, you consider the time to be come when you and your friends may, without imprudence, turn your minds to the contemplation of such an enterprise. Even were you an individual member of that church, a watchman upon a high tower in a metropolis of religious opinion, we should naturally listen with interest to what you had to report of the state of the sky and the progress of the night, what stars were mounting up or what clouds gathering; what were the prospects of the three great parties which Anglicanism contains within it, and what was just now the action upon them respectively of the politics and science of the time. You do not go into these matters; but the step you have taken is evidently the measure and the issue of the view which you have formed of them all.

However, you are not a mere individual; from early youth you have devoted yourself to the Established Church, and after between forty and fifty years of unremitting labor in its service, your roots and your branches stretch out through every portion of its large territory. You, more than any one else alive, have been the present and untiring agent by whom a great work has been effected in it; and, far more than is usual, you have received in your lifetime, as well as merited, the confidence of your brethren. You cannot speak merely for yourself; your antecedents, your existing influence, are a pledge to us that what you may determine will be the determination of a multitude. Numbers, too, for whom you cannot properly be said to speak, will be moved by your authority or your arguments; and numbers, again, who are of a school more recent than your own, and who are only not your followers because they have outstripped you in their free speeches and demonstrative acts in our behalf, will, for the occasion, accept you as their spokesman. There is no one anywhere--among ourselves, in your own body, or, I suppose, in the Greek Church--who can affect so vast a circle of men, so virtuous, so able, so learned, so zealous, as come, more or less, under your influence; and I cannot pay them all a greater compliment, than to tell them they ought all to be Catholics, nor do them a more affectionate service than to pray that they may one day become such. Nor can I address myself to an act more pleasing, as I trust, to the Divine Lord of the church, and more loyal and dutiful to his Vicar on earth, than to attempt, however, feebly, to promote so great a consummation.

[{47}]

I know the joy it would give those conscientious men of whom I am speaking to be one with ourselves. I know how their hearts spring up with a spontaneous transport at the very thought of union; and what yearning is theirs after that great privilege, which they have not, communion with the See of Peter and its present, past, and future. I conjecture it by what I used to feel myself, while yet in the Anglican Church. I recollect well what an outcast I seemed to myself when I took down from the shelves of my library the volumes of St. Athanasius or St. Basil, and set myself to study them; and how, on the contrary, when at length I was brought into Catholicism, I kissed them with delight, with a feeling that in them I had more than all that I had lost, and, as though I were directly addressing the glorious saints who bequeathed them to the Church, I said to the inanimate pages, "You are now mine, and I am now yours, beyond any mistake." Such, I conceive, would be the joy of the persons I speak of, if they could wake up one morning and find themselves possessed by right of Catholic traditions and hopes, without violence to their own sense of duty; and, certainly, I am the last man to say that such violence is in any case lawful, that the claims of conscience are not paramount, or that any one may overleap what he deliberately holds to be God's command, in order to make his path easier for him or his heart lighter.

I am the last man to quarrel with this jealous deference to the voice of our conscience, whatever judgment others may form of us in consequence, for this reason--because their case, as it at present stands, has, as you know, been my own. You recollect well what hard things were said against us twenty-five years ago, which we knew in our hearts we did not deserve. Hence, I am now in the position of the fugitive queen in the well-known passage, who, "haud ignara mali" herself, had learned to sympathize with those who were inheritors of her past wanderings. There were priests, good men, whose zeal outstripped their knowledge, and who in consequence spoke confidently, when they would have been wiser had they suspended their adverse judgment of those whom they had soon to welcome as brethren in communion. We at that time were in worse plight than your friends are now, for our opponents put their very hardest thoughts of us into print. One of them wrote thus in a letter addressed to one of the Catholic bishops:

"That this Oxford crisis is a real progress to Catholicism, I have all along considered a perfect delusion. ... I look upon Mr. Newman, Dr. Pusey, and their associates as wily and crafty, though unskilful, guides. . . . The embrace of Mr. Newman is the kiss that would betray us. . . . But--what is the most striking feature in the rancorous malignity of these men--their calumnies are often lavished upon us, when we should be led to think that the subject-matter of their treatises closed every avenue against their vituperation. The three last volumes [of the Tracts] have opened my eyes to the craftiness and the cunning, as well as the malice, of the members of the Oxford convention. . . . If the Puseyites are to be the new apostles of Great Britain, my hopes for my country are lowering and gloomy. . . . I would never have consented to enter the lists against this strange confraternity ... if I did not feel that my own prelate was opposed to the guile and treachery of these men. . . . . I impeach Dr. Pusey and his friends of a deadly hatred of our religion. . . . . What, my lord, would the Holy See think of the works of these Puseyites? . . ."

Another priest, himself a convert, wrote:

"As we approach toward Catholicity our love and respect increases, and our violence dies away; but the bulk of these men become more rabid as they become like Rome, a plain proof of their designs. ... I do not believe that they are any nearer the portals of the Catholic Church than the most prejudiced Methodist and Evangelical preacher. . . . Such, rev. sir, is an outline of my views on the Oxford movement."

[{48}]

I do not say that such a view of us was unnatural; and, for myself, I readily confess that I had used about the church such language that I had no claim on Catholics for any mercy. But, after all, and in fact, they were wrong in their anticipations--nor did their brethren agree with them at the time. Especially Dr. Wiseman (as he was then) took a larger and more generous view of us; nor did the Holy See interfere, though the writer of one of these passages invoked its judgment. The event showed that the more cautious line of conduct was the more prudent; and one of the bishops, who had taken part against us, with a supererogation of charity, sent me on his death-bed an expression of his sorrow for having in past years mistrusted me. A faulty conscience, faithfully obeyed, through God's mercy, had in the long run brought me right.

Fully, then, do I recognize the rights of conscience in this matter. I find no fault in your stating, as clearly and completely as you can, the difficulties which stand in the way of your joining us. I cannot wonder that you begin with stipulating conditions of union, though I do not concur in them myself, and think that in the event you yourself would be content to let them drop. Such representations as yours are necessary to open the subject in debate; they ascertain how the land lies, and serve to clear the ground. Thus I begin; but, after allowing as much as this, I am obliged in honesty to say what I fear, my dear Pusey, will pain you. Yet I am confident, my very dear friend, that at least you will not be angry with me if I say, what I must say, or say nothing at all, that there is much both in the matter and in the manner of your volume calculated to wound those who love you well, but love truth more. So it is; with the best motives and kindest intentions, "Caedimur, et totidem plagis consumimus hostem." We give you a sharp cut, and you return it. You complain of our being "dry, hard, and unsympathizing;" and we answer that you are unfair and irritating. But we at least have not professed to be composing an Irenicon, when we treated you as foes. There was one of old time who wreathed his sword in myrtle; excuse me--you discharge your olive-branch as if from a catapult.

Do not think I am not serious; if I spoke seriously, I should seem to speak harshly. Who will venture to assert that the hundred pages which you have devoted to the Blessed Virgin give other than a one-sided view of our teaching about her, little suited to win us? It may be a salutary castigation, if any of us have fairly provoked it, but it is not making the best of matters; it is not smoothing the way for an understanding or a compromise. It leads a writer in the most moderate and liberal Anglican newspaper of the day, the "Guardian," to turn away from your representation of us with horror. "It is language," says your reviewer, "which, after having often heard it, we still can only hear with horror. We had rather not quote any of it, or of the comments upon it." What could an Exeter Hall orator, what could a Scotch commentator on the Apocalypse, do more for his own side of the controversy by the picture he drew of us? You may be sure that what creates horror on one side will be answered by indignation on the other, and these are not the most favorable dispositions for a peace conference. I had been accustomed to think that you, who in times past were ever less declamatory in controversy than myself, now that years had gone on, and circumstances changed, had come to look on our old warfare against Rome as cruel and inexpedient. Indeed, I know that it was a chief objection urged against me only last year by persons who agreed with you in deprecating an oratory at Oxford, which at that time was in prospect, that such an undertaking would be the signal for the rekindling of that fierce style of polemics which is now out of date. I had fancied you shared in that opinion; but now, as if [{49}] to show how imperative you deem its renewal, you actually bring to life one of my own strong sayings in 1841, which had long been in the grave--that "the Roman Church comes as near to idolatry as can be supposed in a church, of which it said, 'The idols he shall utterly abolish,'" p. 111.

I know, indeed, and feel deeply, that your frequent references in your volume to what I have lately or formerly written are caused by your strong desire to be still one with me as far as you can, and by that true affection which takes pleasure in dwelling on such sayings of mine as you can still accept with the full approbation of your judgment. I trust I am not ungrateful or irresponsive to you in this respect; but other considerations have an imperative claim to be taken into account. Pleasant as it is to agree with you, I am bound to explain myself in cases in which I have changed my mind, or have given a wrong impression of my meaning, or have been wrongly reported; and, while I trust that I have better than such personal motives for addressing you in print, yet it will serve to introduce my main subject, and give me an opportunity for remarks which bear upon it indirectly, if I dwell for a page or two on such matters contained in your volume as concern myself.

1. The mistake which I have principally in view is the belief, which is widely spread, that I have publicly spoken of the Anglican Church as "the great bulwark against infidelity in this land." In a pamphlet of yours, a year old, you spoke of "a very earnest body of Roman Catholics" who "rejoice in all the workings of God the Holy Ghost in the Church of England (whatever they think of her), and are saddened by what weakens her who is, in God's hands, the great bulwark against infidelity in this land." The concluding words you were thought to quote from my "Apologia." In consequence, Dr. Manning, now our archbishop, replied to you, asserting, as you say, "the contradictory of that statement." In that counter-assertion he was at the time generally considered (rightly or wrongly, as it may be), though writing to you, to be really correcting statements in my "Apologia," without introducing my name. Further, in the volume which you have now published, you recur to the saying, and you speak of its author in terms which, did I not know your partial kindness for me, would hinder me from identifying him with myself. You say, "The saying was not mine, but that of one of the deepest thinkers and observers in the Roman communion," p. 7. A friend has suggested to me that, perhaps, you mean De Maistre; and, from an anonymous letter which I have received from Dublin, I find it is certain that the very words in question were once used by Archbishop Murray; but you speak of the author of them as if now alive. At length a reviewer of your volume, in the "Weekly Register," distinctly attributes them to me by name, and gives me the first opportunity I have had of disowning them; and this I now do. What, at some time or other, I may have said in conversation or private letter, of course, I cannot tell; but I have never, I am sure, used the word "bulwark" of the Anglican Church deliberately. What I said in my "Apologia" was this: That that church was "a serviceable breakwater against errors more fundamental than its own." A bulwark is an integral part of the thing it defends; whereas the words "serviceable" and "breakwater" imply a kind of protection which is accidental and de facto. Again, in saying that the Anglican Church is a defence against "errors more fundamental than its own," I imply that it has errors, and those fundamental.

2. There is another passage in your volume, at p. 337, which it may be right to observe upon. You have made a collection of passages from the fathers, as witnesses in behalf of your doctrine that the whole Christian faith is contained in Scripture, as if, in your sense of the words. Catholics contradicted you here. [{50}] And you refer to my notes on St. Athanasius as contributing passages to your list; but, after all, neither do you, nor do I in my notes, affirm any doctrine which Rome denies. Those notes also make frequent reference to a traditional teaching, which (be the faith ever so certainly contained in Scripture) still is necessary as a Regula Fidei, for showing us that it is contained there--vid. pp. 283, 344--and this tradition, I know, you uphold as fully as I do in the notes in question. In consequence, you allow that there is a twofold rule. Scripture and tradition; and this is all that Catholics say. How, then, do Anglicans differ from Rome here? I believe the difference is merely one of words; and I shall be doing, so far, the work of an Irenicon, if I make clear what this verbal difference is. Catholics and Anglicans (I do not say Protestants) attach different meanings to the word "proof," in the controversy whether the whole faith is, or is not, contained in Scripture. We mean that not every article of faith is so contained there, that it may thence be logically proved, independently of the teaching and authority of the tradition; but Anglicans mean that every article of faith is so contained there, that it may thence be proved, provided there be added the illustrations and compensations of the tradition. And it is in this latter sense, I conceive, the fathers also speak in the passages which you quote from them. I am sure at least that St. Athanasius frequently adduces passages as proofs of points in controversy which no one would see to be proofs unless apostolical tradition were taken into account, first as suggesting, then as authoritatively ruling, their meaning. Thus, you do not deny that the whole is not in Scripture in such sense that pure unaided logic can draw it from the sacred text; nor do we deny that the faith is in Scripture, in an improper sense, in the sense that tradition is able to recognize and determine it there. You do not profess to dispense with tradition; nor do we forbid the idea of probable, secondary, symbolical, connotative senses of Scripture, over and above those which properly belong to the wording and context. I hope you will agree with me in this.

3. Nor is it only in isolated passages that you give me a place in your volume. A considerable portion of it is written with reference to two publications of mine, one of which you name and defend, the other you tacitly protest against: "Tract 90," and the "Essay on Doctrinal Development," As to "Tract 90," you have from the first, as all the world knows, boldly stood up for it, in spite of the obloquy which it brought upon you, and have done me a great service. You are now republishing it with my cordial concurrence; but I take this opportunity of noticing, lest there should be any mistake on the part of the public, that you do so with a different object from that which I had when I wrote it. Its original purpose was simply that of justifying myself and others in subscribing to the Thirty-nine Articles while professing many tenets which had popularly been considered distinctive of the Roman faith. I considered that my interpretation of the Articles, as I gave it in that Tract, would stand, provided the parties imposing them allowed it, otherwise I thought it could not stand; and, when in the event the bishops and public opinion did not allow it, I gave up my living, as having no right to retain it. My feeling about the interpretation is expressed in a passage in "Loss and Gain," which runs thus:

"'Is it,' asked Reding, 'a received view?' 'No view is received,' said the other; 'the Articles themselves are received, but there is no authoritative interpretation of them at all.' 'Well,' said Reding, 'is it a tolerated view?' 'It certainly has been strongly opposed,' answered Bateman; 'but it has never been condemned.' 'That is no answer,' said Charles. 'Does any one bishop hold it? Did any one bishop ever hold it? Has it ever been formally admitted as tenable by any one bishop? Is it a view got up to meet existing difficulties, or has it an historical existence?' Bateman could give only one answer to [{51}] these questions, as they were successively put to him. 'I thought so,' said Charles; 'the view is specious certainly. I don't we why it might not have done, had it been tolerably sanctioned; but you have no sanction to show me. As it stands, it is a mere theory struck out by individuals. Our church might have adopted this mode of interpreting the Articles; but, from what you tell me, it certainly has not done so.'"--Ch. 15.

However, the Tract did not carry its object and conditions on its face, and necessarily lay open to interpretations very far from the true one. Dr. Wiseman (as he then was), in particular, with the keen apprehension which was his characteristic, at once saw in it a basis of accommodation between Anglicanism and Rome. He suggested broadly that the decrees of the Council of Trent should be made the rule of interpretation for the Thirty-nine Articles, a proceeding of which Sancta Clara, I think, had set the example; and, as you have observed, published a letter to Lord Shrewsbury on the subject, of which the following are extracts:

"We Catholics must necessarily deplore [England's] separation as a deep moral evil--as state of schism of which nothing can justify the continuance. Many members of the Anglican Church view it in the same light as to the first point--its sad evil; though they excuse their individual position in it as an unavoidable misfortune. . . . We may depend upon a willing, an able, and a most zealous co-operation with any effort which we may make toward bringing her into her rightful position, in Catholic unity with the Holy See and the churches of its obedience--in other words, with the church Catholic. Is this a visionary idea? Is it merely the expression of strong desire? I know that many will so judge it; and, perhaps, were I to consult my own quiet, I would not venture to express it. But I will, in simplicity of heart, cling to hopefulness, cheered, as I feel it, by so many promising appearances. . . .
"A natural question here presents itself--what facilities appear in the present state of things for bringing about so happy a consummation as the reunion of England to the Catholic Church, beyond what have before existed, and particularly under Archbishops Laud or Wake? It strikes me, many. First, etc. . . . A still more promising circumstance I think your lordship will with me consider the plan which the eventful 'Tract No. 90' has pursued, and in which Mr. Ward, Mr. Oakeley, and even Dr. Pusey have agreed. I allude to the method of bringing their doctrines into accordance with ours by explanation. A foreign priest has pointed out to us a valuable document for our consideration--'Bossuet's Reply to the Pope,' when consulted on the best method of reconciling the followers of the Augsburg Confession with the Holy See. The learned bishop observes, that Providence had allowed so much Catholic truth to be preserved in that Confession that full advantage should be taken of the circumstance; that no retractations should be demanded, but an explanation of the Confession in accordance with Catholic doctrines. Now, for such a method as this, the way is in part prepared by the demonstration that such interpretation may be given of the most difficult Articles as will strip them of all contradiction to the decrees of the Tridentine Synod. The same method may be pursued on other points; and much pain may thus be spared to individuals, and much difficulty to the church."--Pp. 11, 35, 38.

This use of my Tract, so different from my own, but sanctioned by the great name of our cardinal, you are now reviving; and I gather from your doing so, that your bishops and the opinion of the public are likely now, or in prospect, to admit what twenty-five years ago they refused. On this point, much as it rejoices me to know your anticipation, of course I cannot have an opinion.

4. So much for "Tract 90." On the other hand, as to my "Essay on Doctrinal Development," I am sorry to find you do not look upon it with friendly eyes; though how, without its aid, you can maintain the doctrines of the Holy Trinity and incarnation, and others which you hold, I cannot understand. You consider my principle may be the means, in time to come, of introducing into our Creed, as portions of the necessary Catholic faith, the infallibility of the Pope, and various opinions, pious or profane, as it may be, about our Blessed Lady. I hope to remove your anxiety as to these consequences, before I bring my [{52}] observations to an end; at present I notice it as my apology for interfering in a controversy which at first sight is no business of mine.

5. I have another reason for writing; and that is, unless it is rude in me to say so, because you seem to think writing does not become me. I do not like silently to acquiesce in such a judgment You say at p. 98:

"Nothing can be more unpractical than for an individual to throw himself into the Roman Church because he could accept the letter of the Council of Trent. Those who were born Roman Catholics have a liberty which, in the nature of things, a person could not have who left another system to embrace that of Rome. I cannot imagine how any faith could stand the shock of leaving one system, criticising it, and cast himself into another system, criticising it. For myself, I have always felt that had (which God of his mercy avert hereafter also) the English Church, by accepting heresy, driven me out of it, I could have gone in no other way than that of closing my eyes, and accepting whatever was put before me. But a liberty which individuals could not use, and explanations which, so long as they remain individual, must be unauthoritative, might be formally made by the Church of Rome to the Church of England as the basis of reunion."

And again, p. 210:

"It seems to me to be a psychological impossibility for one who has already exchanged one system for another to make those distinctions. One who, by his own act, places himself under authority, cannot make conditions about his submission. But definite explanations of our Articles have, before now, been at least tentatively offered to us, on the Roman and Greek side, as sufficient to restore communion; and the Roman explanations too were, in most cases, mere supplements to our Articles, on points upon which our Church had not spoken."

Now passages such as these seem almost a challenge to me to speak, and to keep silence would be to assent to the justice of them. At the cost, then, of speaking about myself, of which I feel there has been too much of late, I observe upon them as follows: Of course, as you say, a convert comes to learn, and not to pick and choose. He comes in simplicity and confidence, and it does not occur to him to weigh and measure every proceeding, every practice which he meets with among those whom he has joined. He comes to Catholicism as to a living system, with a living teaching, and not to a mere collection of decrees and canons, which by themselves are of course but the framework, not the body and substance, of the church. And this is a truth which concerns, which binds, those also who never knew any other religion, not only the convert. By the Catholic system I mean that rule of life and those practices of devotion for which we shall look in vain in the Creed of Pope Pius. The convert comes, not only to believe the church, but also to trust and obey her priests, and to conform himself in charity to her people. It would never do for him to resolve that he never would say a Hail Mary, never avail himself of an indulgence, never kiss a crucifix, never accept the Lent dispensations, never mention a venial sin in confession. All this would not only be unreal, but dangerous, too, as arguing a wrong state of mind, which could not look to receive the divine blessing. Moreover, he comes to the ceremonial, and the moral theology, and the ecclesiastical regulations which he finds on the spot where his lot is cast. And again, as regards matters of politics, of education, of general expedience, of taste, he does not criticise or controvert. And thus surrendering himself to the influences of his new religion, and not losing what is revealed truth by attempting by his own private rule to discriminate every moment its substance from its accidents, he is gradually so indoctrinated in Catholicism as at length to have a right to speak as well as to hear. Also, in course of time, a new generation rises round him; and there is no reason why he should not know as much, and decide questions with as true an instinct, as those who perhaps number fewer years than he does Easter communions. [{53}] He has mastered the fact and the nature of the differences of theologian from theologian, school from school, nation from nation, era from era. He knows that there is much of what may be called fashion in opinions and practices, according to the circumstances of time and place, according to current politics, the character of the Pope of the day, or the chief prelates of a particular country, and that fashions change. His experience tells him, that sometimes what is denounced in one place as a great offence, or preached up as a first principle, has in another nation been immemorially regarded in just a contrary sense, or has made no sensation at all, one way or the other, when brought before public opinion; and that loud talkers, in the church as elsewhere, are apt to carry all before them, while quiet and conscientious persons commonly have to give way. He perceives that, in matters which happen to be in debate, ecclesiastical authority watches the state of opinion and the direction and course of controversy, and decides accordingly; so that in certain cases to keep back his own judgment on a point is to be disloyal to his superiors.

So far generally; now in particular as to myself. After twenty years of Catholic life, I feel no delicacy in giving my opinion on any point when there is a call for me, and the only reason why I have not done so sooner, or more often than I have, is that there has been no call. I have now reluctantly come to the conclusion that your volume is a call. Certainly, in many instances in which theologian differs from theologian, and country from country, I have a definite judgment of my own; I can say so without offence to any one, for the very reason that from the nature of the case it is impossible to agree with all of them. I prefer English habits of belief and devotion to foreign, from the same causes, and by the same right, which justify foreigners in preferring their own. In following those of my people, I show less singularity and create less disturbance than if I made a flourish with what is novel and exotic. And in this line of conduct I am but availing myself of the teaching which I fell in with on becoming a Catholic; and it is a pleasure to me to think that what I hold now, and would transmit after me if I could, is only what I received then. The utmost delicacy was observed on all hands in giving me advice; only one warning remains on my mind, and it came from Dr. Griffiths, the late vicar-apostolic of the London district. He warned me against books of devotion of the Italian school, which were just at that time coming into England; and when I asked him what books he recommended as safe guides, he bade me get the works of Bishop Hay. By this I did not understand that he was jealous of all Italian books, or made himself responsible for all that Dr. Hay happens to have said; but I took him to caution me against a character and tone of religion, excellent in its place, not suited for England. When I went to Rome, though it may seem strange to you to say it, even there I learned nothing inconsistent with this judgment. Local influences do not supply an atmosphere for its institutions and colleges, which are Catholic in teaching as well as in name. I recollect one saying among others of my confessor, a Jesuit father, one of the holiest, most prudent men I ever knew. He said that we could not love the Blessed Virgin too much, if we loved our Lord a great deal more. When I returned to England, the first expression of theological opinion which came in my way was apropos of the series of translated saints' lives which the late Dr. Faber originated. That expression proceeded from a wise prelate, who was properly anxious as to the line which might be taken by the Oxford converts, then for the first time coming into work. According as I recollect his opinion, he was apprehensive of the effect of Italian [{54}] compositions, as unsuited to this country, and suggested that the lives should be original works, drawn up by ourselves and our friends from Italian sources. If at that time I was betrayed into any acts which were of a more extreme character than I should approve now, the responsibility of course is mine; but the impulse came not from old Catholics or superiors, but from men whom I loved and trusted who were younger than myself. But to whatever extent I might be carried away, and I cannot recollect any tangible instances, my mind in no long time fell back to what seems to me a safer and more practical course.

Though I am a convert, then, I think I have a right to speak out; and that the more because other converts have spoken for a long time, while I have not spoken; and with still more reason may I speak without offence in the case of your present criticisms of us, considering that, in the charges you bring, the only two English writers you quote in evidence are both of them converts, younger in age than myself. I put aside the archbishop, of course, because of his office. These two authors are worthy of all consideration, at once from their character and from their ability. In their respective lines they are perhaps without equals at this particular time; and they deserve the influence they possess. One is still in the vigor of his powers; the other has departed amid the tears of hundreds. It is pleasant to praise them for their real qualifications; but why do you rest on them as authorities? Because the one was "a popular writer;" but is there not sufficient reason for this in the fact of his remarkable gifts, of his poetical fancy, his engaging frankness, his playful wit, his affectionateness, his sensitive piety, without supposing that the wide diffusion of his works arises out of his particular sentiments about the Blessed Virgin? And as to our other friend, do not his energy, acuteness, and theological reading, displayed on the vantage ground of the historic "Dublin Review," fully account for the sensation he has produced, without supposing that any great number of our body go his lengths in their view of the Pope's infallibility? Our silence as regards their writings is very intelligible: it is not agreeable to protest, in the sight of the world, against the writings of men in our own communion whom we love and respect. But the plain fact is this--they came to the Church, and have thereby saved their souls; but they are in no sense spokesmen for English Catholics, and they must not stand in the place of those who have a real title to such an office. The chief authors of the passing generation, some of them still alive, others gone to their reward, are Cardinal Wiseman, Dr. Ullathorne, Dr. Lingard, Mr. Tierney, Dr. Oliver, Dr. Rock, Dr. Waterworth, Dr. Husenbeth, and Mr. Flanagan; which of these ecclesiastics has said anything extreme about the prerogatives of the Blessed Virgin or the infallibility of the Pope?

I cannot, then, without remonstrance, allow you to identify the doctrine of our Oxford friends in question, on the two subjects I have mentioned, with the present spirit or the prospective creed of Catholics; or to assume, as you do, that, because they are thorough-going and relentless in their statements, therefore they are the harbingers of a new age, when to show a deference for antiquity will be thought little else than a mistake. For myself, hopeless as you consider it, I am not ashamed still to take my stand upon the fathers, and do not mean to budge. The history of their times is not yet an old almanac to me. Of course I maintain the value and authority of the "Schola," as one of the loci theologici; still I sympathize with Petavius in preferring to its "contentious and subtle theology" that [{55}] "more elegant and fruitful teaching which is moulded after the image of erudite antiquity." The fathers made me a Catholic, and I am not going to kick down the ladder by which I ascended into the church. It is a ladder quite as serviceable for that purpose now as it was twenty years ago. Though I hold, as you remark, a process of development in apostolic truth as time goes on, such development does not supersede the fathers, but explains and completes them. And, in particular, as regards our teaching concerning the Blessed Virgin, with the fathers I am content; and to the subject of that teaching I mean to address myself at once. I do so because you say, as I myself have said in former years, that "that vast system as to the Blessed Virgin . . . . to all of us has been the special crux of the Roman system," p. 101. Here, I say, as on other points, the fathers are enough for me. I do not wish to say more than they, and will not say less. You, I know, will profess the same; and thus we can join issue on a clear and broad principle, and may hope to come to some intelligible result. We are to have a treatise on the subject of our Lady soon from the pen of the most reverend prelate; but that cannot interfere with such a mere argument from the fathers as that to which I shall confine myself here. Nor indeed, as regards that argument itself, do I profess to be offering you any new matter, any facts which have not been used by others--by great divines, as Petavius, by living writers, nay, by myself on other occasions; I write afresh nevertheless, and that for three reasons: first, because I wish to contribute to the accurate statement and the full exposition of the argument in question; next, because I may gain a more patient hearing than has sometimes been granted to better men than myself; lastly, because there just now seems a call on me, under my circumstances, to avow plainly what I do and what I do not hold about the Blessed Virgin, that others may know, did they come to stand where I stand, what they would and what they would not be bound to hold concerning her.

I begin by making a distinction which will go far to remove good part of the difficulty of my undertaking, as it presents itself to ordinary inquirers--the distinction between faith and devotion. I fully grant that devotion toward the Blessed Virgin has increased among Catholics with the progress of centuries; I do not allow that the doctrine concerning her has undergone a growth, for I believe that it has been in substance one and the same from the beginning.

By "faith" I mean the Creed and the acceptance of the Creed; by "devotion" I mean such religious honors as belong to the objecis of our faith, and the payment of those honors. Faith and devotion are as distinct in fact as they are in idea. We cannot, indeed, be devout without faith, but we may believe without feeling devotion. Of this phenomenon every one has experience both in himself and in others; and we express it as often as we speak of realizing a truth or not realizing it. It may be illustrated, with more or less exactness, by matters which come before us in the world. For instance, a great author, or public man, may be acknowledged as such for a course of years; yet there may be an increase, an ebb and flow, and a fashion, in his popularity. And if he takes a lasting place in the minds of his countrymen, he may gradually grow into it, or suddenly be raised to it. The idea of Shakespeare as a great poet has existed from a very early date in public opinion; and there were at least individuals then who understood him as well, and honored him as much, as the English people can honor him now; yet, I think, there is a national devotion to him in this day such as never has been before. This has happened because, as education spreads in the country, there are more men able to enter into his [{56}] poetical genius, and, among these, more capacity again for deeply and critically understanding him; and yet, from the first, he has exerted a great insensible influence over the nation, as is seen in the circumstance that his phrases and sentences, more than can be numbered, have become almost proverbs among us. And so again in philosophy, and in the arts and sciences, great truths and principles have sometimes been known and acknowledged for a course of years; but, whether from feebleness of intellectual power in the recipients, or external circumstances of an accidental kind, they have not been turned to account. Thus, the Chinese are said to have known of the properties of the magnet from time immemorial, and to have used it for land expeditions, yet not on the sea. Again, the ancients knew of the principle that water finds its own level, but seem to have made little application of their knowledge. And Aristotle was familiar with the principle of induction; yet it was left for Bacon to develop it into an experimental philosophy. Illustrations such as these, though not altogether apposite, serve to convey that distinction between faith and devotion on which I am insisting. It is like the distinction between objective and subjective truth. The sun in the springtime will have to shine many days before he is able to melt the frost, open the soil, and bring out the leaves; yet he shines out from the first, notwithstanding, though he makes his power felt but gradually. It is one and the same sun, though his influence day by day becomes greater; and so in the Catholic Church, it is the one Virgin Mother, one and the same from first to last, and Catholics may acknowledge her; and yet, in spite of that acknowledgment, their devotion to her may be scanty in one time and place and overflowing in another.

This distinction is forcibly brought home to a convert, as a peculiarity of the Catholic religion, on his first introduction to its worship. The faith is everywhere one and the same; but a large liberty is accorded to private judgment and inclination in matters of devotion. Any large church, with its collections and groups of people, will illustrate this. The fabric itself is dedicated to Almighty God, and that under the invocation of the Blessed Virgin, or some particular saint; or again, of some mystery belonging to the Divine name, or to the incarnation, or of some mystery associated with the Blessed Virgin. Perhaps there are seven altars or more in it, and these again have their several saints. Then there is the feast proper to the particular day; and, during the celebration of mass, of all the worshippers who crowd around the priest each has his own particular devotions, with which he follows the rite. No one interferes with his neighbor; agreeing, as it were, to differ, they pursue independently a common end, and by paths, distinct but converging, present themselves before God. Then there are confraternities attached to the church: of the sacred heart, or the precious blood; associations of prayer for a good death, or the repose of departed souls, or the conversion of the heathen: devotions connected with the brown, blue, or red scapular; not to speak of the great ordinary ritual through the four seasons, the constant presence of the blessed sacrament, its ever recurring rite of benediction, and its extraordinary forty hours' exposition. Or, again, look through some such manual of prayers as the Raccolta, and you at once will see both the number and the variety of devotions which are open to individual Catholics to choose from, according to their religious taste and prospect of personal edification.

Now these diversified modes of honoring God did not come to us in a day, or only from the apostles; they are the accumulations of centuries; and, as in the course of years some of them spring up, so others decline and die Some are local, in memory of some particular saint who happens to be the evangelist, or patron, or pride of the [{57}] nation, or who is entombed in the church, or in the city where it stands; and these, necessarily, cannot have an earlier date than the saint's day of death or interment there. The first of such sacred observances, long before these national memories, were the devotions paid to the apostles, then those which were paid to the martyrs; yet there were saints nearer to our Lord than either martyrs or apostles; but, as if these had been lost in the effulgence of his glory, and because they were not manifested in external works separate from him, it happened that for a long while they were less thought of. However, in process of time the apostles, and then the martyrs, exerted less influence than before over the popular mind, and the local saints, new creations of God's power, took their place, or again, the saints of some religious order here or there established. Then, as comparatively quiet times succeeded, the religious meditations of holy men and their secret intercourse with heaven gradually exerted an influence out of doors, and permeated the Christian populace, by the instrumentality of preaching and by the ceremonial of the church. Then those luminous stars rose in the ecclesiastical heavens which were of more august dignity than any which had preceded them, and were late in rising for the very reason that they were so specially glorious. Those names, I say, which at first sight might have been expected to enter soon into the devotions of the faithful, with better reason might have been looked for at a later date, and actually were late in their coming. St. Joseph furnishes the most striking instance of this remark; here is the clearest of instances of the distinction between doctrine and devotion. Who, from his prerogatives and the testimony on which they come to us, had a greater claim to receive an early recognition among the faithful? A saint of Scripture, the foster-father of our Lord, was an object of the universal and absolute faith of the Christian world from the first, yet the devotion to him is comparatively of late date. When once it began, men seemed surprised that it had not been thought of before; and now they hold him next to the Blessed Virgin in their religious affection and veneration.

As regards the Blessed Virgin, I shall postpone the question of devotion for a while, and inquire first into the doctrine of the undivided church (to use your controversial phrase) on the subject of her prerogatives.

What is the great rudimental teaching of antiquity from its earliest date concerning her? By "rudimental teaching" I mean the primâ facie view of her person and office, the broad outline laid down of her, the aspect under which she comes to us in the writings of the fathers. She is the second Eve. [Footnote 11] Now let us consider what this implies. Eve had a definite, essential position in the first covenant. The fate of the human race lay with Adam; he it was who represented us. It was in Adam that we fell; though Eve had fallen, still, if Adam had stood, we should not have lost those supernatural privileges which were bestowed upon him as our first father. Yet though Eve was not the head of the race, still, even as regards the race, she had a place of her own; for Adam, to whom was divinely committed the naming of all things, entitled her "the mother of all the living;" a name surely expressive not of a fact only but of a dignity; but further, as she thus had her own general relation to the human race, so again had she her own special place, as regards its trial and its fall in Adam. In those primeval events, Eve had an integral share. "The woman, being seduced, was in the transgression." She listened to the evil angel; she offered the fruit to her husband, and he ate of it. She co-operated not as an irresponsible instrument, but intimately and personally in the sin; she brought it about. As the history stands, she was a sine qua non, a positive, active cause of it. [{58}] And she had her share in its punishment; in the sentence pronounced on her, she was recognized as a real agent in the temptation and its issue, and she suffered accordingly. In that awful transaction there were three parties concerned--the serpent, the woman, and the man; and at the time of their sentence an event was announced for the future, in which the three same parties were to meet again, the serpent, the woman, and the man; but it was to be a second Adam and a second Eve, and the new Eve was to be the mother of the new Adam. "I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed." The seed of the woman is the word incarnate, and the woman whose seed or son he is is his mother Mary. This interpretation and the parallelism it involves seem to me undeniable; but, at all events (and this is my point), the parallelism is the doctrine of the fathers, from the earliest times; and, this being established, by the position and office of Eve in our fall, we are able to determine the position and office of Mary in our restoration.

[Footnote 11: Vid. "Essay on Development of Doctrine," 1845, p. 384, etc.]

I shall adduce passages from their writings, with their respective countries and dates; and the dates shall extend from their births or conversions to their deaths, since what they propound is at once the doctrine which they had received from the generation before them, and the doctrine which was accepted and recognized as true by the generation to whom they transmitted it.

First, then, St. Justin Martyr (A.D. 120-165), St. Irenaeus (120-200), and Tertullian (160-240). Of these Tertullian represents Africa and Rome, St. Justin represents Palestine, and St. Irenaeus Asia Minor and Gaul--or rather he represents St. John the Evangelist, for he had been taught by the martyr St. Polycarp, who was the intimate associate, as of St. John, 60 of the other apostles.

1. St. Justin: [Footnote 12]

[Footnote 12: I have attempted to translate literally without caring to write English. ]

"We know that he, before all creatures proceeded from the Father by his power and will, . . . and by means of the Virgin became man, that by what way the disobedience arising from the serpent had its beginning, by that way also it might have an undoing. For Eve, being a virgin and undefiled, conceiving the word that was from the serpent, brought forth disobedience and death; but the Virgin Mary, taking faith and joy, when the angel told her the good tidings, that the Spirit of the Lord should come upon her and the power of the highest overshadow her, and therefore the holy one that was born of her was Son of God, answered. Be it to me according to thy word."--Tryph. 100.

2. Tertullian:

"God recovered his image and likeness, which the devil had seized, by a rival operation. For into Eve, as yet a virgin, had crept the word which was the framer of death. Equally into a virgin was to be introduced the Word of God which was the builder-up of life; that, what by that sex had gone into perdition, by the same sex might be brought back to salvation. Eve had believed the serpent; Mary believed Gabriel; the fault which the one committed by believing, the other by believing has blotted out."--De Carn. Christ, 17.

3. St Irenaeus:

"With a fitness, Mary the Virgin is found obedient, saying, 'Behold thy handmaid, O Lord; be it to me according to thy word.' But Eve was disobedient; for she obeyed not, while she was yet a virgin. As she, having indeed Adam for a husband, but as yet being a virgin, . . . becoming disobedient, became the cause of death both to herself and to the whole human race, so also Mary, having the predestined man, and being yet a virgin, being obedient, became both to herself and to the whole human race the cause of salvation. . . . And on account of this the Lord said, that the first would be last and the last first. And the prophet signifies the same, saying, 'Instead of fathers you have children.' For, whereas the Lord, when born, was the first begotten of the dead, and received into his bosom the primitive fathers, he regenerated them into the life of God, he himself becoming the beginning of the living, since Adam became the beginning of the dying. Therefore also Luke, commencing the lines of generations from the Lord, referred it back to Adam, signifying that he regenerated the old fathers, not they him, into the gospel of life. And so the knot [{59}] of Eve's disobedience received its unloosing through the obedience of Mary; for what Eve, a virgin, bound by incredulity, that Mary, a virgin, unloosed by faith."-- Adv. Haer, iii. 22. 34.

And again:

"As Eve by the speech of an angel was seduced, so as to flee God, transgressing his word, so also Mary received the good tidings by means of the angel's speech, so as to bear God within her, being obedient to his word. And, though the one had disobeyed God, yet the other was drawn to obey God; that of the virgin Eve the virgin Mary might become the advocate. And, as by a virgin the human race had been bound to death, by a virgin it is saved, the balance being preserved, a virgin's disobedience by a virgin's obedience." --Ibid. v. 19.

Now, what is especially noticeable in these three writers is, that they do not speak of the Blessed Virgin as the physical instrument of our Lord's taking flesh, but as an intelligent, responsible cause of it; her faith and obedience being accessories to the incarnation, and gaining it as her reward. As Eve failed in these virtues, and thereby brought on the fall of the race in Adam, so Mary by means of them had a part in its restoration. You imply, pp. 255, 256, that the Blessed Virgin was only a physical instrument in our redemption; "what has been said of her by the fathers as the chosen vessel of the incarnation, was applied personally to her" (that is, by Catholics), p. 151; and again, "The fathers speak of the Blessed Virgin as the instrument of our salvation, in that she gave birth to the Redeemer," pp. 155, 156; whereas St. Augustine, in well-known passages, speaks of her as more exalted by her sanctity than by her relationship to our Lord. [Footnote 13] However, not to go beyond the doctrine of the three fathers, they unanimously declare that she was not a mere instrument in the incarnation, such as David, or Judah, may be considered; they declare she co-operated in our salvation, not merely by the descent of the Holy Ghost upon her body, but by specific holy acts, the effect of the Holy Ghost upon her soul; that, as Eve forfeited privileges by sin, so Mary earned privileges by the fruits of grace; that, as Eve was disobedient and unbelieving, so Mary was obedient and believing; that, as Eve was a cause of ruin to all, Mary was a cause of salvation to all; that, as Eve made room for Adam's fall, so Mary made room for our Lord's reparation of it; and thus, whereas the free gift was not as the offence, but much greater, it follows that, as Eve co-operated in effecting a great evil, Mary co-operated in effecting a much greater good.

[Footnote 13: Opp., t. 8, p. 2, col. 369, t. 6, col. 342.]

And, beside the run of the argument, which reminds the reader of St. Paul's antithetical sentences in tracing the analogy between Adam's work and our Lord's work, it is well to observe the particular words under which the Blessed Virgin's office is described. Tertullian says that Mary "blotted out" Eve's fault, and "brought back the female sex," or "the human race, to salvation;" and St. Irenaeus says that "by obedience she was the cause or occasion" (whatever was the original Greek word) "of salvation to herself and the whole human race;" that by her the human race is saved; that by her Eve's complication is disentangled; and that she is Eve's advocate, or friend in need. It is supposed by critics, Protestant as well as Catholic, that the Greek word for advocate in the original was paraclete; it should be borne in mind, then, when we are accused of giving our Lady the titles and offices of her Son, that St. Irenaeus bestows on her the special name and office proper to the Holy Ghost.

So much as to the nature of this triple testimony; now as to the worth of it. For a moment put aside St. Irenaeus, and put together St. Justin in the East with Tertullian in the West. I think I may assume that the doctrine of these two fathers about the Blessed Virgin was the received doctrine of their own [{60}] respective times and places; for writers after all are but witnesses of facts and beliefs, and as such they are treated by all parties in controversial discussion. Moreover, the coincidence of doctrine which they exhibit, and, again, the antithetical completeness of it, show that they themselves did not originate it. The next question is, Who did? For from one definite organ or source, place or person, it must have come. Then we must inquire, what length of time would it take for such a doctrine to have extended, and to be received, in the second century over so wide an area; that is, to be received before the year 200 in Palestine, Africa, and Rome? Can we refer the common source of these local traditions to a date later than that of the apostles, St. John dying within thirty or forty years of St. Justin's conversion and Tertullian's birth? Make what allowance you will for whatever possible exceptions can be taken to this representation; and then, after doing so, add to the concordant testimony of these two fathers the evidence of St. Irenaeus, which is so close upon the school of St. John himself in Asia Minor. "A three-fold cord," as the wise man says, "is not quickly broken." Only suppose there were so early and so broad a testimony to the effect that our Lord was a mere man, the son of Joseph; should we be able to insist upon the faith of the Holy Trinity as necessary to salvation? Or supposing three such witnesses could be brought to the fact that a consistory of elders governed the local churches, or that each local congregation was an independent church, or that the Christian community was without priests, could Anglicans maintain their doctrine that the rule of episcopal succession is necessary to constitute a church? And recollect that the Anglican Church especially appeals to the ante-Nicene centuries, and taunts us with having superseded their testimony.

Having then adduced these three fathers of the second century, I have at least got so far as this, viz., no one, who acknowledges the force of early testimony in determining Christian truth, can wonder, no one can complain, can object, that we Catholics should hold a very high doctrine concerning the Blessed Virgin, unless indeed stronger statements can be brought for a contrary conception of her, either of as early, or at least of a later date. But, as far as I know, no statements can be brought from the ante-Nicene literature to invalidate the testimony of the three fathers concerning her; and little can be brought against it from the fourth century, while in that fourth century the current of testimony in her behalf is as strong as in the second; and, as to the fifth, it is far stronger than in any former time, both in its fulness and its authority. This will to some extent be seen as I proceed.

4. St Cyril, of Jerusalem (315-386), speaks for Palestine:

"Since through Eve, a virgin, came death, it behoved that through a virgin, or rather from a virgin, should life appear; that, as the serpent had deceived the one, so to the other Gabriel might bring good tidings."--Cat. xii. 15.

5. St. Ephrem Syrus (lie died 378) is a witness for the Syrians proper and the neighboring Orientals, in contrast to the Graeco-Syrians. A native of Nisibis, on the farther side of the Euphrates, he knew no language but Syriac:

"Through Eve the beautiful and desirable glory of men was extinguished; but it has revived through Mary."--Opp. Syr., ii. p. 318.

Again:

"In the beginning, by the sin of our first parents, death passed upon all men; to-day, through Mary, we are translated from death unto life. In the beginning, the serpent filled the ears of Eve, and the poison spread thence over the whole body; to-day, Mary from her ears received the [{61}] champion of eternal happiness; what, therefore, was an instrument of death, was an instrument of life also."--iii. p. 607.

I have already referred to St. Paul's contrast between Adam and our Lord in his Epistle to the Romans, as also in his first Epistle to the Corinthians. Some writers attempt to say that there is no doctrinal truth, but a mere rhetorical display, in those passages. It is quite as easy to say so as to attempt so to dispose of this received comparison, in the writings of the fathers, between Eve and Mary.

6. St. Epiphanius (320-400) speaks for Egypt, Palestine, and Cyprus:

"She it is who is signified by Eve, enigmatically receiving the appellation of the mother of the living. . . . It was a wonder that after the fall she had this great epithet. And, according to what is material, from that Eve all the race of men on earth is generated. But thus in truth from Mary the Life itself was born in the world, that Mary might bear living things and become the mother of living things. Therefore, enigmatically, Mary is called the mother of living things. . . Also, there is another thing to consider as to these women, and wonderful--as to Eve and Mary. Eve became a cause of death to man . . . and Mary a cause of life; . . . that life might be instead of death, life excluding death which came from the woman, viz., he who through the woman has become our life." --Haer. 78. 18.

7. By the time of St. Jerome (331-420), the contrast between Eve and Mary had almost passed into a proverb. He says (Ep. xxii. 21, ad Eustoch.), "Death by Eve, life by Mary." Nor let it be supposed that he, any more than the preceding fathers, considered the Blessed Virgin a mere physical instrument of giving birth to our Lord, who is the life. So far from it, in the epistle from which I have quoted, he is only adding another virtue to that crown which gained for Mary her divine maternity. They have spoken of faith, joy, and obedience; St. Jerome adds, what they had only suggested, virginity. After the manner of the fathers in his own day, he is setting forth the Blessed Mary to the high-born Roman lady whom he is addressing as the model of the virginal life; and his argument in its behalf is, that it is higher than the marriage state, not in itself, viewed in any mere natural respect, but as being the free act of self-consecration to God, and from the personal religious purpose which it involves:

"Higher wage," he says, "is due to that which is not a compulsion, but an offering; for, were virginity commanded, marriage would seem to be put out of the question; and it would be most cruel to force men against nature, and to extort from them an angel's life."--20.

I do not know whose testimony is more important than St. Jerome's, the friend of Pope Damasus at Rome, the pupil of St. Gregory Nazianzen at Constantinople, and of Didymus in Alexandria, a native of Dalmatia, yet an inhabitant, at different times of his life, of Gaul, Syria, and Palestine.

8. St. Jerome speaks for the whole world, except Africa; and for Africa in the fourth century, if we must limit so world-wide an authority to place, witnesses St. Augustine (354-430). He repeats the words as if a proverb; "By a woman death, by a woman life" (Opp. t. v. Serm. 233); elsewhere he enlarges on the idea conveyed in it. In one place he quotes St. Irenaeus's words as cited above (adv. Julian i. 4). In another he speaks as follows:

"It is a great sacrament that, whereas through woman death became our portion, so life was born to us by woman; that, in the case of both sexes, male and female, the baffled devil should be tormented, when on the overthrow of both sexes he was rejoicing; whose punishment had been small, if both sexes had been liberated in us, without our being liberated through both."--Opp. t. vi. De Agon, Christ, c. 24.

[{62}]

9. St. Peter Chrysologus (400-450), Bishop of Ravenna, and one of the chief authorities in the fourth General Council:

"Blessed art thou among women; for among women, on whose womb Eve, who was cursed, brought punishment, Mary, being blest, rejoices, is honored, and is looked up to. And woman now is truly made through grace the mother of the living, who had been by nature the mother of the dying. . . . Heaven feels awe of God, angels tremble at him, the creature sustains him not, nature sufficeth not, and yet one maiden so takes, receives, entertains him, as a guest within her breast, that, for the very hire of her home, and as the price of her womb, she asks, she obtains, peace for the earth, glory for the heavens, salvation for the lost, life for the dead, a heavenly parentage for the earthly, the union of God himself with human flesh."--Serm. 140.

It is difficult to express more explicitly, though in oratorical language, that the Blessed Virgin had a real, meritorious co-operation, a share which had a "hire" and a "price" in the reversal of the fall.

10. St. Fulgentius, Bishop of Ruspe in Africa (468-533). The homily which contains the following passage is placed by Ceillier (t. xvi. p. 127) among his genuine works:

"In the wife of the first man, the wickedness of the devil depraved her seduced mind; in the mother of the second Man, the grace of God preserved both her mind inviolate and her flesh. On her mind he conferred the most firm faith; from her flesh he took away lust altogether. Since then man was in a miserable way condemned for sin, therefore without sin was in a marvellous way born the God man."--Serm. 2, p. 124, De Dupl. Nativ.

Accordingly, in the sermon which follows (if it is his), he continues, illustrating her office of universal mother, as ascribed to her by St. Epiphanius:

"Come ye virgins to a virgin, come ye who conceive to her who conceived, ye who bear to one who bore, mothers to a mother, ye that suckle to one who suckled, young girls to the young girl. It is for this reason that the Virgin Mary has taken on her in our Lord Jesus Christ all these divisions of nature, that to all women who have recourse to her she may be a succor, and so restore the whole race of women who come to her, being the new Eve, by keeping virginity, as the new Adam, the Lord Jesus Christ, recovers the whole race of men."

Such is the rudimental view, as I have called it, which the fathers have given us of Mary, as the second Eve, the mother of the living. I have cited ten authors. I could cite more were it necessary. Except the two last, they write gravely and without any rhetoric. I allow that the two last write in a different style, since the extracts I have made are from their sermons; but I do not see that the coloring conceals the outline. And, after all, men use oratory on great subjects, not on small; nor would they, and other fathers whom I might quote, have lavished their high language upon the Blessed Virgin, such as they gave to no one else, unless they knew well that no one else had such claims as she had on their love and veneration.

And now I proceed to dwell for a while upon two inferences, which it is obvious to draw from the rudimental doctrine itself; the first relates to the sanctity of the Blessed Virgin, the second to her greatness.

1. Her sanctity. She holds, as the fathers teach us, that office in our restoration which Eve held in our fall. Now, in the first place, what were Eve's endowments to enable her to enter upon her trial? She could not have stood against the wiles of the devil, though she was innocent and sinless, without the grant of a large grace. And this she had--a heavenly gift, which was over and above and additional to that nature of hers, which she received from Adam, as Adam before her had also received the same gift, at the very time (as it is commonly held) of his original creation. This is Anglican doctrine as well as Catholic; it is the doctrine of Bishop Bull. He has written a dissertation on the point. He speaks of the doctrine which "many of the schoolmen affirm, that Adam was created [{63}] in grace--that is, received a principle of grace and divine life from his very creation, or in the moment of the infusion of his soul; of which," he says, "for my own part I have little doubt." Again, he says: "It is abundantly manifest, from the many testimonies alleged, that the ancient doctors of the church did, with a general consent, acknowledge that our first parents, in the state of integrity, had in them something more than nature--that is, were endowed with the divine principle of the Spirit, in order to a supernatural felicity."

Now, taking this for granted, because I know that you and those who agree with you maintain it as well as we do, I ask, Was not Mary as fully endowed as Eve? is it any violent inference that she, who was to co-operate in the redemption of the world, at least was not less endowed with power from on high, than she who, given as a helpmate to her husband, did in the event but co-operate with him for its ruin? If Eve was raised above human nature by that indwelling moral gift which we call grace, is it rash to say that Mary had a greater grace? And this consideration gives significance to the angel's salutation of her as "full of grace"--an interpretation of the original word which is undoubtedly the right one, as soon as we resist the common Protestant assumption that grace is a mere external approbation or acceptance, answering to the word "favor;" whereas it is, as the fathers teach, a real inward condition or superadded quality of soul. And if Eve had this supernatural inward gift given her from the moment of her personal existence, is it possible to deny that Mary too had this gift from the very first moment of her personal existence? I do not know how to resist this inference--well, this is simply and literally the doctrine of the immaculate conception. I say the doctrine of the immaculate conception is in its substance this, and nothing more or less than this (putting aside the question of degrees of grace); and it really does seem to me bound up in that doctrine of the fathers, that Mary is the second Eve.

It is to me a most strange phenomenon that so many learned and devout men stumble at this doctrine, and I can only account for it by supposing that, in matter of fact, they do not know what we mean by the immaculate conception; and your volume (may I say it?) bears out my suspicion. It is a great consolation to have reason for thinking so--for believing that in some sort the persons in question are in the position of those great saints in former times who are said to have hesitated about it, when they would not have hesitated at all if the word "conception" had been clearly explained in that sense in which now it is universally received. I do not see how any one who holds with Bull the Catholic doctrine of the supernatural endowments of our first parents, has fair reason for doubting our doctrine about the Blessed Virgin. It has no reference whatever to her parents, but simply to her own person; it does but affirm that, together with the nature which she inherited from her parents, that is, her own nature, she had a superadded fulness of grace, and that from the first moment of her existence. Suppose Eve had stood the trial, and not lost her first grace, and suppose she had eventually had children, those children from the first moment of their existence would, through divine bounty, have received the same privilege that she had ever had; that is, as she was taken from Adam's side, in a garment, so to say, of grace, so they in turn would have received what may be called an immaculate conception. They would have been conceived in grace, as in fact they are conceived in sin. What is there difficult in this doctrine? What is there unnatural? Mary may be called a daughter of Eve unfallen. You believe with us that St. John Baptist had grace given to him three months before his birth, at the time [{64}] that the Blessed Virgin visited his mother. He accordingly was not immaculately conceived, because he was alive before grace came to him; but our Lady's case only differs from his in this respect, that to her grace came not three months merely before her birth, but from the first moment of her being, as it had been given to Eve.

But it may be said, How does this enable us to say that she was conceived without original sin? If Anglicans knew what we mean by original sin, they would not ask the question. Our doctrine of original sin is not the same as the Protestant doctrine. "Original sin," with us, cannot be called sin in the ordinary sense of the word "sin;" it is a term denoting the imputation of Adam's sin, or the state to which Adam's sin reduces his children; but by Protestants it is understood to be sin in the same sense as actual sin. We, with the fathers, think of it as something negative; Protestants as something positive. Protestants hold that it is a disease, a change of nature, a poison internally corrupting the soul, and propagated from father to son, after the manner of a bad constitution; and they fancy that we ascribe a different nature from ours to the Blessed Virgin, different from that of her parents, and from that of fallen Adam. We hold nothing of the kind; we consider that in Adam she died, as others; that she was included, together with the whole race, in Adam's sentence; that she incurred his debt, as we do; but that, for the sake of him who was to redeem her and us upon the cross, to her the debt was remitted by anticipation; on her the sentence was not carried out, except indeed as regards her natural death, for she died when her time came, as others. All this we teach, but we deny that she had original sin; for by original sin we mean, as I have already said, something negative, viz., this only, the deprivation of that supernatural unmerited grace which Adam and Eve had on their creation--deprivation and the consequences of deprivation. Mary could not merit, any more than they, the restoration of that grace; but it was restored to her by God's free bounty from the very first moment of her existence, and thereby, in fact, she never came under the original curse, which consisted in the loss of it. And she had this special privilege in order to fit her to become the mother of her and our Redeemer, to fit her mentally, spiritually, for it; so that, by the aid of the first grace, she might so grow in grace that when the angel came, and her Lord was at hand, she might be "full of grace," prepared, as far as a creature could be prepared, to receive him into her bosom.

I have drawn the doctrine of the immaculate conception, as an immediate inference, from the primitive doctrine that Mary is the second Eve. The argument seems to me conclusive; and, if it has not been universally taken as such, this has come to pass because there has not been a clear understanding among Catholics what exactly was meant by the immaculate conception. To many it seemed to imply that the Blessed Virgin did not die in Adam, that she did not come under the penalty of the fall, that she was not redeemed; that she was conceived in some way inconsistent with the verse in the Miserere psalm. If controversy had in earlier days so cleared the subject as to make it plain to all that the doctrine meant nothing else than that, in fact, in her case the general sentence on mankind was not carried out, and that by means of the indwelling in her of divine grace from the first moment of her being (and this is all the decree of 1854 has declared), I cannot believe that the doctrine would have ever been opposed; for an instinctive sentiment has led Christians jealously to put the Blessed Mary aside when sin comes into discussion. This is expressed in the well-known words of St. Augustine. All have sinned "except the holy Virgin Mary, [{65}] concerning whom, for the honor of the Lord, I wish no question to be raised at all, when we are treating of sins" (de Nat. et Grat. 42); words which, whatever St. Augustine's actual occasion of using them (to which you refer, p. 176), certainly, in the spirit which they breathe, are well adapted to convey the notion that, apart from her relation to her parents, she had not personally any part in sin whatever. It is true that several great fathers of the fourth century do imply or assert that on one or two occasions she did sin venially or showed infirmity. This is the only real objection which I know of; and, as I do not wish to pass it over lightly, I propose to consider it at the end of this letter.

2. Now, secondly, her greatness. Here let us suppose that our first parents had overcome in their trial, and had gained for their descendants for ever the full possession, as if by right, of the privileges which were promised to their obedience--grace here and glory hereafter. Is it possible that those descendants, pious and happy from age to age in their temporal homes, would have forgotten their benefactors? Would they not have followed them in thought into the heavens, and gratefully commemorated them on earth? The history of the temptation, the craft of the serpent, their steadfastness in obedience--the loyal vigilance, the sensitive purity of Eve--the great issue, salvation wrought out for all generations--would have been never from their minds, ever welcome to their ears. This would have taken place from the necessity of our nature. Every nation has its mythical hymns and epics about its first fathers and its heroes. The great deeds of Charlemagne, Alfred, Coeur de Lion, Wallace, Louis the Ninth, do not die; and though their persons are gone from us, we make much of their names. Milton's Adam, after his fall, understands the force of this law, and shrinks from the prospect of its operation:

"Who of all ages to succeed but, feeling
The evil on him brought by me, will curse
My head? Ill fare our ancestor impure;
For this we may thank Adam."

If this anticipation has not been fulfilled in the event, it is owing to the needs of our penal life, our state of perpetual change, and the ignorance and unbelief incurred by the fall; also because, fallen as we are, from the hopefulness of our nature we feel more pride in our national great men than dejection at our national misfortunes. Much more then in the great kingdom and people of God--the saints are ever in our sight, and not as mere ineffectual ghosts, but as if present bodily in their past selves. It is said of them, "Their works do follow them;" what they were here, such are they in heaven and in the church. As we call them by their earthly names, so we contemplate them in their earthly characters and histories. Their acts, callings, and relations below are types and anticipations of their mission above. Even in the case of our Lord himself, whose native home is the eternal heavens, it is said of him in his state of glory, that he is a "priest for ever;" and when he comes again he will be recognized, by those who pierced him, as being the very same that he was on earth. The only question is, whether the Blessed Virgin had a part, a real part, in the economy of grace, whether, when she was on earth, she secured by her deeds any claim on our memories; for, if she did, it is impossible we should put her away from us, merely because she is gone hence, and not look at her still, according to the measure of her earthly history, with gratitude and expectation. If, as St. Irenaeus says, she did the part of an advocate, a friend in need, even in her mortal life, if, as St. Jerome and St. Ambrose say, she was on earth the great pattern of virgins, if she had a meritorious share in bringing about our redemption, if her maternity was earned by her faith and obedience, if her divine Son was subject to her, and if she stood by the [{66}] cross with a mother's heart and drank in to the full those sufferings which it was her portion to gaze upon, it is impossible that we should not associate these characteristics of her life on earth with her present state of blessedness; and this surely she anticipated, when she said in her hymn that "all generations shall call her blessed."

I am aware that, in thus speaking, I am following a line of thought which is rather a meditation than an argument in controversy, and I shall not carry it further; but still, in turning to other topics, it is to the point to inquire whether the popular astonishment, excited by our belief in the Blessed Virgin's present dignity, does not arise from the circumstance that the bulk of men, engaged in matters of the world, have never calmly considered her historical position in the gospels so as rightly to realize (if I may use the word a second time) what that position imports. I do not claim for the generality of Catholics any greater powers of reflection upon the objects of their faith than Protestants commonly have, but there is a sufficient number of religious men among Catholics who, instead of expending their devotional energies (as so many serious Protestants do) on abstract doctrines, such as justification by faith only, or the sufficiency of holy Scripture, employ themselves in the contemplation of Scripture facts, and bring out in a tangible form the doctrines involved in them, and give such a substance and color to the sacred history as to influence their brethren, who, though superficial themselves, are drawn by their Catholic instinct to accept conclusions which they could not indeed themselves have elicited, but which, when elicited, they feel to be true. However, it would be out of place to pursue this course of reasoning here; and instead of doing so, I shall take what perhaps you may think a very bold step--I shall find the doctrine of our Lady's present exaltation in Scripture.

I mean to find it in the vision of the woman and child in the twelfth chapter of the Apocalypse. [Footnote 14] Now here two objections will be made to me at once: first, that such an interpretation is but poorly supported by the fathers; and secondly, that in ascribing such a picture of the Madonna (as it may be called) to the apostolic age, I am committing an anachronism.

[Footnote 14: Vid. "Essay on Doctr. Development," p. 384, and Bishop Ullathorne's work on the "Immaculate Conception," p. 77.]

As to the former of these objections, I answer as follows: Christians have never gone to Scripture for proofs of their doctrines till there was actual need from the pressure of controversy. If in those times the Blessed Virgin's dignity were unchallenged on all hands as a matter of doctrine, Scripture, as far as its argumentative matter was concerned, was likely to remain a sealed book to them. Thus, to take an instance in point, the Catholic party in the English Church (say the Non-jurors), unable by their theory of religion simply to take their stand on tradition, and distressed for proof of their doctrines, had their eyes sharpened to scrutinize and to understand the letter of holy Scripture, which to others brought no instruction. And the peculiarity of their interpretations is this--that they have in themselves great logical cogency, yet are but faintly supported by patristical commentators. Such is the use of the word

or facere in our Lord's institution of the holy eucharist, which, by a reference to the old Testament, is found to be a word of sacrifice. Such again is

in the passage in the Acts, "As they ministered to the Lord and fasted," which again is a sacerdotal term. And such the passage in Rom. xv. 16, in which several terms are used which have an allusion to the sacrificial eucharistic rite. Such, too, is St. Paul's repeated message to the household of Onesiphorus, with no mention of Onesiphorus himself, but in one place, with the addition of a prayer that "he might find mercy of the Lord" in the day of [{67}] judgment, which, taking into account its wording and the known usage of the first centuries, we can hardly deny is a prayer for his soul. Other texts there are which ought to find a place in ancient controversies, and the omission of which by the fathers affords matter for more surprise; those, for instance, which, according to Middleton's rule, are real proofs of our Lord's divinity, and yet are passed over by Catholic disputants; for these bear upon a then existing controversy of the first moment and of the most urgent exigency.

As to the second objection which I have supposed, so far from allowing it, I consider that it is built upon a mere imaginary fact, and that the truth of the matter lies in the very contrary direction. The Virgin and Child is not a mere modern idea; on the contrary, it is represented again and again, as every visitor to Rome is aware, in the paintings of the Catacombs. Mary is there drawn with the Divine Infant in her lap, she with hands extended in prayer, he with his hand in the attitude of blessing. No representation can more forcibly convey the doctrine of the high dignity of the mother, and, I will add, of her power over her Son. Why should the memory of his time of subjection be so dear to Christians, and so carefully preserved? The only question to be determined, is the precise date of these remarkable monuments of the first age of Christianity. That they belong to the centuries of what Anglicans call the "undivided church" is certain; but lately investigations have been pursued which place some of them at an earlier date than any one anticipated as possible. I am not in a position to quote largely from the works of the Cavaliere de Rossi, who has thrown so much light upon the subject; but I have his "Imagini Scelte," published in 1863, and they are sufficient for my purpose. In this work he has given us from the Catacombs various representations of the Virgin and Child; the latest of these belong to the early part of the fourth century, but the earliest he believes to be referable to the very age of the apostles. He comes to this conclusion from the style and the skill of the composition, and from the history, locality, and existing inscriptions of the subterranean in which it is found. However, he does not go so far as to insist upon so early a date; yet the utmost liberty he grants is to refer the painting to the era of the first Antonines--that is, to a date within half a century of the death of St. John. I consider then that, as you fairly use, in controversy with Protestants, the traditional doctrine of the church in early times, as an explanation of the Scripture text, or at least as a suggestion, or as a defence, of the sense which you may wish to put on it, quite apart from the question whether your interpretation itself is traditional, so it is lawful for me, though I have not the positive words of the fathers on my side, to shelter my own interpretation of the apostle's vision under the fact of the extant pictures of Mother and Child in the Roman Catacombs. There is another principle of Scripture interpretation which we should hold with you--when we speak of a doctrine being contained in Scripture, we do not necessarily mean that it is contained there in direct categorical terms, but that there is no other satisfactory way of accounting for the language and expressions of the sacred writers, concerning the subject-matter in question, than to suppose that they held upon it the opinions which we hold; that they would not have spoken as they have spoken unless they held it. For myself I have ever felt the truth of this principle, as regards the Scripture proof of the Holy Trinity; I should not have found out that doctrine in the sacred text without previous traditional teaching; but when once it is suggested from without, it commends itself as the one true interpretation, from its appositeness, because no other view of doctrine, which can be ascribed to the inspired writers, so happily [{68}] solves the obscurities and seeming inconsistencies of their teaching. And now to apply what I have said to the passage in the Apocalypse.

If there is an apostle on whom, à priori, our eyes would be fixed, as likely to teach us about the Blessed Virgin, it is St. John, to whom she was committed by our Lord on the cross--with whom, as tradition goes, she lived at Ephesus till she was taken away. This anticipation is confirmed à posteriori; for, as I have said above, one of the earliest and fullest of our informants concerning her dignity, as being the second Eve, is Irenaeus, who came to Lyons from Asia Minor, and had been taught by the immediate disciples of St. John. The apostle's vision is as follows:

"A great sign appeared in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet; and on her head a crown of twelve stars. And being with child, she cried travailing in birth, and was in pain to be delivered. And there was seen another sign in heaven; and behold a great red dragon . . . And the dragon stood before the woman who was ready to be delivered, that, when she should be delivered, he might devour her son. And she brought forth a man-child, who was to rule all nations with an iron rod; and her son was taken up to God and to his throne. And the woman fled into the wilderness." Now I do not deny, of course, that, under the image of the woman, the church is signified; but what I would maintain is this, that the holy apostle would not have spoken of the church under this particular image unless there had existed a Blessed Virgin Mary, who was exalted on high, and the object of veneration to all the faithful.

No one doubts that the "man-child" spoken of is an allusion to our Lord; why, then, is not "the woman" an allusion to his mother? This surely is the obvious sense of the words; of course it has a further sense also, which is the scope of the image; doubtless the child represents the children of the church, and doubtless the woman represents the church; this, I grant, is the real or direct sense, but what is the sense of the symbol? who are the woman and the child? I answer, They are not personifications but persons. This is true of the child, therefore it is true of the woman.

But again: not only mother and child, but a serpent, is introduced into the vision. Such a meeting of man, woman, and serpent has not been found in Scripture, since the beginning of Scripture, and now it is found in its end. Moreover, in the passage in the Apocalypse, as if to supply, before Scripture came to an end, what was wanting in its beginning, we are told, and for the first time, that the serpent in Paradise was the evil spirit. If the dragon of St. John is the same as the serpent of Moses, and the man-child is "the seed of the woman," why is not the woman herself she whose seed the man-child is? And, if the first woman is not an allegory, why is the second? if the first woman is Eve, why is not the second Mary?

But this is not all. The image of the woman, according to Scripture usage, is too bold and prominent for a mere personification. Scripture is not fond of allegories. We have indeed frequent figures there, as when the sacred writers speak of the arm or sword of the Lord; and so too when they speak of Jerusalem or Samaria in the feminine; or of the mountains leaping for joy, or of the church as a bride or as a vine; but they are not much given to dressing up abstract ideas or generalizations in personal attributes. This is the classical rather than the Scripture style. Xenophon places Hercules between Virtue and Vice, represented as women; AEschylus introduces into his drama Force and Violence; Virgil gives personality to public rumor or Fame, and Plautus to Poverty. So on monuments done in the classical style, we [{69}] see virtues, vices, rivers, renown, death, and the like, turned into human figures of men and women. I do not say there are no instances at all of this method in Scripture, but I say that such poetical compositions are strikingly unlike its usual method. Thus we at once feel its difference from Scripture, when we betake ourselves to the Pastor of Hermes, and find the church a woman, to St. Methodius, and find Virtue a woman, and to St. Gregory's poem, and find Virginity again a woman. Scripture deals with types rather than personifications. Israel stands for the chosen people, David for Christ, Jerusalem for heaven. Consider the remarkable representations, dramatic I may call them, in Jeremiah, Ezechiel, and Hosea; predictions, threatenings, and promises are acted out by those prophets. Ezechiel is commanded to shave his head, and to divide and scatter his hair; and Ahias tears his garment, and gives ten out of twelve parts of it to Jeroboam. So, too, the structure of the imagery in the Apocalypse is not a mere allegorical creation, but is founded on the Jewish ritual. In like manner our Lord's bodily cures are visible types of the power of his grace upon the soul; and his prophecy of the last day is conveyed under that of the fall of Jerusalem. Even his parables are not simply ideal, but relations of occurrences which did or might take place, under which was conveyed a spiritual meaning. The description of Wisdom in the Proverbs, and other sacred books, has brought out the instinct of commentators in this respect. They felt that Wisdom could not be a mere personification, and they determined that it was our Lord; and the later of these books, by their own more definite language, warranted that interpretation. Then, when it was found that the Arians used it in derogation of our Lord's divinity, still, unable to tolerate the notion of a mere allegory, commentators applied the description to the Blessed Virgin. Coming back then to the Apocalyptic vision, I ask, If the woman must be some real person, who can it be whom the apostle saw, and intends, and delineates, but that same great mother to whom the chapters in the Proverbs are accommodated? And let it be observed, moreover, that in this passage, from the allusion in it to the history of the fall, she may be said still to be represented under the character of the second Eve. I make a further remark; it is sometimes asked, Why do not the sacred writers mention our Lady's greatness? I answer, she was, or may have been, alive when the apostles and evangelists wrote; there was just one book of Scripture certainly written after her death, and that book does (if I may so speak) canonize her.

But if all this be so, if it is really the Blessed Virgin whom Scripture represents as clothed with the sun, crowned with the stars of heaven, and with the moon as her footstool, what height of glory may we not attribute to her? and what are we to say of those who, through ignorance, run counter to the voice of Scripture, to the testimony of the fathers, to the traditions of East and West, and speak and act contemptuously toward her whom her Lord delighteth to honor?

Now I have said all I mean to say on what I have called the rudimental teaching of antiquity about the Blessed Virgin; but, after all, I have not insisted on the highest view of her prerogatives which the fathers have taught us. You, my dear friend, who know so well the ancient controversies and councils, may have been surprised why I should not have yet spoken of her as the Theotocos; but I wished to show on how broad a basis her greatness rests, independent of that wonderful title; and again, I have been loth to enlarge upon the force of a word, which is rather matter for devotional thought than for polemical dispute. However, I might as well not [{70}] write on my subject at all as altogether be silent upon it.

It is, then, an integral portion of the faith fixed by ecumenical council, a portion of it which you hold as well as I, that the Blessed Virgin is Theotocos, Deipara, or Mother of God; and this word, when thus used, carries with it no admixture of rhetoric, no taint of extravagant affection; it has nothing else but a well-weighed, grave, dogmatic sense, which corresponds and is adequate to its sound. It intends to express that God is her Son, as truly as any one of us is the son of his own mother. If this be so, what can be said of any creature whatever which may not be said of her? what can be said too much, so that it does not compromise the attributes of the Creator? He, indeed, might have created a being more perfect, more admirable, than she is; he might have endued that being, so created, with a richer grant of grace, of power, of blessedness; but in one respect she surpasses all even possible creations, viz., that she is Mother of her Creator. It is this awful title, which both illustrates and connects together the two prerogatives of Mary, on which I have been lately enlarging, her sanctity and her greatness. It is the issue of her sanctity; it is the source of her greatness. What dignity can be too great to attribute to her who is as closely bound up, as intimately one, with the Eternal Word, as a mother is with a son? What outfit of sanctity, what fulness and redundance of grace, what exuberance of merits must have been hers, on the supposition, which the fathers justify, that her Maker regarded them at all, and took them into account, when he condescended "not to abhor the Virgin's womb?" Is it surprising, then, that on the one hand she should be immaculate in her conception? or on the other that she should be exalted as a queen, with a crown of twelve stars? Men sometimes wonder that we call her mother of life, of mercy, of salvation; what are all these titles compared to that one name, Mother of God?

I shall say no more about this title here. It is scarcely possible to write of it without diverging into a style of composition unsuited to a letter; so I proceed to the history of its use.

The title of Theotocos [Footnote 15] begins with ecclesiastical writers of a date hardly later than that at which we read of her as the second Eve. It first occurs in the works of Origen (185-254); but he, witnessing for Egypt and Palestine, witnesses also that it was in use before his time; for, as Socrates informs us, he "interpreted how it was to be used, and discussed the question at length" (Hist. vii. 32). Within two centuries (431), in the general council held against Nestorius, it was made part of the formal dogmatic teaching of the church. At that time Theodoret, who from his party connections might have been supposed disinclined to its solemn recognition, owned that "the ancient and more than ancient heralds of the orthodox faith taught the use of the term according to the apostolic tradition." At the same date John of Antioch, who for a while sheltered Nestorius, whose heresy lay in the rejection of the term, said, "This title no ecclesiastical teacher has put aside. Those who have used it are many and eminent, and those who have not used it have not attacked those who did." Alexander again, one of the fiercest partisans of Nestorius, allows the use of the word, though he considers it dangerous. "That in festive solemnities," he says, "or in preaching or teaching, theotocos should be unguardedly said by the orthodox without explanation is no blame, because such statements were not dogmatic, nor said with evil meaning." If we look for those, in the interval between Origen and the council, to whom Alexander refers, we find it used again and again by the fathers in such of their works as are extant: by [{71}] Archelans of Mesopotamia, Eusebius of Palestine, Alexander of Egypt, in the third century; in the fourth, by Athanasius many times with emphasis, by Cyril of Palestine, Gregory Nyssen of Cappadocia, Gregory Nazianzen of Cappadocia, Antiochus of Syria, and Ammonius of Thrace; not to speak of the Emperor Julian, who, having no local or ecclesiastical domicile, speaks for the whole of Christendom. Another and earlier emperor, Constantine, in his speech before the assembled bishops at Nicaea, uses the still more explicit title of "the Virgin Mother of God;" which is also used by Ambrose of Milan, and by Vincent and Cassian in the south of France, and then by St. Leo.

[Footnote 15: Vid. "translation of St. Athanasius," pp. 420, 440, 447.]

So much for the term; it would be tedious to produce the passages of authors who, using or not using the term, convey the idea. "Our God was carried in the womb of Mary," says Ignatius, who was martyred A.D. 106. "The word of God," says Hippolytus, "was carried in that virgin frame." "The Maker of all," says Amphilochius, "is born of a virgin." "She did compass without circumscribing the Sun of justice--the Everlasting is born," says Chrysostom. "God dwelt in the womb," says Proclus. "When thou hearest that God speaks from the bush," asks Theodotus, "in the bush seest thou not the Virgin?" Cassian says, "Mary bore her Author." "The one God only-begotten," says Hilary, "is introduced into the womb of a virgin." "The Everlasting," says Ambrose, "came into the Virgin him." "The closed gate," says Jerome, "by which alone the Lord God of Israel enters, is the Virgin Mary." "That man from heaven," says Capriolus, "is God conceived in the womb." "He is made in thee," says Augustine, "who made thee."

This being the faith of the fathers about the Blessed Virgin, we need not wonder that it should in no long time be transmuted into devotion. No wonder if their language should be unmeasured, when so great a term as "Mother of God" had been formally set down as the safe limit of it. No wonder if it became stronger and stronger as time went on, since only in a long period could the fulness of its import be exhausted. And in matter of fact, and as might be anticipated (with the few exceptions which I have noted above, and which I am to treat of below), the current of thought in those early ages did uniformly tend to make much of the Blessed Virgin and to increase her honors, not to circumscribe them. Little jealousy was shown of her in those times; but, when any such niggardness of devotion occurred, then one father or other fell upon the offender, with zeal, not to say with fierceness. Thus St. Jerome inveighs against Helvidius; thus St. Epiphanius denounces Apollinaris, St. Cyril Nestorius, and St. Ambrose Bonosus; on the other hand, each successive insult offered to her by individual adversaries did but bring out more fully the intimate sacred affection with which Christendom regarded her. "She was alone, and wrought the world's salvation and conceived the redemption of all," says Ambrose; [Footnote 16] "she had so great grace, as not only to preserve virginity herself, but to confer it upon those whom she visited." "The rod out of the stem of Jesse," says Jerome, "and the eastern gate through which the high priest alone goes in and out, yet is ever shut" "The wise woman," says Nilus, who "hath clad believers, from the fleece of the Lamb born of her, with the clothing of incorruption, and delivered them from their spiritual nakedness." "The mother of life, of beauty, of majesty, the morning star," according to Antiochus. "The mystical new heavens," "the heavens carrying the Divinity," "the fruitful vine," "by whom we are translated from death to life," according to St. Ephrem. "The manna which is delicate, bright, sweet, and virgin, [{72}] which, as though coming from heaven, has poured down on all the people of the churches a food pleasanter than honey," according to St. Maximus.

[Footnote 16: "Essay on Doctr. Dev.," p. 408]

Proclus calls her "the unsullied shell which contains the pearl of price," "the church's diadem," "the expression of orthodoxy." "Run through all creation in your thought," he says, "and see if there be one equal or superior to the Holy Virgin, Mother of God." "Hail, mother, clad in light, of the light which sets not," says Theodotus, or some one else at Ephesus--"hail, all-undefiled mother of holiness; hail, most pellucid fountain of the life-giving stream." And St. Cyril too at Ephesus, "Hail, Mary, Mother of God, majestic common-treasure of the whole world, the lamp unquenchable, the crown of virginity, the staff of orthodoxy, the indissoluble temple, the dwelling of the illimitable, mother and virgin, through whom he in the holy gospels is called blessed who cometh in the name of the Lord, .... through whom the Holy Trinity is sanctified, through whom angels and archangels rejoice, devils are put to flight, .... and the fallen creature is received up into the heavens, etc, etc." [Footnote 17] Such is but a portion of the panegyrical language which St. Cyril used in the third ecumenical council.

[Footnote 17: Opp., t. 6, p. 355. ]

I must not close my review of the Catholic doctrine concerning the Blessed Virgin without directly speaking of her intercessory power, though I have incidentally made mention of it already. It is the immediate result of two truths, neither of which you dispute: first, that "it is good and useful," as the Council of Trent says, "suppliantly to invoke the saints and to have recourse to their prayers;" and secondly, that the Blessed Mary is singularly dear to her Son and singularly exalted in sanctity and glory. However, at the risk of becoming didactic, I will state somewhat more fully the grounds on which it rests.

To a candid pagan it must have been one of the most remarkable points of Christianity, on its first appearance, that the observance of prayer formed so vital a part of its organization; and that, though its members were scattered all over the world, and its rulers and subjects had so little opportunity of correlative action, yet they, one and all, found the solace of a spiritual intercourse, and a real bond of union, in the practice of mutual intercession. Prayer, indeed, is the very essence of religion; but in the heathen religions it was either public or personal; it was a state ordinance, or a selfish expedient, for the attainment of certain tangible, temporal goods. Very different from this was its exercise among Christians, who were thereby knit together in one body, different as they were in races, ranks, and habits, distant from each other in country, and helpless amid hostile populations. Yet it proved sufficient for its purpose. Christians could not correspond; they could not combine; but they could pray one for another. Even their public prayers partook of this character of intercession; for to pray for the welfare of the whole church was really a prayer for all classes of men, and all the individuals of which it was composed. It was in prayer that the church was founded. For ten days all the apostles "persevered with one mind in prayer and supplication, with the women, and Mary the Mother of Jesus, and with his brethren." Then again at Pentecost "they were all with one mind in one place;" and the converts then made are said to have "persevered in prayer." And when, after a while, St. Peter was seized and put in prison with a view to his being put to death, "prayer was made without ceasing" by the church of God for him; and, when the angel released him, he took refuge in a house "where many were gathered together in prayer."

[{73}]

We are so accustomed to these passages as hardly to be able to do justice to their singular significance; and they are followed up by various passages of the apostolic epistles. St. Paul enjoins his brethren to '"pray with all prayer and supplication at all times in the Spirit, with all instance and supplication for all saints," to "pray in every place," "to make supplication, prayers, intercessions, giving of thanks for all men." And in his own person he "ceases not to give thanks for them, commemorating them in his prayers," and "always in all his prayers making supplication for them all with joy."

Now, was this spiritual bond to cease with life? or had Christians similar duties to their brethren departed? From the witness of the early ages of the church, it appears that they had; and you, and those who agree with you, would be the last to deny that they were then in the practice of praying, as for the living, so for those also who had passed into the intermediate state between earth and heaven. Did the sacred communion extend further still, on to the inhabitants of heaven itself? Here too you agree with us, for you have adopted in your volume the words of the Council of Trent which I have quoted above. But now we are brought to a higher order of thoughts.

It would be preposterous to pray for those who are already in glory; but at least they can pray for us, and we can ask their prayers, and in the Apocalypse at least angels are introduced both sending us their blessing and presenting our prayers before the divine Presence. We read there of an angel who "came and stood before the altar, having a golden censer;" and "there was given to him much incense, that he should offer of the prayers of all saints upon the golden altar which is before the throne of God." On this occasion, surely, the angel Michael, as the prayer in mass considers him, performed the part of a great intercessor or mediator above for the children of the church militant below. Again, in the beginning of the same book, the sacred writer goes so far as to speak of "grace and peace" being sent us, not only from the Almighty, but "from the seven spirits that are before his throne," thus associating the Eternal with the ministers of his mercies; and this carries us on to the remarkable passage of St. Justin, one of the earliest fathers, who, in his "Apology," says, "To him (God), and his Son who came from him, and taught us these things, and the host of the other good angels who follow and resemble them, and the prophetic Spirit, we pay veneration and homage." Further, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, St. Paul introduces, not only angels, but "the spirits of the just" into the sacred communion: "Ye have come to Mount Sion, to the heavenly Jerusalem, to myriads of angels, to God, the Judge of all, to the spirits of the just made perfect, and to Jesus, the Mediator of the New Testament." What can be meant by having "come to the spirits of the just," unless in some way or other they do us good, whether by blessing or by aiding us? that is, in a word, to speak correctly, by praying for us; for it is by prayer alone that the creature above can bless or aid the creature below.

Intercession thus being the first principle of the church's life, next it is certain again that the vital principle of that intercession, as an availing power, is, according to the will of God, sanctity. This seems to be suggested by a passage of St. Paul, in which the supreme intercessor is said to be "the Spirit:" "The Spirit himself maketh intercession for us; he maketh intercession for the saints according to God." However, the truth thus implied is expressly brought out in other parts of Scripture, in the form both of doctrine and of example. The words of the man born blind speak the common sense of nature: "If any man be a worshipper of God, him he heareth." [{74}] And apostles confirm them: "The prayer of a just man availeth much," and "whatever we ask we receive, because we keep his commandments." Then, as for examples, we read of Abraham and Moses as having the divine purpose of judgment revealed to them beforehand, in order that they might deprecate its execution. To the friends of Job it was said, "My servant Job shall pray for you; his face I will accept." Elias by his prayer shut and opened the heavens. Elsewhere we read of "Jeremias, Moses, and Samuel," and of "Noe, Daniel, and Job," as being great mediators between God and his people. One instance is given us, which testifies the continuance of so high an office beyond this life. Lazarus, in the parable, is seen in Abraham's bosom. It is usual to pass over this striking passage with the remark that it is a Jewish expression; whereas, Jewish belief or not, it is recognized and sanctioned by our Lord himself. What do we teach about the Blessed Virgin more wonderful than this? Let us suppose that, at the hour of death, the faithful are committed to her arms; but if Abraham, not yet ascended on high, had charge of Lazarus, what offence is it to affirm the like of her, who was not merely "the friend," but the very "Mother of God?"

It may be added that, though it availed nothing for influence with our Lord to be one of his company if sanctity was wanting, still, as the gospel shows, he on various occasions allowed those who were near him to be the means by which supplicants were brought to him, or miracles gained from him, as in the instance of the miracle of the loaves; and if on one occasion he seems to repel his mother when she told him that wine was wanting for the guests at the marriage feast, it is obvious to remark on it that, by saying that she was then separated from him because his hour was not yet come, he implied that, when that hour was come, such separation would be at an end. Moreover, in fact, he did, at her intercession, work the miracle which she desired.

I consider it impossible, then, for those who believe the church to be one vast body in heaven and on earth, in which every holy creature of God has his place, and of which prayer is the life, when once they recognize the sanctity and greatness of the Blessed Virgin, not to perceive immediately that her office above is one of perpetual intercession for the faithful militant, and that our very relation to her must be that of clients to a patron, and that, in the eternal enmity which exists between the woman and the serpent, while the serpent's strength is that of being the tempter, the weapon of the second Eve and Mother of God is prayer.

As then these ideas of her sanctity and greatness gradually penetrated the mind of Christendom, so did her intercessory power follow close upon and with them. From the earliest times that mediation is symbolized in those representations of her with uplifted hands, which, whether in plaster or in glass, are still extant in Rome--that church, as St. Irenaeus says, with which "every church, that is, the faithful from every side, must agree, because of its more powerful principality;" "into which," as Tertullian adds, "the apostles poured out, together with their blood, their whole doctrines." As far, indeed, as existing documents are concerned, I know of no instance to my purpose earlier than A.D. 234, but it is a very remarkable one; and, though it has been often quoted in the controversy, an argument is not the weaker for frequent use.

St. Gregory Nyssen, [Footnote 18] a native of Cappadocia in the fourth century, relates that his namesake, Bishop of Neo-Caesarea, surnamed Thaumaturgus, in the century preceding, shortly before he was called to the priesthood, received in a vision a creed, which is still extant, from the Blessed Mary at the hands of St. John.

[Footnote 18: Vid. "Essay on Doctr. Dev." p. 386.]