Chapter XVII: The End (17)

Our task is drawing to a close. It has been our endeavor to encircle the whole creation with the chain of faith, and to bind each to all in endless links of the divine love. We have dared to glance back before time into the bosom of eternity. We have beheld time, as it appears to our human ken, in a manner detach itself from eternity, and seem to become an entity—which indeed it is in a certain sense. We have marvelled at its slow-flowing course and its distant results, as compared with our own rapidity of thought and grasp of imagination. And we have seen that time is patient because it is the offspring of eternity, and because it is the mode and vehicle of God’s revelation of himself to us. God is patient because he is almighty and omniscient. For a little space we have strained our endeavors to look upon the flowing stream as God sees it, and not as we break it up into moments and hours. Our motive for doing this has been to realize so far as is possible the continuousness of God’s action with the indivisibility of his being as he is in himself, and to prove that this indivisibility and intrinsic unchangeableness lie at the root of all his manifestations of himself through the _nunc fluens_ of time. Wherever we have fancied a contradiction to exist, or even a disparity, the error has lain in our partial vision and not in any shadow of change in the great God. He meant always what he means now, but mankind could not always equally bear that meaning. Therefore, as pitying his creation, he has condescended in past ages to pour the divine waters of revelation in diverse colored vessels; so that at one time the limpid liquid seemed to us of a different hue from what it assumed subsequently, until at last the waters of life were held in the crystal vases of the church, pure and white as they. We perceive and understand that the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob is the same God as our God of Bethlehem and Calvary. And the unity of God’s nature becomes ever more and more obvious to us as we study the characteristics of his government. At no period and in no place has the loving Creator forgotten the work of his own hands. And lest we could not find him, he has adapted the light he poured upon us to the weakness of our sight. In the unity of God and in his unchangeableness we find our own link to the past, and discover how we are the inheritors of former ages and the heirs of the years to come. We have indicated (we could do no more) the great fact that all is because God is; that he has and can have no other end than himself; and that it is exactly in that great truth that lies all our hope and all our salvation. For he is absolute goodness as certainly and as necessarily as he is absolute being. This being so, it is impossible for us to wish anything that he has made not to be. Dreadful as is the thought of hell, we could not wish hell were not—we cannot wish evil to exist. But we find it there, and we are silent because he has permitted it. We hate it, because, though he permits it, he hates it. But we see how it grows out of the free will of men and angels; and that, as all merit lies in deliberate choice, there could be no choice if virtue were a necessity. Evil is not, like good, an original and universal principle. It is the negation of that; and required, to give it an actual existence, the free power of deliberate selection, like that of the devils when they fell. We see as we read the history of the world, in the light thrown by the knowledge of God, that evil works greater good. And as we can see this in part, we believe that it exists in the whole, though our perception is limited. We know that good must triumph in the end. If we thought otherwise, we should make the devil stronger than God, and the scheme of redemption a comparative failure.

As we enumerate all these things, what is the result we arrive at except one of illimitable joy and confidence—exultation beyond all expression in the might and majesty of our God—a hopefulness that exceeds language—a courage too large for a narrow heart, and a boundless, passionate yearning towards all living souls, that they may learn how great a God is our God, and how good and grand a thing it is to be alive and to serve him?

We can only measure life with any accuracy by the amount of thought which has filled it—that is, by the quantity of our intellectual and spiritual powers which we have been able to bring to the small aperture in the camera obscura by which to contemplate the ever-flowing eternity that lies beyond, and cut it up into the sections we call time.

Another example will show us how plastic is the nature of time. Take the life of an animal. We are inclined to give the largest possible and reasonable importance to the brute creation. It is an open question in which we see great seeds of future development, all tending to increased glory to the Creator and to further elucidation of creative love. Nevertheless it is obvious that brutes perceive only, or chiefly, by moments. There is, as compared with ourselves, little or no sequence in their perceptions. There is no cumulative knowledge. They are without deliberate reflection, even where they are not without perceptions of relations and circumstances, past or future. Consequently, they are more rigorously subjected to time than ourselves. Therefore, when we deprive an animal of life we deprive him of a remainder of time that is equal to little more than no time, in proportion to the degree in which his power of filling time with perception is less than our own.[155] All we have said tends to prove that time has in itself only a relative existence; it is a form or phase of our own being.[156] It is an aspect of eternity; the aspect which is consistent with our present condition.

From the way in which we have seen that God has made use of different races to work for the establishment and development of his church, we have opened a glorious vista of hope in the future, and we have rejoiced over the work to be done, and the laborers who at the eleventh hour shall be called into the vineyard, until even the fragments that remain shall be gathered up, so that nothing may be lost. We have dared to maintain, against all those who cavil at the evil days on which we have fallen, that Christianity has infiltrated its influence in regions where it is blasphemed, or, as in the past Roman Empire, where it was denied. We have endeavored to impress on our readers the importance, and in a certain sense the sacredness, of matter, as the vehicle of God’s demonstration of himself. For, as Fénelon says, “God has established the general laws of nature (which involve all the laws of matter) to hide under the veil of the regulated and uniform course of nature his perpetual operation from the eyes of proud and corrupt men, while on the other hand he gives to pure and docile souls something which they may admire in all his works.” In proportion as we honor God’s laws, so should we honor the means of their manifestation, the substance through and in which they work, and without which they would fall back into the abstract and have no existence outside God himself. We say in proportion, because the manifestation is second to the principle manifested, and the _modus operandi_ is inferior to him who employs it. We have as much difficulty in conceiving of God apart from his operations as we have in realizing eternity apart from time. And therefore is all honor due to the vast creation whereby we see the evidence of things not seen, and everything becomes to us “holy to the Lord.” It is for this reason that the true and intelligent love of nature is essentially the offspring of the Christian faith. The ancients cannot be said to have had it in any degree beyond a remote possibility in their intellectual nature. To them nature was a weird enchantress, hiding her terrible secrets with a jealous care. The silence and solitude of the forests and the mountains were full of a sense of horror. The separate trees held a lamenting and imprisoned spirit; the gay, sparkling streams were a transmuted nymph, which, like the perfumed shrubs and flowers, told some tale of the anger of the gods and their swift revenge. All that was inanimate inspired sadness. And when their pastoral tales rose into cheerfulness, it was that the lowing herds and bleating sheep formed a part. The sounds and motion of at least animal life were essential. The solitudes of nature were simply awful and terrific; for nature was then only a mystery to unredeemed humanity. She held deep secrets in her bosom, but the curse had set its seal upon them all, and she waited in long mournful silence for the hour when the human feet of the Creator should press her varied fields, and by his thrilling touch break the iron bars of her captivity, and teach her to tell of him in the whispered music of her thousand voices. In truth, her secrets were his, nor dared she break silence until he had come to set free the mystery of love for which she was created and instituted. But when Love himself had walked the earth, and mingled his tears—ay, and his precious blood—with the dews of his own creation, then the dark melancholy of nature grew into sweet pathos, and her solitudes were filled with secrets of his presence.

But what was then hidden from the pagan world could hardly be so to the first father of our race, he who out of the vast stores of his infused science named all created beings. When Adam saw the corn growing bright in thick array, and the vine bending down with purple fruit, surely he understood, as in a prophecy, the great symbol of the bread of life and of the Holy Eucharist. The body and blood of the Incarnate God, albeit unbroken and unshed, must have been present to his ardent expectation as he beheld their antitype in the garden of Paradise. The rose with her mystic bosom deep enfolded must ever have awakened some passing thought of the _Rosa mystica_. And when to sad Eve, after her exile beyond the gates guarded by the flaming sword of the cherubim, the rose appeared bearing thorns among her five or seven leaved foliage, she guessed at the sacred crown and the divine wounds of the God-man, and at the sevenfold desolation of the mother who bore him. And what to us are the bright autumn hedgerow leaves dabbed with blood, not red now but tawny? Are they not tokens that he has trod that way and left the traces of his past glorious passion—past, because that blood was shed once for all, but still and for ever remaining; while the scarlet poppy takes up the theme, and in every corn-field, on barren tracks, and meeting the way-worn traveller by the road’s dusty side, reminds him that the sacrifice is renewed hour by hour the wide world over, fresh and life-giving as ever? Can the rich woodlands fail to bring before us the thought of him who gathered from the forests of his own creation the wood for his own cross? Can we sit beneath the dappled sunshine of the flickering boughs without remembering how it dared to lay its quick vibrating touch upon his sacred head, as he walked amid the olive groves of Gethsemane, but withdrew itself, and gave place to the cold moon before the scene of his great agony?

Surely these shadows are full of uncreated light; and from time to time the church retrims her lamps of dogmatic theology, and each time the light streams further down into the still, dim, uncertain regions of natural science, another precious secret is revealed, another ancient doubt dispelled; and matter and natural laws prove themselves each more and more to be the depositories of divine truth and the faithful creatures of the omnipresent Creator.

While acknowledging the force of law, we have denied that law can have an independent existence apart from a self-existing, self-conscious lawgiver, of whom it is the exponent. We have asserted the same as regards force, which is but another name for law, or, rather, which is law _in posse_. And we have stated that as science proves the absence of all direct contact in the material world, the world of atoms, so the only real contact is that of spirit on matter, of the divine Creator on his own creation. For he is nearer to us than we are to ourselves. All forces, all active powers, emanate from God. They are the evidences to us of his existence. They could as little exist without him as a shadow can exist without light. They are one in their nature, though they are diverse in their effects, because they are God’s constant _touch_ on his own creation. He exists formally in all space and beyond all space. And everywhere he is the same: the immutable and absolute _Ens_. In his touch on his creation he gives rise to the active forces which virtually declare his being, and which are extended throughout space, but under a million varied degrees of being and a million varied forms. They are virtually everywhere equally. But their manifestation in mind and degree is as diverse as all that exists in the vast cosmos, inside and outside of which God is, infinite and entire.

We have not enlarged upon this theme as we might have done. We have only pointed out to our readers how God’s touch on his creation is the only absolute contact that exists, and that science goes to prove the absence of all other, that is, of all material contact. We have abstained from trying to demonstrate how this truth sweeps away a hundred doubts respecting God’s ways towards man, and a thousand difficulties that might prove stumbling-blocks to our faith. We have desired no more than to put the thought, nay, we might say the fact, before them, and leave them to work out all its corollaries in love and devotion. We are not writing for sceptics but for those who believe, and would fain believe yet more surely, giving a reason for the faith that is in them, and dwelling in prayer on thoughts which reveal more of God’s character to the soul. We are to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect. That is, in our measure and degree, we are to aim at a faint reflection of the harmony, the proportion, the justice of God. To do this, and to aim at doing it, we need to form in our own minds an accurate though but a limited view of the character of God. And to effect this, we must as it were look at his character all round—for which purpose the past, the present, and the future are all-important to us; and we have to view him as he reveals himself to us in his creation, in his government, and in his promises. We have ventured to maintain that the whole of his creation is with a view to his Incarnation; that the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity is enhanced by his glorious passion and most precious death working our redemption; that it is glorified by his resurrection and ascension; and only completed in his sacramental presence; that as this sacramental presence is the one great fact virtually enclosing in itself all the others, as it is the coping-stone of the great mystery of the Incarnation, its lowest depth and greatest height, so is it the link that rivets the creation to the God-man, and the keystone to all the science of matter and dynamic force. For it is the divine epitome of all the laws that govern both, the reason of their being, and the last exponent of their rootedness in God. It completes the circle within whose bounds lies the entire cosmos as a globe environed by the serpent. It is the golden ring with which the divine Spouse has wedded himself to his church and to all the world, if they but know it. Words fail us. We cannot say enough; for these are thoughts too deep for words, and which seem to be rather darkened than expressed by language. And, like all that is greatest, they come to us from that which seems most simple and most hidden of all—a silken-curtained Tabernacle; and behind the little closed door lies all; every secret has its solution within the round white limits of the Host, for that Host is the great ultimatum of the creation, and the absolute consummation of God’s giving himself to man, while the latter is in the condition of viator.

We have entreated our readers not to be deluded by the dimness of the present times, but by prayer and solitary thought to strain their spiritual vision to behold the brightness of the future which is coming upon us like the rays of the sun behind a mist; the reign of the Holy Ghost—the enlargement of the church’s border, and the spreading of the cords of her tent; the devotion to the Mother of God taking root in an honorable people; and thus, through the mediation of her who is the first among all created beings, bringing the whole outer world nearer to the spiritual world. This, and the future mission, may be a very distant one, of her messengers the angels, are all certain because they are written, and even now the signs of the times indicate their advent. In whatever form they may come, whatever may be the details filling up the wonderful picture of the future, whatever, in short, may be the literal working-out of the wonderful promises of the Gospel, one thing at least is certain: they mean peace to men of good-will. We may be quite unable to define or explain them; we are waiting for the hour when the church shall teach us more. But we cannot exaggerate their importance, nor can we deny that our blessed Lord has left a rebuke on those who make no attempt to discern the signs of the times. There are souls among his special servants who are the men of the future. They are those who are called to stand on the watch-towers of prayer, and to hear the cry, “Watchman, what of the night?”

The time of figs was not yet. Nevertheless, he in his eternal justice cursed the fig-tree that yielded him no fruit, when he deigned to look up among the broad, scented leaves of its knotted branches. There are souls who are called to bear fruit out of season as well as in season, and woe to them if they fail in their higher and exceptional spiritual vocation. They are to be beforehand with time; they are to be, though in a silent, hidden way, the spiritual heralds of the future, the harbingers of God’s coming spring, the pioneers of prayer. They are the human messengers that are to prepare his way before him, in those never-ceasing conquests which multiply in proportion as our hearts are ready to receive him. They are to live, as all the great saints have done, in advance of their age. St. Francis was centuries before his time in the refinements of his exquisitely spiritualized nature; St. Vincent of Paul was the same in the creations of his charity; and St. Francis of Sales like St. Philip Neri in the blending of deep piety with the exigencies of modern life. The nearer we approach to the consummation, the more numerous will become the watchers of the night, the souls that are looking out for a new dawn, and who meanwhile are leading an inner life in advance of the present. God alone can know them, and those on whom he has bestowed the gift, though but partially, of the discernment of spirits. To others they will appear as men walking in a dream, visionary and unpractical. It matters not to them. Even here they have in a measure their great reward, for they can say, with their divine Master, “I have meat to eat which you know not.”

We are often tempted to complain that we have fallen upon evil times. The past seems to us to have been more full of heroism, the future we believe will be richer in knowledge. We have slid into a period of prosaic piety mingled with many doubts. Without pausing to argue how much of this is false, we would remark that the present is an epoch which may yield a larger amount of merit to those who know how to profit by it than perhaps any other—we may make a rich harvest of faith and hope. And we must bear in mind that both these are virtues that will ultimately be swallowed up in the greater and crowning virtue of perfect charity. When we see, there will be an end of faith; when we know, hope will expire in certainty. “There remain now faith, hope, and charity; but the greatest of these is charity.” In proportion to the extension of our knowledge, the area of our blind faith is diminished. “Because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed. Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” There is a special grace attending these twilight days, when a larger demand is made upon our faith. The light will gradually increase unto the perfect day—not only the real absolute perfect day of heaven, but in a measure here upon earth. The merit of faith will be less, when the angels are obviously carrying out their mission upon earth, than it is now, when the good lies so hidden, and the evil is so rampant and open. We are foolish not more truly to value the advantages of our own time, and to rejoice that we are called upon to have a greater and a stronger faith than may be possible in those who will, as it were, put their hand into the wounded side where beats the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Whatever has an appearance of discouragement about it is in fact a fresh demand from God upon our larger faith and deeper trust. It is as if he said to us, “You are my friends, and therefore I can count upon you.” We should make haste to lay up a larger harvest of meritorious faith from every doubt that falls across our path and every cloud that veils the sunshine, and by this very act we shall hasten the dawn and bring on the joyous fruition of our prayer. “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”—for surely this prayer is intended to be granted in a far greater degree than anything the world has ever seen from the creation to the present hour. Remember who taught us that prayer; and remember the centuries that it has been breathed by all the church of God from infancy to age. It is not a poetic phrase. It is not a hyperbole. It is God’s word, expressive of God’s will and God’s intention; and, therefore, has he made it the universal petition of all his children. It is the epitome of all he demands in every separate soul, until the many units have become a large multitude of the faithful, greater than any man can number.

It is the strenuousness of our faith which will give a greater distinctness, a more delineated and chiselled clearness, to our convictions, and even to our opinions. At present they hang loose on too many of us, and flap about in the high wind of the world’s contempt and impudent indifference, blinding our sight and hindering our steps. A firmer, steadier faith will gather tight across our bosom all our outstanding notions and ideas, bringing them into subjection to the faith which teaches us to see all things as God sees them—that is, according to our degree, but in the same light that he sees them, which is the light of eternity and of his own being. He has bidden us open our mouth wide that he may fill it. Can, we, then hope too largely or too earnestly? Can we assign any limits to the grace of sanctification in its continuous progression, or to the advance of love in the ever-enduring reign of the Holy Ghost? The God towards whom we are being so sweetly drawn is infinite, and though each individual must reach his own appointed measure and degree, yet who can dare put a limit even in thought to the plenitude of that future? But for our great and exceeding hope, how barren would our present life appear! Like Rachel, the church cries incessantly to her Lord, “Give me children, or I die.” Let us repeat the prayer, and re-echo in every act of our lives the passionate desire for the spread of truth and the increase of light; for it is hardly less difficult to guess at the beautiful and glorious future which God reserves for his cherished creations—the garment that he has woven for his only-begotten Son—than it is to form an opinion of the possible glorious future of some souls as compared with others. And is this all? Have we by any unguarded expression left on our reader’s mind a notion that we are anticipating the perfectibility of mankind upon earth, the absence of evil, and a sort of pious utopia, as the sum and substance of our expectations—a deifying of the system of nature, a glorification in some distant future of all the natural laws, as ultimate and final, and which, because of the beauty of creation, are to content us and be in some form or other our higher destiny? Not so. The end is not in that, neither is it here. Were Satan bound now, as one day he will be, we still should as now carry about with us the concupiscence which has tainted the nature of every human being, save only the Mother of God. Alas! we need no devil to prompt us to sin, for we carry an enemy within us. Even mortal sin can be committed without his assistance; and we are but too apt to paint him blacker by thrusting upon him a responsibility which is too often all our own. We believe in no absolutely sinless existence this side the gates of death, except that of the God-man and his immaculate Mother. But this we do believe, that “wisdom is justified by her children,”[157] and we venture to anticipate that all that is holy, beautiful, and fitting in nature will shine with a renewed glory upon earth as the dawn grows to the perfect day, before the temporal gives place to the eternal, and the Son of Man shall have delivered up the kingdom to the Father. “And when all things shall be subdued unto him, then the Son also himself shall be subject unto him that put all things under him, that God may be all in all.”[158] We have borne the image of the earthly, we must also bear the image of the heavenly—when God shall be all in all, when we shall have ascended by the ladder of the sacred humanity to the mystery of the Holy Trinity, when we shall look on the Triune God and be satisfied. Before the immensity of that thought there falls a veil of light more impenetrable than the thickest darkness. We cease to think. Our whole being becomes as it were detached from our human consciousness, and for one moment, one awful, never-to-be-forgotten moment, we hang over the abyss which is the eternity and the infinity of God. Towards that we yearn, for it is our last end. Even the immaculate heart of Mary; even the unutterable endearments of the sacred humanity; even that which in its mystery and its hiddenness is the nearest approach to the undivided thought of God—the Blessed Eucharist—become to us but parts of a whole which must be ours, if we are to be content. The cosmos rolls away from our sight like a scorched parchment before that living heat. The history of Bethlehem and Calvary are manifestations limited in themselves, and indicative of more. The Blessed Paraclete, whose personality we perhaps sometimes find it hard to individualize (though we do not say with the Ephesian disciples that “we have not so much as heard whether there be a Holy Ghost”), becomes in our thoughts a more intense and absolute idea, less vague than in the past, and how inscrutably attractive! We have reached the thought of the Holy Ghost through Jesus. And now we seem to sink into the bosom of the Father through the Holy Ghost; and, in a way too deep for words, to be conscious of ourselves only through our perception of the great God, and to have lost everything save the immensity and the unity, the eternal being and the eternal love, of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost—the three Persons we have dimly known on earth; and the one God, whom we shall only fully know in heaven, when we shall have entered on the eternal years.

THE END.

[153] By this is meant the first Mass celebrated by a
mere man.

[154] With ever-yearning love he calls us in the dear
Sacrament of the Altar and before the doors of his
tabernacle that we may touch not only his sacred feet
as Mary Magdalene pressed them to her lips, but his
whole self, his humanity and his divinity in one.

[155] In other words, there is a more imperfect being
than ours. Though whether its imperfection is to
exclude all idea of their having a future fuller
development, whereby and in which they will be
indemnified for their sinless share in guilty man’s
punishment, is still an open question.

[156] Time is the measure of successive existence in
created and finite beings. As a finite spirit cannot
escape from this limit of successive existence, any
more than a body can escape from the limit of locality
and finite movement in space, it is evident that this
statement is not correct in a literal and strictly
metaphysical sense. Eternal existence is the entire
possession of life which is illimitable in such a
perfect manner that all succession in duration is
excluded. It is possible only in God, who is alone
most pure and perfect act, and therefore is at once
all he can be, without change or movement. The created
spirit must ever live by a perpetual movement or
increase in its duration, because it is on every side
finite. It is impossible, therefore, that time should
cease while creatures continue to exist.—ED. C. W.

[157] Matt. xi. 19.

[158] 1 Cor. xv.

NEW PUBLICATIONS.

THE GLORIES OF THE SACRED HEART. By Henry Edward, Cardinal
Archbishop of Westminster. New York: The Catholic
Publication Society. 1876. [Republished by special
permission of his Eminence.]

There are many excellent works on the Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The new one whose title is given above is not a mere repetition in a new form of the substance of any of these preceding treatises. It is different from all of them, and quite peculiar in its scope, as well as in its style, as might be expected from its eminent author. Its basis is strictly theological. With his usual and characteristic accuracy of doctrine and lucidity of style, the cardinal makes an exposition of the mystery of the Incarnation and its consequences, especially in respect to the deification and adoration of the sacred humanity of Jesus Christ. The special _cultus_ of the Sacred Heart is explained in its relation to the deified humanity, to the Blessed Sacrament, to the sanctification of men, and to the eternal glory of the elect. This is a book to enlighten the mind of a sincere and devout reader, and, through the illumination of the understanding, to awaken a solid, rational, and ardent devotion.

* * * * *

We have received the following books, but in consequence of the unusually crowded state of our columns must defer notice of them until later.

TERRA INCOGNITA; OR, THE CONVENTS OF THE UNITED KINGDOM. By
John Nicholas Murphy. Popular Edition. London: Burns &
Oates. New York: The Catholic Publication Society.

SOUVENIRS OF NOTRE DAME: A Collection of Poems and Dramas.
By Mrs. Mary T. Monroe. New York: The Catholic Publication
Society.

JULIAN THE APOSTATE, AND THE DUKE OF MERCIA: Historical
Dramas. By the late Sir Aubrey de Vere. London: Pickering.

MARGARET ROPER; OR, THE CHANCELLOR AND HIS DAUGHTER. By
Agnes M. Stewart. Baltimore: Kelly, Piet & Co.

REAL LIFE. By Mathilde Froment. Translated from the French
by Miss Newlin. Kelly, Piet & Co.

THE WISE NUN OF EASTONMERE, and other Tales. By Miss Taylor.
Kelly, Piet & Co.

SAINT ELIZABETH, THE LILY OF PORTUGAL; SAINT ELIZABETH, THE
MATRON OF ISRAEL; SAINT ELIZABETH, THE QUEEN OF HUNGARY. By
the author of “Life in the Cloister.” Kelly, Piet & Co.

MEDITATIONS AND CONSIDERATIONS FOR A RETREAT OF ONE DAY IN
EACH MONTH. Kelly, Piet & Co.

BERTHA: A Historical Romance. By Conrad von Bolanden.
Translated by S. B. A. Harper. New York: D. & J. Sadlier &
Co.

THE NEW MONTH OF THE SACRED HEART OF JESUS. From the
original French. B. S. P. Philadelphia: Peter F.
Cunningham’s Son.

SCIENCE AND RELIGION. A Lecture delivered at Leeds, England.
By Cardinal Wiseman. St. Louis: Patrick Fox.

LITTLE CATECHISM OF THE INFALLIBILITY OF THE SOVEREIGN
PONTIFF. New York: Benziger Bros.

SPIRITUALISM AND NERVOUS DERANGEMENT. By William A. Hammond,
M. D. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. By Antoinette Brown
Blackwell. G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

CLAREL: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. By Herman
Melville. Two vols. G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

THE GREEKS AND THE PERSIANS. By the Rev. G. W. Cox, M.A. New
York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co.

THE FALL OF THE STUARTS AND WESTERN EUROPE. By the Rev. E.
Hale, M.A. Scribner, Armstrong & Co.

THE AGE OF ELIZABETH. By Mandell Creighton, M.A. Scribner,
Armstrong & Co.

THE LIFE, LETTERS, AND TABLE-TALK OF BENJAMIN ROBERT HAYDON.
Edited by Richard Henry Stoddard. Scribner, Armstrong & Co.

POEMS. By Christina G. Rossetti. Boston: Roberts Bros.

REVOLUTIONARY TIMES. By Edward Abbott. Roberts Bros.

ACHSAH: A New England Study. By Rev. Peter Pennot. Boston:
Lee & Shepard.

A QUESTION OF HONOR. By Christian Reid. New York: Appleton &
Co.

SPIRIT INVOCATIONS. Compiled by Allen Putnam, M.A. Boston:
Colby & Rich.

* * * * *

In the next number of THE CATHOLIC WORLD will be begun a new serial entitled “Six Sunny Months,” by the author of _The House of Yorke, Grapes and Thorns_, etc.

THE CATHOLIC WORLD.

VOL. XXIII., No. 137.—AUGUST, 1876.

Copyright: Rev. I. T. HECKER. 1876.

THE NEXT PHASE OF CATHOLICITY IN THE UNITED STATES.

The history of the universal church, replete as it is with miraculous conversions and great moral revolutions, presents no parallel to the growth and spread of the Catholic faith in this republic; and if we be allowed to forecast the future by the light of the past, we may without presumption predict for Catholicity a career of usefulness and glory, an influence far-reaching and all-pervading, on American soil, hitherto unequalled, even in the most triumphant days of our holy and venerable mother.

In the early ages of Christianity whole tribes and nations were won over bodily to the Gospel, not alone by the superhuman efforts of a comparatively small number of apostolic men, but incidentally by the attractions of the purer and higher order of civilization which everywhere followed their footsteps and resulted naturally from their teachings. The primitive missionaries were reformers of manners and governments, advocates of mercy and equity, promoters of peace, industry, and education, as well as expounders of divine law. They indeed realized the fabled power of Orpheus, and tamed the brute passions of paganism by the harmony of their lives and the melody of their doctrines.

Far different have been the circumstances which surrounded the first permanent introduction of Catholicity into what is now the United States. Though we can dwell with commendable pride on the devotion and self-sacrifice which characterized the Spanish and French Dominicans, Franciscans, and Jesuits in their arduous labors among the aborigines; and recall with deep gratitude the beneficent and indefatigable exertions of the zealous pioneers of our present hierarchy and priesthood, we cannot help feeling that we have had no national inheritance in the merits of those extraordinary men of the Old World, those confessors and martyrs, whose names shine forth with such resplendent lustre in the calendar of the saints of God.

We look in vain, also, for any great name, distinguished for political power or intellectual supremacy, among the humble immigrants who first raised the standard of the cross in the hostile atmosphere of colonial Protestantism. As in the crumbling yet still luxurious Roman Empire, the foundations of our infant church were laid on what, in a worldly sense, may be called the lowest class in the social scale, the poor, the simple, the neglected and despised. Wealth, fashion, and self-interest were opposed to it. A people shrewd, intelligent, and in their own way religious, were in possession of the country, and had neither the will nor the disposition to yield one jot to the professors of a faith which they had been taught to regard as debasing and idolatrous. Only a hundred years ago the Catholics of the United Colonies consisted of a few isolated groups, principally in Maryland and Pennsylvania, without influence, authority, or legal recognition. In the aggregate they counted about one in every thousand of the population, and, save some descendants of the original Maryland settlers, and a few private gentlemen who afterwards rose to eminence in the Revolutionary War, they were alike devoid of wealth and social standing.

Still, this very obscurity was their safeguard and defence. Though soon declared free by the fundamental law of the new confederacy, public opinion, or rather popular prejudice, was against them, and for many years after the achievement of our independence their numbers increased with more steadiness than rapidity. Recruits came from all quarters. Attracted by the guarantees presented by the Constitution, Catholics of various nationalities hastened to place themselves under its protecting ægis. The hurricane of revolution which swept over France and the greater part of Europe, and reached even the West Indies, drove many pious priests and exemplary laymen to our shores. On the north the French Canadian crossed the frontier, while as our southern boundaries were enlarged so as to embrace the valley of the Lower Mississippi, the inhabitants of that large region, who were nearly all of one faith, helped materially to swell the Catholic population of the Union. At that period Ireland had not begun to pour in her myriads, but a small, steady stream of emigrants was setting in from other ports as soon as it was ascertained that the new nation of the west had discarded the penal code of England when it had thrown off her authority.

In 1810 the Catholics within the limits of the United States were estimated at upwards of one hundred and fifty thousand, and the clergy numbered eighty, or double the number reported in 1800. Twenty years afterwards the laity had increased to 450,000 and the clergy to 232. The hierarchy, which only dated from 1789, at this time reckoned thirteen bishops.

From 1830 may be dated the extraordinary growth in numbers, influence, and activity of the Catholic Church in this country. The tide of European immigration, which has flowed on with undiminished volume till within a year or two, then fairly began. Between that year and 1840 over 300,000 arrivals were reported from Ireland, 58,000 from France, Spain, and other Catholic countries, and 150,000 from Germany, a strong minority of whom may also be credited to the church. All these accessions, added to the native-born and already adopted element, brought the Catholic strength in the latter year to over one million, and swelled the ranks of the priesthood to 482, or one for every 2,000 souls.

Satisfactory as were these results, the next decade was destined to witness an advance much more magnificent as to numerical strength, and infinitely more salutary when we reflect on the quarter from which some of that strength was drawn.

The Oxford movement, as it was called, had already spread consternation among the Anglicans. Many of the ablest and most erudite scholars of Oxford University, wearied and dissatisfied with the contradictions and pretensions of English Protestantism, had sought peace and rest in the bosom of the church. Their writings and example produced a profound sensation wherever the English language was spoken, and nowhere a more decided one than in this country. Men who had formerly exhibited nothing but contempt or indifference for Catholicity, and some even who had displayed a marked hostility to the faith, eagerly read the works of such thinkers as Newman, and, as a consequence, guided by Providence, abandoned their favorite heretical notions and became reconciled to the church. This spirit of investigation and submission pervaded all classes, particularly the more studious, conscientious, and influential. Judges, journalists, artists, authors, physicians, ministers, and doctors of divinity openly declared their adhesion to the Catholic faith, and arrayed themselves beside the contemned and obscure Irish immigrant and his children. Many of the ablest publicists of to-day, not a few of the most energetic of the clergy, and at least one illustrious member of the hierarchy are the fruits of this sympathetic movement which had its origin in the cloisters of the once Catholic university.

Another cause which helped to swell the Catholic census about the same time was the annexation of Texas, which eventually led to the acquisition of New Mexico and California. The population of those Territories could have scarcely numbered less than two hundred thousand, nearly all of whom were Catholics. By a strange coincidence the sons of the Puritans, who claimed the land and the fulness thereof as theirs, were brought into the same fold and under the same jurisdiction simultaneously with the native Mexican, whose ancestors were Catholics before the keel of the _Mayflower_ was laid.

German immigration, also, had assumed large proportions. From 1840 to 1850 the arrivals were 440,000, of whom it may be safely said one-fourth, or 110,000, were Catholics. This stalwart element sought what was then considered the far West-Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa, and the Territories—where to-day we find them and their descendants among the most devoted children of the church.

But all these influences combined did not equal in effect that produced by the tremendous exodus of the Irish people—a spontaneous movement of population unexampled in modern times. Though immigration from Ireland had steadily increased from the beginning of the century, it was only during the latter half of the decade of 1840-50 that it assumed its phenomenal proportions. Notwithstanding its political servitude, that remarkable island in 1845 presented the spectacle of a population as happy, moral, and law-abiding as any in Christendom. Her people had increased from year to year in a ratio unknown to less virtuous and more pampered lands. The voice of her great leader could at any time call together hundreds of thousands of her enthusiastic sons to listen to the story of their wrongs or to descant on the near approach of legislative independence, and dismiss them to their homes with the promptitude of a general and the authority of a parent. Father Mathew, of blessed memory, had exorcised the demon of intemperance, and counted his followers by millions. Agrarian crime and faction fights, those twin children of misgovernment, were almost unknown, and the soil, as if in unison with the general spirit of peace and harmony, never put forth such an abundance of agricultural wealth. In one night, it may be said, a blight came over all those fond hopes and bright anticipations. The food upon which three-fourths of the people mainly subsisted was destroyed, and Famine, gaunt and lean, suddenly usurped the place of generous abundance.

The destruction of the potato crop of Ireland in 1846-7-8 was undoubtedly the act of an inscrutable Providence; the misery, suffering, and wholesale sacrifice of human life which followed were the work of man. At the worst times of the famine there was always more than enough cattle and grain in the country to feed the entire population. Under a wise or just government a sufficiency of these would have been retained to supply the primary wants of the people; as it was, they were exported and sold in foreign markets to satisfy that most insensate and insatiable of all human beings, the Irish landlord.

Appalled by the suddenness and extent of the calamity, the peasantry at first stood mute, and before assistance could reach them many hundreds had actually lain down and died of starvation. Then, when public and private charity was exhausted; when pestilence was superadded to want, and all earthly succor seemed to have failed; when nothing but death or the poorhouse threatened even the best of the middle class, the people, with, it would appear, one accord, resolved to give up home and kindred, rushed like a broken and routed army to the nearest sea-ports, and abandoned a country apparently doomed to destruction. Many crossed to England and Scotland, others fled even to the Antipodes, but the great mass looked to the United States as their haven of refuge. Thenceforth every day witnessed the arrival of crowded immigrant ships in our harbors, while the streets of our large cities were literally thronged with swarms of strange and emaciated figures. From 1840 to 1850 over one million Irish immigrants arrived in the United States, one-fourth of whom landed at New York during the last three years of that period.

Never were a people less prepared to encounter the difficulties and dangers which necessarily beset strangers coming into a strange land and among a community so different from themselves in manners, habits, and methods of living. Unlike the Germans and other Europeans, who had had leisure and means to organize emigration, the Irish of that memorable epoch acted without concert and without forethought. They had fled precipitately from worse than death, and brought with them little save the imperishable jewel of their faith. Fortunately, this proved to be for them even better than worldly store; it was their bond of unity and best solace in the hour of trial and disappointment which awaits most of those who come among us with exaggerated ideas of the wealth and resources of this country. Numbers of those helpless strangers paused upon the threshold of their new home, and helped materially to swell the already overcrowded population of the large towns and cities; but very many, the majority perhaps, sought the manufacturing villages of New England, the mineral regions of Pennsylvania, and the Western prairies.

Then began in earnest the labors of the resident priesthood, which, though reinforced by numbers of their brethren from abroad, were still hardly equal to the herculean task of providing for the spiritual wants of so vast a mass of people scattered in every direction. Some means, however, had to be found to reach and minister to those faithful though helpless outcasts; some roof under which the holy sacrifice of the Mass might be occasionally offered up and the essential sacraments of the church administered. The churches already built scarcely sufficed for the Catholics settled in the country, yet here was a new congregation arriving in every ship. In the large centres of population the difficulty was not so great; for with the increase of priests the number of Masses said in each church was multiplied, while the sick and the penitent seldom went unattended or unshriven. In the smaller towns and remote settlements the case was far different. Private houses, “shanties,” barns, ball-rooms, court-houses, lecture-halls, markets, and even sectarian meeting-houses were brought into requisition. Yet, with all these appliances, there were hundreds of small, isolated congregations who seldom were enabled to hear Mass oftener than once a month, and in many cases less often, one priest having to attend four or five such missions in rotation.

But the clergy had other and scarcely less sacred duties to perform. Such heterogeneous masses of humanity huddled together for weeks in the foul holds of rotten emigrant vessels, where was germinated the seeds of disease sown by famine and pestilence, could not but bring infection to our shores. From Gros Isle in the St. Lawrence, and along the Atlantic seaboard to New Orleans, the deadly ship-fever polluted the atmosphere, and hundreds who, flying from starvation, had braved the dangers of the ocean, found that they had endured those hardships only to die within sight of the promised land. One prelate and several heroic priests fell victims to the dire pestilence, but others were found equally zealous, not only to soothe the last moments of the dying with the consolations of religion, but to comfort and care for the helpless survivors.

At the beginning of the second half of the century we find the Catholic population of the country estimated at two and a quarter millions, the clergy at eighteen hundred, or one to every thirteen hundred of the laity, while the number of dioceses had increased to thirty-three.

Had immigration entirely ceased at that time, and the growth of the Catholic population been limited to its natural increase, the labors of the priesthood in ministering to the spiritual wants of so large and scattered a body would have more than taxed the energies of a less devoted class of men; while the pecuniary resources of the laity, always so generously expended in the building of churches and asylums, could have to a certain extent borne the unusual draft on their means which the exigencies of the times demanded. But it did not cease. On the contrary, it continued for many years with augmented volume. The causes which had impelled such vast multitudes to renounce home and country for ever were still active. From 1850 to 1860 the immigration from Europe was reported as follows:

From Germany, 950,000; ¼ Catholic, 237,000[159]
From France and other Catholic countries,
105,000; ¾ Catholic, 78,750
From Ireland, 1,088,000; 9/10 Catholic, 979,200
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Total in ten years, 1,294,950

Thus another million and a quarter were added to the church in America, making a grand total at the end of this decade of four and a half millions of souls under the charge of 2,235 priests, or one for every 2,000 persons. Thus we see that, though the priesthood had received an accession of 435 members in ten years, the labors of each individual had been almost doubled.

Incredible as these figures may seem, the next decade showed little diminution in amount. From 1860 to 1870 the Catholic immigration, calculating on the above basis, may be set down as follows:

From Germany, 268,000
“ France, etc., 51,000
“ Ireland, 841,000
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Total in ten years, 1,160,000

If to this reinforcement be added those who have come among us since 1870, we find that the past fifteen years have increased the Catholic census by about one and a half millions from abroad, and materially helped to bring it up to what, on the best authority, it is said to be in this year of grace, 1876—seven millions, or about one-sixth of the entire population.

Fortunately for the interests of religion, the increase in the number of priests kept pace with the wonderful augmentation of the laity. In 1785 there was one priest to every 1,000 laymen; in 1808, one to every 1,500; in 1830, one to every 1,900; in 1840, one to 2,000; 1850, one to 1,200; 1860, one to 2,000; and in 1875, one to every 1,300, or 5,074 priests of all ranks.