Chapter I (4)

At the end of two years, the doctor again ascended the pulpit. The crowd which came to hear him was large. Tauler cast his eyes over the expectant multitude, then drew his cowl over his eyes and prayed.

The crowd awaited him; but he spoke not a word. Tears filled his eyes and rolled down his cheeks. Tauler wept bitterly.

What a scene! The audience become impatient. Some one asks Tauler if he will preach. Tauler continues weeping. He wept and wept; and the multitude, anxious to hear his inferior oratory, and incapable of appreciating the higher eloquence of tears, could not comprehend the doctor's conduct. At last Tauler dismissed the assembly; for his sobs choked his utterance. He asked pardon of the people for having kept them uselessly waiting; and they went home. "Now," said some of them, "we see that he has become a fool."

{424}

But after five days' silence, Tauler preached before the friars of the convent, and he was sublime. One of the friars went to the pulpit and addressed the congregation as follows: "I am requested to make known to you that Doctor Tauler will preach here to-morrow; but if he acts as he did last time, remember not to blame me." "How will he succeed?" said one to another. "I do not know," was the answer; "God knows."

This time Tauler could control his voice, and _silence_ was his theme. He had built his eyrie in silence, as an eagle on the summit of a cliff. His language, worked out in silence, seemed to long after it; to return to its home, and die away in the high sombre clouds of complete solitude. Silence is the doctrine of Tauler; his secret, his food, his substance and his slumber. Absolutely free from all oratorical finery, his sermons go right to the mark, without respect for conventionality or the cant of ordinary discourses. He utters what he wishes to express; praises solitude, and returns into it. This is the reason why his external word takes nothing away from his interior recollection. His words do not betray his soul. Silence is the guardian angel of strength.

It was doubtless this profound doctrine of silence which gave to the eloquence of Tauler an extraordinary virtue. This man, who seemed to come out of a tomb, appeared with a thunderbolt in his hand. Fifty men, after the sermon, remained in the church as if transfixed by an invisible hand. Thirty-eight of them were able to move during the half-hour which followed; but the twelve others could not stir. Tauler said to the unknown layman, his adviser: "What shall we do with these people, my son?" The layman went from one to the other and touched them, but they were as immovable as rocks.

Tauler was frightened at the paralysis which he had caused. "Are they dead or alive?" said he to his friend. "What do you think?" "If they are dead," replied the layman, "it is your fault, and that of the Spouse of souls."

This fact, which is historical, seems like a legend.

This picture would be magnificent, if an artist should sketch it. The place where Tauler had just preached was a cemetery, and the twelve men who were lying on the ground in ecstasy resembled those who slumbered in death beneath. The orator, walking with his friend through the audience, who had become almost his victims; feeling the pulse and the face of his hearers, to detect in them after the sermon, as after a battle, some sign of life; passing through the ranks of the vanquished and healing the wounded, must have seemed something superhuman. At last the friend of Tauler found that the thunderstruck hearers breathed still, "Master," said he, "those men still live. Request the nuns of the convent to take them away from here; for this cold floor will injure them." One of the nuns, who was a listener to the fearful discourse, had to be carried to her bed, where she lay motionless.

The biography of John Tauler, which serves as prologue to his sermons, says nothing of his exterior life; but dwells specially on his unhistorical and legendary character. Those who wrote about him have not deigned even to inquire in what century he lived. This strange man has dispensed history from its ordinary inquiries, as if eternity had been the sole theatre of his terrestrial existence.

{425}

His friends are as strange as himself. The astonishing layman, who tells his name to nobody, and gives us no means of discovering it, was not the doctor's only teacher. Another of his instructors was a beggar, just as extraordinary.

Tauler, according to Surius, petitioned God during eight years for a master capable of teaching him the truth. One day when his desire was more than usually strong, he heard a voice saying to him, "Go to the door of the church. Thou wilt find there the man whom thou seekest." He obeyed, and met at the appointed spot a beggar, whose feet were soiled with mud, and whose rags were not worth three half-pence. They began a dialogue, of which the following is a portion:

Doctor Tauler. "_Good_ day, my friend."

The Beggar. "I do not remember ever to have had a _bad_ day in my life."

Tauler. "May God grant thee prosperity."

The Beggar. "I know not what adversity is."

Tauler. "Well, may God make thee happy!"

The Beggar. "I have never been unhappy."

Urged for an explanation, the mendicant affirms that, "by means of silence, he had arrived at perfect union with God; never being able to find pleasure in anything less than God."

Tauler. "Whence comest thou?"

The Beggar. "From God."

Tauler. "Where hast thou found God?"

The Beggar. "Where I have left all creatures."

Tauler. "Where is God?"

The Beggar. "In men of good will."

Tauler. "Who art thou?"

The Beggar. "I am a king."

Tauler. "Where is thy kingdom?"

The Beggar. "In my soul."

We need often recall to our minds, in reading Tauler's life, that he was really a man of flesh and bone, an historical personage. Surius, Fathers Echard and Touron, have written his real life circumstantially. He was born in 1294. He was an Alsatian. He lived at Cologne, and died probably at Strasburg. We cannot fix the date of his death. It happened May 17th, 1361, says Father Alexander. Father Echard places it in the year 1379. Another historian, M. Sponde, puts it in 1355.

Let us now speak of his doctrine.

II.

The doctrine of Doctor Tauler is the practice of divine union. This union, transcending human thoughts and hopes, is the secret of his life and the leading principle of his work. His sermons are full of instruction regarding this union.

His _Institutions_ also teach it. Some writers hostile to Tauler pretend to have found in his writings the foreshadowing of quietism. This mistake can be refuted in three ways: by the works of Tauler, which always affirm human activity to the most contemplative soul, thus clearly separating the doctrine of the quietists from that of the German thinker. Secondly, Bossuet, whom no one will suspect of any leaning toward quietism, says of Tauler: "He is one of the most solid and exact of the mystical theologians." Thirdly, Tauler himself predicted quietism in a remarkable monograph, blaming strongly all that Molinos, Madame de Guyon, and Fenelon afterward asserted.

A close study of the Alsatian doctor shows that he always gives to both internal and external activity all the reality and all the rights which they possess.

{426}

"If any one," says he, "ascends to such a height of contemplation as Saints Peter and Paul reached; and he perceives that a sick beggar needs his help to warm his soup, or for any other service, it would be much better for him to leave the repose of contemplation, and aid the poor man, instead of remaining in the sweetness of contemplative life." (_Institutions_, p. 195.)

Here is the plain truth and no illusion. And elsewhere he writes: "Men should not pay so much attention to what they do, as to what they are in themselves; for if the core of their heart be good, their acts will be so also without difficulty; and if their conscience be just and right, their works cannot be otherwise. Many make sanctity [to] consist in action; but action is not the chief element in it. Holiness must be judged in its principle as well as in its acts. In other words, we must be interiorly saints before we can perform exterior holy actions. No matter how good may be our works, they do not sanctify us as works. It is we, on the contrary, who make them meritorious, in virtue of inner sanctity which is their producing principle. It is in the bottom of the soul that we find the essence of a just man." (_Institutions_, p. 156.)

Here is the truth again. Collate those two passages, after having studied them separately, and you will find that they throw complete light on the nature and value of human acts.

The almost continual ecstatic state in which Tauler lived, never made him forget his smallest duties.

It has been often remarked that grace adapts itself to the natural qualities of the individual whom it sanctifies. This is as true of nations as of individuals. In Italy, asceticism has the color of the sun. Italian ascetics shout, burn with ardor, and seem full of exaggerated transports to the nations of cooler blood. The landscape of Italian asceticism presents you a burning sky, an ocean of fire, and a scorching earth. Sadness is generally wanting. In Spain, the hue is more sombre. The same ardor is there; but ardor tempered with jealousy. There is interior disquietude in Spanish mysticism, and even adoration in it examines itself as if suspicious of its truth. In Germany, profound gravity and stern austerity lead the soul into a horrible place. In Italy, images come crowding together, and divine love, instead of rejecting them, embraces them. The soul of the Italian saint holds garlands of flowers in his hands, offering them joyously to the blessed sacrament. Familiarity and adoration unite, like the two species of electricity before the thunder-clap. Familiarity, wedded to adoration, appeared in St. Francis of Assisi. The greatness of that strange man, who saw brothers and sisters in everything, and conversed with water, fire, the birds, and his monks, in the same tone and spirit, is not immediately manifest to superficial minds. Plain good nature veils his wonderful character. In Germany, those images which poetry presents to love are accepted with great precaution. Adoration is sober in thought and expression; and aspires to something sublime, whose form and name are intangible. German adoration is philosophical, meditative, broad, comprehensive, austere, silent, wrapped up in herself, and self-sufficing. She borrows only what is strictly necessary from persons and things. The world is a servant which she employs only with regret. She holds aloof from all creatures, and her words sound like concession. She says to no one, "My brother," or "My sister." If she had a brother. he would be silence. Her sister would be the mist which surrounds God.

{427}

Tauler is one of the most majestic representatives of Teutonic asceticism.

A disciple of St. Dionysius the Areopagite and of that layman of whom we have written, in the wake of those two great characters he follows, with eye and wing of eagle, into the region of translucent darkness. He does not flutter there, he _soars_; or, if he flies, his motion is so high and rapid, that it seems like the active repose of a sublime and fruitful immobility.

Tauler seems to desire obscurity. The remarkable effects of his preaching on his audience are less like thunder pealing in his language, than like the awful presence of the sacred cloud where the thunder is reposing.

Every man is a universe in himself. Unity and variety are the two terms of the antinomy, without which there is no life. But perfection consists in equilibrium between those terms. Such perfection is very rare. In general the antinomy of life is replaced by the contradictory, which is death. Man is divided between good and evil, always attempting an impossible reconciliation between them. Contradiction is a dead force which tries to serve two masters. An antinomy is a living force which, having chosen a master, and obeying but him, desires to serve him in a thousand different ways always useful. Nothing better displays the unity of a landscape than the variety of colors which it presents to the eye at the same time. The lights and shades, the undulations of the soil, and the accidents of sun, clouds, villages, forests, and spires, all are harmonized in the eye of the spectator; and the more numerous, varied, and unexpected are the details, the more does he experience delight and a certain dilation of mind and heart in the contemplation of their unity. If he takes away some of the circumstances, he mars the effect of the whole; for he cannot even destroy a shadow without diminishing the sunshine. What is true of a landscape is also true of a book or a man. But Tauler lost the balance between unity and variety, for he gave all to one and nothing to the other. Few individuals, even among the greatest saints, have been so ardent in the sentiment, love, pursuit, and conquest of unity. He seeks after it incessantly, and it haunts him. He never seems to look at the road he is travelling. He fixes his eyes solely on the goal ever present to his soul. He turns neither to the right nor the left. He knows not whether there be flowers or thorns on the borders of his pathway. Do not ask him to imitate St. Antony of Padua, and preach to the fishes of the streams. He minds neither fishes nor birds. He seems to regard creation as a stranger, of whom he had heard tell long ago, but whose remembrance is now but faintly glimmering in his mind.

His love of unity, his call to unity, his transports for it, always take the same shape, the same key and accent; and produce in the end a certain monotony, which is not a question of doctrine, but an affair of nature and temperament.

Tauler somewhere relates the history of a hermit, from whom a troublesome visitor begged something that was lying in the cell. The hermit went in to find the required object, but forgot at the threshold what was wanted, for the image of external things could not remain in his head. He went out, therefore, and asked the visitor what he sought. The visitor repeated his petition. {428} The hermit re-entered his cell, but again forgot the request; and was at last obliged to say to his guest: "Enter and find yourself what you seek, for I cannot keep the image of what you ask for sufficiently long stamped on my brain to do what you desire."

Tauler, in narrating this story, unintentionally describes his own character. In every one of his sermons, he chooses a text and a subject. This was required by circumstances and by his audience. But the moment he enters the cell of his contemplation, he forgets text and everything else, and mounts into the realms of sublimity where he loses himself in that supreme unity after which his heart is always aspiring. The moment he begins to fly, he forgets the course he must take. With one stroke of her wings, his intellect finds her love, and then soars in her natural element, with plumes unruffled. Far above modes and forms of earth, she stretches out her broad wings in the cerulean vault of her beloved repose. If any should then ask him about some ordinary detail, he would certainly answer like the recluse above mentioned: "Enter yourself, and find what you are inquiring after. I cannot keep the image of material or minor things long enough in my mind to fulfil your request."

Tauler is continually citing Saint Dionysius the Areopagite. In fact, these two great men are at home in the same latitudes. The sermons of Tauler are to the works of the Areopagite what a treatise of applied mathematics is to one on theoretical mathematics. Tauler, like St. Dionysius, dwells in the interior of the soul, that secret and deep abode, the name of which he is ever seeking without finding, and which he ends by calling ineffable as God himself.

"It is in this recess of the soul," he preaches, "that the divine word speaks. This is why it is written, 'In the midst of silence, a secret word was spoken to me.' Concentrate then, if thou canst, all thy powers; forget all those images with which thou hast filled thy soul. The more thou forgettest creatures, the more thou wilt become fit and ready to receive that mysterious word. Oh! if thou couldst of a sudden become ignorant of all things, even of thy own life, like St. Paul, when he said, 'Was I in the body or out of the body? I know not, God knows it.'" ... "Natural animation was suspended in him, and for this reason his body lost none of its powers during the three days which he passed without eating or drinking. The same happened to Moses when he fasted forty days on the mountain, without suffering from such long abstinence, finding himself as strong at the end as at the beginning."

The desire of Tauler that his hearers should become _Christian children_, ignorant or forgetful of everything in sublime ecstasy, shows plainly the nature of his charity. He wished for them absolute perfection, contemplative and active, transfiguration, transport, exactness, total accomplishment of truth, and the plenitude of all heavenly things. The atmosphere in which he lived favored his hopes and helped the efficacy of his teaching. He declares that in the monastery when a soul is suddenly called to some interior consideration, it can leave the choir in the midst of the exercises, and plunge itself unseen into the abyss of meditation to which God draws it. He also affirms that when friars pass several days in ecstasy, they have no reason to be disturbed at any irregularity of theirs which may result from such an accident, provided they obey the rule again, when they become masters of themselves. {429} Thus the prodigious transports of true asceticism are ever strengthening; while those of false mysticism enervate the soul. Hence it is that Tauler, though he is always speaking of ravishments, never loses the character of force, and of that austerity which is the sign of God and the test of true contemplation.

"Where then does God act without a medium? In the depths, in the essence of the soul? I cannot explain; for the faculties cannot apprehend a being without an image. They cannot, for instance, conceive a horse under the species of a man. It is precisely because all images come from without to the soul, that the mystery is hidden from it; and this is a great blessing. _Ignorance plunges the soul into admiration_. She seeks to comprehend what is taking place in her; she feels that there is something; but she knows not what it is. The moment we know the cause of anything, it has no longer any charm for us. We leave it to run after some other object; always thirsting for knowledge, and never finding the rest which we seek. This knowledge, full of ignorance and obscurity, fixes our attention on the divine operations within us. 'The mysterious and hidden word' of which Solomon writes, is working in our minds." (_Sermons_.)

Many men of genius, from the beginning of the world, have studied the human soul, and many are illustrious for the profundity of their psychological researches. Yet compared to the great mystical writers, those philosophers are mere children. Merely human psychology skims over the surface of the soul, only analyzing its relations to the interior world. They are ignorant of the phenomena which take place in the secret recesses of the mind. The great light, the incarnate Word, alone can throw its rays into those abysses. It is remarkable that those who study the soul for curiosity, merely to find out, and consecrate their life to such investigations, discover very little. While those who care nothing for simple science, but who act virtuously, obey and glorify the Lord, see all things properly. Instead of aiding vision to peer into the soul's _penetralia_, curiosity dims the light. _Simplicity_ is the best torch in those catacombs. _Simplicity_, commissioned by God, penetrates into the abysses of the soul, with the audacity of a child sent by its father.

The interior and extraordinary efforts by which Tauler rose to the height of contemplation, gave him, though he knew it not, an astounding knowledge of the resistance which man makes to man and to God; of our combats, defeats, and victories; and of those artifices by which we veil from ourselves our true situation during the battle. The rounds by which the soul ascends are counted, and yet the ladder of perfection has no summit.

The gospel, so merciful to sinners, vents all its wrath on the Scribes and Pharisees. All its charity is for external enemies; all its severity for interior enemies. Jesus Christ used the whip once in his life to show men in what direction his indignation was turned. We have Magdalen and the woman taken in adultery on the one hand; the money-changers of the Temple, the Scribes and Pharisees on the other. _There is a line of fire separating sinners from the accursed_. All Catholic doctrine, all ascetical tradition, is but the echo of Christ's mercy and Christ's anger. Tauler teaches like all the great doctors, in this respect.

He reprobates exterior practices which are devoid of charity, as the works of hell, most hateful to the Holy Spirit. The fixedness of his ideas gives a singular solemnity to his repetitions. On every page his hatred of works done without interior life shows itself. {430} Such works are his abomination. In all his meditations, prayers, experiences, and contemplations, he condemns them. "This doctrine," says he, "ought to be attentively meditated by those who torment and mortify their poor flesh, plucking out the bad roots which lie hidden around the core of man's heart. My brother, what has thy body done that thou shouldst scourge it in that fashion? Those men are fools who act as if they wanted to beat their heads against the wall. Extirpate thy vices and thy bad habits, instead of tormenting thyself as thou dost." ... "There are men in the cloister and in solitude whose soul and heart are always distracted by a multiplicity of external things. There are men, on the contrary, who in public places, in the midst of a market, and surrounded by countless distractions, know so well how to keep their heart and senses recollected, that nothing can trouble their interior peace or injure their soul. These deserve the name of religious far more than the former." (_Sermons_.)

Tauler goes farther. When those men who place God in external acts remain apparently virtuous, "the Lord," says he, "turns away from them. But when, in his mercy, he allows them to fall into grievous exterior faults, then he returns to them and offers them forgiveness." Tauler is always in the sky. He never stays long on earth. "God," says he, "can unite himself to the soul simply, immediately, _and without image_. He acts in the soul by an immediate operation; he operates in the depths of the mind where no image ever penetrates, and which are accessible only to him. But no creature can do this. God, the Father, begets his Son in the soul, not by means of an image, but by a process similar to the eternal generation. Do you want to know how divine generation takes place? God the Father knows himself, and comprehends himself perfectly. He sees down to the very source of his being; and contemplates himself, not by aid of an image, but in his own essence. Thus he engenders his Son in the unity of divine nature. In this manner also the Father produces him in the essence of the soul, and unites himself to her." (_Sermons_.)

All the discourses of Tauler end by a refrain. The chorus of his song is ever divine unity. Tauler is hardly a man; he is a voice speaking in the wilderness, calling men to descend into the depths of their souls. All his doctrine may be resumed in this word, to which we must give its etymological signification: _Adieu, à Dieu_. [Footnote 99]

[Footnote 99: The point of these words is untranslatable. The
sense is _adieu_ to creatures; and turn to God--_à
Dieu!_--[Translator's Note.]]

-----------

New Publications.

History of Civilization in the Fifth Century.
Translated, by permission, from the French of A. Frederick
Ozanam, late Professor of Foreign Literature to the Faculty of
Letters at Paris. By Ashley C. Glyn, B.A., of the Inner Temple,
Barrister-at-Law. London: W. H. Allen & Co. For sale by The
Catholic Publication House, 126 Nassau street, New York.

{431}

A work like this furnishes the best antidote to the poison contained in the writings of such sophists and falsifiers of history as Buckle and Draper. It substitutes genuine philosophy and history for the base metal of counterfeiters. It exhibits truthfully what Christianity--that is, the Catholic Church, which is concrete, real Christianity--has done in creating the civilization whose benefits we are now enjoying. The translator's preface furnishes so interesting a sketch of M. Ozanam's life and literary career, that we are sure of giving a great gratification to our readers by transferring the greater portion of it to our pages.

"A few words may be said as to the career of the author,
Frederic Ozanam, whose name has not yet become widely known in
this country. He was born August 23d, 1813, at Milan, where his
father, who had fallen into poverty, was residing and studying
medicine. His mother, whose maiden name had been Marie Nantas,
was daughter to a rich Lyonnese merchant, and it was to that
city that his parents returned in 1816. The father obtained
there a considerable reputation as a doctor, and died from the
effects of an accident in 1837. His son pursued his studies at
Paris with great success, and was destined for the bar. He took
a prominent place in the thoughtful and religious party among
the students, and his published letters show how he became
identified with the movement set on foot by Lacordaire and
others. He was especially distinguished, however, by the
foundation of an association of benevolence, called the Society
of St. Vincent of Paul, which from its small beginnings in
Paris spread over France, and has at the present time its
conferences, composed of laymen, in all the larger towns of
Europe. M. Ozanam showed, even during his student life, a
leaning toward literary pursuits, and a distaste for the
profession of the bar, to which he was destined; but he joined
the bar of Lyons, obtained some success as an advocate, and was
chosen in 1839 as the first occupant of the professional chair
of Commercial Law, which had just been established in that
city. The courses of lectures given by him were well attended,
the lectures themselves were eloquent and learned, and M.
Ozanam seems to have preferred inculcating the science of
jurisprudence to practising in the courts. But in the course of
the following year, 1840, he obtained an appointment which was
still more suitable to his talent, the Professorship of Foreign
Literature at Paris, and which gave him a perfect opportunity
for the cultivation of his favorite pursuit, the philosophy of
history. Shortly after his appointment, M. Ozanam married, and
the remaining years of his life were spent in the duties of his
calling; in travelling, partly for the sake of health and
pleasure, partly to gain information which might be woven into
his lectures; and in visits to his many friends, chiefly those
who had taken an active part with him in upholding the
interests of religion in France. He never entered upon active
political life, though he offered himself upon a requisition of
his fellow-townsmen as representative of Lyons in the National
Assembly of 1848. In politics M. Ozanam was a decided liberal,
in religion a fervent Catholic. His letters show a great
dislike of any alliance between the church and absolutism, and
a conviction that religion and an enlightened democracy might
flourish together. He wrote in the _Correspondant_, which
embodied the newer ideas, and was frequently animadverted upon
by the _Univers_, which represented the more conservative
party in church and state. His more important works were
developed from lectures delivered at the Sorbonne; and his
scheme was to embrace the history of civilization from the fall
of the Roman Empire to the time of Dante. But failing health,
although much was completed, did not allow him entirely to
achieve the great object which he had originally conceived when
a mere boy; and the touching words in which he expressed his
resignation to an early death, when his already brilliant life
promised an increase of success, and his cup of domestic
happiness was entirely full, may be found among his published
writings. M. Ozanam seems to have continued his literary labors
as long as rapidly increasing weakness would permit, but after
a stay in Italy, which did not avail to restore his broken
health, he reached his native country only to die, September
8th, 1853, in the fortieth year of his age, and the heyday of a
bright and useful career. He was lamented by troops of friends,
old and young, rich and poor--the latter indeed being under
especial obligations to his memory. His friend, M. Ampère,
became his literary executor, and undertook the task of giving
his complete works to the public, for which end a subscription
was quickly raised among those who had known and respected him
at Lyons and elsewhere. From the lectures which he had
completed and revised, from reports of others, and his own
manuscript notes, an edition of his complete works was formed
in nine volumes, comprising _La Civilisation au Cinquième
Siècle, Etudes Germaniques, Les Poëtes Franciscains, Dante et
la Philosophie Catholique au Treizième Sièle_, and
_Mélanges_,
to which were added two volumes of his letters.

{432}

"The work which has now been translated forms the first two
volumes of the above series, and was intended by the author as
the opening of the grand historical treatise which he had
designed. As it was delivered originally in the shape of
lectures, and preserves that form in the French edition, it has
been necessary, in order to preserve the continuity of the
historical narrative, to alter the constructions occasionally,
and to pass over a sentence here and there which refers solely
to the audience of students to which the lectures were
originally addressed."

---

The Illustrated Catholic Sunday-School Library.
First series of 12 volumes, pp. 144 each.
New York: The Catholic Publication Society,
126 Nassau street. 1868.

This is the initial set of a New Illustrated Catholic Sunday-School Library, now in preparation by the Catholic Publication Society. It contains 12 handsome volumes, put up in a neat paper box. The titles of the volumes in this, the first series, are as follows: _Madeleine, the Rosière;_ _The Crusade of the Children;_ _Tales of the Affections;_ _Adventures of Travel;_ _Truth and Trust;_ _Select Popular Tales;_ _The Rivals;_ _The Battle of Lepanto and The Relief of Vienna;_ _Scenes and Incidents at Sea;_ _The School-Boys and The Boy and the Man;_ _Beautiful Little Rose;_ and _Florestine, or Unexpected Joy_. From the above list it will be seen that the set comprises fiction, history, and adventures. This set of books has been selected with an eye to give our Catholic youth useful as well as entertaining reading. The illustrations are good, but might be better--however, they are a great improvement on the class of illustrations heretofore printed in our Catholic books. The type, paper, and binding are excellent. We hope these books will be extensively used as premiums in our schools, as well as find a place in every Catholic library in the country.

---

Assemblee Generale Des Catholiques en Belgique.
27 Sept., 1867. Bruxelles: Devaux.

This large volume of 900 royal octavo pages, which has been just received from M. Ducpetiaux, of Brussels, is a complete record of the transactions of the late Catholic Congress of Malines. Among other things it contains the complete report of F. Hecker on the state of Catholicity in the United States, correctly translated into French. It is truly surprising to see what an immense amount of business can be transacted in one week, when all are intent upon doing the work in hand, and nothing else. Some of our legislators might learn a valuable lesson in this regard from this volume. The noisy and vulgar writers for the newspapers, and the other clamorous declaimers in speech and print, who are constantly repeating their hoarse outcry of ignorance and superstition against the Catholics of Europe, would be completely silenced and put to shame, if that were a possible thing, if the records of the Congress of Malines could be placed in the hands of all their intelligent readers. We may safely challenge the world to produce another similar volume, bearing so clear an impress of intelligence, good taste, patriotism, philanthropy, and religious zeal as this. Give us only a sufficient quantity of Catholicity like this, and we will renovate the earth.

---

Received from Kelly & Piet, Baltimore:

_The Ghost_; a comedy in three acts. Taken from the
French. Pp. 50. Price, 50 cents.

_The Banquet of Theodulus; or, The Reunion of the Different
Christian Communions._ By the late Baron de Starck. New
edition. Pp.204. Price, $1.

From H. M'Grath, Philadelphia: _White's Confutation of the
Church of Englandism, and Correct Exposition of the Catholic
Faith_. Translated from the Latin by E. W. O'Mahony. 1 vol.,
pp. 342. New Edition. Price, $1.25.

---

"The Catholic Publication Society" has in press, and will soon publish, the second series of the new _Illustrated Catholic Sunday-School Library_, and a new edition of _Moehler's Symbolism; Problems of the Age, Nellie Netterville_, and _A Sister's Story_ are now being printed, and will be ready in a short time.

----------

{433}

THE CATHOLIC WORLD.

Vol. VII., No. 40.--July, 1868.

A Plea For Liberty Of Conscience.

Foreseeing that we shall be obliged, in this present article, to present some very unpalatable truths to a portion of our readers, we assure them in the outset that we do not wish unnecessarily to revive unpleasant recollections.

Facts are facts, however, history is history, and truth is truth; and so long as we do not cherish a malevolent spirit, or seek to embitter and envenom the minds of our fellow-men against each other, there is no reason why we should not have liberty to speak plainly, even about very ugly and very discreditable things. On the present occasion, we use this liberty in defence of the weak and defenceless against tyranny and oppression, in defence of the rights of conscience and religious freedom in the case of a considerable number of persons grossly disregarded and violated. The right which we undertake to defend is the right to embrace, profess, and practise the Catholic religion; and the wrong which we wish to contend against is the system of domestic and social tyranny by which this right is impeded. It may appear to some a very curious statement, yet we venture to make it boldly, that in every part of the world where the English race is dominant, Catholics have been engaged, ever since the era of Protestant ascendency, in a struggle for liberty of conscience against spiritual tyranny, either political, social, or both combined. We do not propose to go back to the period of penal laws, civil disabilities, and legal persecution in Great Britain and America, just at present. This is a chapter in history already tolerably well elucidated and likely to be still further commented upon in the future. We will let it pass, however, for the present, and confine our view to a more recent period, during which, theoretically speaking, in England Catholics have enjoyed full toleration, and in the United States equal liberty with other citizens.

Notwithstanding this theoretical liberty. Catholics have been exposed, as every one knows, to outbreaks of popular violence, in which their blood has been shed, their churches and other property burned and destroyed, and their religion made the object of denunciation, vituperation, and ridicule in a wholesale manner. {434} The primary cause of this state of things is to be found in the representation which Protestant preachers and writers have made of the Catholic religion. On this head we will content ourselves with quoting the language of a Protestant clergyman, the Rev. Leonard W. Bacon, of Williamsburg, L. I., which we have just seen in a report of one of his sermons published in the _Brooklyn Times_ for March 17th, 1868:

"The duty of considering the question now submitted to us has required me to stand before shelves filled with volumes of antipapal literature, and to glance from page to page of its contents. The character of much of that literature is a shame and a scandal to the cause in which it is uttered. It is full of evil and uncharitable talk against Romanists and their clergy, and deformed with bad temper and bad logic and reckless assertion." A few sentences further on he designates a certain class of writers against the Catholic religion as the "scurrilous crew of antipopery-mongers, who make a trade of the prejudices and passions of the American public, feeding them with vituperation and invective."

This description applies to a class of writers in England and Ireland equally as well as to the class designated among ourselves. We pass over all that the general body of the Catholic clergy and people have had to suffer from the general prejudice against them created and excited by the calumnies and invectives of these writers and declaimers against their religion. We fix our attention upon one point only, what those persons have had and still have to suffer from this prejudice who have become Catholics from conviction and choice, or who have wished to do so, and would have done so, had they not been deterred by the violent opposition they have encountered.

In England, a little stream of reconversion began to set back to the ancient church during the cruel and despotic reign of Elizabeth, which continued to run during several succeeding reigns, but at last was either totally or almost dried up. Its source received a new supply through the influence of the French clergy who were refugees in England, and at length the current began to flow more fully and strongly than ever. Within the last twenty-five years the movement of return to Catholic unity has been steadily progressing, until it has become so considerable as to attract universal attention, and awaken general anxiety concerning its probable results. In the United States, a few rare and isolated instances of conversion occurred from time to time during the early part of the present century, which have become much more numerous within the past twenty-five years, from various causes which we need not specify. At present, there are probably fifty thousand converts within the fold of the Catholic Church of this Republic, a great many more who would gladly become Catholics if there were no sacrifices to be made in order to do so, and an indefinite number of persons who are more or less favorably predisposed toward the Catholic religion or partially convinced of its truth. From the first day on which these strayed children of the holy Mother Church began to retrace their steps to her blessed fold to the present moment, there has been essentially the same story to tell of the disregard and violation of that liberty of conscience and right of religious freedom which Protestants have been so loudly proclaiming ever since they have had existence. {435} In the earlier period of this disastrous epoch, some have suffered a literal martyrdom, and all along, down to the present time, many others have endured a moral martyrdom which is perhaps harder to bear as well as more lingering in its agony. Very many have needed a virtue and constancy truly heroic or bordering on the heroic, in order to nerve themselves to the sacrifices and to push through the opposition which they have been forced to encounter as the condition of becoming members of the Catholic Church and following the voice of their reason and conscience.

Those whose memory goes back over the last twenty or twenty-five years, can recall the storm of indignation and obloquy evoked by the first remarkable conversions which took place as the sequel of the Catholicizing movement originating at Oxford. As a general rule, the converts in England, even though belonging to the highest classes in society, including the nobility, and well known for their exemplary moral character, found themselves ostracized from the circles in which they had been wont to move, shunned by their most intimate friends, in many instances excluded from intercourse wholly or in great measure with the members of their own families. Some persons of high rank were obliged to go abroad, in order to find the society of persons of their own class which they needed for themselves and their families. It was the same in our own country. A convert to the Catholic Church found himself treated as an individual who had abjured Christianity, engaged in a conspiracy against his country and the human race, or as if he had been detected in perjury or forging notes. Every one was speculating upon the motives and cause of his strange conduct, as they have been recently, in England upon the Rev. Mr. Speke's sudden disappearance and mysterious rambles. Insanity was the most frequent and the most charitable reason assigned for an act generally considered as utterly unreasonable and disreputable. Some were excluded from the bosoms of their own families; some were disinherited by those whose heirs of blood they would have been; and others, who were helpless, dependent persons, were thrown upon the world by near and rich relations, who had hitherto supported them, and would gladly have continued to do so had they consented to smother their consciences. Some have been thrown out of business and employment, reduced to straits in order to gain a living, or even to extreme poverty and suffering. We do not allude now to those Protestant clergymen with families who have resigned their benefices in the Church of England, or given up their salaried offices in the Protestant Churches of the United States. The sacrifices made by these individuals, although very great, were unavoidably necessary, and cannot be attributed to any injustice or illiberality in the Protestant community. But we refer to those cases where persons have been deserted and abandoned by those on whose previous good-will, patronage, or custom they had been dependent for the means of gaining their living, for no other reason than the simple fact of their becoming Catholics. We may add to these more serious matters the infinitude of petty grievances and annoyances to which many persons are subjected by their relatives and friends. Their religion is attacked and ridiculed, without regard to the proprieties of polite intercourse, as if a Catholic were out of the category of persons whose convictions and sentiments are entitled to respect. {436} Obstacles are placed in the way of their fulfilling the duties of their religion. Their children are enticed to eat meat on days of abstinence, to attend Protestant churches, to read anticatholic books, to shun the society of Catholics, without regard to the conscience of the child or the authority of the parent. Every possible influence is brought to bear upon them to make them feel that their religion places them at a social disadvantage, and that Protestantism is more genteel and respectable. In short, if we try to imagine the state of things which converts to Christianity had to struggle with in Rome and the gentile world after the laws had ceased to persecute, but before the Christian religion had ceased to be a despised and unpopular religion, we shall have a very good counterpart of the present condition of Catholic converts in England and the United States.

The trials and difficulties of those who are on the way to the Catholic Church are even greater than those which have to be encountered afterward. Not to speak of the interior trials which are necessarily involved in the process of conversion, even for those who are perfectly free and independent, or even placed under influences which facilitate the transition to Catholicity, there are exterior difficulties in the case of most persons of the gravest and most distressing nature. Besides the opposition of relatives and friends, in the shape of argument, entreaty, expostulation, sorrowful disapprobation, which is the more painful and the harder to be overcome the more kind and affectionate it is in manner and spirit, the dread of wounding and grieving those who are dearest and most respected, disappointing their hopes and incurring their displeasure, there is often to be encountered the might of spiritual tyranny, the violence of a parent's or husband's despotic will, and, in short, a _persecution_ worse to be borne than would be a summary trial and execution. Unhappily, these trials are often too great for the courage of those who have received the inward vocation to the Catholic faith, and who are required to undergo so much if they would follow it. Some are afraid of losing caste, some of being turned out of doors, some of losing their livelihood; others are afraid of encountering the anger and reproaches of their friends, or the scorn and calumny of the world, or the loss of popularity. There are those who are deterred by their dainty and fastidious dislike of mingling with the poor, and who cannot bring themselves to go to a church which is humble or mean in its appearance, to receive the sacraments from a priest of unpolished exterior. But these last have themselves only to blame, although we may commiserate their weakness, and lay the chief blame of it on the false maxims prevalent in the community at large.

It would be easy to cite numerous instances in illustration of all that we have just said upon this subject, from personal knowledge or the testimony of others; and if it were possible for the complete history of the conversions to the Catholic Church which have occurred during the last quarter of a century to be written and published, it would be, for the most part, only an extensive commentary upon the statements we have made. Even then the saddest part of the story must remain untold, unless all those who have been deterred from obeying the voice of conscience could be induced to publish their confessions to the world, and those who have died in perplexity and distress for the want of those sacraments which their own cowardice or the refusal of their friends prevented them from receiving, could come back from the grave to add their testimony to that of the living.

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The writer of these pages was acquainted with a gentleman of eminent position in the world, who was for a long time a Catholic at heart, and who on his death-bed desired to see a priest with whom he was intimately acquainted, that he might receive the last sacraments from his hands. This priest, who was a man of the greatest dignity of character and universally venerated in the community, called at the house several times, was politely received, but never permitted to see the dying man. When the poor old man perceived his last hour drawing near, he called his faithful Irish nurse to his bedside, as the only true friend to whom he could open his grief, and confided to her the sorrow that was darkening his dying moments. He told her that he desired to see a priest, to make his confession and to receive the last sacraments, but that his request was denied, so that he had given up all hope of his salvation, and believed himself doomed to die in despair. The good girl comforted and soothed him, assured him that he need not distrust the mercy of God, and explained to him that in his case a perfect contrition for his sins would suffice for their full remission. He begged of her to teach him how to make the acts of faith, hope, charity, and contrition, to recite prayers by his side, and to help him to prepare for death. She did so, and through her holy ministrations his soul was tranquillized, so that he died in peace.

The writer was once sent for by a man of unusual intelligence and plain, respectable standing, who was in reduced circumstances, and dying of a slow consumption. He learned from the lips of this man that he had been for some time perfectly convinced of the truth of the Catholic religion, and was satisfied that it was his duty to be received into the church. Nevertheless, it was impossible to persuade him to act on his convictions, because he was sure that the assistance of certain societies, upon which his family depended, would be withdrawn. He hoped to recover, and promised that, if he did, he would profess his faith openly; but we never heard anything more from him, and have never heard the conclusion of his sad history.