THE

CATHOLIC WORLD.

A

MONTHLY MAGAZINE

OF

General Literature and Science.

VOL. XXIII.
APRIL, 1876, TO SEPTEMBER, 1876.

NEW YORK:
THE CATHOLIC PUBLICATION HOUSE
9 Warren Street.

1876.

CONTENTS.

THE

CATHOLIC WORLD.

VOL. XXIII., No. 133.—APRIL, 1876.

Copyright: Rev. I. T. Hecker. 1876.

HOW WE ARE MISREPRESENTED ABROAD.

Following the example of older nations, the United States has been accustomed to keep at foreign courts and capitals certain diplomatic agents whose presence there seems to be considered necessary for the protection of our national interests, as well as a pledge of mutual friendship and comity. Under the more modest title of envoys or ministers these gentlemen exercise the powers and enjoy the immunities of ambassadors, and to their supposed wisdom, tact, and judgment are entrusted all difficult negotiations and the settlement of doubtful questions of international law.

In view of the increased facilities for communication between independent governments afforded by railroads and telegraphs, the general diffusion of accurate geographical and commercial knowledge, and the almost total disuse of the secret diplomacy of former times, it has been seriously considered whether this class of rather expensive officials might not be dispensed with altogether. Many persons, also, are inclined to believe that the public welfare would suffer little, if at all, by

such a measure, on the principle that bad or incompetent representatives are worse than none. But if the custom, as appears probable, is still to be adhered to, it is becoming more and more apparent that the personnel of our diplomatic corps must speedily undergo a radical change for the better, if we would not bring our country into lasting disrepute and contempt in the eyes of all just and discerning men.

In Europe diplomacy is practically as much a profession as law or medicine. Its students begin their allotted course at an early age in the capacity of attachés or secretaries of legation. As they gain in experience they are moved from one court to another, in regular order of promotion, until finally, after years of practical observation and laborious study, they develop into accomplished diplomatists and ripe statesmen, whose services are invaluable to their country, at home and abroad. Not so in America; with us the post of minister resident or envoy extraordinary, is usually the reward of some obscure partisan, the solace of a disappointed Congressional

aspirant, or the asylum in which superannuated cabinet officers can find dignified obscurity. Occasionally accomplished international lawyers like the late Mr. Wheaton or Reverdy Johnson are selected, but these rare cases are in sad contrast with the generality of persons chosen, every few years, to represent in foreign countries the power, dignity, and intelligence of the republic. They are almost invariably men of mediocre ability, contracted views, and defective education; unaccustomed to any high degree of social refinement, and sometimes ignorant of the very language of the country to which they are accredited, while not necessarily masters of their own. From a perusal of some volumes of state documents[1] we are led to conclude that the principal duty of our diplomats is to write long, prosy letters to the Secretary of State, and to encumber the archives of his office with copious extracts from foreign newspapers of no value or public interest whatever. In this mass of correspondence we look in vain for the keen, accurate criticism of men and manners, or the profound views of statesmanship which characterized the despatches of the Venetian ambassadors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the French and English emissaries of a later period.

On the contrary, we find these letters exhibiting a remarkable feebleness and crudity of mind, and, where matters relating to religion or morals are discussed, a purblind prejudice unworthy of any rational American, but especially reprehensible in an exalted official of our government. This latter blemish is so prominent, and withal so repeatedly displayed, as to be painfully suggestive

of a desire on the part of the writers to win, by unworthy means, the favor of the appointing power at the federal capital. We also observe with regret that they are accustomed to use, with the greatest deliberation and upon the slightest occasion, the terms reactionist, Romanist, ultramontane, and other nicknames—all of which are inaccurate and most of them offensive—when describing the supporters of the Catholic Church, who, in various parts of the Christian world, are battling for the rights of conscience and the freedom of their religion; while eulogistic adjectives are lavished on all parties and measures, no matter how tyrannical or arbitrary, provided they are directed against the church and her priesthood. Just here we may as well ask at the start, Is there not occupation enough for our diplomatic service in attending to the great commercial and other secular interests of the republic, but that they must turn aside to devote their chief attention to the cultivation and spread of anti-Catholic bigotry?

One of the most glaring examples of this indecent partisanship is to be found in the records of our diplomatic relations with Mexico—our nearest neighbor and the most populous of the Spanish-American republics. Formerly the greatest care was exercised in filling this important mission, only gentlemen of sound discretion and liberal views being selected; but since the advent of Mr. Fish as Secretary of State, this wise precaution has been neglected, and, as a consequence, we have had at the Mexican capital, for several years, a deputy named John W. Foster, whose total misapprehension of the duties of his office is painfully apparent, even from his own reports. It will be remembered that in 1859 the partisans of Juarez,

assembled at Vera Cruz, proclaimed war on the Catholic Church, abolished all religious communities, confiscated their property, and expelled their members of both sexes. They also declared marriage a civil contract, to be entered into only before a magistrate, abolished religious oaths, and attempted other “reforms” equally impertinent and detrimental to the public good. During the short reign of Maximilian these attempts on the liberty of the church were of course discontinued; but when Juarez assumed absolute control of the government they were renewed, and on the 25th of September, 1873, were declared by his successor, Lerdo de Tejada, a part of the constitution. This effort to make religious proscription the fundamental law of the republic seemed so judicious and praiseworthy to Mr. Foster that he immediately transmitted to Washington a full copy of Lerdo’s proclamation, with the remark: “Their incorporation into the federal constitution may be regarded as the crowning act of triumph of the liberal government in its long contest with the conservative or church party.”

Knowing something of the antecedents of Mr. Foster, we are not surprised at his sympathy with what may be called the illiberal or anti-church party; but the reply of our Secretary of State is simply inexplicable. On October 22 he writes:

“The Mexican government deserves congratulation upon the adoption of the amendments of its constitution to which the despatch relates. It may be regarded as a great step in advance, especially for a republic in name. We have had ample experience of the advantage of similar measures—an experience, too, which has fully shown that, while they have materially contributed to enlarge and secure general freedom and prosperity, they have by no means tended to weaken the just interests

of religion or the due influence of clergymen in the body politic.”

How a gentleman of Mr. Fish’s acknowledged intelligence could permit himself to write such a document is incomprehensible. He knows well that “we”—meaning the United States—have not had “ample experience,” or any experience whatever, “of the advantage of similar measures.” “We” have had our moments of fanaticism, our church-burnings and convent-sackings, it is true; but neither the municipal law nor the Constitution has presumed to control the spiritual affairs of the church in this republic. Our seminaries, colleges, convents, and schools are yet untouched by the civil magistrate; our priests can administer the sacraments without the risk of police interference; and our Sisters of Mercy and Charity can pursue their holy avocations and not incur the risk of perpetual banishment. What has contributed to enlarge and to secure to us general freedom and prosperity is not such anti-Catholic legislation as that upon which Mr. Fish congratulates the “republic in name,” but the very contrary.

It would seem, however, that some of those entrusted with the highest offices of state regret this happy condition of things. Evidence crops out everywhere to strengthen the suspicion that our government, not finding interests at home of sufficient magnitude to occupy its attention, is drifting more and more into sympathy with the conspiracy now prevalent in Europe against the rights of the Catholic Church and that birthright of every American citizen—freedom of conscience.

But, however unsustained by fact, the moral sympathy thus tendered by the mouth-piece of our

government to the Mexican president was highly valuable to his party at that juncture. The laws against the clergy and nuns were exceedingly unpopular with the great mass of the Mexicans, and it was necessary that the endorsement of the powerful and prosperous republic of the north should be secured in their favor. If such measures had “materially contributed to enlarge and secure general freedom and prosperity” in one country, as Mr. Fish solemnly asserted, why should they not have the same salutary effect in another? There is no reason for surprise, therefore, to find that when the elated Mr. Foster transmitted Mr. Fish’s letter, with his own felicitations, to Mr. Lafragua, the Mexican Minister of Foreign Affairs, he was answered in the following complimentary phrase:

“The president of the republic has received with special gratification the expression of the kind sentiments which animate the people and government of the United States respecting the people and government of Mexico, which sentiments could not have been interpreted by a more estimable person than your excellency. The president is sincerely thankful, as well for the cordial congratulation which his excellency the Secretary of State has had the kindness to address to you on account of the proclamation of the amendments to the federal constitution, as for the ardent wishes which your excellency manifests for the consolidation of the republican institutions and of peace, and for the prosperity and material development of the United Mexican States.”

It will thus be seen that by the wilfulness—or indiscretion, let us call it—of Mr. Fish “the people and government of the United States” are credited with a sympathy for, and approval of, what their conscience, their spirit, and their whole history up to this time repudiate—a legislation

of tyranny and religious proscription. Mr. Fish—and no man better—knows that such sympathy has no foundation in the hearts of the American people or in the real policy of its government. He knows that the people abhor the sentiment expressed in the “amendments to the federal constitution” of Mexico. What are we to think, then, of a statesman who, actuated by whatever motive, shows himself so ready to play fast and loose with the solemn trusts confided to him? Is the vast power that he must exercise safe in the hands of one who is ready to veer with every wind that blows, especially when it blows against Rome? Is this the true expression of the policy of which we have lately heard so much—“Let the church and the state be for ever separate”? Our American feelings rise with indignation against so grave a misrepresentation of the principles and policy of our government, especially by one so familiar with them as Mr. Fish. There is no excuse for this.

Mr. Fish’s faux pas was too precious to the anti-Catholic faction not to receive the widest publicity. “This correspondence,” writes Mr. Foster to his principal, “was yesterday read in the national Congress by the Minister of Foreign Affairs, by direction of the president of the republic, and after its reading the president of Congress, in the name of that body, expressed the gratification with which the assembly had received the intelligence, and by a vote of Congress the correspondence was entered upon its journal. The Minister of Foreign Affairs has also caused its publication in the official newspaper, and it has appeared in all the periodicals of this capital.”

A year had scarcely passed away, during which every effort had been

made thus to mislead and pervert public opinion, when De Tejada’s government found itself strong enough to pass additional “laws of reform” infringing still farther on the rights of conscience. On the 15th of December, 1874, the Sisters of Charity, the last remnant of the Catholic orders in Mexico, were also rudely expelled from their institutions and ordered to quit for ever the scenes of their pious and untiring labors. And in this connection, a curious comment on Mr. Fish’s congratulatory despatch was offered by the people of the city of San Francisco. The Sisters expelled by virtue of the constitution which met with such marked approval from Mr. Fish, were received with open arms and welcomed by our fellow-citizens in California. Surely, this was giving the lie direct to Mr. Fish by his own countrymen, whose conscience naturally revolted from a system of government which, as its chief claim to the sympathy and fellowship of foreign peoples, set up its power and willingness to banish from its jurisdiction all that was purest and holiest. Yet Mexico is as far from “general freedom and prosperity” as ever, and Messrs. Fish and Foster, the instigators of this last outrage on humanity, continue to be high and trusted officials of our freedom-loving republic.

Still, the faction that controls Mexican politics was not content with constitutional and statutory “reforms.” As long as the heart of the country remained Catholic its hold on power was feeble and uncertain. It therefore aimed at nothing less than a general conversion of the people, at a new Reformation, and selected what it considered the most fitting instruments for that purpose. These were itinerant Protestant missionaries of

all sects, kindly furnished to order by the Boston American Board of Missions and the Pacific Theological Seminary of California, who soon overspread the promised land and began their labors of conversion. The states of Mexico, Vera Cruz, Guerrero, Puebla, Jalisco, Hidalgo, Zacatecas, and San Luis Potosi were especially favored by their presence, where, from their method of proceeding, their foul abuse of the religion of the populace, and the rank blasphemy that characterized their preaching, it was plain that they considered they had fallen among barbarians and idolaters. Going from place to place, and surrounded by armed guards, they not only fulminated the heresy of Protestantism, but scattered broadcast printed travesties of the Commandments and of the prayers and ritual of the church, some copies of which they had the hardihood to nail to the cathedrals and other places of Catholic worship. To make matters still more offensive, they frequently interspersed their harangues with laudations of the “liberal” party who patronized them, and direct attacks on all who opposed its iniquitous policy.

One of those zealots, a Rev. Mr. Stephens, after a nine months’ journey through several towns, found his way to Ahualulco, where, relying on the countenance of the government officials, he commenced a series of bitter assaults on Catholicity. A popular tumult was the result, during which the unfortunate man was killed, March 2, 1874. When news of this cruel, though not unprovoked, murder reached Mr. Foster, he waited on the Mexican minister, who informed him that “the principal assassins and two priests had been arrested, and that

a judge had been despatched to the district with an extra corps of clerks to ensure a speedy investigation and trial.” This promise was faithfully and promptly kept, as we find by a despatch dated April 15, in which the minister says:

“Up to the present date seven of the guilty parties have been tried and condemned to death, from which sentence they have appealed to the supreme court. Twelve or fifteen more persons charged with complicity in the crime are under arrest awaiting trial, including the cura of the parish of Ahualulco.”

Yet this summary vengeance, nor even the indignity offered to the venerable cura, who had had no participation whatever in the disturbance, did not satisfy the insatiable soul of Mr. Foster. From his subsequent letter to Lafragua, and several despatches to our government, we infer that the condign punishment of the priest, innocent or guilty, was to him the most desirable of objects. To inaugurate the new Reformation by the execution of a Catholic clergyman appears to have been considered by him as a master-stroke of policy. But even the Lerdistas were not prepared for so desperate a step, and Foster was doomed to find his hopes blighted. Alluding to a conversation with Minister Lafragua in September, he writes to Mr. Fish, bemoaning his hard fate:

“I thanked him for communicating the intelligence in relation to the trials of the assassins of Rev. Mr. Stephens, the receipt of which I had anxiously awaited, but expressed my disappointment in finding no mention of the proceedings had in the trial of the cura of Ahualulco, to whom the published accounts attributed the responsibility of the assassination.…”

This information, and the fact that the appeal of the seven condemned

persons had not been determined, drew forth one of Mr. Fish’s unaccountable diplomatic missives. “You may farther inform him orally,” says our Secretary, alluding to Lafragua, “but confidentially, if need be, that this must necessarily become an international affair, unless it shall be satisfactorily disposed of and without unreasonable delay.” Now, why should the information be given orally and confidentially if there was not some desire, some trick, to avoid responsibility for a doubtful act tending to intimidate a friendly power? and wherefore should the killing of the man Stephens be made an international affair—i.e., a just cause of war—when so many American citizens had been already murdered in Mexico with impunity? Foster had repeatedly complained that during the short time he had been in charge of the legation thirteen “murders of the most horrid character and revolting to our common civilization” had been committed on his countrymen, for which there had not been a single punishment; yet we hear of no intimation of making them international affairs. Were the lives of these persons, presumably following legitimate callings, collectively of less value than that of a mendacious preacher of a gospel of violence?

Emboldened by the words of Mr. Fish, Foster again returned to the attack in a note to Lafragua, in which he directly, and on his own responsibility, charges the cura with having been the instigator of the crime. The first intimation that the cura had had any participation in exciting the mob against Stephens was contained in a letter from a brother preacher named Watkins, who was stationed at Guadalajara, more than sixty miles from the scene of the disturbance. On this

suspicious and slender foundation Foster had been in the habit of building up a mass of insinuations and charges against the priest, referring to “general” and “printed” reports as his authority. When after a searching investigation the cura was honorably discharged, and the minister again complained to Lafragua, that official replied rather tartly in the following unequivocal terms:

“In relation to the acquittal of those who were charged with being instigators of the crime, it is the result of a judicial act, which has taken place after the due process had been completed for the investigation of the truth, which is not always in accord with the prejudices of the public.”

If the minister had added: “and of Mr. Foster and the Board of Missions,” the sentence would have been more complete. Having failed to accomplish his grand design—the chastisement of the cura—the ultimate fate of the convicted laymen became a matter of little importance to our assiduous representative.

Another opportunity soon presented itself for Mr. Foster’s official interference. On the night of January 26, 1875, a riot occurred in Acapulco, in which five persons were killed and eleven wounded on both sides. Of the former, one was claimed to be an American. It appears that a Rev. M. N. Hutchinson, supported by the United States consul, J. A. Sutter, and a few native officials, had commenced his evangelical labors in that city by personally insulting the parish priest, Father J. P. Nava, and by openly abusing everything considered holy and venerable by Catholics. This method of preaching Christ’s Gospel so exasperated the populace that an attack was made on the building

used as a Protestant church, and a street fight, with fatal results, followed. Hutchinson, the cause of the fray, escaped and found refuge on board a ship; while Sutter, who seems to have been as cowardly as he was vicious, threatened to abandon the consulate and follow his example. As in the case at Ahualulco, the “liberal” authorities at once arrested the cura, but so indignant were the citizens, and even some of the federal employees, at the act that he was at once set at liberty.

Here was a rare chance for Mr. Foster to display his reformatory energy, and on this occasion he had a most efficient associate in the gallant consul. That truthful gentleman writes to his chief, January 27, three days after the riot:

“All the Indians are under arms, and threaten to attack the town if the parish priest—who, in my opinion, is the prime mover of these heinous crimes—should be arrested. So he is still at large, and laughing, probably, at the impotence of the authorities.… Everybody in town is afraid of the Indians, who, incited by a fanatical priest, would perpetrate the most atrocious crimes.”

All this Mr. Foster believed, or appeared to believe; for we find him embodying it in his official communications to Lafragua, with some additional remarks of his own to give the calumny greater point and force. Supported by the American minister, Sutter now looms up as the defender of Protestant rights in general. Addressing personages of no less distinction than the governor of the state and the district judge, he requests them to “promptly take the necessary measures within your power to procure the speedy punishment, according to the law, of the instigators and perpetrators of the atrocious massacre of Protestants,” etc. There is no limitation

here, it will be observed, to American citizens; the peremptory consul, “in obedience to instructions received yesterday from the Hon. John W. Foster, envoy extraordinary, etc.,” had assumed a protectorate over the entire evangelical body of Acapulco, and felt himself at liberty to insult the executive and judiciary of the state of Guerrero.

The people of Acapulco, however, differed materially in opinion from the consul. Not only did they not fear the Indians or regard their priest as an abettor of riot and murder, but, on the contrary, five or six hundred of them waited on Governor Alvarez, and, in the name of the rest, assured him that the disturbance was wholly caused by Hutchinson and his handful of Protestants, requesting him at the same time to remove the disturbers from their city, as he had the power to do under the laws of the state. Even the Minister of Foreign Affairs—though, like so many of his party, deadly opposed to the church—could not help but ascribe the riot to something like its proper cause. Annoyed, doubtless, by the impertinence of Sutter and the importunities of Foster, he writes to the latter in a vein of delicate irony:

“The consul in Acapulco cannot be ignorant of the fact that Protestant worship was a new propaganda among a people who, unfortunately, have not been able to attain to that degree of civilization to enable them to accept without aversion religious tenets which they disown, and it is well known that the religious sentiment is one of the most sensitive, and that, when attacked, it is all the more irritable.”

The logical position of the Mexican minister is unassailable. But what a humiliating predicament for our government to be placed in by her diplomatists abroad! Such is the natural result of selecting the

kind of men for important posts, or indeed for any posts at all, complained of at the beginning of the article. It is clear that this Mr. Foster has missed his vocation. He would be more at home in a Protestant board of missions, or as a “worker” in “revivals,” than standing before a people as the representative of the truth, worth, and genius of a great nation.

Mr. Foster was not satisfied with the explanation. He had lost one priest, and he was not going to let another slip through his fingers without a struggle. He reminds Lafragua of Mr. Fish’s “congratulations,” and appeals to his gratitude. “While it is very natural that I,” he writes, “as the representative of a government which has officially congratulated that of Mexico on the constitutional triumph and recognition of the principles of religious liberty, should watch with deep interest the practical enforcement of these principles, I have made the outbreaks of fanatical mobs the subject of diplomatic intervention only when American citizens have been assassinated.” But the plea was in vain; even the government of Lerdo de Tejada dared not molest the cura of Acapulco, who, strong in his innocence and in the affection of his flock, continued to exercise the duties of his sacred office, regardless alike of native “reformers” and officious diplomats. Up to the latest dates Mr. Foster had not yet caught a cura, and the people of Mexico seem as far as ever from the enjoyment of the blessings of a new Reformation, so happily and characteristically begun.

The Central American States include Guatemala, San Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, each of which holds an undivided fifth interest in the official attention

of Mr. George Williamson, our worthy minister peripatetic. When not involved in domestic brawls—which seldom happens—these miniature commonwealths have a habit of varying the monotony of peaceful life by a descent on one of their neighbors, and even a civil and a foreign war have been known to rage at the same time and place. Having such a vivacious people to look after, the attention of our representative might reasonably be considered fully occupied; yet we learn that he has ample leisure to devote himself to theological and educational speculations, and particularly to the subject of marriage. On this important social relation he not only becomes eloquent, though occasionally obscure, in his despatches, but is evidently looked upon as an authority by the “liberal” party on the Isthmus. Having been asked his opinion by President Barrios of Guatemala, who contemplated extending civil marriage to his people, “I replied,” he says, “it would in all probability soon come; … that in our country we considered the civil law supreme, and would neither furnish a hierarchy of Romanists nor Protestants, to assert its sanction was necessary to give validity to a contract which the law pronounced good.” It may be objected that this passage is not well constructed; so, in justice not only to the liberal views, but to the erudition of Mr. Williamson, we quote the following descriptive extract from a despatch on the condition of the Central American population:

“Intelligence is more generally diffused; people are slowly learning republican habits and adopting republican ideas; a monarchical hierarchy that fostered superstitions, that only allowed education in a certain direction, and

which ‘gathered gear’ unto itself ‘by every wile,’ has been dethroned; agriculture now has the aid of the numerous laborers who were employed in the erection of large edifices for monks and nuns and religious exercises.”

A subsequent communication on the state of public education furnishes a rather strange commentary on the above:

“The present attempt at organizing a public-school system is, in my judgment, one of the most laudable acts of the present government, for which it should be entitled to credit, whether there be success or failure. My opinion is that there are too many obstacles to be overcome for the plan to be successful, and that the government is undertaking a grave experiment which is likely to create great dissatisfaction, and may result in revolution. But having driven out most of the priests and nuns, who were heretofore the instructors of the people, it seemed necessary the government should try to supply their place.”

The same latitude of opinion and ill-concealed hostility to the Catholic Church, the same desire to take advantage of every trifling circumstance to misrepresent and malign the motives of her supporters, pervade the correspondence of our other representatives in South America, almost without exception. Thus Mr. Thomas Russell has no scruple in lauding the usurping government of Venezuela, which, in 1870, first imprisoned and then banished perpetually the Archbishop of Caracas and Venezuela, suppressed the seminaries, confiscated the property of the monasteries, and expelled the nuns. Still less has Mr. Rumsey Wing in assuring the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ecuador, in writing about an alleged desecration of a grave in Quito, that the news “of those outrages on the bodies of Protestants” “would create an intense feeling not only in my own country

but throughout Europe”; while, having nothing else to send, we suppose, the same officious gentleman forwards to Washington copies of two decrees of Congress, one granting a tithe of the church revenues to his Holiness the Pope, and the other placing Ecuador under the protection of the Sacred Heart, “to show the intense Catholicism prevailing in this country.”

Then Mr. C. A. Logan, some time of Chili, appears to have interested himself very much in local politics, and it is not difficult to discover upon which side his sympathy rests. In a despatch to Secretary Fish, November 2, 1874, he has the hardihood to charge the Archbishop of Santiago with bribing congressmen, pending the passage of a bill for the partial repeal of a penal law against the clergy. He writes:

“The day arrived for the vote, and a large crowd gathered about the building, awaiting the result with the most breathless anxiety; among these was the archbishop himself, in full clerical robes. Much to the chagrin of the liberals, a two-third vote was gained by the church party under the spur and lash of the clericals, and, as it is freely asserted, by the liberal use of money. The senate is composed of only twenty members, which is not a large body to handle, if they take kindly to handling.”

Mr. Francis Thomas, of Lima, goes even farther than his confrère, and deliberately asserts the complicity of the Catholics, as a body, in the recent attempt to assassinate President Pardo.

“The conspirators,” he says, “had calculated upon the co-operation of all that class of the population of this country who have become hostile to the president of Peru on account of his proceedings, in which high dignitaries of the Catholic Church were concerned. The congress of Peru at its last session passed

a law forbidding members of the order of Jesuits to reside within the jurisdiction of Peru. In violation of this law, members of that order who had been expelled from other Spanish republics took possession of a convent in the interior of Peru, and took measures to organize their society. President Pardo, in conformity to the law, issued a proclamation requiring them to leave the country, which has caused some degree of excitement.”

This fact, and the attempts of the government to introduce irreligious books and periodicals into the schools, were sufficient, in the opinion of our impartial minister, to provoke the Catholics of Peru to the foulest crimes.

The Emperor of Brazil, in his open war on the church, also finds an advocate and eulogist in Mr. Richard Cutts Shannon, the American chargé at his court, who employs his vicarious pen in justifying the arrest, trial, and condemnation of the Bishop of Olinda to four years’ imprisonment with hard labor. But he is surpassed by minister James R. Partridge, who, in alluding to the determined intention of the government to prosecute to the bitter end the various vicars who were named to take the place of those successively cast into prison, emphatically declares: “From present appearances, the ministerial party are going on and are determined to carry it through. It is to be hoped that their courage may not fail, neither by reason of the long list of those who are thus declared ready to become martyrs, nor by any political move of the ecclesiastical party.”

Such, in brief, are the views of the men sent to represent this country on American soil. If we turn to Europe—though we may acknowledge a higher order of ability in our diplomatic agents there—we

discover prejudice as strong and partisanship equally conspicuous. Referring to the German Empire, we are pained to find so profound a student of the past as Mr. Bancroft our late minister at Berlin, so easily deceived in contemporary history. Nothing, certainly, can be more untrue than the following statement of the position of affairs in Prussia in 1873:

“The effect of the correspondence [between the Pope and Emperor William] has been only to increase the popularity and European reputation of the emperor, and to depress the influence of the clerical party, thus confirming the accounts, which I have always given you, that the ultramontane political influence can never become vitally dangerous to this empire. The Catholic clergy are obviously beginning to regret having commenced with the state a contest in which it is not possible for them to gain the advantage. The intelligent Catholics themselves for the most part support the government, and so have received from the ultramontanes the nickname of state Catholics.”

There is not a single sentence in the above which is not a misapprehension of facts. How far Mr. Bancroft’s easy assertions and confident predictions, made scarcely two years ago, have been justified by the event is a matter that happily needs no inquiry, while comment on our part would be almost cruel. Mr. Bancroft, however, was not content with supplying information to the State Department on matters exclusively pertaining to his mission. His wide range of vision took in all Europe, past and present. Of the old Helvetian republic he writes:

“Switzerland shows no sign of receding from its comprehensive measures against the ultramontane usurpations; and the spirit and courage of these republicans have something of the same effect on the population of Germany that was exercised

by their forefathers in the time of the Reformation.”

And again:

“How widely the movement is extending in Europe is seen by what is passing in England, where choice has been made of a ministry disinclined to further concessions to the demands of the Catholic hierarchy, and where the archbishops of the Anglican Church are proposing measures to drive all Romanizing tendencies out of the forms of public worship in the Establishment. Here in Germany, where the question takes the form of a conflict between the authority of the state at home within its own precincts, and the influence of an alien ecclesiastical power, it is certain that the party of the state is consolidating its strength; and I see nothing, either in the history of the country, or in the present state of public opinion, or the development of public legislation, that can raise a doubt as to the persistency of the German government in the course upon which it has entered.”

What the “comprehensive measures” in Switzerland “against the ultramontane usurpations” mean readers of The Catholic World already know. They are simply a rather aggravated form of the Falck laws—a form so aggravated that it is only within the past year M. Loyson himself warned the world that the “comprehensive measures against ultramontane usurpations,” which Mr. Bancroft finds such reasons to commend, were aimed, through Catholicity, at all Christianity. And yet a high official of our free government, a man of universal reputation and great authority in the world of letters, finds in this elaborate system of proscription and intolerance food for congratulation. One would suppose from the spirit so plainly animating Mr. Bancroft that he is a member of the O. A. U., and that he was chosen rather to represent that delectable society in Berlin than the American Government. It is to be presumed, from his own

despatches, that he would have our government follow the tyrannical attempt of Prussia and Switzerland to “stamp out” freedom of conscience. Mr. Bancroft’s diplomatic experience, under the influence of the court of Prussia, seems destined to reverse his principles and maxims as an American historian. He has, we fear, remained too long abroad for the good of his native truth, character, and sense of right. It is to be hoped that this baneful influence of foreign courts does not pursue him on his return to his own country and people.

Mr. John Jay, who formerly acted as our envoy at Vienna, though not so pronounced or diffusive in his despatches, is not far behind Mr. Bancroft in expressing his entire concurrence with the restrictive policy recently adopted by the government of Austria towards the church; while Mr. George P. Marsh, our representative in Italy, is so great an admirer of Garibaldi that he is never tired of chanting his praises in grandiloquent prose. Those familiar with the life of that notorious bandit will be surprised to learn from so high an authority as the American minister that “he has never through life encouraged any appeal to popular passion or any resistance to governments, except by legal measures or in the way of organized and orderly attempts at revolution; and, from the moment of his arrival at Rome, he exerted himself to the utmost to restrain every manifestation of excitement.”

In marked contrast to the unfair and ungenerous spirit displayed in the despatches of those ministers are the letters from France, Spain, and England. The stirring political events which occupy the entire attention of the two former countries leave no room, perhaps, for the discussion

of penal laws and judicial decrees against Catholicity; while the latter, having carried out Protestantism to its logical conclusion, and found it a sham, is more inclined to profit by the blunders and crimes of its neighbors, so as to push its commercial interests, than to imitate them and begin anew the rôle of persecutor for conscience’ sake.

In explanation of the erroneous views so frequently put forth by so many of our diplomatic officials, we are assured that most of those sent to Mexico and Central and South America have been members of secret societies, and, having been accustomed to affiliate with the lodges of those Freemason-ridden countries, have had whatever little sense of equity they originally possessed perverted by the sophisms of their new associates. Possibly; but let us consider how much harm may be done by following such a short-sighted course. All the independent countries south of us on this continent are largely Catholic, and, with the exception of Brazil, claim to be republican. They are bound to us by strong ties, political as well as commercial, and are naturally inclined to look upon the United States as their exemplar and guide, and, if need be, their protector. When they shall have shaken off the incubus of military dictation that now weighs upon them, and, restoring to the church its rights—as will eventually be done—have entered on a new career of freedom and material prosperity, how will they be disposed to feel towards a power which they have known only through its agents, and those the advocates and supporters of everything that is illiberal in politics and degrading in polemics?

In Europe the influence of incapable and unworthy representatives is likely to be even more deleterious

to our national character. The affections of the people of the Old World are strongly inclined toward the free institutions of the New. But if we continue to permit our delegated authority to be used only in favor and encouragement of such enemies of human liberty as the usurper at the Eternal City, the tyrant at Berlin, and the communists of Geneva, the popular sympathy born of our protestations of liberality will soon fade away, to give place to feelings of mistrust, if not of positive aversion.

In calling public attention to the incapacity and perversity of the majority of our diplomatists—men who do not hesitate to put into their correspondence with foreign governments, and their private home despatches, sentiments they dare not utter publicly in the forum or through the press—we by no means desire to restrict proper expressions of opinion or limit the just criticisms of the agents of the Department of State. We only insist that these shall not be indulged in at the expense of a very large and respectable portion of this community. Neither do we require that they shall take sides with Catholics,

as such, anywhere, no matter how harsh or unjust may be their grievances. This country is not Catholic, it is true, neither is it Protestant; and, indeed, it is questionable if, in any strict sense, it can be called Christian. But it is a country civilly and religiously free, by custom, statute, and Constitution, and we have a right to demand that whoever undertakes to act for it, as part and parcel of the machinery of our government, among foreigners, shall represent it as it is, in spirit as well as in fact—the opponent of all proscription for conscience’ sake, the enemy of tyranny whether exercised by the mob or the state. Is it not the true policy of our government to send abroad as representatives of our interests men who, while they are not hostile to the prevailing religious beliefs of the country to which they are accredited, are, at the same time, true and stanch Americans? If such men cannot be found, let us, in the name of common sense, have none at all. Some minor interests may perhaps suffer by the omission, but the honor and reputation of the republic will remain unsullied and unimpaired.

[1] Papers relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, etc., for 1874-5.

LINES ON LEONARDO DA VINCI’S
“VIRGIN OF THE ROCKS.”

Maternal lady with the virgin grace,

Heaven-born thy Jesus seemeth sure,

And thou a virgin pure.

Lady most perfect, when thy sinless face

Men look upon, they wish to be

A Catholic, Madonna fair, to worship thee.

Charles Lamb.

A POET AMONG THE POETS.

It is of the last importance that English criticism should clearly discern what rule for its course, in order to avail itself of the field now opening to it, and to produce fruit for the future, it ought to take. The rule may be summed up in one word—disinterestedness.

Mr. James Russell Lowell[2] has applied Mr. Matthew Arnold’s rule with rare fidelity in his essays, just published, on Dante, Spenser, Wordsworth, Milton, and Keats. His estimate of the two greatest of modern poets, especially the paper on Dante, is calculated to attract general attention, and to arouse, we apprehend, some acrid sentiment in a certain class of literary butterflies who are accustomed to sip or decline according to the theological character of the garden. It requires considerable courage to place Dante above all his rivals and salute him as

“The loftiest of poets!”

in an hour when poetry has lost the qualities that made Dante lofty and Milton grand, and when the epithet “Catholic,” which Dante loved and Milton hated, has become again a reproach. Lowell’s consideration of both is characterized by disinterestedness as to time, religion, politics, and literature; and the sincere student who casts aside his prejudices, like his hat, when he approaches the temples that enshrine so much of divinity as God deposited in the souls of the Florentine and the Puritan, will find it difficult to dissent from the judgment of Lowell upon their individuality, their inspiration, or their art. Lowell is peculiarly adapted to the form of literature, semi-critical, semi-creative, in which he has recently distinguished himself. We believe his essay on Dante to be the

most successfully-accomplished task which he has yet undertaken; and the cultivated American public should thank one who has amused and diverted it as well as he has done for the solid instruction which this volume conveys in a style at once scholarly, fresh, and refined. Lowell’s mental temperament is admirably adapted for the mirroring of poets’ minds. Himself a genuine poet, without ambition above his capacity, his agile fancy discerns the quicker and appreciates more intensely the imagination of epic souls; while his critical faculty, naturally acute, has the additional advantage of a keen sense of humor, which enables him to discover more readily the incongruous, and is, therefore, an invaluable assistant in literary discrimination.

It is the trade of criticism to expose blemishes; it is genius in criticism to appreciate the subject. The journeyman critic of the last two centuries has been so busy making authors miserable without felicitating mankind that when we read through an essay like Lowell’s on Dante, on Wordsworth, or on Spenser, we cheerfully recognize a man where experience has taught us to look only for an ingenious carper or spiteful ferret. However, critics are no worse than they used to be. Swift, who had excellent opportunity of forming an opinion, both in his own practice and in the observation of that of others, has left this dramatic picture, the truthfulness of which there is no reason yet to question:

“The malignant deity Criticism dwelt on the top of a snowy mountain in Nova Zembla; Momus found her extended in her den upon the spoils of numberless volumes half devoured. At her right hand sat Ignorance, her father and husband, blind with age; at her left, Pride, her mother, dressing her up in the scraps of paper herself had torn. There was Opinion, her sister, light of foot, hoodwinked, and headstrong, yet giddy and perpetually turning. About her played her children, Noise and Impudence, Dulness and Vanity, Positiveness, Pedantry, and Ill-Manners.” Such is reckless and conscienceless criticism even to this day; and we turn from it, in grateful delight, to the reverential commentary which Lowell has produced upon one of the saddest of all human creatures—the great Catholic poet of the middle ages.

Dante, little understood by those who have the largest title to his legacies, is, after all, the universal poet—the poet of the soul. Homer chants the blood-red glories of war, and is the poet of a period; Virgil charms by the grace of his lines, and is the poet of an episode; Milton awes with the mighty sweeps of his rhetoric, and is the poet of the grandiose; Shakspeare astounds with his knowledge of human nature and enchains with his wit, and is the poet of the passions; Dante, when read aright, is found to be the poet of the Soul. The line that divides him from Shakspeare lies between the subjective and the objective—Shakspeare’s themes are men and women; Dante’s sole subject is Man—man within himself, as he is related to God, to religion, to eternity. As Lowell felicitously writes it, “Arma virumque cano; that is the motto of classic song. Dante says, Subjectum est

homo, not vir—my theme is man, not a man.”

Why, then, do we not read him more and value him as he deserves? For two reasons: first, the difficulty of adequate translation; next, the mysterious richness of his thought, whose pearls are not strung across the door of the lines to warn us, as later poetry so candidly does, that within there is nothing but barrenness. The proper understanding of Dante has been a growth, beginning in Italy as soon as he was dead, extending gradually over Europe, into England, and now westward, gaining in clearness and glory as time recedes and space enlarges.

Within a century after the poet’s death lectures on his works were delivered in the churches, and, as soon as the invention of printing enabled, numerous editions were edited and circulated. The first translation was into Spanish; then into French; next into German; and a copy of a Latin translation of the Divine Comedy by a bishop was made at the request of two English bishops in the early part of the fifteenth century, and was sent to England. Spenser and Milton were familiar with the poet’s works, but the first complete English translation did not appear until 1802. Of the English translations since then, the most familiar are Cary’s and Longfellow’s; and to this catalogue Mr. Lowell adds: “A translation of the Inferno into quatrains by T. W. Parsons ranks with the best for spirit, truthfulness, and elegance”—praise which will be cordially endorsed by those who have profited by Mr. Parsons’ labor.

We propose to discuss Dante the man and Mr. Lowell’s estimate of him, as exhibited in his writings, and shall touch upon the latter only

as they may be necessary to the clearer revelation of their author’s character. For Dante, like Milton, was not of common mould; in whatever aspect we view him he proves extraordinary to a degree which frequently becomes incomprehensible. It is natural to wish to throw the two under the same light, although the result of the experiment is only to magnify their points of difference and diminish those of comparison. The sum of the results appears to be that only in the accidents of life are they comparable; in the essentials of character, with a single exception—that of intense faith—they were radically unlike. Widely apart as their names appear—Dante dying in 1321 and Milton entering life in 1608—men were engaged during the lives of both in civil revolution, and each had his own theory of government and exercised the functions of political power. Both were men of sorrow, both were unappreciated in their day and generation, and the light and joy which each experienced emanated from within and supplied the fire of their genius. The noblest work of each was written in the gloomiest period of his life. Here the possibility of parallel ends.

There is a close relation—a much closer one than may at first be suspected—between Dante and the instant condition of American society and politics. Nearly six hundred years have passed away, and we have to go back to Dante to learn personal virtue in political life, as well as religion in social affairs. Lowell has escaped the poison of the time. He perceives the essence as well as the necessity of virtue, and fully realizes its absence in our own state.

“Very hateful to his fervid heart and sincere mind would have been the modern

theory which deals with sin as involuntary error, and by shifting off the fault to the shoulders of Atavism or those of Society—personified for purposes of excuse, but escaping into impersonality again from the grasp of retribution—weakens that sense of personal responsibility which is the root of self-respect and the safeguard of character. Dante, indeed, saw clearly enough that the divine justice did at length overtake society in the ruin of states caused by the corruption of private, and thence of civic, morals; but a personality so intense as his could not be satisfied with such a tardy and generalized penalty as this. ‘It is Thou,’ he says sternly, ‘who hast done this thing, and Thou, not Society, shalt be damned for it; nay, damned all the worse for this paltry subterfuge. This is not my judgment, but that of the universal Nature, from before the beginning of the world.’… He believed in the righteous use of anger, and that baseness was its legitimate quarry. He did not think the Tweeds and Fisks, the political wire-pullers and convention-packers, of his day merely amusing, and he certainly did think it the duty of an upright and thoroughly-trained citizen to speak out severely and unmistakably. He believed firmly, almost fiercely, in a divine order of the universe, a conception whereof had been vouchsafed him, and that whatever or whoever hindered or jostled it, whether wilfully or blindly it mattered not, was to be got out of the way at all hazards; because obedience to God’s law, and not making things generally comfortable, was the highest duty of man, as it was also his only way to true felicity.… It would be of little consequence to show in which of two equally selfish and short-sighted parties a man enrolled himself six hundred years ago; but it is worth something to know that a man of ambitious temper and violent passions, aspiring to office in a city of factions, could rise to a level of principle so far above them all. Dante’s opinions have life in them still, because they were drawn from living sources of reflection and experience, because they were reasoned out from the astronomic laws of history and ethics, and were not weather-guesses snatched in a glance at the doubtful political sky of the hour.”

In this Dante strikingly differed

from Milton, who was a revengeful and intensely-bigoted fanatic of his own faction, and he admitted to his companionship no man, high or low, who presumed to differ from him. Dante was a politician by principle, placing his country first, and setting a high value on himself as her servant. Milton was a politician by bigotry, placing himself first, and setting a high value on his country because he was her servant. But the manliness of Dante in demanding that the severe precepts of religion should be inflexibly applied to political administration in an age whose corruption was only less shocking than that of our own, is the particular lesson which this vigorous extract from Lowell conveys. If society in this era should esteem political wire-pullers, convention-packers, and politicians who deem patriotism the science of personal exigencies, as Dante esteemed and treated them, should we be any the worse off? Dante looked upon a thief as a thief, and the knave who conspired to defraud the government as fit only to “begone among the other dogs.” Would there not be a healthier tone in our political affairs if these classes of criminals were not met, as is usually the case, by justice daintily gloved and the bandage removed from her eyes, lest she should make a mistake as to persons?

The inspiration of Dante was strictly religious. So was Milton’s; but with this distinction: that Dante’s religiousness was real and beneficent, while Milton’s was unreal and malignant—as Lowell says, Milton’s “God was a Calvinistic Zeus.”

A brief and succinct analysis of the Divine Comedy will be found serviceable by those who have not analyzed it for themselves, and at the same time will make manifest

the dependence of Dante’s inspiration upon Catholic doctrine:

“The poem consists of three parts—Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. Each part is divided into thirty-three cantos, in allusion to the years of the Saviour’s life; for although the Hell contains thirty-four, the first canto is merely introductory. In the form of the verse (triple rhyme) we may find an emblem of the Trinity, and in the three divisions of the threefold state of man, sin, grace, and beatitude.… Lapse through sin, mediation, and redemption—these are the subjects of the three parts of the poem; or, otherwise stated, intellectual conviction of the result of sin, typified in Virgil; … moral conversion after repentance, by divine grace, typified in Beatrice; reconciliation with God, and actual, blinding vision of him—‘The pure in heart shall see God.’… The poem is also, in a very intimate sense, an apotheosis of woman.… Nothing is more wonderful than the power of absorption and assimilation in this man, who could take up into himself the world that then was, and reproduce it with such cosmopolitan truth, to human nature and to his own individuality as to reduce all contemporary history to a mere comment on his vision. We protest, therefore, against the parochial criticism which would degrade Dante to a mere partisan; which sees in him a Luther before his time, and would clap the bonnet rouge upon his heavenly muse.”

Dante proved himself a reformer of the most aggressive kind. The difference between him and Luther was that Dante endeavored to reform men by means of the church; Luther endeavored to destroy the church rather than reform himself. Evils existed within the church, as a part of society, during the periods of both. Dante helped to correct them as a conservative; Luther chose, as a radical, to tear the edifice down. Unlike the temple of Philistia, the church stood, and the Samson of the sixteenth century fell beneath the ruins of a single column.

No fact in the history of poetry is

more striking than the necessity of religion as a source of inspiration. The Iliad and Odyssey acquire their epic quality from the religion of Greece; gods stalk about, and Minerva’s shield resounds in the clangor with that of Achilles. The Æneid would be beautiful without the association of mythology; but it is mythology which enhances its grace into grandeur. The Vedas are an expression of the religious aspirations of the Hindoos. The verse of Boccaccio is pleasing only in proportion as religion cleansed his pen. Petrarch’s sonnets would never have been written had not Laura taught him the distinction between pure love, as the church knows it, and the passions which carried Byron into hysterics. The Italian epic of the sixteenth century, Jerusalem Delivered, which is held by Hallam to be equal in grace to the Æneid, had the First Crusade for its theme. Would it have been possible for Milton to have written any poem equal to Paradise Lost out of other than Scriptural materials? Aside from the literary characteristics and dramatic strength of the plays of Shakspeare, does not their chief value lie in their correct morality—the morality which is found nowhere outside Catholic teaching? This is not the place to discuss the modern decline of poetry. Matthew Arnold’s theory—it is a general favorite—is that history and boldly-outlined epochs make poetry; and Lowell says, in his essay on Milton, “It is a high inspiration to be the neighbor of great events.” But the last two centuries have been crowded with history; boldly-outlined epochs have lifted their awful summits in England, in France, in Italy, in the United States, in Spain. Where are the great poets among the verse-makers who have been

neighbors of these great events, and might have caught high inspiration from them? Since the Reformation the moral world has been growing iconoclastic, and there is no poetry in iconoclasm.

Next to religion, woman has been the great inspiration of poets; but the modern idea of marriage has shattered the sanctuary walls which Christianity erected around it; the sacredness of home is invaded, the oneness of love destroyed—there is no poetry in divorce.

Is not the decline of poetry a very curious, if not a fatal, reply to the hypothesis of evolution, carried logically into the moral and intellectual world?

Mr. Lowell completes his essay by a minute examination of Dante’s thought and style, as exhibited in the Divine Comedy; and we can find space only for the closing period:

“At the Round Table of King Arthur there was left always one seat empty for him who should accomplish the adventure of the Holy Grail. It was called the perilous seat, because of the dangers he would encounter who would win it. In the company of the epic poets there was a place left for whoever should embody the Christian idea of a triumphant life, outwardly all defeat, inwardly victorious; who should make us partakers in that cup of sorrow in which all are communicants with Christ. He who should do this would achieve indeed the perilous seat; for he must combine poesy with doctrine in such cunning wise that the one lose not its beauty nor the other its severity—and Dante has done it. As he takes possession of it we seem to hear the cry he himself heard when Virgil rejoined the company of great singers:

‘All honor to the loftiest of poets!’”

Mr. Lowell’s Dante is a man divinely inspired and overshadowed by divinity to the grave itself—a character austere, devoid of humor, unflinchingly faithful to his

conceptions of right whether moral or political, self-respecting, and believing in his own commission from God; a mind logical, systematic, and illuminated by Heaven, consciously developing its marvellous genius in the midst of contumely; a heart consumed first by human love for Beatrice, and by it purged and refined out of personality into the love of God and the proper relative appreciation of all creatures; a sublime human soul, in brief, transformed from the individual into the universal, and teaching all men, as it was taught in sorrow and in love, to seek eternity as the sole object worthy of human effort; and teaching in a lofty splendor of phrase and successions of exquisite imagery which continue to astonish posterity and will for ever adorn general literature.

The essay on Milton is devoted rather to Mr. David Masson than to the poet. There is nothing to indicate that the critic is in love with either the poems or the personality of the sublime Puritan who officiated in the capacity of Latin secretary to Oliver Cromwell, and who devoted himself to epic verse after his services ceased to be available for the oppression of his fellow-men. Still less is he enamored of Mr. David Masson as a biographer of Milton, and the jovial though thoroughly effective manner in which he demonstrates the Scotch professor’s unfitness for this office adds to his volume a flavor of pungency which brings back happy recollections of the “Table for Critics.” Masson is very voluminous and exasperatingly given to remote and often irrelevant detail; and Macaulay, in extinguishing some of the literary pretenders of his time, was never more dextrous than Lowell in this grotesque joust at

the Edinburgh professor’s faults, nor half so witty. Referring to the length of the biography—there are eight volumes octavo of the Life and Works—Lowell says with perfect gravity: “We envy the secular leisures of Methuselah, and are thankful that his biography, at least (if written in the same longeval proportion), is irrecoverably lost to us. What a subject that would have been for a person of Mr. Masson’s spacious predilections!” And he goes on to say: “It is plain, from the preface to the second volume, that Mr. Masson himself has an uneasy consciousness that something is wrong, and that Milton ought to be more than a mere incident of his own biography.” Masson, on the other hand, is of opinion “that, whatever may be thought by a hasty person looking in on the subject from the outside,” no one can study Milton without being obliged to study also the history of England, Scotland, and Ireland; whereupon Lowell retorts that, even for a hasty person, eleven years is “rather long to have his button held by a biographer ere he begins his next sentence.”

Masson’s rambling history of the seventeenth century “is interrupted now and then,” says Lowell, “by an unexpected apparition of Milton, who, like Paul Pry, just pops in and hopes he does not intrude, to tell us what he has been doing in the meanwhile.” Blinded by the dust of old papers which Masson ransacks, to discover that they have no relation to his hero, the critic compares the ponderous biography to Allston’s picture of Elijah in the wilderness, “where a good deal of research at last enables us to guess at the prophet absconded like a conundrum in the landscape, where the very ravens could scarce have found him out.”

This characterization of Edinburgh by Harvard will certainly inspire suggestion, if it does not awaken hope; but Lowell’s right to criticise the sedate and prolix gentleman who occupies in the Scottish metropolis the chair which he himself fills at Cambridge does not rest, as we have already seen in the essay on Dante, on Susarion’s faculty of turning the serious and dull into actual comedy.

Like all who have recently written of Milton—with the exception of Masson—Lowell looks upon him as a being “set apart.” To idealize the author of Paradise Lost is quite as natural as to idealize Dante, notwithstanding their relative distances from us; but in the former case, with Lowell, it is the idealization of admiring awe; in the latter, of tender and exquisitely appreciative love. He does not appear to hold Milton in any degree of the personal affection which he feels for the inspired Florentine, but is constrained to insist that Masson is disrespectful toward his subject, and that “Milton is the last man in the world to be slapped on the back with impunity.”

When Lowell writes of Milton’s literary style, although he does it sparingly, every stroke is a master’s. His estimate of Milton as a man is calm, judicial, and courageous. “He stands out,” he says, “in marked and solitary individuality, apart from the great movement of the civil war, apart from the supine acquiescence of the Restoration, a self-opinionated, unforgiving, and unforgetting man.” It is the habit of hurried teachers of our day, who have to teach so many more things than they know, to exalt Milton

“High on a throne of royal state,”

and swing before him the incense of a senseless and absurd homage.

In our school-days most of us were led to look upon the sightless poet as a being more than man, if a little less than God. Virtues, as he understood them, he certainly possessed; but many more virtuous than he suffered ignominy and death for presuming to exercise the very liberty which he grandly claimed for himself, but which, we find on examining his prose, he was dilatory in awarding to others, even in the abstract. These prose writings are at once curious and monstrous, and exhibit the real Milton in a true and natural light, even as Samson Agonistes, Lycidas, and Paradise Lost manifest his superb and supreme characteristics as a poet. In prose he wrote as he thought; in verse he wrote as he could. He was always the rhetorician, making an art of what men of less genius can display only as the artificial; but while his poetry is the complete manifestation of his art, his prose, always written with an obvious and acknowledged personal purpose, manifests himself. His prose works are already scarce; the day is not distant when nothing will remain of them but their ashes, for the types will plead release from perpetuating the hard, angular, stony reality of a man whom taste, if not instinct, yearns to withdraw from our painful knowledge of what he was, and veil him in a radiant mistiness of what we wish he might have been. Nothing better illustrates the idealism with which the pencil of youth paints Milton than Macaulay’s essay, written while he was still a boy, but included with the mature expressions of his manhood. Nothing could more completely pulverize this roseate estimate than Milton’s own works in the days when he wrote for time and not for immortality. No matter what the theme, his prose is always ponderous and polysyllabic,

abounding in magnificent metaphor, violent epithets, arrogant dogmatism, and personal abuse of those who differed from him, of which no trace, happily, remains in our day. The higher the man, the coarser the missile which he hurled at him with a giant’s force. In his reply to Salmasius he addresses that eminent scholar as “a vain, flashy man,” and, in the progress of his argument, reminds him that he is also a knave, a pragmatical coxcomb, a bribed beggar, a whipped dog, an impotent slave, a renegade, a sacrilegious wretch, a mongrel cur, an obscure scoundrel, a fearful liar, and a mass of corruption.

He seems to have lacked both consistency and clearness of conviction. He was apparently incapable of loving woman; he scarcely respected her; and, in his social theory, awarded the sex a place somewhat below that which it occupied under the patriarchs, and considerably lower than that described by Homer as peculiar to the heroic age of Greece. He obtained coy and pretty Mary Powell from her father in consideration of so many pounds of the coin of the realm, at a time when a mortgage had become embarrassing and a daughter was the only available means of extinguishing it. When that volatile young woman, shivering in the shadows of a Puritan despot, found courage enough to leave his roof, Milton was undoubtedly more impressed by her audacity than grieved by her absence. It was his pride that was hurt; and notwithstanding that he had previously advocated social views of the straitest and most conservative kind, he then published his essay on divorce, which, in amazing egotism, in wealth of classical and Scriptural allusion, in looseness of morals, and in equality of social privileges as between man and

woman, is as veritable a curiosity as antiquarians have yet rescued from the monumental mysteries of old Assyria. In politics and religion he was as unsound and wavering as in his laws for society. An aristocrat of the most despotic type, he enthroned learning, and yet permitted his daughters to acquire only the alphabets, that he might use their senses as his slaves. He despised them as human beings, and they, in turn, hated and deceived him, and almost his last words on earth were terrible denunciations of those whom God intended to illumine his home, soothe his life, and deliver his whitened head, already aureoled, to

“Dear, beauteous Death.”

For many years—the very best of his life—he lent himself to the political schemes of Oliver Cromwell, and the violence and coarseness of his pamphlets made him one of the most conspicuous figures of a long series of civil storms; yet Lowell is constrained to admit that “neither in politics, theology, nor social ethics did Milton leave any distinguishable trace on the thought of his time or in the history of opinion.” He considered his ideas and inclinations correct and above appeal, simply because they were John Milton’s. The harshest word which Lowell says of his prose style is his comparison of a man of Milton’s personal character, which was without taint, to Martin Luther, whose writings were a true reflection of their author. Lowell is very gentle in saying of so noted a plagiarist as Milton: “A true Attic bee, he made boot on every lip where there was a trace of truly classic honey.” He did indeed, not in prose only, but in his verse. But we easily forgive him. There are thieves whom stolen garments more become than their owners.

[2] Among my Books. Second Series.

ARE YOU MY WIFE?

BY THE AUTHOR OF “PARIS BEFORE THE WAR,” “NUMBER THIRTEEN,” “PIUS VI.,” ETC.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE EPISODE EXPLAINED.

The night closed in—night, that is so cruel, yet so merciful; intensifying every pain in the long dark watch, or lulling it in blessed sleep.

There was very little sleep for Raymond that night, and none at all for his two nurses. They sat by his bed while the slow hours dragged on, watching his feverish restlessness, that was occasionally soothed by broken snatches of rest, thanks to a potion that was administered at intervals. Franceline’s anxiety gradually returned as she sat there observing every sound and symptom. She could not but see that there was something far more serious in this sudden attack than an ordinary fainting fit. Raymond was so troubled and excited in his sleep that she almost wished him to awake; and then again she longed for unconsciousness to soothe his feverish terrors. He clutched her hand; he could not bear her to move from him. At last the dawn came, and like a bright-winged angel scattered the darkness and scared away the ghostly phantoms of the night, and Raymond fell into a slumber long and deep enough to be refreshing.

Some days passed without bringing any change; but he was no worse, which, the doctor said, meant that he was better. His condition, however, continued extremely critical.

It was wonderful both to Angélique and to herself how Franceline

bore up under the strain; for both her mental and physical powers were severely taxed. She had hardly closed her eyes since her father had fallen ill; and she took scarcely any food. But anxiety, so long as it does not utterly break us down, buoys us up.

The few neighbors who were intimate were kind and sympathizing. Lady Anwyll had driven over and made anxious inquiries, and would gladly be of use in any way, if she could. Miss Bulpit also came to offer her services in any way they could be available. Miss Merrywig called every day. So far Franceline had seen none of them; she was always with her father when they called, and Angélique would not disturb her for visitors.

Father Henwick came constantly to inquire, but did not always ask to see the young girl. Franceline wondered why her father had not before this expressed a wish to see him; it seemed so natural that such a wish should have manifested itself the moment Raymond was able to receive any one. She dared not take the initiative and suggest it, but she could not help feeling that it would be an immense relief to the sufferer if he could disburden his mind of the weight that was upon it, and speak to Father Henwick as to a tried and affectionate friend, if even he did not as yet seek spiritual help and guidance from him. It had

long since been borne in on Franceline that the horrible suspicion which had so mysteriously fallen on Raymond was in some way or other connected with his sudden illness; she brooded over the thought until it became a fixed idea and haunted her day and night. How was it that he did not instinctively turn for comfort to the Source where he was sure to find it? Father Henwick himself must feel pained and surprised at not having been summoned to the sick-room before this. Franceline was thinking over it all one morning, sitting near Raymond’s bedside, when Angélique put in her head and announced in a loud whisper that M. le Curé, as she dubbed Father Henwick, was down-stairs, and would be glad if she could speak to him a moment. Franceline rose softly, and was leaving the room, when her father, who was not dozing, as she fancied, said:

“Why does he not come up and see me? I should be glad to see him; it would do me good.”

Father Henwick came up without delay, and Franceline soon made a pretext for leaving him alone with the invalid. It was with a beating heart that she closed the door on them and went down-stairs to wait till she was recalled. She could hear only the full, clear tones of Father Henwick’s voice at first; after a while these grew lower, and then she heard the murmur of Raymond’s voice; then there seemed to follow a silence. She was too agitated to pray in words, but her heart prayed silently with intense fervor. The conference lasted a full half-hour, and then Father Henwick’s cheerful voice sounded on the stairs.

“How do you think he looks, father?” she said, meeting him at

the study door with another question in her eyes that Father Henwick thought he understood.

“Much better than I expected!” he answered promptly and with a heartiness of conviction that was music to her ears; “and you will find that from this out he will improve steadily, and rapidly, I hope, too.”

A stifled “Thank God!” was Franceline’s answer.

“And now how about you?” said the priest, with something of the old blunt grumble that was so much more reassuring than the tenderness called forth by pity. “I heard a very bad account of you this morning—no sleep, and no food, and no air; you mean to fret yourself into an illness before your father is up and able to attend on you, do you? That would be one way of showing your dutiful affection for him. Humph! Are those the eyes for a young lady to have in her head on a fine sunny morning like this? Did you go to bed at all last night?”

“Yes, but I could not sleep; I was too anxious, too unhappy.”

“Too unbelieving, too mistrustful. Go up-stairs this minute, you child of little faith, and lie down and lay your head upon the pillow of divine Providence, and be asleep in five minutes!”

He left her with this peremptory injunction, and Franceline, with a lightened heart, went up-stairs determined to obey it. It was as yet, of course, a matter of pure conjecture what had passed between the priest and her father; but when, an hour later, after obediently taking that refreshing sleep on the pillow of divine Providence which had been commanded her, she came into Raymond’s room, there was a marked change in his whole

demeanor. He had not passed the interval in the listless apathy that had now become habitual to him. He had made Angélique bring over a little celestial globe and set it on the bed for him, and had amused himself with it awhile; and then he had taken up the book Franceline had left on the chair beside him when she stole out of the room. It was The Imitation of Christ. He was reading it when she entered, and there was an expression on his features that made her happier than she had been for a long time. He looked more peaceful, more life-like than she had seen him for weeks even before he had fallen ill.

“You are feeling better, petit père?” she said, kissing him, and taking the dear face between her hands to look into it more closely.

“Yes, my clair de lune, much better,” he replied, with a smile that had all its wonted sweetness and something of the old brightness. “I think I shall be able to get down-stairs in a day or two.”

“I see you have been at your old tricks again,” she said, shaking her finger at him and pointing to the globe; “you know you are forbidden to do anything that gives you the least fatigue.”

“It was not a fatigue, my little one—it amused me; but I will not do it again, if you don’t wish it.”

Franceline hugged his head to her cheek, and said she would let him do anything so long as it amused him.

“I was thinking of you last night, petit père,” she said, making the globe revolve slowly on its axis; “the sky was so beautiful at twelve o’clock when I happened to look out of my window that I longed for you to see it.”

“Ha! Then probably it will be

the same to-night,” said Raymond. “I will keep my curtain drawn, so that I may see it, if it is.”

“Yes; and let the moon keep you awake whether you will or not! I should like to hear what Angélique would say to that proposal! No; but I will tell you what we’ll do: I will be on the watch to-night, and if the stars are like last night I will steal in and see if you are awake, and if you are I will draw the curtain so that you may see them from your bed. We shall be like two savants making our ‘observations’ in the night-time, shall we not? And—who knows?—we may discover a new star!”

Raymond pinched her cheek and laughed gently. His hopes in this respect were limited by facts—or rather negatives—that Franceline did not stop to inquire into; she had not gone deeply into the science of astronomy.

“There is no saying what I might not discover with those bright eyes of thine for a telescope,” said M. de la Bourbonais.

Angélique rejoiced in her own fashion at the decided turn for the better that her master had suddenly taken. She saw that he spoke a good deal during the evening, and ate with a nearer approach to appetite than he had yet shown; so she settled him for the night, and went to bed with a lighter heart than for many past nights, and soon slept soundly.

Franceline did not follow her example. It was not anxiety that kept her awake, but happiness; she could not bring herself to part with it so quickly, and lose it for a time in unconsciousness. There was a presence, too, in the ecstatic silence of the night, that answered to this sense of joy and appealed

to her for responsive watch. Joys are more intense when we dwell on them in the night-time, because they are more separate, farther lifted from the jarring discord of our daily lives, where pain cries around us in so many multiform tongues. It is as if the world grew wider in spiritual space, and that senses and fibres, too delicate to vibrate in the glare of daylight, woke up in the solemn hush when the world of man is out of sight and God comes nearer to us.

Franceline stood at the window and gazed at the beautiful scene that spread itself before her. The moon was at her full; the landscape, diluted in the moonlight, floated in mystic, illimitable space, still and hushed as if the world were holding its breath to hear the stars tingling in the sapphire dome; every tree and blade of grass were listening to the silence; the river sped stealthily along like a silver snake between its banks where the gray poplars stood looking down, frighted by the vibration of their own shadows, dyeing themselves black in the water.

“If he were awake, how he would enjoy this!” murmured Franceline to herself; and then, unable to resist the temptation, she stole softly through Angélique’s room and across the landing into Raymond’s. The doors were all open, partly to admit more air, partly that they might hear the least tinkle of his little hand-bell, if he sounded it.

“Is that my Franceline?” asked a voice from the bed. The night light threw her shadow on the floor, and Raymond, who was not asleep, saw it.

“Yes, petit père,” she answered in a whisper; “the sky is so lovely I thought I must come and see if

you were awake. Shall I draw the curtain?”

“Yes.”

She did so, and then crept back and knelt down beside him. Raymond laid his cheek against her head, and clasped her hand in his, and they remained for some moments gazing at the beauty of the heavens in silence. Then he said, making long pauses, as if he were thinking aloud rather than speaking to her:

“How wonderful is the splendor of God as he reveals it to us in his works!… Who can measure his power, his glory?… Think what it means, the creation of one of those stars! And there are myriads and myriads of them spangling millions of miles of blue sky! There are no steppes, no barren spots, there where the stars cannot grow. They are not like flowers, those stars of our world; they never perish or fade—they only draw behind the light for a while; always harmonious, moving in their appointed places like the notes of a divine symphony; they make no discord. The great stars are not scornful of the little ones; the little stars are not jealous of the great; each is content to be as it is and where it is, and to stay where the great Star-Maker has fixed it.… My clair de lune, let us try and be content like the stars.”

Franceline raised his hand to her lips, and murmured the strophe of her favorite hymn of S. Francis: “Praised be my Lord for our sister the moon, and for the stars, which he has set clear and lovely in the heavens.…”

The next morning Father Henwick came and was once more closeted with Raymond. Nothing had been said about it, but, when the door-bell sounded, M. de la

Bourbonais glanced quickly at the clock, and exclaimed in a tone of surprise: “Already half-past twelve! I did not think it was so late. Thou wilt show him up at once, my child, and then leave us alone for a little.”

No further explanation was necessary. Franceline kissed him in silence, placed a chair close by his pillow, and then, in a happy flutter, went down to meet Father Henwick.

Two days after this there was great joy at The Lilies. The little cottage was decked out as for a bridal. Franceline had stayed up late to have it all finished for the early morning; she would do everything with her own hands. The stairs were wreathed with garlands of green leaves and ferns; every vase and cup she could find was filled with the sweet spring flowers—cowslips, primroses, anemones, and wild violets—and placed in the tiny entrance and on the landing opposite Raymond’s room. The room itself was transformed into a chapel. At the foot of the bed stood a small table covered with Franceline’s snowiest muslin, joyously sacrificed for the occasion. Lights were burning on either side of a large crucifix; there were lights and flowers on the mantelpiece, where she had placed her statue of the Madonna and other precious ornaments; the thin curtains were drawn and filled the little room with a soft golden twilight. Franceline was kneeling beside the bed, reciting some litany aloud, which Raymond answered from a book in timid, reverential under-tones.

But now a sudden hush falls upon the faintly-broken silence. There is a sound of footsteps without; a dear and awful Presence is

approaching. No need to ring; the door stands open to its widest, and Angélique, kneeling on the threshold, adores and welcomes the divine Guest; a little bell goes tinkling up amidst the flowers, and ceases as it enters the illuminated room.…

*  *  *  *  *

The sudden improvement in Raymond’s state was not followed by a proportionately rapid progress. He still continued extremely weak, and was not able to come down-stairs until several days later. Dr. Blink was puzzled; he had been very sanguine when the rally took place, and now he hardly knew what to think. He was convinced from the first that the attack had been in a great measure caused by some mental shock; but that seemed at one moment to have righted itself, and he thought his patient was safe. This was apparently a mistake. The pressure may have been unexpectedly lightened, but it was clearly not removed; and until this was done medicine could do very little.

“There is something on his mind,” said the doctor to Mr. Langrove one morning, on coming out from his daily visit; “there is some trouble weighing on him, and he will not recover until something is done toward removing it.”

The vicar understood perfectly the drift of this remark. It was an appeal from the medical man to the friend of the patient for help or light. Mr. Langrove could give neither. He observed that the count had been seriously anxious about Franceline’s health; but Dr. Blink shook his head. He knew how to discriminate between the effect of heartache and a pressure on the mind. In this case the mind was oppressed by some secret burden, or he was very much mistaken;

it might be some painful apprehension in the future, or something distressing in the past; but whatever the cause was, past or future, the present effect was unmistakable, and, unless some friend who had the full confidence of the patient could afford some relief, the worst might still be apprehended. Mr. Langrove answered by some irrelevant expression of sympathy and regret, but volunteered no opinion of his own. He went home and sat down and wrote to Sir Simon Harness. This was all he could think of. If Sir Simon could not help, he believed no one else could.

It so happened that the baronet was just now absent in the South of Italy, in dutiful attendance on Lady Rebecca; and as he had been called off suddenly, and left no orders about his letters being sent after him, those directed to his bankers lay there unopened. There was another besides Mr. Langrove’s lying there, which, if it had reached him, would have rejoiced the baronet’s heart and provoked a quick response.

The fears which Raymond’s tardy progress raised in the mind of his medical man were not shared by Franceline. Hope still triumphed over alarm, and she felt confident that, since the great weight on her father’s mind had been removed, his complete recovery must ultimately follow. This certainty made the delay easy to bear. It was wonderful how her own strength bore up. She had quite lost her cough—a fact which confirmed the doctor’s previous opinion that the nerves had more to do with this symptom than the lungs—she kept well, and was altogether in better health than for some months previously. Her spirits raised to elation

after that happy morning’s episode, continued excellent—at times as joyous as a child’s.

The moment M. de la Bourbonais was able to get down-stairs Angélique insisted on Franceline going every day for a walk while the sun was shining. One morning, when he had come down and was comfortably established on the sofa in his study, propped up so that he could see out of the window, Franceline said she was going to gather him a bouquet. She smoothed and changed the cushions, put another shawl over his feet, moved the sofa a little bit nearer the window, and then back again a little bit nearer the fire, until, finding there was absolutely nothing more to fuss over, except to kiss him for the tenth time with “Au revoir, petit père!” as if they were separating for a journey, she sallied forth for her constitutional.

The weather was mild and beautiful; spring was intoning the first bars of its idyl, striking bright emerald notes from the tips of the trees, and drawing low, pink whispers from the blackthorn in the hedges; the birds were beginning to tune their lutes and make ready for the great concert that was at hand. Franceline’s heart bounded in unison with the pulse of joy and universal awakening; she began to warble a duet with the skylark as she went along, stopping every now and then to make a nosegay of the pink and white anemones and violets and torch-like king-cups that grew in wild luxuriance in the woods and fields. Dullerton was famous for its wild flowers. Half an hour passed quickly while thus engaged, and then she turned homewards. The doves were on the watch for her, “sunning their milk-white bosoms on the thatch,” as she came

in sight, and swelling the sweet harmony of earth and sky with a tender, well-contented coo. But hark! Could that be the cuckoo that was already calling from the woods? She paused with her hand on the latch to listen. No: it was only the voice of the sunshine echoing through her own happy heart. She pushed open the gate and walked quickly on; but again her step was arrested. Some one was coming round by the park entrance. It was no doubt Mr. Langrove; no one else came that way—no one but Sir Simon Harness, and there he stood. Franceline had nearly uttered a cry, when a quick sign from the baronet checked it and made her walk leisurely on without doing anything to attract attention. She cast a furtive glance towards the casement, to see if by chance her father had changed his place and come to sit by the window; but he was still on the sofa where she had left him.

Sir Simon opened his arms and clasped her with a warmth of emotion that did not surprise Franceline.

“You heard that he was ill! You are come to see him!” she exclaimed.

“I have only heard it this minute from my people at the house. Why did you not write to me, child? Ah! he would not let you, I suppose? My poor Raymond! And now how is he? Can I see him? Will he see me?”

“Why should he not see you, dear Sir Simon?” said Franceline, raising her large, soft glance to him, full of wondering reproach.

“Of course, of course,” said the baronet; “but is he strong enough to see me? They tell me he has been terribly shaken by this illness. It might cause him a shock if he saw me too suddenly.”

“Shall I tell him that you are expected down to-day? That would break it to him,” suggested Franceline. “Or you might write a line and send it in first to say you were here; would that do?”

Before Sir Simon could decide for either alternative, fate, in the shape of Angélique, decided for him. She had seen Franceline enter the garden, and wondered why she loitered outside instead of coming in; so she came out to see, and, on beholding Sir Simon, threw up her arms with a shout of astonishment.

Franceline cried out “Hush!” and shook her hand at the old woman, but it was too late; Raymond had seen and heard her from his sofa.

“Go in at once,” said Sir Simon, much excited—“go and tell him I am come to kiss his feet; to ask his forgiveness on my knees. Tell him I know everything.” And he pushed her gently from him. Franceline did not stop to ask what the strange message could mean, but ran in, thinking only how best she could deliver it so as to avoid too sudden a shock to her father.

Raymond was sitting up on the sofa, his face slightly flushed.

“What is the matter? Who is there?” he cried.

“Dear father, nothing is the matter; only something you will be glad to hear,…” she began.

“Ha! it is Simon! What has he come for? What does he want?”

“He wants to embrace you; and, father, he bade me say that he knows everything, and has come to ask you to forgive him and let him kiss your feet. He is waiting; may he come in?”

But Raymond did not answer; he was murmuring some words to himself, with hands lifted reverently as in prayer, while a smile of unearthly joy diffused itself on his

whole countenance. The emotion was too much for him; he fell back exhausted on his pillow.

Franceline thought he had fainted and screamed out for help. Sir Simon was beside her in an instant.

“Raymond! my friend, my brother, can you ever forgive me?” he cried, kneeling beside M. de la Bourbonais and taking his hand in both his.

“You know the truth, then? You got his letter?”

“Whose letter? I got no letter; but I found the ring. Look at it!”

He drew an enamelled snuff-box from his pocket, opened it, and held up the diamond, that flashed in the sun like a little star.

“Thank Heaven! I shall now be justified before all men!” exclaimed M. de la Bourbonais with trembling emotion. “This is more than I dared to hope. My God! I give thee thanks for this great mercy.”

No one spoke for a moment. Franceline had signed to Angélique to leave the room, but remained herself, a silent spectator of the strange scene.

“Who had it? How was it found?” said M. de la Bourbonais, taking the ring and examining it with an expression of mistrust, as if it were some uncanny thing that he half expected to see melt in his fingers.

“It has been in my possession, locked up at the Court, all this time!” replied Sir Simon. “You may remember I used this snuff-box that night, and sent it round the table. Someone dropped the ring into it unawares; it was not opened afterwards, and it never entered into my stupid brain to think of looking into it. I went away in a great hurry next morning, and

threw the snuff-box into a safe in my room where I keep papers and the loose jewelry I have in use. I came down this afternoon to get a deed out of the safe, saw the snuff-box, and by the merest chance opened it and found the ring.”

“Mon Dieu!” murmured Raymond, after hearing this simple explanation of the mistake that had very nearly cost him his life.

“Bourbonais, can you ever forgive me?” said Sir Simon.

Raymond opened his arms without speaking. Sir Simon flung himself with a sob upon his breast, and the two clung together and wept.

Franceline felt as if even she had no right to be present; that she was intruding in a sacred place where some mystery, not intended for her eyes, was being unfolded. She was moving softly toward the door when her father called her back.

“Come hither, my child; come and embrace me. I can have no happiness that thou dost not share.”

“Franceline,” said Sir Simon, rising from his knees and taking her hand with an expression of humility that was very touching in the grand, white-haired gentleman, “I have been guilty of a great act of disloyalty towards your father. I cannot tell you what it was; perhaps he will. Meantime, he has forgiven me for the sake of our long friendship, and because his soul is too noble, too generous, to bear malice, even against an unfaithful friend. Will you do as he has done, and say you forgive me too?”

His voice was full of trembling, his eyes were still moist. Franceline did as he had done to her father: she flung her arms round his neck and wept.

TO BE CONTINUED.

A SEQUEL OF THE GLADSTONE CONTROVERSY.

III.

The keen relish which we all have for other people’s sins is proverbial. As those who think with us are right, so are they virtuous who have only our own vices. Prodigality, which, to the miser’s thinking, is the worst of sins, is, in the eyes of the spendthrift, merely an evidence of a generous nature. Men who wish to be thought gentlemen have a weakness for what are called gentlemanly vices; but from the coarser though less depraved wickedness of the vulgar they turn with loathing. This bias of our common nature is not confined in its action to individuals; it affects classes, nations, races. The rich are shocked by the vices of the poor, and the poor, in turn, no less by those of the rich; masters hate the sins of servants, and are repaid in their own coin.

When the free-born Briton sings, “England, with all thy faults, I love thee still,” he means that faults, if only they be English, are after all not so bad. Wrapt up in the precious bundle of our self-love are all our pet sins and weaknesses. The universal hatred which existed between the nations of antiquity must be attributed in great part to the fact that their vices were unlike, and therefore repellant. The national contempt for foreigners is, in Christian times, strong in proportion to the barbarism of the people by whom it is felt; but in Greece and Rome such civilization as was then possible seemed to have no power over this prejudice. Not to be a Greek was to have been created for vile uses, and not to be a Roman was to be nobody.

The French, as seen by the English, are giddy and lack dignity; the English appear to French eyes, sulky and wanting in good nature; the Turk thinks both struck with madness, because they walk about and stretch their legs when they might sit still; and though he is at their mercy, yet he cannot persuade himself that they are anything but Christian dogs. The negro is quite sure the first man must have been black, and in this he is in accord with Mr. Darwin. The North American Indian will vanish from the earth through the golden portals of the western world still believing that he is the superior of the “pale face.” The power of national prejudice is almost incredible. “Our country, right or wrong” is, we believe, an American phrase; but it expresses a sentiment which is almost universally held to be right and proper. In international disputes men nearly always take sides with their own country, without stopping to inquire into the merits of the quarrel, which, indeed, the strong feeling that at once masters them would prevent them from being able to do. They act instinctively like children who always think that in difficulties with neighbors their own parents are in the right. We Americans are certainly not paragons of virtue, and in this centennial year it is probably wise to discuss almost anything rather than our morals; yet we cannot but think that M. Louis Veuillot was somewhat under the influence of national prejudice when he wrote that, if we

were sunk in the bottom of the ocean, civilization would have lost nothing. Our form of government, it is true, does not lead us to look for salvation, either in church or state, from a king by divine right; still, he might just as well have let us alone, especially as he is at no loss for quarrels at home. Nor can we think that the Germans who have raised such a storm of indignation over the crime in Bremerhaven, committed, as it is supposed, by an American, would have held the whole German people and their civilization responsible for the offence had they known its author to be native there and to the manner born.

As no passion takes hold of the human heart with such sovereign power as that of religion, it follows that no bias of judgment is more fatal to truth than religious prejudice; and now let us gently descend again to M. Emile de Laveleye and his pamphlet:

“It is agreed on all sides,” he says (p. 25), “that the power of nations depends on their morality. Everywhere is found the maxim, which is almost become an axiom of political science, that where morals are corrupted the state is lost. Now, it appears to be an established fact that the moral level is higher among Protestant than among Catholic populations. Religious writers confess this themselves, and explain it by the fact that the former remain more faithful to their religion than the latter, which explanation I believe to be the true one.”

Here is fairness surely. The soft impeachment could not have been made in a more moderate or subdued tone. Catholics are notoriously more immoral than Protestants; but the subject is a painful one, and M. de Laveleye does not wish to emphasize the unpleasant truth by giving proof—which, indeed, would be superfluous, since

Catholics themselves, we are assured, admit the fact and are concerned only about its explanation; and, strange to say, they have found the key to the mystery in the greater fidelity of Protestants to their religion: so M. de Laveleye and the Catholics shake hands and the dispute is at an end.

The position of Protestants with regard to this question is peculiar. The very life of their religion is intimately associated with a fixed belief in the preternatural wickedness of popes, priests, nuns, and Catholics generally. The sole justification of Protestantism was found in the abominable corruptions of Rome, and its only defence is that it is a purer worship, capable of creating a higher morality. The history of the Reformation, as written by Protestants, traces its origin to an awful and heaven-inspired indignation at the sight of papal iniquity, which resulted in a divine Protest against sin. It is this feeling, indeed, which is the living human magnetism in the words of Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and Knox. They all felt that in so far as they protested against open and patent evil they were right, and therefore strong. Leo X., with God’s eternal truth, but encircled by all the Graces and Muses, was at a disadvantage with those strong and plain-spoken men. In fact, the eternal ally of human error is human truth. It is because men who are right do wrong that men who are wrong seem right; and if men in general were fit to be priests of God, there would be on earth no power to oppose the Catholic Church. St. Paul had protested, St. John Chrysostom had protested, St. Peter Damian had protested, St. Bernard had protested, St. Catherine of Sienna had protested, and yet there was no Protestantism.

To protest was well and is well, but to seek to found a religion upon a protest is madness; and this is Protestantism. With Protestants purity of dogma is out of the question; and nothing, therefore, remains to them but purity of morals. To this they must cling like drowning men to straws. Protestantism, if considered from a doctrinal point of view, is nihilism. Gather up the hundred sects which, taken collectively, are called Protestantism, and we will find every positive religious dogma excluded; not even the personal existence of God remains. Mr. Matthew Arnold is a true Bible-Protestant, who has a little sect of his own, and all that he holds is that there is “a Power in us, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness”; and this he has discovered to be the sum and substance of all Scripture teaching. Doctrinal Protestantism is like the wrong side of a piece of tapestry with its fag-ends hanging in patches, twisted and jumbled; and yet they are the very substance out of which has been wrought a work of divine beauty. The dogmatic weakness of Protestantism throws its whole energy upon the moral side of religion. Its utter falseness, when we accept the fact that Christ has established a divine system of faith, is so manifest that no impartial thinker would hesitate to give his full assent to the sentiment of Rousseau: “Show me that in religious matters I must accept authority, and I shall become a Catholic at once.” Supposing the Christian religion to be what it is commonly held to be by both Catholics and Protestants, it necessarily follows that the Catholic Church is the only logical as it is the only historical Christianity. This, we believe, is the almost universally-received opinion of non-Christian

writers in our own day, in which, for the first time since the Reformation, a considerable number of learned men who are neither Catholic nor Protestant have been able to view this subject dispassionately. We do not mean to say that these writers prefer the church to the sects; on the contrary, they are partial to these because in their workings they perceive, as they think, the breaking-up and dissolution of the whole Christian system. Protestantism is valuable in their eyes as a stage in what Herbert Spencer calls “the universal religious thaw” which is going on around us. If there has been no divine revelation, then whatever tends to weaken the claim of the church to be the depository of such revelation is good, especially as her claim is the only one which rests upon a valid historical basis. And it is because a very large number of men more than half suspect there never has been a revelation that Protestantism meets with so much favor from the unbelieving and pagan world, as serving the purpose of an easy stepping-stone from the strong and pronounced supernaturalism of the church to the nature-worship of Darwin and Spencer or the German Culturists.

Macaulay was struck and puzzled by what his keen eye could not fail to perceive to be so universal a phenomenon as to have the force of a law of history.

“It is surely remarkable,” says this brilliant writer, “that neither the moral revolution of the eighteenth century nor the moral counter-revolution of the nineteenth should have in any perceptible degree added to the domain of Protestantism. During the former period whatever was lost to Catholicism was lost also to Christianity; during the latter whatever was regained by Christianity in Catholic countries was regained also by

Catholicism. We should naturally have expected that many minds, on the way from superstition to infidelity, or on the way back from infidelity to superstition, would have stopped at an intermediate point. Between the doctrines taught in the schools of the Jesuits, and those which were maintained at the little supper-parties of the Baron Holbach, there is a vast interval in which the human mind, it should seem, might find for itself some resting-place more satisfactory than either of the two extremes; and at the time of the Reformation millions found such a resting-place. Whole nations then renounced popery without ceasing to believe in a First Cause, in a future life, or in the divine authority of Christianity. In the last century, on the contrary, when a Catholic renounced his belief in the Real Presence, it was a thousand to one that he renounced his belief in the Gospel too; and when the reaction took place, with belief in the Gospel came back belief in the Real Presence. We by no means venture to deduce from these phenomena any general law; but we think it a most remarkable fact that no Christian nation which did not adopt the principles of the Reformation before the end of the sixteenth century should ever have adopted them. Catholic communities have since that time become infidel and become Catholic again, but none has become Protestant.”

There could not be a more satisfactory proof of the transitional and accidental nature of Protestantism. Like all human revolutions, it grew out of antecedent circumstances; and these were primarily political and social and only incidentally religious. The faith in the divine authority of the Christian religion was at that time absolute, and not at all affected by the tendency to scepticism observable among a few of the Humanists. The political power of the pope, however, together with his peculiar temporal relations to the German Empire, had gradually created throughout Germany a very strong national prejudice against his authority, which, upon the slightest provocation, was ready to break out

into downright hatred of the Papacy. The worldly lives and ways of some of the popes had been as fuel for the conflagration which was to burst forth. Men, unconsciously it may be, grew accustomed to look upon the Christian religion and the Papacy as distinct and separable; and the temper of the public mind, while remaining reverential toward Christ and his religion, was embittered against his vicar. When, from amidst the social abuses and political antagonisms of Germany, Luther, in the name of Christ, denounced the pope, his voice struck precisely the note for which the public ear was listening, and, as Macaulay says, whole nations renounced allegiance to the pope without giving up faith in God and his Christ. This was done in the excitement of revolutionary enthusiasm, when passion and madness made deliberation impossible, and when a thoughtful and analytical study of the constitution of the church was out of the question. The Reformers imagined that they could abolish the pope and yet save Christianity, just as in France, two centuries and a half later, it was thought possible to abolish God and yet save the principle of authority, without which society cannot exist. And, indeed, it is as reasonable to suppose that this world, with its universal evidence of design and adaption of means to ends, could have come into existence without the action of a supreme and intelligent Being, as to think that the system of religious truths taught by Christ can have either unity or authority amongst men without a living centre and visible representative of both. Protestants, by rejecting the primacy of the pope, were forced to accept as fundamental to their faith a principle

of so purgative and drastic a nature that, in the general process of sloughing of religious thought which it brings on, it is itself finally carried away into the vacuum of nihilism.

This became evident as soon as the attempt was made to agree upon articles of belief. New heresies sprang up day after day, and complete chaos would have ensued from the beginning had not the different states taken hold of one or other of the sects and “established” it, thus, by the aid of the temporal power, giving to it a kind of consistency, but at the same time depriving it of vitality. Thus what Macaulay regarded as so remarkable—that no Christian nation which did not adopt the principles of the Reformation before the end of the sixteenth century should ever have adopted them—and he might as well have made the proposition universal, since there was no reason why he should limit it to Christian nations, since it is well known that in nothing has Protestantism given more striking proof of its impotence than in its utter failure to convert the heathen,—this, we say, far from surprising us, seems so natural that we cannot understand how an observant mind should think it strange.

Protestantism was, in the main, the product of the peculiar political and social condition of Europe during the last period of the middle ages, and to expect Catholic nations, or indeed individual Catholics of any intellectual or moral character, to become Protestant in our day argues a total want of power to grasp this subject. As well might one hope to see the pterodactyls and ichthyosauri of a past geologic era swimming in our rivers. Catholics there are, indeed, now, as in the eighteenth century, who become sceptics, who abandon all belief in

Christianity, but none who become Protestants; for we cannot consider such persons as Achilli or Edith O’Gorman as instances of conversion of any kind. A very limited acquaintance with Catholics and Catholic thought will suffice to convince any reflecting mind that for us there is no alternative but to accept the doctrine of the church or to renounce faith in Christ. Was there ever fairer field for heresy to flourish in than that which opened up before Old Catholicism at its birth? But it was still-born. To this day its sponsors have not dared define its relation to the pope; and until this is done it remains without character. At any rate, it does not claim to be Protestant.

Turning to view the present condition of Protestantism, we are struck by the contrast. The very word “Protestant” is without meaning when applied to two-thirds of the non-Catholics of Germany, England, and the United States. Their mental state is one of disbelief in, or indifference to, all forms of positive religion; and if occasionally they are roused to some feeling against the church, it is through an association of ideas, traditional with them, which places her in antagonism with their political theories and national prejudices. Among earnest and reflecting Protestants who are united with one or other of the sects, there are two opposite currents of religious thought of a strongly-marked and well-defined character. Those who are borne on the one are being carried farther and farther away from the historic teachings of Christ, and are busied in trying to dress out in Biblical phraseology some of the various cosmic or pantheistic philosophies of the day. They very generally assume that religion has nothing to do with

theology, nor, consequently, with doctrines and dogmas. As its home is the heart, its realm is the world of sentiment; and so it matters not what we believe, provided only we feel good. Opposed to this current, which is bearing with it all the distinctive landmarks of the Christian religion, is another which is carrying men back to the church. In fact, all great minds among Protestants who have been strongly impressed by the objective character of Christian truth have been drawn towards the Catholic Church. Who can have failed to perceive, for instance—to mention only the three greatest who have occupied themselves with religious questions—how Leibnitz, Bacon, and Bishop Butler, in their intellectual apprehension of the Christian system, were, in spite of themselves, attracted to the church? Or who that is acquainted with the English Catholic literature of our own day is ignorant of the divine illumination which many of the most intellectual and reverent natures from the sects of Protestantism have found in the teachings of the one Catholic Church? In this way, by a process of supernatural or natural selection, the fragments of Protestantism are being assimilated to the church or are disappearing in the sea of unbelief in which even now they are seen only as barren islands in the wild waste of waters.

These considerations must be borne in mind by whoever would take a comprehensive view of the question which we propose now to discuss. In the first place, by reflecting upon them we shall find no difficulty in accounting for the marked difference in tone and character between Catholic and Protestant controversy, by which no attentive observer can have failed to be struck. Taking for granted the existence

of God and the divinity of Christ, as admitted by the earlier Protestant sects, the logical position of the church is unassailable, which, as we have already stated, is generally conceded by impartial non-Christian thinkers.

As a consequence, Catholic controversialists, assured of the absolute coherence of their whole system with the fundamental dogma of the divine mission of Christ, have been chiefly concerned with showing the logical viciousness of the essential principles of Protestantism. They have, indeed, not omitted to remark upon the moral unfitness of such men as Henry VIII., Luther, Knox, and Zwingli to be the divinely-chosen agents of a reformation in the religion of Christ; but such observations have been incidental to the main course of the argument, and this is alike true of our more learned discussions and of our popular controversies.

Catholic writers—allowing for individual exceptions—have not felt that, to show the falsity of Protestantism, it was necessary to denounce Protestants or to stamp upon them any mark of infamy. They have treated them as men who were wrong, not as men who were wicked. Protestant controversy, on the other hand, presents for our consideration characteristics of a very different nature. In the consciousness of their inability to settle upon a fixed creed, which has been shown by history, and from the necessarily feeble manner in which articles of faith could be held by them, on account of the disagreement and conflict of opinion among themselves, Protestant writers were forced to treat their religion, not as a doctrine, but as a tendency; and for this reason,

together with the natural hatred which men entertain for a church or government against which they have rebelled, they were led to draw contrasts between the results of Protestantism and Catholicity; so that it became customary to attribute all the enlightenment, morality, progress, and liberty of the world to Protestantism, and to represent Catholics as cruel, ignorant, corrupt, and in every way depraved. Luther, as we should naturally expect, led the way in this style of controversy.

“The Papists,” he said, “are for the most part mere gross blockheads.… The pope and his crew are mere worshippers of idols and servants of the devil.… Pope, cardinals, bishops, not a soul of them has read the Bible; ‘tis a book unknown to them. They are a pack of guzzling, stuffing wretches, rich, wallowing in wealth and laziness.… Seeing the pope is Antichrist, I believe him to be a devil incarnate.… The pope is the last blaze in the lamp which will go out and ere long be extinguished—the last instrument of the devil, that thunders and lightens with sword and bull;… but the Spirit of God’s mouth has seized upon that shameless strumpet.… Antichrist is the Pope and the Turk together.… The pope is not God’s image, but his ape.… Popedom is founded on mere lies and fables.… A friar is evil every way; the preaching friars are proud buzzards; all who serve the pope are damned; the Papists are devoid of shame and Christianity.”[3]

This is the style of Protestant controversy which, except in form, still lingers in this nineteenth century. Protestant devotion, it may be said

without sarcasm or exaggeration, consists essentially in a holy horror of popery. Were it possible to eliminate the Catholic Church from human society, Protestantism would at once fatally assume an attitude towards the world wholly different from that in which it now stands. At present, when attacked by evolutionistic pantheism—which means all the sophistries of the day—it takes refuge behind the historic fortress of Christianity, the Catholic Church, and, when encountered by the church, it makes an alliance with cosmism or anything else. Were the Catholic Church not in existence, it would be forced at once to build a fortress of its own; for the Bible is only a breastwork, which must be in charge of a commander-in-chief if we hope to hold it for the sovereign Lord. From the beginning, then, Protestants branded Catholics with a mark of infamy; they were idolaters, worse than pagans, for the most part gross blockheads, who fall an easy prey to the designing arts of priests and monks, who are only knaves and rogues, whose chief aim is to carry out the fiendish purposes of the pope, the arch-enemy, Antichrist, the devil in the flesh; and thus the church becomes the Woman of Babylon, flaming in scarlet, and alluring the nations to debauch.

No evidence, therefore, is needed to show that Catholics are immoral, depraved, thoroughly corrupt. To doubt it would be to question the truth of Protestantism and to believe that something good might come out of Nazareth. In good sooth, do not the Catholics, as M. de Laveleye says, admit the fact themselves?

We often hear persons express surprise that intelligent and honest Protestants should still, after such sad experience, be so eager to believe

the “awful disclosures” of “escaped nuns,” and to patronize that kind of lecture—of which, thank God! Protestants have the monopoly—delivered to men or women only, in which the abominations of the confessional are revealed and the general preternatural wickedness of priests, monks, and nuns is made fully manifest. This, to us, we must say, has never seemed strange. The doctrine of total depravity is an article of Protestant faith, and, when applied to Catholics, to none other have Protestants ever clung with such unwavering firmness and perfect unanimity. When disagreeing about everything else, they have never failed to find a point of union in this. Even after having lived and dealt with Catholics who are kind-hearted, pure, and fair-minded, in the true Protestant there still lurks a vague kind of suspicion that there must be some mysterious and secret diabolism in them which eludes his observation; that after all they may be only “as mild-mannered men as ever scuttled ship or cut a throat”; and after his reason has been fully convinced that the Catholic Church is the only historical Christianity, he is still able to remain a strong Protestant by falling back upon the undoubted total depravity of Papists. Dr. Newman, in his Apologia, the most careful and instructive self-analysis which has been written in this century, or probably in any other, declares that after he had become thoroughly persuaded of the truth of the Catholic Church his former belief that the pope was Antichrist still remained like a stain upon his imagination; and yet he had never been an ultra-Protestant. Many a Protestant has ceased to believe in Christ, without giving up his faith in the pope as Antichrist.

It is not surprising, in view of all this, that Protestants should have habitually held the church responsible for the evil deeds of Catholics.

When quite recently the excited Germans charged the dynamite plot of Thomassen upon our American civilization, we replied, with perfect justice, that such crimes are anomalies, the guilt of which ought not to be laid upon any nation, and all reasonable men admitted the evident good sense of our answer; but Protestants the world over have been unanimous in seeking to hold up the church to the execration of mankind as responsible for the St. Bartholomew massacre. Is Protestantism answerable for Cromwell’s massacres at Drogheda and Wexford? Religious fanaticism, no doubt, had much to do in urging him to butcher idolaters and slaves of Satan; but we should blush for shame were we capable of thinking for a moment that such inhumanities are either produced or approved by the real spirit of the Protestant religion.

We know of nothing in the Catholic Church which in any way corresponds with Protestant anti-popery literature; indeed, we doubt whether in the whole history of literature anything so disgraceful and disreputable as this can be found, unless, possibly, it be that which is professedly obscene, but which has nowhere ever had a recognized existence; and we question whether even this is as discreditable to human nature as the “awful disclosures” and “lectures to men or women only” of Protestants.