XV.

As the night wore away the bonfires lighted in the public places were extinguished. Quiet and silence succeeded the tumult, the shouts, dances, and the surging waves of an excited populace rushing wildly through the streets of the capital. The ladies had deposited their borrowed charms upon the ebony and ivory of their solitary and hidden toilets. Themselves wrapped in slumber within the heavy curtains of their luxurious couches, their brocade robes and precious jewels still waited (hanging up or thrown here and there) the care of the active and busy chambermaids. Of all the sensation, triumphs, and irresistible charms there was left nothing but the wreck, disorder, and faded flowers. And thus passes everything appertaining to man. Beauty lives but a day; an hour even may behold it withered and cut down.

The sun had scarcely risen when a number of carts, mounted by vigilant upholsterers, were driven up, in order to remove the scaffolds, the triumphal arches, and strip them of their soiled drapery and withered garlands. The avenues of the palace were deserted, and not a courtier had yet appeared. One man, however, all alone, slowly surveyed the superb apartments of the Tower. He paused successively before each panel of tapestry, examining them in all their details, or he took from their places the large chairs with curved backs, that he might inspect them more closely; he then consulted a great memorandum-book he held in his hand.

“Ah! Master Cloth, you are not to be cheated. It is not possible that Signor Ludovico Bonvisi has sold you this velvet at six angels the piece; and six hundred pieces more, do you say? But I will show you I am not so easily duped as you would think by the thieving merchants of my good city. The rascals understand very well how to manage their affairs; but we will also manage to clip some of their wings.”

And Henry VIII. gave a stroke with his penknife through the column he wished to diminish; it was in this way he made his additions.

“The devil! This violet carpet covering the courtyard is enormously dear.

“Mistress Anne, your reception here has ruined me. We must find some means of making all this up. These women are full of whims, and of very dear whims too. A wife is a most ruinous thing; everything is ruinous. They cannot move without spending money. It has been necessary to give enormous sums right and left――to doctors of universities, to Parliament; and all that is an entire loss, for they will clamor none the less loudly. There are men in Parliament who will sell themselves, and yet they will ridicule me just as much as the others, in order to appear independent. Verily, it is terror alone that can be used to advantage; with one hand she replenishes the purse, while with the other she at the same time executes my commands.

“This fringe is only an inch wide; it cannot weigh as much as they say it does here. I counted on the rest of the cardinal’s money; but nothing――he had not a penny, or at any rate he has been able to hide his pieces from me, so that I could not find a trace of them.

“Northumberland has written me there was nothing at Cawood but a box, where he found, carefully tied up in a little sack of red linen, a hair shirt and a discipline, which have doubtless served our friend Wolsey to expiate the sins I have made him commit.” And as these reflections were passing through his mind, the king experienced a very disagreeable sensation at the sight of a man dressed in black, who approached him on tiptoe. Henry VIII. did not at all like being surprised in his paroxysms of suspicion and avarice.

“What does that caterpillar want with me at this early hour?” he said, looking at Cromwell, who was in full dress, frizzled, and in his boots, as though he had not been to bed, and had not had so much to do the day before.

The king endeavored to conceal the memorandum he held in his hand; but who could hide anything from Cromwell? He was delighted to perceive the embarrassment and vexation of his master, because it was one of his principles that he held these great men in his power, when favor began to abate, through the fear they felt of having their faults publicly exposed by those who had known them intimately. He therefore took a malicious pleasure in proving to the king that his precautions had been useless, and that he knew perfectly well the nature of his morning’s occupation, for which he feigned the greatest admiration.

“What method!” he exclaimed. “What vast intellect! How is your majesty able to accomplish all that you undertake, passing from the grandest projects to the most minute details, and that always with the same facility, the same unerring judgment?”

Henry VIII. regarded Cromwell attentively, as if to be assured that this eulogy was sincere; but he observed an indescribable expression of hypocrisy hovering on the pinched lips of the courtier. He contracted his brow, but resolved to carry on the deception.

“Yes,” he said, “I reproach myself with this extravagance. I should have kept the furniture of my predecessors. There are so many poor to relieve! I am overwhelmed with their demands; the treasury is empty, I cannot afford it, and I have done very wrong in granting myself this indulgence.”

“Come!” replied Cromwell, “think of your majesty reproaching yourself for an outlay absolutely indispensable. Very soon, I suppose, you will not permit yourself to buy a cloak or a doublet of Flanders wool, while you leave in the enjoyment of their property these monks who have never been favorable to your cause. The treasury is empty, you say; give me a fortnight’s time and a commission, and I will replenish it to overflowing.”

The king smiled. “Yes, yes, I know very well; you want me to appoint you inspector of my monks. You would make them disgorge, you say.”

“A set of drones and idlers!”[88] cried Cromwell. “You have only to drive them all out, take possession of their property, and put it in the treasury; it will make an immense sum. They are to be found in every corner. When you have dispossessed them, you will be able to provide for them according to your own good pleasure, your own necessities, and those of the truly poor. Give me the commission!”

Cromwell burned to have this commission, of which he had dreamed as the only practicable means of enriching himself at his leisure, and making some incalcuable depredations; because how could it possibly be known exactly how much he would be able to extort by fear or by force? Having the king to sustain him and for an accomplice, he had nothing to fear. He had already spoken of it to him, but in a jesting manner, apparently; it was his custom to sow thus in the mind of Henry VIII. a long time in advance, and as if by chance, the seeds of evil from which he hoped ultimately to gather the fruits.

At the moment this idea appeared very lucrative to the king; but a sense of interior justice and the usage of government enlightened his mind.

“This,” said he, “is your old habit of declaiming against the monks and convents. As for idleness, methinks the life of the most indolent one among them would be far from equalling that which yourself and the gallants of my court lead every day in visits, balls, and other dissipations. Verily, it cannot be denied that these religious live a great deal less extravagantly than you, for the price of a single one of your ruffs would be sufficient to clothe them for a whole year. All these young people speak at random and through caprice, without having the least idea of what they say. I love justice above all things. Had you the slightest knowledge of politics and of government, you would know that an association of men who enjoy their property in common derive from it much greater advantages, because there are a greater number to partake of it. These monks, who are lodged under the same roof, lighted and warmed by the same fire, nursed, when they are sick, by those who live thus together, find in that communion of all goods an ease and comfort which it would be impossible to attain if they were each apart and separated from the other. If, now, I should drive them from their convents and take possession of their estates, what would become of them? And who would be able so to increase in a moment the revenues of the country as to procure each one individually that which they enjoyed in common together? And, above all, these monks are men like other men; they choose to live together and unite their fortunes: I see not what right I have to deprive them of their property, since it has been legally acquired by donations, natural inheritance, or right of birth. ‘These church people monopolize everything,’ say the crack-brained fools who swarm around me; and where would they have me look for men who are good for something? Among those who know not either how to read or write, save in so far as needs to fabricate the most insignificant billet, or who in turn spend a day in endeavoring to decipher it? I would like to see them, these learned gentlemen, holding the office of lord chancellor and the responsibility of the kingdom. They might be capable of signing a treaty of commerce with France to buy their swords, and with Holland to purchase their wines. These coxcombs, these lispers of the “Romance of the Rose,” with their locks frizzled, their waists padded, and their vain foolishness, know naught beyond the drawing of their swords and slashing right and left. Or it would be necessary for me to bring the bourgeois of the city, seat them on their sacks, declaring before the judge that they do not know how to write, and sending to bring the public scribe to announce to their grandfathers the arrival of the newly born. Cromwell, you are very zealous in my service; I commend you for it; but sometimes――and it is all very natural――you manifest the narrow and contracted ideas of the obscure class from whence you sprang, which render you incapable of judging of these things from the height where I, prince and king, am placed.”

Cromwell felt deeply humiliated by the contempt Henry VIII. continually mingled with his favor in recalling incessantly to his recollection the fact of his being a _parvenu_, sustained in his position only by his gracious favor and all-powerful will, and then only while he was useful or agreeable. He hesitated a moment, not knowing how to reply; but, like a serpent that unfolds his coils in every way, and whose scales fall or rise at will at the same moment and with the same facility, he said:

“Your Majesty says truly. I am only what you have deigned to make me; I acknowledge it with joy, and I would rather owe all I am to you than possess it by any natural right. I will be silent, if your majesty bids me; though I would fain present a reflection that your remark has suggested.”

“Speak,” said the king, with a smile of indulgence excited by this adroit admission.

“I will first remark that your majesty still continues to sacrifice yourself to the happiness and prosperity of your people; consequently, it seems to me that they should be willing, in following the grand designs of your majesty, to yield everything. Thus they would only have to unite the small to the greater monasteries, and oblige them to receive the monks whose property had been annexed to the crown. The treasury would in this way be very thoroughly replenished, and no one would have a right to complain or think himself wronged.”

“But,” said the king, “they are of different orders.”

However, he made this objection with less firmness; and it appeared to Cromwell that his mind was becoming familiarized with this luminous idea of possessing himself of a number of very rich and well-cultivated ecclesiastical estates, which, sold at a high price, would produce an enormous sum of money.

Cromwell, observing his success, feared to compromise himself and make the king refuse if he urged the matter too persistently; promising himself to return another time to the subject, he said nothing more, and, adroitly changing the conversation, spoke of all that had occurred the day before, and dwelt strongly on the enthusiasm of the people.

“Oh!” said the king, “that enthusiasm affects me but little! The people are like a flea-bitten horse, which we let go to right or left, according to circumstances; and I place no reliance on these demonstrations excited by the view of a flagon of beer or a fountain of wine flowing at a corner of the street. There are, nevertheless, germs of discord living and deeply rooted in the heart of this nation. Appearances during a festival day are not sufficient, Cromwell. Listen to me. It is essential that all should yield, all obey. I am not a child to be amused with a toy!” And he regarded him with an expression of wrath as sudden as it was singular.

“Think you,” he continued with gleaming eyes, “that I am happy, that I believe I have taken the right direction? It is not that I would retract or retrace my steps; so far from that, the more I feel convinced that it is wrong, the more resolved am I to crush the inspiration that would recall me. No! Henry VIII. neither deceives himself nor turns back; and you, if ever you reveal the secret of my woes, the violence and depth of your fall will make you understand the strength of the arm you will have called down on your head.”

Cromwell felt astounded. How often he paid thus dearly for his vile and rampant ambition! What craft must have been continually engendered in that deformed soul, in order to prevent it from being turned from its goal of riches and domination, always to put a constraint upon himself, to sacrifice in order to obtain, to yield in order to govern, to tremble in order to make himself feared!

“More,” he said in desperation.

“More!” replied the king. “That name makes me sick! Well, what of him now?”

“Sire,” replied Cromwell vehemently, “you speak of discords and fears for the future; I should be wanting in courage if I withheld the truth from the king. More and Rochester――these are the men who censure and injure you in the estimation of your people. There are proofs against them, but they are moral proofs, and insufficient for rigid justice to act upon. They refuse to take the oath, and it is impossible to include them in the judgment against the Holy Maid of Kent. They would be acquitted unanimously. However, you have heard it from her own lips. You know that she is acquainted with them, has spoken to them; this she has declared in presence of your majesty. They were in the church; she had let them know she was to appear at that hour. Well, it is impossible to prove anything against them; they will be justified, elated, and triumphant. Parliament, reassured, encouraged by this example of tenacity and rebellion, will recover from the first fright with which the terror of your name had inspired them. They will raise their heads; your authority will be despised; they will rise against you; they will resist you on every side, and compel you to recall Queen Catherine back to this palace, adorned by the presence of your young wife. And then what shame, what humiliation for you, and what a triumph for her! And this is why, sire, I have not been able to sleep one moment last night, and why I am the first to enter the palace this morning, where I expected to wait until your majesty awoke. But,” he continued, “zeal for your glory carries me, perhaps, too far. Well then you will punish me, and I shall not murmur.”

“Recall Catherine!” cried the king, who, after this name, had not heard a syllable of Cromwell’s discourse; and he clenched his fists with a contraction of inexpressible fury. “Recall Catherine, after having driven her out in the face of all justice, of all honor! No, I shall have to drink to the dregs this bitter cup I have poured out for myself; and coming ages will for ever resound with the infamy of my name. Though the earth should open, though the heavens should fall and crush me, yet Thomas More shall die! Go, Cromwell,” he cried, his eyes gleaming with fury; “let him swear or let him die! Go, worthy messenger of a horrible crime; get thee from before my eyes. It is you who have launched me upon this ocean, where I can sustain myself only by blood. Cursed be the day when you first crossed my sight, infamous favorite of the most cruel of masters! Go, go! and bring me the head of my friend, of the only man I esteem, whom I still venerate, and let there no longer remain aught but monsters in this place.”

Cromwell recoiled. “Infamous favorite!” he repeated to himself. “May I but be able one day to avenge myself for the humiliations with which you have loaded me, and may I see in my turn remorse tear your heart, and the anger of God punish the crimes I have aided you in committing!” He departed.

Henry VIII. was stifled with rage. He crushed under his foot the upholsterer’s memorandum; he opened a window and walked out on the balcony, from whence the view extended far beyond the limits of the city. As he advanced, he was struck by the soft odor and freshness which was exhaled by the morning breeze from a multitude of flowers and plants placed there. He stooped down to examine them, then leaned upon the heavy stone balustrade, polished and carved like lace, and looked beyond in the distance.

The immense movement of an entire population began in every direction. There was the market, whither flocked the dealers, the country people, and the diligent and industrious housewives. Farther on was the wharf, where the activity was not less; soldiers of the marine, cabin boys, sailors, ship-builders, captains――all were hurrying thither. Troops of workmen were going to their work on the docks, with tools in hand and their bread under their arms. The windows of the rich alone remained closed to the light of day, to the noise and the busy stir without. There they rolled casks; here they transported rough stones, plaster, and carpenter’s timber. Horses pulled, whips cracked――in a word, the entire city was aroused; every minute the noise increased and the

## activity redoubled.

“These men are like a swarm of bees in disorder,” said Henry VIII.; “and yet they carry tranquil minds to their work, while their king is suffering the keenest tortures in the midst of them; yet is there not one of them who, in looking at this palace, does not set at the summit of happiness him who reigns and commands here. ‘If I were king!’ say this ignorant crowd when they wish to express the idea of happiness and supreme enjoyment of the will. Do they know what it costs the king to accomplish that will? Why do I not belong to their sphere? I should at least spend my days in the same state of indifference in which they sleep, live, and die. They are miserable, say they; what have they to make them miserable? They are never sure of bread, they reply; but do they know what it is to be satiated with abundance and devoured by insatiable desires? Then death threatens us and ends everything――that terrible judgment when kings will be set apart, to be interrogated and punished more severely. More, the recollection of your words, your counsel, has never ceased to live in my mind. Had I but taken your advice, if I had sent Anne away, to-day I should have been free and thought no more of her; while now, regarded with horror by the universe, I hate the whole world. But let me drown these thoughts. I want wine――drunkenness and oblivion.” And pronouncing these words, he rushed suddenly from the balcony and disappeared.

In the depths of his narrow prison there was another also who had sought to catch a breath of the exhilarating air with which the dawn of a beautiful day had reanimated the universe. It was not upon a balustrade of roses and perfumes that he leaned, but upon a miserable, worm-eaten table, blackened by time, and discolored by the tears with which for centuries it had been watered. It was not a powerful city, a people rich, industrious, and submissive, that his eyes were fixed upon, but the sombre bars of a small, grated window, whose solitary pane he had opened.

He sat with his head bowed upon one of his hands. He seemed tranquil, but plunged in profound melancholy; for God, in the language of holy Scripture, had not yet descended into Joseph’s prison to console him, nor sent his angel before him to fortify his servant. And yet, had any one been able to compare the speechless rage, the frightful but vain remorse, which corroded the king’s heart, with the deep but silent sorrow that overwhelmed the soul of the just man, such a one would have declared Sir Thomas More to be happy. And still his sufferings were cruelly intense, for he thought of his children; he was in the midst of them, and his heart had never left them.

“They know ere this,” he said to himself, “that I shall not return. Margaret, my dear Margaret, will have told them all!” And he was not there to console them. What would become of them without him, abandoned to the fury of the king, ready, perhaps, to revenge himself even upon them for the obstinacy with which he reproached their father?

Whilst indulging in these harrowing reflections he heard the keys cautiously turned in the triple locks of his prison; and soon a man appeared, all breathless with fear and haste. It was Kingston, the lieutenant of the Tower. He entered, and, gasping for breath, held the door behind him.

“My dear Sir Thomas,” he cried, “blessed be God! you are acquitted, your innocence is proclaimed. The council has been assembled all night, and they have decided that you could not in any manner be implicated in the prosecution. Oh! how glad I am. But the Holy Maid of Kent has been condemned to be hanged at Tyburn. Judge now if this was not a dangerous business! I have never doubted your innocence; but you have some very furious and very powerful enemies. That Cromwell is a most formidable man. My dear Sir Thomas, how rejoiced I am!”

A gleam of joy lighted the heart of Sir Thomas.

“Can it be?” he cried. “Say it again, Master Kingston. What! I shall see my children again? I shall die in peace among them? No, I cannot believe in so much happiness. But that poor girl――is she really condemned?”

“Yes,” cried Kingston; “but here are you already thinking of this nun. By my faith, I have thought of nobody but you. And the Bishop of Rochester has also been acquitted.”

“He has, then, already been in the Tower?” cried More.

“Just above you――door to the left――No. 3,” replied Kingston briefly, in the manner of his calling.

“What!” cried Sir Thomas, “is it he, then, I have heard walking above my head? I knew not why, but I listened to those slow and measured steps with a secret anxiety. I tried to imagine what might be the age and appearance of this companion in misfortune; and it was my friend, my dearest friend! O my dear Kingston! that I could see him. I beg of you to let me go to him at once!”

“Of what are you thinking?” exclaimed Kingston――“without permission! You do not know that I have come here secretly, and if they hear of it I shall be greatly compromised. The order was to hold you in solitary confinement; it has not been rescinded, and already I transgress it.”

“Ah! I cannot see him,” repeated Sir Thomas. “I am in solitary confinement.” And his joy instantly faded before the reflection which told him that the real crime of which he was accused had not been expiated.

Penetrated by this sentiment, he took the keeper’s hand. “My dear Kingston,” he said, “you are right――you would surely compromise yourself; for my case is not entirely decided yet. As you say, I have some very powerful enemies. However, they will be able to do naught against me more than God permits them, and it is this thought alone that animates and sustains my courage.”

“Nay, nay, you need not be uneasy,” replied Kingston; “they can do nothing more against you. I have listened to everything they have said, and have not lost a single word. You will be set at liberty to-day, after you have taken an oath the formula of which they have drawn up expressly for you, as I have been told by the secretary.”

“Ah! the oath,” cried Sir Thomas, penetrated with a feeling of the keenest apprehension. “I know it well!”

“Fear naught, then, Sir Thomas,” replied Kingston, struck by the alteration he observed in his countenance, a moment before so full of hope and joy. “They have arranged this oath for you; they know your scrupulous delicacy of conscience and your religious sentiments. This is the one they will demand of the ecclesiastics, and you are the only layman of whom they will exact it. You see there is no reason here why you should be uneasy.”

“Oh!” said Sir Thomas, whose heart was pierced by every word of the lieutenant, “you are greatly mistaken, my poor Kingston. It is to condemn and not to save me they have done all this. The oath――yes; it is that oath, like a ferocious beast, which they destine to devour me. Ah! why did the hope of escaping it for a moment come to gladden my heart? My Lord and my God, have mercy on me!”

Sir Thomas paused, overcome by his feelings, and was unable to utter another word.

“My dear Sir Thomas,” said Kingston, amazed, “what means this? Even if you refuse to take this oath they will doubtless set you at liberty. Cromwell has said as much to the secretary. But what should prevent you from taking it, if the priests do not refuse?”

“Dear Kingston,” replied Sir Thomas, “I cannot explain that to you now, as it is one of the things I keep between God and myself. I know right well, also, that these prison walls have ears, that they re-echo all they hear, and that one cannot even sigh here without it being reported.”

“You are dissatisfied, then, with being under my care!” exclaimed Kingston, who was extremely narrow-minded, and whose habit of living, and still more of commanding, in the Tower had brought him to regard it as a habitation by no means devoid of attractions.

“You may very well believe, Sir Thomas,” he continued, “that I have not forgotten the many favors and proofs of friendship I have received from you; that I am entirely devoted to you; and what I most regret is not having it in my power to treat you as I would wish in giving you better fare at my table. Fear of the king’s anger alone prevents me, and I at least would be glad to feel that you were satisfied with the good-will I have shown.”

More smiled kindly: for the delicate sensibility and exquisite tact which in an instant discovered to him how entirely it was wanting in others never permitted from him other expressions than those of a pleasantry as gentle as it was refined.

“In good sooth, my dear lieutenant, I am quite contented with you; you are a good friend, and would most certainly like to treat me well. If, then, I should ever happen to show any dissatisfaction with your table, you must instantly turn me out of your house.” And he smiled at the idea.

“You jest, Sir Thomas,” said Kingston.

“In truth, my dear friend, I have nevertheless but little inclination to jest,” replied More.

“Well, all that I regret is not having it in my power to treat you as I would wish,” continued Kingston in the same tone. “I should have been so happy to have made you entirely comfortable here!”

“Come,” said Sir Thomas, “let us speak no more of that; I am very well convinced of it, and I thank you for the attachment you have shown me to-day. I only regret that I cannot be permitted to see the Bishop of Rochester for a moment.”

“Impossible!” cried Kingston. “If it were discovered, I should lose my place.”

“Then I no longer insist,” said Sir Thomas; “but let me, at least, write him a few words.”

Kingston made no reply and looked very thoughtful. He hesitated.

“Carry the letter yourself,” said Sir Thomas, “and, unless you tell it, no person will know it.”

“You think so?” said Kingston, embarrassed. “But then my Lord Rochester must burn it immediately; for if they should find it in his hands, they would try to find out how he received it; and, Sir Thomas, I know not how it is done, but they know everything.”

“They will never be able to find this out. O Master Kingston!” said More, “let me write him but one word.”

“Well, well, haste, then; for it is time I should go. If they came and asked for me, and found me not, I would be lost.”

Sir Thomas, fearing he might retract, hastened immediately to write the following words on a scrap of paper:

“What feelings were mine, dear friend, on learning that you are imprisoned here so near me, you may imagine. What a consolation it would be to clasp you in my arms! But that is denied me; God so wills it. During the first doleful night I spent in this prison my eyes never once closed in sleep. I heard your footsteps; I listened, I counted them most anxiously. I asked myself who this unfortunate creature could be who, like myself, groaned in this place; if it were long since he had seen the light of heaven, and why he was imprisoned in this den of stone. Alas! and it was you. Now I see you, I follow you everywhere. What anguish is mine to be so near you, yet not be able to see or speak to you! Rap from time to time on the floor in such a manner that I may know you are speaking to me; my heart will understand thine. It seems to me the voice of the stones will communicate your words. I shall listen night and day for your signals, and this will be a great consolation to me.”

“Hasten, Sir Thomas,” said Kingston. “I hear a noise in the yard; they are searching for me.”

“Yes, yes,” replied Sir Thomas.

“My friend, they hurry me. Do you remember all you said to me at Chelsea the night you urged me not to accept the chancellorship? O my friend! how often I have thought of it. And you――you also will be a victim, I fear. They hurry me, and I have so many things to say to you since the time I saw you last! I fear you suffer from cold in your cell. Ask Kingston for covering; for my sake he will give it you. Implore him to bring me your reply. A letter from you――what happiness in my abandoned condition; for they will not permit Margaret to visit me. I am in solitary confinement. They will probably let me die slowly of misery, immured within these four walls. They fear the publicity of a trial; and men so quickly forget those who disappear from before their eyes. God, however, will not forget us, and we are ever in his keeping; for he says in holy Scripture: ‘I carry you written in my hand, and a mother shall forget her child before I forget the soul that seeks me in sincerity of heart.’ Farewell, dear friend; let us pray for each other. I love and cherish you in our Lord Jesus Christ, our precious Saviour and our only Redeemer. “THOMAS MORE.”

Meanwhile, Rumor, on her airy wing, in her indefatigable and rapid course, had very soon circulated throughout the country reports of Henry’s enormities. The great multitudes of people who prostrated themselves before the cross, carried it with reverence in their hands, and elevated it proudly above their heads, were astonished and indignant at these recitals of crime. Princes trembled on their thrones, and those who surrounded them lived in constant dread.

Thomas More, the model among men, the Bishop of Rochester, that among the angels――these men cast into a gloomy prison, separated from all that was most dear to them, scarcely clothed, and fed on the coarse fare of criminals――such outrages men discussed among themselves, and reported to the compassionate and generous hearts of their mothers and sisters.

Will, then, no voice be raised in their defence? Will no one endeavor to snatch them from the tortures to which they are about to be delivered up? Are the English people dead and their intellects stultified? Do relatives, friends, law, and honor no longer exist among this people? Have they become but a race of bloodthirsty executioners, a crowd of brutal slaves, who live on the grain the earth produces, and drink from the rivers that water it? Such were the thoughts which occupied them, circulating from mouth to mouth among the tumultuous children of men.

But if this mass of human beings, always so indifferent and so perfectly selfish, felt thus deeply moved, what must have been the anguish of heart experienced by the faithful and sincere friend, what terror must have seized him, when, seated by his own quiet fireside, enjoying the retreat it afforded him, the voice of public indignation came to announce that he was thus stricken in all his affections! For he also, a native of a distant country, loved More. He had met him, and immediately his heart went out toward him. Who will explain this sublime mystery, this secret of God, this admirable and singular sympathy, which reveals one soul to another, and requires neither words nor sounds, neither language nor gestures, in order to make it intelligible? “I had no sooner seen Pierre Gilles,” said More, “than I loved him as devotedly as though I had always known and loved him. Then I was at Antwerp, sent by the king to negotiate with the prince of Spain; I waited from day to day the end of the negotiations, and during the four months I was separated from my wife and children, anxious as I was to return and embrace them, I could never be reconciled to the thought of leaving him. His conversation, fluent and interesting, beguiled most agreeably my hours of leisure; hours and days spent near him seemed to me like moments, they passed so rapidly. In the flower of his age, he already possessed a vast deal of erudition; his soul above all――his soul so beautiful, superior to his genius――inspired me with a devotion for him as deep as it was inviolable. Candor, simplicity, gentleness, and a natural inclination to be accommodating, a modesty seldom found, integrity above temptation――all virtues in fact, that combine to form the worthy citizen――were found united in him, and it would have been impossible for me to have found in all the world a being more worthy of inspiring friendship, or more capable of feeling and appreciating all its charms.”

In this manner he spoke before his children, and related to Margaret how painful he found the separation from his friend. Often during the long winter nights, when the wind whistled without and heavy snow-flakes filled the air, he would press his hand upon his forehead, and his thoughts would speed across the sea. In imagination he would be transported to Antwerp, would behold her immense harbor covered with richly-laden vessels, her tall roofs and her long streets, and the beautiful church of Notre Dame, with the court in front, where he so often walked with his friend. Then he entered the mansion of Pierre Gilles; he traversed the court, mounted the steps; he found him at home in the midst of his family; it seemed to him that he heard him speak, and he prepared to give himself up to the charms of his conversation.

The cry of a child, the movement of a chair, came suddenly to blot out this picture, dispel this sweet illusion, and recall him to the reality of the distance which separated them. An expression of pain and sorrow would pass over his features; and Margaret, from whom none of her father’s thoughts escaped, would take his hand and say: “Father, you are thinking about Pierre Gilles!”

A close correspondence had for a long time sweetened their mutual exile; but since the divorce was set in motion the king had become so suspicious that he had all letters intercepted, and one no longer dared to write or communicate with any stranger. Thus they found themselves deprived of this consolation.

Eager to obtain the slightest intelligence, questioning indiscriminately all whom he met――merchants, strangers, travellers――Pierre Gilles endeavored by all possible means to obtain some intelligence of his friend Thomas More. Whenever a sail appeared upon the horizon and a ship entered the port, this illustrious citizen was seen immediately hastening to the pier, and patiently remaining there until he had ascertained whether or not the vessel hailed from England; or else he waited, mingling with a crowd of the most degraded class, until the vessel landed. Alas! for several months all that he could learn only increased his apprehensions, and he vainly endeavored to quiet them. He had already announced to his family his intention of making the voyage to England to see his friend, when the fatal intelligence of More’s imprisonment was received.

Then he no longer listened to anything, but, taking all the gold his coffers contained, he hastened to the port and took passage on the first vessel he found.

“O my friend!” he cried, “if I shall only be able to tear you from their hands. This gold, perhaps, will open your prison. Let them give you to me, let my home become yours, and let my friends be your friends. Forget your ungrateful country; mine will receive you with rapturous joy.”

Such were his reflections, and for two days the vessel that bore him sailed rapidly toward England; the wind was favorable, and a light breeze seemed to make her fly over the surface of the waves. The sails were unfurled, and the sailors were singing, delighted at the prospect of a happy voyage, while Pierre Gilles, seated on the deck, his back leaning against the mast, kept his eyes fixed on the north, incessantly deceived by the illusion of the changing horizon and the fantastic form of the blue clouds, which seemed to plunge into the sea. He was continually calling out: “Captain, here is land!” But the old pilot smiled as he guided the helm, and leaning over, like a man accustomed to know what he said, slightly shrugged one shoulder and replied: “Not yet, Sir Passenger.”

And soon, in fact, Pierre Gilles would see change their form or disappear those fantastic rocks and sharp points which represented an unattainable shore. Then it seemed to him that he would never arrive, the island retreated constantly before him, and his feet would never be permitted to rest upon the shores of England.

“Alas!” he would every moment say to himself, “they are trying him now, perhaps. If I were there, I would run, I would beg, I would implore his pardon. And his youthful daughter, whom they say is so fair, so good――into what an agony she must be plunged! All this family and those young children to be deprived of such a father!”

Pierre was unable to control himself for a moment; he arose, walked forward on the vessel; he saw the foaming track formed by her rapid passage through the water wiped out in an instant, effaced by the winds, and yet it seemed to him that the vessel thus cutting the waves remained motionless, and that he was not advancing a furlong. “An hour’s delay,” he mentally repeated, “and perhaps it will be too late. Let them banish him; I shall at least be able to find him!”

Already the night wind was blowing a gale and the sea grew turbulent; a flock of birds flew around the masts, uttering the most mournful cries, and seeming, as they braved the whirlwind which had arisen, to be terrified.

“Comrades, furl the sails!” cried the steersman; “a waterspout threatens us! Be quick,” he cried, “or we are lost.”

In the twinkling of an eye the sailors seized the ropes and climbed into the rigging. Vain haste, useless dexterity; their efforts were all too late.

A furious gust of wind groaned, roared, rent the mainmast in twain, tore away the ropes, bent and broke the masts; a horrible crash was heard throughout the ship.

“Cut away! Pull! Haul down! Hold there! Hoist away! Let go!” cried the captain, who had rushed up from his cabin. “Bravo! Courage, there! Stand firm!”

“Ay, ay!” cried the sailors. A loud clamor arose in the midst of the horrible roaring of the winds. The sailor on watch had fallen into the sea.

“Throw out the buoy! throw out the buoy!” cried the captain. “Knaves, do you hear me?”

Impossible; the rope fluttered in the wind like a string, and the tempest drove it against the sides of the vessel. They saw the unfortunate sailor tossing in the sea, carried along like a black point on the waves, which in a moment disappeared.

“All is over! He is lost!” cried the sailors. But the howling winds stifled and drowned their lamentations.

In the meantime Pierre Gilles bound himself tightly as he could to a mast; for the shaking of the vessel was so great that it seemed to him an irresistible power was trying to tear him away and cast him whirling into the yawning depths of the furious element.

“The mizzen-mast is breaking!” cried the sailors; and by a common impulse they rushed toward the stern to avoid being dragged down and crushed by its fall.

The gigantic beam fell with a fearful crash, catching in the ropes and rigging.

“Cut away! Let her go!” cried the captain.

He himself was the first to rush forward, armed with a hatchet, and they tried to cut aloose the mast and let it fall into the water.

But they were unable to succeed; the mast hung over the side of the ship, which it struck with every wave, and threatened to capsize her. Every moment the position of the crew became more dangerous. The shocks were so violent that the men were no longer able to resist them; they clung to everything they could lay hold of; they twined their legs and arms in the hanging ropes. All efforts to control the vessel had become useless, and, seeing no longer any hope of being saved, the sailors began to utter cries of despair.

Pierre Gilles had fastened himself to the mainmast. “If this also breaks,” he thought, “well, I shall die by the same stroke――die without seeing him!” he cried, still entirely occupied with More. “He will not know that I have tried to reach him, and will, perhaps, believe that I have deserted him in the day of adversity. Oh! how death is embittered by that thought. He will say that, happy in the bosom of my family, I have left him alone in his prison, and he will strive to forget even the recollection of my friendship. O More, More! my friend, this tempest ought to carry to you my regrets.”

Looking around him, Pierre saw the miserable men tossing their arms in despair; for the night was advancing, their strength nearly exhausted, while the vessel, borne along on the crest of the waves, suddenly pitched with a frightful plunge, and the water rushed in on every side.

The captain had stationed himself near Pierre Gilles; he contemplated the destruction of his ship with a mournful gaze.

“Here is this fine vessel lost――all my fortune, the labor of an entire life of toil and care. My children now will be reduced to beggary! Here is the fruit of thirty years of work,” he cried. “Sir,” he said to Pierre Gilles, “I began life at twelve years; I have passed successively up from cabin-boy, mariner, boatswain, lieutenant, captain finally, and now――the sea. I shall have to begin anew!”

“Begin anew, sir?” said Pierre Gilles. “But is not death awaiting us very speedily?”

“That remains to be seen,” answered the captain, folding his arms. “I have been three times shipwrecked, and I am here still, sir. It is true there is an end to everything; but the ocean and myself understand each other. We shall come out of it, if we gain time. After the storm, a calm; after the tempest, fine weather.” Here he attentively scanned the heavens. “A few more swells of the sea, and, if we escape, courage! All will be well.”

“Hold fast, my boys!” he cried; “another sea is coming.”

He had scarcely uttered the words when a frightful wave advanced like a threatening mountain, and, raising the vessel violently, swept entirely over her; but the ship still remained afloat. Other waves succeeded, and the unfortunate sailors remained tossing about in that condition until the next morning. However, as the day dawned, hope revived in their hearts; the horizon seemed brightening; the wind allayed by degrees. Pierre Gilles and his companions shook their limbs, stiffened and benumbed by the cold and the water which had drenched them, and thought they could at last perceive the land. They succeeded in relieving the vessel a little by throwing the mast into the sea. Every one took courage, and soon the coast appeared in sight. There was no more doubt: it was the coast of England. There were the pointed rocks, the whitened reefs. They were in their route; the tempest had not diverted the ship from its course. On the fourth day they entered the mouth of the Thames.

The poor vessel, five days before so elegant, so swift, so light, was dragged with difficulty into that large and beautiful river. Badly crippled, she moved slowly, and was an entire day in reaching London. Pierre Gilles suffered cruelly on account of this delay, and would have made them put him ashore, but that was impossible. Besides, he wished to arrive more speedily at London, and that would not hasten his journey. From a distance he perceived the English standard floating above the Tower, and his heart swelled with sorrow. “Alas! More is there,” he cried. “How shall I contrive to see him? how tear him from that den?” Absorbed in these reflections, he reached at length the landing-place. He knew not where to go nor whom to address in that great city, where he had never before been, and where he was entirely unacquainted. He looked at the faces of those who came and went on the wharf, without feeling inclined to accost any of them.

Suddenly, however, he caught the terrible words, “His trial has commenced”; and, uncertain whether it was the effect of his troubled imagination or a real sound, he turned around and saw a group of women carrying fish in wicker baskets, and talking together.

“At Lambeth Palace, I tell you. He is there; I have seen him.”

“Who?” said Pierre in good English, advancing in his Flemish costume, which excited the curiosity and attention of all the women.

“Thomas More, the Lord Chancellor,” answered the first speaker.

“Thomas More!” cried Pierre Gilles, with a gesture of despair and terror which nothing could express. “Who is trying him? Speak, good woman, speak! Say who is trying him? Where are they trying him? Conduct me to the place, and all my fortune is yours!”

The women looked at each other. “A foreigner!” they exclaimed.

“Yes,” he replied, “a stranger, but a friend, a friend. Leave your fish――I will pay you for them――and show me where the trial of Sir Thomas is going on.”

The fisherwoman, having observed the gold chain he wore around his neck, his velvet robe, and his ruff of Ypres lace, judged that he was some important personage, who would reward her liberally for her trouble; she resolved to accompany him. She walked on before him, and the other women took up their baskets, and followed at some distance in the rear.

Meanwhile, Pierre Gilles and his conductress, having followed the quay and walked the length of the Thames, crossed Westminster Bridge, and he found himself at last in front of Lambeth Palace.

A considerable crowd of people, artisans, workmen, merchants, idlers, began to scatter and disperse. Some stopped to talk, others left; they saw that something had come to an end, that the spectacle was closed, the excited curiosity was satisfied. The juggler’s carpet was gathered up, the lottery drawn, the quarrel ended, the prince or the criminal had passed; there was nothing more to see, and every one was anxious to depart――careless crowd, restless and ignorant, which the barking of a dog will arrest, and a great misfortune cannot detain!

“Here it is, sir,” said the woman, stopping; “this is Lambeth Palace just in front of you, but I don’t believe you can get in.” And she pointed to a large enclosure and a great door, before which was walking up and down a yeoman armed with an arquebuse.

Standing close to one of the sections of the door was seen a beautiful young girl, dressed in black, and wearing on her head a low velvet hat worn by the women of that period. A gold chain formed of round beads, from which was suspended a little gold medal ornamented with a pearl pendant, hung around her neck, and passed under her chemisette of plaited muslin bordered with narrow lace. She stood with her hands clasped, her beautiful countenance pale as death, and her arms stretched at full length before her, expressive of the deepest sorrow. Near her was seated a handsome young man, who from time to time addressed her.

Pierre Gilles approached these two persons.

“Margaret,” said Roper, “come.”

“No,” said the young girl, “I will not go; I shall remain here until night. I will see him as he goes out; I will see him once more; I will see that ignoble woollen covering they have given him for a cloak; I will see his pale and weary face. He will say: ‘Margaret is standing there!’ He will see me.”

“That will only give him pain,” replied Roper.

“Perhaps,” said the young girl. “Indeed, it is very probable!” And a bitter smile played around her lips.

“If you love him,” replied Roper, “you should spare him this grief.”

“I love him, Roper; you have said well! I love him! What would you wish? This is my father!”

Pierre Gilles, who had advanced, seeking some means of entering, paused to look at the young girl, and was struck by the resemblance he found between her features and those of her father, his friend, who was still young when he knew him at Antwerp.

“Can this be Margaret?” murmured the stranger.

“Who has pronounced my name?” asked the young girl, turning haughtily around.

Pierre Gilles stood in perfect amazement. “How much she resembles him! Pardon me, damsel,” he said; “I have been trying to get into this place to see my friend, Sir Thomas More.”

“Your friend!” replied Margaret, advancing immediately toward him. Then a feeling of suspicion arrested her. She stepped back and fixed her eyes on the stranger, whose Flemish costume attracted her attention. “And who,” she said, “can you be? Oh! no; he is not here. Sir Thomas More has no friends. You are mistaken, sir,” she continued; “it is some one else you seek. My father――no, my father has no longer any friends; has _any one_ when he is in irons, when the scaffold is erected, the axe sharpened, and the executioner getting ready to do his work?”

“What do you say?” cried the stranger, turning pale. “Is he, then, already condemned?”

“He is going to be!”

“No, no, he shall not be! Pierre Gilles will demand, will beseech; they will give him to him; he will pay for him with his gold, with his life-blood, if necessary.”

“Pierre Gilles!” cried Margaret; and she threw herself on the neck of the stranger, and clasped him in her arms.

“Pierre Gilles! Pierre Gilles! it is you who love my father. Ah! listen to me. He is up there; this is the second time they have made him appear before them. Alas! doubtless to-day will be the last; for they are tired――tired of falsehoods, artifices, and base, vile manœuvres; they are tired of offering him gold and silver――he who wants only heaven and God; they are weary of urging, of tormenting this saintly bishop and this upright man, in order to extort from them an oath which no Christian can or ought to take. Then it will be necessary for these iniquitous and purchased judges to wash out their shame in blood. They must crush these witnesses to the truth, these defenders of the faith! My father, child of the martyrs, will walk in their footsteps, and die as they died; Rochester, successor of the apostles, will give his life like them; but Margaret, poor Margaret, she will be left! And it is I, yes, it is I, who am his daughter, and who is named Margaret!” As she said these words, she clasped her hands with an expression of anguish that nothing can describe.

TO BE CONTINUED.

[88] These words, which we find in the mouth of this hypocrite, the impious Cromwell, have been the watchword from all time of those who wished to attack the monks and destroy them. Well-informed and educated persons know, by the great number of works coming from their pens, whether they were idlers, and the poor in all ages will be able to say whether they have ever been selfish or uncharitable.

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

SERMONS ON THE SACRAMENTS. By Thomas Watson, Master of St. John’s College, Cambridge, Dean of Durham, and the last Catholic Bishop of Lincoln. First printed in 1558, and now reprinted in modern spelling. With a Preface and Biographical Notice of the Author by the Rev. T. E. Bridgett, of the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer. London: Burns & Oates. 1876. (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society.)

After Father Bridgett’s beautiful work, _Our Lady’s Dowry_, we may be sure that whatever he puts forth, whether original or edited, will repay perusal. He has a _penchant_ for forgotten treasures of England’s Catholic past, and spares himself no pains to give us the benefit of his researches. Not content with editing the present volume, he has gone to the trouble of a biographical notice, and quite a long one, of his author. We cannot do better than let him speak for himself in the opening lines of his preface:

“Here is a volume of sermons, printed more than three centuries ago in black-letter type and uncouth spelling, and the existence of which is only known to a few antiquarians. Why, it will be asked, have I reprinted it in modern guise and sought to rescue it from oblivion? I have done so for its own sake and for the sake of its author. It is a book that deserves not to perish, and which would not have been forgotten, as it is, but for the misfortune of the time at which it appeared. It was printed in the last year of Queen Mary, and the change of religion under Elizabeth made it almost impossible to be procured, and perilous to be preserved. The number of English Catholic books is not so great that we can afford to lose one so excellent as this.

“But even had it less intrinsic value, it is the memorial of a great man, little known, indeed, because, through the iniquity of the times, he lacked a biographer. I am confident that any one who will read the following memoir, imperfect as it is, will acknowledge that I have not been indulging an antiquarian fancy, but merely paying, as far as I could, a debt of justice long due, in trying to revive the memory of the last Catholic bishop of Lincoln.”

Father Bridgett further explains that these sermons belong to the class which “are written that they may be preached by others.” Their author undertook to write them as a “Manual of Catholic Doctrine on the Sacraments,” and in compliance with the order of a council under Cardinal Pole in December, 1555.

“Being intended for general preaching――or rather, public reading――these sermons are, of course, impassioned and colorless. We cannot judge from them of Bishop Watson’s own style of preaching. We cannot gather from them, as from the sermons of Latimer and Leaver, pictures of the manners and passions of the times. They scarcely ever reflect Watson’s personal character, except by the very absence of invective and the simple dignity which distinguishes them. As specimens of old English before the great Elizabethan era, they will be interesting to students of our language, especially as being the work of one of the best classical scholars of the day” (Preface, p. xii.).

Father Bridgett characterizes these sermons as “eminently patristic.” “I have counted,” he says, “more than four hundred marginal references to the fathers and ecclesiastical writers; and I may say that they are in great measure woven out of the Scriptures and the fathers.” Then, after remarking that, “with regard to their doctrine, it must be remembered that they were published before the conclusion of the Council of Trent,” he tells us: “I have added a few short theological notes only; for the doctrine throughout these sermons is both clearly stated and perfectly Catholic. As they certainly embody the traditional teaching of the English Church before the Council of Trent, they are an additional proof that Catholics of the present day are faithful to the inheritance of their forefathers.”

From what we have had time to read of these pages, we have been struck with at once the fulness and simplicity of the instructions they contain. The style, too, in our eyes, has both unction and charm. We thank Father Bridgett that he has “exactly reproduced the original, with the exception of the spelling.” “No educated reader,” he says, “will find much difficulty in the old idiom. The sentences, indeed, are rather long, like those of a legal document; yet they are simple in construction, and, when read aloud, they can be broken up by a skilful reader without the addition of a word.” We will only add that, perhaps, not the least attractive feature of these sermons (to the modern reader) is their brevity.

THE CONSTITUTIONAL AND POLITICAL HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES. By Dr. H. von Holst, Professor at the University of Freiburg. Translated from the German by John J. Lalor and Alfred B. Mason. 1750-1833. State Sovereignty and Slavery. Chicago: Callaghan & Co. 1876.

The efforts of Europeans to study and write upon the American Constitution and the political life of our people, though partial and somewhat prejudiced, have always been interesting and instructive. De Tocqueville, in his _Democracy in America_, studied rather to teach us than to learn from our theory of government and its practice, and this from his transient observations as a tourist. Professor von Holst resided in this country from 1867 to 1872, and thus may be supposed to have studied more profoundly our system, and to have seen more thoroughly our practice. No one, however, could rightly judge of our political history or the system of our government who had not seen and known us both before and after our civil war. De Tocqueville saw us before, and Von Holst after, that great crisis in our history. Hence we think that both authors should be read, in order to appreciate the efforts of learned and distinguished foreigners to comment upon a theme so difficult to any European. This is especially desirable now, as in this case the Frenchman and the German are not admirers of each other’s respective political systems. The present volume, however, is able, spirited, and well written, and shows a remarkable acquaintance with our history and institutions, and with the lives and characters of our public men. The author is not in love with our government, and yet is not without sympathy for it and for our people. He is, no doubt, more in sympathy with our present than with our past. From his vigorously-written pages Americans may learn something of their virtues and of their faults. The _animus_ and style of the work might be inferred from the title of the second chapter: “The Worship of the Constitution, and its real Character.” We have often been accused of making the Constitution our political _bible_, and Washington our political patron saint. Such seems to be the impression of Professor von Holst. But it must be said that his able and interesting work is well calculated to promote the study of the American republican form of government; for we are certainly a _terra incognita_ to most Europeans. Having ably studied his subject, he has ably and learnedly communicated his researches to his countrymen and to the world. His work will appear in a series of volumes, of which we have now only the first, and the English translation will hereafter appear in this country simultaneously with the original German publications. The work seems to deal exclusively with political questions, and handles them ably. We commend its perusal to our readers.

ALICE LEIGHTON. A Tale of the Seventeenth Century. London: Burns & Oates. 1876. New York: The Catholic Publication Society.

This story of the wars between Roundhead and Cavalier will prove an agreeable disappointment to the reader who contrives to wade through its first few pages, which are rather silly. We tremble for the fate of a story which in the very first page tells us of its youthful hero: “His brow was, however, clouded, either with emotion or with sorrow, _perchance with both_; and a _careful_ observer _might_ have marked a tear in his soft dark eyes as he turned his gaze upon the fair view before him.” In the second page the hero tells us, or rather nobody in

## particular, that eighteen summers have at last passed over him,

whereupon he proceeds to deliver a page of an address to his “own dear home,” in the course of which he remarks that “the _accents_ of a dethroned monarch are _calling_ for assistance,” but “the long-listened-to maxims” of his childhood hold him back from joining the king. In the third page he encounters a mild sort of witch, who is gifted with that very uncertain second sight that has been the peculiar property of witches from time immemorial, and who prophesies to him, in Scotch dialect, in the usual fashion of such prophets.

Nothing could be more inauspicious than such a beginning; and yet as one reads on all this clap-trap disappears, and a very interesting story, though by no means of the highest order, unfolds itself. There is abundance of incident, battle, hair-breadth escape, varying fortunes, misery, ending with the final happiness of those in whom we are chiefly interested. Some of the characters are very well drawn, and the author shows a competent knowledge of the scenes, events, and period in which the story is laid. It affords a healthy and agreeable contrast to the psychological puzzles generally given us nowadays as novels. It looks to us as though the writer were a new hand. If so, _Alice Leighton_ affords every promise of very much better work in a too weak department of letters――Catholic fiction. If the writer will only banish for ever that antiquated _deus_ or _dea ex machinâ_, the witch, especially if she speak with a Scotch accent, give much more care than is shown in the present volume to English, not _force_ fun for fun’s sake, we shall hope soon to welcome a new volume from a lively, pleasant, and powerful pen.

“MY OWN CHILD.” A Novel. By Florence Marryat. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1876.

Florence Marryat has become, and deservedly, quite a popular novelist. She has, we understand, become something in our opinion very much better――a Catholic. We see no reason why her faith should interfere with the interest or power of her stories. On the contrary, it should steady her hand, widen her vision, chasten her thought, give a new meaning to very old scenes and types of character; and we have no doubt at all that such will be the case. _My Own Child_ is neither her best story nor her worst. It is a very sweet and pathetic one, simple in construction and plot, yet full of sad interest throughout, lightened here and there by bits of lively description or pictures of quaint character. It is easy to recognize a practised hand in it. The chief characters of the story are Catholics. We have only one fault to find, but that a very serious one. It is too bad to make a young lady, and so charming a young lady as May Power is represented to be, talk slang. Where in the world did she learn it, this bright, beaming, Irish, Catholic girl? Certainly not from her mother, for she never indulges in it, and surely not from the good Sisters in Brussels by whom she was educated. Yet she bounds out of the convent perfect in――slang! For instance: “‘I’ll get some nice, jolly fellow to look after it [her property] for us, mother.’ ‘You’ll never get another Hugh!’ I exclaimed indignantly. ‘Well, then, we’ll take the next best fellow we can find,’ replied my darling.” The first “best fellow,” the Hugh alluded to, happened to be the “darling’s” dead father. The same darling, only just out of convent, is anxious to make her first appearance “with a splash and a dash.” It is only natural that she should discover her mother looking “rather peaky” when that lady is threatened with an illness that endangers her life.

This is to be regretted. Young ladies are much more acceptable as young _ladies_ than when indulging in language supposed to be relegated to “fast” young women. Slang is bad enough in men’s mouths, whether in or out of books; but, spoken by a woman, it at once places her without the pale of all that is sweet and pure and calculated to inspire that admiration and reverence in men which are the crown and pride of a Christian woman’s life. Miss Marryat is clever enough to dispense with such poor material. Meanwhile, what becomes of this slangy young lady the reader will discover for himself.

THE CATHOLIC WORLD.

VOL. XXIV., No. 141.――DECEMBER, 1876.

Copyright: Rev. I. T. HECKER. 1877.

THE UNITARIAN CONFERENCE AT SARATOGA.[89]

The Unitarians in September last held at Saratoga their biennial conference, and we have looked over the issues of the _Liberal Christian_, a weekly publication of this city, for a full report of its proceedings, and looked to no purpose. It has, however, printed in its columns some of the speeches delivered in the conference, and given _in extenso_ the opening sermon of the Rev. Edward E. Hale. Before the conference took place the _Liberal Christian_ spoke of Rev. Edward E. Hale “as one of the few thoroughly-furnished and widely-experienced men in their ranks.” This notice prepared us to give special attention to the opening sermon, and to expect from it a statement of Unitarian principles or beliefs which would at least command the assent of a considerable portion of the Unitarian denomination. More than this it would have been unreasonable to anticipate; for so radical and extreme are their divergencies of belief that it may be said Unitarians agree on no one common objective truth; certainly not, if Mr. Frothingham and the section which the latter gentleman represents are to be ranked within the pale of Unitarianism.

The Rev. Edward E. Hale has not altogether disappointed our anticipations, for he has given expression to some of the ideas most prevalent among Unitarians; but before entering upon the consideration of these there are certain preliminary statements which he makes deserving some attention.

In the closing sentence of the first paragraph of his sermon Mr. Hale gives us a noticeable piece of information. He says:

“We were taught long since by Macaulay, in fervent rhetoric, that the republic of Venice is new in comparison with the papacy, and that the Roman Church was in its vigor when Augustine landed in Kent in the sixth century. So it was. But earlier than all this, before there was a bishop in Rome, there were independent Christian churches, liberal in their habit and Unitarian in their creed, in Greece, in Asia, and in Cyprus. Nay, before those churches existed there had gathered a group of peasants around the Saviour of men, and he had said to them: ‘Fear not, little flock; it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.’ The Congregational Church order, with the Unitarian theology, is the _oldest_ Christian system known to history.”

What authentic history goes back of the account given in the New Testament of the founding of the Catholic Church and her hierarchy by Christ the Rev. Mr. Hale does not deign to inform us. When he does, it will be time enough to pay attention to the assertion, “The Congregational Church order is the oldest Christian system known to history.” The church is in possession; the plaintiffs must make out their case. Until then, “_quod gratis asseritur gratis negatur_”; for an assertion without proof counts for nothing.

But he does attempt to prove his assertion about “Unitarian theology” by what follows:

“I make no peculiar partisan claim or boast in this statement. As to the statement of theology, I do but condense in a few words the statement made by the Roman Catholic writer in highest esteem among Englishmen to-day. He says what I say, that he may argue from it that you require the development of doctrine which only the perpetual inspiration of a line of pontiffs gives you, unless you choose to hold by the simple Unitarian creeds of the fathers before Constantine.”

From which of the many volumes of the writings of Dr. Newman Mr. Hale has ventured to condense his language we are not told; but we are led to suppose that it was written by Dr. Newman since he became a Catholic, for he speaks of him as “the Roman Catholic writer in the highest esteem among Englishmen to-day.” As a Catholic, Dr. Newman never used language which could be condensed by a “thoroughly-informed” man to what Rev. Mr. Hale has made him say; and we have our doubts whether before he was a Catholic he used it. It would not be amiss if Mr. Hale had something of Dr. Newman’s clearness of thought and accuracy of expression. If he had, of this we are sure: he would never venture to utter in a public speech or put in print that any Catholic writer who has any claim of being a theologian believed or maintained “the perpetual _inspiration_ of a line of pontiffs.”

In the next paragraph Rev. Mr. Hale literally quotes a passage from Dr. Newman’s writings to sustain his thesis, but he fails. Here is the quotation:

“The creeds of that early day,” says Dr. Newman, “make no mention in their letter of the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity at all. They make mention, indeed, of a three, but that there is any mystery in the doctrine, that the three are one, that they are co-equal, co-eternal, all increate, all omnipotent, all incomprehensible, is not stated, and never could be gathered from them.”

He fails, because he proceeds on the supposition that the Catholic Church teaches that her creeds contain the whole body of truth of the Christian faith. The Catholic Church at no time or nowhere taught this. Her creeds never did contain explicitly the whole body of the Christian faith, they do not even now; for such was not her intention or purpose. Had it not been for the errors of Arius and his followers, the Christian doctrine of the Trinity might not have been contained in the creeds of the church explicitly, even down to our own day. The supposition, however, that the mystery of the Trinity was not believed in the church “before Constantine” is as absurd as to suppose that the necessity of good works for salvation, or there being a purgatory, was not believed and maintained in the Catholic Church before the time of Charles V., or that Papal Infallibility was not believed and held in the church before the time of William of Prussia, the German _kaiser_! The discussions and definitions of the councils render Christian truths more explicit and intelligible than they were before; this is a matter of course, but who is so ignorant as to suppose that the councils originated these truths?

That the creeds “before Constantine” implied the Trinity and intended it Dr. Newman would have taught the Rev. Edward E. Hale, if he had ingenuously quoted the two sentences which follow his extract. Dr. Newman continues thus: “Of course we believe that they [the early creeds] imply it [the Trinity]. God forbid we should do otherwise!”[90] Rev. Edward E. Hale ought to know that the Catholic Church repudiates with instinctive horror the idea of adding to, or taking away from, or altering in the least, the body of the Christian truth delivered once and for all to her keeping by her divine Founder when upon earth. The mistakes he makes on these points arise from his viewing the church solely as an assembly, overlooking that she is also a corporated body, informed by the indwelling Holy Spirit, and the constitution given to her by Christ includes the commission to “teach all things whatsoever he commanded.”

Following what has gone before, the Rev. Mr. Hale makes another surprising statement. He says:

“It was not to be expected――nor, in fact, did anybody expect――that a religion so simple and so radical should sweep the world without contaminating its own simplicity and blunting the edge of its own radicalism in the first and second contact, nay, in the contact of centuries. Least of all did Jesus Christ himself expect this. Nobody so definite as he in the statement of the obscurities and defilements which would surround his simple doctrine of ‘Love God and love men.’”

In all deference to Mr. Hale, this is precisely what everybody did expect from the church of Christ――to teach the truth with purity and unswerving fidelity, “without contamination in the contact,” for all “centuries.” For this is what the promises of Christ led them precisely to expect when he founded his church. He promised that “_the gates of hell shall not prevail against it_.”[91] He promised also that he would be with his church through all ages: “Behold, I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world.”[92] Does Mr. Hale read the Holy Scriptures and believe what he reads? Listen, again, to St. Paul’s description of the church. After saying that “Christ is the head of the church,” and “the church is subject to Christ,” he adds: “Christ also loved the church, and delivered himself up for it, that he might sanctify it, cleansing it by the laver of water in the word of life; that he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle, nor any such thing.”[93] Now, although the Rev. E. E. Hale has thrown overboard the belief in the divinity of Christ and the supernatural inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, nevertheless the words of Christ and his apostle, measured only by the standard of personal holiness and learning, ought to be esteemed, when speaking of God’s church, of equal authority, at least, to his statement, even though he ranks “as one of the few thoroughly-furnished and widely-experienced men” among Unitarians.

But how did the church of Christ become “contaminated”? This is an important point, and here is the Rev. E. E. Hale’s reply to it:

“And, in truth, so soon as the church met with the world, it borrowed while it lent, it took while it gave. So, in the face of learned Egypt, it Egyptianized its simple Trinity; in the face of powerful Rome it heathenized its nascent ritual; in the face of wordy Greece it Hellenized its dogmatics and theology; and by way of holding well with Israel it took up a rabbin’s reverence even for the jots and tittles of its Bible. What history calls ‘Christianity,’ therefore, is a man-adorned system, of which the methods can be traced to convenience, or even to heathen wisdom, if we except that one majestic method by which every true disciple is himself ordained a king and a priest, and receives the charge that in his daily life he shall proclaim glad tidings to every creature.”

The common error of the class of men to whom the Rev. E. E. Hale belongs, who see the church, if at all, only on the outside, is to “put the cart before the horse.” It is not the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, who teach the church of Christ, but the church of Christ which teaches the truth to the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans. Christ came to teach all nations, not to be taught by them. Hence, in communicating his mission to his church, he said: “All power is given to me in heaven and in earth. Going, therefore, teach ye all nations.”[94] The church, in fulfilling this divine commission of teaching all nations, utilizes their gifts in bringing out the great truths committed to her care by her divine Founder. It is in this cooperation with the work of the church that the different nations and races of men find the inspiration of their genius, the noblest employment of their highest faculties, and the realization of their providential mission upon earth. For the scattered rays of religious truth which were held by the different nations and races of men under paganism were derived from primitive revelation, and it is only when these are brought within the focus of the light of universal truth that their complete significance is appreciated, and they are seen in all their original splendor. The Catholic Church, in this aspect, is the reintegration of natural religion with the truths contained in primitive revelation and their perfect fulfilment. Moreover, there is no truth contained in any of the ancient religions before the coming of Christ, or affirmed by any of the heresies since that event, or that may be hereafter affirmed, which is not contained, in all its integrity, in Catholicity. This is only saying, in other words, The Catholic Church is catholic.

But these men do not see the church, and they appear to regard Christianity as still an unorganized mass, and they are possessed with the idea that the task is imposed upon them to organize the Christian Church; and this work occupied and perplexed them not a little in their Unitarian biennial conference held in the town of Saratoga, in the United States of North America, in the month of September, in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and seventy-six!

“Poor wanderers! ye are sore distrest To find the path which Christ has blest, Tracked by his saintly throng; Each claims to trust his own weak will―― Blind idol!――so ye languish still, All wranglers, and all wrong.”[95]

Were the veil taken from their spiritual eyes, and did they behold the church as she is, they would easily comprehend that her unbroken existence for nineteen centuries alone, saying nothing of what glory is in store for her in the future, is a more evident and conclusive proof to us of the divinity of her Founder than the miracle of his raising Lazarus from the dead was to those who were actual witnesses to it. For, in raising Lazarus from the dead, he had but to deal with passive matter, and that for only an instant; whereas in founding his church he had to exert his power and counteract all the attacks of the gates of hell, combined with the persecutions of the world and the perversities of men, during successive centuries until the end of all time. None but the living God could be the author of so potent, comprehensive, and indestructible a body as the Catholic Church. Of all the unanswerable testimonies of the divinity of Christ, there is none so forcible as that of the perpetual existence of the one, holy, Roman Catholic Church. She is the standing miracle of Christ.

The reverse sense of the statement of the Rev. Edward E. Hale on this point contains the truth. The Catholic Church welcomes all nations and races to her fold, and reintegrates the scattered truths contained in every religious system, not by way of reunion or composition, but by simplicity and unity in a divine synthesis; and as the ancient Egyptians, and the Greeks, and the Romans, so also the modern Franks and Celts, have served by their characteristic gifts to the development and progress of Christian truth. In like manner the Saxons, with their peculiar genius and instincts, will serve, to their own greater glory, in due season, in the same great cause, perhaps, by giving a greater development and a more scientific expression to the mystic life of the church, and by completing, viewed from intrinsic grounds, the demonstration of the truth of her divine mission.

Leaving aside other misstatements and errors contained in the first part of this sermon from want of space, we pass on to what may be termed its pith. Mr. Hale starts with the hazardous question, “What is the Unitarian Church for?” As far as we can make out from repeated reading of the main portion of the sermon――for there reigns a great confusion and incoherence in his ideas――the Unitarian Church has for its mission to certify anew and proclaim the truth that “God is in man.” “God in man,” he says, “is in itself the basis of the whole Gospel.” Undoubtedly “God is in man,” and God is in the brute, and God is in every grain of sand, and God is in all things. God is in all things by his immensity――that is, by his essence, and power, and presence. But this is a truth known by the light of human reason, and taught by all sound philosophers, heathen and Christian. There was no need of the Gospel, nor of that “fearlessness” which, he tells us, “was in the Puritan blood,” nor of the Unitarian Church, to teach this evident and common truth to mankind.

The Gospel message means more than that, and the Rev. Mr. Hale has some idea that it does mean more. He adds: “Every man is God’s child, and God’s Spirit is in every life.” Again: “Men are the children of God really and not figuratively”; “The life of God is their life by real inheritance.” After having made these statements, he attempts to give the basis and genesis of this relation of God as father to man as child, as follows:

“That the force which moves all nature is one force, and not many, appears to all men, as they study it, more and more. That this force is conscious of its own existence, that it is conscious of its own work, that it is therefore what men call spirit, that this spirit has inspired and still inspires us, that we are therefore not creatures of dumb power, but children of a Father’s love――this is the certainty which unfolds itself or reveals itself, or is unfolded or is revealed, as higher and higher man ascends in his knowledge of what IS.”

That man, by the light of his reason, can, by the study of nature, attain to this idea of God and his principal attributes, as Spirit, as Creator, upholder of the universe, and as Providence, is no doubt true; but that, by the study of “the force which moves all nature,” our own consciousness included, we can learn that we are the “children of a Father’s love,” does not follow, and is quite another thing. It is precisely here that Unitarianism as a consistent, intelligible religious system crumbles into pieces. Nor can Unitarians afford to follow the Rev. Edward E. Hale in his attempt to escape this difficulty by concealing his head, ostrich-like, under the sand of a spurious mysticism, and virtually repudiating the rational element in religion by saying: “The mystic knows that God is here now. He has no chain of posts between child and Father. He relies on no long, logical system of communication,” etc. The genuine mystic, indeed, “knows God is here,” but he knows also that God is not the author of confusion, and to approach God he does not require of man to put out the light of his reason. He will tell us that the relation of God to all things as created being, and the relation of God to man as rational being, and the relation of God to man as father to child, are not one and the same thing, and ought not, therefore, to be confounded. The true mystic will further inform us that the first relation, by way of immanence, is common to all created things, man included; the second, by way of rationality, is common to the human race; the third, by way of filiation, is common to those who are united to God through the grace of Christ. The first and second are communicated to man by the creative act of God, and are therefore ours by right of natural inheritance through Adam. The third relation is communicated to us by way of adoption through the grace of the new Adam, Christ, who is “the only-begotten Son of God.” This relation is not, therefore, ours by inheritance. We “have received from Christ,” says St. Paul to the Romans, “the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry: Abba, Father.”[96] “By whom also we have access through faith into this grace, wherein we stand, and glory in the hope of the glory of the sons of God.”[97] It is proper to remark here that it is an error very common among radicals, rationalists, and a certain class of Unitarians to suppose that the relation of the soul to God by way of filiation, due to Christ, is intended as a substitute for our natural relations to God by way of immanence and rationality; whereas Christianity presupposes these, reaffirms, continues, completes, and perfects them, by this very gift of filiation with God. For it is a maxim common to all Catholic theologians that _gratia supponit et perficit naturam_.

Our intelligent mystic would not stop here. Proceeding further, he would say that to be really and truly children of God by inheritance implies our being born with the same identical nature as God. For the nature of a child is not a resemblance to, or an image of, that of his father, but consists in his possessing the same identical essence and nature as his father. If the son is equal to his father by nature, then he is also equal to his father in his capacities as such. Now, if every man, by nature, has the right to call God father, as the Rev. Mr. Hale and his co-religionists pretend, then all men by nature are equal to God, both in essence and attributes! Is this what Unitarians mean by “the divinity of human nature”? The Rev. E. E. Hale appears to say so when he tells us: “What we are struggling for, and what, if words did not fail us, we would fain express, is what Dr. James Walker called ‘the identity of essence of all spiritual being and all spiritual life.’” All, then, that the believers in the divinity of Christ claim exclusively for him is claimed by Unitarians equally for every individual of the human race. But the belief in the divinity of Christ is “the latest and least objectionable form of idolatry”――so the Rev. H. W. Bellows informs us in his volume entitled _Phases of Faith_. The Unitarian cure, then, for the evil of idolatry is by substituting an indefinite multitude of idols for one single object of idolatrous worship.

There is one class of Unitarians, to whom the author of this sermon seems to belong, who accept boldly the consequences of their premise, and maintain without disguise that all men are by nature the equals of Christ, and that there is no reason why they should not, by greater fidelity, surpass Christ. Up to this period of time, however, they have not afforded to the world any very notable specimen of the truth of their assertion. Another class attempt to get over the difficulty by a critical exegesis of the Holy Scriptures, denying the authenticity or the meaning of those parts which relate to the miraculous conception of Christ, his miracles, and his divinity. A representative of the extreme wing on the right of Unitarianism replied, when this point was presented to him: “Oh! we Unitarians reject the idea of the Trinity as represented by Calvinists and other Protestants, for they make it a tritheism; but we accept the doctrine as holy mother Church teaches it”; while a leader of the extreme left admitted the difficulty, and in speaking of Dr. Channing, who championed the idea of the filiation of man to God, he said: “No intelligent Unitarian of to-day would attempt to defend the Unitarianism of Dr. Channing.” He was right; for no Unitarian, on the basis of his belief, can say consistently the Lord’s Prayer; for the Catholic doctrine of the Incarnation is a rigorous necessity to any one who admits the infinite and the finite, and the necessity of a union of love between them which authorizes the finite to call the Infinite Father! One may bestow sympathy upon the pious feelings of that class of Unitarians of which Dr. Channing is the representative, but the less said about their theological science the better.

Our genuine mystic would not stop here. He would continue and show that the denial of the Incarnation involves the denial of the Trinity, and the denial of the Trinity reduces the idea of God to a mere abstraction. For all conception of real life is complex. Intellectual life in its simplest elements, in its last analysis, will be found to consist of three factors: Man as the thinker, one factor; the thing thought, the second factor; and their relation, the third factor――or the lover, the beloved, and their relation; again, the actor, the thing acted upon, and their relation. Man cannot think, love, or act where there is nothing to think, to love, or to act upon. Place man in an absolute vacuum, where there is nothing except himself, and you have man _in posse_, but not man as being, as existing, as a living man. You have a unit, an abstraction, nothing more. But pure abstractions have no real existence. Our conception of life in accordance with the law which governs our intelligence is comprised in three terms――subject, object, and their relation.[98] There is no possible way of bringing out of a mere unit, as our absolute starting point of thought, an intellectual conception of life. But the Unitarian idea of God is God reduced to a simple, absolute unit. Hence the Unitarian idea of God is not the conception of the real, living God, but an abstraction, a non-existing God.

Our genuine mystic would proceed still further; for infused light and love from above do not suspend or stultify the natural action of our faculties, but quicken, elevate, and transform their operations. He would apply, by way of analogy, the same process of thought in confirmation of the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity. If there had been a time, he would say, when there was no object before God, then there would have been a period when God was not the real, living God, but only God _in posse_, non-existing. But this is repugnant to the real conception of God; therefore the true idea of God involves a co-eternal object. If, however, this co-eternal object was not equal to God in substance as well as in attributes, then there would have been a period when God did not exist in all his fulness. Now, this object, co-eternal and equal to God the Father, is what the Catholic doctrine teaches concerning Christ, the only-begotten Son of the Father, “begotten before all ages, consubstantial with the Father.” But the Father and the Son being co-eternal and co-adequate, their relations to each other must have been eternal and equal, outflowing toward each other in love, commensurate with their whole nature. This procession of mutual love between Father and Son is what the Catholic doctrine teaches concerning the Holy Spirit. Thus we see, however imperfectly, that the Catholic doctrine concerning the Trinity presents to our minds nothing that is contrary to our reason, though it contains an infinite abyss beyond the present scope of our reason, but which we shall know when our reason is increased, as it will be, by the gift of the light of glory. But every mystery of Christianity has an intelligible side to our natural reason, and by the light of faith it is the privilege and joy of a Christian while here upon earth to penetrate more deeply into their hidden, divine truth.

Again, the Unitarian is mistaken when he supposes that Catholics, in maintaining the Trinity, exclude the divine Unity. They include both in one. Herein again is found in man an analogy. Man is one in triplicity. Man is thought, love, and activity, and at the same time man is one. He thinks, he loves, he acts; there are not three distinct men, one who thinks, another who loves, and still another who acts. There is, therefore, a sense in which man is one in three and three in one. So there is in the Trinity. The Unitarians are right in affirming the divine Unity; their error consists in excluding the divine Trinity. All heresies are right in what they affirm, and wrong in what they exclude or deny; which denial is the result of their breaking away from that divine Unity in whose light alone every truth is seen in its co-relation with all other truths.

Our true mystic would not be content to rest here, but, soaring up upon the wings of divine light and love, and taking a more extended view, he would strive to show that where the doctrine of the Trinity is not held either explicitly or implicitly, there not only the theory of our mental operations and the intellectual foundation of religion dissolve into a baseless fabric of a vision; but that also the solid basis of society, the true idea of the family, the right conception of the state and its foundations, and the law of all genuine progress, are wanting, and all human things tend towards dissolution and backward to the reign of old chaos.

We give another characteristic statement of the Rev. Edward E. Hale’s opening sermon which must have grated harshly on the ears of the more staid and conservative portion of his audience; it is under the head of “The immanent presence of God.” He says:

“The Roman Church will acknowledge it, and St. Francis and St. Vincent and Fénelon will illustrate it. But, at the same time, the Roman Church has much else on her hands. She has to be contending for those seven sacraments, for this temporal power, all this machinery of cardinals and bishops, and bulls and interdicts, canon law and decretals, so that in all this upholstery there is great risk that none of us see the shrine. So of the poor little parodies of the Roman Church, the Anglican Church, the Lutheran Church, and the rest of them.”

Again:

“All our brethren in the other confessions plunge into their infinite ocean with this hamper of corks and floats, water-proof dresses lest they be wet, oil-cloth caps for their hair, flannels for decency, a bathing-cart here, a well-screened awning there――so much machinery before the bath that one hardly wonders if some men refuse to swim! For them there is this great apology, if they do not proclaim as we must proclaim, God here and God now; nay, if they do not live as we must live, in the sense of God here and God now. For us, we have no excuse. We have stripped off every rag. We have destroyed all the machinery.”

The Rev. Mr. Hale regards the seven sacraments, the hierarchy, the canon law――briefly, the entire visible and practical side of the church――as a “hamper,” “machinery,” “rags,” and thinks there “is great risk that none of us see the shrine.” The difficulty here is not where Mr. Hale places it.

“Night-owls shriek where mounting larks should sing.”

The visible is not the prison of the invisible, as Plato dreamed, but its vehicle, as St. Paul teaches. “For the invisible things of God, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, his eternal power also and divinity.”[99] The author of this sermon is at least consistent in his error; as he believes in an abstract God, so he would reduce “the church of the living God,” “the body of Christ,” to an abstract non-existence. Suppose, for example, that the Rev. Edward E. Hale had reduced “all the machinery” of his curiously-devised body to an abstraction before the Unitarian biennial conference was held at Saratoga; the world would have been deprived of the knowledge of that “simplicity which it is the special duty of the Unitarian Church to proclaim.” Think of the loss! For it was by means of the complex “machinery” of his concrete body that the Rev. E. E. Hale came in contact with the “machinery” of the Unitarian biennial organization at Saratoga, and, thus “upholstered,” he publicly rants against all “machinery.”

There may be too complex an organization, and too many applications of it, and too much made of these, owing to the necessities of our times, in the Catholic Church, to suit the personal tastes and the stage of growth of the Rev. Edward E. Hale. But the Catholic Church does not exist solely for the benefit of Mr. Hale, or for any peculiar class of men, or any one race alone. He has and should have, and they all have, their own place and appropriate niche in her _all_-temple; for the Catholic Church takes up in her scope every individual, and the human race entire. But there are others, with no less integrity of spiritual life and intelligence than he, who esteem those things of which he speaks so unappreciatingly as heavenly gifts and straight pathways to see more clearly the inner shrine and approach more nearly to the divine Presence. Are the idiosyncrasies of one man, though “thoroughly furnished and widely experienced,” to be the norm of all other men, and of every race? Men and races differ greatly in these things, and the church of God is not a sect or conventicle; she is Catholic, universal, and in her bosom, and in her bosom alone, every soul finds its own place and most suitable way, with personal liberty and in accord with all other souls and the whole universe, to perfect union with God.

The matter with the Rev. E. E. Hale is, he has missed his vocation. His place evidently was not in the assembled conference at Saratoga; for his calling is unmistakably to a hermit life. Let him hie to the desert, and there, in a forlorn and naked hermitage, amid “frosts and fasts, hard lodgings and thin weeds,” in an austere and unsociable life, “unswathed and unclothed,” _in puris naturalibis_, “triumphantly cease to be.” The Rev. E. E. Hale is one-sided, and seems to have no idea that the Catholic Church is the organization of that perfect communion of men with God and each other which Christ came to communicate and to establish in its fulness upon earth, and is its practical realization. God grant him, and others like him, this light and knowledge!

But we would not have our readers think that all Unitarians agree with the Rev. E. E. Hale in his estimate of the visible or practical side of the church. We quote from a leading article in the _Liberal Christian_ of August last, under the head of “Spirit and Form in Religion,” the following passage:

“It seems painfully indicative of the still undeveloped condition of our race that no truce or medium can be approximated in which the two great factors of human nature and society, the authority and supremacy of _spirit_ and the necessity and usefulness of _form_, are reconciled and made to serve each other or a common end. Must inward spirituality, and outward expression of it in forms and worship, be for ever in a state of unstable equilibrium? Must they ever be hostile and at cross-purposes? Must all progress be by a displacement in turn of each other――now an era of honored forms, and then of only disembodied spirituality? There is probably no entire escape from this necessity. But, surely, he is the wisest man who can hold this balance in the evenest hand; and that sect or school, whether political, social, or religious, that pays the finest justice and the most impartial respect to the two factors in our nature, spirit and form, will hold the steadiest place and do the most good for the longest time. This is the real reason why Quakerism, with all its exalted claims to respect, has such a feeble and diminishing importance. It has oil in the lamp of the purest kind, but almost no _wick_, and what wick it has is made up of its _thee_-ing and _thou_-ing, and its straight coat and stiff bonnet. These are steadily losing authority; and when they are abandoned, visible Quakerism will disappear. On the other hand, Roman Catholicism maintains its place against the spirit of the age, and in spite of a load of discredited doctrines, very largely because of its intense persistency in forms, its highly-illumined visibility, its large-handed legibleness; but not without the unfailing aid and support of a spirit of faith and worship which produces a devoted priesthood and hosts of genuine saints. No form of Christianity can boast of lovelier or more spiritual disciples, or reaches higher up or lower down, including the wisest and the most ignorant, the most delicate and the coarsest adherents. It has the subtlest and the bluntest weapons in its arsenal, and can pierce with a needle, or mow with a scythe, or maul with a mattock.”

The same organ, in a later number, in speaking of the Saratoga conference, says:

“The main characteristic of the meeting was a conscientious and reverent endeavor to attain to something like a scientific basis for our faith in absolute religion, and in Christianity as a consistent and concrete expression of it,”

and adds that the opening sermon of the Rev. Mr. Hale “had the merit of starting us calmly and unexcitedly on our course.” Our readers will form their own judgment about what direction the course leads on which the Rev. Edward E. Hale started the Unitarians assembled at Saratoga in their seeking after a “scientific basis” for “absolute religion, and Christianity as a concrete expression of it”!

[89] “A Free-born Church.” The sermon preached before the National Conference of Unitarian and other Christian Churches at Saratoga, Tuesday evening, Sept. 12. The _Liberal Christian_, New York, Sept. 16, 1876.

[90] _An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine_, p. 14. Appleton, N. Y.

[91] Matt. xvi. 18.

[92] Matt. xxviii. 18.

[93] Eph. v. 25, 26, 27.

[94] St. Matt. xxviii. 18, 19.

[95] Dr. Newman.

[96] Rom. viii. 15.

[97] _Ibid._ v. 2.

[98] “Liquido tenendum est, quod omnia res, quamcumque cognoscimus, congenerat in nobis notitiam sui. Ab utroque enim notitia paritur, a cognoscente et cognito.”――St. Augustine, _De Trinitate_, s. ix. c. xii.――Wherefore it must be clearly held that everything whatsoever that we know begets at the same time in us the knowledge of itself; for knowledge is brought forth from both, from the knower and from the thing known. Again, “Behold, then, there are three things: he that loves, and that which is loved, and love.”――s. viii. c. x., _ibid._

[99] Romans i. 20.

SIX SUNNY MONTHS.

BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE HOUSE OF YORKE,” “GRAPES AND THORNS,” ETC.

## CHAPTER VII.

AN UNEXPECTED PROPOSAL.

The next morning coffee was brought to the bed-rooms at the first peep of dawn, and when the little party went out for their walk the sun had only just begun to set the sea-line on fire.

They stepped for a moment into the Franciscan church next door, then went down the road leading past it to the Campagna. Fresh and sweet the morning air touched them as they sauntered along――not the morning breeze of New England, simple in associations as the breath of a newly-created being, but like the breath of one, immortally beautiful, about whom Calliope, Clio, and Erato have circled in their stately dance through the unfading centuries. Not only every spot of earth, but every waft of air, was haunted.

Mr. Vane stopped them presently with a silent gesture, and pointed to a near height, where a solitary cloud, softly resplendent in all its beautiful undulations, was slowly and loathly detaching itself to float upward and disappear in the sky, as if the door of a sapphire palace had opened to receive it. “Is it Diana?” he whispered.

“The Jew has touched nature with a pen of fire,” the Signora said as they walked on again; “but the pagan has dominated, and still in a certain sense possesses that beautiful realm. If, as Milton sings, ‘the parting genius was with sighing rent’ from tree and grove at the birth of Christ, its ghost still haunts the spot, and Milton himself uses pagan language when he sings the beauties of nature. Why does not some Christian Job dislodge these ‘mythic fancies,’ and make nature live with a life that is something more than the rustling of a garment? Job made the lightnings go and return at the command of God, saying, ‘Here we are!’ and he speaks of the ‘store-houses of the snow.’ The Christian poet seems to fear his imagination, to find it tainted, and, instead of purifying it, and setting it flying, like a bird or a butterfly, through the garden of the earth, he puts it in a cage or under a glass along with the pagan images he only glances askance at. Now and then one meets with a saint whose heart overflows in that direction, like St. Francis of Assisi, calling the birds his sisters. Blessed Fra Egidio made the flowers bear witness, as when he proved the miraculous motherhood of the Virgin to the doubting _Predicatore_. At each of the three strokes of his staff in the road, following his three assertions of Our Lady’s purity, up sprang a beautiful lily. Our Lord set the example in his reference to the lilies of the field: they toiled not, neither did they spin, yet the Creator had arrayed them as Solomon in all his glory was never arrayed. Did he talk to his mother about the flowers, I wonder? When the boat was tossed by a tempest, he spoke to the waves, as to living creatures, saying, ‘Peace, be still!’ Do spirits troublesome and troubled take shape, or, stretching their invisible hands, catch the shapes of nature as weapons, and lash with foam or strike with lightning? We cannot know, and we need not know; and we must not assert. It is not, however, forbidden to fancy. Nature may serve as the playground wherein our imagination and fancy shall exercise themselves and prepare our minds for the wonders of the spiritual life. Fancy and imagination are as really a part of ourselves, and as truly and wisely given by God, as reason and will. They are the sweet little enticements inviting us to fly off

‘From the dark edges of the sensual ground,’

as the bird-mother coaxes her young to try its wings in little flights from twig to twig before it soars into the heavens. No, it is not forbidden to the fancy to play around the mysterious life that makes the bud swell into the flower and the seed grow into the lofty tree, so long as we see all in God, and see in God the Trinity, and, in the aspiring flame of created adoring spirits, behold Maria Santissima as the white point that touches the foot of the throne.”

The Signora had been speaking slowly and dreamily, pausing now and then; but at the last, growing earnest, had, as it were, waked herself, and become aware that she was talking aloud and was listened to.

Smiling, and blushing too a little, “_Scusino!_” she said. “I cannot help it. I preach as the sparks fly upward.”

“I speak for a seat in your meeting-house for the rest of my life,” Mr. Vane replied promptly.

“Apropos of meeting-houses,” she said, “what do you think of those for spires?” pointing to four gigantic cypresses in the villa they were passing.

This villa was a strange, deserted-looking place just above the Campagna. Nothing in it flourished but the four cypresses, which rose to a magnificent height, their huge cones sloping at the top to a feather so slender that it was always tipped to one side. Stern, dark, and drawn close together, they looked down on the place as if they had cursed it and were waiting to see the consummation of its ruin. All their shadows were full of a multitudinous grit of cicali voices that sounded like the sharp grating together of teeth. At their feet stood the house, half-alive, half-dead, hidden from the street by the walls it was not high enough to overlook. It was like the upper part of a house that the earth had half swallowed. At each side of the door stood a statue dressed in some antique fashion, hat on head and sword on thigh. They might have been two men who were petrified there long before. At each side of the gate, inside, a stone dog, petrified too, in the act of starting up with open jaws, crumbled in a blind rage, as if a paralyzed life yet dwelt under the lichen-covered fragments, and struggled to pour forth its arrested anger.

A little farther on was another decaying villa, where green moss and grasses grew all over the steps, half hid the paving-stones of the court, and choked the fountain dry. The house, once a gay and noble mansion, had now got its shutters decently closed over the sightless windows, and resigned itself to desolation. The long, dim avenues had a damp, unhealthy breath, and not a flower was to be seen.

They went in and seated themselves on the steps, where the shadow of the house, covering a verdant square in the midst of the sunshine, looked like a block of verd-antique set in gold.

“It reminds me of the funeral we went to in St. Peter’s,” Mr. Vane said, glancing about the sombre place, and over the walls into the outside splendor. “The mournful pageant looked as small in that bright temple as this villa in the landscape.”

The two girls gathered grasses and leaves and bits of moss, binding them into tiny bouquets to keep as mementos, and Bianca made a sketch of the two villas. They talked but little, and, in that silent and quiescent mood, perceived far more clearly the character and influence of the scene――the melancholy that was not without terror; the proud beauty that survived neglect and decay, and might at any time burst into a triumphant loveliness, if but some one should care to call forth the power hidden there; the dainty graces that would not thrust themselves forward, but waited to be sought. Yet it needed that summer and sunshine should be all about to keep the sadness from being oppressive. With those cheering influences so near and so dominantly larger, the touch of melancholy became a luxury, like a scattering of snow in wine.

Isabel came back to the steps from her ramble about the place, and found her father and the Signora sitting there with no appearance of having uttered a word since she left them.

“It is just the time to read something I found and brought with me from Rome,” she said. “I tucked it into my note-book, see, and something at this moment reminded me of it. Bianca was saying that if the place should be sprinkled with holy water, she did not doubt that flowers would immediately begin to grow again, and the track was not long from her notion round to this poem. It had no name when I found it, but I call it ‘At Benediction.’ The Signora told me that it was rude and unfinished; but no matter.” She read:

AT BENEDICTION.

“Like a dam in which the restless tide Has washed, till, grain by grain, It has sapped the solid barrier And swept it down again, The patience I have built and buttressed Like a fortress wall, Fretted and undermined, gives way, And shakes me in its fall.

“For I have vainly toiled to shun The meaner ways of life, With all their low and petty cares, Their cold and cruel strife. My brain is wild with tangled thoughts, My heart is like to burst! Baffled and foiled at every turn―― My God, I feel accursed!

“It was human help I sought for, And human help alone; Too weary I for straining To a height above my own. But thy world, with all its creatures, holds Nor help nor hope for me; I fly to sanctuary, And cast myself on Thee!

* * * * *

“The priest is at the altar Praying with lifted hands, And, girdled round with living flame, The veilèd Presence stands. Wouldst thou kindle in our dying hearts Some new and pure desire, That thou com’st, my Lord, so wrapt about In robes of waving fire?

“Hast thou come, indeed, for blessing, O silent, awful Host? Thou One with the Creator, One with the Holy Ghost! Hast thou come, indeed, for blessing, O pitying Son of Man? For if that thou wilt bless me, Who is there that can ban?

“Hast thou come, indeed, for blessing, Within whose knowledge rest The labyrinthine ways of life, The cares of every breast? My doubting hope would fain outshake Her pinions, if she durst; For if truly thou wilt bless me, I cannot feel accursed!

“The _Tantum Ergo_ rises In a chorus glad and strong, And, waking in their airy height, The bells join in the song. And priest, and bells, and people, As one, in loud accord, Are pouring forth their praises Of the Sacramental Lord.

“’Tis as though, from out of sorrow stepping, And a darksome way, The singers’ eyes had caught the dawn Of the celestial day. ’Tis as though, behind them casting off Each clogging human load, These happy creatures, singing, walked The open heav’nly road.

“The hymn is stilled, and only The bells ring on above. Oh! bless me, God of mercy; Have mercy, God of love! For I have fought a cruel life, And fallen in the fray. Oh! bless me with a blessing That shall sweep it all away!

* * * * *

“It is finished. From the altar The priest is stepping down; His incense-perfumed silver train Brushes my sombre gown. The mingled crowd of worshippers Are going as they came; And the altar-candles drop to darkness, Tiny flame by flame.

“Silence and softly-breathing Peace Float downward, hand in hand, And either side the threshold, As guardian angels stand. I see their holy faces, And fear no face of man; For when my God has blessed me, Who is there that can ban?”

The Signora rose rather hastily. “If we are going to Monte Compatri this afternoon, we have no time to linger about reading rhymes,” she said.

They went out into the sunshine, already burning hot, and stole along, one by one, in the shadow of the high wall, walking over crowds of little pale, pink morning-glories, that crept humbly on the ground, not knowing themselves to be vines with a power to rise and climb to the height of a man, any more than dear Hans Andersen’s ugly duck knew that he was a swan, though at one point they might have seen, through an opening in the stonework, better-instructed morning-glories climbing hedge and shrub, and blowing out a rhythmic joy through their great white trumpets far up in the air. The greatest pride or aspiration these little creatures seemed capable of was when, now and then, one grew, breath by breath, over some small obstacle in its path, and bloomed with its pretty pink cheek against a gray bit of stone. The whole ground blushed softly with their sweet humility.

They entered the shaded avenue that circles the lower part of the town, and saw the beautiful city climbing on the one hand, and the beautiful Campagna spread out on the other; passed the little wooden _chalet_ where Garibaldi was holding his court――a wooden house is such a wonder in Italy!――and the public garden, sweet with the infantine breath and bright with the infantine hues of countless petunias, and at length found refuge in Villa Torlonia.

Thick and dark, the lofty trees knit their branches over the seats where the travellers sat and looked at the grand fountain-front, with its stone eagle and rows of huge stone vases along the top, and its beautiful cascade and basin in the centre. At either side this cascade, in the ten or twelve niches, tall stone vases overflowed with wild-flowers that had once overflowed with water, the masks above still holding between their dry lips the pipes from which the sunny streams had sprung. Far above could be seen, in the rich green gloom of overarching trees, cascade after cascade dancing down the steep slope, and, farther yet, the top of a great column of water that marked the uppermost fountain.

“It is too late to go up now,” the Signora said; “but you can see the way. It goes round in a circling avenue, or up the steps that are at each side of the ten cascades. I think there are ten. But the steps at the right are constantly wet with the spray, and covered with ferns and moss. You go up at the left, which the sun sometimes touches, and which is always dry. Below here, too, there are two ways of going up, either by the parting avenues or by the little dark door you see beside the cascade. That door leads through a dim passage, where the walls are all a green tremble with maidenhair fern growing as thick as feathers on a bird, and up a little dim winding stair that brings you out beside the stone eagle there. I gathered one of those ferns once that was half a yard long. You see they build palaces here for waters as well as for princes.”

The day went by like a dream, steeped in dazzling light, embalmed with the odors of flowers growing in a luxuriance and beauty new to their northern eyes, sprinkled over with a ceaseless fountain-spray, sung through by countless larks, and made magnificent by palace after palace, and by constantly-recurring and incomparable views. For many a year to come they would remember the honey-snow of the orange-trees and the clustered flames of the pomegranates; they would compare their rose-bushes with the tree which, in one of these gardens, held its tea-roses nodding over their heads, nor love their own shyer gardens the less, indeed; and in their trim walks, and loath and delicate blooming, they would sometimes think with longing of the careless profusion of the land where the best of nature and the best of art dwelt together in the familiar and graceful intercourse of daily life.

An hour before sunset they were again in their carriage, and, after a short drive, found themselves following the long loops of the road that lead leisurely up the side of Monte Compatri, through the rich woods, through the pure and exquisitely invigorating air, with all the world unrolling itself again before their eyes in a view almost equal to that of Tusculum.

They were obliged to alight in the piazza of the fountain; for the steep and narrow streets did not admit of carriages. From this piazza the streets straggled, climbing and twisting, breaking constantly into little flights of stairs, and sometimes ending in a court or at a door.

“Prepare to be stared at,” the Signora said, as they took their way up the _Via Lunga_. “We are the only ladies in the town whose headgear is not a handkerchief; and as for Mr. Vane, they are very likely to take him for Prince Borghese. And, come to think of it,” she said, looking at him attentively, “you are very much like the prince, Mr. Vane.”

The gentleman smiled quietly, without answering. He recollected what the Signora had forgotten――that she had once expressed the greatest admiration for Prince Borghese. He took the lady’s parasol and travelling-bag from her hand, and offered his arm, which the steep way and her fatigue made acceptable, and the two girls followed, searching on every side with bright and curious eyes, and murmuring little exclamations to each other. The irregular stone houses, so near each other, face to face, that one could easily toss a ball from window to window across the street, were quite vacant, except for pigeons that flew in at the windows, or a cat that might be seen sleeping on a chair or window-ledge, or, perhaps, for a few hens searching for crumbs. The families were all out of doors. In one little corner portico sat a handsome woman, with her dark hair beautifully plaited, and a bright handkerchief laid over her massive shoulders. Her hands were folded in her lap, and she sat smiling, chatting with a neighbor now and then, and enjoying a conscious queenship of the place. At either side of her was a young girl, slim, dark, and bright, a mere slip of the mother. These girls kept their eyes cast down, and appeared to think only of their knitting. On the next step was Carlin’s group. Further on, a young mother steadied her year-old child between her knees and a chair, while she darned a stocking. One perceived that the whole and snowy-white stockings worn even by the poorest were not kept in order without constant care and labor. Near by, an old woman with a distaff spun flax, and entertained a company of men with her lively talk. This antique goddess was, perhaps, the wit of the place. She was, however, in no manner allied to the graces; for the thin gray hair gathered tightly with a comb to the top of her head, and entirely uncovered, and the white kerchief knotted round her neck, instead of being draped in the becoming Italian fashion, showed that she had long since ceased to hold by even the shadow of a personal charm. Outside the door of a little _café_, the only one in the place, half a dozen men sat at tables, drinking coffee and smoking, while on the door-step a man with a furnace and rotary stove, and a basket of charcoal beside him, roasted coffee to keep up the supply, lazily turning the crank while he listened to the gossip going on at the tables. On a neighboring step were gathered several women in a little sewing-circle. To these came a woman up the street, bearing on her head a tub covered over with nodding fern-leaves, which she set down on the wide top of the balustrade. The circle suspended their work while the woman displayed a sample of her wares――twelve frogs run on to a stick. She was met with shrugs and exclamations of disapproval.

“Poor frogs!” said Isabel. “They look like little white babies.”

They were very poor little babies indeed, thin and small as spiders.

The frog-merchant, nothing disconcerted, laid aside her first sample and displayed another. “Oh! those are better,” the women cried, and immediately began to chaffer about the price.

Children swarmed everywhere. The close little town was as full of them as the shoe where the old woman we all know so well dwelt with her tribe of young ones. It did not need a powerful imagination to picture the place boiling over like a pot some day, with a many-colored froth of _bambini_ down the mountain-side. It was out of the question that there should be room for the rising generation to stay in the town when they should have become a risen generation; for they were six or seven in a family, and already the houses were full.

“Perhaps one of them will go to America, and set up on some sidewalk a furnace for roasting chestnuts,” Bianca said. “And perhaps, some day, ten or fifteen years hence, we may stop and ask such a person what part of Italy he came from, and he will answer, ‘From Monte Compatri’; and we will say, ‘Ah! we have been there, at such a time; and perhaps it was you we saw playing in _Via Lunga_ or in the _piazza_?’ and he will brighten an instant, and then, all at once, begin to cry. And Isabel will almost cry for him, and will give him her best handkerchief to wipe his tears away, perhaps wiping them for him; and I will buy all his chestnuts, which will be cold by the time we get home, and papa will slip some money into his hand, and ask him if he wants work to do, and we will all tell him where we live, and to come to us if he should get into trouble. And then we will go home and talk for all the rest of the day about nothing but Italy, and that day we went up Monte Compatri. And Isabel will insist that she recognizes the fellow perfectly, and try to coax papa to take him for a gardener or something.”

“And then,” resumed Mr. Vane, continuing the story, “we shall have the lazy vagabond coming to us every day begging, and we shall miss things out of the room where he is left alone a few minutes, and Isabel will give him my clothes, till I shall have nothing left to wear.”

“Meantime, what will the Signora be doing?” that lady demanded, finding herself left out. “Is she to have no part?”

She did not see the pleasant glance that fell on her from the eyes of the gentleman at her side. She was looking down, a little hurt, she hardly knew why. For was it not a matter understood that her home was in Italy, and theirs in America?

“Why, you,” said Isabel――“you will be in _Casa Ottant’Otto_, thousands of miles away, and we shall be writing you all about it.”

“Not so!” Mr. Vane said. “She will be with us at the time, I think, and will correct all our mistakes, and reward all our well-doing with her approbation.”

“There, that sounds comfortable,” the lady said, smiling. “I was really feeling neglected and left out in the cold.”

They had come to the street that encircles the town, and on the outside of which a row of houses hangs on the mountain-edge. In one of these they were to spend the night, and, as she spoke, the Signora looked up brightly, and beckoned some one in a window above to come down and open the door for them.

Mr. Vane spoke rather hastily in answer to her remark, and apparently for her ear alone. “If you should be outside, the cold will then be inside the circle,” he said. “It is you who are to choose.”

“Oh! thank you,” she replied lightly. “And now mind the steps. They are rather dark.”

The street from which they entered this house was so narrow, and the houses so joined, that they seemed to be still in the heart of the town; but when they had passed the dusky stairs, and entered the long, low _sala_ at the head of them, they found the place like a nest in a tree-top. The mountain-side dropped sheer from under the very windows, and the view swept round from Rome and the sea to Palestrina and the mountains.

In this _sala_ the whole family of the _padrone_ had assembled to welcome and stare at the strangers before giving the room up to their use. A dozen or so smiling faces, full of good-will and curiosity, clustered about without the slightest sign of any thought that they might be intruding, or that there was to be any limit to the free use of their eyes. An old woman leaning on a cane muttered unintelligible blessings and made innumerable little bows right and left, a hale young matron talked and welcomed, a servant smiled unceasingly, a young girl with a baby in her arms asked abrupt questions in a loud voice, and children of all ages filled up the gaps.

The young ladies resigned their clothes to examination, and began shyly petting the little ones, and the Signora gave orders for their entertainment. While she was talking the servant and two of the boys ran skurrying out of the room and presently returned with an air of great pride, bearing in their hands beautiful white pigeons, which they caressed while displaying.

The young ladies admired them and smoothed their snowy plumage, without being in the least aware why they had been brought.

“They are for our dinner to-morrow,” the Signora remarked with great composure.

There was a little duet of dismayed exclamations. “I thought they were family pets!” Bianca said, recoiling.

“And so they are, my dear,” was the reply. “They pet them up to the moment of killing them, and praise while they are eating them. Their fondness never ceases. And now let us take off our bonnets and have supper.”

The room was long, low, and paved with coarse red bricks. The ceiling, crossed by several large beams, was papered in compartments representing squares of blue sky with light clouds floating over, and a bird or two here and there in the space, and the flowery walls were nearly hidden by great presses holding linen, by sideboards laden with dishes, and by the high backs of patriarchal old chairs, very picturesque to look at and very penitential to sit in.

All the centre of this room was taken up by a long table, at one end of which their supper was speedily prepared. There was bread, as good as could be had in Rome, and such a salad as could scarcely be had in any city, the oil as sweet as cream, and the lettuce so crisp and delicate that it could be almost powdered between the hands. Just as they sat down a large decanter of gold-colored wine, ice-cold from the grotto, was placed before them. For in these little Italian towns, however they may lack the necessities of life, they are never without the luxuries.

They sat down merrily, only one of the family remaining to wait on them, the others hovering about the door, and watching the faces of their guests as they ate, to see how the food pleased them.

“Papa,” said Isabel, pointing to a plate before her, on which a small onion shone like silver, “do you recognize that vegetable?”

“I recog_nose_ it,” replied Mr. Vane, who would sometimes play upon words.

“Well, I propose that we agree to divide it in four parts, each a little larger than the last, the largest for you, the smallest for Bianca, and that we all eat our portions, and so find no fault with each other.”

Bianca instantly declined the invitation, and blushed deeply when they rallied her on her daintiness.

“These onions are very delicate and sweet,” the Signora said. “I used to avoid them, till one day I received a call from a personage of the most dignified position and unexceptionable manners, from whose breath I perceived, in the course of the conversation, that he had been eating these little onions. But the faint odor that reached me as he spoke was as though a rose and an onion had been grafted together. Since then I have eaten without scruple.”

But Bianca still declined, still blushing. Why? Was it that her affection for the friend ever tenderly remembered had so consecrated her to him that nothing but what was sweetest and purest must touch where his image was enshrined, whether he were present or absent? She was quite extreme enough in her sensitive delicacy for such a thought.

Supper over, they went out into a _loggia_ attached to their _sala_ and overhanging the steep mountainside, and watched the sun go down over the sea. The globe of fire had already touched the water-line, that by day showed only like a line of purple cloud, and kindled it to an intense lustre; and, as they looked, there was half a sun above the horizon, and another half visible as though seen through the transparent edge of the world over which it disappeared; then, without diminishing, it dropped out of sight, leaving an ineffable, silent glory over the scene. The fire of the sea faded to a faint gold, the rosy violet of the Campagna changed to a deep purple, and Earth, raising her shadowy hands, put aside the curtaining light of day, and looked out at the stars.

The sisters withdrew presently, and left the two elders to admire the beauties of nature at their leisure. Isabel, screened off in one corner of the _sala_, made voluminous notes of her experiences, and planned a wonderful story, into which they should all be woven. Seated on a footstool, with a brass lamp hanging to the back of a chair near her, and her writing on her knees, she saw one character after another emerge from the shades and take form and individuality before her eyes, as if they grew there independent of her will. They spoke and moved of themselves, and she only looked and listened. Now and then some trait, some feature, some word, was such as she had seen in real life, but these people were not portraits, though they might have such resemblances, and even might have been suggested by persons she had known. The shades grew more and more alive, gathering into substance. Stone walls built themselves up silently and with a more than Aladdin-like celerity, and gardens burst into instantaneous bloom. If she willed the sea present, its waves rolled up to her feet in foam, or caught and tossed her in their strong arms; if she called for forests, swiftly their darkening branches shut her in, and her light feet trod their dry, crackling twigs and rich, disordered flowers. The very accidents of a great pine-cone to stumble over, or an unexpected lizard running across the path, were there. The dull walls of the room she sat in, the rough bricks under her feet, the crowded town about her, were as though they were not. She was free of the world.

O precious gift of the magical lamp! which, at a touch, calls about its possessor all that men wish, and work, and strive for of earthly good, without the pain or responsibilities of earthly possession; which gives the rose without its thorn, the wine without its lees, the friend without the doubt, the triumph without disappointment! Happy they who, when what we call real life presses too hard or becomes too dull, can put it aside for the time, and enter a world of their own, for ever beautiful and satisfying, who, walking the common street, see things unseen of common eyes, and for whom many a beauty smiles under an ugly mask.

Bianca was in no such exalted mood of fancy, but, withdrawn to the chamber she was to occupy with the Signora, was lifting the holier eyes of faith, and, with childlike simplicity and confidence, laying all her heart open to God, sending up her petitions for earthly happiness on a cloud of the Acts, said after her own manner: “O my God! I believe in thee, I hope in thee, I love thee, I thank thee, and I am sorry for having offended thee”; and then, as a thought or wish more earthly thrust itself forward, presenting it, unafraid and undoubting. Living and dead, friends and strangers, the poor, and those who had no one to pray for them――all were remembered by this tender heart; but ever, like the refrain of a song, came back the petition, “Bless, and guard from all ill of soul or body, him who is so much more to me than all other men, and, if it be thy will, give him to me for a friend and companion as long as I shall live.”

The two in the balcony, left to themselves, were talking quietly, having no mind to separate. The Signora found in the society of Mr. Vane a pleasure altogether new to her――the pleasure of being able to depend on some one. It was only now, when she was surrounded with a constant, friendly care, that she became aware how unprotected and unhelped her former life had been, and how sweet was that repose which the protected enjoy. Besides, Mr. Vane’s care was of a particularly agreeable kind. It did not, by watching and seizing on opportunities of serving, suggest the existence of an emotional care which might change to neglect, but was simply a calm readiness, which assumed, as a matter of course, that it should help when help was needed.

“I shall never be sufficiently thankful for having been led to make this European journey,” Mr. Vane said after a little silence. “It has done me good in many ways, and promises more even than it has performed as yet.”

“I am glad you say thankful instead of glad,” the Signora said, smiling. “Perhaps, too, I should say, I am thankful you say so.”

He thought a moment before speaking, and recollected that only a few months before he would not have used the word. The change had come so gradually that he had scarcely been aware of it. “Yet I believe that I always recognize the Source from which all good flows,” he resumed seriously. “At least, I never denied it. Here religion is such a household affair, one falls after awhile into the habit of expressing what before was only felt, and felt, perhaps, unconsciously.”

“It is better so,” was the reply. “We strengthen a true feeling when we give it utterance. Besides, we may thus communicate it to others.”

“One of my causes of thankfulness,” he resumed, “is that my daughters should be associated with you. I wish you could make them more like yourself, and I am sure that their admiration and affection for you will lead them naturally to imitate you and to receive your instructions willingly. They have been to me a source of great anxiety, and I feel myself utterly incapable of directing them; for, while I wish them to be modest and womanly, on the one hand, I as certainly wish them to be capable of finding in life an object and a happiness which shall not depend on any other person. It would please me to see them well married; but God forbid that an unmarried life should be for them a disappointed life! What I could do for them I have done, but with an immense self-distrust; and I have felt safer when leaving them to themselves than when interfering or seeking to guide them.”

“I should think you had done well both in guiding and in leaving them free,” the lady replied. “Many parents do too much either one way or the other. Does not the result satisfy you so far?”

She was surprised at the emotion with which he spoke, not knowing anything of his married life.

“The result is not yet. Everything depends on their marriage, or their reason for not marrying.” He hesitated, then went on, as if incapable of keeping silence longer on a subject of which he had never spoken: “The fate of their mother is to me a constant warning and a constant pain. In one respect I can save them from that; for I shall never urge them to marry, and shall never oppose any choice of theirs, unless it should be a manifestly bad one. But I cannot guard them from the tyranny of some mistaken sense of duty, or mistaken pride or delicacy which they might conceal from all the world.”

Startled by this half-revelation, his companion kept silence, waiting for him to speak. It was impossible he should not speak after such a beginning.

“I do not know which was the more deeply wronged, I or my poor Bianca,” he said presently. “It all came from the blundering coarseness of parents who overstepped, not their authority――for they never commanded her――but their power to influence, which, with one like her, was quite as strong. Their mistake has taught me to interfere and control less the gentle, silent one than the one who speaks her mind out clearly and loudly. I have always thought that the mother of my daughters had some preference which she never acknowledged. Often, more often than not, these preferences come to nothing and are soon forgotten; but not always. She did not wish to marry me, but she consented without hesitation, and I believed that the slight reserve would vanish with time. Perhaps she believed it too. Her conscience was as pure as snow. She did perfectly, with all her power, what she believed to be her duty. But that preoccupation, whether for another person or for a single life, was never vanquished. You have, perhaps, chased a butterfly when you were a child, beaten it with your hat from flower to flower, and at last imprisoned it under a glass; or you have caught a hummingbird that has strayed into your room, and flown from you as long as it had strength. Neither resisted when it was caught; but the down was brushed off the butterfly’s wings, and the bird was dead in your hand. My wife omitted nothing that a good will could accomplish. She was grateful for my efforts to make her happy; she was calm, and even cheerful; and I am sure that she never said to herself, even, that she was sorry for having married me. But the only beaming smile I ever saw on her face was when she knew that she was going to die.”

His voice trembled a little, and he stopped a moment, as if to steady it before going on.

“Was not I wronged too? Was not the unwilling jailer as unfortunate as the unwilling prisoner? I say nothing of my own personal disappointment, though that was great. The mutual confidence, the delightful companionship, the perfect union, to which I had looked forward, and which were my ideal of marriage――where were they? In place of them I never lost the feeling that I had a victim for ever at my side. I felt as if I had been unmanly and cruel; yet the fault was not mine. She gave herself to me in all that she could, yet she was never mine.”

He paused again; yet this time his voice trembled more in resuming than in leaving off his story.

“I rejoiced in her release; and I look forward to no future meeting with her that shall be different from that meeting which we are permitted to look forward to with all the good in heaven. If other husbands and wives expect some closer partnership in heaven, I neither expect nor wish it. I have resigned her absolutely and for ever. I do not think that I am morbid. You should know her peculiar character to understand well how I could be made to feel that crystal wall that always stood between us. I felt it so that I really believe, if the children were not demonstrative in their affection for me, I should not have the courage to show any fondness for them. I used, when they were little ones, to look at them sometimes with a kind of terror when I came home, to see if they would smile brightly, and run to me as if they were glad from the heart to see me. I always waited for them, and, thank God! they never failed me. Duty and submission are there, but a perfect affection makes them almost unnecessary.”

Finishing, he glanced for the first time at his companion, and saw that she was in tears.

“My dear friend!” he exclaimed, “how selfish I have been! Forgive me!”

“No,” she replied gently, wiping her eyes, “you are not selfish. It seems to me that you are one of the least selfish of men. I am glad you have confidence enough in me to tell me such a story, which, I can well believe, you seldom or never speak of. It is quite natural that you should confide it to some one, and you could not expect any one to hear it unmoved.”

What an exquisite moonlight covered the world, and made a fairy-like, silvery day in the little balcony where the two sat! The air sparkled with it, and one tear still hanging to the Signora’s eyelashes shone like a diamond in its beams.

“You are the first person to whom I have ever spoken on this subject, and the only person to whom I could confide it,” Mr. Vane said. “Can you guess why, Signora?”

She looked at him with a startled glance and read his meaning, and, in the first astonishment and confusion, was utterly incapable of replying.

“Shall I tell you why?” he asked.

She rose hastily, blushing and distressed.

“Do not say any more!” she exclaimed, and was on the point of leaving him abruptly, but checked herself, and, turning in the open low window, held out her hand to him. “You have called me friend. Let us remain friends,” she said.

He touched the hand, and released it without a word, and they separated.

Half an hour afterward Bianca’s face peeped out into the moonlight. “Are you still here, papa?” she said, and went to him. “Good-night, dear.”

He embraced her gently, and echoed her good-night, but did not detain her a moment.

“What! papa romancing here all alone?” exclaimed Isabel in her turn. “It isn’t good for your complexion nor for your disposition. Late hours and too much thinking make one sad.”

“Therefore you should go to bed directly,” was his reply.

She kissed him merrily and left him alone.

TO BE CONTINUED.

MIVART’S CONTEMPORARY EVOLUTION.[100]

If in our contemporary evolution a great genius should appear, worthy to continue the work of St. Thomas, it would be requisite that he should combine in himself the gifts and acquirements of a metaphysician, a theologian, and a master of natural science. We accentuate strongly the last of these requisites, because we are not so much in need of pure metaphysics and theology, possessing both already in a state of high perfection and completeness, as we are of the mixed science in which the relations of the higher and the lower orders of being, truth and good, are developed and manifested. There have been some men already, since the modern period began, who have combined metaphysical and natural science in a remarkable degree. Such a man was Leibnitz. The famous Jesuit Boscovich was perhaps superior intellectually, as he certainly was morally, even to this prodigy of talent and learning. He was a great mathematician and physicist, a great metaphysician, and a great statesman, besides being eminent in Christian perfection and apostolic zeal. Balmes was a man of a similar stamp, though especially eminent in social science. Among living men a high place belongs to Father Bayma as a metaphysician, mathematician, and physicist, although he has published little under his own name, except his remarkable work on _Molecular Mechanics_. Such men are invaluable at the present time. And for all those who are aiming at a thorough education for important positions in the service of the church and humanity, the conjoined cultivation of these various branches of science, in the due proportion for acquiring what we have called the mixed science, is of the highest importance. We are happy to know that it is not neglected, and is likely to be advanced to a higher and more extensive state of excellence in the near future. One who has the chance of looking over the theses in physics which are prepared for the examinations at Woodstock will be convinced that there is one Catholic seminary, at least, in this country where such matters receive due attention. The articles published from time to time in the Catholic reviews of Europe, as well as an occasional volume from the pen of a Catholic professor, are another evidence of what we have stated. The English hierarchy, aided by the band of gifted and learned priests and laymen who adorn the Catholic Church of England, is distinguishing itself in the promotion of this scientific culture. Dr. Mivart is one of this band. We have, in former numbers, taken occasion to notice several of his works, and express our high estimation of the courage and ability with which he is constantly laboring for the advancement of true, Catholic science. Dr. Mivart’s specialty is natural science; but he is not a mere physicist or scientist. He has the genuine philosophical spirit, and shows in his writings that he has studied to some purpose metaphysics, theology and ethics, history, politics, and _belles-lettres_. The essays contained in the volume we are at present reviewing were first published in the _Contemporary Review_, with the exception of the last one, which appeared in the _Dublin Review_. We propose, at present, to do little more than give an analysis of their contents and of the author’s argument.

The title informs us that his topic of discussion is, “Some great Social Changes.” These social changes, in his idea, are very deep and universal alterations in the social fabric which have been going on during the entire post-mediæval period, are still in progress, and are likely to proceed much further as time goes on. It is in view of their bearing on the perpetuity and action of the Catholic Church that they are considered. In the introductory chapter a general view is taken of their nature, origin, causes and probable development, and the plan to be followed in pursuing the particular scope of the essay is laid down. The second chapter is on Political Evolution. The third presents the three ideals of social organization, which are proposed by as many different classes of political philosophers: 1. The pagan, or monistic. 2. The civic, or that which is based on some maxims of natural right and expediency. 3. The theocratic or mediæval. The fourth chapter treats of Scientific Evolution, the fifth of Philosophical and the sixth of Æsthetic Evolution.

We may as well premise a statement of Dr. Mivart’s idea of evolution before we proceed to analyze his argument. It is a procession from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, whose origin is God as first cause, whose ultimatum is God as final cause or end, whose principle of continuity is the intelligent volition of God as ruler, embracing all the phenomena of the universe, physical, biological, political, moral, and religious, in one enchainment of activities, which rise in a graduated series from the lowest to the highest toward their Ideal in God.[101] A similar idea is laid by Leo at the foundation of his _Universal History_: “The Christian view of the history of the world takes all facts, not as something new superadded by the power of man to the creative act of God, but only as a further _evolution_ of the facts of creation.”[102] In the introductory chapter Dr. Mivart begins by noting the fact that there are crises or great epochs in this historical evolution, and expressing his conviction that the present is one of these, and particularly marked by being a period of _conscious_ development. As the outcome of the changes occurring in the past, he traces its logical connection with the periods of the French Revolution, the revolt of the sixteenth century, the Renaissance, and the conflict of Philip the Fair with the Holy See. The process of this evolution is designated as a struggle of reviving paganism to reject the domination of mediæval theocracy, which, gradually obtaining success, is likely to be carried to a much further point than it has yet reached. Two questions are proposed for consideration: 1. “The effect on Christianity of the further development of the great movement.” 2. “The probable result of the renewed conflict between such a modified Christianity and a revived paganism.”

In order clearly and fully to understand the author’s method of treating these questions, it is necessary to place and keep distinctly in view with whom he is arguing and on what principles. It is not with professed Christians or Catholics that he primarily intends to discuss these topics, on their principles, but with those who are mere naturalists, and who admit nothing but what is evident or provable by purely scientific and rational arguments. The truth of revelation and the Catholic faith is therefore left on one side, and nothing is taken into consideration except “obvious or admitted tendencies of known natural forces and laws.” It is the author’s purpose to extort from the enemies of revelation and the Catholic Church, by using their own principles and ideas, evidence for the ability of the church to cope with, overcome, and bend to her own superior force of intelligence and will the new and hostile environments, political, scientific, and philosophical, by which she is surrounded. In respect to the political aspect of the question, he argues that, supposing the changes in this order to proceed in their evolution until a complete disintegration of the mediæval, theocratic system is effected, an interior, latent capacity will be evolved in the church, by which she will be integrated and strengthened for a more complete and extensive triumph than was ever before achieved. Briefly, his argument amounts to this: Violent, red-republican, or despotic subversions of the liberty of the masses and social order cannot be lasting. Some kind of basis for liberty with order must be found in natural law and right, consisting of maxims of ethical truth and expediency. The political maxims of England and the United States are referred to for illustration, and the author anticipates for the English-speaking nations, their maxims of policy and their language, an universal, predominating influence in the future. Now, the church, he argues, can avail herself of this liberty. The laboring classes, once liberated from and raised above that misery and oppression which are the active cause of their hostility against both the hierarchy and the aristocracy, can be won over to the cause of the church. Religious orders, founded on poverty and labor, whose members are drawn from these classes and associated with them, can gain new life, power, and extension. Opposition and persecution will only purify and invigorate the intellectual and moral constitution of the church, and intensify its unity of organic life and action. That part of society which is corrupted by pagan immorality will be weakened and diminished by its errors and vices, while the Catholic portion will become always stronger and more numerous by the effect of its ethical maxims carried out in practice. The past history of the church enables us to augur for her future history that there are no circumstances, however difficult and apparently destructive to her life, which she cannot surmount, and over which she cannot achieve a complete triumph, in virtue of the organic strength which she possesses. At the end of his long and minute process of argument, in which he says he has “endeavored dispassionately to estimate what, at the very utmost, must be the destructive effects on Christianity of the greatest amount of anti-theocratic change which can possibly be anticipated,” the author considers that a Catholic may be fairly entitled to express the following conviction: “By the continuance, then, of this evolutionary process, there is plainly to be discerned in the distant future a triumph of the church compared with which that of mediæval Christendom was but a transient adumbration――a triumph brought about by moral means alone, by the slow process of exhortation, example, and individual conviction, after every error has been freely propagated, every denial freely made, and every rival system provided with a free field for its display――a triumph infinitely more glorious than any brought about by the sword, and fulfilling at last the old pre-Christian prophecies of the kingdom of God upon earth.”[103]

One-half of the volume is taken up with the consideration of political evolution and the three political ideals. Nevertheless, the author considers that the questions respecting science and philosophy are much the most important. For, although he concludes from his course of reasoning that political changes will be harmless to the church, and even give her increased strength, coherence, and efficiency, so that a Catholic may reasonably expect for her all that triumph which he thinks her Author has foretold, in spite of such changes; yet, in arguing with an unbeliever, such a ground of confidence cannot be assumed. If the claims of the church to authority, and the dogmatic truth of her doctrine, can be successfully assailed by science and philosophy, then scientific and philosophical evolution must be fatal to Christianity, and political changes will facilitate and hasten the catastrophe, though they are powerless to produce it by their own solitary, unaided force. Here we arrive at that part of the subject which is to us the most interesting, and which the author has treated in the most satisfactory manner. On this field Dr. Mivart is at home; for it is his own peculiar ground, where he has already labored with eminent success, and where we confidently hope he will hereafter gather a still greater and richer harvest.

We anticipate a great revolution in the attitude of what is in common parlance rather incorrectly called “science”――_i.e._, the complex of various branches of physics――toward the Catholic Church. A hostile attitude is wholly unnatural. Second-class scientists, sciolists in knowledge, men of an imperfect and one-sided culture, are intellectually swamped in the morass of facts, theories, and hypotheses in which they pass their lives. The imperfect beginnings of natural sciences present phases of apparent contradiction to revealed truths. Imperfect theological systems, and opinions which rest on merely human authority, but are erroneously supposed to be revealed doctrines, frequently clash with science, or with scientific hypotheses which are more or less probable or plausible. But there is in genuine natural science, in the methods by which it proceeds, in the spirit which actuates its great masters, something eminently favorable to genuine sacred science and akin to it. The wild, anti-Christian hypotheses which are put forth under the name of science are not unfrequently crushed by the masters in science, even though they are not themselves Christians. Inductive science is modest, calm, impartial, slow, and just, in its procedure. It is like the law in its accepting and examining evidence on all sides of every question. The masters in science who are unbelievers are so in spite of, and not because of, their scientific spirit and method. If they are actively hostile to Christianity, it is because of some false philosophy which is accidentally connected with their science, or by reason of their ignorance of real Christianity. No false system can stand the application of the genuine principles and method of scientific inquiry. It is precisely by that method and those principles that the truth of the Catholic Church is established, corroborated, and confirmed. An amiable friend, a Unitarian minister, once remarked to us that men’s minds were going back, by a circuitous route, to the Catholic Church. This is what Dr. Mivart endeavors to show. Having tried all false routes and traced up all errors to their ending in No-Land, men work back across lots and through thickets to the old travelled road which they abandoned through caprice.

In respect to physical science, Dr. Mivart’s principal line of argument goes to show that it has nothing to do directly with theology, because it is conversant exclusively with “phenomenal conceptions.” Facts as to the coexistences and sequences of phenomena do not furnish the philosophy by which they are to be explained. This philosophy, and the theology which rests on it as its natural basis, have their own distinct sphere. It is only where theology affirms something as a revealed truth respecting facts of this kind――_e.g._, that the sun revolves around the earth, that creation began four thousand years before Christ, and was completed in six literal days――that it comes upon the common ground where it can clash with physical science. In regard to Catholic doctrine, he shows that such affirmations are but few, and that none have ever been made into dogmas by the authority of the church which have been afterwards proved by scientific evidence to be false. The complete revolution in cosmology effected by the demonstration of the Copernican system is referred to as an instance of apparent conflict between science and dogma which turned out to be no conflict at all. So, also, the apparent conflict between evolutionary biology and Christian dogma, which the author has more fully discussed in other works, is succinctly treated. The antagonism between physics and theology, though of long standing, is accidental, and “physical science should be considered, alike by the philosophic Christian and anti-Christian, as neutral and indifferent.” The only influence, therefore, which physical science can have on Christianity is through the philosophy which is connected with it. It is philosophy which affords the real battle-ground for the final and decisive conflict between the Christian and anti-Christian forces. Notwithstanding the narrow-minded, ignorant, and absurd contempt for philosophy which many modern scientists express, and which has been quite common for some time past, the author thinks that the scientists themselves, even by their destructive efforts, are aiding powerfully in bringing about a great philosophic reaction. The author most justly observes that fundamental questions of philosophy underlie all physical science, and that, for this reason, the great development and wide popularity of physical science must drive many minds into philosophy. Reviving paganism, which is only a return to the old Aryan predilection for pantheistic naturalism, and is theoretically based on ancient philosophical ideas revived in new dresses by modern sophists, can only come into that internecine conflict with Christianity, after which it pants, on the ground of philosophy. Both sides must therefore give themselves to philosophical study and discussion, and they have already begun to do so. The supreme question, therefore, in respect to the movement of contemporary evolution, is the philosophical direction it is likely to take.

We arrive, then, at the last topic but one considered by Dr. Mivart――viz., Philosophic Evolution, and the process by which he endeavors to “form a final judgment as to the result of the great conflict between reviving paganism and the Christian church.”

In Dr. Mivart’s opinion――one in which we need not say we most heartily concur――what is needed is a return, “not to a philosophy, but to _the_ philosophy. For if metaphysics are possible, there is not, and never was or will be, more than one philosophy which, properly understood, unites all speculative truths and eliminates all errors: _the_ philosophy of _the_ philosopher――Aristotle.”[104] Moreover, he declares his conviction that evolution will infallibly bring about this return. In his view, scholastic philosophy simply went out of fashion in the same way that mediæval architecture came to be despised as barbarous, and will again resume its sway just as the architectural glories of northern Europe have come to be universally appreciated. One or two testimonies to the grandeur of the mediæval philosophy from distinguished opponents are given. The widespread and earnest revival of the same among Catholics all over the world is a fact too patent to need any proof. Dr. Mivart’s almost chivalric enthusiasm for scholastic philosophy is of itself a signal instance of a movement in this direction from a new quarter――_i.e._, from the ranks of the devotees of physical science. It would seem that he himself has been led through science to philosophy, and therefore his views and reasonings on the matter have a peculiar interest. He presents two distinct phases of the question. One represents the inability of the anti-Christian scientists to construct a philosophy which may successfully oppose Christianity. The other presents positive tendencies in scientific evolution toward the peripatetic philosophy of the Christian schools. In respect to the first, his line of argument shows that these anti-Christian scientists are at war with each other and can never agree upon any one system; furthermore, that their reasonings end in absolute scepticism, and thus undermine their own foundations. Human nature and common sense invariably cause a reaction against idiotic and suicidal systems of this sort. Even the cultivation of natural science, therefore, must produce a tendency to seek for a satisfactory system of psychology and ontology. And as the philosophy which Des Cartes brought into vogue, ending with the transcendentalism of Kant and his successors, is no better than a philosophy of scepticism, it seems that a return to the mediæval and Grecian school, to Aristotle and St. Thomas, is unavoidable. There is but one other system which holds out the promise of a refuge from materialism and scepticism――that of the Ontologists. This system, however, is too contrary to the spirit and method of the natural sciences to offer any attractions to minds seeking for a synthesis of the spiritual and the material. The exposition of positive tendencies toward Catholic philosophy in the evolutionary processes of modern thought is on too abstruse and extensive a range to admit of being more compendiously treated than it actually is in the author’s text. We will, therefore, content ourselves with quoting his own words, in which he summarily expresses the result of his arguments in his conclusion: “Glancing backward over the course we have traversed, it seems borne in upon us that the logical development of that process which Philip the Fair began is probably advancing, however slowly, to a result very generally unforeseen. But if such result as that here indicated be the probable outcome of philosophical evolution, Christianity has once more evidently nothing whatever to fear from it. A philosophy which as a complement unites in one all other systems will harmonize with a religion which as a complement synthesizes all other religions, and not only religions properly so called, but atheism also. Atheism, pantheism, and pure deism, running their logical course and mutually refuting each other, find an ultimate synthesis in Christianity, as we have before found them to do in nature. Christianity affirms the truth latent in atheism――namely, that God, as He is, is unimaginable and inscrutable by us; in other words, no such God as we can _imagine_ exists. It also affirms the truth in pantheism, that God acts in every action of every created thing, and that in him we live and move and are. Finally, it also asserts the truths of deism, but by its other assertions escapes the objections to which deism is liable from opposing systems. Similarly, Christianity also effects a synthesis between theism and the worship of humanity, and that by the path, not of destruction, but through the nobler conception of ‘taking the manhood into God.’

“Our investigations have led us to what we might have _à priori_ anticipated――the conclusion that the highest and most intellectual power is that which must ultimately dominate the inferior forces. Neither political nor scientific developments can avail against the necessary consequences of philosophical evolution. No mistake can be greater than that of supposing that philosophy is but a mental luxury for the few. An implicit, unconscious philosophy possesses the mind and influences the conduct of every peasant. Metaphysical doctrines, sooner or later, filter down from the cultured few to the lowest social strata, and become, for good or ill, the very marrow of the bones, first of a school, then of a society, ultimately of a nation. The course of general philosophy, it is here contended, is now returning to its legitimate channel after a divergence of some three centuries’ duration. This return cannot affect prejudicially the Christian church, but must strengthen and aid it; and thus that beneficial action upon it of political and scientific evolution, before represented as probable, will be greatly intensified, and the great movement of the RENAISSANCE hereafter take its place as the manifestly efficient promoter of a new development of the Christian organism such as the first twenty centuries of its life afforded it no opportunity to manifest.”[105]

The author’s last chapter, on Æsthetic Evolution, is a kind of appendix to the essay――which is really concluded with the passage just now quoted――but it is nevertheless an ingenious and elaborate essay in itself. The author begins by remarking that the question of evolution in religion is one which would furnish an interesting subject of inquiry. He then pays a very high but just tribute to the genius of Dr. Newman, whose influence over Dr. Mivart’s mind may be traced in all his writings, as the one who, in his great essay on Development, has elucidated with a master-hand the evolutionary process within the church, and anticipated the doctrines of Spencer, of Darwin, and of Haeckel. With a passing allusion to the great Vatican decree as the culmination of this process and the keystone of the great arch of civil and religious liberty; and to the two distinct though intermixed processes of evolution outside the church, one simply pagan, the other sectarian; and to the process of disruption and dissolution which is tending to carry the adherents of the sects either toward anti-theism or toward the church――the author turns aside to consider a subject closely connected with religious evolution: the probable effect of the great modern movement of contemporary evolution upon Christian art. Most of his remarks are upon architecture, although he touches lightly upon music, painting, and sculpture. In music he appears to give his vote for St. Gregory and Palestrina. In respect to painting and sculpture, he anticipates progress in these arts by the blending of the best elements of the Preraphaelite period and those of the Renaissance. In handling the topic of architecture he analyzes the arguments for and against both the Gothic and Italian styles, and ends by declining to advocate the side of the exclusive champions of either of the two styles. After discussing some of the general principles of the art, he proposes a return to the style which prevailed before the introduction of the pointed arch, as a starting point for an improved style combining some features of the Gothic with some others of the Romanesque style of architecture. One consideration which he presents respecting the use of stained-glass windows strikes us as especially worthy of attention. As ornaments and as objects of devotion, the paintings upon glass in church-windows are far inferior to statues and pictures, and they nevertheless exclude them and occupy their place by reason of the quality of the light which is reflected through stained glass. It is desirable, therefore, to find some way of making the windows beautiful and ornamental as well as useful, and at the same time admitting light of that quality and in that direction which is requisite in a church decorated with paintings and statuary. Dr. Mivart says: “In the first place, the absence of any rigid rule of symmetry will allow the admission of light just wherever it may be required. Secondly, the windows may be of any shape found the most convenient――square, elongated, and narrow windows, rose-windows or semi-circular windows, as in the nave of Bonn cathedral. They may also be made ornamental by mullions, while tracery need not by any means be confined to the upper part of each window, since each window may be all tracery, the stone-work being of such thickness as may combine strength and security with a copious admission of light. The absence of that beautiful but self-contradictory feature, _brilliant_ stained glass, will allow an ample supply of light without too great a sacrifice of wall-space, and without any impairment of stability. Not that the glazing should not be ornamental and artistic; the pieces of glass might be so designed that their lead frame-work may form elegant patterns, while the glass itself, of delicate grays and half-tints, will afford a wide scope for the skilful designer.”[106]

Finally, the author winds up by expressing his belief in a future development of Christian art in language which we condense a little from his concluding pages: “_Nullum tempus occurrit ecclesiæ!_ The ever-fruitful mother of beauty and of truth, of holy aspirations and of good works, has not come to the end of her evolution even in the world of art, and it may be affirmed that there appear to be grounds for thinking that in the whole field of art, music, painting, sculpture, and architecture, our successors may witness a vast, new, complex, and stable artistic integration of a special and distinctly Christian character――a self-consciousness, as it were, in Christian art such as never was before, and which will appropriately serve to externally clothe and embody that vast and magnificent Christian development for which all phases of evolution are preparing the way, and to which Christians may look forward with joy and hope as the one supreme end of the whole evolutionary process, so far as the Author of nature has revealed to us his purposes either by the lessons which the universe of mind and matter displays before our eyes, or by supernatural revelation.”[107]

The essay of which we have given an analysis, and all the other works of Dr. Mivart, are well worthy of attentive perusal. Their great merit lies in the fact that they break up new ground and lead the way to investigations in new fields of thought. Of course it could not be expected that subjects so wide-spreading and far-reaching as those which the author has discussed in this volume should be thoroughly and completely handled within so small a compass. Each chapter would require an elaborate volume even for the full elucidation of the author’s own ideas. Whatever difference of opinion may exist in regard to particular views and theories, there is one grand, predominant idea pervading them all, in which Dr. Mivart expresses in his own peculiar way what is a very common belief and expectation of great numbers of the most illustrious champions of the Catholic Church in the present eventful period.

That this is really a great and critical era in the church’s history, and that present changes and events, however painful and unpromising they may be, are preparing the way for one of her grand and decisive triumphs, is a general conviction in the minds of her devoted adherents, the truth of which her most embittered enemies seem to forebode with a dread anticipation. All things created by God have a potentiality in them which is infinite. Much more, the greatest of his works on this earth, the church. The mere observation of what she has done, and of the capabilities which are contained within her, looked at from a purely rational viewing-point, is sufficient for prognosticating a future evolution to which no limits are assignable. A Catholic must, however, look upon her origin, her past action, and her future destiny as belonging to the supernatural order. She has been created to fulfil God’s purpose. That his purpose is the final triumph of good over evil is certain. But, in particulars, we only know how far, how long, and in what way this triumph is decreed to take place on this earthly arena where the church is militant; in so far as the purposes of God are made manifest to us by actual history or by prophecy. The general sense of the most approved interpreters of prophecy in the sacred Scriptures justifies the expectation of some signal triumph of the church on the earth yet to come. There seems to be a presentiment in the hearts of the faithful that it is now drawing near. We have a strong warrant for attributing this presentiment to a secret movement of the Holy Spirit, in the repeated and emphatic utterances of the august and holy Vicar of Christ upon earth, our gloriously reigning Sovereign Pontiff Pius IX. As to the time, the means, the nature, and the duration of this triumph of the church upon earth, and the exact, precise sense of the unfulfilled prophecies respecting the temporal kingdom of Jesus Christ, there is room for much diversity of opinion. The great social changes and evolutionary movements of which Dr. Mivart writes present a problem to a thoughtful Christian mind very difficult of solution. “_Où allons nous!_” is the anxious exclamation of Bishop Dupanloup in respect to France, and a similar questioning of the future agitates the minds of men throughout the world. Whoever has any sagacious and well-reasoned answer to this interrogation is, therefore, likely to find eager and interested listeners, and deserves a respectful hearing. Dr. Mivart thinks that he sees the way out of present complications, and discovers signs which herald the advent of a new and long period of human history under the influence of Christianity which will be the culmination of God’s work on the earth. Whatever may be thought by different persons of this horoscope and of the signs in our present sky, all must admit the ingenuity and force of reasoning which the author has displayed, admire his chivalrous and generous spirit, and recognize the great amount of valuable knowledge and genuine truth, both in physics and metaphysics, contained in the volume now reviewed and in Dr. Mivart’s other productions.

[100] _Contemporary Evolution._ An Essay on some Recent Social Changes. By St. George Mivart. (Dedicated to the Marquis of Ripon.) Henry S. King & Co., London. 1876. (An American edition of the work is announced by the Messrs. Appleton.)

[101] See p. 194.

[102] _Lehrb. der Univ. Gesch._, vol. i. p. 17.

[103] P. 121.

[104] P. 179.

[105] P. 215.

[106] P. 247.

[107] P. 253.

THE DEVIL’S CHRISTMAS GIFT.

Let fastidious and fashionable people say what they will about shanties, there was something in Mike Roony’s humble dwelling that was really attractive. Perched on the top of a broad and lofty rock near the corner of Broadway and Forty-ninth Street, it commanded a magnificent view of the Hudson River and the Sound; and as the only way to reach it was by a flight of steps which Mike had cut in the rock, ’twas known among the neighbors by the name of Gibraltar. Some said Roony was a squatter; that he paid neither tax nor rent for the small piece of Manhattan Island which he occupied. Well, be this as it may, one thing is certain――he always declared his readiness to move when they blasted him out. Nothing grew upon this homestead――not a bush, not a weed, not a blade of grass; it was a little desert, roamed over by a goat, and swept clean by the winds, which made it their romping-ground from every quarter of the compass.

But Mike had a wife who loved flowers, and in the window fronting south stood a flower-pot wherein there bloomed a sweet red rose. Helen――for this was her name――had the true instincts of a lady, albeit her garment was not of silk and she sometimes went barefoot. She kept herself scrupulously neat――for water does not cost anything――and was fairer to behold than the flower she cherished. Born in America, of Irish parents, hers was one of those ideal faces which we not seldom meet with among American women. A freckle or two only helped to set off the perfect whiteness of her skin; her eyes had taken their hue from the blue sky of her native land, and like the raven’s wing was the color of her hair.

But although Helen knew that she was beautiful, and there was a small mirror in the shanty, she did not waste any time before it, unless, perhaps, of a Sunday morning ere going to High Mass. A true helpmate was this wife in every sense of the word. She arose betimes, no matter how cold the weather might be, to prepare her husband’s breakfast, and, if a button was missing off his coat, always found time to sew it on before he went to his work. The floor of the shanty was daily sprinkled with fresh sand; the pictures on the wall――one of the Blessed Virgin at the foot of the cross, the other of St. Joseph――were never hung awry; you saw no broken panes in the windows; and the faces of her two little children, Michael and Helen, were kept as bright and clean as her own. She never quitted home during her husband’s absence to gossip and talk scandal with other women; and, monotonous as her life may seem, ’twas a happy one. Mike, too, was happy, and no mariner homeward bound ever watched for the beacon-light on his native coast more impatiently than he watched for the light which Helen used to place in the window, whence he might see it from afar as he trudged back from his day’s work. And no matter how hard it might be raining, or snowing, or freezing, at the first glimpse of its welcome rays Mike always burst out into a merry song. In the evening she would read him to sleep with some story from the _Catholic Review_; then, when his head began to nod, she gently drew the pipe out of his mouth and whispered: “Love, ’tis bed-time.”

Oh! happy were those days――so happy that Helen would sometimes tremble; for surely they could not last for ever――otherwise it would be heaven on earth.

But, sober and inoffensive as Roony was, he was not without enemies; indeed, for very reason of his sobriety and inoffensiveness some hated him. And one evening――Christmas eve――he and his young wife were seated by the stove, talking about the Black-eye Club, whose head-quarters were in a liquor-store close by, and whose members had sworn vengeance on Mike for refusing to join them. “They have threatened to beat me,” he said; “but if they only give me fair play, I’ll be a match for the biggest of ’em.”

“Ay, fair play!” said Helen, shuddering. “Savages like them always take a man unawares, and, like wolves, they hunt in packs.”

“They carry pistols, too,” added Mike, “while I carry nothing but my fists.”

“Well, bad as I feel about it, husband dear, I’d a thousand times rather have you brave the whole villanous gang than see you join them; for now we are so happy.” Here Helen twined her arm round his neck, then, gazing on him with loving eye, she continued: “You have never touched liquor, you do not get into fights, you are so good; and this rock is dearer to me than the greenest farm in the land.”

“With you any spot would be a paradise,” rejoined Mike; “and I hope to-morrow will be the last Christmas that we’ll go without a turkey and some toys for the children.”

“Oh! I’m sure it will,” said Helen. “But you are right to pay all our debts first; and already the boards which the shanty cost are paid for, and so is the stove, and there is nothing owing except the coal”; then, with a smile: “And I’ve promised a pailful of coal to Mrs. McGowan, who lives on the next rock. You see, poor as we are, we can afford to give something away. Oh! isn’t that sweet?”

“It is indeed,” answered Roony; then, after a pause: “But now tell me, wife, who do you think is going to preach to-morrow?”

“Father H――――.”

“Really! Oh! I’m so glad; he always knows when to stop.”

“A good sermon can’t be too long,” said Helen.

“Well, I own it isn’t easy to leave off when once you get a-going. I was a brakeman five years, and know what it is to stop a train of cars. But if I was in the pulpit I’d know how to do it.”

“How?”

“Well, I’d just fix my eye on the sleepiest-looking fellow in the congregation, and the very moment his head began to nod I’d lift up my hand and say, ‘A blessing I wish you all.’” Here Helen laughed, and while she was laughing Mike added: “And I’ve sometimes thought Father H―――― kept his eye on me.”

While they were thus chatting by the little stove the northwest wind went howling round the house, and Jack Frost tried his best, his very best, to get in, but did not succeed, not even through the keyhole; for Roony was not sparing of fuel, and the stove-pipe was red hot. Indeed, ’twas rather pleasant to hear the voice of the blast and the rattling of the window-panes; while at times the whole building seemed to rise up off the rock, and then Helen would throw an uneasy glance at her husband, who would grin and say: “It’s well anchored, darling; never fear.” At length the clock struck midnight, and the children, who had been sleeping on their parents’ laps, were taken gently up and put to bed――so gently that their slumber was scarcely broken. Then husband and wife retired too; but, ere placing their heads on the pillow, they knelt and gave thanks to God for the many blessings they had enjoyed since last Christmas. Oh! sweet was the sleep which followed the prayer, and happy were their dreams; and when Christmas morning came, the sun did not rise on a happier home than this one. Scarcely had its rays flashed through the east window when Mike sprang up, and, clapping his hands, shouted: “O Helen, Helen! open your eyes and see what Santa Claus has brought you.”

Obedient to his call, Helen awoke; and sure enough, to her great surprise, discovered one of her stockings dangling from the latch of the door, and there was something in it, but what it might be she had not the least notion, nor her husband either.

“Oh! go quick and see what it is,” she said. “I’m so curious to know.”

Accordingly, Mike went to the stocking; then, plunging his hand into it, drew forth――a bottle, and on it was marked, “Whiskey.”

“Well, I declare,” he said, grinning, as he held it up, “here is something, Nell, to drink your health with this Christmas day.”

But the wife’s bright look had vanished in a moment when she heard what the bottle contained; and now, in a grave tone, she answered: “No, dear, do not drink my health with that. Thank God! you have never yet touched liquor, so do not begin the bad habit on this sacred day, nor on any other day. Throw the bottle out of doors――do!”

“Well, now, can’t a fellow take just a sip in honor of Santa Claus, who brought it?”

“No, no; the devil brought it. Don’t take even one drop; throw the poison away――quick!”

“Oh! but it’s a bitter cold morning, Nell, and the fire isn’t lit, and a sip of whiskey’ll keep me warm while I make it――only just one sip.”

“Husband, I beg you”――here the wife clasped her hands――“I implore you to get rid of the devil’s gift as quick as possible. I see that you are already tempted. O husband! listen to my voice.”

To calm her――for she seemed much excited――Roony opened the door, and, stepping out into the frosty air, struck the neck of the bottle against the rock, so as to make her believe that it was broken in pieces; but only the neck came off. “Really,” he said within himself, after moistening his lips with a drop, “this doesn’t taste bad; surely a little won’t hurt me.” Then, concealing the bottle in the goat-house, he went back and told his wife what he had never told her before――a lie.

“You broke it! Oh! I’m so glad,” she exclained, “so very glad!” But there was a tear in her eye as she spoke; then, while Mike busied himself kindling the fire, Helen knelt down and remained a good while on her knees.

“Why, Nell, what ails you?” he asked, drawing near her after she had finished the prayer. “This is Christmas morning; let’s be merry.”

“Oh! yes, I must be merry,” she replied, trying to assume a cheerful air. But there was something in her tone which struck Mike as peculiar, and for a moment he blushed. Did she suspect the untruth which he had told? No; her faith in him was unbroken, and she could not account to herself for the heavy weight upon her heart, which even the prayer had not taken away; and now, despite the glorious sunbeams flooding the room and the sweet voices of her children, Helen felt sad. Who had entered their happy home in the stillness of night, and placed that ill-omened gift in her stocking? Might it really be the Evil One? And while she wondered over this mysterious occurrence, she thought of the many families, once happy and well-to-do, who had come to grief and misery through intemperance. Was her own day of trial approaching? What did this Christmas gift portend? “But no, no; I will not be sad; I’ll be cheerful. For Michael’s sake I will,” she said to herself. Then, as the bright look spread over her face, Mike clapped his hands and shouted: “That’s right, my darling. Hurrah!”

And so the early hours went by; and when ten o’clock struck, they set out for St. Paul’s Church, which was about nine blocks off, the mother holding her little boy by the hand, the father carrying little Nell, who was not yet old enough to walk so far. But when they were within a few paces of the church door, Roony stopped and declared that he had forgotten to feed the goat. “Well, dear, it’s too late now,” said Helen. “Nanny can wait; you’ll miss Mass if you go back.”

“O wife! how would you like to miss your breakfast?” rejoined Mike. “Nanny is hungry. I must return.”

“And lose Mass?” she said, with a look of tender reproach. Roony did not answer, but turned on his heel and went away, leaving her too overcome with surprise to utter another word.

The priest was already at the altar when Helen arrived, and the church very full; yet more people continued to push their way in, and ever and anon she would look round to see if her husband were among the late-comers. She tried to keep her thoughts from wandering, but did not succeed. Never had Helen felt so distracted before, and the foreboding of evil which had oppressed her in the early morning now returned and shrouded her in such gloom that she could hardly pray. But, troubled as the poor woman was, no suspicion of the truth had yet entered her mind. She was very innocent, and did not doubt but Mike, having come late, was hidden among the crowd by the door.

At length the service ended; and now she felt quite certain that he would join her. But five minutes elapsed, and then ten――a whole quarter of an hour passed away. The congregation was fast dispersing; still, her husband did not appear. “Oh! where can he be?” she asked herself. “Where can he be?” At every voice that greeted her Helen started; for many knew her and wished her a merry Christmas, and Mrs. McGowan, who had a keen eye, exclaimed: “Why, what ails you, Mrs. Roony?”

How lonesome the wife felt as she plodded homeward! Yet her children were prattling merrily, and the street was full of happy people. She was blind to them all, she was deaf to every word that was spoken, and kept murmuring again and again: “Where can Michael be?”

Finally Helen reached home, and was about to cross the threshold, when suddenly she paused and uttered a cry which might have been heard afar, ’twas so loud and piercing; while little Mike and Nell exclaimed at one breath: “Mamma, look at papa sleeping.”

Yes, there lay their father stretched upon the floor, breathing heavily. But ’twas not the pleasant slumber into which Helen loved to see him fall when he returned weary from a hard day’s work; and after gazing on him a moment with an expression impossible to describe, she buried her face in her hands. Poor thing! well might she weep; and if a feeling of disgust mingled with her grief, may we not forgive her? He was breathing heavily; by his right hand lay an empty bottle with the neck broken off, and the air of the room was tainted with the fumes of liquor.

“Stop! let your father sleep,” she said to her son, who had knelt down and was playfully brushing the hair off his parent’s face. But this precaution was needless; the latter was too deep in his cups to be roused by the touch of the child’s hand, and presently, with a heavy heart, Helen turned away and set to work to prepare the dinner. There was no turkey to cook; still, she had intended to provide a somewhat better repast than ordinary, it being Christmas day. But, alas! she hardly knew what she was doing as she bustled about the stove; and when, by and by, dinner was ready, she tasted not a mouthful herself――all appetite had fled. The children, however, ate heartily, pausing now and again to say: “Mamma, why don’t you call papa?”

It was evening when Roony awoke, and the moment Helen perceived that his eyes were open she began to tremble; for, though she did not doubt but he was sober by this time, she felt as if another man were near her, and not the one whom she had once so honored and trusted. And as he stared at her from the floor, he did indeed appear changed; there was a silly, vacant look on his face, his eyes were bloodshot, and it was almost five minutes before he attempted to rise. Then, without opening his lips, he got up and went out of the house, closing the door behind him with a slam.

“Well, I declare,” he said, tossing away the broken bottle――“I declare I’ve been drunk; and, what’s more, I told a lie and missed Mass. Will she ever forgive me?” Then stamping his foot: “Oh! what a fool I’ve been――what a wicked fool!”

Presently, while he was thus lamenting his sins, the door opened and a voice said: “Come to me, dear; come to me.”

“O Helen!” he cried, turning toward her, “can you forgive me, will you?”

“Come to me,” she repeated, opening wide her arms, but at the same time drawing back a step from the threshold; for curious eyes were watching them from a neighboring rock. Quick Roony flew into the shanty, then, dropping down on his knees, burst into tears. The wife wept too, while little Mike and Nell looked on in childish wonder at the scene.

“But, darling, why do _you_ cry?” he exclaimed presently, rising to his feet. “_You’ve_ done nothing wrong.”

Helen made no response, but brushing the tears away, twined her arms around his neck.

“Well, speak, darling. What have _you_ done to cry?” repeated Roony.

“O Michael!” she answered in faltering accents, “you have been such a good, kind husband to me. We have been so happy together――so very, very happy. God has blest us with two darling children. We might live, perhaps, years and years in this sweet spot; and when at length death parted us, ’twould not be for long――we should meet again in heaven. O Michael! I weep because all this may be changed――because death might part us for ever and ever!”

“No, no, darling, it shall not! It shall not!”

“Well, I will pray with heart and soul, husband dear, that you may not fall a second time. Alas! if the habit of drink once fasten upon you, it may be impossible to shake it off; and intemperance not only ruins many a family, but damns many a soul.” At her own words the wife shuddered and began to weep anew.

“Well, I say never fear. Not another drop of liquor will I touch,” said Mike――“no, not another drop as long as I live.”

“Oh! thank God!” exclaimed Helen, “thank God!”

“Yes, yes, I solemnly promise it. And now, darling, try and forget all about my wickedness to-day, won’t you?”

“Yes, I’ll forget all about it,” she answered. With this Helen began to sing a merry song, in which her husband joined, while the children went romping around the room, and the cricket came out of his tiny hole beneath the stove and chirped merrily too. But although Helen had forgiven him, yet Mike’s conduct had wrought a deep impression on her; and when bedtime arrived and they retired, he slept soundly enough, but she lay awake for hours. And whenever the wind shook the house, she would tremble; and once the door seemed to open. But no, this was merely fancy. The noise, however, which startled her at midnight was real and not imagination. It proceeded from the den where the Black-eye Club was celebrating Christmas, and mingled with their yells were horrible oaths. Helen did not doubt but a fight was going on; perhaps some one was being beaten to death. Then she turned toward her husband, and even touched him, to make quite sure that he was lying beside her.

The following day Roony went off to work as usual, and came back in the evening, cheered as usual, too, by the light in the window; and immediately its welcome rays flashed upon him, he exclaimed: “Oh! what a good wife I have. God bless her!”

Ay, Helen is good! Her heart is with you, Mike, wherever you go; and at this very moment she is kneeling by the little beacon, praying that it may guide you safely to her side, and that you may not be tempted to stray into the bar-room on the corner.

But not the next day only, the whole week, Roony was his old, good-natured, hard-working, sober self; and what had marred the joy of Christmas was fast fading from Helen’s memory. But one Saturday evening, as he was trudging homeward with his pocket full of wages, there came over him a sudden craving for spirits; the broken bottle out of which he had taken his maiden drink seemed to rise up before his eyes; the delicious taste of the whiskey was on his lips afresh. In fact, the craving was so very strong, so wholly unexpected, that it startled him, and his heart beat violently.

“Oh! I never thought I should be seized in this way,” he groaned. “How very strange! I can’t resist; yet I must. O Helen! would to God I had not taken that first drink.” The words were scarcely breathed when the beams of the home-light flashed upon him. ’Twas still a good distance off, and the air was muggy and thick, yet it shone brighter than Mike had ever seen it shine before. For about a minute he watched it yearningly; he even quickened his steps and twice groaned, “O Helen!” Then, muttering a curse upon himself, he turned his eyes away from the light, and at the same time, swerving out of the dear home-path, he hurried on to the liquor-saloon.

“Three cheers for Mike Roony!” was the salutation which greeted him from a dozen voices as he entered. “I knew you’d join us afore long,” said the President of the Black-eye Club, advancing and shaking him warmly by the hand; then, motioning to the others, their empty glasses were refilled and the new-comer’s health toasted. Presently Roony wanted to treat; but “No, no,” they all shouted; “’tis our privilege to treat you this evening.” Whereupon the bottle was passed round again; while poor Mike, flattered beyond measure by this unlooked-for reception, thought to himself: “What a fool I was not to join the club long ago!”

And so on they went carousing, and Helen’s husband growing more and more intoxicated, until at length, when he was barely able to stand, a voice exclaimed: “Now, boys, let’s christen him.” Quick as lightning a violent blow on the eye followed these words; then down dropped Roony unconscious to the floor.

“Where can he be?” said the anxious wife, seeing that he did not return at the usual hour. “I pray God nothing has happened. The dear fellow came near being killed by a blast last year. O my God! I hope nothing has happened.” After waiting for him awhile, Helen and her young ones took their places at the supper-table; but not a morsel did she eat. A vague fear possessed her. The children spoke, but the mother answered them not; the cricket chirped――she was deaf to its merry song; and every few minutes she would open the door, and look out and listen. But no husband appeared. And now, without him, how everything seemed to change! The rock, the shanty, the pretty rosebush she cherished, even the children whom she loved ten thousand times more than the rose――all appeared different to her eyes; nothing was the same when he who was the corner-stone of home was missing; and Helen realized as never before what a link of adamant bound her heart to his. “Oh! if anything has happened. If he is killed, ’twill kill me too,” she sighed. Then, when little Mike asked, “Where is papa?” she answered, “Coming soon.” And even to speak these words brought her a moment’s peace of mind, and she would try to think of some good cause which might detain him. But the clock went on ticking, and the hour-hand moved further and further toward midnight; still, no husband came. The children were put to bed, and soon were fast asleep; the fire in the stove died out; the cricket became silent; but the wife grew more and more wakeful, while ever and anon she would go to the window and nervously snuff the candle burning there. Then again she would open the door and listen――listen with all her ears; but she heard only the throbbing of her heart and boisterous voices in the direction of the liquor-saloon.

“Well, I’ll watch and pray till he arrives,” said Helen; then kneeling beside the crib where her children were sleeping, she lifted her thoughts to God. But the many hours she had been awake, the busy day prolonged so far into night, proved at last too much for her; and just as the clock struck one her weary eyes closed and her guardian angel took up the prayer which she left unfinished.

How long Helen slept she did not know; but when she awoke the candle had burned out and the chamber was pitch dark. “Oh! what is the matter? What did I hear? Was it only a dream?” she cried, starting to her feet.

“Come, now, I want my supper!” growled Mike, staggering further into the room. “Where’s my supper?”

Pen cannot describe the wife’s feelings as she groped about for the match-box. And when finally, after letting three or four matches drop out of her quivering fingers, she succeeded in lighting a fresh candle, what a sight did she behold! Was this man scowling at her, with one eye battered and swollen, her own Michael?

“I say, where’s my supper?” he repeated with an oath.

Without uttering a word, but with a sinking of the heart which she had never experienced till now, Helen made haste to kindle a fire and heat up the potatoes and pork which she had laid aside for him in the evening. While thus employed Roony dropped down on a bench; then, after grumbling at her a few minutes, began suddenly to giggle. “I want you to know,” said he, “that I’m now a member of the Black-eye Club. But that’s plain enough by looking at me, eh? And when I’ve eaten supper, I’m going to make you cut my hair――cut it short to fighting trim.”

“O husband!” replied Helen, in a voice of sorrowful entreaty, “do not break my heart, I love you so.”

“Break your heart! Ha! ha! that’s a good joke.” Then, glancing up at the clock: “Well, by jingo, Nell, I’d better call this meal breakfast. Why, it’s pretty nigh four, isn’t it?”

Encouraged, perhaps, by the somewhat milder tone in which these last words were spoken, she now approached him, and, bending down, proceeded to examine his wounded eye. “Yes, bathe it for me,” he continued. “But, for all it hurts, I’m deuced proud of it; for it’s the christening mark of the Black-eye Club.”

“Oh! hush, dear. Don’t mention that wicked gang any more,” said the wife. “I hate them; they are fiends.”

“Fiends? Ha, ha! Well, well, hurry up with my breakfast or supper, whichever you choose to call it; then get the scissors and cut off my hair.”

“Let me bathe your poor eye first,” she answered; “then, after you have done eating, ’twill be daylight, and I want you, love, to come to Mass this morning, and to see the priest; we’ll go together. O Michael! dark clouds are lowering over us; come with me to the priest.”

“To the priest? No, indeed! The Black-eye Club have nothing to do with priests.”

“O husband! do not talk so; save yourself before it is too late,” she went on, as she sponged the clotted blood off his cheek.

“I can’t, wife. The craving for spirits is too strong. It all comes, I know, from that one little drink Christmas morning. Now I’m not master of myself; I believe there’s a devil in me.”

A long, shadowy silence followed, during which Helen wept, while ever and anon Roony would say, “It’s no use crying.” While he was at his breakfast she once more begged him to go with her to Mass. But again he refused, saying, “Our club don’t go to Mass; nor must you, until you have trimmed my hair.”

“Why, ’tis short enough,” replied Helen.

“Is it? Look!” And as Mike spoke he clutched a fistful of it, then gave a pull. “Now, don’t you see that some chap might grab me and get my head in ‘chancery’? I want my hair short as pig’s bristles, and well greased too; then I’ll be like an eel, and grab me who can.”

The wife obeyed without a murmur, performing the operation to his entire satisfaction; after which, approaching the crib where her children were sleeping, she gave each a soft kiss, then went off by herself to church.

Helen had never been wanting in devotion; her faith had always been strong. But now, as she took her way along the lonely street, with the morning star still shining in the heavens, she felt as though God were come nearer to her; and all her former prayers were cold compared with the prayers which she offered this morning at the foot of the altar. And when Mass was over and she turned her steps homeward, ’twas with a more cheerful heart and a firm resolution to be a loving and faithful wife to the end, the bitter end, whatever it might be.

When Helen entered the shanty she found her husband gone. But little Mike was there, and he looked so like his father; and little Nell was there too. Oh! surely they would not be abandoned. “No, God is with us,” she murmured. “My prayers will be heard, and Michael will one day be what he used to be. Yes, yes! I know it.” As she spoke a radiant look spread over her face; then, making the sign of the cross, she straightway set about her daily duties as if nothing had happened. O blessed Faith! which makest the darkest hour bright; richer, indeed, in gifts than a gold-mine art thou, and stronger than a mountain to lean upon in moments like these!

When evening came round, Helen placed the candle in the window as usual, although she had faint hope that Mike had been at work. And again she set up till a very late hour, keeping the fire burning and taking good care not to fall asleep this time.

It was one o’clock when Roony returned. He was not tipsy, but surly, and when she laid her hand on his arm he flung it away, saying, “Now, I want no preaching and petting; I want my supper.” The poor woman was a little frightened, and waited upon him awhile in silence.

“Yet I must speak,” she murmured; “I must brave his anger. No husband was ever kinder than he, no spouse happier than I have been till now; I must make one more effort to save him from ruin.” With this, she again gently touched his arm and said, “Dear love――”

“D―――― your preaching; I won’t listen to it,” he snarled, cutting short her words, and in a voice so loud that it awoke the children. Then, presently, shrugging his shoulders, “Oh! you needn’t whimper. I’m bound to be master here.”

“Have I ever denied your authority?” inquired Helen, looking calmly at him through her tears.

“Oh! hush. Don’t bother me,” continued Roony, lifting up his plate. Then, as if he had changed his mind about throwing it at her, he dashed it into shivers on the floor.

“Alas! what a curse liquor is,” she cried in a tone of passionate energy. “What a terrible curse!”

“Well, I’m not drunk, am I?”

“But you have been drinking; and the poison is in your veins. O Michael! for God’s sake abandon the villanous set you belong to!” Here he clenched his fist. But heedless of the threat she went bravely on: “Think how happy we were, Michael. This bare rock was more lovely than a garden to us. And we have two dear children; look at them yonder! Look at them!”

“I say, woman, go to bed and leave me alone,” thundered Roony, bringing down his huge fist on the table with a thump which made everything in the shanty rattle.

Poor, poor Helen! With a heart torn by anguish, she obeyed. But not a wink of sleep came to her――no, not a wink, and never night seemed longer than this one. But her husband slept like a top, nor opened his eyes until ten the next morning; then, as soon as he was dressed, and without waiting for breakfast, out he went to take a drink.

“Oh! what is coming? What is going to happen now?” thought Helen, as she watched him enter the bar-room. Then kneeling down, she said a prayer.

The clock had just struck noon when Mike returned, accompanied part of the way by another man, who helped him mount the difficult path which wound up the rock; and Roony needed assistance, for even when he gained the summit he could not walk straight, and fell within a yard of his door. Quick Helen ran to him; for, although his condition filled her with disgust, yet she could not abide the thought of other eyes than hers discovering him thus. “Come in, husband, come in the house,” she said, taking his arm. Scarcely, however, had she got him on his feet again when he caught her by the throat and exclaimed, in the voice of a wild beast, “Ah, ha! now I’m going to beat you.” But in an instant Helen broke loose from him; then rushing back into the shanty, she called her children and bade them hurry out on the rock. The little things obeyed, too innocent to know what the trouble was. Then facing her husband, who was scowling at her from the threshold, “Now enter,” she said, “and beat me if you will. Here, at least, nobody will witness the deed.” Roony staggered in and Helen closed the door.

That evening, after pressing her children many times to her poor bruised heart, Helen went away. She quitted the home where she had once been so happy, and, as she went, she said to herself: “If on my wedding day an angel from heaven had told me this, I should not have believed him.”

But the step she was now taking was all for the best. In his madness Roony had threatened to kill her. “And he might do it,” she sighed, “for when he is intoxicated he doesn’t know what he is doing. And then all his life afterward he would be haunted by remorse. Poor Michael! I believe he still loves me. For his own sake I am going away.”

It was Helen’s intention to seek refuge with a family who dwelt not far off, and for whom she had once done some work. They received her very kindly, and wondered ever so much at the ugly cut under one of her eyes, from which the red drops were still oozing; and her upper lip, too, was cut. But Helen refused to tell who had ill-used her. “Pray, ask no questions,” she said. “Only furnish me with employment; I’ll drudge; I’ll do anything to earn a little money.” Accordingly, they gave her a number of shirts to make; and being a deft hand at needle-work, she was able to gain quite a good livelihood. But it was not for herself that Helen labored, ’twas for those whom she loved better than herself. And every evening, when the stars began to twinkle, she visited her old home, and there, peeping through the window, would watch little Mike and Nell with yearning eyes. And once she saw her husband seated by the stove, eating a piece of the bread and meat which she had left at the door the previous evening.

“Oh! thank God!” she said, “that I am able to support him and the children. Perhaps ere long my prayers will be heard, and I shall be happy again.”

But Roony was still drinking steadily; even now, as he ate the cold victuals, he was barely able to sit on the chair, and so the poor woman did not venture to show herself. Next day, however, the fifth since she left home, the longed-for opportunity presented itself; Mike was sober, and with bounding heart Helen went into the shanty.

“O wife!” he exclaimed, rising to meet her, “’tis an age since I laid eyes on you. Where have you been?” Then his countenance suddenly growing dark as a thundercloud, “but, by heaven! what’s happened? How came those bruises on your face? Somebody has ill-treated you! Tell me the villain’s name, that I may take his heart’s blood.”

“I’ll never tell his name,” answered Helen, in a low but firm voice. “Never!”

For about a minute Roony gazed on her in silence; the mournful, the shocking truth seemed to be gradually dawning upon him. “Oh! is it possible? Could I have done it――done such a wicked, brutal thing?” he asked himself. Then, falling on his knees, he bathed her feet with bitter tears. Helen wept also, while the children ceased their gambols and wondered what was the matter. But presently the wife bade him rise, then, twining her arms round his neck, gave him a tender embrace, by which he knew that he was forgiven. And now for a brief half-hour, oh! how happy he was, and how happy she was! During the dark days which followed Helen often looked back to those fleeting moments; ’twas like a gleam of sunshine flung across a scathed and desolate landscape.

“Now, husband dear,” she said after he had fondled her a little while, “let me put things to rights.” Whereupon she took her broom, swept the floor, and sprinkled it with clean sand; the pictures were dusted; the clock set agoing; the rosebush watered; nor was the poor goat forgotten. And delighted, indeed, was the half-starved creature to see her again.

“Helen!” exclaimed Mike, while she was thus employed, “a wife like you is a priceless treasure. Would to Heaven I had listened to you Christmas morning! What a different man I’d be now!”

“Well, love, all is bright once more,” answered Helen, cheerily. He made no response save a deep sigh.

“Why, husband dear, what troubles you?” she asked, her look of joy vanishing in a moment.

“No slave was ever bound by such chains as bind me,” he groaned, dropping his forehead in his hands. “And it all comes from that one fatal drink.”

“Well, pray, dear, pray to God, and I will pray with you.”

“Too late! The craving for liquor which seizes me at times is irresistible; ’tis seizing me now――the demon!”

“O my Saviour!” cried Helen, trembling and turning pale. The words had hardly left her lips when the door opened and a strange face――at least it was new to her――peeped in.

“Time!” spoke the chief of the Black-eye Club in a voice which caused Roony to start to his feet.

“Begone!” cried Helen, advancing boldly toward the intruder.

“Time!” he repeated, now holding up a pistol. But, nothing daunted, she was about to try and close the door on him, when her husband slipped past, and ere she could recover from her amazement they were both beyond the rock and half way to the grog-shop.

That night the poor woman remained in the shanty, watching, and weeping, and praying. But her husband did not come back till sunrise; and then he was so crazy with drink that she deemed it best to quit her home once more. Accordingly, she returned to the kind people who had given her shelter and employment. But it was not easy to settle down anew to her sewing; the needle would drop from her fingers and a cold fear thrill through her veins as she thought of the repulsive, sin-stamped face which had peeped into the shanty and enticed her dear Michael away. We may imagine, also, her agony of mind when it was reported that a burglary, accompanied by murder, had been committed during the night, and that suspicion pointed to certain members of the Black-eye Club. But, to her unspeakable relief, Mike was not among those who were arrested. The chief of the gang, however, was; and condemned, too, to be hanged; which sentence would doubtless have been carried out had he not managed to escape from prison. This incident, far from ruining the Black-eyes, only afforded them a pleasing excitement; like rats when the cat comes, they dived into their holes for a space; then out they came as flourishing as ever, and Roony was one of their most popular members.

But let us be brief with our story. Why linger over poor Helen’s misery? Why tell of all the brutal treatment she suffered?

Month after month rolled by. Spring came; summer followed spring. Yet there was no change for the better in Mike. His shanty, once the prettiest and cleanest of all the shanties on Manhattan Island, grew to be the dirtiest and most forlorn-looking. The door was kicked off its hinges, ugly rags and papers fluttered in the broken windows, and occasionally the Black-eye Club assembled on the rock, making it the scene of a drunken revel. But brave, faithful Helen continued to visit her children every evening after dark, carrying them food and clothing. She would not remove them from the spot which she still called home, for she hoped that the sight of the little innocents would sooner or later call her husband back to his old self again. And every day Helen went to St. Paul’s church and made the Stations of the Cross; this was her favorite devotion. “And if my Saviour suffered so much,” she would say, “oh! surely, I can bear my load.” Yet there were moments when she seemed well-nigh ready to sink under it. Ay, more than once Hope wrestled with Despair; but Hope always came off victorious.

If the wife’s faith was still glowing, if her trust in God continued strong as ever, nevertheless in one respect a woful change appeared in her. Oh! sad was the havoc which this year of grief, of cruel ill-treatment wrought on her once bright and lovely face! ’Twas as if a coarse hand had rubbed off the delicate tints of that sweet picture, and left behind, not the ruins of her beauty, but the ruins of those ruins.

And now in time’s monotonous circle winter is come round again; another Christmas is at hand. Evergreens and toys, laughing children and good-humored parents, with well-filled purses, all tell it to you. And papa and mamma, as they dash hither and thither in their jingling sleighs, doubt not but everybody else is happy too: Santa Claus will visit every home; Santa Claus will fill every stocking. Why, who could help feeling merry at this holy season?――unless, perhaps, the turkeys. Yes, it is Christmas Eve.

“How well I remember last Christmas!” sighed poor Helen as she leaned back in her chair and gazed with tearful eyes at the shirt which, alas! she was unable to finish. How could she finish it? She was barely able to see. Yet those livid, tell-tale marks on her visage, painful as they are, are easier to bear than the curses and unfeeling words which have broken her heart at last. As night approached, snow began to fall and the wind to blow――a keen, angry wind from the north-east; one of those winds we love so to hear howling round the house while we sit toasting our slippers by the fire. But, bitter cold as it was, Helen did not shrink from going to church; although half-blind, she could still find the way there.

She went; she made anew the stations of the Cross, and said, as she had so often said before, “If my Saviour suffered so much, oh! surely I can bear my load.” As she breathed these words to herself the ugly black-and-blue marks which disfigured her seemed to fade away, a glow of heaven shone in her face, and for a moment, one brief moment, she became once more the beautiful Helen――Helen, “the Belle of the Shanties,” as Mrs. McGowan used to call her――then suddenly she gave a start and the mien of rapture changed to a look of wonder and alarm. Who had spoken her name? There was nobody near; who could it be? While Helen was gazing about her, she heard the voice again. “Who is calling me?” she asked, her heart now throbbing violently. The words were scarcely uttered when for the third time, and more distinctly, “_Helen!_” sounded in her ear. “It is Michael!” she exclaimed, hastening to the door. “Yes, it is he calling me.” But ere she passed out of the church she broke off a sprig of evergreen and dipped it into the holy-water font. Then hiding it in her bosom, so that the angry wind might not snatch it away, she sped homeward on winged feet.

But ’twas no easy matter to get to the rock at this hour with her poor bruised eyes and in such a driving storm. Yet she did find the way. And up the rude path she climbed with marvellous agility; ’twas as though an invisible hand were leading her on.

The sight which Helen beheld on entering the shanty might have appalled any heart but hers. Her husband, his face streaming with blood, was engaged in a deadly struggle with a horrible-looking being much larger than himself, who seemed striving to make him drink from a cup which he pressed to his lips. “O Ellen!” cried Michael in a tone of despair, “save me! save me!” Quick she flew towards him, stretching forth at the same time the branch of evergreen. In another instant ’twas in his hand; then, just as he grasped it, his strange adversary uttered a demoniac cry and the cup fell to the floor, shattered in many pieces.

“Oh! I am saved,” exclaimed Roony――“saved! saved! Thank God!” But while his joyful words were ringing through the house, the fiend turned upon his deliverer and out into the black night Helen was driven. Vainly she struggled; a powerful hand, which seemed mailed in iron, thrust her out, and presently, when released from its ruthless grip, she found herself blindly groping here and there in the darkness. Round and round the house she wandered――near it always, yet never finding it.

And during these sad moments, the last moments of her life, her husband was anxiously seeking her. But it was easy to miss each other in such a snow-storm, and when he shouted her name the wild wind carried away her response, until at length, numbed by the cold, she answered him no more. And so, within a few feet of home, the brave Helen, the faithful Helen, was wrapt in a winding-sheet of snow.

* * * * *

Next morning――sweet Christmas morning――the sun rose in a cloudless sky; and as its bright beams flashed from window to window, from spire to spire, every object, the humblest, the least beautiful, became suddenly transformed into a thing of beauty. Ay, even those two icy hands peeping above the snow hard by Mike Roony’s shanty door sparkle as if they were covered with gems and have a golden halo round them. They were clasped as if in prayer, and when poor Mike discovered them he cried aloud: “Oh! she prayed for me to the last; she prayed for me to the last!”

His wail was heard at the next rock, and far beyond it. Then a crowd began to collect, a very large crowd; for Helen was known to many, and her husband was not the only one who shed tears over her remains this bright Christmas morning.

“I had a feeling that something was going wrong,” spoke Mrs. McGowan. Then, when Roony told of the infernal being who had attacked him, and how he had been rescued by the blessed evergreen which Helen had brought, the good woman solemnly shook her head, and whispered: “This house ought to be exorcised――indeed it ought.”

“Well, one thing I vow by all that’s holy,” ejaculated Mike, crossing himself and lifting his voice so that the crowd might hear him――“I vow never again to touch liquor――never, never, never!”

“I join you!” exclaimed a bystander.

“So do I!”

“And I too!”

“And I!” shouted a number of voices. And those who spoke were members of the notorious Black-eye Club. Then they all knelt around the body and swore, hand-in-hand together, never to drink another drop of intoxicating spirits.

And thus by Helen’s death many sinners were converted, many a drunkard’s home made happy again; for the ways of the Lord are mysterious. Good is not seldom wrought out only through tears and suffering. Oh! who will say it was not well for Helen to die?

But poor Mike was inconsolable. He who had once been so blithe and frolicsome now spoke scarcely a word. Days and weeks rolled by, yet he did not change. We may pity him indeed! There was no light in the window now to welcome him from afar as he trudged back from his work in the dusk. And when he sat down to warm himself by the stove, instead of lighting his pipe as of yore and falling into a pleasant doze, he became strangely wakeful.

Then the spectre remorse would glide out of some shadowy corner and whisper bitter words in his ear. If at times he succeeded in silencing its voice, and would give himself up to a reverie of other days, when this miserable shanty was more gorgeous to him than a palace, oh! the pleasure which the sweet vision brought was like music heard from withinside a prison wall, like sunshine seen through the bars; for those golden days would come never more. Eternity stood between him and them.

Then back remorse would creep and whisper: “You beat her――you broke her heart――you killed her――you did――you did!”

And one evening, while these torturing words were wringing his soul, he threw up his right hand――the hand which had struck her so often――and groaned aloud: “Oh! this is hell. Where’s the axe?”

Forlorn wretch! well it was that as he bared his arm and clutched the axe――ay, well it was that at that very moment the minister of God appeared to check the rash deed he contemplated, to speak soothing words, to save him, perhaps, from madness.

And as from this hour forth a new life began for Michael Roony, we end our tale with the closing advice which the priest addressed him. “My dear friend,” he said, “do not weep any more, for tears will not bring back your wife. There is nothing in this world so vain as regret. Therefore cease to mourn; strive your best to be cheerful.” Then pointing to little Mike and Nell, who were playing at his feet, “work hard, too, for these children whom she bore you. For their sake, as well as your own, keep true to the pledge of temperance, and so live here on earth that one day you may meet again your dear Helen in heaven.”

SIENA.

_Cor magis Sena pandit._

The railway from Empoli to the south passes through a rough, hilly country, following its sinuosities, spanning the valleys on gigantic arches, or plunging through the tunnelled mountains. One tunnel is a mile long――through the hill of San Dalmazzo; and when you issue from it, you see before you another hill, on which rises, stage after stage, the strange, mediæval city of Siena, to the height of nearly a thousand feet above the level of the sea. It was rather a disappointment not to enter it, as carriages from Florence do, by the celebrated Porta Camollia, where the traveller is greeted by the cordial inscription, _Cor magis Sena pandit_――Siena opens her gates even more willingly than her heart――testifying to the hospitable character of the inhabitants. The city is built on three hills, with deep ravines between them. These hills are crossed by three main streets, meeting at the Piazza del Campo, around which the city radiates like a star. There is scarcely a level spot in the whole place. Even the central square descends like the hollow of a cone. Nothing could be more favorable to the picturesque. The old brick walls of the thirteenth century, with their fortifications and thirty-eight gate-ways, go straggling up the heights. Narrow, lane-like streets, inaccessible to carriages, rush headlong down into deep ravines, sometimes through gloomy arches, the very houses clinging to the steep sides with a giddy, top-heavy air. On one of these three hills stands the cathedral, with its lofty arches and magnificent dome, a marvel of art, full of statues and bronzes, carvings and mosaics. On another is the enormous brick church of San Domenico, for ever associated with the divine raptures of St. Catharine of Siena. Palaces, as well as churches, adorn all the heights――palaces grim and time-worn, that bear old, historic names, famed in the great contests between the Guelphs and Ghibellines, in which live, secluded in their own dim halls, the aristocratic owners, keeping up their ancient customs, proud as the imperial Ghibellines or lordly Guelphs from whom they sprang. Amid all the towers, and domes, and palaces, rises, from the central square, light and slender, the tall, arrow-like Torre del Mangia, which shoots up to a prodigious height into the sapphire sky, crowned with battlements, as if to defend the city against the spirits of the air.

Yes, Siena is singularly picturesque and striking as no other city in Italy is, but sad and melancholy with its recollections of past grandeur. It cannot forget the time when it sent forth its legions to triumph over the Florentines, and had two hundred thousand inhabitants. Now it has only about a tenth of that number. Once it was great in war. It was a leader in art. Eight popes sprang from its territory, among whom were Pius II., the poet, diplomatist, and lover of art, from the Piccolomini family; the great Hildebrand, so prominent in the history of the church; and Alexander III., who deposed Frederick Barbarossa, and gave his name to a city――styled by Voltaire himself the benefactor of the human race. And like so many stars that blaze in the heaven of the Italian Church――nay, the church universal――are the Sienese saints, wondrous in life and glorified by art.

The first place into which the traveller inevitably drifts, if he attempts to explore the city alone, is the Piazza del Campo, now called, of course, Vittorio Emmanuele, in spite of Dante. This piazza is singularly imposing from its unchanged, mediæval aspect. It slopes away like an amphitheatre, being intended for public games and spectacles; Murray says, like a shell. Yes, a shell that whispers of past storms――of the tempestuous waves that have swept over the city; for it has witnessed many a popular insurrection, many a struggle between the nobles and people. Among the interesting associations we recall the haughty Ghibelline leader, Provenzano Salvani, whose name, as Dante says:

“Far and wide Through Tuscany resounded once; and now Is in Siena scarce with whispers named.”

It was here, when a friend of his, taken prisoner by Charles of Anjou, lay under penalty of death, unless his ransom of a thousand florins in gold should be paid within a certain time, that Provenzano, the first citizen of the republic, the conqueror of Monte Aperti, unable to pay so large a sum, humbled himself so far as to spread a carpet on this piazza, on which he sat down to solicit contributions from the public.

“When at his glory’s topmost height, Respect of dignity all cast aside, Freely he fixed him on Siena’s plain, A suitor to redeem his suffering friend, Who languished in the prison-house of Charles; Nor, for his sake, refused through every vein to tremble.”

Dante, who meets him in Purgatory, alludes to the grandeur of this act as atoning for his ambition, which

“Reached with grasp presumptuous at the sway Of all Siena.”

So stanch a friend would seem to have deserved a less terrible fate. On the disastrous day of Colle he was taken by the Florentines, who cut off his head, and carried it around the battle-field, fastened on a lance.

On one side of the piazza is the massive Palazzo Pubblico, bristling with battlements. On its front blazes the holy name of Jesus, held up by St. Bernardin of Siena for the reverence of the whole world. The busy throng beneath looks up in its toilsome round, and goes on, the better for a fleeting thought. Below is a pillar with the wolf of pagan Rome that bore Siena. From this palace rises the beautiful tower _del Mangia_, seen far and wide over the whole country, so called from the automaton which used to come forth at mid-day, like the Moor at Venice, to strike the hours. This figure was to the Sienese what Pasquino was to Rome. To it were confided all the epigrams of the city wits; but, alas for them! one day, when it came forth to do its duty, a spring gave way, and it fell to the ground and was dashed in pieces. This tower commands an admirable view. North, the country looks barren, but the slopes of Chianti are celebrated for their wines, and Monte Maggio is covered with forests. South and west, it is fresher and more smiling, but leads to the fatal marshes of Maremma. Santa Fiora, the most productive mountain, annually yields vast quantities of umber. The happy valleys are full of olives and wheat-fields. Farther off, to the south, the volcanic summits of Radicofani, associated with Boccaccio’s tales, blacken the horizon. To the east everything is bleak and dreary, the whole landscape of a pale, sickly green.

At the foot of the tower is a beautiful votive chapel of the Virgin, built in the fourteenth century after a pestilence which carried off eighty thousand people from Siena and its environs. It is like an open porch resting on sculptured pillars. Over the altar within are statues and a fresco of the Madonna, before which are flowers and lamps burning in the bright sunlight――all open to the air, as if to catch a passing invocation from the lips of those who might otherwise spare no thought, amid their toils, for heaven.

Siena is peculiarly the city of Mary. Before the great battle with the Florentines,

“That colored Arbia’s flood with crimson stain,”

the Sienese solemnly placed their city under the protection of the Virgin, and vowed, if victorious, to regard her as the Sovereign Lady of the land, from whom they would henceforth hold it as her vassals. After their triumph they came to lay their spoils at her feet, and had her painted as Our Lady of Victory, throned like a queen, with the Infant standing on her knee. When Duccio, some years later, finished his Madonna, he wrote beneath it: _Mater sancta Dei, sis causa Senis requiei!_――Give peace to Siena!――and the painting was transported, amid public rejoicings, to the cathedral. Business was entirely suspended. All the shops were closed. The archbishop, at the head of the clergy and magistrates, accompanied it with a vast procession of people, with lighted tapers in their hands, as if around a shrine. The trumpets sounded; the bells rang; nothing could equal the enthusiasm. The picture was placed over the high altar of the church.

This was during the height of Siena’s grandeur, when the wisdom of its laws corresponded to the depth of its religious sentiments, so that, while most of the Italian republics were ruined by intestine commotions between the nobles and people, Siena had the wisdom to modify its constitution in such a way as to admit the representatives of both parties to the government, and so preserve the vigor of the nation. It was thus she was enabled to extend her dominion and win the great victory of Monte Aperti, in which ten thousand Florentines were left dead on the field.

On one side of the piazza is the palace of the Sansedoni, one of the great Ghibelline families belonging to the feudal aristocracy of Siena――a frowning, battlemented palace, with a mutilated tower built by a special privilege in 1215. In it is a chapel in honor of the Beato Ambrogio Sansedoni, a Dominican friar who belonged to this illustrious family. It was he whom Pope Clement IV., after a vain effort to save the unfortunate Conradin of Souabia from death, sent to administer the sacraments and console the young prince in his last moments. Ambrogio distinguished himself as a professor of theology at Paris, Cologne, and Rome.

Close beside the Palazzo Buonsignori, one of the finest in the city, is the house said by tradition to have been inhabited by the unhappy Pia de Tolomei, indebted for her celebrity to Dante, rather than to her misfortunes. He meets her in the milder shades of Purgatory, among those who had by violence died, but who, repenting and forgiving,

“Did issue out of life at peace with God.”

Her death was caused by the deadly miasmas of “Maremma’s pestilential fen,” to which her cruel husband had banished her.

It was a member of the Tolomei family――the Beato Bernardino――who, in the fourteenth century, founded the Olivetan Order. He was previously a professor at the university of Siena, but, being struck blind while discussing some philosophical subject in his lecture-room, he resolved, though he soon recovered his sight, to embrace the religious life; and when he next appeared in his chair, instead of resuming his philosophical discussions, he astonished his audience by insisting on the vanity of all earthly acquirements, and the importance of the only knowledge that can save the soul. Several of his pupils were so impressed by his words that they followed him when he retired to one of the family estates not far from Siena, which he called Monte Oliveto, whence the name of the order. Bernardino fell a victim to his zeal in attending to the sick in the time of a great plague. The convent he founded became a magnificent establishment, with grounds luxuriantly cultivated, a church adorned by the arts, and apartments so numerous that the Emperor Charles V., and his train of five thousand, all lodged there at once.

The Palazzo Bandanelli, where Pope Alexander III. was born, is gloomy and massive as a prison, with iron gratings at the arched windows, brick walls black with age, from which project great iron rings, and on the doors immense knockers of wrought iron, made when blacksmiths were genuine artists. But, however dismal his birthplace, Alexander III. was enlightened in his views. It was in 1167 he declared, in the name of a council, that all Christians ought to be exempted from servitude.

To go back to the Piazza del Campo. Before the Sansedoni palace is the Fonte Gaja――so called from the joyful acclamations of the people, when water was brought into the square in 1343. It is surrounded by an oblong basin of white marble, elegantly sculptured by Giacomo della Quercia, to whom was henceforth given the name of Del Fonte.

Siena, being on a height, was, from the first, obliged to provide water for its inhabitants at great expense. Aqueducts were constructed in the time of the Romans. But a still grander work was achieved in the middle ages, when water was brought from the neighboring mountains by an aqueduct about twenty miles long, that passed beneath the city, giving rise, perhaps, to the derisive report in Dante’s time that the hill was tunnelled in search of the river Diana:

“The fancied stream They sought, of Dian called.”

These vast subterranean works so excited the admiration of Charles V. that he said Siena was more wonderful below ground than above. Now there are three hundred and fifty-five wells in the city, and eighteen fountains. The deep well in the cloister of the Carmine is called the Pozzo di Diana.

The most noted of the fountains is Fonte Branda, whose waters were so famous in Dante’s time for their sweetness and purity that he makes Adamo of Brescia, the coiner of counterfeit money, exclaim, amid the flames of the Inferno, that to behold the instigators of his crime undergoing a like torture would be sweeter to him than the cool waters of Fonte Branda:

“For Branda’s limpid font I would not change The welcome sight.”

This fountain has also been celebrated by Alfieri, who often came to Siena to visit his friend, Francesco Gori, with whom he remained months at a time. He liked the character of the people, and said, when he went away, that he left a part of his heart behind. And yet Dante, perhaps because a Florentine, accused the Sienese of being light and vain:

“Was ever race Light as Siena’s? Sure, not France herself Can show a tribe so frivolous and vain.”

Formerly, if not still, giddy people in Tuscany were often asked if they had been drinking water from the Fonte Branda, as if that would account for any excess.

The Sienese are proud of the fame and antiquity of this fount, which is known to have existed in 1081. It flows at the very bottom of one of the deep ravines which makes Siena so peculiar, between two precipitous hills, one crowned by the Duomo, and the other by the church of St. Dominic, and you look from one to the other in silent wonder. The whole quarter is densely populated. The people are called Fontebrandini――mostly, as five centuries ago, tanners, dyers, and fullers, who are reputed to be proud, and are to Siena what the Trasteverini are to Rome. The streets around diverge from a market-place, on one side of which is the fount under a long, open arcade of stone, of immense thickness, built against the hillside. You go down to a paved court, as to something sacred, by a flight of steps as wide as the arcade is long. Here are stone seats around, as if to accommodate the gossips of the neighborhood. Three pointed archways, between which lions look out with prey between their outstretched paws, open into the arcade, where flow the waters, gathered from the surrounding hills, by three apertures, into an enormous stone reservoir. The surplus waters pass off into other tanks beyond the arcade, for the use of the workmen of the quarter. Lemon-trees hang over the fount, and grape-vines trail from tree to tree. The steep hillside is covered with bushes and verdure up to the church of San Domenico, which stands stern and majestic, with its crenelated tower amid the olive-trees.

An old Sienese romance is connected with the Fonte Branda. Cino da Pistoja, a poet and celebrated professor of jurisprudence at Siena in the fourteenth century, whose death Petrarch laments in a sonnet, promised his daughter, a young lady of uncommon beauty, to any one of his pupils who should best solve a knotty law-question. It was a young man, misshapen in form, to whom the prize was adjudged, and the poor girl, in her horror, threw herself into the Fonte Branda. Her suitor, sensible of the value of the prize, plunged in after her, and not only saved her life, but fortunately succeeded in winning her affections.

Turning to the right, and ascending the Costa dei Tintori, you come in a few moments to the house of St. Catharine of Siena, once the shop of her father, a dyer, but now a series of oratories and chapels, sanctified by holy memories and adorned by art. It is built of brick, with two arched galleries, one above the other, of a later period. _Sposæ XPI. Katharinæ Domvs_ is on the front, with a small head of the saint graven in marble, and another tablet styling her the Seraphic Catharine. Below hang tanned skins, probably for sale. The memories of the place are truly seraphic, but the odors would by no means be considered so by those who do not believe in the dignity and sacredness of labor; for the whole quarter――at least, when we were there――was redolent of tan. Skins hung on all the houses. Tan-cakes for fuel were displayed on shelves for sale at every door. Everybody seemed industrious. There was none of the _far niente_ we like to associate with Italy. It was a positive grievance to find great heaps of tan around the Fonte Branda, so poetical to us, because associated with the Divine Poet. But it was still harder to have the same odors follow us to the very house of the seraphic St. Catharine, the mystic Bride of Christ. Very little change can have taken place during the last five centuries in the neighborhood where bloomed this fair lily of the church, and, in one sense, this is a satisfaction. The house itself is of the most touching interest. There are the stairs Catharine, when a child, used to ascend, with an _Ave_ at every step, and over which the legend says she was so often borne by the angels. Everywhere through the passages are the emblematic lily and heart. An oratory has been made of the kitchen which became to Catharine a very sanctuary, instead of a place of low cares, where she served Christ under the form of her father, the Blessed Virgin under that of her mother, and the disciples in the persons of her brothers and sisters. Her father’s _Bottega_ has also been converted into an oratory. In the garden where she loved to cultivate the symbolic rose and lily and violet for the altar, is a chapel in which hangs the miraculous crucifix painted by Giunta of Pisa, framed in pillars of black marble, over the altar. Before this crucifix she received the stigmata in the church of St. Christina at Pisa. In these various oratories are a profusion of paintings by Sodoma, Vanni, and other eminent artists. Del Pacchia has attained the very perfection of feminine beauty in his painting of St. Catharine’s visit to the shrine of St. Agnes of Monte Pulciano――a genuine production of Christian inspiration. Salimbeni represents her calm amid the infuriated, ungrateful Florentines after her return from Avignon; and Sebastian Folli, her appearance before Gregory XI.

But the most sacred part of the house is her chamber, a little, dark cell about fifteen feet long and eight or nine wide. A bronze door now opens into this sanctuary. Here you are shown the board on which she slept, and other relics of the saint. Here she passed nights in prayer and converse with the angels. Here she scourged her frail body, unconscious that her mother was weeping at the door. Here she wrote the admirable letters so remarkable for their purity and elegance of style. Here took place the divine _Sposalizio_ which, immortalized by art, we see all over Italy. Here, when calumniated by the repulsive object of her heroic charity, she came to pour out her pure soul, that shrank from the foul accusations, before the heavenly Bridegroom; but when he appeared with two crowns, one of gold set with jewels, and the other of thorns, she unhesitatingly chose the latter, pressing it deep into her head, thus becoming for all time, in the world of art, the thorn-crowned Catharine. Pius IX., when he visited the house in 1857, prayed long in this cell, where lived five centuries ago the obscure maiden who, for a time, almost guided St. Peter’s bark.

On St. Catharine’s day the house is richly adorned and resplendent with light. The walls are covered with emblems and verses commemorating her life. The altars have on their finest ornaments. The neighboring streets are strewn with flowers and hung with flags. Hangings are at all the windows. A silver statue of the saint is borne into the street by a long procession of clergy and people. The magistrates join the _cortège_, and they all go winding up to San Domenico with chants, perfumes, and flowers, where a student from the college Tolomei pronounces a eulogy on their illustrious townswoman. When night comes on, the whole hill around Fonte Branda is illuminated, the rosary is said at the foot of the Madonnas, and hymns are sung in honor of the saint.

St. Catharine’s life, in which everything transcends the usual laws of nature, has been written by her confessor, the Blessed Raymond of Capua――the life of one saint by another. He was not a credulous man easily led away by fantasies of the imagination, but one of incontestable ability and knowledge, who relates what he witnessed in the soul of whose secrets he was the depositary, who scrutinized every prodigy, but only to give additional splendor to the truth.

Raymond was a descendant of Piero della Vigna (the celebrated chancellor of Frederick II.), whose spirit Dante finds imprisoned in “the drear, mystic wood” of the Inferno, and, plucking a limb unwittingly from

“The wild thorn of his wretched shade,”

to his horror brings forth at once cries and blood. For nineteen years Raymond was general of the Dominican Order. Pope Urban VI. confided the most delicate and difficult missions to him; called him his eyes, his tongue, his feet, and his hands; held him up to the veneration of princes and people; and would have raised him to the highest dignities but for the opposition of the saint. No one, therefore, could have greater claims to our confidence.

Catharine Benincasa was born in 1347. From her earliest years she was a being apart, and favored with divine communications. Uncomprehended at first by those around her, her home became to her a place of trials. Her parents tried to draw her into the world, and she cut off her long, golden hair. They wished her to marry, and she consecrated herself to a higher love. They then subjected her to household labor, but she found peace in its vulgar details. She worked by day. At night she prayed till lost in ecstasy, insensible to everything earthly. She wished to enter the Third Order of St. Dominic, but was refused admission because she was too young and beautiful. It was only after an illness that made her unrecognizable that she was received; but she continued, like all the members, an inmate of her father’s house. Her soul was peculiarly alive to the sweet harmonies of nature. She liked to go into the woods, at springtime, to listen to the warbling of the birds and watch the mysterious movements of awakening vegetation. She loved the mountain heights, with their wild melodies of winds and torrents, as well as the gentle rustling of the air among the leaves, which seemed to her like nature’s whispered prayer. She said, as she looked at the ant, a thought of God had created it. She loved flowers. She had a taste for music, and liked to sing hymns as she sewed. The name of Mary from her lips was said to leave a singular harmony in the ears of her listeners. She sympathized in every kind of misery to aid it; lent a helping hand to every infirmity, and often served in the hospital, choosing those who were abandoned by the rest of the world as the objects of her care. She rose above the wants of the body. From her childhood she never ate meat, the very odor of which became repugnant to her. For years she subsisted from Ash Wednesday till Whitsuntide solely on the Holy Eucharist, which she received every morning. She entered into all the troubles of the times, diffusing everywhere the pure light of divine charity. Though without human instruction, she astonished the doctors of the church by her profound knowledge of theology. “The purest Italian welled from her untutored lips.” She wrote to popes, cardinals, princes, and republics. Some of her letters are to Sir John Hawkwood, or, as the Italians call him, Giovanni Aguto, the ferocious English _condottiere_, who stained the flag of the church, and then entered the service of her enemies. She takes a foremost rank among the writers of the age――that of Boccaccio, who lacks her touching grace and simplicity.

Siena, at the time of St. Catharine, was no longer the powerful, united city it had been a century before, but in its turn had become the prey of anarchy and division. The different classes of people were at war with each other. They proscribed each other; and private hatred took advantage of the disorder to indulge in every kind of revenge. The Macconi were at variance with the Rinaldini; the Salimbeni with the Tolomei; the Malvotti with the Piccolomini.

War reigned all over Italy. Milan and all Lombardy were ravaged by the Visconti. Naples was a prey to the excesses caused by Queen Joanna. Florence, that had been devoted to the church, was now governed by the Ghibellines, who went to every extreme against the Guelphs, whose cause, says Dean Milman, “was more (!) than that of the church: it was that of freedom and humanity.” The States of the church were ravaged. Rome itself, widowed and abandoned, “with as many wounds as she had palaces and churches,” as Petrarch says, was in a complete state of anarchy.

Amid all these horrors St. Catharine moved, an angel of peace. God gave her a wonderful power of appeasing private resentments and calming popular tumults. Inveterate enemies clasped hands under her influence. Veteran warriors, and republics themselves, listened respectfully to her voice. She wrote to Pope Gregory XI. at Avignon, pleading the cause of all Italy, and urging him to return to Rome, where he could overrule the passions that agitated the country, and restore dignity to the Apostolic See. Her heart bled at the sight of so much misery and crime. “Peace! peace!” she wrote to the pope――“peace for the love of a crucified God! Do not regard the ignorance and blindness and pride of your children. You will perhaps say you are bound by conscience to recover what belongs to holy church. Alas! I acknowledge it; but when a choice is to be made, it should be of that which is most valuable. The treasure of the church is the Blood of Christ shed for the redemption of souls. This treasure of blood has not been given for temporal dominion, but for the salvation of the human race. If you are obliged to recover the cities and treasures the church has lost, still more are you bound to win back the souls that are the true riches of the church, which is impoverished by losing them. It is better to let go the gold of temporal than the gold of spiritual wealth. You must choose between two evils――that of losing grandeur, power, and temporal prosperity, and the loss of grace in the souls that owe obedience to your Holiness. You will not restore beauty to the church by the sword, by severity and war, but by peaceful measures. You will combat more successfully with the rod of mercy and kindness than of chastisement. By these means you will recover what belongs to you both spiritually and temporally.”

Noble liberty on the part of the dyer’s daughter! And it is to the honor of Pope Gregory that he listened to her with respect. It was time to pour oil on the troubled waters. The proud republic of Florence, after revolting against all spiritual authority, torturing the priests, declaring liberty preferable to salvation, and exciting the papal cities to rebellion, had been laid under an interdict. The people began to feel the disastrous effects on their commerce, and came to solicit Catharine’s intervention with the pope. She went to Avignon, where she made known her mission in a public consistory. “She passed from her father’s shop to the court of princes, from the calmness of solitude to the troubles of factions; and everywhere she was in her place, because she had found in solitude a peace above all the agitations of the world, and a profound charity.”

Pope Gregory left her to dictate the terms of peace with the Florentines, though he foresaw their ingratitude. Nay, more: after some hesitation he decided to return to Rome. Nor was St. Catharine the only woman that urged him to do so. St. Bridget of Sweden added the influence of her prophetic voice. Ortensia di Gulielmo, one of the best poets of the day, thus begins a sonnet:

“Ecco, Signor, la greggia tua d’intorno Cinta da lupi a divorla intenti. Ecco tutti gli onor d’Italia spenti, Poiché fa altrove il gran Pastore soggiorno.”[108]

Catharine’s return to Siena was celebrated by festive songs:

“Thou didst go up to the great temple, Thou didst enter the mighty consistory; The words of thy mouth were full of power; Pope and cardinals were persuaded to depart. Thou didst direct the course of their wings towards the See of Peter. O virgin of Siena! how great is thy praise――soul prompt in movement, energetic in action.”

On the tomb of Gregory XI., in the church of St. Francesca at Rome, St. Catharine is represented walking before the pope’s mule as he makes his triumphal entrance into the city――a symbol of her guiding influence. From this time she took a prominent part in all the affairs of Italy. But the re-establishment of the papal throne at Rome was her last joy on earth. At the death of Pope Gregory fresh disorders broke out. Catharine’s life slowly wasted away, inwardly consumed, as she declared, for the church. She died in Rome at the age of thirty-three, and lies buried under the high altar of the Minerva, surrounded by lamps and flowers. Her countryman, Pius II., canonized her, not only at the request of the magistrates of Siena, but of several of the sovereigns of Europe.

Siena boasts of other saints: St. Ansano, the first apostle of the country, beheaded on the banks of the Arbia in the time of Diocletian; Galgano di Lolo, who led an angelic life in the mountains; the founder of Monte Oliveto, whose order sheltered Tasso; Ambrogio Sansedoni, the confessor of Conradin, noted for his eloquence and sanctity; St. Bernardin, on whose breast glows the potent Name; Beata Nera Tolomei, noted for her ascetic charity; the poor Pietro Pettinajo, who devoted himself to the plague-stricken in the hospital della Scala; Aldobrandescha Ponzi, who wished to be crowned with thorns like Christ; the Blessed John Colombini, whose only passion was to be like Jesus; and many more besides. But St. Catharine――the heroine of divine love――is the most sublime expression of Sienese piety, and of her is the city especially proud. Her statue was placed by the republic on the front of its glorious cathedral, and she is represented in the gorgeous picture of Pinturicchio in the library, where, as Mrs. Stowe says, “borne in celestial repose and purity amid all the powers and dignitaries of the church, she is canonized as one of those that shall reign and intercede with Christ in heaven.”

From St. Catharine’s house you go winding up under the mulberry-trees to San Domenico, soon leaving the tops of the houses below you. On the way is the place where Catharine, when a child, coming down the hill one evening with Stefano, her favorite brother, turned to look back, and saw the heavens opened above the campanile of the church, and the Great High-Priest seated on a radiant throne, around which stood SS. Peter, Paul, and John, who seemed with uplifted hands to bless her. Keeping on to the top of the hill, you come to a large green, silent and deserted, before the church. The street that properly leads to it is well named the _Via del Paradiso_. The church of St. Dominic is vast and imposing, though of severe simplicity of style, offering a marked contrast to the richness of the Duomo. It is shaped like the letter T, without aisles or apsis. Rafters support the vault, but at the entrance to the transepts is an enormous arch of singular boldness. There is something broad and expansive about the atmosphere of the church, as often found in the churches of the Dominican Order. Even with a considerable number of worshippers it would seem solitary. In one of its chapels is a Madonna, celebrated in the history of art, long attributed to Guido of Siena, but now proved to be by Guido di Graziano, a contemporary of Cimabue, whose Madonnas it resembles, with its oblique eyes, large head, and a certain angular stiffness. Among other noted paintings is one of Santa Barbara by Matteo da Siena, very beautiful in expression. She sits, crowned by two angels, with a palm in one hand and a tower-like tabernacle in the other, in which the Host is exposed above a chalice. SS. Magdalen and Catharine are at her side.

A domed chapel, protected by a balustrade of alabaster, has been built on the east side of the church, in which is enshrined the head of St. Catharine――evidently the most frequented part of the church, from the numerous seats before it, mostly with coats of arms and carved backs. Framed prayers, as is common in Italy, are chained to a _prie-Dieu_――one to St. Catherine with the anthem: _Regnum mundi et omnem ornatum sæculi contempsi propter amorem Domini mei Jesu Christi, quem vidi, quem amavi, in quem credidi, quem dilexi_. Three lamps were burning before the relics of St. Catharine. The walls are covered with exquisite paintings by Sodoma, which were lit up by the morning sun. Nothing could be more lovely than St. Catharine swooning at the Saviour’s apparition――a figure full of divine languor, grace, and softness. Two nuns tenderly sustain her. Her stigmata are radiant. An angel bears a lily. The whole painting is delicate, ethereal, and heavenly as a vision. It is on the gospel side of the altar; on the other side she kneels between two nuns with her eyes raised to heaven, where, above the Virgin and Child, appears the _Padre Eterno_. Angels bear the cross and crown of thorns. Another brings the Host. A death’s head and lily are at her feet. The whole is of wonderful beauty.

On the left wall, as you enter the chapel, is painted the execution of a young knight, beheaded at Siena for some slight political offence. St. Catharine went to comfort him in his despair, and induced him to receive the sacraments. She even accompanied him to the block, where his last words were “Jesus” and “Catharine,” leaving her inundated with his blood, but in a state of ecstasy that rendered her insensible to everything but his eternal welfare. The odor of his blood seemed to intoxicate her. She could not resolve to wash it off. She only saw his soul ransomed by the blood of the Lamb, and, in describing her state of mind to her confessor, she cries: “Yes, bathe in the Blood of Christ crucified, feast on this Blood, be inebriated with this Blood, weep in Blood, rejoice in Blood, grow strong in this Blood, then, like an intrepid knight, hasten through this Blood to defend the honor of God, the liberty of the church, and the salvation of souls.” Her letters often begin: “I, Catharine, servant and slave of Jesus Christ, write you in his precious Blood,” as if it was there she derived all her strength and inspiration. In the picture before us nothing could be more peaceful than the face of the young knight just beheaded, whose soul two beautiful angels are bearing to heaven.

On the pavement is traced in the marble Adam amid the animals in Paradise, among whom is the unicorn, the ancient emblem of chastity.

At the extreme end of the church is the Chapel delle Volte, to which you ascend by six steps. Over the door is this inscription:

En locus hic toto sacer | et venerabile orbe, Hic Sponsũ Catharina suum | sanctissima sepe, Vidit ovans Christum | dictu mirabile, sed tu Quisquies ades hic funde | preces venerare beatam Stigmata gestantem | Divini insignia amoris;――

Behold this place, sacred and venerable among all on earth; here holy Catharine rejoicing often beheld, wondrous to say, the Christ, her spouse. But thou, whosoever approachest, here pour forth thy prayers, to venerate the holy one who bore the sacred stigmata, the insignia of divine love.

This chapel, the scene of so many of St. Catharine’s mystic visions, is long and narrow, with one window. The arches are strewn with gilt stars on a blue ground. The floor is paved with tiles, with tablets here and there. On one, before the altar, are the words: _Cathâ. cor mutat XPUS_――Christ changes the heart of Catharine; for it was here she underwent that miraculous change of heart which transformed her life. Our Saviour himself appeared to her, surrounded by light, and gave her a new heart, which filled her with ecstatic joy, and inspired a love for all mankind.

Over the plain altar is an authentic portrait of St. Catharine by the poetic Andrea Vanni, a pupil of Sano di Pietro. He was one of her disciples and correspondents, though a _Capitano del Popolo_. He painted this portrait in 1367, while she was in an ecstatic state in this very chapel. It represents her with delicate features, a thin, worn face, and must have been a charming picture originally, but it is now greatly deteriorated.

On one of the pillars of the chapel is the inscription: _Catâ. cruce erogat XPO_――Catharine bestows the cross on Christ; referring to the silver cross she one day gave a beggar in this church, which was afterwards shown her set with precious stones. And on another pillar is: _Catâ. vesti induit XPUM_――Catharine clothes Christ with her garment; in memory of the tunic she here gave our Saviour under the form of a beggar, who showed it to her some hours after, radiant with light and embroidered with pearls――acts of charity full of significance. Three lovely little paintings by Beccafumi, at the Belle Arti, represent the three mystic scenes commemorated in this chapel.

In the adjoining convent, now a school-house, lived for a time St. Thomas of Aquin and the Blessed Ambrogio Sansedoni, whose tomb is in the cloister. Here, in 1462, was held a chapter of fifteen hundred Dominicans, and here Pius II. blessed the standard of the Crusaders.

On our way to the Porta Camollia we turned down at the left, by a steep, paved way, to the church of Fonte Giusta, erected in memory of a victory over the Florentines. It is a small brick church with four small windows, four pillars to which are attached four bronze angels holding four bronze candlesticks, and on the walls hang four paintings of note. One is a beautiful coronation of the Virgin with four saints, by Fungai. Then there is a Visitation by Anselmi, in which two majestic women look into each other’s eyes, as if to fathom each the other’s soul. In an arch of the right aisle is the sibyl of Peruzzi――a noble figure――said to have been studied by Raphael when Agostino Chigi, the famous banker of the Farnesina palace (a Sienese by birth), commissioned him to paint the celebrated sibyls of the _Della Pace_ at Rome――sibyls that have all the grandeur of Michael Angelo, and the grace that Raphael alone could give.

But what particularly brought us to this church was to see the Madonna of Fonte Giusta, to which Columbus made a pilgrimage after the discovery of America, and presented his sword, shield (a round one), and a whale’s bone, which are still suspended over the entrance. The Madonna turns her fair, sweet face towards you, while the Child has his eyes turned towards his mother, with his hands crossed on his breast. Both have on silver crowns, and pearls around their necks. The picture is in a frame of cherubs’ heads, surrounded by delicate arabesques. Beneath is the inscription:

Hic requies tranquilla, Salus hic dulce levamen: Hic est spes miseris ꝕsidiũq reis――

Here is tranquil repose; here safety and sweet consolation; here is hope for the wretched, and for the guilty an unfailing refuge.

Columbus’ devotion to the Blessed Virgin is well known. It was under her auspices he undertook, in a vessel called by her name, the discovery of a new world. He daily said her office on board ship from a valuable MS. given him by Alexander VI. before his departure and afterwards bequeathed to Genoa, and the _Salve Regina_ was sung every evening by his followers.

Porta Camollia is not remarkable in an architectural point of view, but it has its sacred associations. It was here St. Bernardin of Siena used to come every night, when a boy, to pray before the tutelar Madonna of the gate. His aunt, hearing him speak of going to see the fairest of women, followed him at a distance one night and discovered his secret.

The chapel of the Confraternity of San Bernardin is a museum of art. The walls are covered with fine frescoes of the life of the Virgin by Beccafumi, Sodoma, and Pacchia. One of the most beautiful is Sodoma’s “Assumption,” in which Mary――_pulchra ut luna_――in a mantle like a violet cloud, is borne up to her native heaven by angels full of grace. The apostles, with thoughtful, devout, but not astonished faces, stand around the tomb, out of which rise two tall lilies amid the white roses. St. Thomas lifts his hands to receive the sacred girdle.

Everywhere about this chapel is the sacred monogram so dear to San Bernardin. The holy name of Jesus is inscribed on the front, on the holy-water basin, on the walls; placed there in more devout times, when even genius sought to

“Embalm his sacred name With all a painter’s art and all a minstrel’s flame.”

There are more than sixty churches and chapels at Siena, but perhaps not one without some work of art that is noteworthy. Siena was the cradle of art in the thirteenth century, and has its aureola of artists as well as of saints. The school of Florence only dates from the fourteenth century. Guido da Siena, Bonamico, and Diotisalvi were the glorious precursors of Cimabue, and Simone Memmi, a century later, shared with Giotto the friendship and admiration of Petrarch.

“_Ma certò il mio Simon fû in Paradiso._”

The old Sienese artists were profoundly religious. In their statutes of 1355 they say: “We, by the grace of God, make manifest to rude and ignorant men the miraculous events operated by virtue, and in confirmation, of our holy faith.” The efflorescence of the arts is one of the expressions of a profound faith. We have only to visit the galleries of Italy, filled with the sad spoils of numberless churches and convents, to be convinced of this. And there is not a tomb of a saint of the middle ages out of which does not bloom some flower of art, fair as the lilies that spring from the sepulchre of the Virgin. What wreaths of art entwine the tombs of St. Francis, St. Dominic, and St. Antony of Padua!

The collection of paintings at the Academy of Siena is very interesting. Here Beccafumi represents St. Catharine receiving the stigmata. She is in soft, gray robes, with a lovely face, kneeling before a crucifix under an archway, through which you see the landscape. A dead, thorny tree is behind her. By way of contrast to her beauty and grace is the austere St. Jerome, haggard and worn, with his lion, before one of the pillars of the arch. At the other is a Dominican in black and white garments. Above are the Madonna and Child attended by angels. The whole picture is very soft and charming.

Sodoma has also here a St. Catharine with a delicate, thoughtful face, and a crucifix in her pierced hands.

Perhaps the most striking picture in the gallery is Sodoma’s “Christ Bound,” which is wonderful in expression. The face and form are very human and of grand development. From under the crown of thorns flows the long, amber hair. The eyes are sad, inexpressibly sad, and the bleeding form is infinitely pathetic. “It is a thing to stand and weep at,” says Hawthorne.

“I suffer binding who have loosed their bands. Was ever grief like mine?”

Sodoma’s “Judith,” in a blue dress and orange mantle, stands beside a leafless tree, holding up the bloody knife with one hand, and the head of Holofernes with the other. She has a gleaming jewel on her forehead, though the old rabbis represent her with a wreath of lilies, believed by the ancients to be a protection against witchcraft and peril.

The university of Siena existed in the thirteenth century. Among its noted members was Cisto da Siena, a Jew, who became a Catholic and a monk, and finally a Calvinist. Condemned to death for his apostasy, he was indebted for his life to the friendship of Pope Julius III. and Cardinal Ghislieri, afterwards Pius V.

M. Taine speaks of the deplorable ignorance of the present Sienese, and says there is no library, not a book, in the place.[109] As he seems, by his journal, to have been there only two days, he probably, like many travellers, noted down his preconceived opinion. The library of Siena, one of the oldest in Italy, has always been famous. It was founded by Niccolo Oliva, an Augustinian friar, and contains fifty thousand volumes――a respectable number for an inland town. About seven hundred belong to the very first age of printing. There are also five thousand manuscripts, among which are a Greek Gospel of the tenth century that came from the imperial chapel at Constantinople, bound in silver, and many other rare MSS. and documents, such as the original will (in Latin) of Boccaccio, and autograph writings of Metastasio, St. Catharine, and St. Bernardin.

Siena has several charitable institutions. The asylum for deaf mutes, founded by Padre Pendola is spacious and agreeable. The great hospital della Scala, opposite the cathedral, founded by Fra Sorore, is one of the most ancient in Italy. It is vast and sunny, with a fine view over the valley around Siena. Its atmosphere is thoroughly religious, with its walls frescoed by the old masters, its numerous altars and religious emblems. St. Catharine used to come here to attend the sick. It is now served by Sisters of Charity.

It is dreadful to say, but the first glimpse we had of the Duomo, with its striped wall of black and white marble, reminded us of good old Sarah Battles――“now with God”――and her cribbage-board, which Charles Lamb tells us was made of the finest Sienese marble, and brought by her uncle from Italy. But on coming nearer to it every trivial thought vanishes before its grandeur and expressive richness of detail. The impression it makes on the mind is so profound, M. Taine says, that “what we feel on entering St. Peter’s at Rome cannot be compared to it.” He calls it “a most admirable Gothic flower, but of a new species that has blossomed in a more propitious clime, the production of minds of greater cultivation and genius, more serene, more beautiful, more religious, and yet healthy; and which is to the cathedrals of France what the poems of Dante and Petrarch are to the _chansons_ of the French _trouvères_.”

On the pavement before the entrance is represented the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican who went up into the Temple to pray――a lesson to ponder over as we enter the house of prayer. The façade is of marvellous workmanship. Amid angels and prophets and symbolic sculpture, delicate as lace-work, are St. Ansano, St. Catharine, and San Bernardin――the special patrons of Siena. On entering the church you are at first dazzled by its richness. The pavement is unrivalled in the world, with its pictures in niello, by an art now lost, where we find page after page from the Scriptures, some written by the powerful hand of Beccafumi, whose cartoons are to be seen at the Belle Arti; sibyls noble as goddesses; Trismegistus, who received his knowledge from Zoroaster, offering the Pimandra in which is written: “The God who created all things, the maker of the earth and starry heavens, so greatly loved his Son that he made him his Holy Word”; and Socrates climbing the mountain of Virtue, who sits on its summit, holding forth a palm to him, while with the other hand she offers the book of wisdom to Crates, who empties a casket of jewels to receive it. The walls are covered with paintings, by Duccio, of twenty-six scenes of the Passion, full of life and power, dramatic and yet strictly Scriptural, forming a book one is never weary of studying as Christian or artist. The stalls by Fra Giovanni, the Olivetan monk, are the very perfection of intarsia work, which here, as Marchese says, “almost rises to the dignity of painting.” The wondrous pulpit, with its nine columns resting on lions, its sides covered with scenes from the life of Christ by Nicholas of Pisa, and the seven sciences on the central octagonal pillar, is a prodigy of richness and elegance.

The frieze around the nave is adorned with the heads of the popes down to Alexander III. Among these, strange to say, was once Pope Joan, such hold had that popular error on the public mind. It was Florimond de Raymond, a counsellor of the parliament of Bordeaux, and a friend of Montaigne and Justus Lipsius, who, in the sixteenth century, protested against such an insult to the Papacy, and by his efforts had it effaced. He wrote to the Sovereign Pontiff himself: “Avenge the injury done to your predecessors. Order this monster to be removed from the place where Satan, the father of lies, has had it set up. Do not suffer an image to remain of that which never existed. If there was no body, let there be no shadow”; and he calls upon the pope to destroy this idol, raised to the disgrace of the church. Besides this, he wrote a book, now rare, completely exploding the fable, showing by incontestable documents there was not the least place for Joan in the succession of popes. This work, together with his appeal, produced such an effect as to procure the removal of her portrait from the cathedral of Siena. The illustrious Cardinal Baronius wrote to him in 1600 that it had just been removed by order of the Grand Duke of Tuscany according to his wishes, and he congratulated him in magnificent terms on such a triumph.

On an altar in the left nave is the crucifix borne by the Sienese at the battle of Monte Aperti, and beneath the arches are still suspended, after so many centuries, the long flag-poles captured from the Florentines Sept. 4, 1260, the most glorious day in the history of Siena.

At the right is the chapel of the Madonna del Voto, built by Alexander VII., a Sienese pope (Fabio Chigi), with its Byzantine-looking Virgin amid paintings, bronzes, mosaics, and precious stones.

The family of Piccolomini is glorified in this church. To it belonged the great Æneas Silvius, as well as Pius III., also a lover of the arts, and Ascanio Piccolomini, Archbishop of Siena, a friend of Galileo, to whom he gave hospitality when he came forth from what people are pleased to call the dungeons of the Inquisition at Rome――that is, from pleasant apartments in the delightful palace of the Tuscan ambassador on the Trinità de’ Monti, now the French Academy. The Piccolomini chapel has five statues sculptured by Michael Angelo, and the beautiful hall, known as the Library, is world-famous for its frescoes of the life of Pius II. by Pinturicchio.

The whole church is a temple of art, with its sculptured altar, its bronze tabernacle, its rare paintings, its beautiful pillars of differently-colored marbles, and its rich windows of stained glass. Nothing could be more serene and calm than the atmosphere of this glorious church. Amid the sacred silence, the struggling light, with the grandest symbols of religion on every side, you feel lifted for a moment out of your own mean imprisonments into a very heaven of art and piety.

[108] Behold, O Lord! thy flock surrounded by wolves eager to devour it. Behold all the honor of Italy spent, because its Chief Pastor sojourns in a foreign land.

[109] “_Point de bibliothèque: aucun livre_,” are his words.

SIR THOMAS MORE.

_A HISTORICAL ROMANCE._

FROM THE FRENCH OF THE PRINCESSE DE CRAON.