Chapter V (7)

While the Episcopal Church is falling to pieces under the disintegrating influence of Protestantism, which is its essence, and of rationalism, which has invaded it, as the lamented Robert Wilberforce has clearly shown, [Footnote 38] many Christians born within its communion, but animated by a different spirit which urges them to the divine centre of Catholicity, are no longer willing to build their faith on the shifting sand of human opinions, and cement a religious society by the dissolving principle of private judgment. For them the authority and the common faith of the universal church are necessary: they demand the integrity of the gospel of Jesus Christ and the sacred guardian of apostolic traditions. For such as these, the book of Henry VIII. and John Fisher is a most striking monument of the unity and antiquity of the faith, a sort of beacon to show all in the great impending shipwreck of religion in England what direction they must take in order to find safety.

[Footnote 38: The principle of authority in the church.]

You who seek the unity of the faith, then, "one heart and one soul," [Footnote 39] see in what splendor she shines here.

[Footnote 39: Acts iv. 32.]

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It is the King of England, and with him the most pious and learned English bishop of the sixteenth century, who makes his profession of faith, who glories in his submission to the authority of the pope, who defends the seven sacraments. Does a single bishop protest? Are Oxford and Cambridge silent? Do the secular and regular clergy, the parliament, the laymen of every condition of life, all acquiesce? Does not a single Englishman present this respectful remonstrance: "Sire, you are sacrificing the rights and prerogatives of your crown! A King of England submit to the pope! Is not one king the supreme head of the church? You defend seven sacraments: how so when there are only two?"

It was, then, evidently the faith of England that Henry VIII. and John Fisher defended; and this monument, reared before the schism and different creeds that it has created, shows us that those who would dare to deny the doctrines there put forth would be considered innovators, which, in the church of Jesus Christ, has always been considered synonymous with heretics.

But if this book is the monument of the faith of England in the sixteenth century, before 1534, it is at the same time a monument of the Roman faith, that is to say, of the faith of the Catholic Church. At that time, when the pontiffs were more than usually vigilant on account of the heresies which were springing up in the various countries of Europe, two popes, Leo X. and Clement VII., were not content with sanctioning the work of Henry VIII., but gave and confirmed to him the title of the "Defender of the Faith." England declared her belief; Rome, and through her the Catholic Church, answered: "Your faith is ours; we congratulate you on your able defence of it." Here was indeed unity and unanimity.

Is this all the light that we can gather from this source? This monument was erected in the midst of the religious life of England, between its Roman Catholic past, of more than a thousand years from the birth of the Anglo-Saxon Church, and its schismatic future, which would count more than three hundred years. Nowhere can one better stand to see the different policies and course travelled by England than here: once as the cherished daughter of the Roman Church, the sister of Catholic nations; and then how she has changed since she rebelled against Rome, and has gone on in her isolation, sufficient for herself, Christian in her own way, even while an oecumenical council was assembled.

The Roman Catholic past of England is known by the certain evidence of history; and from the monument of Henry VIII., which can well be considered its terminus, we propose to cast a hasty glance at its most distant events; and of these by far the most interesting are the glorious acts of the pontificate of Pope St. Gregory the Great, who sent missionaries to convert his dear English, although yet idolaters, and who chose their first bishop from the Benedictine monks of his convent at Rome. What unity, what unanimity between Rome and England in the time of the monk St. Augustine! It was the union of a daughter and mother: it was precisely the same union, the same faith, in the sixth as in the sixteenth century, until 1534.

The sixth century makes us go far back in the history of the church; but, in admiring the apostolic works of St. Augustine and his companion, we find about them precious and striking witnesses of a past yet more distant. {262} St. Augustine convokes the bishops of the Britons to beg them to aid him in converting the Saxons to Christianity. He acknowledged, then, that the Britons were in the same communion, and professed the same Roman Catholic faith. Indeed, if the Britons were wrong in refusing their help, it was only because of their hatred against their oppressors, for the ancient British Church was never separated from the communion of the Roman Church, never lost the purity of the Catholic faith. [Footnote 40]

[Footnote 40: See _The Monks of the West_,
by M. le Comte de Montalembert.]

Pelagius, it is true, was a Briton, and his heresy, which he first sowed at Rome, was not long in reaching Great Britain, yet it never took deep root there. The British Catholics sent a deputation to the bishops of Gaul, urging them to send a number of missionaries to them. Pope Celestine, warned of the danger to the faith, sent St. Germain of Auxerre; the bishops of Gaul, assembled for this purpose, added St. Loup of Troyes. These two great bishops left their peaceful flocks in all haste to come to the rescue of the invaded folds; and while they were working so faithfully for the glory of God and of his holy church, all Catholic Gaul was praying most fervently for its sister, Great Britain. Pelagianism was vanquished and found no home in the land of Pelagius; it was in another land that it made its most deplorable ravages.

Thus it was in Great Britain that the bishops, who are established by the Holy Spirit to govern the church, [Footnote 41] triumphed over this sad and insidious heresy, when they were free to exercise their divine mission in that country, and when they were closely united to the centre of unity.

[Footnote 41: Acts xx. 28.]

There was something like it in the fourteenth century, when the heresy of Wickliff arose. He was condemned by the council of London, (1382,) although an Englishman, and one who had studied at Oxford, and who had been the principal of the College of Canterbury, at once the flatterer and the favorite of his sovereigns. His doctrine, which contained the germ of all the Anglicanism of the time of Elizabeth, caused considerable trouble in England; but, thanks to the firmness of the episcopate, these troubles are not to be compared with those from which Bohemia suffered, where John Huss taught the same heresy.

Before the Anglican "reform," which has created a system before unheard of, and which unites calumny with historical delusions, every Englishman was proud to claim for his country the honor of having preserved the faith always in its purity from the time that the gospel had first been preached there. [Footnote 42]

[Footnote 42: According to the Venerable Bede, Catholic
missionaries were sent there in the second century of our
era, by Pope Eleutherius.]

Was England, then, in error? If so, she has deceived herself and all Christendom; and this universal error has lasted from the pontificate of Pope St. Eleutherius, to that of Pope Clement VII., a period of more than thirteen hundred and fifty years! We must say that anyone who looks upon this fact as of slight importance would greatly astonish us. Where do they think that the true church of Jesus Christ was during these long centuries, that church against which the gates of hell shall not prevail? [Footnote 43] Did it disappear, this city of God, which was to be placed on the mountain and seen by all people? [Footnote 44] Surely the spirit of delusion and darkness must be very potent when it can make a pious Englishman declare that the glory of the English Church was reduced to nothing before the sixteenth century, and that then Henry VIII. and Cranmer, an infamous libertine and his servile courtier, were raised up to open a new career to her.

[Footnote 43: St. Mark xvi. 18.]

[Footnote 44: St. Matthew v. 14.]

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Yet England, notwithstanding its modern religious state, is not revolutionary. She loves order as warmly as she does liberty. Even in religion, she desires by subordination the only means of preserving it.

How much light for Anglicans of good faith (and they are numerous) shines in the violent and even indecent attacks made by their preachers and historians upon the greatest names of Catholic England--names that England revered in former times with the whole Christian world--names still dear to the Catholic Church, albeit they are now almost unknown in England. To efface so much glory, it was needful that a new kind of glory should appear and dazzle by its very contrast.

At the end of 1534, and still more definitively in 1559, at the commencement of the reign of Elizabeth, the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Church were violently separated; they no more profess the same creed, they have no longer the same worship, their hierarchies are strangers, they mutually reproach each with not being the true church of Jesus Christ. It is from the monument of Henry VIII. and John Fisher that we can see the different paths they followed and the daily increasing difference which has separated them.

For the Roman Church this epoch was one of those glorious epiphanies which our Lord Jesus Christ prepares for it in different times, and of which the joys are sown in tears. After a sterile and desolate winter a spring appeared for the divine tree, full of sap, and perfumed with celestial blossoms, followed by a summer and autumn, rich in precious fruits of sanctity, of knowledge, and charity. The Council of Trent was convoked in 1542 by Paul III. for the spread and exaltation of the Christian faith, for the extirpation of heresies, the peace and union of the church, _for the reformation of the clergy and the Christian people_, for the repression and extinction of the enemies of the Christian name. The evils that existed were fearful. The holy council, with the divine assistance, acquitted itself of its task in a manner which would bring a speedy and certain remedy to all the prevalent abuses. God, the supreme King of kings, recompensed so many generous efforts on the part of his faithful people by according to them, before the end of the sixteenth century, under the glorious pontificate of St. Pius V., that memorable victory of Lepanto, which crowned the work of the crusades and shattered for ever the power of the Mussulman.

But what avail the laws the most salutary in the bosom of nations profoundly ignorant and deeply corrupt, if there do not rise in their midst men powerful in word and work to instruct them, and, above all, to regenerate them by the irresistible attraction of the most heroic virtue? It was then God raised up in Italy, in France, in Spain, in Germany, _true reformers_, who, after the example of their divine Master, began to act before they began to teach. Their names are too well known to need mention here. They compelled men to acknowledge the divine tree by its fruits. They professed the faith proclaimed by the Council of Trent, which was nothing else than the faith of Nice in its legitimate development. The faith of Nice was the faith of the apostles. This faith of the apostles, of Nice, of all the oecumenical councils, is the faith to-day of the Roman Church in the solemn profession of faith of Pius. IV., which is a _résumé_ of all the doctrine of the holy Council of Trent.

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As for England, in separating from the Roman Church she commenced the history of her variations: she entered upon that downward path of religious decline which naturally ends in a sudden descent into the gulf of scepticism. With a creed subject to the changing will of man, she was Anglican after one fashion under Henry VIII., after another fashion under Edward VI., after a third under Elizabeth, and now, to the inexpressible confusion and grief of those pious Christians born and nurtured in the bosom of the established church, she has arrived, step by step, at a point where she offers the spectacle of a chaos of incoherent doctrines, some true, some false, some orthodox, others heretical, some pious, others monstrously wicked, but all tolerated out of respect for the genius of the individuals who took the pains to invent them; all publicly and peaceably taught beneath the standard of the Thirty-nine Articles. _Le pavilion couvre la marchandise_.

While so many great servants of God and his poor, venerated and blessed throughout the rest of Christendom, adorned the Roman Church, unfortunate England, shut up in its island and still closer imprisoned by an atrocious religious persecution, saw generations of her children grow up in hate, contempt, and horror of popery and papists. Every source of education, all the pulpits of the Anglican Church, all books allowed to be published, helped to keep up this spirit of ignorant and bigoted hate against the church of God.

While St. Vincent de Paul, that great reformer of the clergy and saintly founder of world-wide works of charity, prepared, together with so many other apostolic men, the glory and prosperity of our present great age; in sanctifying the family, divinely instituted as the practical school of social virtues; in arousing a spirit of generous devotion and sacrifice which led men to comfort all forms of misery and reconcile rich and poor--those brethren so easily made enemies--England was deprived of all her religious orders, consecrated in former times to the service of the poor and the sick, to the education of youth, to the stubborn labors of science, to the contemplation of divine things, to the crucified life, the life of prayer, the life of the soul, against which the world blasphemes because it cannot comprehend it. She lost the blessings of a celibate clergy: she was despoiled of the sacred patrimony of the poor by her king and lords, who distributed it among themselves, together with the greater part of the wealth of the church, as the enemy's spoils are divided and shared after a victory. (We intend to be polite.) England beheld the wound of pauperism open wider each day, and found herself forced to have recourse to the poor-tax, unheard of in old Catholic times. Within her boundaries will be found to-day an excessive wealth in face of poverty unknown elsewhere. By the constant progress of science and industry, machine labor tends to replace the labor of the individual, and self-aggrandizement diminishes wages in proportion as it augments the daily task of the workman. What a harvest would be offered to the works of Catholic charity if her divine activity were only there to replace the horrible workhouses where souls are withering and dying! We yet have in France and elsewhere the money of St. Vincent de Paul in an innumerable number of works of charity truly Christian, and that enables us to live without taxing the poor.

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Such are the different paths which the Roman and Anglican Church have followed since the deplorable schism of Henry VIII., renewed and aggravated under Elizabeth. If before his death Henry VIII. had repented of his wicked attack upon the church, what would he have been obliged to do to reconcile himself with Rome? He would have needed only to return to that profession of faith which he made in his book against Luther. Since the beginning of the Anglican schism, and at any point of its successive variations, any Englishman, to return to the bosom of the Catholic Church, would have nothing to do but to return to that same profession, conformable in every point to the profession of faith of Pius IV. This is what has been done in our own day by Father Spencer, Archbishop Manning, Fathers Newman and Faber, Palmer and Wilberforce, and a host of others, eminent for their virtues, their knowledge, their public and private character, whom no Englishman capable of appreciating the merit of sacrifices made for God and in fidelity to conscience can name without respect and pride.

But possibly some of our readers may be astonished that we insist so strongly upon the book written by Henry VIII., for it might seem that the shameful life of the author reflects discredit upon the work. Let us not be mistaken. In the first place, when Henry VIII. wrote against Luther, he was very far from being the monster of iniquity which he became afterward, and whose history I leave to the severe judgment of a Christian Tacitus. Again, it is important to understand that Henry VIII. was not the sole author of this monument of his former faith reared by his hand fourteen years before his apostasy. The universal judgment of critics has always attributed the more solid part of the work, at least, to John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, who assumed ostensibly all the responsibility of it in the public defence he made of it.

Thus we see, on the one hand, Henry VIII., who, after putting forth his work with so much ostentation, belied it without shame and strove to mutilate it; and, on the other, John Fisher, who plants it upon the immovable rock where he had taken his place, and with glorious magnanimity sacrifices his life to defend it This is the choice offered. He who returns to the ancient faith of Henry VIII. separates himself from the tyrant and the murderer, and joins himself to the company of his victim. He ranks himself beside the glorious martyr who, during the second half of King Henry's reign, was, of all the episcopate of England, the only guardian left of English honor, and the last champion of the liberty of conscience.

An unwelcome truth, but a hard fact. In 1521, at the time of the publication of the king's book against Luther, the whole English episcopate most undoubtedly believed in the primacy of the pope with Fisher, with Henry VIII., with all the Catholic Church, and in no sense believed in the spiritual supremacy of the king. Then there was unity and unanimity, and the present and past of England were in harmony. But in 1534 the king changes his doctrine, and with him the whole episcopate and parliament. One English bishop only was found to display the firmness of a Basil, a Hilary, an Athanasius, an Ambrose, a Chrysostom, a Lanfranc, an Anselm, an Edward, a Thomas of Canterbury. The number of the cowards does but make the immortal beauty of the contrast shine out with the greater splendor. How many rough stones are not thrown together pell-mell in their shapelessness and obscurity, to form the foundation of the pedestal of one chosen stone, carved with the sublime inspiration of genius by the chisel of a Michael Angelo, to become the statue of a great man!

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If John Fisher, like the heroic Thomas More, had not the support of his own nation, he had that of all Christendom. Yes, the monument of John Fisher is worthy to become the rallying point of every generous-hearted Christian Englishman, who ardently looks for the realization of the promise and dearest wish of our common Redeemer and Saviour, Jesus Christ--There shall be one flock and one Shepherd.

With what indescribable emotion the heart of an Englishman must beat when, after a long interior combat with so many prejudices in which he has been nurtured, he at last breaks the chains of his slavery, and when, feeling himself free with that liberty which only a Catholic can feel, he cries out: "I'll do it: I abjure the schism of Henry VIII., the creed of Cranmer and Parker; I will go back to the faith of John Fisher!"

Such, doubtless, were the sentiments of the pious and learned Robert Wilberforce when he returned to the bosom of the holy Catholic Church. His words, so serious, so marked by the ardent love of truth, so touching in their tone of respect and fraternal charity for his adversaries, fall upon our ears in accents of majestic solemnity as they echo back to us from the depths of the tomb. This is what his hand has written whose memory is enshrined in the noblest hearts:

"When national distinctions cease to exist, and mankind, small
and great, are assembled before God, it will be seen whether it
was wiser, like Henry VIII. and his minion Cromwell, to break
up the Church Catholic for the sake of ruling it, or, like More
and Fisher, to die for its unity."

--------

Seventy-three.

Be merry as May,
If you want to be
As merry and gay,
At seventy-three.

To be merry and gay
Though, at seventy-three,
Argues Life's primal May
Spent virtuously.

T. K.

--------

{267}

A Winged Word.

"O power of life and death
In the tongue! as the preacher saith."

Mr. Basil Andrew paused in writing and held his pen suspended, his breath also slightly in suspense, as he contemplated his subject anew. He had been reviewing a theological work just published; but his thoughts had developed as he dwelt on them, and were no longer a plan, but the torso of a plan.

He sat like one in a trance while the new idea grew; grew slowly, almost painfully, seeming to find scant room in his brain, albeit his brows were wide. Touches from the utmost limits of his nature and his experience shaped and modified it: the swell of feeling with the ray of intellect that ruled its tide; vague emotions and vaguer speculations, in whose mists sparks of truth were dissipated, from whose sudden meeting had sometimes sprung the electric flash of intelligence; aspirations that had climbed their Jacob's ladder, reason fixing the rounds till the climbers took wings, and dazzled her with their transfigured faces; fragments of knowledge hard and sharp-edged; stray conclusions finding their premises, and stray premises their conclusions--mallet and handle for blows--all working the shape till there it stood in his brain, the perfect form of a truth.

One instant he contemplated it with rapture, while it glowed alive under his gaze; the next, he looked outward and perceived its relations with the world. As he did so, a wave of color swept over his face; and, heart failing, that form was no longer to him a living truth, but the statue of a truth.

"I might have known," he muttered, flinging his pen aside, "for me, at least, 'all roads lead to Rome.' I believe I am bewitched."

With that flush still upon his face, he rolled up the unfinished manuscript, and deliberately laid it on the coals that burned redly in the grate, where it quivered like a sentient thing. One might fancy that the thoughts just warm from his brain still retained some clinging sensation, telling where their rest had been, as, stepping ashore, for a while we continue to feel the motion of the sea on which we have been tossing. Then the edges of the leaves blackened, slender fingers of flame stole over them, opened them out, drew rustling leaf from leaf, scorching them, till one sentence started out vivid as lightning on a cloud, that sentence on which he had paused, finding it not a conclusion, but an indication. Then a strong draught caught the yet quivering cinders and carried them up the chimney.

"There they go in a swirl, like Dante's ghosts," he thought; and turned away to look out into the north-eastern storm that, having brushed the bloom from a crimson sunrising, was now, at afternoon, rushing in power over the city. The air was thick with snow, through which, far aloft, dark objects occasionally sailed with the wind-witches, probably. Passers struggled in wind and drift, and the houses seemed not sure of their footing, and had a forlorn and smothered aspect. But Mr. Andrew perceived with satisfaction that the mansion in which he dwelt maintained its dignified dowager port, and that, if ever a feathery drift presumed to alight on the doorsteps, an obsequious little flirt of wind darted round a corner of the house and whisked it off.

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While the gentleman stood there, the door of the room opened for the first time in three hours, and Miss Madeleine, Mrs. Hayward's niece, came in with a book in her hand. He watched her as she crossed the room without noticing him, and, when she had seated herself at another window, he breathed out, "How sweet is solitude!" speaking in one of those cloudy, golden voices, such a voice as might have swept over the chords of David's harp when David sang.

The lady looked up, brightening for an instant as though shone upon. Then she opened her book, and Mr. Andrew returned to his table and read also. And there was silence for another hour.

Mr. Basil Andrew was in person rather superb, tall till he bent slightly with a languid grace, which also hung about his motions and his speech. But when he was excited, these mists were scorched up. Then he grew erect as a palm-tree, the not large but beautifully shaped eyes flashed out their crystalline blue, and delicate lines trembled or hardened in mouth and nostril. Then, too, it appeared that those tones of his could ring as well as melt. If it be true that "soul is the form, and doth the body make," the philosophical reader may be able to guess the shape of his nose and chin. Lavater would have pronounced favorably concerning his intellect from seeing only that significant inch across the brows. In color he was white and flaxen-haired, but had some indefinable glow about him, like a pale object seen in a warm light.

Mr. Andrew at thirty-five years of age found himself in that pause of life which, in natures too well poised for violent reaction, comes between the disgust of unsatisfying pursuit and the adoption of higher aims, or the disdainful and half-despairing resumption of the former life. He awaited the inspiring circumstance which should waft him hither or thither, or perhaps for his soul to gather itself and make its own will the wind's will, whichever might be more potential. Pending this afflatus, interior or exterior, he rested upon life

"As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean."

Miss Madeleine was a well enough young woman, baptized into the church, but from an early age subjected to Protestant influences; oscillating between the two, never very conspicuously Catholic except when the faith was assailed, then _plus Arabe que l'Arabie;_ at other times following out Protestantism to its ultimate pantheism. She had a dimly remembered father and mother somewhere in church suffering or triumphant, and occasionally, when life seemed to her unstable, she sent out a little prayer for or to them, a prayer too weak to find olive-leaves. This young woman was not without power, but it escaped in reverie and dreaming; what she meant to do so vividly imagined that she rested there as on accomplished work. Too impetuous and flimsily ambitious to think with profit, her mind was encumbered with fragments of thought, often with a sparkle in them, like the broken snow-crystals she now dropped her book to watch. In fine, her outer life was a purposeless stupor, her inner life one of Carlyle's "enchanted nightmares" in miniature.

{269}

As the clock struck four, Mr. Andrew closed his book and approached his companion.

"I have been reading Thoreau's description of autumn woods," she said, "and I feel all colored. I am steeped in crimson, and purple, and amber, and rich tawny browns. My eyes are violet, and my hair is golden."

"Your hair is brown, and your eyes are gray," was the matter-of-fact reply, it being Mr. Andrew's opinion that the girl's mind needed ballast.

"What book have you there?" she asked, settling into place.

"Oh!" just aware he still held it, "it is Father de Ravignan's _Society and Institute of the Jesuits_--very good if one desires information on the subject. Moreover, one is charmed to learn that Père de Ravignan, though himself a Jesuit, has been a magistrate and a man of his time; also that he is still a man, and, _par excellence_, a Frenchman. The good father becomes a little Hugoish and staccato when he refers to himself."

Since she still waited, watching him with eager, imperative eyes, he went on. "You know the story of the Florentine and Genoese who wished to compliment each other: 'If I were not a Genoese, I should wish to be a Florentine,' said one. 'And I,' said the other, 'if I were not a Florentine, should wish to be--' 'A Genoese!' suggested the other. 'No, a Florentine!' So I, if I were not a free-thinker, would wish to be--"

"A Catholic!" the girl broke in. "Don't deny. You already tire of your Theodore Parker, whose intellect was to him what astronomers call a crown of aberration. You have but to look at the church, and faith is easy! How beautiful are thy steps, O prince's daughter!"

"Very pretty, but not very conclusive," was the cool comment. "You once said to me, 'Epithets are not arguments.' Allow me to retort that apostrophes are not arguments. By the way, how impossible it is to calculate on where you may be found, except that it is sure to be 'in _issimo_.' The arc of your motion takes in both poles."

Miss Madeleine relapsed again immediately, and with a somewhat weary expression.

At the same moment the door opened wide, and Mrs. Hayward entered, producing the effect of being preceded by a band of music. This lady of fifty was ample, rustling, and complacent, and, being lymphatic, was called dignified. If, on being left a widow in straitened circumstances, and finding herself obliged to take a few boarders, Mrs. Hayward had felt any sense of diminished social lustre, no one had perceived it. "They pay my housekeeping expenses," she said serenely; and immediately that seemed the end of their being.

There is something imposing in the suave conceit of such persons. Possessing themselves so completely, they also possess those who approach them, abashing larger and more slowly ripening natures. Names respectfully pronounced by them become at once names of consequence, and trivial incidents by them related swell into significant events. If they are something, then I am nothing, is the thought with which we approach them; and the fact that they are something seems so clear that the mortifying conclusion is inevitable.

After this lady followed Mrs. Blake, obviously the wife of Mr. Blake, also the mother of an uproarious boy of six years who accompanied her, and who was at this moment quieted by the possession of an enormous cake which he was devouring.

{270}

"O the cherub!" cried Miss Madeleine wickedly. "That child has genius. See, he eats his cake in the epical manner, beginning in the middle. Little pocket edition of his papa! Only," in an aside to her aunt, "I hope they haven't stereotyped him. And here comes his papa now."

A bang of the street-door, and enter Mr. Blake, rubbing his hands, and quoting,

'It is not that my lot is low,
That bids the silent tear to flow;'

it is the cold. No, my son; no kiss now. Sydney Smith says that there is no affection beyond seventy or below twenty degrees Fahrenheit. Wait till I rise to the paternal temperature."

Mr. Blake was assistant editor of a second-class magazine, considered himself literary, and had a way of saying "we scribblers" to Mr. Andrew, which made that gentleman stiffen slightly. While the one entertained the ladies with an account of the immense amount of literary labor performed by him since breakfast, the other looked from the window and absently watched the wild wind curl itself to edge off the crest of a drift, curling it over like the petal of a tuberose, but more thinly, hanging, wavering, flake to flake, daintily and airily touching the frail crystals.

"Oh! there's to be a great Christmas at your cathedral to-morrow," Mr. Blake said to Madeleine, as they went out to dinner. "Bassoon's going to sing, and Kohn's orchestra to play. It will be worth seeing and hearing, especially at five o'clock. I mean to go if I can wake. And you?"

"Yes," Madeleine said, glancing at Mr. Andrews, who flushed a little as he nodded acquiescence.

"'Similia similibus curantur,'" he thought. "I'll go and get cured."

"They really do things of that sort well at the cathedral," said Mrs. Hayward patronizingly, seeming to pat a personified cathedral on the head as she softly touched the table with her plump white hand.

Madeleine groaned inwardly.

"Mr. Andrew," she said, "what should put me in mind of the frog that tried to swell to the size of an ox?"

Mr. Andrew found himself unable to guess.

"But wouldn't it have been odd," she pursued, with the air of a philosophical child, "if the frog had succeeded, and had swelled to the size of an ox?"

Mr. Andrew admitted that it would have been a phenomenon.

"But," she concluded, with an air of infantile _naiveté_, "it wouldn't have been anything but a great frog, would it?"

"My dear, what are you talking about?" said her aunt. "Pray eat your dinner."

"Christmas-eve is a fast-day of obligation," says Madeleine.

A little raising of three pairs of eyebrows fanned the flame. This young woman had a tongue of her own, and while the others dined she entertained them with a theological discourse, which, if not always logical, had some telling points, and which certainly did not assist the digestion of her hearers. They sat with very red faces, choking a little, but trying to appear indifferent.

"Do people take bitters with their dinner?" asked Mr. Andrew, at length. "I should think it would spoil the taste."

"I must say, Madeleine," Mrs. Hayward interposed, "that, considering you address Protestants, and that we are all friends of yours, you show very little regard for our feelings."

{271}

The best thing that could have been said. Madeleine melted at once.

"O auntie!" she cried penitently, "'it is not that I love Caesar less, but Rome more.' I own that it is you who have shown the Christian spirit, and reminded me that centuries ago to-night the angels sang 'Peace on earth.' I'm going to banish myself in disgrace to the parlor. Rest you merry."

Going, into the parlor, she saw all out-doors suffused with a soft rose-color, a blush so tender and evanescent that it seemed everywhere but where the eye rested. "The sky side of this storm is all a sea of fire," she thought, throwing up the window, and drawing in a delicious breath of mingled sunshine, west wind, and frost. "How the clouds melt! And the winds and sunbeams, with their convex gleams, build up the blue dome of the air."

Coming in later, the others found her sitting at the piano in the amethystine twilight, and singing a faint and far-away sounding Gloria.

"Hush!" said Mr. Blake, pausing on the threshold, "the evening stars have begun, that the morning stars may know. See them all of a tremor on that sky!"

Listening to those strains of threaded silver, Mr. Andrew sat looking into the twilight through which the grander constellations burned with outlines unblurred by the lesser stars. There was Orion, erect, with his girdle of worlds; Taurus, with starred horns lowered; the Dogs, witnessed to by the liquid brilliance of Sirius, matchless in shifting hues; the Lion, just coming out of the East, his great paw resting on the ecliptic; all those hieroglyphs of fire in which God has written his autograph upon the heavens.

"What a pretty myth it was," he thought, "that of the morning-stars singing together. And that other of the star of Bethlehem!" He half-wished he could believe those things, they saved so much weary thought, so much maddening speculation. Sometimes, while straining to grasp at extraordinary knowledge, he had felt as though falling from a giddy height into an outer darkness, and had drawn back shuddering, eager to catch at some homely fact for support. He smiled now mockingly to himself. "Perhaps the stars did sing. Like a child, I'm going to make believe they did, and that one 'handmaid lamp' did attend the birth of Jesus." It was easier to believe anything while he listened to that Gloria. For, disregarded as Miss Madeleine might be at other times, when she sang she was regnant. Her voice was magnetic enough to draw the links from any man's logic.

Ceasing, she called Mr. and Mrs. Blake to the piano, and the three voices sang Milton's Hymn on the Nativity.

It is astonishing how magnificently some small-souled persons do contrive to sing, expressing sentiments which they must be totally incapable of experiencing. Mrs. Blake sang a superb contralto, and the three perfect voices struck fire from one listener's heart as they beat the emphatic rhythm of that majestical measure.

All but Miss Madeleine went to bed early. She kept vigil, and was to call them. They seemed scarcely to have slept when they heard her voice ring up the stairs in the muezzin which she christianized for the occasion, being in no mood to call Mohammed a prophet:

"Great is the Lord! Great is the Lord!
I bear witness that there is no God but the Lord!
I bear witness that Jesus is the Son of God!
Come unto prayer--come unto happiness--
Great is the Lord! Great is the Lord!
There is no God but the Lord!
Prayer is better than sleep--prayer is better than sleep!"

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As the last word died upon the air, every foot touched the floor, and in half an hour the party had gathered as wild as witches.

Mr. Andrew came down late and grumbling. "Cannot we hear music and see candles without getting out of bed for the purpose at such unearthly hours? I had just gone to sleep, and was in Elysium. Miss Madeleine, why should you say that prayer is better than sleep? We are not going to pray; we are going to hear demi-semi-quavers, and Mr. Bassoon's C in the deeps. I'll go to bed again."

"Possibly we may pray, Mr. Andrew," she said in a low tone. "I have been thinking to-night, and it seems to me that God had a Son, and that he will come down this morning and stand in the midst of the candles."

A Catholic, unless a convert, can scarcely understand the emotions of a stranger who enters a church for the first time on one of our great festivals. That "cool, silver shock" must be taken from another element. Our party stepped from the dim and frosty starlight into an illumination more dazzling than daylight, into a warmth that was fragrant with flowers, into a crowd where every face had a smile dissolved in it. And over all waved a sparkling tissue of violin music from the orchestra.

"By George!" was Mr. Blake's only audible comment.

"It is like the Arabian Nights!" exclaimed his wife.

"Turns up the mastodon strata in them," whispered Mr. Andrew to the lady on his arm.

They were shown to seats, and sat watching the steadily increasing crowd, and the altar that was a pyramid of fire. The worshippers were, of course, various: ragged Irish women, whose faith invested them with better than cloth of gold; rich ladies, sweeping in velvets and sables, but with thoughts of better things in their faces; ambitious working-girls, finer than their mistresses. A pretty young woman came into the slip in front of our party, her face beautifully arranged to represent modesty and sweetness. She cast a glance behind at her audience, then sank upon her knees and beat her breast with one hand, while she arranged her bonnet-strings with the other. This performance at an end, she faced about and closely scanned the gallery, turning again and again till those behind her began to feel annoyed.

"I do wish he'd come!" said Madeleine impatiently.

"He has come," whispered Mr. Andrew, as the young woman suddenly returned toward the altar, and began a series of languishing attitudes and prostrations, all her _repertoire_ of theatrical devotion.

A grand-looking man next attracted their attention, walking past with the unmistakable sailor roll. His head was erect, and his massive shoulders looked fit for Atlas burdens; but the clear, blue eyes were gentle, and his face was full of a beautiful solemnity and reverence. As he walked, the long, tawny beard flowing down his breast waved slightly.

Madeleine gave Mr. Andrew's arm a delighted squeeze, and whispered,

'With many a tempest had his beard been shaken.'

Fancy him on the ship's deck, in mid-ocean, in darkness and storm, beaten by the wind, drenched with spray, the lightnings blazing and the thunders crashing about him, shouting to the men to cut the mast away!"

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Here the organ and choir broke forth in glad acclaim, and the procession came winding in from the sacristy. Cloth of gold and cloth of silver, lace and fine linen, and crimson and purple, all combined, gave the effect of a many-jewelled band coiled about the sanctuary.

Attending alternately to the altar and the choir, Mr. Andrew tried to believe it all a vain pageant; but thoughts will enter, though the doors be shut. What a stupendous thing, he thought, if the Real Presence were true; if, as this girl said, God had a Son, and he should come down this morning and stand in the midst of the candles!

For one instant he was dazzled and confounded by the possibility; the next, he recoiled from it.

"Gloria in excelsis" sang the choir with organ and orchestra in many an involved and thrilling strain, a pure melody springing up here and there from the midst, voice and instrument meeting and parting, catching the tone from each other, swelling till the vaulted roof of the cathedral rang, fading again, dropping away one after another, till there was left but a many-toned sigh of instruments, and one voice hanging far aloft, with a silvery flutter, upon a trill, like a humming-bird sucking the sweetness from that flower of sound. A pause of palpitating silence, then an amen that set swinging the myrtle vines hanging over the St. Cecilia in front of the organ, and made the pennons of blue and scarlet that hung about the altar wave on their standards.

Contrary to custom, there was to be a sermon at that Mass, and, as the preacher ascended the pulpit, Mr. Andrew said to himself: "If Christ was the Son of God, he is on that altar; and if there, I wish he would speak to me by this man."

He hoped to hear an argument to prove the divinity of Christ, not aware that his reason had already been pampered with such until it had grown insolent. The speaker, however, handled his subject quite otherwise. Assuming that divinity, he took for his theme, "what thoughts should fill the mind, what sentiments dilate the heart," on the feast of the Nativity. Calling up before them then, in a few words, a picture of that scene at once so humble and so marvellous, and pointing to the mysterious babe, he boldly announced on the threshold of his discourse the difficulties connected with the dogma for which he demanded their homage:

"This babe is a creature as you and I: this babe is the Creator of all contingent being. This babe is just born; this babe is from all eternity. This babe is contained in the manger; this babe pervades all space. It suffers: hear its cries! It enjoys bliss beyond power of augmentation. It is poor: see the swaddling-clothes! To it belong the treasures of the universe. Here present are husband and wife; yet I am required to believe that her the Holy Spirit overshadowed, a virgin conceived, a virgin bore a Son."

Not Ulysses' arrow flew through the rings with surer, swifter aim than these words through the winding doubts that had bound that listener's heart. It was too sublime not to be true! Almost the triumphant paradox--I believe, because it is impossible--broke from his lips. The human mind was incapable of inventing a falsity so glorious.

In that tumult of feeling he lost what came next; but, listening again, heard: "If I must bow down and worship, I elect him as the object of my adoration whose dwelling is in light inaccessible, who is inscrutable in his nature, and incomprehensible in his works."

"Amen!" said Basil Andrew.

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"A virgin conceived, a virgin bore a Son," repeated itself again and again in his thought. All the singing of voices and the playing of instruments were because of that; all the splendor of the festival, the gathering of the crowd in the midst of the winter night, were for that. "O sweetest and most glorious mother in all the universe!" he thought, bowing where it is, perhaps, most difficult for a convert to render homage.

Clouds are unsubstantial things for anything but rainbows to stand on, and even they find but vanishing foothold. Had that delight in Basil Andrews's heart warmed only his imagination, it would have faded with the moment; but thought and study had done their part, and that uprising of the heart was Pygmalion's kiss to his statue. The feeling with which he turned to leave the cathedral was one of thankful content with perfected work.

Pausing in the vestibule for the crowd to pass, he looked back with a tender fear toward the altar.

Poor Madeleine's religion was iris and the cloud. She had known well what was going on in her companion's mind, and, as she stood waiting with him, a text went sighing through her memory like a sighing wind. "_I say unto you that the kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and shall be given to a nation yielding the fruits thereof._" While she, a child of the church, had given it a fitful obedience more insulting than a consistent disregard, this man had toiled every step of the way from a far-off heresy, and, passing by her as she loitered outside, had walked into the very penetralia.

She stood looking gloomily out into the morning that was one cloudless glow of pale gold.

"The air has crystallized since we came in," she said, "and we are shut inside a great gem, like flies in amber. We will have to stay here for ever."

He bent a smiling face toward her as they went out into the morning, and said softly: "How beautiful are thy steps, O Prince's daughter! You were right, Madeleine!"

A fortnight from that day Madeleine Hayward stood on the steps of her aunt's house, saying good-by to its inmates. A Southern girl, the cold skies of the North froze her. She wanted to get into a warmer sunshine, and, being prompt and determined, obstacles vanished before her.

"Mr. Andrew," she said, as he gave her his arm to the carriage, "I am sorry I can't stay to be your god-mother."

"I wouldn't have you," he said. "I'm going to have my old nurse."

Madeleine took her seat in the carriage, gave a smiling nod toward the group in the door, then held a cold hand out to her companion.

"When you are a priest, and when you hear that I am dead, say a Mass for me," she said faintly, then turned her face resolutely away.

The violent color that had risen to the gentleman's face at her words faded into a paleness as he went up the steps. By what power did that girl sometimes divine the thoughts which he had not yet owned to himself?

But she was a prophetess.

--------

{275}

Translated from the French of L. Vitet.

The Present Condition of Christianity in France

Some time ago M. Guizot published the second series of his _Meditations on the Christian Religion_. He is now prosecuting right valiantly, and will ere long have completed, the noble task that won for him two years since so novel a triumph among his many victories, and crowned his illustrious life with what may be considered its brightest glory. That calmest and most serene of creeds, a lucid definition and summary of the fundamental dogmas of Christianity, viewed from the highest stand-point, in all their native simplicity and grandeur, was greeted, it will be remembered, with gratitude by some who looked upon it as furnishing most timely aid, and with respect and partial embarrassment by others; and so marked was its effect that the most exciting religious polemics were for the time being quieted. The first series referred to the very essence of the Christian religion; what is the subject of the second?

The author, in his preface, had thus drawn the general plan of the work: First, the essence of Christianity, next its history, then its present condition, and, finally, its future. Thus a complete history of Christianity was really promised us. The plan determined upon had, perhaps, some advantages. The history of Christianity is nowadays the point that anti-christian critics would show to be vulnerable, and the portion of the armor they seek to penetrate. The public, however, after a moment's surprise, has of itself meted out partial justice to this manner of attack; or at all events, new attempts, as skilfully devised as the first, have been received with a coolness of good augury that weakens vastly the importance of previously achieved successes. Was it not most opportune, then, to enlighten still more and at once a public whose _furore_ had but just died away? was it not most important not to adjourn, even by a brief delay, a decisive refutation? As for ourselves, we yearned to behold, striving with the new-comers of criticism and history--who claim to be their masters and almost their inventors--him who, nearly half a century since, founded in our land modern historical criticism. By setting face to face with their rash assertions the true and severe laws of historic certainty; by taking down, piece by piece, their most cleverly contrived scaffolding; by reducing to naught their credit, was not the writer rendering to Christianity a most great and needed service?

M. Guizot has thought that there was something still more urgent to be accomplished; without abandoning his original idea, involving the four series, he has inverted their order of sequence; he now dwells upon the present state of Christian beliefs. At a later day he proposes to resume the discussion of historical questions, dilate upon the authority of holy books, continue his commentary on the concord of the Scriptures, and his arguments concerning technicalities and minor details; subsequently he will try to look into the future. {276} At present, he has but one care, one thought: he wishes to know what is occurring, or rather what men are believing, around him. To place in the strongest light the present state of Christianity; to enumerate its armies and those of its opponents, and establish a comparison between the strength of both; thus to summon all Christians to awaken to a sense of the events concerning the common safety; to teach them not to be deceived either as to their might or as to the magnitude of the perils besetting them, and to guard against a feeling of treacherous security as against cowardly discouragement; this it is that engrosses his attention, and, forming the subject of all his thoughts, indicates to him that which he is to consider his first duty. As he says himself, he supplies the most pressing emergency, and, hurrying to the spot where the struggle is commencing, rushes into the thick of the fight.

We can readily understand his impatience. All other questions become unimportant when compared with such a problem. No eagerness can be more legitimate than that of M. Guizot, and the investigation which it is necessary to make is surely the most serious and interesting that could be prosecuted. Let us add that few inquiries are as intricate and as difficult.