Chapter VI: Marriage Bells (3)

Mgr. Mermillod, the successor of S. Francis of Sales, is a native of Caronge, a suburb of Geneva, and was born of a Catholic family, poor in the world's goods, and obscure in its estimation. He has a vivacity rather French than Genevese, but with a solid foundation of that more serious character which distinguishes his countrymen. As an orator, he is hardly second to the Bishop of Orléans, Mgr. Dupanloup; as a lecturer to pious women on the duties of womanhood, he is superior to most ecclesiastics. In the guidance of souls, the enlightened discrimination between what is in itself wrong, and what harmless if done in a proper spirit, he seems to have inherited the special gift of S. Francis of Sales in directing women of good family, living at court or otherwise, in the world. His singular prudence and the graciousness of his manner are essential helps to him in the prominent position he holds towards modern governments, and the daily contact which confronts him with modern sentiment. He is the weapon expressly fashioned for the last new phase into which the eternal struggle against the world, the flesh, and the devil has entered. Like S. Francis, he wraps his strength in gentleness, and carries out the _suaviter in modo, fortiter in re_. In conversation, of which he is fond--for his is not the monastic ideal of holiness--he is sprightly, witty, and accurate. His power of crystallizing ideas into a _mot_ is quite French, and the childlike joyousness of his demeanor is no less so. The word ascetic seems to imply the very antipodes of his nature; and yet his private apartment, which we were once privileged to see, is almost like a cell. Here is a description of it, gathered from the impressions of two worthy visitors: "I felt," says one, "in this little _buco_ (hole) as if I were in the cell of a saint, and examined everything with veneration. That little _prie-Dieu_, so simple in its build, which daily witnesses the prayers and sighs of the pastor, anxious for his flock and the souls entrusted to him by God; of the Christian humbling himself and praying for his own needs.... Perhaps some day this little room will be visited as S. Charles Borromeo's is now at Milan. I am favored in that I know it already. Two purple stocks and the tasselled hat alone recalled the _bishop_, while the framed table of a 'Seminarist's Duties,' taken in connection with the simplicity, nay, poverty, of the room, might make one think it the habitation of a young cleric."

And another account adds: "What a memory to have seen this room, so narrow, so humble, so evidently the home of a saint! We shall always be able to fix the picture of the bishop in our memory, night or day, praying or working, at all times; ... and that beautiful print of Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque, and that tiny _prie-Dieu_!"

The bishop's library, his ordinary working-room, was also a very simple retreat, and often fireless in the coldest days of winter. The house stood next door to the cathedral, and the rest of the clergy, four or five in all, lived there in community. Among them was the old vicar, the second priest to whose charge the reconstituted parish of Geneva had been entrusted before being raised to the dignity of a bishopric. It was very touching to watch this old man lovingly deferring to the young bishop, who was formerly but a curate under him, and rejoicing as a father in the elevation of one of whose fitness for the episcopal office he, above all, had reason to be certain.

"No man securely commands but he who has learned well to obey."[84] Another of the clergy was a very remarkable man, the type of a character found nowhere in these days save under the cowl of the monk, and even among religious probably nowhere save in the Benedictine Order. He was the bishop's private secretary, and his right hand in the business of the diocese. He belonged to the Reformed Benedictines of Solesmes, and was a friend and spiritual subject of Dom Guéranger, author of the invaluable _Liturgical Year_, the beautiful _History of S. Cecilia_, and other works. It was only by a special dispensation that he was allowed to hold his present position and live outside his cloister; but having, in early life, been the schoolmate of the bishop, and being eminently fitted to wield ecclesiastical sway, this privilege (which was none to him, however) had been obtained by Mgr. Mermillod. He was called rather by the title of his religious profession, _le père_, than by his name in the world--a name since become known as that of the author of a learned and voluminous _Life of S. Dunstan_. He was, as it were, a stranded pilgrim in this age of compromise--a stern, heroic soul cast in the giant mould of the XIIIth century; rather a Bernard of Clairvaux than a Francis of Sales; in learning a descendant of Duns Scotus, and a disciple of Aristotle; an ascetic, a scholastic, a rigid disciplinarian, an unerring director. In person tall, dignified, spare of form, with keen, eagle glance, clear-cut, largely-moulded features; in dress simple to rusticity, and a fit model for an old monkish carving at the foot of a pulpit or on the boss of an arch.

They completed each other, these two saintly characters, the bishop and the monk, bound together in a mystic marriage for the production of spiritual children for God and the church; and the contrast between them seemed, as it were, typical of that other union of distant ages, one with another, for the furtherance of a principle ever the same, whether its accidental exponent be Peter the fisherman, Hildebrand the Reformer, Bernard the monk, Francis of Sales, the gentle bishop, or Pius IX., the yet more gentle and more persecuted Pope.

Our stay at Geneva covered three-fourths of a year, so that we grew familiar with the beauties of the neighborhood in its different aspects of summer, autumn, and winter. It would be difficult to chronicle every detail of these beauties of earth, sky, and water, which, as the seasons brought them severally into prominence, seemed to form a series of cabinet pictures for memory to dwell upon ever after. There is nothing like a long stay in one place to make one feel its loveliness; the transient wayfarer among the most enchanting scenes sees not a quarter as much natural beauty as the constant dweller in a less favored spot. In the wild rush, named with unconscious satire a _tour_, the traveller sees a kaleidoscopic mixture of incongruous, discordant beauties, and of each in detail he sees but one phase, sometimes an abnormal one, sometimes an obscured one, and not seldom he sees but the vacant place where this beauty should be. His opinions are hastily formed, and, strange phenomenon! the more hastily the more ineradicably, and they are often erroneous, or at least one-sided. A man looking for the moon during the week when the moon is new, and concluding, therefore, that no moon exists or is visible at any time, would not be a rasher tale-teller than he who asserted that because he passed twenty-four hours in Venice during a fog, therefore the sun never shone in the Adriatic city; or that since in a week's scamper through the environs of Naples he never came across a beautiful woman, therefore the type of the Grecian goddess was extinct among the women of Parthenope. Sweeping statements are as invariably wrong as they are temptingly easy to make; it is needless to say how intellectually absurd they are. Give your experience _as_ your experience, and you will have contributed something to the sum total of acquisition on any given subject; but do not give it as the only, absolute, indisputable, and final result of research. All knowledge is but partial; it is subject to all kinds of qualifications. Few men can speak with authority of more than a grain of it at a time, and it is equally unwise and undignified to put yourself in the position of the Pharisee whom the lord of the feast directed to give place to a guest of worthier and seemlier station. But this is a digression. We began by saying that long residence in one place is the true way to see, learn, and probe its beauties; as well as its resources. Until your heart _grows to_ a place, you do not _know_ it, and no place unassociated with family or patriotic connections can teach your heart to _grow to_ it without long residence. Perhaps there are exceptions, corresponding to "love at first sight," but even this in human relations is only an exception. We remember one place, seen for one day only, for which this sadder feeling of kinship and yearning grew up in our heart--it was Heidelberg; but intimate knowledge in ordinary cases is the only channel to a great and appreciative love.

Geneva won its way to our love thus, and, more than any one spot we visited--not excepting even Rome--came to represent to the memory the happiest, most peaceful, and most fruitful period of our lives. We shall be forgiven if we draw a sketch of the surroundings which are associated with our knowledge of the Bishop of Geneva. In all our reminiscences his figure is the central one, and the group of persons who formed our circle of friendship seems naturally to revolve around his person. Our summer life was spent in a shy little villa, invisible from the high-road, and embowered in groves of pine, chestnut, and oak; our winter days were passed, perforce, at the uncongenial but perfectly appointed Hôtel de la Paix. The party consisted of our own family only, with one or two accidental additions from England for a week at a time. The house was slightly built and cottage-like, with a flight of steps on each side, the front stoop being festooned with a jessamine-vine, and the wide, grand drive, flanked by a bed of flaming balsam-flowers, sweeping up to the door under the shade of two or three massive horse-chestnuts. No room in the house was carpeted, and only the drawing-room had a _parquet_ floor. The bed-rooms were miracles of simplicity and cleanliness--milk-white boards, white-washed walls, no curtains to bed or window, and an absence of any furniture, save a narrow bed, a washstand, a dimity-covered table, and one cane chair, making them seem so many dormitory sections partitioned off. We made the "best" room a little more picturesque, as that of a loved invalid never fails to be, by the help of crimson velvet coverlets, blue silk and knitted wool in cushions, a portable easy-chair, muslin bed-curtains, and a display of cut-glass bottles with gold stoppers--in short, the contents of an English dressing-case on the pretty, white-robed table. Books, also, and any pretty thing that struck our fancy in the treasure-houses of the town, accumulated here, and made of it the choicest room in the house. We had a severer trysting-place on the ground-floor, where reading was carried on systematically, illuminating and ecclesiastical embroidery filled up many an hour, and our journals (from which we have already quoted) were compiled. But there was a rarer treasure yet--a chapel. A tiny room, darkened _all' Italiana_, with red curtains, and containing a portable altar suitably draped, recalled the oratories of Roman _palazzi_; and here was often seen the tall figure of _le père_ and a little chorister from Notre Dame, as we had Mass said there generally twice a week. It was a sanctification to the house, and we felt it an incitement in our "labor of love" of reading and manual work. Another gathering-spot was the wall on the garden side, forming the parapet between the terrace and the lower level of meadow-land. There was a whole colony of spiders nestled in the miniature grove of jessamine that hid the wall; and, as we sat with our books on the steps leading from the terrace, we assisted, as it were, at a perpetual natural history lecture _in actu_. The webs were generally very perfect, and, as the autumn came on, the early dews transformed them into a jewelled network, shining rainbow-wise, with the loveliest prismatic hues. Sometimes, when they were broken, they seemed like a cordage of diamonds--the tangled ruins of some fairy wreck clinging to the mast, represented by a green twig. But there was in the grounds another more sylvan and lonely retreat still--our own especial haunt. It was a damp valley, below the level of the high-road, carpeted with periwinkles and decaying leaves, and shut out from human observation by a grove of oaks and chestnuts. A peculiar darkness always brooded over it, and one might have forgotten the existence of noontide had he spent twenty-four hours in its gloom. A little brook ran along the bottom, its waters carrying miniature freight-barks in the shape of half-opened horse-chestnuts or curled and browned oak-leaves. If anything so small could bear so lofty a likeness, we should say that this sombre valley was akin to a Druidical grove.

Our outdoor pleasures were few, as the world understands them; they mostly consisted of long drives into the interior, where we would often pass dignified, melancholy-looking iron portals, let into a wall festooned profusely with the Virginia creeper, and giving a glimpse of some deserted, parklike expanse of meadow. Other less pretentious entrances showed a wilderness of roses, flowering shrubs, and vines, but always in contrast with the luxuriant Virginia creeper, which nowhere else in Europe grows in such perfection. A variety of shades absolutely Western greets the eye and delights the imagination; the hues of the Indian summer seem concentrated in this one plant, and, from its rich glow, an artist can easily guess what a forest of indefinitely multiplied trees, painted in the colors of this creeper, would look like. Two of our visitors were welcome additions to our party and sympathetic sharers in our pleasures--one, a lady well known for her energetic and active charity, whose presence in any place pointed invariably to some hidden work of mercy to be performed there, and whose mission just then was to comfort a lonely and despairing widow under peculiarly trying aggravations of her sorrow; the other an artist whose name in his public capacity has already appeared more than once in the pages of THE CATHOLIC WORLD, and whose character of childlike simplicity and reverent earnestness has endeared him to us in private life as a friend and a model.

People staying at Geneva--at least, English people--always make a point of going through the arduous expedition to Chamouni and the Mer de Glace. We do not mean to disparage the spirit which inevitably urges on our countrymen and countrywomen to put their necks in jeopardy on the slightest provocation; but, turning the adventurous instinct of our Anglo-Saxon blood to a better purpose, we chose rather to make two or three expeditions to sites hallowed by the presence of the Apostle of Geneva--S. Francis of Sales. Mont Blanc could not, from any point of view, appear more majestically beautiful than it does from the shores of Lake Leman; and we preferred to gaze upon the monarch with the eye of an artist rather than that of a gymnast. We here lean upon the authority of Ruskin, whom we are glad to appeal to in an instance where his naturally reverential mind makes him a safe and unbiassed guide. Our first pilgrimage was to the Castle _des Allinges_, on the Savoy side of the lake, a ruin now, but where, in former days, the saint often said Mass in a chapel, which is the only part of the castle still untouched. There is no lack of visitors to this shrine during the summer, and each party is generally accompanied by a priest. We were happy in persuading _le père_ to be our companion, and started overnight for the village of Thonon. The lake was unruffled, and the sun shining tropically, as the little steam boat carried us over the waters. Thonon is a Catholic village, with an ugly church, adorned by carved and gilded cherubs and other unsightly excrescences ambitiously striving to be Michael Angelos and Donatellos. Frogs never can let oxen alone, especially in art. We slept at the inn, a picturesque and proportionately dirty hostelry, very little changed, we should say, from what it was in the days of S. Francis. It stands on a high terrace above the lake, the top of which terrace forms a drilling-ground; for Thonon has fortifications and the ghost of a garrison. The road from the boat-landing winds up through stunted vines to a dilapidated gateway, and is often dotted by the curious one-horse vehicle of the country, called _char-à-banc_--_i.e._ a sort of diminutive brougham turned sideways, and hardly capable of holding two persons--a kind of side-saddle locomotion rather curious to any one accustomed to sit with his face to the horses. The view over the lake by sunrise the next morning was dreamlike in its beauty--each rounded peak veiled in mist, and the motionless waters lying at their base as a floor of azure crystal. As we went further up into the mountains, the sun's rays flashed on hill after hill, throwing a softened radiance over each, and shooting darts of gold across the clear blue of the lake. We met carts laden with wheat-sheaves, and men and boys going to their day's work; passed farms and dairies before coming to the heathery waste that separates the lonely hill-top of _les Allinges_ from the cultivated lands below; jolted over the stony path, called, in mockery, a _road_; and, having seen in a short two hours' drive as many beauties as we could conveniently remember, arrived at the Chapel of S. Francis. It has been changed since his time, but the altar is said to be the one at which he celebrated Mass. The chapel is a white-washed room like a rough school-room, fitted up with painted benches and cheap prints; but the feeling that draws so many Christian hearts to this refuge of the missionary Bishop of Geneva hallows the bare walls and open poverty of the chapel, and a spirit seems to rise from the altar recess to rebuke any worldly sense of disparagement or even disappointment. The manner in which _le père_ said Mass was enough to make one feel the solemnity of the occasion and the gratitude that ought to possess one after having had the privilege, doubtless not to be repeated in a lifetime, of praying on this consecrated spot. We all received holy communion during Mass. An old man is stationed at _les Allinges_ as _custos_, sacristan, and Mass-server; and his little garden, in full view of the lake, makes a pretty domestic picture grafted on to the mediæval one of the "ruined castle ivy-draped."

S. Francis, so says tradition, often wandered day and night over this mountain on his apostolic missions, and, being once overtaken by darkness, found no better resting-place than the fork of a chestnut-tree. Wrapped in his cloak, he there went to sleep, lulled by the howling of the wolves, which abounded in that neighborhood. Many similar stories are told in Savoy of his missionary adventures; one of them recording that one day he presented himself, with two or three companions, at one of the gates of Geneva. The guard, not knowing him, asked who he was, before he would allow him to pass; the saint calmly and smilingly replied, "I am _l'évêque du lieu_" (the bishop of the place). The guard, concluding he was some foreign visitor, and that _Dulieu_ was the name of his diocese or manor, nonchalantly opened the gate, and let him in. When the magistracy discovered _who_ had thus got entrance into the city of Calvin, there was a terrible outcry; the too innocent guard was summoned and threatened with death for his gross neglect of his duty, and a hasty search was begun for the hated Papist bishop. S. Francis had by that time quietly finished his business and left the hostile walls of Geneva. This is not unlike the incident related by Cardinal Wiseman in _Fabiola_, where a Christian substitutes for the watchword _Numen Imperatorum_, without repeating which he could not pass out to his secret worship in the catacombs, the words similar in sound, though widely different in meaning, _Nomen Imperatorum_, and succeeds in cheating the guard, who was a Pannonian, and whose knowledge of Latin was but elementary. It was probably during one of these stolen visits that S. Francis administered the sacraments to a poor Catholic servant-girl in the cellar of the _Hôtel de l'Ecu d'or_--an old inn still standing at Geneva, and where the identical apartment is now shown.

From Thonon we took the boat to Lausanne, on the opposite side of the lake, visited the Castle of Chillon, and returned to Geneva, after another night spent at the Vevay end of Lake Leman; where the mountains, purple and rounded; the vegetation, southern in its quality and luxuriance; the winding road by the shore--all contribute to remind you of the Bay of Naples and the Sorrento road along the Mediterranean.

Lausanne itself, its cathedral, monuments, fortifications, and general quaintness of architecture and beauty of position, was the goal of another expedition, in which our English friend, Mr. B----, accompanied us, and became our commentator and artistic guide.

There were many other places we also visited; one of us was indefatigable, and followed the bishop to Thonex, where he solemnly deposited a _corpo santo_; to Collonge, where he blessed a new cemetery with all the pomp of ritual, made easy by this village being situated on Savoyard ground; and to Caronge, where he distributed the prizes at a girl's school, and gave an excellent and appropriate lecture on the education of women in this century.

But the most beautiful ceremony of all was the consecration of the new parish church of Bellegarde, the French frontier post and custom-house. This village is a mere handful of white-washed cottages dropped among the spurs of the Jura range. The mountains, though not high, have all the beauty of the Alps; their varied outline, their abrupt gorges, and their swift torrents being yet more beautiful because embowered in a vegetation of softer aspect than the monumental pineries which close-clothe the Alps. Within half a mile of Bellegarde is a curious natural phenomenon--_la perte du Rhône_. The river, here scarcely more than a mountain brook, after struggling through a barren, sandy bed, strewn with boulders of a porous white stone worn by the action of the water into strange shapes of vases, cauldrons, and urns, suddenly plunges under an arched entrance in a wall of rocks, and disappears. Its subterranean course is some miles long, and it re-emerges, on a lower level, a placid, shallow stream. Around the mouth of this unknown cavern the scenery is very striking; deep clefts of rock, with fringes of Alpine flowers, alternate with thick growths of oak and chestnut; and from every peaklet of the mountains some charming pastoral scene comes into view. The new church was a plain white building, of no architectural pretensions, but strong and impervious to the weather. The internal decorations were simple in the extreme; no frog emulation here, as in ambitious Thonon. For once we saw French peasants _au naturel_; they really seemed the fervent, hospitable, unsophisticated people one longs to see. The Jura protects Bellegarde from Geneva; there is no large town near on the French side, and there is neither hotel, nor mineral springs, nor iron mines, nor natural resources of any kind to attract the acquisitive mind of the XIXth century. So God still reigns undisturbedly in this narrow kingdom--narrow, indeed, if measured by the numerical strength of its inhabitants, but noble and precious if measured by the worth of each immortal soul which it holds. The people were collected outside the church, as the full ceremonies of consecration were going to be performed, and many of these take place before the people can canonically be admitted into the interior. A priest stood on the natural pulpit of a low stone wall, describing to the faithful the symbolic meaning of each ceremony, as the bishop and his assistants passed round and round the walls, chanting psalms and anointing the building, or, entering the portals, inscribed the Greek and Latin alphabets in the form of a cross on the floor of the church, made seven crosses on the different internal walls, and recited psalms and litanies before each. The men stood in the burning sun, bare-headed and motionless, often kneeling in the dust, and singing hymns in French corresponding to the meaning of the Latin prayers; a line of _Gardes Nationales_, in uniforms rather the worse for wear, and many wearing the Crimean medal, stood opposite the entrance, while an excruciating brass band played with a will a mixture of national and religious airs. When at last the congregation all poured into the church, High Mass was sung, the brass band doing duty in a scarcely less subdued tone than before, but being as much of an improvement upon the theatrical and sensuous exhibitions nicknamed _sacred_ music in many grander churches, as a rough but pious print is--religiously speaking--an improvement on a lascivious Rubens. The sermon (we forget whether preached by the bishop or not) was a touching exhortation to the people to remain knit in heart and soul to this church, the emblem at once of their hopes in the future and their spiritual struggles in the present. In the afternoon, the bishop sang solemn Vespers, and towards dusk we all returned to Geneva, happy in having witnessed a ceremony so seldom seen in its beautiful entirety. Mgr. Mermillod was throughout the summer our frequent guest at the villa, and as we purposed staying through the winter as well, he promised to accompany us to Annecy, in Savoy, to visit S. Francis of Sales' tomb and other places hallowed by his memory, on his own feast (29th of January). We started on the eve in two or three close carriages, with postilions. The road lay over a low pass of the Savoy Alps; the cold was intense--such as we have never felt in any other temperate climate in Europe, and which nothing but the unexpectedly rigorous winters of the Northern States have surpassed in our American experience. The road was lined with trees, and valleys here and there opened a vista which in summer must have been gorgeous. It was scarcely less lovely now. Each slender twig was sharply defined, and covered with a clinging garment of frost; the white mist wreathed itself round the mountain-tops, falling down the river-sides like shadowy waterfalls, and, mingling with the white sky overhead, formed, as it were, a vast dome of snow. No noise disturbed the silence save the creaking wheels of our vehicles, and as far as eye could reach there was no sign of life but our own presence. We might have been in cloud-land, or below the surface of the ocean, among hedges of gigantic white coral! After two hours of this elf-like journey, we came to a ravine over which was thrown an iron suspension bridge, and here the intensely earthly resumed its dominion and made itself clearly felt in the prosaic necessity of paying toll and listening to profane language, rendered yet more uncouth by the Savoyard _patois_.

Annecy is a little, old-fashioned town, with a cathedral in not much better taste than the church of Thonon. The place wears a deserted look, and, the cold being terrible, yet fewer of the inhabitants cared to be seen loitering in the public squares. We adjourned first to the inn (we fear modern pilgrims are less fervent than of old), but could get no fire. Grates are unknown, and a miserable stove, badly managed and half filled, is the starveling and inefficient substitute. The old inn was a characteristic place. We went through the kitchen, the general meeting and _table-d'hôte_ room, to our upper chambers. The staircase was wide enough for a palace, of beautiful carved oak, as was all the wood-work in the house. The next morning the bishop said Mass for us at the shrine of S. Francis. The building of greatest interest after this is the Convent of the Visitation, a rambling house with a large kitchen-garden, which we crossed to reach it. We were shown, through a double grating (the Visitation nuns are enclosed), the various relics which form the spiritual wealth of the convent. They have the original manuscript of S. Francis' _Treatise on the Love of God_ written by his own hand, the pen with which he wrote it, and a shirt embroidered for him by S. Jeanne Françoise de Chantal. In the lower part of the house, corresponding to the position of a cellar, is a little chapel partly hewn in the rock, which serves as the foundation, where S. Francis gave the veil to S. Jane and one companion, or rather, blessed the first semi-religious costume which the founders of the order wore. This consisted of a black gown and cape, and a large, close, white cap in one piece covering the neck and shoulders as well as the head. This house then belonged to S. Jane in her own right. In the chapel to the right of the altar is a picture of her in this dress, and on the other side a description of the simple ceremony. Later on, when the order was constituted, the dress became thoroughly monastic, as it has remained ever since. The cell of S. Jane is exactly as she left it; not made into a regular chapel, but, on days connected with her memory or that of S. Francis, Mass is said there at a temporary altar. Her cloak is kept in a press in the room, and one of us was privileged in having it thrown over her shoulders for a few minutes by the superioress. The order is not at all austere, but there is an immense deal of moral sacrifice imposed by the spirit of the rule. S. Francis designed it rather as a discipline of the mind than of the body; and since saints have differed about this point, we are not at a sufficient elevation to pronounce upon it. Individually, however, we prefer the spirit of the older and more ascetic orders, as involving a more complete oblation of the whole being to God; but--to every age its own institutions, and, we might add, its own saints.

Mgr. Mermillod is surely one of those saints of our day. Indefatigable in preaching (once the distinctive duty of a bishop), his own flock sometimes complain, not without reason, that he is always away, preaching a retreat here, a mission there--Lent in Paris, Advent at Lyons, etc.; but in the winter of 1866, he fortunately preached five _conférences_ at S. Germain, at Geneva itself. The church was in the old, hilly part of the town, but neither that nor the difficulty of approach--the frost made steep roads impassable that winter, and even the cabs went on runners--seemed to diminish the ardor of the people. All denominations were represented at these evening lectures, and the subject was invariably one accessible to the understanding and commanding the interest of all. One, on the regeneration of fallen man, was peculiarly fine; but the arguments were perhaps inferior to the language in which they were clothed. It wound up with a forcible peroration on that "brutal and atheistical democracy which, in its most hideous exponent (the French Revolution of 1793), prostrated itself before a courtesan, and knelt before a scaffold. When the worship of God perished, the worship of shame was the substitute; and when the blood of God ceased to flow upon the altar, the blood of man began to flow on the guillotine." The orator's enthusiasm in speaking sometimes carried him beyond his argument, and he even lost the thread of his similes in the ardor of his utterance. His watch invariably stopped before he had been twenty minutes in the pulpit, and this _entraînement_ was all the more vivid from being quite spontaneous, as he never wrote his sermons, but preached extempore from a few scattered notes. How much study he must have gone through at a previous time to make him so polished, as well as so forcible, an orator, we can only conjecture.

In ordinary social intercourse, his charm was chiefly sweetness and sprightliness, with a certain happy diction which is a special gift, seldom found except among Frenchmen or those to whom French has become a second mother-tongue. Our long winter evenings at the Hôtel de la Paix (the cold having driven us from the villa) were often enlivened by his genial presence; other friends, too, came sometimes, and one, a Russian and an acute thinker, M. S----, was one of the most welcome. He was blind, but his infirmity only seemed to enhance his powers of conversation, and made his company more agreeable than it might otherwise have been. One night, the bishop was speaking of Lamennais and his more hidden life. There were soul-struggles and temptations assaulting him even in his chosen retreat of La Chênaie, in the midst of his triumph, when the Christian youth of France clustered round him, and sat at his feet as his humble disciples. He sometimes fancied himself irretrievably destined to eternal loss, and experienced paroxysms of terrible agony. The Abbé Gerbet, his confessor, once surprised him in one of these fits of despair, and did his best to strengthen and comfort him; but the demon was not to be laid so easily. The bishop, telling us this, added: "The three greatest geniuses of France in this age have fallen, the one through pride, the others through vanity--Lamennais, Victor Hugo, and Lamartine." The conversation having rested upon these two failings, some one quoted the saying that "The greater part of mankind is incapable of rising to the level of pride." A Russian lady who was present then said: "Indeed, one ought to have a great deal of pride to save one's self from petty vanity."

Thereupon M. S---- quickly remarked: "Oh! therefore, we should burn down a city to prevent fires." Our Russian friend was very sharp at repartee. Another evening, when he brought with him a young German, the conversation fell upon Duke Ernest of Saxe-Coburg, Prince Albert's brother. He had lately had an immense forest awarded to him as damages for some losses sustained during the Austro-Prussian war of the previous summer; so S----said:

"There are people who make arrows out of any wood, but he has contrived to make wood out of any arrow." This is a French rendering of "'Tis an ill wind that blows no one good"; but the connection in this case between an arrow, a weapon typical of the war, and the wood, or forest gained in compensation, is better expressed by the French form.[85] Later on, some one remarked that in that war the telegraph had been _Prussianized_ throughout Germany; and when the young German, S---- 's friend, was trying to give us an idea of Duke Ernest's ticklish position, S---- interrupted:

"Yes, yes; I know what you mean; in short, he played the part ... of the telegraph!"

Mgr. Mermillod had a winning way of turning everything into a moral, and at the same time giving balm to a rebuke and strength to a counsel. For instance, one day, as he visited a sick penitent of his, whose mental energy was for ever soaring beyond her physical capabilities, he said:

"You will do more good on your sick-bed than you could in the best of health in the London _salons_. Remember that Our Blessed Lord lay but three hours stretched upon the cross, and thereby converted the world; while, during his three years' ministry, he scarcely converted a handful of Jews."

On New Year's Eve, 1866-7, gave us a few little books of devotion as a souvenir, and then, making the sign of the cross on each of our foreheads, said:

"Here are crosses to disperse the crosses of 1866 and frighten away those of 1867."

Another time, on one of his penitents going to him with a load of doubt, uneasiness, almost despair, he gave her the wisest and gentlest counsels, after which he said sympathizingly, comprehending the whole in a dozen words:

"I understand, my child; you go from one extreme to another--from sadness to laughter, from melancholy to irony."

Once when some one in his presence expressed a wish that all priests were like him, he answered humbly: "My dear child, every priest is in some sort an incarnation of the Spirit of God."[86]

It is sad to think of Geneva without the presence of its pastor, so admirably fitted as he is to carry on the work of S. Francis and execute the designs of God in this important see. The faith is most vigorous just where the attack is hottest, and it is on the missionary bishoprics, flung thus into the warring bosoms of non-Catholic nations, that, humanly speaking, the future--and let us say the triumph--of the church very much depends.

With such internal bulwarks as the Benedictine secretary of Mgr. Mermillod represents, and such external champions as the eloquent, energetic, and enlightened bishop himself, it is not too much to say that not even the faintest heart has reason to dread the fall of the rock-built citadel of Peter.

FOOTNOTES:

[84] _Following of Christ_, b. 1. c. xx. v. 2.

[85] The original proverb sounds less ponderously: "Il en est qui font flèche de tout bois, mai lui, il a fait bois de toute flèche."

[86] The Catholic reader will not misunderstand the still more forcible original: "Tous les prêtres c'est une petite incarnation du bon Dieu."

CATHOLIC LITERATURE IN ENGLAND SINCE THE REFORMATION.

It is not surprising that Catholic literature was at a low ebb for many years after Henry VIII., of evil memory. Deprived of the means of knowledge in their own country under Edward VI., Elizabeth, and James I., Catholics were compelled to seek education abroad in colleges where they forgot their mother-tongue and the writers of their native land. As to their brethren who remained at home, it was dangerous for them even to possess books, and they seldom had time or opportunity to make themselves acquainted with their contents. A prayer-book, black with use and carefully secreted, was all the library of those who were liable at any moment to be ferreted out of vaults and wainscots, and hanged, drawn, and quartered for believing in the Papal supremacy. The Puritan movement in the time of Charles I. and the Commonwealth was highly unfavorable to literature in general; and the Catholics who joined the royal standard were more anxious to wield the sword than the pen. But the fewer the authors who broke the long literary silence of the Catholic body in England, the more their names deserve to be cherished. We will endeavor, therefore, to make a _catena auctorum_, and to offer a few comments on each link in the chain. Though all of them were Catholics at some period or other of their lives, they were not all persistent in their faith nor exemplary in their practice. It will be understood that they are cited in their literary capacity, and not as saints, martyrs, and confessors in a calendar.

Robert Southwell, however, must head the list, as he was both author and martyr. He published many volumes in prose and verse, though his life was closed prematurely in his thirty-fifth year. Educated at Douay, he labored in England eight years during Elizabeth's reign. He was a member of the Society of Jesus, and he touched the hearts of his suffering brethren by his tender and plaintive verse. _S. Peter's Complaint, with Other Poems_, appeared in 1593, and _Mœoniæ, or Certaine Excellent Poems and Spirituall Hymnes_, in 1595, the year in which he was hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn, under a false charge of being engaged in a political movement. His real offence was that of the Bishop of Ermeland and the Jesuits of Germany in the present day--his allegiance in spiritual matters to the authority of the Holy See. Robert Southwell's memory is still cherished in England, and it is not long since selections from his poems were read to a crowded audience in Hanover Square Rooms, London, by the Rev. F. Christie, S.J. They do not rise high in poetic merit, but they are full of noble, just, and devout sentiments. "Time Goes by Turns" is found in most collections of British poetry. The following are the last stanzas of his "Conscience":

"No change of fortune's calms
Can cast my comforts down;
When fortune smiles, I smile to think
How quickly she will frown.

"And when in froward mood
She moves an angry foe,
Small gain I find to let her come,
Less loss to let her go."

Religious writings--sermons, meditations, and even works of controversy--had more importance, in a literary point of view, in Queen Elizabeth's reign than they have now. At that time, people read little; books were few and dear. Books of piety cultivated the mind, though used chiefly to edify the heart. They exercised many persons in the art of reading, who, but for that branch of literature, would have read nothing at all. They kept up a habit which was good on secular grounds, apart from the higher spiritual consideration. Looked upon in this light, the tracts and letters of such holy men as Campion, Persons, and Allen (afterwards cardinal) had a twofold value. Edmund Campion was an accomplished scholar. He received his education at S. John's, Oxford, and being courteous and refined, as well as clever, he was universally beloved. After leaving college, he went to Ireland, and wrote a history of that country, which was highly esteemed. Having been reconciled to the church, he repaired to the new college at Douay, that he might there study theology; and after following the usual course, he was admitted into the Society of Jesus, and sent to England to comfort and strengthen his brethren who were contending for the faith. His friendship for Persons, his publication of a work written by that father, entitled _Reasons for not Going to Church_ (that is, to the parish Protestant church), and the seizure of a private press, which a Catholic gentleman had given to the friends, that they might work off edifying books and tracts, led to his apprehension. He was dragged through the streets of London, with a paper fixed on his hat, stigmatizing him as "Campion, the seditious Jesuit" (July, 1581), and being tried for treason, of which he was quite guiltless, he was barbarously executed, after suffering the most horrible tortures. The life of Cardinal Allen, if carefully written, would be an important addition to English Catholic literature, and involve numerous particulars of thrilling interest respecting the political and domestic history of the times. His writings lie in the border-land between theology and politics. His _Apology or Defence of the Jesuits and Seminarists_ was a reply, written in 1582, to the proclamations of the government which denounced the Catholic priests as traitors. Persons engaged in the same controversy, dwelling chiefly on the dogmatic and practical side of the question. All honor to these heroes of the cross, whom literature as well as religion claims as her own!

In placing "Rare Ben Jonson" among Catholic authors, it is not meant to claim him altogether as one of the church's children. In early youth, he bore arms and served a campaign in the Low Countries. His troop being disbanded, he took to the stage; but a hot temper often led him into brawls, and in one of these he had the misfortune to kill a brother actor. Being in prison, he contracted an intimacy with a fellow-prisoner, a Catholic priest, which ended in his conversion. During twelve years he remained a Catholic, and then returned to the Established Church. It was the only pathway to worldly success, and he became a favorite with James I., as Shakespeare had been with Queen Elizabeth. We name them together, for, indeed, they were rivals; yet what a difference between the texture and the productions of their brains! Ben Jonson was made poet-laureate, and wrote comedies and masques without number. Here and there we find in his works noble sentiments worthily expressed, as in that classical drama, _Catiline's Conspiracy_. We find also rhythmical sweetness, as in the song, "To Celia,"

"Drink to me only with thine eyes,"

and in the "Hymn to the Moon,"

"Queen and huntress, chaste and fair."

Now and then he touches a more sacred chord, and such as might suit a Catholic lyre, as in the following hymn:

"Hear me, O God!
A broken heart
Is my best part.
Use still thy rod,
That I may prove
Therein thy love.

"If thou hadst not
Been stern to me,
But left me free,
I had forgot
Myself and thee;

"For sin's so sweet,
As minds ill bent
Rarely repent,
Until they meet
Their punishment."

The way had been prepared for Ben Jonson's success as a dramatist--not to speak now of Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger, and Marlowe--by the miracle plays or mysteries of the middle ages, similar to those which are acted at the present time among the Indians in Mexico, and the famous Ammergau, or Passion Play, in Bavaria. In these plays, _The Fall of Man_, _The Death of Abel_, _The Flood_, _Lazarus_, _Pilate's Wife's Dream_, _St. Catharine's Wheel_, and the like, were brought on the stage with the approbation of the clergy, in order that they might bring home the mysteries of the faith to people's heart and imagination, and supply in some measure the place of books. The miracle plays had been succeeded in time by moral plays, which, from the early part of Henry VI.'s long reign, had represented apologues, not histories, by means of allegorical characters. Vices and Virtues, however, did not stand their ground long at the theatre. They gradually changed into beings less vague and shadowy, who, while they represented vices or virtues in the concrete, had, in addition, the charm of resembling real life.

Richard Crashaw's fame as a poet rests mainly on one line, and that in Latin; nor was the rest of his poetry of sufficient force and merit to enable him always to retain the credit of that single line. It has over and over again been attributed to Dryden and other hands. Yet it is positively his, and a poem in itself. It is to be found in a volume of Latin poems published by Crashaw in the year in which he graduated at Cambridge (1635). The line is a pentameter--on the miracle at Cana of Galilee--and consists of two dactyls, a spondee, and two anapests. It is often quoted inaccurately, but we give it exactly:

_Nympha pudica Deum vidit, et erubuit._
"The modest water saw its God, and blushed."

The author's mind was devotional from his earliest years. He had always been hearing about religion; for his father preached at the Temple, and took part largely in the controversies of the day. There was one favorable feature in the religious polemics of that period--both sides professed belief in God and in the Christian religion; now our warfare is with atheists, deists, pantheists, positivists, with whom we have scarcely any common ground. After his election as a Fellow of Peterhouse in 1637--about the time that Hampden, Pym, and Cromwell himself were embarking for New England, and were forcibly detained from sailing--he became noted in the university as a preacher, and passed so much of his time in devotion that the author of the preface to his poems says: "He lodged under Tertullian's roof of angels. There he made his nest more gladly than David's swallow near the house of God. There, like a primitive saint, he offered more prayers in the night than others usually offer in the day. There he penned these poems: _Steps for Happy Souls to climb to Heaven by_."

In 1644, sorrow came to his calm nest; and as he would not sign the covenant, he was driven from the university he loved and from surroundings increasingly dear. Accomplished in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian, and Spanish, skilled in drawing, music, and engraving, he was still more noted for his talent in the higher art of poetry. He belonged to what is called the fantastic school of Cowley, which is full of conceits. But "conceits" are often original and beautiful ideas quaintly expressed. The poetry of conceits was a reflex of the times, and is, with all its faults, far preferable to classic platitudes in flowing verse.

The overthrow of the Church of England by the Commonwealth was to Crashaw a cause of poignant regret. He could no longer bear to look on the towers and spires of venerable churches given over into the hands of bawling, nasal Puritans. He quitted England, and, crossing the Channel, found that, in France, he was a member of no church at all. His own communion was extinct, and he was a stranger to the Catholic Church, before whose altars he now stood as an alien. But he had taken up his residence in France, and it was not long before he decided on embracing the faith which that land prized as its most precious heritage. After the decisive battle of the Civil War had been fought at Naseby, the poet Cowley, who was an ardent royalist, visited Paris, and found Crashaw in great distress. He represented his case to Henrietta Maria, the exiled queen of England, and presented him to her. He received kindness from her majesty, and letters of recommendation to her friends in Italy. Having made his way to Rome, he became secretary to one of the cardinals, and was subsequently appointed canon of the church of Our Lady at Loretto. Here he resided during the remainder of his days, and died "a poet and a saint" (as Cowley calls him) in 1650, the year after the execution of Charles I.

Two years after his death, a volume of his posthumous poems was published; and his memory was honored by Cowley in what Thomas Arnold calls "one of the most loving and beautiful elegies ever written." His _Steps to the Temple: Sacred Poems, and other Delights of the Muses_, which appeared in 1646, had reached a second edition before his decease, and a third was published in 1670. In 1785, his entire poems were published in London, and included a translation of part of the _Sospetto di Herode_ of Marini. His style resembled that of Herbert, and a few lines breathing a Catholic spirit shall be quoted from his works. It is called _A Hymn to the Nativity_:

"Gloomy night embraced the place
Where the noble Infant lay:
The babe looked up, and showed his face--
In spite of darkness, it was day.

"We saw thee in thy balmy nest,
Bright dawn of our eternal day.
We saw thine eyes break from the east,
And chase the trembling shades away.
We saw thee, and we blessed the sight:
_We saw thee by thine own sweet light_.

"She sings thy tears asleep, _and dips
Her kisses in thy weeping eye;
She spreads the red leaves of thy lips_
That in their buds yet blushing lie.
Yet when young April's husband-showers
Shall bless the faithful Maia's bed,
We'll bring the first-born of her flowers
To kiss thy feet and crown thy head:
To thee, dread Lamb! whose love must keep
The shepherds while they feed their sheep."