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THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW
A MONTHLY PUBLICATION FOR THE CLERGY Cum Approhaiione Superiorum
Vol. XLVII
** Ut Ecclesia aedificationem accipiat.""
I Cor. 14 : 5.
O/xofi^
hf.Brf.
PHILADELPHIA
Bmerican jecclesiastlcal -Review.
Q;be Dolpbin press
1912
6 1955
Copyright, 1913
american ^Ecclesiastical IRcview
Zbc Dolpbin pread
CQNTENTS-VOL^XLVIL
July!
Flavian : A Clerical Portrait '*^*
Father Prout ' J
R. F. O'Connor, Cork, Ireland.
Over the Desert to Convent St. Catharine. Practical Hints to
SiNAiTic Tourists
Leopold Senfelder, M.D., Vienna, Austria.
Father Carlton's Offerings. A Clerical Story a^*
L. E. Dobree. . ^
Something More About the Tiresome Sermon 53
The Rev. Francis P. Donnelly, S.J., Poughkeepsie, N. Y.
Reminiscences of Maynooth. III. A Student's Daily Day 63
The Rev. P. Sheridan, Dungloe, Ireland.
The Old Priest's Vespers— and Complin 60
A. Dease. » " *
Analecta :
Sacra Congregatio Consistorialis :
I. Erectionis Dioecesis Kearneyensis 76
II. Erectionis Dioecesis Corpus Christ! 77
III. Declarationis circa Dioecesis Fines Wa)me-Castrensis 77
Sacra Congregatio Concilii :
Litterae circa Dies Festos 77
Sacra Congregatio Rituum :
I. Urbis et Orbis (Continuaiur) : Mutationes in Breviario et Missali Romano faciendae ad normam Constitutionis Apo-
stoHcae " Divino Afflatu " 79
II. Circa Doxologiam v. Primae, et Prefationem Propriam in occurrentia Festorum B.M.V. ad instar simplicis redactorum. 97
III. Decretum de Festis Ritus Duplicis Maioris Octava conde- coratis 97
IV. Decretum de Novi Psalterii edendi Facultate ab Episcopis non concedenda 98
V. Monitum 99
Studies and Conferences :
Our Analecta — Roman Documents for the Month 100
Does the Virtue of Communion Last? (The Rev. F. M. de Zulueta,
SJ., Chesterfield, England) lOO
Quid Mihi et Tibi? Again.
1. The Rev. Thomas a K. Reilly, O.P., Immaculate Conception Col- lege, Washington, D. C 105
2. The Rev. Walter Drum, SJ., Woodstock College, Maryland .. 109 Our Catholic Soldiers in China {The Rev. P. Grobel, C.F., Tientsin,
N. China) "0
The De Profundis Bell "0
Our Midsummer Number ^^'
Criticisms and Notes:
Benson : The Friendship of Christ "J
Otten : The Reason Why "5
Bonvin : Cantemus Domino 'J|
Mathias: Organum comitans ad Proprium de Tempore i»»
Huby: Christus : Manuel d'Histoire des Religions "|
Roussel : Le Bouddhisme Primitif ; \""ii" '
Murat: L'Idee de Dieu dans les Sciences contemporaines : Les Mer- ^^^
veilles du Corps Humain ^^^
Huizinga : Authority \ ^^^
Literary Chat J27
Books Received
iv Contents.
AUGUST.
FAGB
Pulpit Eloquence and the Supernatural 129
The Rev. John A. McClorey, S.J., Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin.
The Latest Proposal in Calendar Reform 141
The Rev. H. T. Henry, Litt.D., Overbrook Seminary, Pa.
Thomas a Kempis as a Hymn Writer iS5
W. H. Grattan Flood, Enniscorthy, Ireland.
Babylonian Legislation 4500 Years Ago 161
The Rev. W. D. Strappini, S.J., Bournemouth, England.
About Bells ^72
L. E. D. Studies in American Philosophy. III. The Modern Schools: Kant- ism IN America 185
The Rev. J. B. Ceulemans, Moline, Illinois. Analecta :
Acta Pn PP. X:
Ad R. D. Philippum Fletcher, M.A., Sodalitatis Moderatorem quae " of Our Lady of Ransom " nuncupatur, XXV Anniver-
sario adventante ex quo Sodalitas ipsa condita fuit 212
Sacra Congregatio Rituum:
I. Instructio super Privilegiis in Triduo vel Octiduo solemniter celebrando intra annum a Beatificatione vel Canonizatione per Rescriptum Sacrae ipsius Congregationis a Summo Pontifice
concedi solent 213
II. Societatis Missionariorum Sacratissimi Cordis Jesu : Dubia.. 215 III. Litterae Circulares ad Rev.mos locorum Ordinarios quoad
Propria Officiorum Dioecesana 216
S. Congregatio Indicis:
I. Decretum quo quaedam prohibentur Opera 218
II. Dubiura 218
S. Congregatio de Sacramentis:
Decretum circa Impedimentum ex adulterio cum attentatione Mat- rimonii proveniens 219
Curia Romana:
Recent Pontifical Appointments 220
Studies and Conferences :
Our Analecta — Roman Documents for the Month 221
TI EMOI KAI 201, rYNAI;— Without Comment {The Rev. J. J.
Loughran, Seward, Nebraska) 221
The Prescribed Reverence in Pontifical Masses and Vespers 224
Indulgence and Communion at Forty Hours' Devotion 225
Where is the Diocese of Kempen ? 226
The Question of Mitigating the Eucharistic Fast 226
An Appeal for an Expression of Sentiment and Action {The Rev. A.
Van Sever, Route 2, Grand Rapids, Wisconsin) 228
Ecclesiastical Library Table :
Some Recent Apologetic Works 229
Two French Novels 231
An Introduction to the History of the Popes 232
" Manalive " 233
Criticisms and Notes:
Jorgensen-Sloane : St. Francis of Assisi 236
Walling : Socialism as It is 239
Boyle : What is Socialism ? 239
Benson : The Coward 241
Dawson : The Mirror of Oxford 249
Pustet : Breviarium Romanum continens Novum Psalterium 251
Thompson : Life and Times of the Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob. 252
Aertnys : Compendium Liturgiae Sacrae 252
Literary Chat 253 Books Received 255
Contents. SEPTEMBER.
Studies IN American Philosophy. IV. Modern Schools: Evolutionism '^S The Rev. J. B. Ceulemans, Moline, Illinois. vulutionism. 258
Ecclesiastical Dress and Vestments o
John R. Fryar, Canterbury, England. ^^
The Temple of Jahu in Syene and Pentateuchal Criticism 2qt
The Rev. Hugh Pope, O.P., Collegio Angelico, Rome, Italy.
The Motu Proprio " Quanta vis Diligentia "
The Very Rev. H. A. Ayrinhac, S.S., D.D., LL.D:,' St Patrick''s* Semi- nary, Menlo Park, California.
Reminiscences of Maynooth. IV. « Vacat ad deambulationem " ^16 The Rev. P. Sheridan, Dungloe, Ireland. • • • • jio
Analecta :
Acta Pii PP. X:
Epistola ad R. P. D. lacobum Duhig, Episcopum Rockhampton- ensem, de quinquagenariis illius ecclesiae sacris solemnibus 329 S. Congregatio S. Officii :
I. Decretum de Dispensationibus super Impedimento Dispari- tatis Cultus absque debitis Cautionibus nnnquam concedendis. 330 II. Decretum de Dispensatione super Impedimento Disparitatis
Cultus absque debitis Cautionibus impertita 331
III. Decretum de Parochi Adsistentia Matrimoniis Mixtis 331
S. Congregatio Indicis :
Decreto S. Congregationis diei 6 maii proximo elapsi laudabiliter
se subiecit E. Th. de Cauzons 332
S. Congregatio Rituum :
I. Decretum praefixum Volumini VI, seu Appendici I operis cui titulus : " Decreta Authentica Congregationis Sacrorum Rituum ex actis eiusdem coUecta eiusque auctoritate pro-
mulgata " 333
II. Decretum seu Declarationes circa novas Rubricas 333
III. De Dispositione Festorum juxta Novas Rubricas 334
Commissi© Pontificia de Re Biblica:
I. De Auctore, de Tempore Compositionis et de Historica Veri- tate Evangeliorum secundum Marcum et secundum Lucam.. 336 II. De Quaesitione Synoptica sive de mutuis Relationibus inter
tria priora Evangelia 339
Studies and Conferences:
Our Analecta — Roman Documents for the Month 34'
De Vasectomia {The Very Rev. A. De Smet, S.T.L., Bruges, Belgium). 341
Clerics before the Civil Tribunal 357
The " Oratio " after the Litany of Loreto 359
The " Caeremoniale Episcoporum " and American Custom ^ 360
Private Exposition of Blessed Sacrament not permitted for Priest's
Personal Devotion • 3^2
Conclusion of the Prayer after distributing Communion outside Mass. 363 Dispensation in Mixed Marriage without the required " Cautiones ". 364 Advertisements in The Ecclesiastical Review 365
Criticisms and Notes:
Noll : For our non-Catholic Friends 3oo
Monin : De Curia Romana 3o7
Dubray : Introductory Philosophy 3^9
Perry : Present Philosophical Tendencies 3^
Coffey : The Science of Logic 309
Rosmini Serbati : Theodicy— Essays on Divine Providence 373
Stoeckl : Handbook of the History of Philosophy . .' 374
Hyde : The Five Great Philosophies of Life 374
vi Contents.
OCTOBEE.
PAGE
The Sixteenth Centenary of Constantine's Proclamation of Relig- ious Liberty — 313-1913 3^5
The Rev. William T. Kane, S.J., St. Louis University, Missouri. The Course of Studies and Discipline in Theological Seminaries . . 395
Roman Seminary Life 403
The Rev. Thomas F. Coakley, D.D., Pittsburgh, Penna.
St. Vincent de Paul and the Foundation of Seminaries 424
The Very Rev. Patrick McHale, CM., Philadelphia.
The Imagination in Saint Francis De Sales 434
The Rev. J. D. Folghera, O.P., Hawkesyard Priory, England. Analecta :
Acta Pii PP. X :
L Litterae Encyclicae ad Archiepiscopos Americae Latinae de
misera Indorum conditione sublevanda 447
II. Motu Proprio de Catholicorum in exteras regiones Emigra-
tione 451
S. Congregatio Rituum :
I. De Conclusione Matutini et Inchoatione Laudum pro recita- tione privata in Triduo Mortis Christi et in Officiis Defunct-
orum 453
II. Decretum circa Modulandas Monosyllabas vel Hebraicas
Voces in Lectionibus, Versiculis et Psalmis 454
S. Congregatio Consistorialis :
I. Litterae Circulares de Seminariis Italiae ad Reverendissi-
mos Ordinaries 455
II. Decretum de quibusdam Rei Biblicae Commentariis in Sacra
Seminaria non admittendis 463
III. De Decreto " Maxima Cura " 464
S. Congregatio Officii (Sectio de Indulgentiis) :
Decretum de Indulgentiis Pio Viae Crucis exercitio adnexis .... 465 S. Congregatio de Propaganda Fide pro Negotiis Ritus Orientalis : I. Epistolae Circulares ad locorum Ordinaries Latini Ritus, de non permittendis Orientalibus eleemosynarum emendlcation-
ibus absque venia eiusdem S. Congregationis 466
II. Litterae Circulares ad Superiores Generales Institutorum Re- ligiosorum Latini Ritus, de modo tenendo antequam Orien-
tales in eorum Sodalitates admittantur 468
Studies and Conferences :
Our Analecta — Roman Documents for the Month 470
Sixteenth Centenary of the Proclamation of Christian Liberty (313-
1913) 472
The New Decree on Mixed Marriages {The Rev. M. Martin, SJ., Si.
Louis University, St. Louis, Mo.) 477
A Plea for our Ageing Catholic Clergy (Senex) 488
The Official Catholic Directory for 1913 491
Defending the Policy of the Popes 492
Using a Crutch at Mass 494
Helping the Country School 494
Conclusion of the Prayer and the Form of Blessing after Distributing
Holy Communion (A Correction) 495
Criticisms and Notes :
Coffey : The Science of Logic 496
Colvin : The Learning Process 496
O'Connor : His Grey Eminence 501
Meyenberg — Brossart : Homiletic and Catechetic Studies 502
Koo : The Status of Aliens in China 504
: The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vols. XIII and XIV 505
Wuest : Collectio Rerum Liturgicarum 507
Contents. yii
NOVEMBER.
PAGE
The Traditional Idea of Sacerdotal Vocation cj.
The Rev. Edmund J. Wirth, D.D., St. Bernard's Seminary, Rochester, New York. The Biblical Commission and the Synoptic Gospels c27
The Very Rev. A. J. Maas, S.J., New York City.
The Cure of Intemperance c-j^
Austin O'Malley, M.D., Philadelphia. "^^
How Bishop Ketteler Corrected the Scandal Given by One of His
Priests ega
Jam Toto Subitus Vesper Eat Polo [[[ 557
The Rev. H. T. Henry, Litt.D., Overbrook Seminary, Penna.
The Story of St. Cecilia and its Value 564
Dom S. A. Parker, O.S.B., Oxford, England. Analecta :
Acta Pii PP. X:
Litterae Apostolicae : Committitur Episcopo Ritus Rutheni Ad- sistentia Spiritualis Ruthenorum in Canadensi Regione com- morantium 583
S. CONGREGATIO DE ReLIGIOSIS :
Decretum de Postulatu in Monasteriis Votorum Solemnium .... 585
S. CONGREGATIO S. OFFICII :
I. Decreto S. Congregationis laudabiliter se subiecit Aloisius
Izsof 586
II. Decretum quo prohibentur Liber et Inscriptio quaedam 586
Studies and Conferences :
Our Analecta — Roman Documents for the Month 588
A League for Priests 589
The Value of Method in Teaching Children to hear Mass and receive
the Sacraments (The Rev. John L. Bedford, Brooklyn, New York). 591
Pere Lagrange, O.P., and the Sacred Congregation 597
The Pastoral Rights of a Convent Chaplain 600
The Maltese for "Quid Mihi et Tibi est, Mulier?" {The Rev. Walter
Drum, SJ., Woodstock College, Maryland) 601
Thomas a Kempis and the Brothers of the Common Life {The Rev.
Vincent Scully, C.R.L., St. Ives, Cornwall, England) 603
Mitigation of the Eucharistic Fast {The Rev. A. Van Sever, Grand
Rapids, Wisconsin) 604
Is Old Age Sufficient Reason for Breaking the Eucharistic Fast? 606
The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council and the Canadian Bill
against the " Ne Temere " 607
Professional Secrecy in Hospitals 610
Private Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament 6x3
Buhver's " Friar Joseph " in the Light of History 613
The Bride and Groom kneeling in the Sanctuary 614
The Old Indult of Requiem Masses and the New Rubrics 615
Images of the Sacred Heart on the Altar 016
The Assistant Priest at a First Mass oi7
La Prise du Bon Dieu °^7
Criticisms and Notes : , ^
Amelli : Collectanea Biblica Latina • •• • • ••••'•• °^'
Henry: Eucharistica : Verse and Prose in Honor of the Hidden God. MO
Straub: De Ecclesia Christi ^^4
Ladd : The Teacher's Practical Philosophy 020
Bardenhewer: Geschichte der Altkirchenlichen Literatur o2»
Burton— Meyers : The New Psalter and Its Use o30
Meehan: A Practical Guide to the Divine Office • • ' VV ' "i'lv* *m ' ' Hetherington : Notes on the New Rubrics and the Use of the Wcw
Psalter •••.•••. S!
Heiner— Wynen : De Processu Criminali Ecclesiastico 031
Pierard : Cours Pratique de Psalmodie Vaticane '>3
viii Contents.
DECEMBER.
PAGE
The Growth of Christian Art in Germany (With Illustrations) 641
George Metlake, Cologne, Germany. The Small Host " Extra Corporale "—A Bit of Casuistry 660
The Rev. Patrick Cummins, O.S.B., Conception Abbey, Missouri. Sermons— Taste and Tolerance 674
The Right Rev. Mgr. F. D. Bickerstaffe Drevi^, Salisbury, England. Cardinal Newman as a Hymn- Writer and Hymn-Composer 685
W. H. Grattan Flood, Enniscorthy, Ireland. The Cure of Intemperance. II. The Alcoholic Insanities 691
Austin O'Malley, M.D., Philadelphia, Pa. Reactions and By-Products of the Decree on Frequent Communion.. 702
The Rev. Joseph H. McMahon, Ph.D., New York, N. Y. Analecta :
Acta Pii PP. X :
Constitutio Apostolica de Sanctissima Eucharistia promiscuo ritu sumenda 7o8
S. CONGREGATIO S. OFFICII (SECTIO DE INDULGENTIIS) :
I. Conceditur Indulgentia Plenaria in honorem Beatae Mariae
. Virginis Immaculatae 7^6
II. Decretum circa Indulgentias Festis Beatorum adnexas 717
S. Congregatio de Religiosis:
I. Quoad Communionem Infirmarum in Monasteriis clausurae
papalis 718
II. Dubium quoad Indulta Abstinentiae et leiunii relate ad Re-
ligiosos 719
III. Dubium quoad Religiosos Votorum Solemnium degentes ad
tempus extra claustra 720
Studies and Conferences :
Our Analecta — Roman Documents for the Month 722
Metrical Translation of Ps. I, VII, XVIII, XXII (£. C. Donnelly). 723 Present Status of Calendar Reform {The Rev. H. T. Henry, Litt.D.). 728
The Proper Abbreviation of the Word " Monsignor " 734
Daily Communion and Priests' Retreats {The Rev. L, F.Schlathoelter). 734
Efficiency of Modem Seminary Education (Connatus) 735
The Essential Presence of the Matter for Consecration 736
Choice of a Diocesan Patron 73^
The Confiteor in the Case of the " Benedictio Apostolica " after Ex- treme Unction 737
Anointing of the Feet 738
Ecclesiastical Library Table :
Sacred Scripture: i. The Sixto-Clementine Vulgate; 2. Archeology; 3. Interpretation; 4. Text (The Rev. Walter Drum, S.J., Wood- stock College, Maryland) 739
Criticisms and Notes:
O. P. : The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas 749
: The Catholic Faith 749
Mullan : Sodality of Our Lady Studied in the Documents 750
Lester : Story of the Sodality of Our Lady 750
Husslein : The Church and Social Problems 752
Toke : The Housing Problem 752
Gerrard : The Church and Eugenics 752
Buchberger : Kirchliches Handlexikon 755
Bregy : The Poet's Chantry 756
De Smet : Betrothment and Marriage 757
Pohle-Preuss : God : The Author of Nature and the Supernatural 758
Augier : Apologie du Catholicisme par les Incredules 758
Gatterer : Annus Liturgicus 759
Janvier : Exposition de la Morale Catholique Speciale 760
Coube : Gloires et Bienfaits de I'Eucharistie 760
Page : Practical Guide for Servers at Low Mass and Benediction 761
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THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW
Fifth Series.— Vol. VII.— (XLVII).— July, 1912.— No. i
FLAVIAN : A OLEEIOAL PORTEAIT.
AT any given period of Flavian's too brief career, the first thing to be said of him was that he was young, and looked younger. His foes might always have added with spite, and his friends with proud affection, that he could never be much older. The calendar, at the last, almost com- promised him, but nobody minded the calendar; and a pre- monitory hint of baldness got no credit at all as against that clear level glance, that virginal gayety, that unblunted cour- age. His most winning and valuable asset was a sort of aureole. Painters have always reported to us that some bodies shine; modern science says they are right. Many have fire in them, as we say ; and some shed it, as did this one. None who watched him could fail, ever and anon, to catch him look- ing as transparent as Cowley's lilies,
Clad but with the lawn of almost naked light.
Yet he was no angel, but " a man's man ", in all.
His policy was not what is commonly defined as asceticism. He held that " holiness is not the emptying, but the filling of life ". However, the positive trend of Flavian's boyish per- sonality never for an instant obscured its dominant note, which was a true priestly dash of other-worldliness, or Uranian wild- ness. He somehow bore silent witness to himself as one bred in the cloister, and fresh (as fresh in any imagined to-morrow as at the moment) from the novitiate. If an observer were quick at inferences, he saw at once that Flavian's had been HO roundabout spiritual journey; that he had always been
2 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
God's by an irresistible and visible religious vocation. There is no assurance quite so fragrant as this. But his morning consecration had not left him one whit less individual, and it had certainly deepened, as nothing else couM have done so fully, his singular tenderness. Those who appreciated winter landscape, and knew the rare beauty of the desert, were glad of certain austere moods in him, moods of silence and peace, lying just beyond the borderlands of every bustling day. These gave him reality. There was even some superior Puri- tanism in him, of a dormant kind, though for all practical purposes he rode with King Charles. Absolute fearlessness; phosphoric energy, nay, wastefulness, physical and mental ; a certain patrician quickness of brain, foot, lip and eye; a huge capacity for painstaking, and for foil to that, instinctive im- patience with bores and shirks, with sophisms and delays, with another's emotions or his own; a way of dealing with obstacles, when necessary, as horned lightning deals with the cloud, and a general uppermost air of inspiration and "unpre- meditated art" ; — these went far to commend him to persons who like living organisms to seem alive.
Flavian's qualities were few, and happily adjusted. He was notably fresh and robust, simple and wholesome, with no least touch of the fantastic. He had " sweetness which cannot be weak, and force which will not be rough ". His stern- ness was pure Hebraic, of the best adamant, and exercised only against himself. What a selfish consideration might be, he never could have had the slightest occasion to discover at first hand. Full of engaging humility, he boggled not at all at displaying repentances and afterthoughts. In fact, his course through life was marked, as Hop-o'-my-thumb's by crumbs, by self-rectifications and little public penances, enough to make the most captious love him. But he was coy in the extreme of explanations. To match his flint and iron, he had a golden laughter, candid and delightful; and to his dying day, he kept up a rocket-like fun, with a distinct streak in it of adventure and soaring mischief, such as would have done credit to the most cherubic of choir-boys. His feeling, like his fun, was exquisite, and went to the quick. The one was defended, and the other fed, by a choice temperamental irony, perhaps Flavian's most essential characteristic.
FLAVIAN: A CLERICAL PORTRAIT. -
He had the sort of truthfulness which does not always go with a strong sense of humor: truthfulness not only concrete and open, but unrelenting, indescribably pervasive. In all he thought, said, or implied; did, or left undone; in his very mien, voice and handwriting, was truth up to the hilt. You were ever detecting in him a most blessed inability not only for taking, but even for crediting, the petty or provincial view of things. He was supremely tolerant, and could allow for almost any attitude of mind, except the born minimizer's. If he had a hobby, it was for largeness : for height, horizons, and freedom of survey. Detail worried him. He always con- founded attention to detail with fuss. It affected him like midges along a river-bank in September. Clearly, his part was — and well he knew it — that of a tireless orderly in the field, and not that of a strategic commander-in-chief in a tent, with charts spread before him, and pipes and conversation thrown in. Meanwhile, he lived out his passion for " Thor- ough ". A hater of sham, and a hero of work, he liked to see mastery and manfulness, and could face their results un- shaken. He endorsed de Tocqueville's arraignment of a society ailing with " Taffaiblissement moral . . . J'aime les passions quand elles sont bonnes, et je ne suis meme pas bien sur de les detester quand elles sont mauvaises. . . . Ce qu'on rencontre le moins de nos jours, ce sont des passions, vraies et solides passions qui enchainent et conduisent la vie. Nous ne savons plus ni vouloir, ni aimer, ni hair." It is remembered (how disedifying!) that Flavian thought better of a burglar for burgling well.
He dearly loved letters and art, and was an illuminating critic of both. Musically, he was defective. It is much to be feared that, with Elia, he would not stake a farthing candle on Pergolesi, Gliick, or Handel, and that the devil with foot so cloven, for aught he cared might take Beethoven! More than letters or art, or anything else mundane, he loved open- air exercise, Socratic parley with country-folk, and " the sleep that is among the lonely hills ". All the fashionable world, all babies, and all dogs, he welcomed without pretence of pan- paternalism, but with a charming semi-benign astonishment. Clerical unction was an ornament of which he knew nothing. He was in no degree a professional philanthropist, though for
4 TffE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW,
any soul whatever which needed him, he carried his life in his hand.
He nursed one pet rage. It was a rage against the smug conscious goodness of good citizens. Any complacent stroking of the fur which might be called your own (i. e., whether personal or tribal), was sure to remind Flavian how the har- lots and the publicans shall go into the Kingdom of Heaven before you! In the pulpit, where he was wondered at and hugely admired, he expounded little, but provided echoes and flights of inspiration, crowding lovely vistas into the crevices of Saxon speech, and was unaffected there as elsewhere, dis- playing no shred of artifice or histrionics. Gesture, with him, was improvised, telling, frankly rectangular. Even his gentlest tones had a vibrancy all but unique. His concep- tions of religion were splendidly masculine and objective, and his ideals sufficiently exasperating, as it would appear, to a temporizing and backsliding generation. He thought moping a damaging heresy, and a bad odor. Ill would it have be- come an officer enlisted, and busy for life, in the Light Ar- tillery of the Catholic Church.
Both shy and bold, he never could be a reciprocal talker. Words, to him, were symbols, not things. He had his own science of shorthand expression, and could not be tied down long enough to thresh out or expatiate. Controversy and dis- cussion were for others; these required a traveling around, and his was only a traveling up. It was his fashion to go flashing in colors across the metaphysical dark, like a Roman candle, spurting twice, thrice, and no more. One of his finest and most racial, most recognizably English traits, was that all which he said in the way of kindly human inter- course was heightened in value by all which he did not say. When he used the superlative, as he sometimes did, it could be perceived that it was of malice prepense and propter homines. For his natural style was built on under-statement and homespun epigram: everything short, and everything loaded. It was a genius intensely elliptical. As Mr. Lowell said so clairvoyantly of Keats : " He knew that what he had to do must be done quickly." Flavian communicated with his kind as if by a line of little super-intelligent aeolian harps hung in the roadside trees, rather than by afternoon calls and
FLAVIAN: A CLERICAL PORTRAIT, t
the parcels post. In any spiritually deforested district, he was bound to fall dumb indeed. Or (to recur to military metaphors, such as he was constantly provoking) one might state that Flavian preferred to conduct all his operations by signal code, and out-of-doors. If you were serving in his battalion, you got signals, and gave them. If you were not, why, you did not ! In the course of all the ages, could there possibly be a simpler and more satisfactory arrangement than that? As is the wont of poets and mystics, he went his way alone. None the less was he almost pathetically dependent for free play on the sympathy and furtherance of the few. He was a prince of courtesy. Gratitude, in him, could be elo- quent; officially, it was so. He could likewise, if you were worth it, set a fairy crown upon a personal gift by taking it lightly, imaginatively, without the oration and the brass band. Despite its too small stock of nervous strength, his nature had an inherent sunniness ; yet, he was as far as possible from the popular ideal of the ** genial " man. Profoundly social, and an incomparable friend, he was always silently proffering cor- roboration, faith, chivalry, most lavishly and loyally from the heart. But to have looked for a repetitive nod and grin as he passed upon the street was misguided. One does well, after all, to take the saints as they are : take them so, or leave them. A certain truancy is the condition of some earthly lives, and must be respected. "Whether in the body, I know not; or whether out of the body, I know not; God knoweth.*'
It is a thankless task, then or now, to attempt to analyze Flavian. He defeated analysis because he was essentially fugitive, and not confined to one element. You could really grasp not much more of him than what had just ceased to be he:
A moulted feather, an eagle's feather.
It is inartistic to wish to run to earth the heart of any fellow-creature's mystery, even were one able to do so. Be- sides, the most sacred and gracious guesses refuse to be put on paper. In Flavian's case, if he went, for the most part, uncomprehended and scot-free, it was because his habit was so supernatural. He lived in the spirit; he had an almost un- canny knowledge of the things of the spirit. Like a lesser
5 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
Philip Neri in this, he could read and construe the never- written. He had the art to interpret secret day-dreams, and to forestall by a word, disarm by a look, or supplement by a sign, another's thought. He was anything but diplomatic; he stood clear of fear or favor; he never dealt for one moment in wiles, subterfuges, and complexities; fancy at her drunken- est could not picture Flavian in an intrigue ! and therefore all this divination was sheer psychic power, and as miraculous in its way as the three R's acquired by St. Catherine of Siena. Certainly, it did not spring from chronic ordinary knowl- edge— a man of the world's knowledge — of human nature and motive, for in that he was eminently deficient. The phe- nomenon proved fairly startling, time after time, to those who heed such things. But he himself was quite unconscious of it. He was unconscious, too, of the diffidence which it bred in some men and women. They did not account it to him for brotherliness. That shining presence seemed to know so much of them that they feared to know more of him. Even so might the unwise treat the Recording Angel.
One thing, however, we all knew, a very beautiful thing to know of any adult: that he was always growing. As has been said, he was young; as if to prove that, he kept on the move. Development and progress are the law of youth, how- ever long it lasts. " My youth is a fault, my Lord," said Jeremy Taylor in his charming gentleness, " which will mend every day." (The sentiment is more familiar yet to us, from the mouth of Pitt.) Those who were impatient with Flavian had no anticipative sense ; for to undo animadversions, he had only to live. His growth had all the dimensions ; it was not a mere length of line. That intense sensitiveness was meant to be rolled wide, beaten out, by process after process, like gold- leaf. You could never be quite as sorry as you would like to be, when Flavian had trouble of any sort to bear, because martyrdom was the very thing, and the only thing, to bring out his inner beauty. Of course he was considered, by the slave of convention, a budding anarchist. To the son of lux- ury, he was a ruthless stoic. To the shortsightedly practical, he was an enthusiast, an agitator, a mere visionary. Miscon- ception saddened him, indeed; but it never soured him, or, still less, deflected him. No misjudgment was ever committed
FLAVIAN: A CLERICAL PORTRAIT. j
by any trained psychologist, or by the poor, whose instinct for genuine sympathy is the most expert instinct in the world. These never found him abrupt, baffling, fugacious. Yet it was natural, nay, inevitable, to make so grave a critical error in relation to Flavian, while he had, as he had for long, a touch of incompletion, and remained partly inoperative.
Anything elliptical, whether literary or sociological, is bound to be set down as obscure and freakish : which it need not be, and generally is not. The average mind is extremely loath not only to establish, but to perceive connexions. Many of us are acquainted with a perte de Rhone: with some stream which fills its channel, then drops suddenly under- ground, and, miles seaward, reappears on the surface, rush- ing over sands and between rocky banks; a most fascinating traveler to track and question, and none the less so because it has not been continuously on exhibition. It will be called three streams by the uninitiated. To " look before and after ", to look on the level and under, is the only working rule with it, and with persons like Flavian. There is nothing like knowing your full context. Otherwise, confusion and mis- reckoning untold, and lunacy settling down on your whole topography. The covenanted need of his rich nature was a freer play of its own powers. They asked not indeed for ac- cretion, but for expression, for ductility, suppleness, wider responsiveness, and intimate and intricate applications. Like all broad, all wholly disinterested characters, Flavian came across those whom he puzzled or infuriated. They could neither fit him into their reckonings, nor even agree as to his genus. To one, he was, let us say, seven pounds of sand ; and to another, seven o'clock! He was like some delicate sound racer, who, for all his sagacity and affectionateness, is a little hard in the mouth. Temperaments of this sort, strongly ab- stract and abstinent, are hidden springs; those who know what change, sorrow, will, philosophy, and the grace of God can do with such, await the sure gushing-forth of the clear stream. Meanwhile, occur certain damna rerum, more notice- able in a pastoral vocation than elsewhere. All the efficiency, pluck, control, gusto, and aspiration which can be mutely packed into the heart of a man go for little until they under- stand and speak the dialect of city streets, where efficiency,
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pluck, control, gusto, and aspiration also exist, turned to evil uses. And so it was a bracing spectacle of late to see our Flavian humanizing as fast as ever he knew how. Keeping all his worth intact, he was ceasing to be a non-conductor, and getting into touch with all that lay about him in the dim world of men. He was learning victoriously the whole art of dedicated fatherliness, and of " suffering fools gladly ", and of giving forth without stint the flowing waters of considera- tion and compassion which had sometimes seemed rockbound within him. He was growing up on the heroic scale, and quite as he had always lived, resolutely, brilliantly, and with joy.
Flavian's most touching circumstance was that he might have been, and happily was not, a stray long-legged genius, writing idiosyncratic verses in ivied bowers. In no ordinary degree, his priesthood was his triumph; it was a wonderful piece of good fortune for him, humanly speaking, that he had chosen the sanctuary. As became the manliest of men, he had a horror of rust. It was granted to him to be broken while still clean and bright. They must have seen to it, above, that he was offered not halo and harp (awkward properties for him!) but stout black armor and a new sword. In the camp of his final happiness, soldierly comrades, familiar to our oldest legendry, must have claimed him : Michael, surely ; and Gideon; and the sacred Maccabees; Sebastian; George and Alban, long-loved in one isle; Martin too, not mitred now, but re-helmeted; Joan the Maid, with her white ori- flamme; and his own smiling sire, the great spirit wounded at Pampeluna. All these, ranged like stars about the King of Martyrs and Lord of Hosts, were prompt, we know, to answer that humble and cheerful countersign of Alleluia! shouted, last April, from the scaled battlements of eternity.
PATHER PROUT.
THERE are few better known or more kindly remembered names in the history of the Anglo- Irish literature of the nineteenth century than that of ** Father Prout ", though it was only a pseudonym. Just as Gerald Griffin's Collegians — that unsurpassed and unsurpassable of Irish novels — has im-
FATHER PROUT.
mortalized Garryowen, so the Reliques of Father Prout, by the Rev. Francis Sylvester Mahony, has made famous for- ever Watergrasshill, the " barren upland " near Cork which acquired its name through its watercresses, but is still more widely known on account of the fictitious fame with which the sportive fancy of the witty priest has environed the memory of its " lone incumbent ". The real Father Andrew Prout, P.P., " in wit a man, in simplicity a child ", to whom Frank Mahony ascribed the authorship of his own learned lucubra- tions, was not at all a scholarly divine, but a good, kindly, unpretentious country priest. The cream of the joke which made the readers of Fraser's Magazine laugh so heartily in the thirties of the last century, was in this comical associa- tion of rural simplicity with erudition and wide knowledge of the world and of books. It made them relish the fun of crediting the parish priest of Watergrasshill with engrafting on English literature the choicest productions of Gallic cul- ture; with a familiarity only to be found among the lettered, with the polished poetry of Horace and the modern songs of Italy; with an elaborate defence of the Jesuits at a time when the purchased pens of Sue and other hired libelers of the Order were busily employed in aspersing the sons of Loyola; and with a clever and amusing polyglot version of Millikin's '* Groves of Blarney " — which he describes as a rare combin- ation of the Teian lyre and the Tipperary bagpipe, of the Ionian dialect blending harmoniously with the Cork brogue; an Irish potato seasoned with Attic salt, the humors of Donny- brook wed to the glories of Marathon.
Very scanty materials are accessible for a complete biog- raphy of Father Mahony, though his memoirs, had he kept a diary and written them therefrom at length, would be a very interesting contribution to the literary history of the first half of the nineteenth century. He has given us some glimpses of himself and his erratic career in the Prout Papers; but as that entertaining book is so much of an olla podrida, is tinged with so much imaginative coloring, is so much more a product of fancy than a record of facts, that which seems to be auto- biographical therein has to be taken cum grano salts. A member of a well-known Cork family, to whose successful enterprise Ireland is indebted for one of its most prosperous
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lO
manufacturing industries— the Blarney Woolen Mills — he was born 31 December (feast of St. Sylvester), 1804, in Blackpool, the northern suburb of the city once noted for its tanneries and distilleries, described by a local poet, Thomas Condon, as "tanned-brown-faced Blackpool". The house in which he was born is not far from where another distinguished Corkman, James Barry, the friend of Dr. Johnson and protege of Edmund Burke, first saw the light. If not within sight, it is certainly within hearing of those bells of Shandon
Whose sounds so wild would In the days of childhood, Fling round his cradle Their magic spells.
On 23 February, 181 5, he entered the Jesuit College of Clon- gowes Wood, near the village of Clare, County Kildare, of which he says, " Even the sacred ' Groves of Blarney ' do not so well deserve the honors of a pilgrimage as this haunt of classic leisure and studious retirement." There he studied for four years — ^years which left a lasting and indelible im- pression upon his mind; for he never forgot what he intellec- tually owed to his Jesuit teachers. The Jesuits not only ex- cel as teachers or educationists, but seem to have a special aptitude for impressing themselves and their particular views upon the plastic minds of their pupils, who long retain the impress of the mould in which their minds have been formed.
The Society was his ecclesiastical first love, and, yielding to the attraction, he returned to Clongowes in 1825 as a Jesuit novice. The attraction of the religious life, however, was su- perficial and transient. After trying his " vocation " in Ire- land and France, his Jesuit superiors, who understood him better than he understood himself, decided against his suit- ability to the clerical state, a decision which subsequent events unfortunately proved correct. Nevertheless he persisted in returning to Acheul and afterward to Rome for further trial. After attending the Jesuit College at Freiburg for a time and after a few months' hesitation as to the course he ought in prudence to pursue, he proceeded once more to Rome. At this time he continued with exemplary regularity to attend theological lectures for two years. The Jesuits still held to their opinion ; but, as Father Mahony frankly acknowledged to
FATHER PROUT. U
Monsignor Rogerson (who later had the privilege and happi- ness of reconciling him to the Church and administering to him the last Sacraments), he "was determined to enter the Church ", that is, the ministry, " in spite of Jesuit opinion ". Dimissory letters to that end were obtained from the Most Rev. Dr. Murphy, Bishop of Cork, and he was ordained at Lucca in 1832.
Mr. Charles Kent, who has compiled a biography of him, rejects as erroneous the statement that he served on the mis- sion in Cork City. But the late Mr. John Windele, the well known Irish antiquary, who must have known him well, says in his Historical and Descriptive Notices of Cork (1849) that he officiated there " for many years and subsequently in London ", and that he had then (at the date of writing) re- <:eived a clerical appointment in Malta " within the reach of scenes congenial to his tastes, which are eminently classical ". Mr. Kent avers " as a simple matter of fact " that " he never returned to Cork after the date of his ordination ". But this is not correct ; he did return and officiate for a time as chaplain in his native city. A story is told of his departure from Cork, of which it may be said, " si non e vero, e bene trovato ". It is related that before the Church of St. Patrick was built, but whilst it was in contemplation, he located what he thought would be a suitable site, and, without any authorization from the Bishop, purchased it from the owner, a Quaker, with that object in view. Dr. Murphy was not a prelate who would tolerate any irregular proceeding or allow anyone to forestall his decision or take the reins out of his hands. He declined to ratify it. When the purchaser went to announce this to the Quaker, the latter replied: 'That is thy affair, friend Mahony ; thou hast bought it and thou must stand by thy bargain." Mahony was in a quandary, but his ready wit got him out of it. The Quaker had a terrace of houses overlooking the site. Mahony had a board put up with the announcement, " This site to be let for a cemetery''. The Quaker, fearing that he would lose his tenants by such a transformation of the plot of ground, soon released Father Mahony from his pre- mature purchase.
When in London he more than once preached in the old embassy chapel in Spanish Place. The father of the present
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writer, who was intimate with him, met him about this time in London, when the Padre gave him to understand that he was then officiating at St. Patrick's, Soho. He is also said to have assisted in his parochial work the well-known Dr. Magee, facetiously dubbed by O'Connell " the Abbot of Westminster ". One at least of the reasons that led to his relinquishment of sacerdotal functions was that he soon realized that the Jesuits were right and that he was wrong. " Fools rush in where angels fear to tread." But though Mahony was no fool, he was, it must be admitted, rash and self-willed, as he frankly confessed. Still, he never lost his reverence for the priesthood per se^ however freely he may have spoken or written of men of his cloth. A scoffer at Christianity or a depreciator of Catholicism he abhorred, and he always re- sented any slight put upon him in his priestly character. His book affords evidence of his lingering leaning toward the Jesuits, notwithstanding their adverse judgment. Indeed, his very voluntary retirement from the sanctuary and abandon- ment of the clerical garb and clerical functions have been at- tributed, at least in part, to his innate reverence for the sacred office for which, too late, he realized that he had no vocation in the strict sense of the word. He loved to read his breviary,, which to the last remained his constant companion, and he as- sumed a semi-ecclesiastic costume. He never lost the faith and was never ecclesiastically censured. The Tablet, having once referred to him as ** a suspended priest ", was summarily challenged by him to prove its assertion in a court of law,. Mahony laying his damages at $10,000; with the result that an apology was instantly offered, and the charge uncondi- tionally withdrawn. Nothing has transpired which leaves any stain upon his moral character.
Dropping gradually out of association with ecclesiastics, he found congenial companions among the editors and contribu- tors to magazines and the leading newspapers — Thackeray, Dickens, his brilliant fellow-countryman and fellow citizen Maginn, and others of that school who used to foregather in Eraser's bookshop in Regent Street, then one of the resorts of London literati, and situate not far from the Chapel of the Bavarian Legation in Warwick Street, where he had officiated for a short time. He soon ranked among the best and bright-
FATHER PROUT. j^
est wits of the epoch and devoted himself wholly to a literary life. He became the decus et tutamen of Eraser's Magazine in which the Reliques — collected and published in book form in 1836, and of which an enlarged edition was issued in i860 — first appeared. Archbishop McHale, the distinguished Irish churchman — the " John of Tuam " whom Daniel O'Con- nell was wont to call '' the lion of the fold of Judah " — once rebuked a person whom he overheard reprehending Mahony. The Archbishop observed that, after all, the Irishman who wrote the Prout Papers was an honor to his country. Not much read nowadays, the book was the talk of the town at a time when the grandfathers of the present generation were young men. It contains a curious mixture of fun and frivol- ity, of sense and nonsense, of wit and wisdom, of literary culture and keen criticism — gems of humor and gems of scholarship scattered in sparkling profusion over pages seem- ingly written, as it were, on the spur of the moment. The writer's acquaintance with classic authors is rather pedanti- cally paraded, but this may be pardoned for the admirable rendering of some of Horace's neatly turned odes. He was an ideal translator. He is at his best in his free translations of the Songs of France^ particularly Beranger's, which are very spirited. The Italian phrase, ** traduttore traditore ", cannot be applied to him, nor can he be charged with what he calls the clumsy servility of adhering to the letter whilst allow- ing the spirit to evaporate. He never fails to interpret faithfully the spirit and sense of the original, which is some- times most felicitously conveyed; in fact he occasionally sur- passes the original. He is equally skillful in his renderings of the Songs of Italy] whether he is coining the pure gold of Dante's matchless verse into the current coin of English un- defiled by colloquial vulgarisms, or the limpid lines of Petrarch, Tolomei, Filicia, or other sweet songsters of the South.
The quaint conceit of the alleged plagiarisms of Moore, the originals of some of whose " Irish Melodies " he pretends to have discovered in French, Greek, Latin, or other authors, of course deceived no one, but served to show his wonderful versatility as a linguist. For this he makes amends to Moore by incidentally observing that the same melodies made Cath-
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oHc Emancipation palatable to the generous and thinking por- tion of the English people and won the cause silently, imper- ceptibly, and effectively.
Passing from gay to grave, he pays a debt of gratitude he owed to the educators of his youth, the Irish Jesuits, en- thusiastically extolling the large share which the intellectual and highly-disciplined followers of the soldier-saint of Pam- peluna had in the making of modern literature, and quoting a long array of distinguished names in support of his thesis. " There is not," he declares, " a more instructive and interest- ing subject of inquiry in the history of the human mind than the origin, progress, and workings of what are called monastic institutions. It is a matter on which I have bestowed not a little thought, and I may one day plunge into the depths thereof in a special dissertation." That day never came, and Mahony, to use his own words, suffered his wit and wisdom to evaporate " in magazine squibs and desultory explosions ". It will always be a matter of regret that he did not concentrate his fine talents and extensive erudition on some sustained work that would take a higher and more enduring place in literature than the Reliques.
Besides his writings for Fraser'Sy he contributed to Bentley's Magazine from 1837. The reprinted edition of The Bentley Ballads is prefaced by a biographical sketch of Father Mahony by his fellow countryman Mr. Sheehan, a London journalist. At the request of Charles Dickens, the first editor of the Daily NewSy he acted as Rome correspondent of that journal. At that time (1843) D^"- Grant, the saintly Bishop of Southwark, drew him in his own sweet way, as Mgr. Rogerson expresses it, once more within the sanctuary, when for the last time he stood vested before the altar. An affectionate mutual greet- ing took place many years subsequently between the prelate and the priest when they accidentally met in Paris. His let- ters to the Daily News were republished in book form under the title of Facts and Figures from Italy ^ by Dom Jeremy Savonarola, Benedictine Monk. Years afterward his Italian version of Millikin's " Groves of Blarney " was sung by Gari- baldian soldiers, awakening echoes in the groves on the shores of the Lake of Como. Journalism, during his later years, ab- sorbed all his time and attention. The last twelve or fifteen
FATHER PROUT, j-
years of his life were spent as Paris correspondent of the GlobCy a post he filled up to within a fortnight of his death.
He was a very traveled man and had roamed over Egypt, Greece, Hungary, and Asia Minor. His life was, indeed, erratic in that sense. " I have been a sojourner in many lands," he says. " I early landed on the shores of Continen- tal Europe and spent my best and freshest years in visiting her cities, her collegiate halls, her historic ruins, her battle- fields. But I have paused longest at Rome. I aspired to the Christian priesthood in that city, which the Code of Justinian, in the absence of mere Scriptural warrant, calls the fountain of sacerdotal honor, fons sacerdotii" •
It was at Rome took place the accidental imaginary meet- ing between " the lone incumbent of Watergrasshill " and James Barry, the painter of the Adelphi cartoons, both Cork- men. Standing in the Piazza del Popolo, musing on many things, Prout had just alighted from the clumsy vehicle of his Florentine vetturino. Barry's wonderment at discovering his quondam acquaintance in a semi- ecclesiastical garb was not the least amusing feature in the group presented under the pedestal of Aurelian's obelisk, which flung its lengthy shadow across the spacious piazza as the glorious Italian sun still lingered on the verge of the horizon. After an adjournment to the Osteria della Sybilla, where they drank from sparkling Orvieto to the health of Edmund Burke, they parted at a late hour. " Barry," relates Prout, " had but to cross the street to his modest stanzina in the Vicolo del Greco; I tarried for the night in the cave of * the sybil ', and dreamt over many a frolic of bygone days, over many a deed of Roman heroism; commingling the recollections of Tim Delaney with those of Michael Angelo, and alternately perambulating in spirit the Via Sacra and Blarney Lane."
He was a familiar figure to the cultured Parisians of his day. Blanchard Jerrold describes him trudging along the Boulevards with his arms clasped behind him, his nose in the air, his hat worn as French caricaturists insist all Englishmen wear hat or cap ; his quick, clear, deep-seeking eye wandering sharply to the right or left, and sarcasm — not of the sourest kind — playing like Jack-o'lantern in the corners 'of his mouth. Apart from his threadbare black garb and shambling gait.
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there were personal traits of character about him which caught the attention almost at a glance, and piqued the curiosity of even the least observant wayfarer. The '' roguish Hibernian mouth," noted by Mr. Gruneisen, and the grey piercing eyes, that looked up at you so keenly over his spectacles, won your interest in him, even upon a first introduction. From the mocking lip soon afterward — if you fell into conversation with him — came the loud, snappish laugh with which, as Mr. Blanchard remarks, the Father so frequently evidenced his ap- preciation of a casual witticism — uproarious fits of merriment signalizing at other moments one of his own ironical successes; outbursts of fun, followed during his later years by the rack- ing cough with which he was then tormented. His '' pipes ", as he called his bronchial tubes, he mistakenly regarded as the only weak point in his constitution, his physical strength having been mainly undermined by diabetes. That disease, in the midst of a complication of maladies and infirmities, first showed its effect in the excessive depression it superinduced in his naturally hilarious temperament.
His life in his closing years was that of a recluse. About six weeks before his demise, his illness assumed an unmistak- ably menacing character. He did then what he had done three years previously when attacked by severe indisposition — he sent round to St. Roch, his parish church, for the Abbe Rogerson. Thenceforth, day after day, the latter was sedu- lously in attendance upon him. The spiritual adviser of the lonely wit became his friend, his guide, his consoler. He fotind him at times testy and irascible. For instance, on one occasion when the Abbe made his appearance at his door, which generally stood open, Mahony called out with some as- perity: "I'm busy." "All right," was the reply, "and not rery civil to-day." That same evening the confessor received a penciled note on the back of Mahony's card: " If you will poke up a bear in his hours of digestion, you must expect him to growl," On another occasion, when the confessor sug- gested to his penitent a visit to the famous church of Notre Dame des Victoires, as it was the centre of the Archcon- fraternity for the Conversion of Sinners as well as a place of pilgrimage to which people of all classes, including the Em- press Eugenie, repaired to seek and to find solace in anguish,
FATHER PROUT.
Mahony, after listening silently and sullenly, broke out: " Don't talk to me of localizing devotion. God is to be met with in all places. The canopy of heaven is the roof of His temple; its walls are not our horizon." " Excuse me," calmly replied Mgr. Rogerson, " I am speaking to you under the im- pression that you are a Catholic wishful to resume his duty. Byron has given us his rhapsodies in some such fashion as this. Pray let me speak as a priest and a believer. If you find me limited and illiberal, seek some one else." Mgr. Rogerson says he deemed it advisable at once to claim his position un- hesitatingly. He did so effectually. Mahony never again displayed any impatience of control or pride of intellect, but became docile and tractable. His confessor had been prepared for these characteristic sallies by overhearing the remark of an Irish dignitary who, when conversing with another bishop on the subject of Father Prout, said, " I should fear him even dying ". The reply of the prelate addressed was : " I should covet no greater grace than to see poor Frank prepared to die well." When listening to those words the Abbe Rogerson little expected, he says, that his were to be the privilege and the re- sponsibility. It came to pass on the evening of Friday, i8 May, 1866, at Father Mahony 's apartment in the entresol of 19 Rue des Moulins, under circumstances of great consolation both to confessor and penitent. In a note dated " 6 o'clock even- ing " he wrote as follows, with reference to his intended gen- eral confession : *' Dear and Reverend Friend — I am utterly unfit to accomplish the desired object this evening, having felt a giddiness of head all the afternoon, and am now com- pelled to seek sleep. It is my dearest wish to make a begin- ning of this merciful work, but complete prostration of mind renders it unattainable just now. I will call in the morning and arrange for seeing you. Do pray for your penitent, F. Mahony."
His remorseful sense of having obtruded himself into the ministry was embodied by him in a document which Mgr. Rogerson presented on his behalf to Rome, when first he sought his aid toward reconciling him to the Church. This was in 1865 when, through the intermediary of the Arch- bishop of Paris, permission was obtained for him " to retire for ever," as he expressed it, " from the sanctuary ", and to
1 3 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
resort to lay communion. Simultaneously he received a dis- pensation enabling him, in consideration of his failing eye- sight and advancing age, to substitute the rosary or the peni- tential psalms for the Breviary Office. The petition was drawn up by himself, its completeness and Latinity exciting the surprise of the Roman ecclesiastical advocate charged with its presentation. Commenting upon this document, Mgr. Rogerson remarks that while Mahony's published specimens of classical and canine Latin are no doubt the wonder and amusement of scholars, his taking up his pen after years of disuse and in a couple of hours throwing off an ecclesiastical paper full of technical details and phraseology was, to say the least of it, very remarkable. Three years before the end came, the Abbe had the happiness of restoring his penitent to practical life in the Church, though, greatly to the con- fessor's regret, only in the degree of lay communion.
At the beginning of May, 1866, his state being very criti- cal, the last Sacraments were administered to him by Mgr. Rogerson. That he was well prepared is evidenced by the following words in which the Abbe describes how he was received by Father Mahony on the last occasion on which he found him seated in his armchair, before he took to his bed : " Thanking me for my patient and persevering attention to him during his sickness, he asked pardon of me and of the whole world for offences committed against God and to the prejudice of his neighbor; and then, sinking down in front of me, with his face buried in his two hands and resting them on my knees, he received from me with convulsive sobs the words of absolution. His genial Irish heart was full to overflowing with gratitude to God, as a fountain released at this moment ; and the sunshine of his early goodness had dispelled the dark- ness of his after-life, and he was as a child wearied and worn out after a day's wanderings, when it had been lost and was found, when it had hungered and was fed again. I raised him up, took him in my arms, and laid him on his bed as I would have treated such a little wanderer of a child ; and left him without leave-taking on his part, for his heart was too full for words." He never rose from that bed again. He would see no one but his confessor. At the Abbe Rogerson's suggestion, however, he consented to see his former fellow-
OVER THE DESERT TO CONVENT ST. CATHARINE. ig
novice of old days, Pere Lefevre, his parting with whom is described as wonderfully touching. Two days afterward he received Extreme Unction at the hands of the Abbe Rogerson, assisted by the Abbe Chartrain. From that moment no arti- culate syllable passed his lips, and at about half-past nine o'clock at night on Friday, i8 May, 1866, he tranquilly ex- pired in the presence of his sister, Mrs. Woodlock, and his confessor.
His remains were taken to Cork, and the obsequies, presided over by Bishop Delany and attended by about twenty priests, were celebrated in St. Patrick's Church, whence the funeral proceeded to the family burialplace in Upper Shandon grave- yard, where reposes the priest-poet who sang so sweetly of the bells of Shandon. The first lines of the melodious metre in which he proclaimed their musical merits are still to be seen traced by his own hand on the wall of the room he once occu- pied in the Irish College at Rome. He rests beneath the steeple from which still, ever and anon, peal forth those same bells which once made melody in the sleeper's ears, a memory, to his thinking, surpassing that of the bell of Moscow, the thunderous tones from '' old Adrian's mole ", or those which
the dome of Peter
Flings o'er the Tiber, pealing solemnly!
R. F. O'Connor. Cork. Ireland.
OVER THE DESEET TO CONVENT ST. CATHARINE. Practical Hints to Sinaitic Tourists.
TWO years or so past, I made up my mind to top a course of intensive preliminary studies with a vernal pilgrimage to the foremost among the international maritime health and quarantine stations of Egypt and Soudan. My plan duly ma- tured in the spring of 191 1.
The largest and most important of those stations is Tor, on the Sinaitic Peninsula, along the edge of the Desert El-Ka. The busy season at this post coincides with the annual return of pilgrims from Mecca; for the station can accommodate from
20 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
20,000 to 25,000 pilgrims, and aims to check the unwary smuggling of pestilence, cholera, dysentery, into Egypt.
To get away from Tor is even a far more circumstantial process than to land there, seeing that only once in a fortnight does a steamer of the Khedivial Mail come to anchor about a marine mile off shore, after touching at the charming Arabian resorts of Djedda and Jambo, where the bubonic plague en- joys freedom of the town. The traveler thus chancing must serve his two days of quarantine detention when he reaches Suez. But I took account of this knowledge in mapping out my route, and accordingly resolved to journey overland from Tor to Suez, with opportunity of visiting by the way the ven- erable Convent of Saint Catharine, at the foot of the Djebel Musa.
The like itinerary called for some perusal of works on Mount Sinai, besides a digression into the domain of Old Tes- tament exegesis. But neither with these matters nor with quarantine data shall I trouble the reader: my sole object is to offer a few practical suggestions to future Sinaitic tourists, by the aid of my own marginal notes, as it were, while the trip is in progress. They may then perceive just how to initiate and compass a trip of the same kind : the very sort of information which is withheld by the bibliography of the subject.
In this connexion my thoughts gratefully recur to that amiable, helpful and experienced Sinai traveler. Dr. Franz Fellinger of Linz, who exerted himself in every way toward inducting me a little beyond Aleph or Alpha in Old Testament science.
Neither are very many tourists likely to share the good for- tune of traveling, as was my lot, under the highly influential protection of the President of the International Board in Alexandria, Dr. M. Armand Ruffer.
A tour of the desert on any considerable scale, presupposes, besides physical health, a degree of self-denial, strength of will, and also trust in God ; for no human aid is to be expected in the event of sickness or accidents.
Quite apart from the strictly scientific preparation, it is worth while to read a few topical books of travel. An ex- cellent book of this class is Szczepanski's Nach Petra zum
OVER THE DESERT TO CONVENT ST. CATHARINE. 2 1
Sinai.^ Suitable for the actual tour will be Baedecker's Pales- tine and Syria, which contains both detailed itineraries and a number of good maps; whilst Pere Barnabe Meistermann's Guide du Nil au Jourdain par le Sinai et Petra^ is an. alto- gether superior work, reinforced with copious illustrations and maps, and showing an exceedingly exact report of dis- tances. The author, then stationed in the Franciscans' Casa Nuova in Jerusalem, is rumored to be preparing a German issue of his volume.
The best season for travel begins midway in March and closes about the last of May. Before that the weather is too cold, with chances of rain or snow; later, too hot. By the middle of March a fresh north wind is intermittent and serves to keep down the already pretty high maximum of daily tem- perature within a fair average. But even in the advanced season the nights are apt to prove decidedly sharp and cold, off and on.
In view of the great fluctuations of temperature, and seeing that the route lies partly over high altitudes, woolen under- clothing is indispensable in every article; and preferably Jager's autumn weight. For outer garb a light tourist suit made of stout English wool answers fairly; and the shoes, for protection against snakes, ought to be of a very substantial type: yellow, laced boots, for instance, with soft leather gaiters. A long autumn-weight ulster is desirable for halts and stops over night. For headgear I selected a soft, wide- brimmed gray felt hat, capped by a second story, so to speak,, and supplemented by a neck band. Hats of this pattern may be purchased in Cairo and are preferable to the tropical hel- mets; as being flexible, and better non-conductors of heat. Then, too, they can be worn on the journey homeward. Hats of similar fashion, but with single crown, and of thicker, drugget material, are worn by the German Colonial troops. The glaring Oriental heat is very liable to impart sunstroke, unless the head be well protected. Let the double hat be constantly worn while the heat is intense; whereas the upper hat can be removed in the shade.
1 By Way of Petra to Sinai, Innsbruck, 1908.
2 Guide from the Nile to Jordan by way of Sinai and Petra. Paris, 1909^
22 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
Like many other travelers, I was locally advised to journey in Bedouin garb, which counsel I rationally declined. The fact is, Europeans take far more advantageously in their " Prankish " habit. Disguise affords no defence against at- tacks, for the keen glance of the " child of the desert " sees through such masquerading a long way off. But anyhow, the tourist may as well buy one of those Bedouin cloaks, an ah aye, in the Bazaar at Cairo, for protection against rain and cold at night, as also to serve as a cushion with the camel saddle.
A sleeping bag is in order at night. My own came from the Cologne firm of Ferdinand Jacob — Wagener style, water- proof, padded, equipped with four air bolsters; in short, the article suited me perfectly. But the air bolsters are wont to play the trick (in spite of tight screwing) of losing buoyancy just where one might most desire it. At first I would get awake soon after falling asleep, to perceive that my sedentary portion, bruised as it was the livelong day, rested very hard; whereas, right and left thereof, was an irrelevant luxury of elastic air cushions. Ultimately, even a stony bed ministers to sound sleep. I may personally recommend the much cheaper sleeping bag of grade I, with air pillows for the head, plus a small bolster filled with wool, and therefore useful for a saddle mat by day; considering the transit by camel, no difficult feat of guessing is required to resolve the bolster's use at night.
Whilst a tent enhances one's feeling of security and is posi- tively necessary in the cooler season, it is not an easy matter to manage the loan of a tent, or if managed at all, the cost is generally high. Whoever plans a prolonged tour had bet- ter buy a tent of medium size at home; and where conveni- ence is a minor factor, an Austrian army tent will meet the purpose, being easily put up and of compact volume when folded. Thanks to the Governing Board, I secured a large English army tent, over twelve feet in diameter, and a small tent for my servant, a so-called cooking tent. The Bedouins are wonderfully handy in setting up tents ; first clearing every stone away and rearing a wall of sand between the floor and wall of the tent, lest some reptile or other creeping intruder slip in by night. In the desert a tent averts two disagreeable ailments, rheumatism and toothache. For although one sees
OVER THE DESERT TO CONVENT ST. CATHARINE. 23
to revision and repairs of his teeth before the trip, all this is no downright warrant against the toothache; and still stranger to relate, that very tooth which seemed least capable of treachery, will be sure to ache first.
Hardly had I gone ashore at Alexandria when the dele- gated official who had been sent to meet me on board the Lloyd steamer, advised me to buy a defensive weapon, either a long- barreled pistol, or a large revolver, for the Sinai tour. This, too, I declined, because the Sinaitic Bedouins are pretty good people, save when irritated ; and furthermore, they know right well that the strong hand of England bears rule in Egypt. When Palmer, in his day, was murdered within two days' march from Suez, along with two English officers, England made short work of the trial, and fifteen Bedouins were hanged in consequence. (The Bedouins give it out that Palmer had voluntarily dashed himself over a precipice when confronted with threats, but this tale seems hardly credible.) Our way of elaborate antecedent investigations is not practicable in the East; where the murderers are not discoverable, the simple alternative is to noose the brother, brother-in-law, Mr. Uncle, or any other convenient member of the tribe, his retinue to boot. No Bedouin is nowadays so unsophisticated as to mur- der a European on Sinai, except perhaps in the passion of strife. Accordingly, firearms may be left quietly at home, since in the desert this side the mountain range of Et-Tih life and property are far safer than in the capitals of Europe.
Strange to say, there are not a few Europeans in Egypt, persons of education among them, who seek to scare tourists from visiting the Sinai Peninsula, by dint of holding before them all conceivable dangers, especially the risk of being murdered. Not to mention warnings of that sort, I had also to listen in Cairo to a highly cultured gentleman's account of the " swarms " of scorpions and venomous snakes to be en- countered. To this I calmly responded that there might be possibly a slight misunderstanding between us, — in fine, that I was not a paleographer. These croakers are of two cate- gories : either those who never visited the Sinai Peninsula at all, or those who know the country very accurately, especially the Convent of St. Catharine and its wo rid- renowned library, so that for this very reason they are fain to keep other visitors
24 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
at a distance. Perhaps a third group should still be adduced, the agents of certain tourist bureaus. In their case the aim is to paint the dangers so black that the traveler will get it into his head that he must by all means have an official dragon-slayer, to wit, a dragoman. I would give sober warn- ing against these people, who tenfold increase the costs of travel ; often they are ignorant of the way itself ; whilst every trifle sets them to quarreling with the Bedouins, whom they render quite headstrong, to the tourist's aggravated discom- fort. It is well, then, to listen tranquilly to the multitude of croakings and trust only in God and oneself. He who suffers himself to be scared away by such process is unworthy to share the glory of beholding Sinai. But Sinai merits a measure of sacrifice, together with a little personal courage and strength of will as travel companions.
Provisioning for the journey can best be managed in Cairo, where the latitude of selection is greater; although nowadays there are also large food stores in Suez. A very responsible warehouse in Cairo is that of the firm of Jules and Henri Fleurent. English canned goods are of the best quality and not expensive. Before actual purchase it is well to determine how long the trip is to last and what is the size of the daily requisition, because all the warehouses naturally strive to sell the tourist a maximum bill of supplies. But in any event it will be wise to procure something of a surplus to meet all con- tingencies, for instance, a ration to cover two days beyond the contemplated length of the trip. Moreover, make sure that the Beldouins always modestly recede at the camping place, without thought of sharing in the victuals. On the other hand, if one gives them portion now and then (but not every day), let it be some tea, coffee or macaroni; then they will thank you in so friendly a style as is not elsewhere ex- perienced in the East. Never offer them pork, which they, being Mohammedans, abominate; nor hand them any spiritu- ous drinks: for the cultivated European must esteem it an affair of conscience to keep the children of nature at a safe distance from poisons.
For my part, I was talked into gauging my supplies too liberally, so that for the profit and weal of others, I will com- municate my bill of fare. In the morning before marching.
OVER THE DESERT TO CONVENT ST. CATHARINE. 2"
a bowl of warm tea without sugar, and some biscuits. For daily use I kept an aluminum flask, cased in felt; and at even- ing this was filled with unsweetened weak tea, the best quencher of thirst. Such flasks keep the contained beverage properly cool, especially if the felt be moistened. I would caution people against the so-called thermos or insulated flasks, inasmuch as during the unavoidable jolts which ac- company the lading and unlading of the camel, they are liable to grow brittle, so as easily to burst when hot tea is poured in. And though the flask stay intact, there still re- mains the disadvantage that the contents take all of twenty- four hours to cool off. But a hot drink in the scorching heat of the desert is a torment.
It is out of the question to make a fire at the midday halt; and then, too, the camels of burden are seldom at hand, being frequently far ahead. For this reason and owing to the short- ness of the halt, there are only cold cakes with noon lunch, and these are stowed on one's immediate saddle camel that morn- ing. My noon meal consisted of a piece of bread and a can of sterilized Swiss condensed milk of a grade rarely found at home. On this diet I fared remarkably well and incline to credit it with the fact that I bore the afternoon heat so favor- ably. But if the like fare appear too meagre, let a box of sardines be tried. The principal meal occurs at evening, ter- minating the day's ride. I then enjoyed a cup of Maggi soup with macaroni and Parmesan cheese, followed by canned meat. In this line much variety is afforded. The regulation can of meat weighs one pound, and that abundantly suffices; com- patibly too with the tourist's ideal, which, after eight to ten hours on camel back, is to sleep aind sleep again, quite un- disturbed on the score of scorpions and poisonous snakes,, leopards, howling jackals, and hyenas. Among the canned meats, all of which must be warmed up over a fire, I particu- larly tried roast beef, corned beef, young hare with dumplings, and small sausages.
In the way of beverages, whiskey and wine were urgently recommended me. To begin with, I had two flasks of Scotch whiskey, a flask of brandy, together with six pint bottles of Medoc. But I was told in Suez that this was far from enough. Then I bought another flask of whiskey. The fate of these
25 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
alcoholics will appear to the reader partly forthwith, partly in sequel. Very soon I perceived that in the desert every phase of alcohol, were it even only a few spoonfuls of whiskey in water after sunset, decidedly depressed the bodily powers of resistance. The day's individual ration would therefore com- prise, besides tea or chocolate, Maggi soup extract, macaroni, Parmesan cheese, a box of sardines or condensed milk, and a can of meat, for the evening meal. English cakes are a con- venient and freely digestible bite in the course of the day. The food supply, together with appurtenances like spirit boiler, spirits, corkscrews, and can-openers, is packed by the dealers in secure boxes, and should be sent to Suez docks, in warehouse. The storage fee amounts to a few cents a day.
A small family medicine chest is recommended for the journey, both for personal use and because the Bedouins take every European to be a physician, and beg for medicines. In the latter article, the best shift is to furnish a ready purga- tive, such as sagrada, or tamarind tablets. Such medicine is much in request through the East, and easily wins for the donor the name of a good physician. In the Convent on Sinai, the steward showed me their medicine chest as well. In the main it was a castor oil vault. It was in Palestine that I made the acquaintance of a German physician who has a large practice among the natives. And he disclosed to me the secret of his success : castor oil in emulsion, tinted in the na- tural color, as well as in blue, red, green. Internal remedies of note are quinine in tablet form, tincture of opium, Hoff- mann's drops. For inflammation of the eyes, collyrium ad- stringens luteum, of which a few drops are dripped into the eyes. For various injuries, keep in readiness a supply of cotton, gauze, Byrolin ointment in tubes, and some skin powder. For antidote to scorpion stings, use a few crystals of permanganate of potash, rubbed in the wound. Better first clench the teeth and enlarge the wound with a sharp knife. The same treatment applies to snake bites. Some European physicians long active in the East and commanding large experience herein, advised me that in supplement to the foregoing procedure one should swallow cognac to the point of intoxication, a remedy of hoary age, and, as it seems, never rejected.
OVER THE DESERT TO CONVENT ST. CATHARINE o^
27
For that matter, there is no occasion for inordinate fear of scorpions and snakes. These creatures prevalently lurk under stones and in proximity to water. Neither Professor Fel- linger nor I saw a single scorpion. Once I remarked a rather large specimen of the snake family, but it fled as we ap- proached.
Besides provisions and family medicines, a further list of articles remains to be procured in Cairo. One good thing is a camel sack, which may be had of the tent-makers, and also a coarse woolen cover for the very hard saddle. To lov- ers of nature I would especially recommend, if they visit the Sinai Peninsula by way of Tor, that they utilize the shipping card in the agency of the Khedivial Mail Line at Cairo. The local agent, Mr. Munari, speaks German, and is a very obliging man, very willing to assist tourists, and as far as possible he places his negro servant at the traveler's disposal for shopping in the Bazaar. The servant is fluent in German, which he melts in the accent of Berlin. Even with the fee to the servant, one buys cheaper than alone.
In Cairo two important documents must be secured — a card of permit for visiting the Peninsula, from the Egyptian Min- istry of War, which is to be presented for signature to the English passport officer in Suez, Falconer Bey; and a letter of recommendation to the Metropolitan of the Sinaitic monks. Without this letter there is no admission to the Convent of Saint Catharine. Both documents are provided by the resi- dent Consul, but I preferred a personal introduction to the Archbishop, which the Director of the Khedivial Library, Dr. Moriz, was good enough to obtain for me. The recommenda- tion must have been impressive, for I was allowed to handle and turn over the leaves even of the most valuable manu- scripts, which otherwise are shown merely at a distance, behind a grating.
At this point a few words may be said concerning the only, and unfortunately unavoidable, means of transport through the desert, the camel. Before starting I went over once more to Schonbrunn in order to inspect the " ship of the desert " quite minutely, and I resolved that the camel has a very high back, to be sure, but in other features is altogether a lovely creation. To my regret we could not meet at short range,
28 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
for the reason that in Schonbrunn the visitors are strictly- forbidden to feed the animals. In Egypt the creature be- gan to attract me sensibly less, when I noticed that the camel is a pacer, and that the rider must thereby endure very un- pleasant oscillations. At Assuan I attempted a personal ap- proach by holding out a crisp cake, but was repelled with a snarl that suggested some snappish cur. Even then the thought began to dawn on me that the camel, despite his properly good qualities, is only a dumb animal; and this thought grew into the texture of firm conviction during the desert journey.
If, after a rough day's ride, the camel for undiscerned rea- sons takes a notion to strike up a brief gallop, then, true enough, the poor rider by no means hears the choir of all angels, but feels rather so profound a pain in the spinal ex- tremity that he could himself nearly sing in his anguish. Then and there I resolved, in order to postpone any further sad dis- illusions, never again to mount a camel unless grim necessity thereto constrained me.
The observation that one cannot grow seasick on camel back seems to me mistaken. I am rather convinced that those incessant, somewhat pronounced pendulum swings are liable to produce nausea and indisposition with sensitive constitutions.
When the long and agitated course of our steamer El- Kahira through the deep blue Red Sea was at an end, and we sighted the Sinai Peninsula, there drew near to me the negro ship's commissary to solicit the drafting of a certificate; for the authorities in Suez keep close watch on all passengers who cross the Red Sea, and require to know the country and ultimate site of one's destination. My goal. Tor, seemed to startle the good negro, who looked at me quite aghast.
In Suez my first errand was to the freight warehouse, for my supplies were there. The next step was to buy some to- bacco, the Bedouins being great smokers and apt to stay in good temper if they get a few packets every evening. I bought fifty packages of smoking tobacco, three hundred cigarettes, and fifty cigars for twenty piastres. Experience showed that this quantity was not gauged too high.
Our Austrian Consul, whom I naturally acquainted with my design, was one of the few people who declared my tour to be
OVER THE DESERT TO CONVENT ST. CATHARINE or.
free from danger. More or less officially, too, I visited the Director of Quarantine, Dr. Josef Batko, a Pole by birth; in whose family I spent a most agreeable evening after my re- turn from Sinai. The tourist v^ho chooses the overland route to Suez v^^ill do well to pay his respects to Director Batko, so as to preclude all manner of difficulties on arriving in the Chat. But of this in its place. What here calls for remark is the ■circumstance that with the quarantine physicians infectious diseases, even bubonic plague and tuberculosis, have lost every sting. My good colleague explained to me, among other points of interest, that probably some cases of smallpox would soon be due by the Indian steamers. This prophesying sounded not unlike a greengrocer's announcement to the cook that this year's potatoes would be presently in the market.
In the afternoon I had a call from the Russian Vice-Consul, Dr. Manolakis, who handed me the letter of credentials from the Archbishop, by way of the Sinaitic Convent in Suez; withal adding a note to Father Polykarpos, omnipotent stew- ard of the Convent of St. Catharine. I found Dr. Manolakis to be an extremely accommodating gentleman. Inasmuch as the Czar is sovereign protector of the Sinaitic religious, his official representative also counts very appreciably with the monks ; for which reason I recommend every traveler to Sinai to pay him a visit. Dr. Manolakis is a physician in vogue, and speaks Italian, French, and English. His villa near the Hotel Bel Air borders a lagoon with orange-red water.
It was in the evening hours of 6 March that the steamer Missir left Suez. The fact that a passenger for Tor was on TDoard had become known, and he was regarded with awe. My qualifications as Hakim seemed popular warrant for curi- osity of the sort, and one of the natives pointed to me, saying to his neighbor with a twitch of the shoulders. Hakim (physi- cian). The first cabin's company was rather mixed: a Turk- ish First Lieutenant, son of the sheriff of Djedda, richly attired ; item, two Bedouin sheiks ; the newly appointed French Consul at Djedda, with his young wife and two serving maids. The party seemed so hopeful that I trust they may experience no disappointment in Djedda. There was also a Jewish pas- senger, and Mr. N. W. de Courcy, chief architect of the Board of Administration. This affable Englishman was the " only
^Q THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
sympathetic heart beneath so many masks " ; and with him I exchanged the customary social glasses. We were the sole passengers for Tor. The saloon on board the Missir measures about eight feet in diameter; being surrounded by the cabins containing three berths each. Having promptly apprehended the merit of the baksheesh, I secured a cabin to myself.
By 7 o'clock of the next morning, our goal was reached. As guest of the Board, I was spared the never very com- fortable, though perfectly safe transit to the Sinaitic Convent by sail boat; for the camp director. Dr. Zachariades Bey came aboard and conveyed me to the station in a steam launch. The process of embarking and disembarking in the East is. altogether summary. Before one thinks of it, he is handled simply like a bag of meal, and stowed away. Then follows the baggage, over which the passenger is often more con- cerned than for himself ; because the pieces are let down from the hull. Thus, at Port Said, I noticed how the tropical hel- met of a Reverend was attached by its chin straps to the boat hooks, and so transferred to the small boat.
Tor (that is to say, the sanitary station Tor) is nowadays a purely English colony, though during the season some Ger- man, French, or Greek physicians are also active. President Ruffer had already made complete arrangements by telegraph,, and reserved for me a room in the President's house. Still more, before his departure for Paris he sent his private cook and rifle charger, Achmed Hamza, a guard of the Board's, to Tor with instructions to attend me on the tour as factotum. Achmed, a Berber of about 30 years, proved himself a very handy, model valet, who even in the desert retained the habits of a well-trained English servant, and every evening " laid the table " by dint of my water chest no less punctiliously than if it had stood in the drawing-room at Ramleh. When we parted in Suez, I nominated him, free of charge, for Pasha.
Other travellers go by sail boat to the village of Tor, quite remote from the camp, where they find shelter in the Sinaitic Convent. For the most part the monks use only modern Greek and Arabic ; although it might be possible to make out with them tolerably in Italian. Just here a word on the lan- guage question. Any one who speaks French, Italian, or English can get along perfectly. The solitary traveller is.
OVER THE DESERT TO CONVENT ST. CATHARINE. ^^^
advantaged by a little Arabic; but a few terms will suffice, and these one may learn from the really excellent Meyer's Guides to Language. I had "A Little Meyers" in pocket: Italian, English, Modern Greek, and Arabic; much to the amusement of the Englishwomen in Tor. Conversation with the Bedouins was managed by Achmed, who spoke English and Arabic.
Where caravan business is forward, the Egyptian official Nasir is always at hand; a right friendly man, who under- stands French and English. My own concerns with the Arch- imandrite and the Nasir were transacted that afternoon by Mr. Director Zachariades Bey. Contrary to common report, the procedure was quiet and smooth. Most tourists are sub- ject to the tap rooted impression that they are going to be overreached. But there is a fixed scale of rates in force, by Government regulation ; and the same applies alike to Egyp- tian officials, pilgrims, and tourists. The latter pay, by camel reckoning, 120 piastres, or about six dollars, from Tor to Convent St. Catharine. The money is taken over by the steward, who seals it and conveys it to the sheik. I was per- sonally present when Father Polykarpos opened the package on Sinai and paid the Bedouins in full. I paid for four camels, including two saddle camels: one for the tent and baggage; in which connexion the Nasir assured me that he would himself select the animals. The contract was drawn up in duplicate, and signed by the Archimandrite and by myself; then sealed by the sheik. The Nasir has a list of authorized sheiks and appoints the one whose turn is instant. Thus it happened that my guide was Sebeijjin Muse, although the President had thought of Sheik Mudakhel for me. They are all trustworthy and at home in their topography. Since the sheik has charge of the camel drivers, the tourist has only to indicate his wishes to the sheik alone: otherwise it may chance that a Bedouin, especially if some servant or dragoman assumes to dispense orders, will explain : " I mind none but the sheik." With friendly treatment, these people are very obliging, and never wax importunate.
Yonder transactions over, the warehouses were visited to the end of completing my outfit. Only when well on my way, did I fully learn to appreciate the thoughtfulness accorded me
^2 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
in this regard by Mrs. Broadbent, the Directress of the estab- lishment, in cooperation with the Director. For instance, I found a small hearth, kitchen utensils, plates, cups, two large lanterns with candles, a wash basin and bath towel, a barrel of water and a folding camp chair with support for the back ; which is quite an invaluable article of furniture when it comes to resting. Achmed had bought a bag of charcoal at my charge.
The journey began about a quarter to ten on the morning of 8 March. After a hearty farewell and thanks for hospi- tality, it was in order to mount camel back. The Nasir had kept his word: six camels in prime condition lay camped before the President's House. It was explained to me that the number of camels need cause no mistake, since only four were to be paid for. I had often read about the rider's ma- noeuvring with reference to climbing the camel, so as not to fall down as soon as mounted ; but a venerable thing is theory : all this was forgotten. The sheik on my right, Achmed on the left, held their arms on guard, and soon I sat safe and sound on the ship of the desert. At the same instant, there was a snapping of kodaks, another good-bye, a waving of the hat, and off I was for the solitary desert with six Bedouins and Achmed. Where man is inwardly stirred to depths of emo- tion, but prefers not to give free course to such mood, then the next moments can be conveniently tided by a pinch of snuff or a cigarette. I chose the latter, and was agreeably diverted to find how easy the lighting proved, in spite of the rocking movement. One grows quickly at home to the camel's back; and having both hands clear, one may eat, drink, read, and even write. Only, the latter pastime is to be recommended exclusively to very great scholars ; forasmuch as in their case it is quite immaterial if they write illegibly.
I chose the route through the Wadi es-Sle, whose peculiar- ities can be followed in Szczepanski's work. A grander moun- tainous landscape will hardly be discovered. The first five hours lead one through the flat, herbless desert El-Ka. But I could descry nought in the way of those " yawning chasms and gaping abysses " mentioned by Szczepanski, who rode by night. Shortly before the entrance gorge of es-Sle, one must dismount, as the road sinks abruptly downward. No new-
Chapel of Elias on Mount Musa
Two Sinai Inhabitants (Greek Monks)
Author's Tent in Convent Grounds, Mount Sinai
First Stop in Waui es-Sle
OVER THE DESERT TO CONVENT ST. CATHARINE.
comer finds fault with this necessity. After half an hour's march, the sheik gives the word to mount again. This time better progress is perceptible. One finds the process of getting down a great deal more obnoxious, in that many camels drop quite suddenly to their knees, thereby causing the rider to cling tightly to the saddle plug. In es-Sle we encountered the first Bedouins. They reach forth their hands to my guide, and embrace amid whispered greetings. Whoever beholds these grave Biblical figures for the first time in this attitude, understands the Saviour's grief when He spoke: " Judas, dost thou betray the son of man with a kiss?" None but good friends embrace; others pass by with a brief salutation.
About 2.30 P. M. I got half an hour's rest; then, off again till 5.30, when, after the matter of eight hours' ride for that day (9.45 A. M. to 5.30 P. M.), the tents were set up. First night in the desert ! Who is likely to sleep at once, where the heart is filled with such magnified impressions. I again stepped forth from my tent. At some distance crouched those gaunt, sunburned figures, to whom for the impending transit my life was intrusted; they were now illumined with the ruddy glow, as they huddled about the camp fire, whilst beside them in the fringe of darker background lay the camels like black mounds, as they chewed their durra fodder. My glances tended involuntarily skyward ; but the clouds con- tinued stark motionless; not a glimmer of light is visible; no voice resounds from above. The time has not yet come which is to renew the glad tidings of the Gospel to these unfor- tunates ; that Gospel which their forefathers forsook these long centuries past in order to follow Islam.
The first night was rounded; but the unaccustomed camp- ing, the strenuous ride of the day before, did not conspire to beget quiet sleep. Strange noises roused me during the night. Could this have been the howling of hyenas? I doubt it not in the least that hyenas howl by night in the desert; only, I think that many a tourist is deluded by his excited imagina- tion, and that often the very loud snorting of the camels is mis- taken for howling of hyenas. Prolonged sleepers in the desert there are none; so I rose at daybreak; when behold, my man Achmed was already brewing tea and preparing warm water for washing. Since the preceding evening he had hired a
24 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
scullion, in the shape of a droll young Geheli Gimel, camel driver; who struck my attention by the fact that he wore a European overcoat, although nothing but the lining was now left of it ! Gebeli ought to have been of compound construc- tion, to be taken apart at will ; seeing that he was incessantly in demand by all the company during the hours of evening rest. When the tents went up, he pounded like one possessed, with his wooden mallet on the tent pegs, and was always in good humor. The camel that bore the tents was his unique property, which supported his wife and child as well as him- self. To the question, did this suffice him? ''Yes," he an- swered seriously: '* God bestows His blessing therewith."
Although the Bedouins work very briskly, the marching preliminaries take up at least an hour; forasmuch as the tents must be struck, and the camels brought in from foraging their scanty breakfast here and yonder, in order to be laden. These curious animals make a frightful din in the operation : a noise comparable to lamentation, growls, and bellowing, all at once. Most unmannerly is the same beast when one mounts him ; no sooner does he perceive such intention than he tries to bite and career, so that the Bedouin presses the camel's head with all his might to the ground, until the rider is firmly seated. But once in motion, the creature behaves itself de- corously. Thanks to the circumspection of my man Achmed, who looked after the baggage and was loath to see me move a hand, I could observe the lively exotic performance with the freedom of a passive beholder. The Bedouin's first care was to get the Chawadscha's, or master's camel, in readiness for the march. Still in advance of the caravan, and accompanied only by the aged proprietor of my mount, Gimar Taema, I left the camping site. The landscape acts with such fascina- tion over the gazer, the feeling of security controls one so completely, that one loses all thought of those earlier warnings about attacks and untoward surprises. After barely an hour's march, Gimar pointed to the road, and made motions to dis- mount. And since on that rocky ground the camel cannot lie down, the rider must let himself down after the fashion of a schoolboy over a lofty stile. But what of that? in the desert one has many things to learn. After protracted clambering over the rocks, the road improved for us again, making it
OVER THE DESERT TO CONVENT ST. CATHARINE. -^c
possible to ride. After four and three quarter hours of march, I gained an hour's rest in Wadi Tarfa, about 12.30 P. M.
On the third day of the journey, Friday, 10 March, I left camp about seven o'clock, on the Rahabe plateau. Only a few hours now separate us from our goal, but this time there was need of continual dismounting, inasmuch as the camels could make their way along the partly impassable, steep and rocky paths only with severe effort. But suddenly our destination looms into view, the cloistered fortress in its world- forgotten vale, flanked by its massive buttress of Djebel Musa and ed- Der. The sight of the spot where, tradition has it, Jehovah first revealed himself to Moses : " I am that I am," was so overpowering that I stood with uncovered head, lost in medi- tation.
About a quarter before noon, and after twenty-one and a half hours' riding, the caravan reached the outer cloister gate, which opened only after considerable delay. Neither does anybody in the broad cloister court invite the strangers to come in : like so many walls the camels continue standing, and the men beside them. For weal or woe, I had to open my trunk outside, and send my letters of recommendation into the yard, where Brother Miltiades received them and vanished. A good while afterward, he returned and silently motioned to me to follow. Though fairly tall, I could easily stay up- right while walking through the narrow passage in shape of a Greek zeta. In the divan of the cloister, I was greeted offi- cially, in the presence of the Archimandrite and the steward. Father Polykarpos, who is fluent in Italian and French. When the letters of credentials had been perused, mastic brandy, black coffee and cigarettes were handed about; and then the steward asked me where I would lodge. I might either so- journ in the cloister, or set up my tent at liberty in the en- vironment. I chose the latter privilege, and asked leave to camp in the cloister garden. There, indeed, under olive trees and blossoming apricots, with the antiquated cisterns of turban design on the right; their precious water coming from Djebel Musa ; and on the left, the monks' burial vault : one felt quite in the mood, only the nights were like ice. Nevertheless, I would select this very spot another time. But again, commu- nication with the cloister is not unobstructed; for the small
36
THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
gate is always barred, and the bell-handle happens to be one story high, so that only practised climbers can reach it. This being the situation, I once asked Achmed concerning the man's wash-room; although nothing short of the Arabic Mustarah revealed to him my want. A handy Bedouin then led me to a pool, visible far below ; kept clapping his hands to disperse the poultry, and thereupon, turning toward me, he made a gesture to approach. Already versatile to new phenomena, I simply uttered a resigned " all right ", and so descended to Tartarus.
In these times the cloister's guest rooms are very clean, habitably ordered, furnished with soft carpets, and answerable even to somewhat fastidious requirements.
Shortly after the formal introduction, began the medical routine ; seeing that a Hakim is but rarely encountered in Con- vent St. Catharine. I deem it worth while to state that from the Archimandrite to the humblest monk, bodily cleanliness and linen left nothing to censure. It is altogether singular, how discreditably German tourists in particular, write about people whose hospitality they previously enjoyed. Are there then in our own cloisters no brethren in service whose hands in the wake of coarse work are not so neat as may be presup- posed of ladies who receive the manicure's visit every morn- ing? The result of one's examination, and still more the subsequent inspection of the tombstones, gave food for reflec- tion. Except rheumatism, there appears to be no disease in the cloister. Death gains admission only when at last ardently welcomed by some weary brother of eighty or ninety years. Here a physician were liable to starve. But in the same cloister, two unsalaried physicians are always active, and they never make a professional mistake: namely, the fresh moun- tain air, and strict diet; especially during the main fasting season. Flesh meat and wine are never to be seen on the Sinaitic table. The frugal meal consists of bread, fish, vege- tables, and fruit, set off with a small glass of mastic brandy, their home product; which, however, is always drunk diluted with water. In the capacity of examining physician, one gains a closer insight into the mode of living and its reactive effects. Among the many monks examined, I discovered no trace of alcoholism. This fact is to be expressly brought out, because on this point, again, descriptive tourists incur the fault of downright want of tact.
OVER THE DESERT TO CONVENT ST. CATHARINE. 37
More than once, as I listened to the monks chanting their Psalms in that archaic Basilica, I put to myself the question : just what moved these men to quit their sunny Greek home, in order to pass their lives here in harsh solitude? Sloth? No, for they work their gardens. Epicureanism? Even the poor Bedouin from time to time brings down an ibex or a bird, and feasts himself with the dainty roast thereof. Avarice? But even if the Convent is wealthy, the individual enjoys nought of that wealth. Only living faith and profound sense of religion (perhaps, indeed, clothed in too rigid forms) could have induced these men to retire into Jethro's Valley.
On returning to the tent to drink my noonday milk, I found myself in quite altered surroundings. By command of the steward. Brother Miltiades had fitted up my tent with a straw mat, a finely- covered table with glasses, knife and fork, and some seats. What a treat is the like scale of convenience! Travelling in the desert brings one properly to the conscious- ness that contentment stands in direct relation to independence of wants.
The following day was devoted to the ascent of Djebel Musa. For nominal fee one may hire a monk and a Bedouin as companions. It is not advisable to go alone, because one may easily miss the path among the boulders, and fail to visit the isolated, locked chapels. The ascent may be recommended even to those who are not free from dizziness. The pilgrims' stairway, a lucus a non lucendo, consists of so many medium- sized rocks, over which one must climb as best he can. The route occupies two hours ; yet my attendant. Brother Constan- tine, who spoke Italian, kept telling me with reassurance, I should only walk right slowly; that people who labored with pen and ink were not used to mountain climbing. In three hours I reached the summit, from which one can admire a part of the imposing mass of Sinai, washed by the sea on both sides of its promontory. On the way down. Biblical explorers visit Ras es Safsaf, whence Moses is supposed to have an- nounced the Ten Commandments to the congregation of Israel. A chapel crowns the pinnacle of Musa, and opposite the same is a ruinous mosque. I took advantage of the hour's rest to eat my lunch : a few swallows of cold tea, with cakes. I also offered a few morsels to the worthy Constantine; but he would
38
THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
not partake until I solemnly assured him that there was no fat contained : only flour, water, and sugar. Constantine pres- ently withdrew to the chapel to chant his Psalms. Achmed lay sleeping beside the ruined mosque. The scene might sug- gest interesting reflections, but I contented myself with photo- graphing the sleeping Moslem and his crumbling house of worship. Archbishop Porphyrios II, a prelate still in his prime, and of antecedent schooling in France and Germany, is said to be planning to restore the chapel to its original form, and to build a road to it. The latter project was already begun. Likewise his work is the damming of the mountain torrent near the cypress plain. Moreover, in the Convent itself, the construction of a library with iron framework is under serious consideration.
Sunday was reserved for rest and inspection of the Convent. Nowadays the use of the library is allowed by the Arch- bishop only to specially well recommended persons, in that their experiences on Sinai with European scholars were none too auspicious. I would counsel future visitors to forbear questions in this regard, because they are not answered with pleasure. Even at Cairo, I was reminded on the part of com- petent authority not to utter the name of Tischendorf, discov- erer of Codex Sinaiticus. As is known, this manuscript was sold to the Czar of Russia ; which sequel still nowadays, and that with good warrant, appears to cause bitterness of regret in the Convent.
Since the contract rate of ten dollars had already been fixed at Tor for each camel as far as Suez, all I had to do was to turn over this amount to the steward. Again I paid for four camels, though the caravan comprised six. This custom ob- tains for the reason that the Bedouins spare their beasts, es- pecially the younger ones, and reckon on lading a supply of durra fodder for themselves at the Convent on the return trip. By special ruling, the steward permitted the same car- avan to continue to Suez ; whereas usually the camels and drivers are relayed at the Convent. My bill from the steward was moderate: a fee for attendance to Djebel Musa, a small sum for the doorkeeper, and the domestics who had got the baggage into the yard. The traveller who sojourns in the Convent and thence draws his provisions, pays for the same
OVER THE DESERT TO CONVENT ST. CATHARINE. ^g
at a fixed rate, and adds an optional sum, say a dollar a day, for his room. Tips to the servants are not customary. But ancient usage approves the outlay of a stranger's gift, xenion, for the Church or the poor. He who needs provisions for the return journey, can obtain the same at moderate price in the Convent. Its market supplies fresh eggs, sardines, macaroni, cheese, and bread, which is baked in the cloister every Satur- day. Good fuel alcohol may also be had. Do not forget to fill any flasks with water. The quality is excellent.
My announcement that in five days I must make Suez was received with dubious shaking of heads. An old Bedouin who had been called in as expert would hear nothing of such pre- cipitation. So I summoned my sheik, and informed him through Achmed that I accounted him and his people capable of achieving this feat, though admittedly a little arduous. The sheik pointed to his head, as much as to signify : By my pate, ere the fifth day is past, thou shalt be in Suez. A vigor- ous grasp of hands, an " all right '* on my side, Marhaha on his side, sealed the agreement. Next in order was to map off the route, from the chart itself : Nakb el Hawa, Wadi Lebwe, Barak, Suwik, etc. As the steward also allowed, Feran oasis, which is visited by Biblical explorers, had to stay out.
Many travellers take ofi'ence at the fact that the Convent is authorized to appoint the caravans ; and make all sorts of ironical comments thereon. But they forget what a mortally wearisome task it is to negotiate with Orientals, with whom time counts not at all. Just plant a German professor with his bookish Arabic over against a group of Bedouins, and let him proceed. He will grow nervous, but reach no result; or if he does, he will pay more than to the Convent. The Bedouin has comparatively no right sense of the value of money, for he stakes everything too high. When one of my attendants was asked what he wanted for his sword, a kind of bayonet blade, in woven leather sheath, he demanded ten dol- lars, or about four times the real value.
Leave-taking was no less of a ceremony than the reception. The steward conveyed gifts of hospitality, put on my hand St. Catharine's pilgrimage ring, and presented one of the same design for Dr. Manolakis. Before departure, he called the Bedouins together, commended me to their protection, and
.Q THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
explained to them that after our arrival in Suez I would tender an exact report of their behavior to the Russian Vice- Consul.
I left the hospitable Convent on 13 March, at 7.45 A. M. The sheik and Achmed discharged their rifles, and a monk on the battlement returned the salute. Thus, amid crackling of rifles and rumbling echoes I made my way into the silent desert, endeared to me now. Whether the sun rises or sets in a play of glorious colors, or the full moon and sparkling stars illumine the night, one is constantly discovering new beauties in the desert, and learns to understand why the Bedouin loves his wilderness above all else.
The several daily stages were as follows: 13 March, 8j4 hours, night camp Wadi Barak; 14 March, 9^4 hours, Wadi Suwik; iSth, 11 hours, 5 minutes, Wadi Uset; 16 March, 9j/$ hours, Wadi Werdan; 17 March, 9 hours, 10 minutes, Quar- antine Chat, across from Suez.
The day's course on 15 March ended not without some up- roar. So early as half-past five the Bedouins wished to halt for the night's rest, but I declined with the remark that to-day we must still make Wadi Uset. Then began a petty revolt, and words of abuse were launched at the sheik, who muffled himself in silence. The men explained that they were tired, that the camels would find no fodder at Uset; and what not of the sort. I remembered that ancient Xenophon, somewhat farther back in Asia, was once in similar plight during the retreat of the Ten Thousand; so I checked my camel, dis- mounted, and gave word by the voice of Achmed : " Let him who was weary, mount my beast, and I would walk." The brawlers receded abashed, but when a little removed, they re- sumed their grumbling. It was now Achmed's turn to step forth with terribly glaring eyes, and threaten that whoever refused obedience would be sternly imprisoned at Suez. When Achmed interpreted to me his instantly effectual menace, I could scarcely conceal my smiles. It was already growing dark when we came to Uset. The most arrant clamorers now proved also loudest with their Marhaba. So still to-day, " Hosanna " may be heard in close contact with " Crucify Him." That evening I dealt out tea with plenty of sugar, thereby restoring the peace. My arrival in Suez on the fifth
Inside the Walls of Convent St. Catharine
'-miJiA
''l€()a Movi] TOv livd 541 {.i. X.
CHHaiicKiii MoHacTbipb 541 n. p. Xp.
The Convent at Sinai (A. D. 541).
Ras es-Safsaf
SAID TO BE THE MOUNT FROM WHICH MOSES ANNOUNCED THE TEN
Commandments
^i^-llte#f-'
Convent St. Catharine in the Sinai Desert
OVER THE DESERT TO CONVENT ST. CATHARINE. 41
day was now assured, to the joy of the sheik, who had de- ported himself like a diplomat.
On 16 March, at 9 A. M., we reached Wadi Gharandel, the first watering station for the camels after leaving the Convent. Surrounded by rushes, appears a small spring, and there is a fairly large pool of water, whence the camels drank in eager draughts. After this, and the wholesome reaction from a foot bath, my water barrel was filled. The soup and chocolate boiled with this water next morning had a slight chemical taste, but were drunk to the last drop. The traveller joyfully greets the telegraph poles and the now visible Red Sea, whose steamers are prompt harbingers of civilization. About 3.50 P. M. of 1 7 March we came to the springs of Moses for a brief rest; and about 6.25 P. M. the march ceased at Chat, where we were confronted by the black Quarantine soldier, posted as sentinel. Many tourists imagine some evil spirit at this station, ready to play them a trick even at the last moment. Such is not the case. Every caravan must halt before Chat pending telephone instructions from Suez, or until the Quar- antine physician appears on his rounds of inspection, consum- ing maybe half an hour. Only then are the tourists of the desert permitted to enter Suez. We rode on to Chat, where Master Zachariades, superintendent of the station, came to meet me with felicitations. In a few moments the Director sent word by telephone for my free transit. Now came the hearty farewell to those good sons of the desert. We parted amid mutual congratulations, and scarcely shall we see one an- other again. I procured a room in Chat, and presently Ach- med could announce that my fare was served in the dining- room. Still at a late evening hour the Quarantine boat hove in sight, which was to convey me to Suez ; but I was grateful to adjourn the trip till next morning. After sound sleep and a refreshing bath, I left the station on the morrow ; not without first perusing the visitors' book of compliments and grievances. But lo, there was no complaint, only praise on the part of the guests here quarantined against their will. Hence it is evident that with wise administration even the most unacceptable passes can be rendered endurable; nay, positively agreeable. Before departure I presented my provisions to Achmed, and supposed I might be affording my friendly surveillant a treat
^2 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW,
with wine and whisky. But when he declined them in aver- sion for alcohol, I had nothing else to do but forget my flasks and bottles. And if not broken, they may still be standing
there to-day.
Leopold Senfelder, M. D.
Vienna, Austria.
FATHEE OARLTON'S OPFEEINGS. A Clerical Story.
IT was May in Italy — Italia mistica. John Carlton, an English priest in traveling mufti, was journeying from Assisi to Perugia, in a shabby little carriage drawn by a very bony horse. He was rejoicing in his first sight of Umbria. Verde Umbria was now spread all around him. Many of the roads were bordered with white flowering acacia; the Judas tree showed its purple-red bloom; he looked upon the pink of the sainfoin, the rising green corn in the fields, the young oaks in spring freshness, olive groves silvery and grey, the small yellow flowers of the ilex peeping out of its sombre leafage, and in the hedges the perfumed honeysuckle, called by Italians " manine della Madonna ".^ The circling swal- lows were seen against the Italian blue sky. Perugia, augusta Perusiay one of the chief and most ancient of old Etruscan cities, now capital of the Province, built on the edge of a group of hills, russet-brown, grave, imposingly meritorious of her chequered history, of her endless associations, was above him.
It commands a magnificent prospect. On clear days one can see the whole ring of Umbrian cities, the two great highways to Rome, the extensive valley of the Tiber, with all Umbria in its ever-varying aspects lying at its feet. To the East is the holy city of Assisi, with Spello, Foligno, the dark ilex woods of Spoleto just visible, for the hill above Bettoma hides the town itself ; to the South is Todi, where the northern russet hills rise in unequal height till they touch the Apennines.
Father Carlton reveled in it all as they drove slowly up, recalling the well-known points in the vista gradually being
1 Little hands of Our Ladv.
FA THER CARL TON'S OFFERINGS. . ,
43 unfolded before him, feeling all its irresistible enchantment. His room on arrival at the hotel had a like prospect, making it hard to tear himself from the window of the exceptionally comfortable bedroom and reflect that he must, when refreshed by the hot water left in a covered can standing in the large basin, go and have some tea.
It was in the days before motors came hooting, grunting, and snorting noisily up from the valley station to the stately medieval town. Then it was very silent, but for the everlast- ing bells from some of the church towers, among the latter — there are about forty-two — the singularly beautiful Campanile of San Pietro. Even now there are not many carriages. The few gardens are hidden behind the old houses, though on many you notice hanging pots of flowers on iron sockets or rings so fastened as to hold them — daisies, carnations. One catches a glimpse of the fair faces of the women often bending over them, or as they are arranging the white and many-colored linen which Italian-fashion hangs from many windows.
There are magnificent town gates in Perugia, one with Etruscan foundations; there are curious winding streets with covered ways, through which the deadly winter winds blow with keen force; there are endless picturesque bits in this irreg- ularly built town, and as you tread the Via Vecchia with its lovely view framed in its arch, you remember that it has been used as a street for over two thousand years, and that in this place you are forever in touch with the past.
Father John Carlton opened his mail as he took his tea in the pretty hall with its palms and flowers, its easy chairs, its rockers, and little cosy tables. There were a few letters from friends — he had a good many and valued them, for he had practically no relatives, being the only child of only chil- dren; his two uncles were dead long ago.
Father Campbell, who was supplying during his absence wrote about some practical matters; and a letter was here, which he kept to the last, from the builder he had decided to employ to throw out the study and add to the veranda. The builder sent a plan and estimate, and off"ered to begin at once, so that it would be nearly done by his return. He en- larged on the fact that it would be a very great improve- ment to the house, and his face, somewhat severe in expression,
^ THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
took on a smile of content as in imagination he saw room for so many of his books, for he was a great collector. It was a capital idea of his, and perhaps next year he would enlarge the spare room above it and put a balcony there. The view over pretty Sussex country would be charming. Finishing his tea, he pushed his letters into his pocket and went out, walking down the flagged Corso which cleaves the tableland of the town in half, until he reached the Piazza del Duomo, where it was impossible for Father Carlton not to stop to ex- amine with interest the Fonte Maggiore, a wonderful fountain which stands near the Cathedral. Its triple basin is beauti- fully sculptured, and dates from the thirteenth century. He was intensely sentient to the atmosphere of place and time, for he loved Italy with a passion that had increased as he came to know her. Year after year he visited her to learn more of her treasures, to revisit old and beloved shrines of art or piety, congratulating himself always on his power to do so during his holiday, for he was a man of independent means. At other times he was quite content in his small Sussex country parish, and he felt God was very good to him.
He stayed musing and recalling the events of long ago which had taken place on that spot. There was the little pulpit outside the Cathedral wall from which St. Bernardine of Siena preached and watched the books of necromancy and the piles of dyed hair burned ; it was on the steps of this foun- tain that many nobles put the heads of their slaughtered ene- mies; it was in this Cathedral square they fought, for it has been truly said of the Perugians that " they always preferred Mars to Muse ".
Turning from the square with its fascinating history, John Carlton went round to the principal door of the Duomo and entered. After his few moments of prayer before the Master of the House, he went to kneel at the shrine of Our Lady of Grace — a picture fastened against a pillar which on that May evening, besides the nine ever-burning lamps, was framed in glass drop chandeliers with lighted candles, giving the place an air of jesta. Many girls and women crowded round, their gay, many-hued silk handkerchiefs arranged gracefully on their heads. Their dress, bodice, band, and apron were all of different colors, yet all sincerely harmonious. Many of the
FATHER CARLTON'S OFFERINGS. .5
young girls, with their grave, refined, tender faces, recalled the same childlike note so evident in the face of the Madonna as seen in the much venerated picture. There she stands, with her jewelled crown, a deep crimson curtain as background, relieving the dull pink of her dress, over which is her blue mantle lined with the fresh green of an Umbrian spring, her face, youthful and smiling, with the touch of sweet gravity, her hands lifted as if in wonderment at the infinite magnitude of her vocation — Our Lady of Grace — how dear she is to the heart of the many who, loving her picture, kneel in the shadowy building which guards the ring which, tradition says, was that of her betrothal.
There for a while he stayed, but, remembering a promised visit, he rose and went away toward the presbytery of a church some ten minutes off. He pulled the bell chain, and the old sacristan let him in with jubilant recognition of the padre inglesey whom he knew well, since every spring brought him to see the Signor Curato, to whose parlor he was now shown.
The English priest went instinctively to the window where away in the West the sun was reddening the sky, and in the near foreground was one roof above another, every hue of brown and grey lichen-stained tiles, with numbers of church towers, and, away beyond, the Vale of Umbria on which the evening shades were falling. The floor of the room was of stone, and a piece of matting lay under the table, on which was a lumen cristi from last Easter. Under a glass case was the Divine Infant clothed in a black velveteen frock with pink jacket, seated on some pine shavings, whilst tiny ducks dis- ported and sheep among vivid green foliage. The wax taper was twisted into various fanciful devices round about. There were a few wooden chairs set against the distempered walls. On the side of the room hung a large realistic crucifix and a few cheap oleographs — Our Lady, St. Joseph, St. Peter's of Rome, as well as photographs, cheaply framed, of the Signor Curato at various stages of his life, singly and in groups of clerical friends, whilst his father and mother occupied places of honor by themselves above the picture of Leo XIIL On a small table by itself was Martina's translation of the Bible into Italian, placed on a grey crochet woollen mat; above it on nails hung the palms of last Palm Sunday.
^5 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
The Signor Curato, Giuseppe Anacleto Rinari, had returned from a retreat at Lucca that very afternoon, the Priore leav- ing as he did so for a belated holiday to his peasant parents at Gubbio. The Curato, still under the spell of the silent days, went into the church, where as a rule some people could be found. It was close to the Duomo and was a popular church of a Religious Order. One old woman was asleep in a corner, her dog curled at her feet; a man with a basket full of empty rush-covered fiaschi knelt at Our Lady's shrine; his lips were moving and his face was full of entreaty — he had a child at home dying.
But Giuseppe Anacleto was bowed before the high altar, his offering before his mind, his whole being shaken with the force of his earnest prayer for courage to make it. Truly, what God had asked in this retreat was a great thing! It meant the giving of that which he prized to a degree little appre- hended until he began to realize fearsomely what he was being asked to do. He started — his mind was so far away from the present — when Onofrio, very slow of movement entered from the sacristy and told him that the padre inglese Wcis there. He had forgotten to ask for his letters — he received very few — since his return, or he would have found one couched in the English priest's pedantic Italian, saying he hoped to be in Perugia and would call that evening.
As Father Carlton stood, enjoying the marvellous view, the latch was suddenly lifted and his friend entered, full of gladness at seeing him again. The visitor was soon seated in the one quasi-easy chair of which the room boasted.
The Signor Curato, a man of forty, though the fact that his tall slight figure was somewhat bent, made him look older, was usually quiet in manner and voice, exceptionally so for an Italian; but his dark eyes flashed with pleasurable feeling at the unexpected visit of the priest.
"You did not come last year — how was that?" asked the Curato, after assuring himself that Father Carlton was well.
" I went to Sicily," said the English priest in somewhat la- bored Italian, " and stayed on all my time. It was a disap- pointment, I assure you, for Perugia always has to come into my program."
" If you will stay and sup with me — the Signor Priore is away — simple fare, but O you will be il henvenuto."
FATHER CARLTON'S OFFERINGS. a»,
47
For half a second the Englishman hesitated. He thought of the meal in the well-appointed dining-room — those pleasant Americans he had made acquaintance with last night at Assisi arrived just as he had come out — the excellent dinner, the iced Orvieto ascuitto ; and yet, he had but three days to give to Perugia ; he knew how the Signor Curato valued his visits. He assented, and his host went away hastily to tell Orlando's old sister Agnese, who acted as housekeeper, of the guest stay- ing for cena.
There was the yellow vino nostrale, which his host mixed with sparkling water from the Nocera springs, whence Perugia is supplied with drinking water. But Father Carlton, who was somewhat particular about his food and drink, took it plain, finding it, though a vino sincere^ not at all to his taste, any more than the thin brodo di fagioli, guiltless of " eyes " denoting oil or butter; or the greasy risotto, or the hard lesso ; and the bread, which was casa linga,^ was sour and stale.
The heavy white plates, discolored by age, were of the com- monest; many were chipped. Tooth-picks bristled between the receptacles for salt and pepper. All, including the table- cloth, was of the roughest. There was no roast, no dessert, the Signor Curato, who loved hospitality, apologized suffi- ciently, but not excessively, for his courtesy was too inborn. And so the two men supped. All the while Father Carlton was more than ever before struck with the poverty of the place, — one chair badly needed mending; the window had a broken pane; the piece of carpet under the table was thin and worn ; old Agnese's dress was very much patched and in parts almost ragged; while the Curato's shiny cassock was as ancient as the shoes which his friend's sharp eyes had noticed as be- ing sadly shabby and old.
The Curato was very fond of Father Carlton, who was some fifteen years his senior. On the other hand Father Carlton felt himself strangely attracted to the poor priest whose ac- quaintance he had made years ago at Assisi, when, as an Anglican clergyman, he had visited the place, with its atmos- phere so charged with holy memories, and its very soil made sacred by the worship of the millions whose feet have trodden it on their way to the sanctuaries of the Poor Man of Assisi.
2 Home-made.
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St. Francis himself had walked about the streets of the little town of red and brown houses, and his holy eyes had often rested on the blue hills and the vineyards, the dear olive groves of the beloved Vale of Umbria.
"And now you have come from Assisi?" asked the Curate, as the Englishman leaned back in the uncomfortable chair which he had resumed after supper.
" Drove over this afternoon. I was two nights at the Subasio," said Father Carlton; " yesterday there was Exposi- tion, and I remembered our first meeting, ah! — how many years ago? "
" It must be fifteen," said the Curato. "And shortly after- ward you became a Christian."
Father Carlton let pass without comment the expression used to convey that he had become a Catholic, knowing that argument was useless, and that the Italians — particularly among the less educated — would always look on a convert to Catholicism as upon a newly-made Christian — stato fatto Cristiano. He shook his shaggy hair, which had been white for the last ten years; he remembered that day well, the quiet, reverent people all crowding to the great sanctuary, the gloom of the entrance to the lower church contrasting with the forest of candles round the monstrance. The brilliancy of the lights had enabled him to see the marvellous frescoes of Giotto which illuminate the low-groined roof and which record the glories of St. Francis. He had been specially struck then, as he had been on the day before, by their wonderful and undying charm.
" I am particularly glad to see you. Father Carlton," said the Curato, stumbling at the English name, which however he was determined to master ; " for I have some news for you — I am leaving Perugia — I — at least I hope so."
"Ah, really? A sudden decision?"
" Yes. I am going — even now at my age, to try my voca- tion as a Franciscan — one of the Friars Minor. I think now, as I look back, it is strange that, though I was born in Perugia and have spent my life in the land of St. Francis, the call did not come to me before — never in the remotest way — ^but now — now — my Lady Poverty has called me." He paused a moment, " I must go." There had been going on
FATHER CARLTON'S OFFERINGS, Ar.
49
in the heart of Father Carlton for some time past a sharp struggle as to his own rightful attitude toward this virtue of holy poverty. The words of his friend strangely affected him, although his mind had been practically made up on the subject; he only wondered how the words of the Curato could have shaped themselves as an expression of his own silent resolution, taken as he had left the chapel a little while ago. He felt a kindred call, though it was not to take him from his present charge in the cure of souls. Yes ! there was to be no more looking back, no more hesitation — he would make the offering to test the reality of this call.
" It is that then that attracts you — Poverty?" asked Father Carlton, after a silence, for he was greatly surprised.
''Yes," said the Curato, ''more than anything; though of course I could have it in any Order — it is that of St. Francis to which I am drawn."
Father Carlton was silent. His eyes wandered round the poor room, and came back to the shabbily dressed priest, with his threadbare cassock — all eloquent of poverty, if not penury. How much more could the Curato desire.
" It is poverty and the obedience together — the religious life in fact. The poverty of Bethlehem, of Nazareth."
" One can live in that spirit surely as a Secular," said Father Carlton. " There's a sitting loosely to the things of this world. In my case I have had no severe financial trials certainly, but many have, and to obey the inner leadings of the Holy Spirit, in submitting to it in all things, is obedience — one perhaps more hidden, really more precious, than the mere resignation of external goods. So at least I take it, and so more or less do those who go deeply into the obligations of the priestly life."
" Yes, sictiro ; but Padre, I cannot argue — I cannot explain it — you know all that the ascetical writers say about the religious life. It is not for all, only for those who are called — as I believe I am. Of course, to be a priest at all there are sacrifices — the love of wife and child. It is but human to desire these and to marry ; that is where the great crucifixion of the ordinary priest's life lies. Not so however to me," he added simply, speaking to his friend as man to man, unlike the way in which, under the somewhat artificial conditions of
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life, people usually do. " To me, as to many, this involves no renunciation, and the life and duties of a secular priest I love all too well, but I love and have my liberty too, and poverty truly taken includes taking the vow of obedience, the absolute nakedness which can say with the holy Thomas a Kempis, ' I am nothing, I have nothing, and can do nothing.' It is that, Padre, that I desire and that I shall find in its perfection in the life for which I pray I may be worthy."
" That means, I take it, that we have and are nothing, save through the merits of Christ. Even the greatest saint must say that," said the English priest as his shaggy white eye- brows twitched and were drawn together — a habit of his when much moved, as he was at the Curato's words, all the more convincing for being spoken calmly.
" But of course they can be taken in another sense as touching on the religious life. I hope you may attain to your desire," he added in cold tones, which were untrue to the fervent feelings now stirring within him and which were char- acteristic of his temperament. In truth, he was in a white heat of emotion, though his somewhat perfunctory farewell to his old friend betrayed none of it.
The Signor Curato watched him go to the comer, and then Father Carlton heard him close the heavy little door, and he felt himself in the velvet softness of the May evening, wind- less and calm. He walked mechanically along. In the bril- liant moonlight showed the swept flags of the Corso, the Um- brian Picadilly, where seemingly everybody in Perugia was out walking. The tourists were promenading, and chatter- ing, gesticulating natives were there too; the cafes were brightly lit, and the magnificent Municipal Palace, with its handsome windows and fine portal, above which are three saints, were all discovered clearly in the silver light. But he saw these things only as at a theatre. Though his strong passionate temper was under the control won by years of labor — for he had learnt travailler son charactere — that night he was angered, as the voice, speaking to his inmost soul, im- periously demanded a hearing.
His thoughts ran swiftly. After poignant spiritual and mental suffering he had taken the step, in faith and courage, leaving the known for the unknown, to become a Catholic.
FATHER CARLTON'S OFFERINGS. cj
Then he became a priest. And though the strength of spirit seemed spent and he could only rejoice in a heart at rest, a mind assuredly satisfied, it was done. But now — yes — a step further, one which he had never for a moment anticipated, but which he knew might be of sacramental worth to him be- cause of the corresponding cost. It was not a call to the re- ligious life. Had it been so, even at his age he would have obeyed. It was in a sense something more difficult to his na- ture to do ; it was to bring the spirit of poverty more insist- ently to bear on his life. Facing his life as he had never done before, he saw it as he had never thought possible. As in crystal he viewed clearly his own easeful life illuminated and tested by a searchlight; no great, excessive luxury certainly — ^but a small well-appointed rectory, his excellent servants, two elderly sisters, his small parish, little work, means to travel — ah ! poverty had not stamped her hallmark on him !
Wrong ? No, he knew it was not ; and that his comfort and prosperity did not free him from anxieties about his flock, from the everyday vexations and worries which fall to the lot of most, and that the life was one which could most truly be lived to the greater glory of God. But not if called to something higher — ah, here was the crux.
The evening was passing on ; and in those Perugian streets which in their day have witnessed so much warfare, John Carlton fought the worst of his battle. He " wrestled not with flesh and blood," but with temptation to follow a path of little resistance instead of one that was sorely against the grain of a naturally ease-loving temperament.
The big hall with palms and rockers and easy chairs to- night had pleasant people chatting and talking. A German professor with whom he had travelled lately to Orvieto, re- cognizing Father Carlton, came up warmly to greet him; and the Americans begged him to share their iced drinks and little cakes. But all the while he was with them he felt as in a dream, and after a sleepless night he said his Mass in a neigh- boring church, and went for a long walk through the beautiful old town, attractive and picturesque at every turn. Several of the doors of the ancient houses were most charmingly adorned with sculptures in pietra serena or travertine of flowers, ribbons, etc., as well as artistic and finely executed
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friezes; and he noted some of the '' doors of the dead " now bricked up and never used, which in some very old houses are just wide enough to admit of the passing of a coffin. These walled up openings are found alongside the house door. The superstition existed in Etruscan times that Death must never be allowed to pass a second time through the principal door. Through the parte del mortuccio, only used by the dead, the spirit of death passed out with the corpse, after which the narrow door was closely locked and the safety of the living thus ensured.
With his hands clasped behind his back he wandered about, his brain working hard. Whatever might be right for others — he would not judge them — he would in future spend less on himself in many ways of which he alone knew. He would make a stricter rule for himself and master himself to keep it. He would strike courageously at the very root of many things which conflicted with the higher line in his life than that he had taken hitherto or had imagined it was necessary to fol- low. His memory, which was exceptionally good, at that moment, recalled the words of a few lines he had once read of Saint Charles Borromeo, addressed to priests : " Live per- sonally in such poverty that you may be able to give for your churches, for the adornment of your altars, and for sacred objects — not the overflow of superfluity, but the savings stolen by self-denial from your necessary maintenance." It would not be at all difficult to see what to do, but to do it. It would be hard on the comparatively free but most difficult life of a secular priest to say " no " where he had said " yes " to many perfectly innocent pleasures, to some tastes good and whole- some in themselves, but not for him to indulge in. Since their renunciation had once been asked for by the voice which had spoken to him individually, should he not put his offering, made up of many and continued sacrifices, into the Sacred Hand where they would, by its holy touch be transmuted into everlasting riches? Nor for that motive only, though he might begin with it ; but it might lead him on by the power inherent in all sacrifice to being able to say that each action was prompted by love.
SOMETHING MORE ABOUT THE TIRESOME SERMON. ct^
Et amo, et amabo Te Solum, quia Rex meus es : Et solum, quia Deus es.
And it did.
John Carlton, as he made his way up the dusty road below the Giardinetto, went with a lighter heart, and before doing anything else he went to the Post Office to telegraph to the builder that he would require nothing done to his presbytery. On his return he wrote a kind letter to an old lady who had offered to send him for a tour through Spain in the autumn with her brother, to decline.
Just three years later, while Padre Leo — the ex-Curato — was laboring in his Community, experiencing great joy at the attainment of his desire. Father Carlton was to be found in the same Sussex presbytery. But the church had been en- larged; schools were about to be built; the parish seemed to have new life in it; and there were great hopes that some exiled poor Clares from France, now established in a small house near, might some day have a Convent built for them; the great fact of a religious house, a centre of penance and reparation, bringing its blessing on the place.
Of how much Father Carlton had to do with all this, no one was cognisant, for though he accounted simply for all gifts received, only God knew how many were the multitudinous acts of poverty included in his own personal offerings.
L. E. DOBREE.
SOMETHING MOEE ABOUT THE TIEESOME SEEMON. Monotony of Style.
A FRENCH writer has defined eloquence as the art of say- ing something to some one. A sermon is talked ; it has a definite subject and a definite audience. A tiresome sermon is often such because it is addressed to none in particular and because it is writing, not speaking, although it may be de- livered without paper or book. Many tiresome sermons are things read from the tablets of the memory.- They are es- says, not talks. They have the whole world for an audience,
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not any particular part of it. Unless one speaks extempoi and there is some hesitation about advising that course— there is every likelihood that the written sermon will not often rise out of the style of print. It is somewhat incongruous to talk to a sheet of paper through a fountain-pen or a typewriter. The writer of a sermon may begin with, " my dear brethren ", but that is the only sign that he is talking to any one. The audience disappears from his sight in the process of the com- position, and he is so engrossed in the work of formulating his thoughts in his mind and casting them into suitable ex- pression that there is no attempt made or no energy left to direct the composition toward living ears rather than project it upon dead paper.
Strange, too, as it may seem, the more care is given to a sermon, the more likely is it to become an essay. Th© preacher himself may have in view a volume of sermons, or the occasion which has called for more careful composition, will likely be one that will be honored with an account in the press. In either case the sermon is written for the eye, rather than for the ear, to be read rather than to be heard. The audience is not a definite one, but the whole world. Instead of saying something to some one, he writes something — more usually anything — ^to anyone.
An Essay has no Definite Audience. What is the effect upon a speech of an audience, either actually present or distinctly imagined ? Fortunately it is not hard to realize. Read the Congressional Record containing the speeches given in regular debate and the issues given up to the reproduction of memorial discourses. The debates, es- pecially in those parts where the speaker is interrupted or likely to be, are vigorous, direct, lively; whereas the me- morials are wearisome biographical essays, vapid, exagger- ated, even bombastic, and containing tasteless flowers of speech which would shrivel in the faintest heat of conflict. It is true indeed that panegyric belongs to a different type of oratory from debate and cannot be as direct. So much the better for our present purpose. The contrast in Congress may well il- lustrate the difference between a talk in the pulpit and a chapter of a new book read, or as good as read, in the same place.
SOMETHING MORE ABOUT THE TIRESOME SERMON. cc
Demosthenes has always been pointed to as more direct than Cicero. Cicero has more commonplaces, more frequent digressions to the general truth, the particular application of which is under discussion. The difference, we believe, will be found due in a large part to the audience. Demosthenes spoke before the people in the Athenian assembly, with the opposition watching intently every word. Demosthenes felt their presence and stripped himself of the luxuriance of style. " There is Phocion," he said, " the pruner of my periods." Cicero, on the other hand, spoke most frequently in the senate, or if he spoke in the court, he was usually chosen to sum up the case and make the emotional appeal, because of his power in moving juries. Is it not worthy too of note that Cicero wrote books and no doubt looked toward publication, whereas Demosthenes has left us only speeches? A like contrast, il- lustrating the same difference between the essay and the speech, between dissertations and debates, between writers and speakers, is found in Burke and Fox. Burke was called the dinner-bell of the house of Commons. He was writing books, composing philosophy and emptying the benches, while Fox spoke far into the night and even to the next morning and prodded tired members into constant attention. A few years ago the present writer had an experience which showed the difference between talking and, what might be called, dis- coursing. One of the most eloquent orators of our time was addressing an audience in Faneuil Hall, Boston. His speech was frequently interrupted with cheers and applause. When, however, the speaker was somewhat advanced in his topic, he entered upon a digression, consisting of lengthy descrip- tions of an event not directly connected with the subject of the meeting. The people who a minute or two before had been applauding, began to rise and leave the hall. The orator finally noted the exodus, dropped his historical essay, went back to his talk and kept his audience attentive and enthusias- tic to the end. The New York Times said recently in an editorial : " The old style of declamatory speech died a natural death. Its revival would be inconsistent with the spirit of the age; it would savor of an anachronism; our- best speakers have a colloquial manner. But they are too few." This voices the modern demand for talks rather than disquisitions.
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A better way still to appreciate the effect of saying some- thing to someone rather than of composing for the wide, wide world, is found in letters, letters, be it understood, which are real letters, not masquerading as such because of an initial " Dear Sir ". In a letter the audience is a definite in- dividual to whom everything is addressed with a directness that is scarcely possible even in the best speeches. Imagine a letter-writer forgetting the one he addresses and delivering himself of learned discourses. It would be easier to imagine a man transmitting over a telephone a chapter of Burke's On the Sublime and Beautiful. How the thought in a letter is pointed and epigrammatic, how it discards useless digres- sions and delivers itself of no ponderous platitudes, how free it is from all pretence at fine writing or elaborate theorizing! How the sentences are light-footed, running on as a rule, but stopping now and then to allow the insertion of a passing re- mark, never stiffening into the self-conscious firmness which would come upon them if they felt they were to make their debut in print, nor dragging heavily along under the weight of some philosophical profundity. But you will say letters are trivial and chatty and deal with a series of unconnected facts and are for one individual, while sermons are quite the contrary. True enough! Nor is it intended to assert that letters are sermons. Yet letters do however illustrate the effect of an audience upon composition, and that fact would be sufficient reason for mentioning them in this connexion.
Fortunately, however, we can go farther with the illustra- tion. We have in existence and at hand letters on serious and sacred subjects, treating of the highest truths of our faith, letters addressed to a whole congregation, having all the spontaneity, freshness, and directness of that style of composi- tion without their ephemeral and trivial character. These let- ters are the Epistles of St. Paul ; letters which are true ser- mons. St. Augustine in the fourth book of his Doctrina Christiana, which may be well styled the first Christian rhet- oric, has enthusiastic studies in St. Paul's eloquence. The great Doctor of the Church, who had himself been a teacher of rhetoric, takes no exaggerated view of rhetorical precepts. " Often," he sa5/s, " do we find speakers without precepts sur- passing those who have mastered them, but no one has ever
SOMETHING MORE ABOUT THE TIRESOME SERMON. 57
been eloquent without hearing or reading speeches." He advo- cates, in consequence, the reading and imitation of Scripture and says, " I could, did leisure permit, point out in the Sacred Scriptures all the good qualities and beauties of eloquence." He declares too that the reader while engrossed with the sense of the sacred text will insensibly be saturated with the style. To enforce his teaching on the use of Scripture for preachers, he does not disdain to subject an eloquent passage of St. Paul to close analysis, pointing out in detail how clauses and phrases vary in number and length and nature, how state- ments are mingled with questions or interrupted with paren- theses, which we may call the foot-notes of the spoken word. The passage thus analyzed is II Cor. 9: 6-30, and surely there cannot be found anywhere anything less tiresome, anything more direct, more unlike a dogmatical disquisition and yet anything better fitted to convey the truths of faith with de- finiteness of audience and liveliness of the spoken word.
An Essay is Written to be Read.
An essay is written for the eye; a sermon is spoken for the ear and is profoundly influenced by the consciousness in the speaker of addressing an audience rather than of print- ing his thoughts for the world in general. An eye looking into your eye, an ear heeding your every word, a mind to be affected now or never, these key a man up, make his thoughts brisk and energetic and promote greater efforts to be clear and direct. There is all the difference between composing a sermon for readers and composing for listeners that there is between working by the day or working by contract, between laboring alone and under the eye of a master. The fertile distinction between essay and talk deals a hard blow to tire- some sermons and the distinction has not yet exhausted its possibilities. In the spoken word there is an animation that seems out of place in an essay. There are indeed essays which are talks just as there are talks that are essays. Lamb's chatty, vivacious essays are really bits of earnest conversa- tion. Such essays, however, are exceptions. To write con- versations looks like pretence or artificiality. What is natural and inevitable in conversation seems forced and out of place when writing-paper takes the place of a companion. So the
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whole Style of sermons when they are written, is likely to doff all the animation of conversation.
What are all the so-called figures of words but the traits of the spoken word classified and ticketed with technical names? A recent writer on rhetoric has no difficulty in showing by a cleverly imagined scene that all the figures of speech are daily occurring around us. It would, no doubt, surprise many, as it surprised Moliere's Upstart, to learn he was speaking prose, to learn that they are indulging every day in such tremendous things as conversion, complexion, conduplication, asyndeton or dissolution, polysyndeton, anticipation, correction, doubt, communication, apostrophe, hypotoposis and aposiopesis. The list would send an ordinary man to the nearest doctor. Yet what do all these terms do but formulate in scientific language the differences between what is written and what is spoken? In the light of this truth, is it remarkable to learn that St. Paul abounds in these so-called figures of speech ? Some will have it he must have derived all his rhetoric from Greek schol- ars in Tarsus. However that may be St. Paul's Epistles fur- nish us with endless examples of the most ornate figures of speech. The strict climax, a combination of repetition of the preceding thought with the ordinary climax, is rare enough in literature, because its artifice is too evident. Cicero has but few examples and Demosthenes still fewer, while St. Paul has, besides others elsewhere, three examples in Romans. " We glory also in tribulations, knowing that tribulation work- eth patience, and patience trial, and trial hope, and hope con- foundeth not ".^ Oxymoron, a seeming contradi|ct{ion in terms, is another figure in which art is apparent. It is fre- quently found in the poets and not uncommon among the orators. It is a favorite beauty with St. Paul and takes no small part in imparting vivacity to his style. A beautiful example occurs in the middle of the eloquent sixth chapter of the II Corinthians. "As deceivers, and yet true; as un- known, and yet known; as dying and behold we live; as chastised and not killed; as sorrowful and yet always rejoic- ing; as needy, yet enriching many; as having nothing, and possessing all things." Paronomasia, or play on words, is St. Paul's most frequent figure. This is surely a most remark-
1 Rom. 5 : 3 ; cf. 8 : 29 ; lo : 14.
SOMETHING MORE ABOUT THE TIRESOME SERMON. t^
able fact that St. Paul should play on words, should indulge in what are really puns, although serious ones. Most of these, of course, are lost to us in the English translation. Twenty- one instances are cited by authorities. The famous example of paronomasia in Demosthenes' Speech on the Crown, No. ii, is almost duplicated in Romans 12:3. Demosthenes says, " With all your guile, Aschines, you were so guileless as to be beguiled into thinking," etc., while St. Paul is rendered thus by Farrar: " Not to be high-minded above what we ought to be minded but to be minded so as to be sober-minded ". St. Paul plays too on the name of Onesimus, profitable. " I be- seech thee for my son whom I have begotten in my bands, Onesimus, who hath been heretofore unprofitable to thee, but now is profitable both to thee and to me ".
Attention has been called to these more striking figures to show how St. Paul made his language strain itself almost in an effort to be varied and interesting and to avoid tedious monotony. It is unnecessary to mention instances of the more usual figures which abound in every letter of St. Paul. Even in the use of ordinary figures such as repetition he strives for point. The well-known passage, " one Lord, one faith, one baptism," is still more striking in the original Greek, where " one " is carried through the three genders of the nominative case. Thirty different kinds of figures in all are pointed out by Farrar.^ It is to these figures we may ascribe the extra- ordinary energy of St. Paul's style, an energy which made St. Jerome say : "As often as I read him, I seem to hear not words but the rolling of thunder. They appear to be the words of a simple and guileless rustic ; of one who could not lay snares nor escape them ; yet look where you will they are lightning flashes. He is persistent in his attempt; he captures anything he attacks; he retreats in order to be victorious; he feigns flight in order the better to slay his foe." *
An Essay is almost all Reasoning.
The sacred essay of the pulpit lacks point because its audi- ence is vaguely visualized ; lacks life because it shuns the emphasis of a lively style, which looms too prominently in
' The Life and Work of St. Paul, Excursus II, p. 693. ^ Ep. ad Pammacb. 68, 13.
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print. Figures have an artificial sound to nimble critics who can outstrip in their thoughts the speaker and, while they are waiting for him to catch up, can leisurely and coldly dissect his language. Figures have an artificial look on the written page where the eye can see a dozen repetitions at a glance or reread a passage until its art is manifest. But the inex- perienced ear has not the power of the cold critic or the wide- reaching eye. It takes in one thing at a time; it does not anticipate and with difficulty reflects. Impression must be had upon it while the words are setting its auditory nerves tingling. If the style is direct and vigorous, the ear does not analyze. It is too busy with the thought and does not, like critic or reader, separate the thought from the expression.
As the true listener is more simple and unreflecting, the true speaker is more likely to be expansive and emotional. Emotion shrinks away abashed from the written page. There are indeed earnest essays couched in burning words. As a rule, however, essays are predominantly intellectual and not emotional. They aim at conveying the truth clearly, not at steeping it in fire and fervor that it may touch the heart. I should be very glad to have every reader thrill with the con- viction that it is necessary to talk and not to deliver essays in the pulpit; but I hesitate to enforce the lesson with the intense emotional appeal that one would naturally use before an audience. I fear the cold print; I dread the inflexibility of reason. Logic chills the heart. The truth is so insistent that it be put fully and clearly and orderly with division and subdivision and rigid proofs and irrefutable conclusions, that emotion never has a chance at all. Dogmatic disquisitions take the place of sermons. A thesis is put into an essay and another tiresome half-hour is the result.
Say something to someone. If a few sparks of the fire which rages sometimes in conversation, were thrown into a thesis, trying to masquerade as a sermon, there would be less tiresomeness in the pulpit. The essay is dull because it never flames into feeling. Here again St. Paul's Epistles will be the best school for unlearning tiresomeness. His great heart beats volcanic at the depths of his thought and his style heaved irregularly, tossed and broken by the pent-up heat and force. He cries out and vehemently protests. He lifts his voice in
SOMETHING MORE ABOUT THE TIRESOME SERMON. 6i
fear; he tenderly entreats; he is shocked; he is horrified; he is aglow with love and aflame with anger. Never can such emotion be tiresome. Mark the feeling surging to the surface in the eleventh chapter of the Second Epistle to the Corin- thians : " Would to God that you could bear with some little of my folly: but do bear with me. For I am jealous of you with the jealousy of God. . . . Although I be rude in speech, yet not in knowledge. Or did I commit a fault, humbling myself that you might be exalted ? Because I preached unto you the Gospel of God freely? . . . The truth of Christ is in me that this glorying shall not be broken off" in me in the regions of Achaia. Wherefore? Because I love you not? God knoweth it ... I say again, (let no man think me to be foolish, otherwise take me as one foolish, that I also may glory a little). ... I speak according to dishonor, as if we had been weak in this part. Wherein if any man dare (I speak foolishly). I dare also. They are Hebrews? So am I. They are Israelites? So am I. They are the seed of Abraham? So am I. They are the ministers of Christ? (I speak as one less wise). I am more. In many more labors, in prisons more frequently, in stripes above measure, in deaths often. Of the Jews five times did I receive forty stripes save one." And then, after a triumphant recounting of details, " Who is weak and I am not weak? Who is scandalized and I am not on fire? . . . The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who is blessed forever, knoweth that I lie not."
What would become of the tiresome sermon if it felt the earthquake shock of such talking and such stormy emotion? Even the elocution would immensely profit by this process. No one uses preachers' tones in conversation, and if the style of our sermons had the directness of a letter and the traits of talk which rhetoricians call figures, and above all if those ser- mons melted their logic in the lava of feeling, all of which St. Paul does, the sermon would cease to be an essay and would to a large extent cease to be tiresome.
Francis P. Donnelly, S.J.
Poughkeepsie, New York.
52 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
EEMIHISOENOES OF MAYHOOTH,
III. " A Student's Daily Day."
I HAVE read somewhere of a priest who, recounting his im- pressions of collegiate life, with refreshing candor de- clared that his most dreaded nightmare was one which brought him back in spirit to his college days, and that the climax of its hideousness was reached when in fancy the sound of the morning 6 o'clock bell was wafted to his subconscious dreaming faculties. Certainly the stroke of the first bell on a cold, dark, winter's morning was not such as to awaken pleas- urable or responsive feelings. It was what might be termed the bete noire of a student's existence. Weird tales are told by older priests of the days before the introduction of heating apparatus, when the walls streamed with moisture and the water- jugs in the student's rooms after a hard night's frost were found to contain solid ice. Times have changed. On the analogy of the different ages of advancing civilization, that period might appropriately be likened to the stone age. The iron age is now well advanced and when we shall see the introduction of a daily newspaper into the college libraries and one or two other social improvements which will readily occur to every student's mind, we shall be well on toward the golden age of what we might term college civilization. How- ever, the conditions of a student's life are now quite different from what they were twenty years ago. Wonderful changes have been effected, and all for the benefit and advantage of the students. What with the introduction of a perfect heating system into every room, class-hall, and library, an equally perfect installation of electric-lighting, swimming baths, etc., etc., the material comforts of the students leave little to be desired. In other respects their lot may not appear quite so roseate, at least to students of an older generation. Rules are now more numerous and more rigidly enforced, while the increasing number of subjects which of late years are being added to the curriculum, entails a continuous mental and physical effort which must prove a severe test of endurance to any but really gifted students.
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63
It will be generally admitted, I think, that of recent inno- vations the General Vacation at Christmas represents to a Maynooth student the Summum Bonum of material gratifica- tion. Under the old system, while most of us had to remain in the college during the Christmas recess, others of the stu- dents were free to go out after their examinations were con- cluded. This was an arrangement depending entirely on the will of the Bishops, who legislated in the matter, each for his respective diocese. A few of the Bishops had made it a hard and fast rule that their students were not to be allowed to go out. Others allowed more freedom to their students. The departure of these latter did not tend to make more pleas- ant the lot of their less fortunate brethren who were com- pelled to remain behind. The greatest diversion we could hope for or obtain was the President's permission to visit Dublin for a day; but even that permission was not always readily granted. Indeed it was sometimes impossible to get a hearing from the latter; and even when we were fortunate enough to obtain an interview, it frequently ended by our being promptly ushered to the door, when the first inkling of our business began to dawn in his venerable head. There was one student of my acquaintance who, having exhausted all orthodox and conventional methods, thought to effect a coup d'etat by appealing to the old gentleman's vanity. The fact that he had already been repulsed twice did not in any way damp his ardor or abate his self-assurance, and with a hope that the President would have forgotten all about the previous interviews, he went up to his rooms with his plan of operations very carefully thought out.
" My Lord,'' he began, " I understand, my Lord, that the Bishops of Ireland have invested you with plentitude of juris- diction in regard to the students of this college. May I have your permission, my Lord, to go to-morrow to Dublin? "
" Most of the Bishops, and Archbishops (ahem!) too, have been so gracious, I am flattered to say, but at the same time, Mr. O'Connor, I must decline to grant you the permission you ask."
" But, Monsignor "
" That will do now ; if you really have business in Dublin and wish to go there, you must first (ahem!) have your Bishop's permission in writing."
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" But, Doctor Gargan, the Bishop leaves everything in your hands."
'' Your Bishop, I regret to say, does not, and besides, even if he did " (moving quickly toward the door) '* even if he did — " but the remainder of the sentence was lost on O'Con- nor. He probably felt he could supply it in his own mind, and with a curt, unceremonious '' Good-day, Father Gargan", he made his way down the stairs with all possible haste.
A group of students who were evidently bent on a similar errand, were at the foot of the stairs eagerly awaiting the result of this interview, but it did not take long to convince them that when a finished tactician of O'Connor's status had failed, it would be a hopeless waste of energy for them to try ; and although O'Connor's method of diplomacy had warmly commended itself to them, they seemed to be unanimously of opinion that had he only persevered in his first and original mode of address, the interview would doubtless have had a much more pleasant and satisfactory termination; to all of which O'Connor gloomily signified approval, attributing his want of success to the fact that when he saw he was making no impression he completely lost his temper.
The first official duty of a student's day was morning prayer. It was read by the deans in their respective divi- sions at 6.30, when all students were supposed to be in their places in the oratory. The athletic prowess displayed by some belated students, rushing down the stairs just on the stroke of the clock, was marvelous to behold, and was such as might turn a troupe of professional acrobats green with envy. There was a story told of a student who once by way of experiment made the descent by means of the bell rope. Having done so, he evidently came to the conclusion that the stairs, if less rapid, entailed less danger of breaking his neck. At all events it is not recorded that he ever attempted the feat again. Few of the students were ever late for prayers; apart from other considerations, the consequences of habitual negligence in this important duty might be found to be unpleasantly serious at the end of the academic term.
After morning prayer half an hour was devoted to medita- tion— on Sunday the dean delivered a lecture instead — and then the students assisted at Holy Mass. There was one Very
REMINISCENCES OF MAYNOOTH. 5^
Venerable, a dear old man, who sometimes said the commu- nity Mass for the Divinity students. He was one of the spiritual directors of the college, and was among the holiest and most conscientious priests it has ever been my fortune to know. He has since gone to his happy reward. At Mass, however, he was painfully slow, and at the consumption of the Sacred Species he was particularly painstaking and exact. Always careful to the point of scrupulosity, he never seemed to be thoroughly satisfied that all the Sacred Fragments had been collected from the corporal, and would return to it time and again, holding the paten this way and that to allow the light to fall on it with a view to detecting any minute frag- ment that might remain.
Some of the fourth year's divines one day made bold to mention the matter to him and to twit him about it in a jocose way.
** Father C — *', they said, " do you know what the students are saying? "
"What is it, child?"
" Well ! that you keep looking, and admiring yourself in the paten."
"Do they say so, now. My ! oh, my ! Ungrateful boys, how unkind ! "
After that, in our oratory at any rate, his Mass was always finished within a reasonable time. Quite in contrast to him, but no less conscientious, was another priest who used occa- sionally to say Mass for us. It is related somewhere of a Canon of Winchester that he could give any other of the Canons to "Pontius Pilate" in the Creed, and beat him. With- out wishing to be irreverent, I should say that this particular priest could begin Mass when any other priest was at the Gospel, and finish before him. He had a natural aptitude for rapidity of movement and quickness of speech. Different natures are differently constituted, and he doubtless felt that the danger of distraction was in his case considerably lessened by performing the sacred ceremony without avoidable delay.
The hour between Mass and breakfast was ostensibly set apart for study, though it was not infrequently devoted to the completion of a hasty and unfinished toilet and setting the rooms in order ; the rest of the hour was passed with one eye
65 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
on the book and another on the clock, and an ear waiting for the first sound of the breakfast bell as 8.30 approached. It is only natural to suppose that no one was by any chance ever late for this particular or any similar function. Although in no sense a triumph of the culinary art or what the dilettanti would term gastronomic metaphysics, the food, considering the enormous crowd that had daily to be catered for, left little to be desired either in the matter of quantity or quality. We had few luxuries, it is true, but meals were all the more wholesome because of that. Chronic indigestion and consti- pation unhappily played havoc with the health of many stu- dents, due, I believe, to the abnormal proportion of calcium which the water contains, and which it would seem is de- posited in the form of sediment in the alimentary tubes just as carbon is deposited in the boilers of a locomotive or in an ordinary kitchen kettle. At least such was the explanation vouchsafed to me by a student who, from painful experience and careful study of the malady, professed to speak with ex- pert knowledge on the matter, and who could dilate on the mysticism of gastronomic alchemy with far more fluency and brilliancy than he could, say, on the essence of habitual grace or the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. It was pitiable to see the wreck which it made of the health of some poor students, and at the time when the regular Christmas vacation had not yet been instituted it was by no means uncommon for students to be obliged to take an extended vacation in the middle of the term, a proceeding which, whilst it no doubt proved highly beneficial to their health, afterward entailed considerable labor and trouble in making up lost ground in class.
During meals strict silence was observed in the refectory — I mean, of course, apart from the terrific din which is neces- sarily occasioned by the frequent clashing of 500 knives and forks with a corresponding number of plates, not to mention the sonorous tones of the reader in the pulpit. " The har- mony of the dinner table," Le Gallienne remarks, " is a music first composed in the kitchen, transferred to notation on the menu, and finally performed in a skilful melody of digestion." Whether all these elements are essential to a successful and satisfactory meal I do not profess to know, but I do know that
REMINISCENCES OF MAYNOOTH.
67
there was no time when the students seemed more in harmony with themselves and with everything else than when the bell summoned them to the refectory. A very worthy priest of my acquaintance makes it a point to extend hospitality twice a year to a number of young priests and students in the shape of an invitation to dinner. There is a careful and rigid exclu- sion of the elder brethren of the cloth, his idea being that, after all, the young fellows are the only people worth giving a dinner to, as they alone know how to appreciate and enjoy it ; and the average Maynooth student, whether inside or out- side the College, can be relied on to give a good account of himself on these occasions.
I think it is Le Gallienne again who remarks that " the kitchen is the power-house of the soul ". To pursue the meta- phor, the only occasions on which there was any departure from the ordinary routine supply of power, were Christmas, Hallow-Eve, and St. Patrick's Day. On these days we were treated to a right royal repast, more expressively termed by the students a " Gaudeamus " or a ** Spread ". There were occasions when the philosophically inclined might freely des- cant on what somebody facetiously calls " the metaphysics of roast duck " — ^yes, and for that matter, of ham and roast beef and the various other appetizing delicacies which are usually associated with a groaning and luxurious dinner table. There was a fruit mess and a wine mess, at either of which any students might sit, but he might not partake of both. The wine mess was never largely patronized, and has since, I understand, on that account been entirely discontinued. There was no reading on these special days, but the reader by custom was always entitled to a bottle of wine, and it was the subject of frequent calculations for weeks before as to who was likely to be the fortunate individual. On these occasions we were generally left free to enjoy our dinner minus the supervision of the ubiquitous dean, who was supposed to take an all- absorbing interest in watching the various processes by which the human animal fortified himself.
After dinner songs were sung, and in the evening a play or variety entertainment much appreciated by the students wasi always provided in the Aula Maxima. Mr. W. Ludwig, the celebrated bass, once favored us with several songs, and an
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American priest from Kentucky who accompanied him created no end of amusement by a jolly speech in which in truly characteristic American fashion he proposed a vote of thanks to his friend Mr. Ludwig, " from the ground right up ever so high ".
Just now on glancing back it occurs to me that, having in- troduced this chapter as " A Student's Daily Day ", I have so far said little or nothing about it. Well, if the truth must be told there is, dear reader, little or nothing to say. " Cribbed, cabined, and confined," as the student is, the ordi- nary routine of his life allows little room for variety. Strict silence is enforced all day, and every day, except during the two or three hours set apart for legitimate recreation. The remainder of the time is divided between study and the lecture halls. Once a month the professor of Irish delivered a lecture in the McMahon Hall on Irish archeology, to which all the students were invited. Occasionally we were privileged to hear some distinguished lecturer or scholar from another Col- lege or University who usually came on the invitation of the President to lecture on some interesting and entertaining sub- ject. On these special occasions there was always a dinner given in the Professors' quarters to which many prominent people from outside, both lay and clerical, were invited. It was at one of these dinners, I believe, that a careless waiter happened to let a plate of soup spill over a very venerable and distinguished ecclesiastic. Somewhat aroused by the in- cident, he turned on the offending waiter: " What the "
he began ; but, suddenly recollecting himself, he turned to the table : " Ahem ! Perhaps some layman would kindly oblige me by saying a few words appropriate to the occasion."
Sunday in Maynooth differed little from the other days of the week. There were no lectures as a rule. A large academic institution like Maynooth, with its trained ecclesiastics, its beautiful chapels, and everything else conducive to devotion, naturally owes to itself and to the Church that all liturgical functions be carried out with that magnificence and accuracy of detail to which the elaborate ritual of the Church so ob- viously lends itself. And indeed it is only right to say that the solemnity and impressiveness of the ceremonies were in every way worthy of the venerable traditions which the
THE OLD PRIEST'S VESPERS— AND COMPLIN.
69
Roman Catholic Church in her history has left behind her. With six hundred and fifty white-robed ecclesiastics chanting the solemn strains of Gregorian music antiphonally, and with one of the best choirs of trained voices in the world, the divine service was always a function well worthy of the most cher- ished traditions of the Eternal City. There are petty minds who profess to sneer at Maynooth and the Maynooth training. I have met them sometimes outside Ireland. They will always be found to be men whose ideas are warped, and whose judg- ments are prei,udiced from the narrow associations of diocesan or provincial colleges, whose minds are tinged with a certain national sectarianism; but facts if they regard them must force even these to admit that, when hard work has to be faced, the Irish priest is always at hand to do it; and that neither in point of learning, nor sanctity, nor priestly equip- ment has the Irish soggarth to yield the palm to any other nation on this broad earth, or forgo the ancient, glorious, and national traditions of the Island of Scholars and of Saints. Maynooth to-day stands in the forefront of the great eccle- siastical institutions of the world — Maynooth with its 650 university graduates, and its staff which includes thirty-five professors and lecturers chosen from the best that Ireland can produce; Maynooth whose venerable halls have sent forth over 7,000 chosen ministers of God's Church, and whose bishops and priests are to be found " in the remotest confines of the earth and the farthest off islands of the sea ".
P. Sheridan. Dungloe, Ireland. \
THE OLD PEIEST'S VESPEKS— AND OOMPLIN/
FATHER FLAVIN yawned long and loudly, and his chin nodded down to where the snuff rested in little rills upon his chest. But his head did not rest; it nodded again, up and down, and the spectacles slipped to an impossible angle on his nose. Unconsciously the knotted old hands had kept hold of the thumb-worn office book, but after a time they too re- laxed, and the breviary fell with sufficient force 'to arouse the
1 The following story is substantially true to fact.
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dozer. He started then and opened his eyes, and stooping gathered up the book and its scattered contents, and opened the leaves at the office of the day.
Vespers had been said, of that he had no doubt; it was only before beginning Complin that he had paused for a moment, and the involuntary interlude of slumber was the result.
Certainly it was terribly hot. Even in the shade of the garden trees where the old man sat it was unlike anything an ordinary summer produces within reach of such Atlantic breezes as usually kept the parish swept. The season was alto- gether unprecedented; no summer within the memory of man had produced such burning sun, so universal a drought. There had been a good deal of sickness too, one way and an- other. More than one young girl had gone out to the weary task of water-drawing with hair only covered, as is the cus- tom, with a loose handkerchief or the corner of a shawl, and had come in, to rest a wildly aching head on a pillow from which it was never to be raised again.
Then too the stagnant pools had been irresistible, where the wells were dry, both to children and to workers in whom common sense and self-control were equally wanting, and the consequences had been not only frequent visits of the Union cart, from the rumble of which along the dusty roads even the children ran, but also several sudden inroads of the fever, where the patient was swept away before doctor could be summoned or van requisitioned. Only the priest had been sent for, and his ministrations had been all that were needed or obtained. Father Flavin decided that he would not at- tempt the psalms for the closing of the day just yet. It was early still, as the glaring heat in the garden testified. He would wait and rest now, and when evening came he would pray. So now with book laid in safety on the bench at his side, again his head fell down in sleep.
The birds twittering about him — lazily, for they too felt the heat — did not disturb him ; they were old friends all, and their voices were a soothing lullaby. Biddy, calling to the boy to " go for the love o' God an' fetch another taste o' water from the chapel tank beyond, for them ducks that was fairly perished with the drought ", Biddy disturbed him no more than the birds. Indeed her requests for water had become
LIBRARY
THE OLD PRIESTS VESPERS— AND COMPLIN. 71
almost as incessant as the chirping of the birds, or the quack- ing of the thirsty ducks.
But later another voice, not that of the boy, came to his slumber-dulled ears, a voice that alternated from entreaty to indignation, and the sleeper moved uneasily, feeling there was something going on in which he ought to have his say. Then he went back to dreaming, and he saw again in sleep a scene that had been enacted under his waking eyes only a few weeks before, and that had dwelt with him since, as something in- finitely tender, infinitely consoling, a token of love that repaid the weary service of many a dark ride through wet and storm on winter nights.
He had been in the garden, then as now — indeed one of Biddy's perennial grievances was the fact that, as she ex- pressed it, " Every moment he's in the house, God help him, he's in the garden " — resting too after a long and sad day's work.
Three children had died of fever in the same house. True, three little souls had gone to heaven, unafraid because Father Flavin had reminded them that Jesus was waiting; yet three little bodies lay still in a lonely house, where a lonely mother sat and watched till daylight would bring the digger of three little graves.
Then, as now, a voice had come to him, and through the gathering dusk of a short summer's night a shadowy figure had risen up beside him, a figure whose bare feet had made no sound, falling on the softness of the turf, and a low husky voice had asked him to hold his hands in absolution over a head that Death had claimed for its own.
" Where was the dying man? " He had not been able to keep the tone of utter weariness out of his voice as he ques- tioned, but the answer came, huskily again but quickly, reas- suring though amazing. It was no man who sought him, but a woman, the woman who now fell on her knees a pace away from him. Yes, she was dying. She knew it, felt it, and as the shawl slipped onto her shoulders and the moon shone on her gray-drawn face. Father Flavin could not say her nay. She had " left the childer, God give them rest in glory! sure, they didn't need her now " — and had come for the comfort of which, a few hours earlier, when the priest had been in her
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own house, she had not felt the need. The sickness this sum- mer had been very quick and sure.
" Why had she not sent for him ? " The priest spoke almost Sternly. Surely the fever had not made every man in the parish a coward?
" Because " — the answer came simply, for the woman had no thought that her act was anything but the most natural. She had never heard, in modern Gaelic at all events, the word " heroine ". Because " hadn't his reverence spent himself entirely that day, an' weren't the childer, God rest them ! lyin' round the kitchen these hours. The doctor had said to go into such a house, an' you drunk or tired, was certain death."
And so when Death began to creep upon her, she unspan- celled the ass and started, two miles and more of a rough bog road, and here she was ; " the ass, savin' his honor's favor, was standin' at the gate ".
She was quite peaceful. Wasn't she " goin' to God Al- mighty to be with the childer an' himself who'd lost his life three years ago at sea ? " Only she was very weary, and when, in a voice more husky now than her own, the priest had said the prayers, had anointed her there, in the garden, creep- ing in for what was needed, like a thief in the night for fear of Biddy, — when all was over she had insisted, nay she had even spoken angrily to the priest, to let her go her own way. So perforce she had her will, only unknown to her the old man had followed even into the shadows of the hillside till the doorway of her own house swallowed her up. Then the tears that had hardened into a ball in his throat came to his eyes, and flowed down the ruts and furrows of his cheeks.
And in his sleep, as he dreamt over again the story of the woman whom he had buried with her children by her side, the tears came as before and choked him, till, between them and the voices which were still wrangling in the kitchen, he awoke.
It was the usual thing, an altercation between Biddy and some one who, for all answer to a declaration that their sick- call was urgent, was met with the information that the curate was out, but would be in for dinner, and the messenger might rely upon her, Biddy's, word that " Mrs. Costello wouldn't go — God be good to her ! — till the turn o' the evening. That was the time they went mostly, without they lasted to the dusk before the dawn."
THE OLD PRIEST'S VESPERS— AND COMPLIN, ni>
But the voice of the messenger told the now fully-awakened listener which of the many owners of the name of Costello was seeking for his priestly ministrations.
Mary-from-Loughee, they called her. For fifty years ago she had come over the mountains to marry one of the sea- going Costellos. And from that same parish had come the priest who, making an exception to the usual diocesan pro- cedure, had long labored first as curate, then as pastor in the home of Mary's husband.
Father Flavin had only lately had a curate himself; but the habit of making use of younger bones was one he did not seem able to acquire. In other parishes the curates seemed fully occupied. Here, assistance was certainly welcome on Sundays, and during the week the school attendance rose con- siderably, for according as the speaker was only an irregular attendant or a systematic " mitcher ", Father McMurrogh was either *' a bit wicked " or " horrid mad *'. But except when Biddy absolutely forbade it and refused to disclose where she had hidden hat and stick. Father Flavin clung to his old habits, and did his visiting and most of his sick-calls unaided.
Then the curate complained that there was nothing to do, and so his bicycle carried him farther afield. Had he been at home now, or had the sick-call come from anyone but Mary- from-Loughee, Father Flavin would have willingly accepted the offer of being replaced, which, when at home, the young man eagerly made. But he was not at home, and it was Mary. It was seldom, very seldom now that he was peremptory with Biddy; but when he was, there was not a word to be said. It was no use speaking of the heat, no use reminding him that he was tired, no use even using the last and biting weapon of a reference to his age. He was going. That was all.
The pony was away, being shod. This was a triumphant fact. Very well, he would walk. Certainly it was not very far and the road all the way was downhill. But the sun was very, very hot and even the white dust seemed almost to burn his feet as he dragged them along, for he was tired and he was old, although before Biddy he would own to neither.
There was no coolness, even in the Costello's kitchen. Here again it seemed that Biddy was right. The sick woman certainly would not go before the turn of the night and, judg-
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ing by the strength of her voice, there was great probability of her lasting till the dusk of the morning.
She received the Food for the journey on which she was about to start, fully conscious, and followed the prayers that the priest read slowly and clearly. Time was when he had read them quickly enough, but now, with the tired aching of his own head and limbs, he seemed to find ease and comfort in the familiar words:
" Depart, ye Christian soul."
Ah well ! and why not? Another sentence came to his mind. " The night cometh, when no man can work." What use would he be if the night came upon him, — would it not be easier to pass out into light everlasting? Somehow to-day for the first time in all his life, the desire to go on living burnt low within him.
" Well, Father James " — Mary-from-Loughee spoke thus to him with a familiarity that none of his other parishioners used — ** so after all 'tis me to go the first of us; but you have a good six years more than I have to carry to the grave, an' maybe it wont be long till God Almighty has a place ready for you as well."
" Maybe not, Mary, maybe not. I believe you're right. I'm getting an old man."
" Getting an old man ! " In all eyes but his own he had been an old man for years, and yet he remained so active that now, going out into the great heat not one of the Cos- tellos thought it might be more than such an old man could bear.
The road coming had been downhill. Therefore re- turning it mounted, mounted wearily and all the while the sun burned and burned, through the thin fringe of hair, and the blood was pumped too violently through the old veins for an old heart to bear.
At long, long last he regained the garden. Biddy had for a moment forsaken her lookout, and so she missed him. His lips were parched; he wanted a drink so badly, but — ^but — . Involuntarily his limbs relaxed and he sank back on the seat he had quitted not so long before.
He had said Vespers. Yes, that he remembered, but not Complin, and — it was curious, for the sun had certainly been shining a few moments ago — it was getting dark.
THE OLD PRIEST'S VESPERS— AND COMPLIN. 75
He began the familiar psalms, holding his book open from long-continued habit, but praying from memory only.
The darkness was gathering. Still he went on with his office. He was very, very tired; but God knew he meant no inattention. Then there were voices. Biddy's again and Father McMurrogh's.
" But he has come back. He is sitting there in the garden." He knew the quick incisive young voice that had earned for its owner the reputation of being " a bit wicked ". He saw the short slight figure, the long black coat, gray now with dust; and as his eyelids fell he caught the glimmer of the sun on bicycle clips. Then it was dark. But again he opened his eyes.
He saw a startled young face. The quick flash of a purple ribbon from a dusty pocket. A figure kneeling beside him with bared head. An upraised hand.
But his office. He was forgetting it.
" Salva nos, Domine, vigilantes, custodi nos dormientes." Yes, he would soon be ready to sleep " ut vigilemus cum Christo, et requiescamus in pace *'. His words must have been audible, for a voice answered him, " Amen ".
Then again it was dark, quite, quite dark. But he had «aid his Complin.
A. Dease.
Hnalecta*
SAOEA OONGREGATIO OONSISTOEIALIS. I.
Erectionis Dioecesis Kearneyensis.
Ssmus Dominus Noster Pius PP. X decreto huius Sacrae Consistorialis Congregationis diei 8 martii 19 12 peramplum dioecesis Omahensis territorium bifariam divisit, in eiusque occidentali parte novam et distinctam dioecesim, Kearneyen- sem ab urbe vulgo Kearney denominandam, erexit.
Limites novae Kearneyensis dioecesis hi sunt, idest ad ori- entem fines orientales comitatum civilium Keyapaha, Rock, Garfield, Valley, Sherman et Buffalo; ad meridiem vero flu- men Platte ac dein confinia civilia inter Status Nebraska et Colorado; ad occidentem et ad septentrionem denique ipsa confinia civilia Status Nebraska; ita ut nova haec dioecesis comprehendat viginti sex comitatus civiles integros, videlicet Keyapaha, Rock, Garfield, Valley, Sherman, Buffalo, Chey- enne, Kimball, Banner, Scotts Bluff, Sioux, Dawes, Box Butte, Morrill, Garden, Sheridan, Cherry, Grant, Hooker, Thomas, McPherson, Logan, Custer, Blaine, Loup et Brown; itemque partem comitatuum civilium Dawson, Lincoln, Keith ac Deuel nuncupatorum.
ANALECTA. ^^
Insuper praedictam dioecesim suffraganeam constituit me- tropolitanae ecclesiae Dubuquensis.
II. Erectionis Dioecesis Corporis Christi. Item eadem Sanctitas Sua decreto eiusdem Sacrae Congre- gationis diei 23 martii 1 91 2 Brownsvillensem apostolicum vicariatum, iisdem ut antea territorii finibus circumscriptum, in dioecesim erexit ac instituit, quam a civitate ubi sedis episco- palis statuta est Corpus Christi denominavit, eamque suffra- ganeam metropolitanae ecclesiae Novae Aureliae constituit.
III.
Declarationis circa Dioecesis Fines Wayne- Castrensis.
Pariter decreto eiusdem Sacrae Congregationis died 29 martii 191 2 Ssmus Dominus Noster declarare dignatus est Wayne- Castrensem dioecesim totum complecti septentrionale territorium civilis Status Indiana, ita ut ipsa iisdem quoquo- versus circumscribatur finibus quibus antea dioecesis Vincen- nopolitana, modo autem Indianapolitana nuncupata, a qua tamen ad meridiem discriminatur per australia confinia comi- tatuum civilium vulgo Warren, Fountain, Montgomery, Boone, Hamilton, Madison, Delaware et Randolph, quos et comprehendit.
SAOEA OONGEEGATIO OONOILII.
LiTTERAE circa DiES FeSTOS.
Plurimus ex locis pervenerunt ad banc S. Congregationem Concilii supplices libelli, quibus instantissime postulatur ut omnes aut nonnulli dies festi de numero festivitatum sub prae- cepto per litteras Apostolicas diei 2 iulii 191 1 expuncti, in pristinum restituantur, tum ad satisfaciendum pietati fidelium id enixe expetentium, tum ob alias peculiares cuiusque loci rationes. Potissimum vero supplicatum fuit ut festum Ssmi Corporis Christi celebrari possit cum solemni processione et pompa, ut antea, feria V post Dominicam Ssmae Trinitatis, earn praesertim ob causam quod huiusmodi processionis de- fectum non sine animi moerore et spirituali iactura pati vi-
1^
THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
deantur populi, qui earn diem specialiter solemnem habere et miro splendore celebrare consueverunt.
Porro, Ssmus Dnus N. Pius PP. X, Cui relatio de prae- missis facta fuit ab infrascripto Cardinali huius S. Congre- gationis Praefecto, plane cupiens ne, ex praepostera aut non recta interpretation e praedictarum litterarum, fidelium pietas ac debitus Deo cultus imminuantur; volens imo ut, quoad fieri possit, augeantur, haec quae sequuntur declarari, praecipi atque indulgeri mandavit:
1° Quum, perpensis temporum rerumque novarum adiunctis, Summus Pontifex nonnullos dies expunxit e numero festivi- tatum sub praecepto, quemadmodum non semel a Suis De- cessoribus factum fuit, minime sane intellexit ut eorum dierum festivitas omnino supprimeretur ; vult immo Sanctitas Sua ut iidem dies in sacris templis celebrentur non minori quam antea, solemnitate, et, si fieri potest, eadem populi frequentia. Ea vero fuit et est Sanctitatis Suae mens, ut relaxata maneat tantummodo sanctio qua fideles tenebantur iis diebus audire Sacrum et abstinere ab operibus servilibus; idque potissimum ad evitandas frequentiores praecepti transgressiones et ne forte contingeret ut, dum a multis Deus honorificatur, ab aliis non sine gravi animarum detrimento offenderetur. Praecipit itaque Eadem Sanctitas Sua omnibus et singulis animarum curam gerentibus ut ipsi, dum haec commissis sibi gregibus significant, ne cessent eos hortari vehementer ut, iis etiam diebus, pergant suam in Deum pietatem et in Sanctos vene- rationem, quantum maxime poterunt, testari, praesertim per frequentiam in ecclesiis ad audienda sacra aliaque pia ex- ercitia peragenda.
2° Quo autem Christifideles magis excitentur ad supra- dictos dies festos pie sancteque excolendos, vigore praesentium litterarum, conceditur omnibus locorum Ordinariis ampla facultas dispensandi cum suis subditis super lege ieiunii et abstinentiae, quoties dies abstinentiae vel ieiunio consecratus incidat in festum quod, licet praecepto non subiectum, cum debita populi frequentia devote celebratur.
3° Item, per praesentes litteras conceditur ut festum Ssmi Corporis Cfiristi, ubi Sacrorum Antistites ita in Domino ex- pedire censuerint, etsi praecepto non obstrictum, celebrari possit cum solemni processione et pompa, prout antea, feria V
ANALECTA. ^
post Dominicam Ssmae Trinitatis; contrariis quibuscumque non obstantibus.
Datum Romae ex Secretaria Sacrae Congregationis Con- cilii, die 3 mail 191 2.
C. Card. Gennari, Praefectus,
L. * S.
O. GiORGi^ Secretarius.
S. OONGEEGATIO EITTJUM.
I.
Urbis et Orbis.
( Continuatur. )
MUTATIONES IN BREVIARIO ET MISSALI ROMANO FACIENDAS AD NORMAM CONSTITUTIONIS APOSTOLICAE " DIVINO AFFLATU."
Expungatur integrum Psalterium, eique substituatur Ordi- narium et Novum Psalterium.
In Propria de Tempore Breviarii.
Post Festum Ss. Innocentium, suppressis Rubricis quae) nunc habentur, ponantur sequentes:
Si Festum Nativitatis Domini, S. Stephani, S. Joannis Evang. et Ss. Innocentium venerit in Dominica, ipsa die nihil fit de Dominica, sed die proxima post Festum S. Thomae Mart, fit de ea, ut infra.
Si Festum Sancti Thomae venerit in Dominica, tunc in II. Vesp. Ss. Innocentium fit comm. Dom. (Ant. Dum medium, V. Verbum caro. Oratio Omnipotens ut infra), deinde S. Thomae et trium Octavarum. Ipsa vero die Dominica fit Offi- cium de ea, ritu semiduplici, ut infra ponitur, et ad Laudes fit Comm. S. Thomae et quatuor Octavarum. In II. Vesp. fit Officium de Nativitate, ritu semiduplici, a capitulo de Dom- inica cum comm. sequentis diei infra Octavam Nativitatis (Ant. Ho die. v. Notum. Oratio Concede), S. Thomae et trium Octavarum. Die vero 30 Decembris fit Officium de die infra Oct. Nativitatis, ritu semiduplici, ut infra, cum commemor- atione trium Octavarum; et II. Vesperae dicuntur, ritu du- plici, de Nativitate, a capitulo de S. Silvestro cum commem- oratione quatuor Octavarum.
8o THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
Si vero Dominica venerit die 30 Decembris, in Sabbato dicuntur Vesperae de Nativitate, ritu semiduplici, a capitulo de Dominica cum commemoratione S. Thomae et quatuor Octavarum. Ipsa vero die Dominica fit Officium de ea, ritu semiduplici, et ad Laudes fit commemoratio quatuor Octa- varum. In II. autem Vesperis fit Officium de Nativitate, ritu semiduplici, a capitulo de Dominica cum commemoratione se- quentis Festi S. Silvestri et quatuor Octavarum.
Si denique Dominica venerit in Festo S. Silvestri, in II. Vesp. S. Thomae fit comm. seq. diei infra Oct. Nativitatis et aliarum Octavarum. Die 30 Decembris fit Officium de die infra Oct. Nativ., ut infra, et in II. Vesp. fit Officium de Nativitate, ritu semiduplici, a capitulo de Dominica; deinde fit comm. diei infra Octav. Nativitatis, S. Silvestri et aliarum Octavarum. Die vero 31 Decembris fit Officium de Dominica, ritu semiduplici, ut infra : ad Laudes fit comm. S. Silvestri et quatuor Octavarum: et 11. Vesp. fiunt de Circumcisione Domini cum comm. Dominicae tantum.
Deinde ponitur:
Dominica infra Octava Nativitatis.
In I. Vesperis: Capitulum Fratres, quanta tempore, etc. Hymnus Jesu, Redemptor, ut supra, v. Verbum caroy etc. Ad Magnificat Ant. Dum mediuniy etc. Oratio Omnipotens. Postea fit comm. Octavarum.
Deinde omnia ut in Breviario usque ad II. Vesp. inclusive.
Postea ponitur:
Die 29 Decembris. In Festo S. Thomae Episc. Mart. Duplex.
Oratio Deus pro cujus, etc.
In I Nocturno : Lectiones A Mileto.
In II. Nocturno: Thomas^ etc. (ut in Breviario) .
In III. Nocturno: Ut in Breviario.
Ad Laudes: Capitulum Beatus vir etc. Hymnus: Invicte Martyr, unicum. v. lustus ut palma, etc. Ad Benedictus Ant. Qui odit animam suam etc. Oratio Deus pro cujus ut supra.
Postea fit comm. Octavarum.
ANALECTA.
8i
Ad Horas: Capitula et RR. sumuntur de Comm. unius Martyris.
Ad Vesperas : Ant. et Psalmi de Nativitate, Capitulum, ut supra ad Laudes. Hymnus : Deus tuorum milHum. v. Justus ut palma etc. Ad Magnificat ant. Qui vult venire etc. Oratio Deus pro cujus ut supra. Deinde fit com. sequentis diei infra Oct. Nativitatis: Ant. Hodie etc. v. Notum etc. Oratio Concede etc. Postea fit com. aliarum Octavarum.
Die 30 Decembris. De VI. Die infra Oct. Nativitatis. Semiduplex.
Omnia dicuntur ut in Festo Nativitatis, praeter RR. quae sumuntur de Dominica et Lectiones III. Nocturni, ut infra: Lectio sancti Evangelii etc. {ut in Breviario) .
Ad Laudes fit commemoratio de aliis Octavis.
Ad Vesperas: Ant. et Psal. de Nativitate. Capitulum Ecce Sacerdos etc. Hymnus Iste Confessor, v. Amavit. Ad Magnificat Ant. Sacerdos et Pontifex. Oratio Da quae- sumus. Deinde fit comm. praecedentis diei infra Octav. Nativitatis. Ant. Hodie. v. Notum. Oratio Concede. Postea fit comm. aliarum Octavarum.
Die 31 Decembris. In Festo S. Silvestri I. Papae Confessoris. Duplex.
Oratio Da quaesumus. In I. Nocturno {ut in Breviario). In II. Nocturno {ut in Breviario) .. In III. Nocturno Homilia in Evang. Siitt lumbi de comm. Conf. non Pont, cum RR. de Comm. Conf. Pont.
Ad Laudes : Capitulum Ecce sacerdos magnus etc. Hymnus Jesu Redemptor omnium, v. Justus etc. Ad Benedictus Ant. Euge, serve hone etc. Oratio Da quaesumus etc. Postea fit comm. Octavarum.
Ad Horas : Capitula et RR. sumuntur de Comm. Conf. Pont.
Vesperae dicuntur de Circumcisione Domini, sine com- memoratione S. Silvestri et Octavarum.
Post Festum Circumcisionis ponatur haec Rubrica: Si m die Circumcisionis, aut in sequentibus, usque ad Epiphaniam inclusive, Dominica occurrerit, de ea nihil fit..
32 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
Dominica infra Octavam Epiphaniae.
In II. Vesperis, pro comm. Octavae loco Ant. Tribus mira- culis, ponatur Ant. Magi videntes.
In die Octava Epiphaniae. Dupl. majus.
Ad Laudes Dominicae Sexagesimae, loco quintae Anti- phonae In tympano, substituatur sequens: In excelsis * laudate Deum.
Ad Laudes Dominicae tertiae Quadragesimae , loco Anti- phonae tertiae Deus misereatur, substituatur sequens: Ad- haesit anima mea * post te, Deus mens.
Ad Laudes Dominicae IV. Quadragesimae, loco Anti- phonae tertiae Benedicat nos Deus, substituatur sequens: Me suscepit * dextera tua, Domine.
Ad Laudes Feriae IV. Ma j oris Hebdomadae, loco Anti- phonae tertiae Ipsi vero, substituatur sequens: Tu autem, Domine, * scis omne consilium eorum adversum me in mortem.
Item loco Antiphonae quintae Alliga Domine, substituatur sequens: Fac, Domine, * judicium injuriam patientibus : et vias peccatorum disperde.
Ad Laudes Feriae V. in Coena Domini, Feriae VI. in Parasceve et Sabbati Sancti ponantur Psalmi de Feria cur- renti, retento pro Sabbato Cantico Ego dixi etc.
In fine Feriae V. in Coena Domini Rubrica Ad Completor- ium etc. sic corrigatur : Ad Completorium non dicitur ... in- cipitur a Psalmo Cum invocarem: et dicuntur Psalmi de Dominica, ut in Psalterio. Dictis Psalmis etc.
Ad Completorium Sabbati Sancti verba Rubricae: Deinde sine Antiphona dicuntur Psalmi consueti, sic corrigantur: Deinde sine Antiphona dicuntur Psalmi de Dominica.
Post Laudes Dominicae Resurrectionis Rubrica Ad Primam etc. sic corrigatur: Ad Primam, Tertiam, Sextam . . . dicuntur Psalmi de Dominica, ad Primam tamen ut in Festis, quibus finitis etc.
Ad Completorium Dominicae Resurrectionis, Rubrica Dicto V. etc. sic corrigatur : Dicto v. dicuntur Psalmi de Dominica . . . quibus finitis etc.
ANALECTA. g
Dominica in Albis in Octava Paschae. Duplex majus.
Ad Laudes suppressis Antiphonis et PscUmis usque ad Capi- tulum, dicatur: Omnia ut in Psalterio.
Feria II. POST Dominicam in Albis.
Ad Laudes supprimatur Ruhrica, quae incipit: Postea fit commemoratio, usque ad v. et O ratio, ut supra inclusive.
Dominica infra Octavam Ascensionis.
In fine addatur: Si vero in crastinum fiat Officium de Oc- tava, Ant. et V. sumuntur e I. Vesperis festi.
In Octava Ascensionis. Duplex majus.
In Festo SS. Trinitatis addatur: Duplex I. classis.
In fine Feriae IV. post Oct. Pentecostes si corrigantur Rubricae:
Feria V. celebratur Commemoratio solemnis Sanctissimi Corporis D. N. J. C.
Infra Octavam non fit de Festo, nisi fuerit Duplex I. classis : reliqua Festa vel transferuntur post Octavam, vel commemor- antur juxta Rubricas, in Vesperis et Laudibus, sine IX. lectione.
Die vero Octava non fit nisi de Festo SS. Apostolorum Petri et Pauli, si occurrat, cum commemoratione ejusdem diei Octavae.
In Commemoratione solemni Sanctissimi Corporis D. N. J. C. Duplex I. classis cum Octava.
Dominica infra Octavam Corporis Christi.
In II. Vesperis, pro commemoratione Octavae ponantur A ntiphona et v. e I. Vesp. Festi.
In fine Feriae IV. infra Octavam Corporis Christi sic corrigatur Ruhrica:
Ad Vesperas, omnia ut in I. Vesperis Festi. Si sequenti die aliud Festum occurrat, vel transferatur vel commemoretur juxta Rubricas, nisi sit Festum SS. Apostolorum Petri et Pauli, quod celebratur, cum commemoratione Octavae.
34 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
Feria V. Octava Corporis Christi. Duplex majus.
In fine ponatur haec Rubrica:
Sequent! die celebratur Festum Sacratissimi Cordis Jesu, de quo nulla fit commemoratio in, II. Vesperis diei Octavae SS. Corporis Christi.
Si autem hodie celebratum sit Festum Ss. Apostolorum Petri et Pauli cum commemoratione Octavae SS. Corporis Christi, in II. Vesperis Ss. Apostolorum fit tantum commemoratio de sequenti Festo Sacratissimi Cordis Jesu.
In propria Sanctorum Breviarii.
Die 14 Decembris.
Ad Vesperas supprimatur Rubrica quae incipit: Si dies Octava.
Die 15 Decembris.
In Octava Immaculatae Conceptionis B. M. V. Dupl. majus.
Die 19 Martii.
In Commemoratione solemni S. Joseph Sponsi B. M. V. CONFESSORIS. Duplex I. classis.
In fine mensis Aprilis:
Dominica III. post Pascha.
In Solemnitate S. Joseph Sponsi B. M. V. et Ecclesiae Universalis Patroni, Confessoris. Dupl. I. classis cum Octava.
In fine Officii supprimatur Rubrica Si hoc Festum celebretur etc.
Feria II. infra Octavam Solemnitatis S. Joseph.
Omnia ut in Festo praeter sequential In I. Nocturno Lec- tiones de Scriptura occurrente. In II. Nocturno De sermone S. Bernardini Senensis etc. ( Ut in Octavario Romano pro Oc- tava Patrocinii S. Joseph).
Et sic in sequentibus Feriis III. IV. V. VI. et Sabbato, ad- hibitis pro Sabbato Lectionibus, quae in Octavario habentur pro die Octava.
Lectiones III. Nocturni Sabbati ita dividantur:
ANALECTA. 3-
Lectio VII. Natalis ho die . . . filium protestatur.
Lectio VIII. Honor atior . . , et ipse faber.
Lectio IX. Ipse enim . . . deputetur.
Similiter in lectionibus IV. et VII. ejusdem Sabbati se- quent es fiant correctiones:
In Lectione IV. pro verbis: pater ejus, utrumque mente, non carne, ponatur: pater ejus, sicut conjux matris ejus, utrumque mente, non carne.
In Lectione VII. pro verbis: in hac se Pater, qui credebatur, insinuat, ponatur: in hac se Pater, qui non credebatur, insinuat
Post Sabbatum infra Octavam Solemnitatis S. Joseph, ponatur sequens Rubrica:
Vesperae dicuntur de sequenti Dominica et in eis fit com- memoratio praecedentis diei VII. infra Octavam, cum Ant. et V. de II. Vesp. Festi : si autem in Sabbato factum fuerit Officium de aliquo festo IX. Lectionum, fit com. diei Octavae cum Ant. et v. e. I. Vesp. Festi.
Sequenti die fit de Dominica IV. post Pascha, nisi oc- currat Festum Domini, aut Duplex I. aut II. classis, cum com- memoratione diei Octavae in Laud, et II. Vesperis.
In Festo SS. Cordis Jesu.
Prima Rubrica sic corrigatur : Vesperae dicuntur de Octava SSmi Corporis ChrLsti sine ulla commemoratione. Si autem praecedenti Feria V. occurrerit Festum Ss. Apostolorum Petri et Pauli, in II. Vesperis Ss. Apostolorum fit commemoratio de Festo Sacratissimi Cordis Jesu: Ant. Improperium. v. Ignem veni. O ratio. Concede^ quaesumus.
Sed si Officium, etc.
In eodem Festo Lectione s II. Nocturni, quae nunc inscri- bufttur: Sermo S. Bernardi Abbatis, amodo inscribantur: Sermo S. Bonaventurae Episcopi.
Post diem 21 J unit sequentia inserantur:
Sabbato ante Dom. IV. Junii.
In Vigilia S. Joannis Baptistae.
Hie inserantur quae posita sunt die 2j Junii, dempta ultima Rubrica Si sequenti die, etc.y cujus loco ponatur sequens:
Si haec Vigilia occurrat eadem die cum Vigilia anticipata Ss. Apostolorum Petri et Pauli, totum Officium fit de Vigilia
35 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
S. Joannis sine commemoratione alterius Vigiliae, nisi in Missa.
Dominica IV. Junii.
In Nativitate S. Joannis Baptistae. Dupl. I. class, cum. Octava.
Hie inseratur Officium, ut habetur in Breviario die 24. Junii.
Post I. Vesperas addatur sequens Rubrica: Et fit commem- oratio Dominicae occurrentis.
Supprimatur deinde Lectio IX., et ponatur haec Rubrica: Lectio IX. de homilia Dominicae occurrentis.
In fine Laudum addatur: Et fit commemoratio Dominicae occurrentis.
In II. Vesperis, in fine, supprimatur : Et fit commemoratio sequentis., et ponatur: et fit commemoratio Dominicae oc- currentis. Prima die libera infra Octavam S. Joannis Baptistae.
Omnia ut in Festo praeter sequentia :
In I. Nocturno: Lectiones de Scriptura occurrente. In 11. Nocturno Sermo S. Augustini Episcopi. Natalem ... {ut in antiquis Breviariis die 25 Junii) .
In III. Nocturno: Lectio S. Evangeliiy etc. De Homilia S. Ambrosii Episcopi. Joannes est... {ut in Breviario die i Julii) .
Secunda die libera infra Octavam S. Joannis Baptistae.
Omnia ut in Festo, praeter sequentia :
In I. Nocturno: Lectiones de Scriptura occurrente.
In II. Nocturno: Sermo Sancti Basilii Magni. Vox Domini . . . {ut in Breviario die 2y Junii).
In III. Nocturno: Lectio Sancti Evangeliiy etc. De Homilia S. Ambrosii Episcopi. Et Zacharias . . . {ut in Breviario die 2y Junii).
Tertia die libera infra Octavam S. Joannis Baptistae.
Omnia ut in Festo, praeter sequentia : In I. Nocturno : Lectiones de Scriptura occurrente. In II. Nocturno: Sermo S. Maximi Episcopi. Festivitatem . . . {ut in Breviario die i Julii). In III. Nocturno:
ANALECTA. g^
Lectio S. Evangelii secundum Lucam.
Lectio VII. (Cap. I.)
Elisabeth impletum est tempus pariendi, et peperit filium.
Et audierunt vicini, et cognati ejus, quia magnificavit Dominus
misericordiam suam cum ilia, et congratulabantur ei. Et
reliqua.
Homilia Venerabilis Bedae Presbyteri. (In Nativit. Sancti Joannis).
Praecursoris Domini nativitas, sicut sacratissima lectionis evangelicae prodit historia, multa miraculorum sublimitate refulget: quia nimirum decebat ut ille, quo major inter natos mulierum nemo surrexit, majore prae ceteris Sanctis in ipso mox ortu virtutum jubare claresceret. Senes ac diu infecundi parentes dono nobilissimae prolis exultant, ipsi patri, quern incredulitas mutum reddiderat, ad salutandum novae prae- conem gratiae os et lingua reseratur. Nee solum facultas Deum benedicendi restituitur, sed de eo etiam prophetandi virtus augetur.
Lectio VIII.
Unde merito sancta per orbem Ecclesia, quae tot beatorum mart y rum victorias, quibus ingressum regni coelestis meruere, frequentat, hujus tantummodo post Dominum etiam nativitatis diem celebrare consuevit. Quod nullatenus sine evangelica auctoritate in consuetudinem venisse credendum est: sed at- tentius animo recondendum quia sicut, nato Domino, pastori- bus apparens angelus ait: Ecce evangelizo vobis gaudium magnum, quod erit omni populo, quia natus est vobis hodie Salvator, qui est Christus Dominus: ita etiam angelus nas- citurum Zachariae praedicans Joannem: Et erit, inquit, gau- dium tibi et exultatio, et multi in nativitate ejus guadebunt, Erit enim magnus coram Domino.
Lectio IX.
Jure igitur utriusque nativitas festa devotione celebratur, sed in illius tanquam, in Christi Domini, tanquam in Salvatoris mundi, tanquam in Filii Dei omnipotentis, tanquam in solis justitiae nativitate, omni populo gaudium evangelizatur. In hujus autem tanquam in praecursoris Domini, in servi Dei
S8 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
eximii, in lucernae ardentis et lucentis exortu multi gavisuri memorantur. Hie in spiritu et virtute Eliae praecessit ante ilium, ut plebent ejus aqua baptizans ad suscipiendum eum, ubi appareret, doceret esse perjectam.
Si aliqua dies infra Octavam Nativitatis S. Joannis oc- currat cum die infra Octavam Ss. Apostolorum Petri et Pauli, fit Officium de prima cum commemoratione alterius.
In die Octava Nativitatis S. Joannis Baptistae fit Officium de Dominica, nisi occurrat Festum Domini, aut Duplex I. vel II. Classis cum commemoratione diei Octavae.
Si dies Octava Nativitatis S. Joannis occurrat cum Festo Ss. Apostolorum Petri et Pauli, de ea nihil fit.
Omnia, quae habentur in Breviario diebus 22 et 2^1. Junii, supprimantur omnino.
Die 25 Junii.
Supprimatur Rubrica, quae incipit: In Laud, fit com- memoratio.
In ultima Rubrica, quae incipit: Vesp. a Capit., suppriman- tur verba: et Oct. S. Joannis.
Die 26 Junii.
In L Vesperis supprimatur Rubrica Deinde Oct. S. Joannis, etc.
Ad Laudes supprimantur verba: et per horas.
In fine laudum supprimatur Rubrica Deinde fit comm., etc.
In II. Vesperis supprimatur Rubrica Deinde fit commem., etc.
Omnia quae habentur in Breviario die 2j lunii, suppri- mantur omnino.
Die 28 Junii.
Supprimatur Rubrica Si hoc festum, etc. et ejus loco ponatur sequens: Si hoc Festum venerit in Dominica, fit de Nativitate S. Joannis Baptistae cum commemoratione Dominicae, et nihil fit de S. Leone. In Sabbato praecedenti fit de Vigilia Nati- vitatis S. Joannis, et nihil fit de Vigilia anticipata Ss. Apos- tolorum Petri et Pauli, nisi in Missa.
Post Orationem supprimatur Rubrica Et fit comm., etc.
In Laudibus supprimatur Rubrica in Laud, fit comm., etc.
ANALECTA. g
Die 29 JuNii.
In I. Vesp. in Rubrica Et non fit, etc. supprimantur ultima verba: nee Octavae S. Joannis.
In II. Vesp. in Rubrica Et non fit, etc. supprimantur ultima verba: nee Oetavae S. Joannis.
In penultima Rubrica Deinde fit, etc., supprimantur verba: Et non fit eomm. Oet. S. Joannis, neque in Laud.
Ultima Rubrica sic corrigatur : Si Commemoratio S. Pauli alieubi alia die celebretur, to turn Officium fit ut in propria Ecelesia.
Die 30 JUNii.
Ad Laudes supprimatur Rubrica Deinde Oetavae S. Joannis.
In II. Vesperis in Rubrica Vesperae integrae etc., suppri^ mantur ultima verba: et Oet. S. Joannis ut in I. Vesp. Festi.
In principio lulii supprimatur Rubrica Prima die etc.
In Festo Pretiosissimi Sanguinis supprimatur Rubrica, quae incipit: Si hodie oeeurrat.
Post festum Pretiosissimi Sanguinis ponatur: Infra Octavam Ss. Petri et Pauli.
Hie inserantur omnia quae habentur in Breviario post festum Visitationis B. M. V.
Die i Julii.
Supprimantur omnino quae nunc habentur in Breviario, et eorum loco ponatur:
Tertia die infra Octavam Ss. Petri et Pauli.
In I. Noeturno: Leetiones de Seriptura oeeurrente.
In II. Noeturno : Sermo S. Maximi Episcopi. Non sine causa ... {ut in antiquis Breviariis die 5 lulii).
In III. Noeturno: Homilia in Evang. Ecce nos reliquimus, de Comm. Apost. i loeo.
Die 6 Julil In Oetava Ss. Petri et Pauli. Duplex Majus.
Die 5 AuGUSTi. Ultima Rubrica sic corrigatur: Vesp. de sequenti eum com- mem. praeeedentis.
go THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
Die 6 Augusti.
In Transfiguratione D. N. I. C. Duplex II. classis.
In I. Vesp. supprimatur Rubrica Deinde Ss Xysti II. Papae, Felicissimi et Agapiti Mm. etc.
Die 22 Augusti.
In Octava Assumptionis B. M. V. Duplex Majus.
Dominica infra Oct. Nativitatis B. M. V. supprimantur omnia quae habentur in Breviario.
Die ii Septembris.
In fine hujus diei addatur: Vesp. de sequent! Festo, sine comm. Oct. Nativitatis B. M. V.
Die 12 Septembris.
Supprimantur omnia quae habentur in Breviario, et ponan- tur sequentia:
SS. NoMiNis B. M. V. Duplex majus.
Omnia ut in Festis B. M. V. per annum, praeter sequentia : Hie inserantur omnia quae in Breviario habentur Dominica
infra Octava Nativ., suppressa tamen in I. Vesp. Rubrica Et
fit Comm. Dom. occurrentis.
In fine VI. Lectionis supprimantur verba: Dominica infra
Octavam Nativitatis Beatae Virginis Mariae.
Post VIII. Lectionem addatur:
Lectio IX.
Beata quae (ut in Decreto S. R. C. lo Novembris ipog). Supprimantur duae ultimae Rubricae et eorum loco ponatur sequens: In II. Vesp. non fit comm. seq. diei infra Oct.
Die i Novembris.
Supprimantur duae ultimae Rubricae Dicto etc., et Si prima dies etc.
Die 2 Novembris.
Supprimantur omnia quae habentur in Breviario, et eorum loco ponantur quae hac die habentur in Appendice novi Psalterii.
ANALECTA. gj
Die 8 Novembris.
In Octava omnium. Sanctorum Duplex majus.
Ultima Rubrica sic corrigatur: Vesp. de seq. cum Comm. praec.
Die 9 Novembris.
In Dedicatione Archibasilicae SSmi Salvatoris. Duplex II. classis. In Vesp. supprimatur Rubrica Deinde S. Theodori Mart.
In Communi Sanctorum et sequentibus partibus Breviarii.
In Communi unius Martyris in III. Nocturno, in Lectione VIII. circa medium, loco verbi Delectat, substituatur: Delectet.
In Communi unius Martyris, posita quarto loco Homilia in Evang. Nihil est opertum, ponatur tertio loco Homilia in Evang. Nolite arbitrari, quae incipit: Quae ista divisio est? ut in Octavario Romano.
In Octava Dedicationis Ecclesiae. Duplex majus.
In Officio B. Mariae V. in Sabbato, in Vesperis, expungatur Rubrica: Post Orationem fiunt etc. et ponatur sequens: Post Orationem fit Suffragium, ut sequitur:
De omnibus Sanctis.
Ant. Sancti omnes intercedant pro nobis ad Dominum. V. Mirificavit Dominus Sanctos suos. R. Et exaudivit eos clamantes ad se.
Or emus. O ratio.
A cunctis nos, quaesumus, Domine, mentis et corporis de- fende periculis: et intercedente beato loseph, cum beatis Apos- iolis tuts etc.
Tempore autem Paschali, loco praecedentis Suffragii, fit commemoratio de Cruce, ut in Ordinario.
Si autem occurrat Festum simplex, de eo fit comm. ante ipsum Suffragium.
Ad Laudes, suppressis verbis Ad Laudes et per Horas: Omnia ut in Festis B. M. V., praeter sequentia,' eorum loco ponatur: Ad Laudes Antiphonae cum Psalmis de Sabbato, ut
Q2 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
in Psalterio: Capitulum et Hymnus, ut in Festis B. M. V. per annum.
In fine Laudum, suppressa Rubrica Deinde fiunt, ponatur: Deinde fit Suffragium, ut supra ad Vesperas.
Post Ruhricam pro Tempore Paschali, supprimatur verba Non fiunt commemorationes etc.
Deinde supprimitur Titulus Ad Vesperas, cum duabus sub- sequentibus Rubricis.
In Officio parvo B. M. V. omittatur prima Rubrica. Ad Laudes post primam Antiphonam dicatur: Ps. Dominus reg- navit, cum reliquis de Dominica.
In Officio defunctorum omittatur prima Rubrica. Ad Laudes tertius Psalmus Deus Deus meus, psalmo Deus misereatur omisso. Quintus Psalmus Laudate Dominum in Sanctis ejus etc., aliis duobus omissis.
In Psalmis Gradualibus supprimatur prima Rubrica.
In Septem Psalmis Poenitentialibus supprimantur duae primae Rubricae.
Officia Votiva per annum supprimantur omnino.
In Missali. In Principio Missalis.
Post Bullas Pii V, dementis VIII et Urbani VIII inseratur Bulla Divino afHatu SSmi D. N. Pii Papae X.
Kalendarium Missalis.
Idem sit ac Kalendarium Breviarii, additis in singulis Festis ritus duplicis II. classis, quoties occurrit comm. simplicis, verbis: in missis privatis tantum.
Post Rubricas Generates inserantur Tit. X., XII. et XIII. Novarum Rubricarum.
In proprio de Tempore Missalis. In Festo Ss. Innocentium.
Post Missam ponatur sequens Rubrica:
Si Festum Nativitatis Domini, S. Stephani, S. Joannis Evang. et Ss. Innocentium venerit in Dominica, ipsa die nihil fit de Dominica, sed die proxima post Festum S. Thomae Mart, dicitur Missa de Dominica ut infra.
ANALECTA, g-
Si Festum S. Thomae venerit in Dominica, Missa dicitur de Dominica cum commemoratione S. Thomae et quatuor Octavarum. Similiter si Festum S. Silvestri in Dominica oc- currerit, Missa dicitur de Dominica cum commemoratione S. Silvestri et quatuor Octavarum. Die vero 30 Decembris, si occurrerit in Feria II. vel in Sabbato, dicitur Missa de die infra Octavam Nativitatis, ut infra, cum commemoratione aliarum Octavarum.
Dominica infra Octavam Nativitatis.
Ui in Missali, additis commemorationibus de Nativitate, S. Stephana 5. Joanne et Ss. Innocentibus.
Die 29 Decembris. Sancti Thomae Episc. Mart.
Ut in Missali, demptis commemorationibus , et addita Ru- brica: Et fit comm. de Nativitate, de S. Stephano, de S. Joanne et de Ss. Innocentibus, ut in Missa praecedenti.
In fine Missae deleantur Rubricae, quae nunc habentur in Missali.
Die 30 Decembris. Ut in Missali, dempta Rubrica Si Festum S. Silvestri, etc.
In Commemoratione Solemni Sanctissimi Corporis D. N. J. C.
In fine Missae prima Rubrica sic corrigatur: Infra Octavam dicitur haec eadem Missa, et non fit de aliquo Festo, nisi fuerit duplex I. classis occurrens, et tunc cum commemoratione Oc- tavae. In die Octava non fit nisi de Festo Ss. Apostol. Petri et Pauli, si occurrat, cum comm. Octavae.
In proprio Sanctorum Missalis. Die 19 Martii.
In Commemoratione solemni S. Joseph, Sponsi B. M. V., Confessoris.
In fine mensis Aprilis:
94
THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW,
Dominica III. post Pascha.
In Solemnitate S. Joseph Sponsi B. M. V. et Ecclesiae Universalis Patroni Confessoris.
Ante Evangelium addantur sequentia:
In Missis Votivis post Pentecosten : Ps. 20. Domine prae- venisti etc. (ut habetur in fine Missae).
In Missis Votivis post Septuagesimam Graduale dicitur ut supra post Pentecosten, omissis Alleluia et V. seq. et dicitur Tractus. Ps. III. Beatus vir, qui timet Dominum: in mandatis- ejus cupit nimis.
V. Potens in terra erit semen ejus: generatio rectorum henedicetur.
V. Gloriae et divitiae in domo ejus: et justitia ejus manet in saeculum saeculi.
Supprimatur ultima Rubrica Si Festum etc. usque ad finem, et ponatur sequens:
Infra Octavam dicitur Missa ut in Festo : post Orationem diei dicitur secunda O ratio Concede noSy tertia Ecclesiae vel Deus omnium fidelium.
In die Octava dicitur Missa de Dominica IV. post Pascha, nisi occurrat Festum Domini, aut Duplex I. aut II. classis, cum commemo ration e Octavae, ut in Festo.
Post diem 21 Junii sequentia inserantur :
Sabbato ante Dom. IV. Junii.
Hie inseratur Missa, quae habetur die 2^ Junii, et in fine addatur haec Rubrica:
Si haec Vigilia occurrat eadem die cum Vigilia anticipata Ss. Apostolorum Petri et Pauli, dicitur Missa ut supra cum secunda oratione ex Missa Vigiliae Ss. Apostolorum et tertia de S. Maria; et in fine Missae dicitur Evang. S. Joannis: In principio.
Dominica IV. Junii.
In Nativitate S. Joannis Baptistae.
Hie ponatur Missa, quae habetur die 2/j. Junii. Post Orationem, et post Secretam addatur: Et fit com- memoratio Dominicae occurrentis. Post Evangelium addatur: Dicitur Credo ratione Dominicae..
ANALECTA. -
Post Postcommunionem addatur: Et fit commemoratio Dominicae occurrentis et legitur ejus Evangelium in fine Missae.
Suppressa ultima Rubrica, addatur: Infra Octavam dicitur Missa ut in Festo cum secunda Oratione Concede y tertia Ec- clesiae vel pro Papa; et non dicitur Credo, nisi in Ecclesia propria, vel nisi venerit infra Oct. Ss. Apostolorum Petri et Pauli.
Si dies Octava venerit in Festo Ss. Apostolorum Petri et Pauli, nihil fit de Octava. Si autem occurrerit die 30 Junii, Missa dicitur de Dominica, cum commemoratione diei Oc- tavae; deinde fit commemoratio tum S. Pauli Ap. turn S. Petri Ap. Si vero occurrerit Dominica I. Julii, Misga dicitur de Pretiosissimo Sanguine D. N. J. C. vel de Visitatione B. M. v., juxta Rubricas, cum com. Dom. et Octavae S. Joannis.
Omnia quae habentur in Missali diebus 2j et 24 Junii sup- primantur omnino.
Die 25 Junii. Supprimatur Rubrica et fit com. Oct. etc.
Die 26 Junii.
Supprimantur Rubricae respicientes com. Oct. S. Joannis.
Ante Diem 28 Junii sic corrigenda Rubrica:
Si sequens Festum S. Leonis venerit in Dominica, Missa
dicitur de Festo Nativitatis S. Joannis Baptistae cum comm.
Dominicae, et nihil fit de S. Leone. In Sabbato praecedenti
fit de Vigilia Nativitatis S. Joannis cum comm. Vigiliae Ss.
Apostolorum Petri et Pauli, et tertia oratione de S. Maria, et
in fine legitur Evang. S. Joannis In principio.
Die 28 Junii.
Supprimantur Rubricae respicientes com. Octavae S. Joannis.
In fine Missae Vigiliae Apostolorum addatur haec Rubrica: Si haec Vigilia in Sabbato anticipanda sit, ideoque oc-
currat eodem die cum Vigilia Nativitatis S. Joannis Baptistae;
de hac secunda dicitur Missa, cum comm. Vigiliae Ss. Apostol.
et tertia Oratione de S. Maria et Evang. S. Joannis in fine.
^6 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
Die 30 JuNii.
Supprimantur Rubrica respicientes Oct. S. Joannis Baptistae.
Supprimantur omnia quae nunc habentur in Missali die i Julii, et ponantur sequentia:
Die I. III. et IV. Julii. Infra Octavam Ss. Apostolorum Petri et Pauli. Hie ponatur Missa, quae habetur die j Julii. Die J Julii supprimatur Missa quae nunc habetur in Missali.
Die 6 Augusti.
Post Orationem sic corrigatur Rubrica: In Missis privatis tantum fit com. Ss. Mm. Xysti, Felicissimi et Agapiti.
Dominica infra Octav. Nativitatis B. M. V. supprimantur omnia quae habentur in Missali.
Die 12 Septembris. In Festo Sanctissimi Nominis B. M. V.
Hie ponatur Missa quae habetur Dom. infra Oct. Na- tivitatis, demptis Rubricis respicientibus commemorationem Dominicae.
Die 2 NovEMRBis.
Retenta prima Rubrica, loco secundae et tertiae ponatur sequens: Si autem hac die 2 Novembris occurrat Duplex I. classis aut Dominica, Commemoratio omnium Fidelium De- functorum in diem immediate sequentem, similiter non im- peditam, transfertur, seu reponitur.
Die 9 Novembris.
Rubrica respiciens com. S. Theodori sic corrigatur : Pro com. S. Theodori, Mart, in Missis privatis tantum.
Missae Votivae per annum supprimantur omnino.
Quae omnia SSmo Domino Nostro Pio Papae X per in- frascriptum Secretarium relata, Sanctitas Sua dignata est rata habere et adprobare, simul iniungens, ut in Missalibus et
ANALECTA. gy
Breviariis iam editis, quae venalia apud typographos prostant, adiiciatur fasciculus Rubricas adaptatas ut supra continens. Die 23 lanuarii 1912.
Fr. S. Card. Martinelli, Praef. L. *S.
■*■ Petrus La Fontaine, Ep. Charystien., Secret
II.
Circa Doxologiam v. Primae, et Praefationem Propriam
IN OCCURRENTIA FeSTORUM B. M. V. AD INSTAR SIMPLICIS REDACTORUUM.
Quum ex Constitutione Apostolica " Divino afflatu " SSmi Dni Nostri Pii Papae X, diei i Novembris 1911, Festum B. M. V. ritus duplicis maioris, aut dies Octava eiusdem Dei- parae, si in Dominicam occurrant, amodo simplificari debeant; Sacrae Rituum Congregationi insequentia dubia proposita fuerunt, nimirum :
I. An in praedictu casu conclusiones Hymnorum et versus Responsorii brevis ad Primam esse debeant de ipsa Beata Maria Virgine?
II. Quae Praefatio in casu dicenda sit in Missa?
Et Sacra eadem Congregatio, ad relationem subscripti Se- cretarii, re mature perpensa, respondendum censuit :
Ad I. Affirmative, nisi dicenda sit propria Temporis, et exceptis Dominicis Adventus.
Ad II. Praefatio Trinitatis, nisi occurrat Praefatio de Tempore aut alicuius Octavae Domini, iuxta Novas Rubricas, tit. X, n. 4.
Atque ita rescripsit die 30 Decembris 1911. Fr. S. Card. Martinelli, Praef.
L. *S.
Hh Petrus La Fontaine, Ep. Charystien., Secret.
III.
Decretum de Festis Ritus Duplicis Maioris Octava condecoratis.
Quaedam Festa, quamvis perpauca, ritus Duplicis Maioris, pro aliqua particulari Ecclesia, transactis temporibus, Octava decorata fuerunt. Quum autem harum Octavarum celebratio
98
THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
novissimis Sanctae Sedis dispositionibus minime congruat, Sacra Rituum Congregatio, ad relationem subscript! Secre- tarii, audita sententia Commissionis Liturgicae, reque ac- curate examine perpensa, statuit et decrevit: Festa ritus duplicis maioris Octava gaudere nequeunt; et si quae huius- modi Octavae iam concessae inveniantur, amodo declarantur suppressae. Atque ita servari praecepit die 30 Decembris 1911.
Fr. S. Card. Martinelli, Praej. L. * S.
•i* Petrus La Fontaine, Ep. Charystien., Secret.
IV.
Decretum de Novi Psalterii edendi Facultate ab Epis-
COPIS NON CONCEDENDA.
Cum nuper nonnulli Rmi loco rum Ordinarii Sacram Rituum Congregationem interrogaverint utrum sibi liceat facultatem concedere Typographis respectivae Dioecesis imprimendi " Psalterium Breviarii Romani cum Ordinario Divini Officii jussu SS. D. N. Pii PP. X novo ordine per hebdomadam dispositum et editum " necne; Sacra ipsa Congregatio re- spondit: " Detur Decretum diei 15 Novembris 191 1 in Edi- tione typica Vaticana relatum ".
Tenor autem Decreti hie est:
" Praesentem Psalterii cum Ordinario Divini Officii edi- tionem Vaticanam diligenter revisam et recognitam, ac juxta recentes Rubricarum immutationes, ad normam Constitutionis Apostolicae " Divino afflatu " SSmi D. N. Pii Pp. X, ac- curatissime dispositam, Sacra Rituum Congregatio typicam declaravit; statuitque, ut novae ejusdem Psalterii editiones huic in omnibus sint conformes, et non imprimantur, nisi a Typographis hujus Sacrae Congregationis, servatisque prae- scriptionibus ab hac Secretaria tradendis ".
Quod, non obstante Decreto diei 17 Maii 191 1, ita servari mandavit.
Die 15 lanuarii 1912.
L. *S.
"i* Petrus La Fontaine, Episc. Charystien.,
S. R. C. Secretarius.
ANALECTA. ^
99 V.
MONITUM.
Sax:rae Rituum Congregation! visum est Rmos locorum Ordinarios certiores facere, eosque orare ut suis subditis notum faciant, nullius roboris esse rescripta, responsa ad duhia, con- cessiones, declarationes cuiusque generis, privilegia, com- mentaria nomine ipsius S. Congregationis evulgata, nisi, prout de iure, subsignata fuerint exclusive ab Emo Cardinali ipsi S. Congregationi Praefecto una cum S. ipsius Congregationis Secretario vel eius Substituto, aut, in casu necessitatis, saltem ab Emo Praefecto, vel a Secretario aut eius Substituto: Item nil esse commune inter S. Rituum Congregationem et cuius- cumque generis ephemerides rem liturgicam pertractantes, cum Sacra ipsa Congregatio, quoties promulgatione opus sit, ea quae statuerit, in Commentario officiali Acta Apostolicae Sedis ad tramitem Constitut. Ap. " Promulgandi pontificias " inserenda curet.
Ex S. R. C. Secretaria, die 28 lanuarii 191 2.
HH Petrus La Fontaine, Epis. Charystien., Secretarius.
OUEIA EOMANA.
Pontifical Appointments.
24 April, ipi2: The Honorable Richard Preston, of the Archdiocese of Liverpool, appointed Secret Chamberlain Supernumerary of the Sword and Cape to His Holiness.
2p April, igi2: Mr. Edward L. Hearn, of New York, made Commander of the Order of San Silvestro.
Stubtes anb Conferences.
OUE A5ALE0TA.
The Roman documents for the month are :
S. CONSISTORIAL CONGREGATION : I . Gives the boundaries of the new Diocese of Kearney, Nebraska, formerly of the Diocese of Omaha. The new See is in the Dubuque Province.
2. The Vicariate Apostolic of Brownsville is made the Dio- cese of Corpus Christi, in the New Orleans Province.
3. The boundaries of the Diocese of Fort Wayne are de- fined.
S. Congregation of the Council publishes a letter re- garding feast days.
S. Congregation of Rites : i . Continuation of the decree containing the changes to be made in the Missal and the Breviary.
2. Rescript concerning the conclusions of Hymns and the verse of the Responsory at Prime; also the simplification of Proper Preface of the Blessed Virgin.
3. Decree concerning feasts of Double Major Rite that have octaves.
4. Permission to publish the New Psaltery is not to be granted by Bishops.
5. Admonition not to accept as authentic documents pur- porting to come from the S. Congregation unless they are signed by the Cardinal Prefect and Secretary (or his substi- tute) of the Congregation.
DOES THE YIETUE OP OOMMITHION LAST?
The question here proposed may be explained as follows. Communion intensifies the soul's supernatural vitality: it in- creases that sanctifying grace which is the vital principle of the supernatural life. The Eucharist thus lessens our danger of losing that divine life by the commission of mortal sin. Amongst other ways, it does this by weakening the rebellion of our natural concupiscences and irregular tendencies. But now the question arises: Does this preserving and vivifying action of a Communion last indefinitely, so that it is unneces- sary to repeat the soul's refreshment for a long time? Need-
STUDIES AND CONFERENCES. iqj
less to say, we are not here discussing the continuance of devout feelings and impressions after the time of Communion.
That some repetition of the spiritual meal is necessary becomes plain from the ecclesiastical precept by which all Catholics are enjoined to receive Holy Communion at least once a year, as soon as they have reached the dawn of reason. This precept is radically divine, since it is the authoritative determination by the Church of Christ's command to " eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink His blood." ^
But here it is important to note that our Lord does not re- quire our obedience to this command merely as a point of re- ligious discipline. He further makes our compliance a con- dition for retaining the spiritual life of grace here, and gaining eternal life hereafter. For He says : " Except you eat . . . you shall not have life in you ... He that eateth . . . hath eternal life/' etc.^
It is not merely a case, then, of Communion being necessary because it is commanded, which is too often the view of the " hardy annual ". Communion is commanded because, in the actual dispensation of Christ, it is necessary for the soul's life.
But is one Communion a year any sort of guarantee that we shall keep in God's grace? It cannot be such if the pre- servative efficacy of the Eucharist be passing and exhaustible. What grounds then have we for supposing that this is actually the case?
This notion of the non-permanent virtue of a Communion has at its back no less a theological authority than Cardinal de Lugo, to whose opinions, even when unsupported by other doctors, Saint Alphonsus Liguori attached so much weight. In his treatise on the Eucharist we read : " Since this Sacra- ment is meant to be received repeatedly, after the manner of food, it is not to be thought that it produces the effects of help and strength so powerfully over a long period as for the time nearer to its reception." ^ Here the non-permanence of the sacramental virtue is clearly indicated.
^ John 6 : 54.
2 Ibid. 54-5. " He does not say that eternal life is reserved for him in the future {habebit), but that he has it already {habet), and holds the sure pledge of it." Papal Address to French First Communicants,- Sistine Chapel, Low Sunday, 14 April, 191 2.
' " Cum hoc Sacramentum saepius, instar cibi, accipiendum sit . . . non est credendum quod aeque efficaciter influat auxilia et vires in longum tempus, sicut in tempus proximum." De Euch. Disp. XIV, Sect. 3.
102 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
Then we have the teaching of the Holy See contained in the Decree on daily Communion. There we are told that our Lord ''more than once and in no ambiguous terms pointed out the necessity of eating His flesh and drinking His blood fre- quently." * This necessity of partaking frequently cannot be one of precept, or Christ would have guided His Church to demand more than an annual Communion under pain of sin. The necessity therefore of a more frequent reception must arise from our own spiritual need of it. And yet, if the effect of Communion did not gradually decline as the weeks and months wear on, a Communion once a year would suffice for realizing our Lord's promise of " life " and for meeting all the soul's emergencies, as well as for satisfying our Lord's precept.
Again, does not experience prove conclusively that, in the case of very many souls, even a monthly Communion does not suffice to ward off the spiritual death of mortal sin? With exceptionally tempted souls even a weekly one may prove in- adequate for this vital purpose.^ Nor will it do to urge that the failure is attributable simply to the communicant's want of care to avoid the occasions of sin, and that, failing such precaution, no number of Communions will keep him safe. For the promise of " life " must necessarily include efficacious graces for observing all conditions that are essential for its preservation. Otherwise the promise would seem to be to a great extent illusory. Neither, putting aside exposure to the occasions of sin, does it seem correct to attribute the slowing down of the Eucharistic action to our daily faults. That these offer a hindrance to the operations of grace is not denied. Yet the known experience of Saints prevents our accepting this as an adequate explanation. Thus St. John Berchmans, for instance, in spite of the great perfection of his daily life, bears witness to the sense of moral faintness which he ex- perienced as the week drew to a close — an interval of a week between one Communion and another being the usual thing in his day. And when a feast day coincided with a Sunday he would observe regretfully, " One Banquet the less! "
* " Crebro manducandi."
^ The reference here is to those who are able to practice more frequent Communion. As for the unavoidably impeded, no doubt our Lord can and will make the rarer Communions, alone possible to them, amply sufficient for their spiritual needs, however extreme these may be.
STUDIES AND CONFERENCES. jq^
If we discard the theory as to the non-permanence of the sacramental virtue, it will be difficult to defend the strong and indiscriminate invitation of the Holy See to the practice of daily Communion. " We should be forced," as Pere Lin- telo remarks, " to fall back upon the Jansenistical theory that one Communion made in perfect dispositions profits the soul more than a number of Communions made in less perfect ones. . . ." Whereas the true view, clearly underlying the Decree of Pope Pius X, is that, given the two essential dispo- sitions and no more, it is still more " salutary " in the long run to receive frequently and even daily.
We need not be greatly surprised at the limited duration of full Eucharistic efficacy, since traces of the same phenomenon may be observed in some of the other Sacraments. This point was worked out somewhat ingeniously, though perhaps not at all points quite convincingly, in a paper read at the Cologne Eucharistic Congress of 1909. Perhaps the least strained analogy which the writer drew from the other Sacraments was from the Sacrament of Extreme Unction. The Last Anointing seems to have its virtue limited, not only to the one illness, but even to the particular danger of death during which it is administered, so that, should the first danger cease and a fresh one supervene, the Sacrament is to be repeated. Again, those theologians who maintain that a person who falls sick during the day upon which he has received Communion is bound to receive it again as Viaticum, evidently regard the virtue of the morning's reception to be sufficient for the ordi- nary purposes of life but not for the special ones of death.
But perhaps we ought not to attach too much weight to these sacramental analogies. More stress should be laid upon the special nature of the Eucharist and its analogy to bodily nourishment. As De Lugo says, it is a Sacrament intended to be received repeatedly after the manner of food. The Coun- cil of Trent, whilst exhorting pastors to urge the frequent re- ception of Communion, bids them explain to the people that the Eucharistic food is necessary for their souls just as material nourishment is for their bodies. We should repeat our spiritual meals, just as we repeat our bodily ones, and not consider that an occasional repast will suffice to maintain our supernatural life in due vigor.
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THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
The type of the Manna upon which our Lord insists so pointedly in His discourse upon the Bread of Life once more suggests the important lesson that, normally speaking, Com- munion is designed to support the soul in full vitality for the day. Jewish men, women, and children were bidden to collect the same quantity of Manna. So we need the Eucharist for our constant support, whether we be adults or only infants in holiness.
A difficulty needing explanation yet remains, that is, if a satisfactory one can be found. It is this. The Eucharist increases sanctifying grace in the soul. How can it be sup- posed that this grace suffers any deterioration in the course of time? Surely nothing except mortal sin can destroy it or even diminish it? Moreover, the sanctifying grace imparted through Sacraments not only increases the soul's holiness, but gives it besides a right to the bestowal of actual graces in due season for the various emergencies of the spiritual life. The sanctifying grace cannot deteriorate. How then can the sup- ply of actual helps, or sacramental graces, based upon the sanctifying grace, weaken either?
This is breaking difficult ground and no pretense is here made of supplying a complete solution to the mystery. Yet the answer may be hazarded that, whilst the sanctifying grace suffers no diminution, the actual graces to which it en- titles its possessors follow the particular nature of the Sacra- ment in question. Accordingly, as in the case of bodily food, their nourishing virtue grows less and less as the time since the last reception lengthens.
To conclude. In discussing the above topic, no attempt, of course, was contemplated to define precisely for how long a Communion exerts its full efficacy. About that we can know nothing. But just for this very reason those are certainly wisest who, having the opportunity, receive the Bread of Life as often as the Church allows, that is, every day. Our con- fidence in our Lord's Providence over His Church justifies our feeling certain that this maximum allowance of the Heavenly Food at least will abundantly meet all our spiritual needs, however pressing or desperate. A smaller allowance too will no doubt satisfy the wants of people of good will whose neces- sary duties thwart their sincere wish for a more frequent
STUDIES AND CONFERENCES. jq-
approach to the Holy Table. Their very desire for Christ will bring them the extra graces that accrue from the practice of Spiritual Communion, and will dispose them to derive ad- ditional profit from their next reception.
Chesterfield, England. p ^ ^^ Zulueta, S.J.
QUID MIHI ET TIBI? AGAIN.
To the Editor, The Ecclesiastical Review.
In the interests of sound criticism I beg leave to submit the following observations on the position of Fr. Drum, S.J., as represented in the last number of the Review (pp. 737- 740). The key to the difficulties advanced by him is a dis- tinction that must be insisted on before proceeding. My study of the text, John 2 : 4,^ is one thing; and the Kurdistan story, later on volunteered by Fr. Weigand ^ is another. These two topics, the study and the story, must be kept apart. The study will stand or fall on its own intrinsic merits; the story will depend largely on the authority or methods of those who endorse or reject it. The following division and arrangement of the Father's objections are made in virtue of this neces- sary distinction.
I. The Study. Objections, a. During the course of the year, Fr. Drum has discovered that the study, which pur- ported to furnish an " original solution " of John 2 : 4, is not unlike another which was discussed in the Irish Ecclesiastical Record of 1888. Dr. Dixon's and Fr. Kenny's rendition of the moot passage is referred to. It reads : " What is there between you and me? " or, " What cause of complaint is there on your part as against me? "
b. Now the idiom, " Quid mihi et tibi?" of St. John, and this other, "What is there between thee and me?" are pro- nounced by Fr. Drum to be " entirely at variance one with the other ". The former, he tells us, has " nothing in common " with the latter; and whoever says that our Lord in using the first, meant the second, is " altogether wrong ".
c. A certain Fr. O'Brien knew of an interpretation like that which I prefer, viz., " The same mind to you and to me ", but Fr. O'Brien characterized it as " silly ", for it makes ab-
1 EccL, Rev., Feb., 191 1, pp. 169-202. ^ ibid., April, p. 483-
I06 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
solute nonsense in every other passage ". This proves to Fr. Drum's satisfaction that there is a '* clear difference " be- tween the Biblical idiom and this peculiar construction.
Reply. — a. The interpretation of John 2 : 4, supported by me is contained in the following equation : quid mihi et tibi= quid mihi et quid tibi=quid meum et quid tuum. Less lacon- ically, our Lord's words to His Mother at the marriage-feast meant: "Why so soon distinguish between mine and thine, since my hour, the hour when I shall act independently of thee, is not yet come? Woman, command me." Christ, al- though on the threshold of His public ministry, was still sub- ject to Mary. — How different this view is from that of Fr. Kenny, " What cause of complaint have you against me? " needs not to be told.
b. Moreover, the rendering which Fr. Drum traces back to the Irish Ecclesiastical Record, 1888, viz., "What is there between thee and me?" antedates the Record by many a year. As indicated in my last paper, old French transla- tions of the Vulgate, notably that preferred by the Oratorian, de Carrieres, Paris, 1745, give as the ipsissima verba of Christ: " Qu'y-a-t-il entre vous et moi?" Authorities who do this would hardly agree to the assertions made by my critic in the second objection.
c. In passing from this, my reputed opinion, back to the one I really hold, it is strange that Fr. Drum detects no differ- ence between the two. It is still stranger, if my interpretation is so " nonsensical " in every other Biblical passage, that he did not recognize it before. Now that he failed in this respect seems evident from the fact that he pronounced my study of John 2 : 4, and all related pasages, on its first appearance, a model of " scholarly exegesis ".
II. The Story. The Kurdistan story, which appeared in the Review in April, 191 1 (p. 483), has occasioned this ob- scure procedure. Fr. Drum's first comment on it was that it " should not be taken as scientifically correct ".^ The reasons he urged against it were: i, its improbable dramatis personae; ii, the language it involves, viz., Arabic; iii, its bad Arabic; iv, its irrelevance in explaining John 2:4. In my reply to these objections,* my purpose was, not so much to defend the
* EcCL. Rev.^ May, 191 1, pp. 598-9. "* June, 191 1, pp. 743-746.
STUDIES AND CONFERENCES. ,Qy
story, as to call attention to the religious, political and social background which belonged to it, if true, and to show, at the same time, that " the reasons alleged against it " in Fr. Drum's development, " did not seem to be well-founded ". Subsequent difficulties recently voiced by the Orientalist sug- gest the following reflections :
i. Fr. Drum at first did not think there were any Dominicans in Kurdistan. Now, at the end of a year, he thinks that Domi- nican missionaries were at least absent from the country up until 1882, when they secured a permanent residence there. Being a Dominican, I can assure him of the contrary. As well might one argue, before knowing the fact, that the Fathers of the Society were unknown in certain American colonies before they obtained a fixed abode in them.
ii. My critic says : *' Any one who speaks with people from Tunis, Egypt, Abyssinia, Syria, and Mesopotamia, will be astounded at the uniformity and purity of their vulgar Arabic ". This is very true, but it is misleading. Of itself, the statement is pointless, except in so far as it implies : there- fore, the vulgar Arabic of Kurdistan is equally pure. Now Kurdistan is in none of the places enumerated, and of this region, the Father correctly wrote a year ago : " Arabic is not the language of Kurdistan ". Adding more definite in- formation, I may quote from La Grande Encyclopedie (art., Kourdes), the following: "There exist among the Kurds, especially along the frontier, numerous dialects containing an abundance of Turkish, Arabic, Syriac, and other words ".
iii. Yet at least the clergy of Kurdistan speak Arabic, for Fr. Drum says: " I have spoken with Chaldaic priests from Kurdistan and their language was Arabic, and no jumble of Arabic with Syriac and Kurd". Evidently, the clergy are on a higher level than the uncultured mountaineers. That was to be expected. Here we have another point of compari- son with early American history. However, missionaries in foreign lands usually familiarize themselves with the lan- guage and dialects of the natives, and occasionally use them instead of their own.
iv. It was the utter irrelevance of the story in illustrating John 2 : 4, that disposed my critic to be surprised at my seem- ing " defence " of it. Plainly, I made no pretence at defend-
I08 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
ing the story. I approved of it only conditionally, and in these words: '* // it can he verified , it possesses, at least for the philologist, a value all its own, even though it jail short in explaining the Cana narrative.'' The if, and the final clause here italicized were inserted designedly. The same is true of my appreciation of the idiom, " What is between me and thee? " In short, I considered the idiom only to dismiss it as being " open to a twofold exposition — the one favorable, the other unfavorable." Conditionally, I was willing to accept it in its favorable sense, as a " desirable parallel ", but not as an exact equivalent, of the Biblical expression. My words were : " If J in any country, the expression were habitually used in the same circumstances as the Biblical idiom, and if its idiom- atic force were such as to exclude the unfavorable sense from the minds of those who used it naturally, I fail to see why we should not then have a desirable parallel of St. John." I might have repudiated the idiom unreservedly, but I pre- ferred not to be dogmatic. The French translators and others who had previously accepted the phrase as a reasonable equivalent or parallel of St. John, were entitled to that much deference.
Fr. Drum has therefore wrongly taken it for granted that I had adopted the phrase as my own, and that the adoption had been absolute. When he revised the Arabic reading of the idiom a year ago, he assigned to it a meaning quite like that I have preferred for John 2:4. He put it thus : " We are at one, there is nothing that stands between us ". But now, in the false supposition that I have adopted it, he excludes this meaning apparently, and mistakenly identifies my position with Fr. Kenny's : " What cause of complaint have you against me?" After this, an unsound principle is given per- emptory value in deciding the imaginary issue : The idioms of one language should be translated literally into those of an- other, for my critic argues : What is there between me and thee, can have no other form in Greek but this : rt fxera^v kfiov koX 09V. Does the principle not involve a contradiction in terms?
The other issues raised will vanish, once they are viewed in their proper perspective.
Thomas a'K. Reilly, O.P.
Immaculate Conception College, Washington, D. C.
STUDIES AND CONFERENCES. jqq
EEJOINDEB BY PATHBE DEUM.
To the Editor, The Ecclesiastical Review.
Having been asked whether I had any comment to make on the above strictures by Father Reilly, I wish to say: In the first place, I do not give Fr. Reilly's " reputed opinion ", as he intimates in the above observations upon my criticism in the June number, but I quote his very words and the page on which they appear. Moreover, it is incorrect to write of me, " he pronounced my study of John 2 : 4, and all related pas- sages, on its first appearance, a model of scholarly exegesis ". All this can not be fairly read in my words : " A propos of Fr. Reilly's scholarly exegesis of John 2:4" (p. 598, vol. 44). Though I disagree with that exegesis, I do not feel such odium theologicum as to call it unscholarly. I have drawn attention to one unscholarly element in Fr. Reilly's article, — his grouping of Joel 3:4 with the other " Quid mihi et tibi " texts (p. 739, vol. 46) ; this item he heeds not. Thirdly, I do not say that his " interpretation is so nonsensical in every other Biblical passage " ; but cite such words as Fr. O'Brien's in re- gard to the Kurdistan story. Fourthly, Fr. Reilly garbles my words in writing: " Now at the end of a year, he thinks that the Dominican missionaries were at least absent from the country up until 1882 ". I think no such thing. I only wrote that " his summary of their residence therein since 1882 does not make clear a story which appeared in 1877 " (p. 738, vol. 44). Fifthly, it is unfair to say that Fr. O'Brien's character- ization of the story as silly is taken by me to prove to my satisfaction anything save that this controversy went on in 1877. Lastly, I give no "peremptory value" to the "un- sound principle " : " The idioms of one language should be translated literally into those of another". I show that the Ara- bic bain of the moot phrase has a meaning such as its Hebrew cognate form; is used precisely in the same setting as utra^v, its Greek equivalent, in the New Testament; must mean the same ; should be translated by the same. Such " sound criti- cism " of the text John 2 : 4 cannot be set aside by a rhetOiical cry of " contradiction in terms ".
I may add here that I am glad to find that Fr. Reilly no longer defends the Arabic phrase as " presumedly Kurd " ; nor his statement of a year ago that " the exegetical bearing
no THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
oi the story, althbugh not convincing, is pertinent " (p. 746,, vol. 44). The exegesis of the phrase shows it is not at all pertinent to the interpretation of John 2 : 4 — n tfioi kqI «oi,
Walter Drum, S.J. Woodstock College, Maryland.
OUB OATHOLIO SOLDIERS IN OHINA.
Dear Sir.
I have the pleasure of enclosing my subscription for the current year and hope the Ecclesiastical Review will con- tinue to be as interesting as in the past. Since the troubles in China the American Army has also sent a regiment here, the 15th Infantry. Amongst them are some 200 Catholics. Unfortunately we have no English prayer-books nor publica- tions for them. The British troops have theirs provided, and I should think there must be some of your readers who could send me a few hundred small prayer-books and a few bundles of tracts published by the American Catholic Truth Society. I should see to their distribution amongst the men of the American contingent. p ^
British Military Chaplain.
THE DE PROFUNDIS BELL.
Qu. Could you give me some information regarding the De Pro- f undis Bell ? It seems it is customary in some places to ring or strike a bell in the evening to remind the parishioners of the dead, and to elicit a De Prof undis from their pious charity. When is this bell to be rung ? Must it be rung or struck, or both ? How many strokes ?
J. M. H.
Resp. The custom of ringing the bell in the evening to invite the faithful to pray for the souls of the departed ap- pears to antedate the institution of the Angelus bell, and to have originated at the time of the Crusades. Pope Urban II is credited with being the originator, when at the Council of Clermont (1095) he ordained that a prayer bell be rung mornings and evenings to invite the faithful to implore Al- mighty God for victory of the Christian armies over the Sara- cens, and to pray for the souls of the soldiers who were left
STUDIES AND CONFERENCES. j j j
dead on the battlefield in the distant country.^ Subsequently Clement XII issued a brief (ii August, 1736) proclaiming a plenary indulgence, to be gained annually by those who regu- larly observed the practice of reciting the De Profundis or one Pater and Ave for the souls of the departed (one hundred days for each time). This prayer was to be said kneeling, about an hour after the Ave Maria (Angelus), at the sound of the bell. Later on Pius VI ( 1 781 ) extended the indulgence to all who performed the act at the time assigned, even where the bell is not sounded. The precise hour of the De Profundis Bell depends on the time of the Angelus, which it follows at an interval of about an hour. In Catholic countries the Ave Maria Bell is rung as a rule at sunset, and accordingly the hour varies; elsewhere it coincides with the curfew bell. In the United States, where the hour of the Angelus is six o'clock, the De Profundis Bell is rung at seven o'clock.
As to the manner of ringing this bell, no definite rule is laid down. Beringer with other writers holds that the bell is to be sounded for the space of time which it takes to recite the De Profundis psalm.
OUR MIDSUMMEE NUMBEE.
The month of July falls in midsummer, when everybody claims some dispensation from the serious tasks of professional life. The clerical reader too expects to find temporary relax- ation from the mental strain which the discussion of theo- logical problems, however practical in the result, involves. Since the Review is not built on wholly conventional lines of current theological periodicals, it takes the liberty to depart to some extent from the traditional method in order to be more useful to its readers. Accordingly we fill this issue of the hottest month in the ecclesiastical as well as the civil year, with clerical stories and travel experiences, or in other words with the sort of Pastoralia which, whilst they appeal to the priest, as is our exclusive purpose, do so through the more convenient way of the heart and without making any particu- lar demand on the mental energies. We feel sure the tem- porary change is agreeable to most of our readers, and will not lessen the appreciation of the practical and serious ques- tions to be discussed in these pages during the rest of the year.
^ Dr. Heinrich Otte, Glockenkunde. Leipzig. 1884.
Criticisms anb Botes*
THE PBIENDSHIP OF OHBIST. By Bobert Hugh Benson. New Tork and London: Longmans, Green & Oo. 1912. Pp. 167.
A priest must often ask himself why good people, being so good as they are, fail to make that real progress in virtue and holiness of which their consistent rectitude of life and avoidance of at least any- thing like habitual sin would seem to give promise, and of which they certainly afford the starting-point. Why, with sanctifying grace habitually in their souls; why, considering all that this involves — the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, of the Blessed Trinity Itself, — why are they not much more like the Saints than they are? Why are they so timid, so apt to be discouraged, so prone to say, when it is suggested to them that they should enter upon the " devout life ", " Oh, such things are not for me " ? Mgr. Benson would say that this comes about because they do not cultivate the friendship of Christ; and of the friendship of Christ he discourses in this book in a manner at once sympathetic with such souls as we speak of, enlightening, encouraging, and revealing a true insight into the thoughts, the needs, and the difficulties of the many who, but for the obstacle the author sets out to remove, would do great things in the spiritual life, or rather would open the way for God's Holy Spirit to do great things in them.
When Mgr. Benson's book appeared, the reviewer happened to be reading the wonderful Histoire d'une Ame, the spiritual autobiog- raphy of that wonderfully simple soul. Sister Teresa of the Infant Jesus, who died in 1897 in the odor of sanctity at the Carmelite Con- vent of Lisieux. She walked by the spiritual way of most simple child-like confidence in the love and goodness of Jesus Christ toward all, and one was impressed with the similarity in spirit, though not in the mode of treatment, between her appeal and Mgr. Benson's, to timid souls to cast off their timidity and make friends with Christ, who so constantly in the Gospels invites their friendship and offers His. For this, amongst other reasons, He became Man. Yet Catho- lics, says Mgr. Benson, " are prone ... to forget that His delights are to be with the sons of men more than to rule the Seraphim, that, while His Majesty held Him on the Throne of His Father, His Love brought Him down on pilgrimage that He might transform His ser- vants into His Friends. For example, devout souls often complain of their loneliness on earth. They pray, they frequent the Sacra-
CRITICISMS AND NOTES. j j ^
ments, they do their utmost to fulfil the Christian precepts; and, when all is done, they find themselves solitary. There could scarcely be a more evident proof of their failure to understand one, at least, of the great motives of the Incarnation. They adore Christ as God, they feed on Him in Communion, cleanse themselves in His precious Blood, look to the time when they shall see Him as their Judge; yet of that intimate knowledge of and companionship with Him in which the Divine Friendship consists, they have experienced little or nothing. They long, they say, for one who can stand by their side and upon their own level, who cannot merely remove suffering, but can himself suffer with them, one to whom they can express in silence the thoughts which no speech can utter ; and they seem not to understand that this is the very post which Jesus Christ Himself desires to win^ that the supreme longing of His Sacred Heart is that He should be admitted, not merely to the throne of the heart or to the tribunal of conscience, but to that inner secret chamber of the soul where a man is most himself, and therefore most utterly alone " (pp. 6, 7).
Beautifully and persuasively Mgr. Benson draws from the Gospel record the evidence of this desire of the Heart of Jesus. We would direct attention especially to his brief, but very striking use of the passage also from the Apocalypse — the words of Jesus risen and ascended : " Behold, I stand at the gate and knock. If any man shall hear My Voice, and open to me the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him and he with Me " ( Apoc. 3 : 20) .
But Christ is God, as well as man. " A single individualistic friendship with Him therefore does not exhaust His capacities. . . . He approaches us, therefore, along countless avenues, although it is the same Figure that advances down each. It is not enough to know Him interiorly only: He must be known (if His relation with us is to be that which He desires) in all those activities and manifesta- tions in which He displays Himself."
Hence Mgr. Benson divides his book into two parts : ( 1 ) Christ in the Interior Soul; (2) Christ in the Exterior. In the first part he gives us a short treatise on the Purgative and Illuminative Ways, up to the point at which Ordinary (not Extraordinary) Contempla- tion is reached — a goal, he points out, perfectly attainable by any- one with ordinary graces, something to be aimed at and prayed for. In a modern way — modern in the sense of being practical and suited to the difficulties and problems with which pious persons are faced now; in the sense also of being couched in language which people to-day can understand — the old and orthodox doctrine concerning
1 Italics are the reviewer's.
114 ' THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW,
these stages of the spiritual life are presented; doctrines which often may fail to be understood when read in the archaic phraseology of past days. This is what in a certain kind of religious parlance, come to savor somewhat of cant, would be called very " helpful ". Despite the associations of the hackneyed phrase, it is entirely true in this case, and many souls will thank Mgr. Benson for what he has done for them in this section of his little work.
The second part of the book, treating of Christ in the Exterior, has not only a spiritual value for Catholics, but an apologetic value also. It shows how interior religious experience must be judged as to its validity by those external criteria which Christianity, as Christ made it, afford. The Evil One clothes himself as an angel of light, so as to deceive even the elect, and " notoriously, nothing is so dif- ficult to discern as the difference between the inspirations of the Holy Ghost and the aspirations or imaginations of self" (p. 41). This confusion happens in Protestantism; it happened to the Mod- ernists. So we must look to Christ in His exterior manifestations of Himself. Nor can our friendship with Him be a true one if we do not. Particularly we must know and love Christ in the Church, " Christ-in- Catholicism ", as Mgr. Benson expresses it. Catholics, even, need to be reminded of this. It is a disposition eminently prominent in the lives of God's saints, and the greatest interior lovers and friends of Jesus have also been the greatest lovers and most loyal children of the Church. Readers of this Review will recall the author's work, Christ in the Church, recently noticed here,^ in which this aspect of the question is treated at length.
One by one, then, Mgr. Benson takes the external manifestations of Christ, the various avenues down which the Divine-Human Friend makes advance to us. Christ in the Eucharist, in the Church, in the Priest, in the Saint, in the Sinner, in the Average Man, in the Sufferer, and, lastly, in His historical life — crucified, and vindicated — is presented to us in these illuminating pages. " Christ is the Saviour " is a chapter that will bring new light to many souls, re- vealing a view of sin, often missed, which must surely seize the attention of the sinner himself with appealing force.
We cannot conceive of anyone, be he Catholic or Protestant, good or bad, who will not be benefited by the careful study of this work, which merits more than a cursory reading, and should find a place amongst the few chosen works to which each, according to his needs, goes for spiritual nourishment.
2 See the Ecclesiastical Review for June, 191 1.
CRITICISMS AND NOTES. j j -
THE EEASON WHY. A Oommon-Sense Contribution to Christian and Catholic Apologetics. By Bernard J. Otten, S.J., Professor of Theology, St. Louis University. St. Louis, Mo. : B. Herder. Pp. 347.
Father Otten's book is not a disappointment to the common-sense reader, as many advertised contributions to Christian and Catholic apologetics are, inasmuch as they are aggressive when they pre- tend to be defensive, and they exaggerate and characterize as malicious opposition to the truth what should be merely stated as fact and explained as due to ignorance or misunderstanding. If our Divine Master could say from the Cross that those who maligned and crucified Him " knew not " what they did ; if His attitude toward Judas down to the very last was one of a friend who pities rather than blames even the wilful perversity of a disciple, it hardly becomes the Catholic apologist to point in scorn and malevolence to those who are in error or who conscientiously differ from us and are therefore at least materially in the right.
Father Otten would rather persuade by reasoning and pre- sentation of fact. He starts from the evidence of creation, and makes it clear that religious service and worship of some kind is a duty which is the outcome of man's evident dependence. The quality of this service is determined by man's distinctly superior nature, which imposes the obligation of religion as well as the instinct of morality upon him. Thence we are led to examine the claims of supernatural religion: the reasonableness of faith, the possibility and need of revelation, the credentials of that revelation, the verification of the truths of revelation in their ap- plication to man's moral and spiritual aspirations. The third part of the volume is devoted to a study of the person of Christ, by which His divinity and as a consequence the divine authority of the Church established by Him to perpetuate His teaching and to lead to the fulfilment of His promises, are clearly demonstrated, logically as well as historically. The conclusion is an appeal to reason and honesty of purpose to acknowledge and embrace the one true religion. The volume is well printed, a fact which is not an altogether superfluous recommendation.
OANTEMUS DOMINO. Catholic Hymnal with English and Latin Words for Two and Three Equal Voices. Edited by Ludwig Bonvin, S. J., Op. 104. (OEGAN ACCOMPANIMENT— same editor and publisher— L. Bonyin, Op. 104 a). St. Louis : B. Herder. 1912.
The present hymnal adapts the author's previous Hosanna hymnal " to the needs of those convents, academies and other in-
Il6 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
stitutions where the custom exists of singing such hymns in 2- or 3-part chorus." The author has accordingly selected from the Hosanna the hymns which seemed " to lend themselves most readily to the desired arrangement and at the same time suffice for the va- rious needs of the ecclesiastical year," and he has also included " some polyphonic and more pretentious, though not difficult, chants." Among these latter he calls special attention to Nos. 78 and 84, which were originally written for two mixed voices, and which " may be counted among the most expressive and poetic com- positions not only of Koenen, but also in the entire field of more recent church music." The volume contains 91 numbers, of which 68 are in English text, and the remainder in Latin.
It is needless to comment on the scholarly musical abilities of Fr. Bonvin or on his well-guided taste in selection from the work of others, to whom he gives credit in the Preface to the Organ Accom- paniment. Hearty commendation may, however, be bestowed on his carefulness in acknowledging the various obligations he incurs to the work of others. He has given indications of all this by the initials placed at the end of the various accompaniments; but in order to understand the meaning of the abbreviations we refer to, it is neces- sary to have read the Preface. We venture to suggest that in a future edition it might be desirable to give all such information in an additional Index, which should also include indications of the sources of the texts of the hymns. This hymnological apparatus is a very acceptable feature of the compilations of our separated brethren in the hymnal field, and while it demands much editorial labor, nevertheless justifies the labor by the large amount of interesting and helpful information it furnishes both to the organist and to the singers. There are, for instance, in the present hjrmnal a nimiber of translations into English from Latin originals: No. 2 (" O Come, O Come, Emmanuel ") is a translation of the beautiful Latin hymn, Veni, Veni, Emmanuel, which itself is based on the Great Anti- phons (the " O's ") of Advent. The translation is a slight variation of that of the accomplished and highly successful Anglican trans- lator of oiir Latin hymns, the Rev. Dr. J. M. Neale. No. 3 (" O Come, Redeemer of the Earth ") is a translation of the famous hymn of St. Ambrose, Veni Redemptor Gentium (which is not found in our Roman Breviary), and is but slightly different from the trans- lation as found in the most recent edition of the Anglican hymnal. Hymns Ancient and Modern. No. 4 ("On Jordan's Banks the Baptist's Voice") is based on Chandler's version (found with va- rious changes in many non-Catholic hymn-books) of G. Coffin's hymn, Jordanis oras praevia, found in the Paris Breviary. These
CRITICISMS AND NOTES, j j ^
Latin originals are not so well known as the Jesu dulcis memoria, ascribed by some hymnologists to St. Bernard (which appears in translation as No. 12: ** Jesus, the Very Thought is Sweet") ; or as the Ave Maris Stella (appearing as No. 54: "Star of Ocean Fairest ") — and yet neither organist nor singer may know aught of all this interesting hymnal history. It would be desirable to furnish such information in an Index — and even to connect, in some wise, the hymns Nos. 30 and 31 ("Humbly I Adore Thee", and "O Food of Men Wayfaring") with the originals given later on in the vol- ume, Nos. 77 and 80 ("Adoro Te Devote" and "O Esca Via- torum"). The beautiful English version, hymn No. 1 ("Make Broad the Path, Unbar the Gate") is from the German original (" Macht hoch die Thiir, das Thor macht weit") of the Lutheran, Georg Weissel (d. 1665), whose original is esteemed as one of the finest Advent hymns.
An Index which should contain all similar hymnological informa- tion for the texts used throughout the volume would be, we think, desirable and helpful. Meanwhile, we must congratulate the editor on the improved text of several of the hjnnus. It is indeed a pleas- ure to find the " Holy God" (No. 28) given in an absolutely cor- rect rhythmic version; for even at this late day the hymn is often reprinted with many errors, such as " Everlasting is thy Name ", in- stead of the proper " Everlasting is thy reign " (in the first stanza) ; " Angel choirs above are singing ", instead of the proper " Angel choirs above are raising ", etc. Especially are we gratified at the careful emendation of the popular hymn, " To Jesus' Heart All- burning ", in the interests of rhyme and rhythm, and even of pro- nunciation. The editorial file was necessary here, and the result is one that must please every careful hymnologist and singer. By some oversight, the 6th stanza of hymn No. 6 has allowed an error ap- parently (it is repeated in Nos. 7 and 8) to creep in:
" The love that is between us Shall be a tie for aye, And nought shall e'er estrange us, As pledge accept my heart."
In the previous stanzas the 2nd and 4th line always rhyme.
In general, we commend also the work of printer and binder. We have noticed the following misprints: polophonic (p. Ill), Ave Maria gratis plena (p. V), "Make bread the path" (p. 3). As they stand, the volumes must be cordially commended for the excel- lence of both the music and the text; and the suggestions we have made look merely to a possible betterment in future editions.
H. T. Henry.
1 1 8 THE E CCLESIA STICAL RE VIE W.
OEaANUM OOMITANS AD PEOPEIUM DE TEMPOEE a Septuagesima usque ad Periam VI. post Octavam Ascensionis Gradualis Eomani quod juxta editionem Vaticanam harmonice omavit Dr. Fr. X. Mathias, Ee- gens SeminariiEpiscopalis Argentinensis. EditioEatisbonensis. (New York and Oincinnati : Pustet. 1912). 354 pages Quarto.
Dr. Mathias has furnished organists with an ably conceived sys- tem of accompaniment for plainsong. In the present installment of his accompaniment to the Vatican edition of the Roman Gradual, he has deemed it advisable to present certain of the chants in two keys, as for example the Introit, Offertory, Communion of Septua- gesima, Sexagesima, Quinquagesima Sundays, the first antiphon of Ash Wednesday, etc. This is done by printing the chants, not in a double signature (a device which, we conceive, must be confusing to many organists), but in two fully printed sets for each chant melody. This care for the convenience of organists involves a double labor for the musical editor and an added expense for the publisher; but both labor and expense are justified by the greater convenience thus created for the organist, who is often sufficiently tasked in his desire to render the accompaniment smooth and flow- ing, even without the added botheration of two sets of signatures placed before a single piece of music. Dr. Mathias has created his own system of rhythmical interpretation, and embodies it in the present installment of the Gradual melodies and accompaniments. Singers must sing the melodies as the organist finds them in transcrip- tion in the accompaniments; and it is obvious that either the sing- ers must be well trained in the system adopted by Dr. Mathias, or must have the use of rhythmized editions according to his system. He has provided these in the case of the Kyriale chants, of those of the Commune Sanctorum, and for the Epitome ex Editione Vati- cana Gradualis Romani. Perhaps he has done this also for the full Gradual; but if so, we have not come across it as yet. The system is somewhat similar to, but not identical with, that of Solesmes.
H. T. Henry.
OHEISTUS: MANUEL D'HISTOIEE DES EELIGIONS. Par Joseph Huby, avec la collaboration des plusieurs anteurs. Paris : Beauchesne & Oie. 1912. Pp. 1046.
LE BOUDDHISME PEIMITIF. Par Alfred Eonssel. Paris : Pierre Teqni. 1911, Pp. 440.
Much of the material which has already appeared in Father Martindale's excellent collection History of Religions (5 Vols.,
CRITICISMS AND NOTES. ug
London: Catholic Truth Society), previously recommended in the Review, has been utilized in the present Manuel. The volume contains, besides an introduction on the general historical study of religions, chapters dealing successively with the religions of savage races, the religion of China, Japan, the Aryans, Brahmanism and Buddhism, the Greeks, Romans, Celts, Germans, Egyptians, Baby- lonians, Islam, Israel.
A special feature of the work is the elaborate chapter on the Christian religion (pp. 681-1016), a study which justifies the title of the volume and places Christianity in its proper position as the unique and perfect expression of God's revelation and man's reli- gious faith and duty. There are full bibliographies and excellent indexes. The manual, while containing much matter, is compact and convenient, though the binding might easily have been more befitting.
M. Alfred Roussel's study is closed with an extract which concludes a prior work on the same subject by Barthelemy St. Hilaire. Coming as it does from an authority equally competent and unbiased, the citation is worth requoting here. " Buddhism," says M. St.-Hilaire, " has nothing to teach us and its school would be disastrous to us. Despite its appearances, which are sometimes specious, it is simply a long tissue of contradictions ; and it is doing it no injustice to say that on close acquaintance it proves to be a spiritualism without a soul, a virtue without duty, a morality with- out liberty, a charity without love, a world without nature and with- out God. What then could we gain from such teachings? And how much we should have to forget were we to become its blind disciples? How many degrees we should have to descend in the scale of nations and of civilization! The sole, though immense service, that Budd- hism can render us is by its sad contrast to make us better appreciate the inestimable value of our own beliefs by showing to us how much it has cost these peoples who have no part with us therein."
But, it may be asked, if Buddhism is thus sterile in itself and if its best lesson be negative, why multiply books to set forth " a long tissue of contradictions " or a mere standard of negative value? A sufficient answer to this query may perhaps be found in the fact that uncounted millions — one-third of the human race according to Professor Roussel — are enmeshed in this " long tissue of contradic- tions ", which, having spread far beyond its Eastern beginnings, is now enfolding new victims throughout the Western world. The moral, if not religious, beliefs of so vast a multitude of human beings cannot be without appeal to the interest of readers of this Review; and consequently the recent monograph above introduced
120
THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
may well merit their attention. Of course they already possess the well-known work of Dr. Aiken, in which the Professor of Apolo- getics in the Catholic University, Washington, examines the alleged relation of Buddhism to primitive Christianity. It is an able piece of scholarly criticism and contains the best bibliography on Budd- hism up to the year 1900 — the date of its publication. There is also the no less able work by M. de la Vallee Poussin, Professor in the University of Ghent, much of which is devoted to the philo- sophical aspects of Buddhism.
The book under review, by M. Roussel, Professor of Sanscrit in the Freiburg University (Switzerland), is somewhat more descriptive than the two just mentioned. About half the volume is devoted to the life of the Buddha, the remaining half being divided between an analysis of the Dhamma, the law of the Buddha, and a description of Buddhistic monachism. The volume closes with an account of the present condition of Buddhism in its fatherland. It will not be necessary to enter here into further details. Suffice it to recommend it not simply to professional students but to general readers to whom its subject may appeal. The author has the happy art of making a seemingly dry subject attractive. Although the work is the outcome of much research, the erudition is not paraded; it blends smoothly in a narrative that delights whilst it instructs.
L'IDEE DE DIEU DANB LES SOIEITOES OONTEMPOEAIMES : LES MEEVEILLES DU OOKPS HUMAIN. Par le Dr. L. Murat, en col- laboration aveo le Dr. P. Murat, Paris s Pierre Tequi. 1912. Pp. 890.
The volume here introduced is the third on the projected program, though the second in turn to appear, of studies designed to strengthen and illustrate the teleological argument for the exist- ence of God. The first volume, treating of the anorganic and the vegetable kingdoms, appeared about two years ago and is now in its fourth edition. It was reviewed at the time in these pages. The second volume, on the animal world, is still in course of prepara- tion. The volume at hand opens with an elaborate examination of the design argument, the objections against it drawn from Darwin- ism and materialistic evolutionism generally being especially con- sidered. The seven hundred pages which constitute the rest of the book comprise studies in the anatomy and physiology of the brain, the heart and circulatory system, the digestive organs, etc., the sensory apparatus, eye, ear, etc. especially, as well as the protective devices of the body. The aim of the author throughout has been
CRITICISMS AND NOTES. 521
to secure scientific accuracy with the avoidance as far as possible of unnecessary technicalities. The work is not therefore precisely popular. It is scientific, and yet not beyond the capacity of the average educated person to read with profit and satisfaction. The French have a well recognized felicity of being clear and exact without being tedious. The book will therefore serve the serious student of science and philosophy as well as theology, while the preacher of the word will find it a storehouse of facts and ideas available in illustration of the nature and attributes of the Creator.
AUTHORITY. The runction of Authority in Life and its Eelation to Legalism in Ethics and Religion, By A. v. 0. F. Huizinga. Boston: Sherman, Prench & Oo. Pp. 270.
This book promises much but fulfills little. Authority is con- sidered from a " psychological and sociological ", also from a " metaphysical and theological aspect " — terms which designate the main divisions of the volume — but nowhere is there a clear and ade- quate definition of authority itself. Much is said about authority, but there is no analysis of its various meanings and its nature or essence in its religious application. The work evidences consider- able reading. Indeed it is little more that a catena of excerpts from authors who have said something more or less germane to the sub- ject. Some of these extracts are misinterpreted by the compiler, owing apparently to an imperfect knowledge of the general mind of the author from whom the excerpt is taken. This is evident in the extracts from " Tyrell ". The writer has manifestly not read, or, if he has, has failed to understand " Tyrell's " mind on " author- ity " as it is expressed in that beautiful and profound chapter, " The Mystical Body," which forms a part of Hard Sayings.
The chain upon which the excerpts that make up the substance of the book are strung is weak and ill-formed. There runs through it a straining after philosophical effect which reveals a mind whose ambition surpasses its powers of attainment or its stage of prepara- tion. No one can do philosophical work who does not think at least clearly. Very much of the thought for which the author himself is responsible is hazy and confused. This is not because the thought is profound, or the subject so very difficult, but because the writer has not mastered his subject, though no doubt he honestly thinks he has. He undertook a task for which he lacked philosophical and theologi- cal ability or at least preparation. Consequently the product is im- mature and of little or no value as a contribution to' the subject.
Xiterari2 Cbat
What impresses the student of social problems most intensely, and often no less painfully, is the complexity of his undertakings. This is especially the case with " the drink question ". The frightful ravages wrought by the abuse of alcoholic stimulants are of course among the most sadly familiar of facts. The difficulties spring up and becloud the mind as soon as the method of stemming the flood is confronted. Here, as in every other phase and ramification of " the social question ", the means and remedies centre in the individual, the State, and the Church, and each of these agencies calls for special study and prudent application. The priest dealing with individual souls and applying to them the spiritual powers which the Church entrusts to him, as her representative, holds within his hands the most effective safe- guards and remedies. The functions, however, of the State, the rights and the duties of government in the matter, are less determined and more uncer- tain of execution.
The literature bearing on this department is fairly abundant. Neverthe- less, there is plenty of room for such a treatment of the subject as is given by Mr. Robert Bagnell in a neat little volume entitled Economic and Moral Aspects of the Liquor Business (New York, Funk & Wagnalls ; pp. i86). The opening chapter alone is devoted to the effects of the excessive use of alcohol upon the individual. The rest of the book deals with the social influ- ences of the saloon, and the economic and moral aspects of the subject, in view of the pertinent rights and responsibilities of the State. The treatment is calm and judicious, not rampant or subjective. The author's theory of the basis of rights is sound — a praise that cannot always be accorded to writers on the temperance question.
After recommending such a book it may seem somewhat out of place to introduce forthwith the Year Book of the United States Brewers' Association. Perhaps the insistence of the audi alteram partem might justify such a pro- ceeding; for indeed in view of the complexity of the drink question, the student who would be in every way just, dares leave no side thereof unex- amined. It is rather however for the data furnished by the volume that atten- tion is here drawn to the elaborate report of the proceedings of the Fifty-First Annual Convention of the said association (Chicago, November, 191 1). The data in point refer to the relative effects of prohibitory and permissive legis- lation on the liquor traffic. The comparative failure of prohibition is of course a well-known fact. However, the precise results of the measure are summarized in graphic statistical tables in the Year Book.
Lest any one should suspect the impartiality of the reports (the case being apparently one of pro domo sua), it should be noted that the statistics are all taken from governmental, and therefore unbiased, documents.
Much has been heard lately of boy-saving, the Boys' Brigades, Scouts, and so on. Saving the girl used to be thought a comparatively easier process, though recently the difficulties and the urgency thereof are looming up larger, and our educated Catholic women here and there are taking up the work in earnest.
Sodalities are potent agencies in the girl-saving service, but there are large numbers whom they do not and cannot reach. Working girls' clubs are becoming more and more a necessity, especially in large centres of population. We have previously called attention to Madame Cecilia's little volume, Girls' Clubs and Mothers' Meetings (New York, Benziger), and we now want to redeem our promise of returning to it.
LITERARY CHAT. J23
What impresses one most in perusing the book is its eminently practical, workable character. Madame Cecilia has had wide experience in dealing with girls, young and otherwise ; and she knows their dispositions, their ways, their faults, little meannesses, as well as their good points. She understands thor- oughly how to handle them, how to draw out their better qualities, how to minimize their weaknesses and defects. Moreover, she has supplemented her knowledge by the experience of many other workers in the same field, lay and religious, Catholic as well as non-Catholic. The result is a compendium of sound, sane, detailed, practical information covering every phase of the large and intricate subject and presented with her wonted felicity of expres- sion in this neat little volume.
The aims of Catholic working girls' clubs, how to start them, time-tables, order, discipline, committees, competitions, libraries, leaders, finances, rules, rewards, amusements, games, occupations, analyses of two hundred and fifty plays — these are the principal topics treated ; and there will probably be no conditions or occasions for advice on the side of workers in this most im- portant and timely of woman's charities, that will not be foreseen and pro- vided for in these richly-stored pages.
Hardly second if not first in ingeniousness of Christian charity is that which is known as Mothers' Meetings. Municipalities and lay benevolent organizations are actively engaged in the work of instructing mothers in their maternal and domestic duties. Much good is thus being accomplished amongst the poor. A still larger range of beneficence spreads out where all this is inspired by and permeated with the heavenly graces of the Catholic spirit. To this most fruitful and winsome of works in which spiritual interblends with corporal mercy, Madame Cecilia devotes a special chapter, the perusal of which may, it will be hoped, inspire our Catholic women in our American cities to undertake the work described.
Over against the Socialist movement which is so ably presented by Mr. Walling in his recent book. Socialism As It Is (to be reviewed in the August number) , stands the Catholic Church. Herein the Socialist " finds opposed to him ", as Mr. Hilaire Belloc says, " an organism whose principle of life is opposed to his own, and an intelligence whose reasoning does not (as do the vulgar capitalist arguments to which he is so dreadfully accustomed) take for granted the very postulates of his own creed. He learns, the more he comes across this Catholic opposition, that he cannot lay to avarice, stupidity, or hypocrisy, the resistance which this unusual organism offers to his propa- ganda."
It probably did not fall within the scope of Mr. Walling's undertaking to mention this antagonism between the two greatest organized forces existing in the world to-day. Or it may be that he desired to exclude the religious element from his argumentation, and this for reasons more or less obvious. Whatever be the case, the fact of this determined, unflinching opposition between the Church and Socialism is one of the most universal and con- spicuous of present social phenomena.
The bases and reasons of this conflict have been made clear in many books and widely spread pamphlets. Nevertheless the media of enlightenment on this point can hardly be too multiplied and too much disseminated. The International Catholic Truth Society (Brooklyn, New York) has done a good work therefore by reprinting in this country Mr. Belloc's brief paper, at a price which makes it easy to spread broadcast. Needless to say, the little essay is both bright and thoughtful.
Those who are interested in the study of the growth of sociological phe- nomena will find in the last number of the Columbia University Studies (No.
124
THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
117) an instructive type of a good method and its results. The title is A Hoosier Village: A Sociological Study, by Newell Sims (New York, Long- mans, Green & Co.)-
The identity of the actual Indiana village is concealed under the name " Aton ". The author describes the locality, the people, their social organi- zation, political, religious, etc., " the social mind ", and lastly the genesis of all these factors and activities. The whole shows how much of the ever interestingly human can be learned from the study of a back-country village of some 2,600 souls.
The Quarterly Rivista di Filosofia Neo-Scolastica, which has recently put on a bright new dress, continues to reflect the progress of philosophical studies in Italy. The editor. Dr. Gemelli, being both an eminent physician and a scholastic philosopher, knows how to combine the old metaphysics and the new- science. With his eye on the unchanging principles he has an alert sense for their progressive application to changing phases and conditions of thought (Florence, Italy).
Bishop Hay's The Sincere Christian has its place amongst the permanent books of religious instruction, a place from which the multitude of cognate works that have appeared during the past hundred years will not remove it. Solidity and clarity of doctrine, if not elegance of diction, are its claims to endurance. The new edition, revised by Canon Stuart, gives the work a worthy embodiment (St. Louis, Herder: London, Sands & Co.).
During the summer of 191 1 a series of investigations on the subject of religious ignorance was carried on through the columns of the well-known French daily. La Croix. The most eminent Catholics in France contributed their thought, and the whole product has recently been edited by the Abbe Terasse and published in a convenient volume by Lethielleux (Paris). The facts, causes, consequences and remedies — under these headings a large amount of instructive thought and suggestion relative to the growing ignorance of religion is summed up. Though directly pertaining to conditions prevailing in France the subject possesses a universal interest (pp. 173).
Bible et Science ^ Terre et del, by Ch. de Kirwan, is the title of a recent addition to M. Blond's favorably known series of " Science et Religion ". There are just three score pages, but these are well packed with pithily ex- pressed thought on the interrelations of the Bible and science and on certain fundamental problems centring in astronomy. Short studies, yet withal inter- esting, on great subjects.
To the same series has recently been added Lettres choisies de St. Vincent de Paul. The booklet contains some thirty letters, now printed for the first time from the original MSS. and edited by M. Pierre Coste (Paris: Bloud et Cie).
An oddity in ecclesiastical literature mentioned by Fr. W. Weth, S.J., in Zeitschrift fur kath. Theologie (Innsbruck) is a Missal of pre- Reformation times, belonging to the Patriarchate of Aquileja, printed in 15 19 at Venice. In connexion with its regular Calendar of Saints and feasts it gives certain rules of health and practical advice on right living.
The so-called " dog days " are marked out in the following couplet :
Octava Pe Pau canis incipit et finit Oc Lau. Mar gar caniculas Assumptio terminat illas —
which means that the vacations began on the Octave of SS. Peter and Paul, or on the feast of St. Margaret; and they ended with the Octave of St. Laurence, or the feast of the Assumption of the B. V. Mary.
LITERARY CHAT. J25
The rules of healthy living are set forth in the Calendar as follows :
I. In Januario claris calidisque cibis potiaris Atque decens potus post fercula sit tibi notus, Ledit enim medo tunc potatus, ut bene credo. Balnea tutus intres et venam scindere cures.
Nascitur occulta febris Februario multa (influenza) Potibus et escis si caute minuere velis Tunc cave frigora, de poUice funde cruorem, Sugge mellis favum, pectoris morbos curabit.
Martins humores gignit variosque dolores. Sume cibum pure, cocturas si placet ure. Balnea sunt sana, sed quae superflua vana. Vena nee abdenda ; nee potio sit tribuenda.
Hie probat in vere vires Aprilis habere. Cuncta renascuntur : pori tunc aperiuntur. In quo scalpescit corpus sanguis quoque crescit. Ergo solvatur venter, cruorque minuatur.
Maio secure laxari sit tibi curae. Scindatur vena : sed balnea dentur amena. Cum calidis rebus sint fercula seu speciebus. Potibus adstricta sit salvia cum benedicta.
In Junto gentes perturbat medo bibentes. Atque novarum fuge potus cerevisiarum. Ne noceat colera valet hec refectio vera. Lactuce frondes ede jejunus, bibe fontes.
Qui vult solamen Julio hoc probat medicamen : Venam non scindat nee ventrem potio ledat. Somnum compescat, et balnea cuncta pavescat Prodest recens unda, allium cum salvia munda.
Quisquis sub August o vivat medicamine justo Raro dormitet, estum, coitum qu,oque ritet. Balnea non curet nee multum comestio duret, Nemo laxari debet vel phlebotomari.
Fructus maturi Septemhris sint valituri
Et pira cum vino, panis cum lacte caprino.
Aqua de urtica tibi potio fertur amica.
Tunc venam pandas, species cum semine mandas.
October vina praebet cum came farrina, Necnon auccina caro valet et volucrina. Quamvis sint sana, tamen est repletio vana. Quantum vis comede, sed non praecordia laede.
Hoc tibi scire datur, quod rheuma Novembri curatur. Quaeque nociva, vita: tua sint preciosa dicta. Balnea cum venere tunc nullum constat habere. Potio sit sana atque minutio bona.
Sane sunt membris res calide mense Decembris. Frigus vitetur, capitalis vena scindatur. Lotio sit vana, sed vasis potio cara. Sit tepidus potus frigore contrario totus.
Father John Hedrick's The Office with the New Psalter, which appeared in the Review (April) and which gave the General Ordo for the months of
126 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
April, May, June, and July, has now been published by Fr. Pustet & Co., in a handy pamphlet and extended to include the new 19 12 Ordo for all the rest of the year. This makes it unnecessary for us to continue the publication of the Mutationes in Kalendario Anno.
Creighton University (Omaha, Nebraska) seems to be doing exceptionally good work in the professional courses of Law and Medicine and its allied branches of Dentistry and Pharmacy. In these courses we note the admission of women-graduates. In the May issue of the Creighton Chronicle, the Uni- versity organ, an attractive account of the progress made by the institution is given. Father Eugene Magevney, S.J., the President, is evidently bringing his University to the front.
According to the Tablet (London) the official reports of France indicate a continued decline of the birth rate there. The recorded deaths for the past year exceeded the births by 34,869. There were 13,058 divorces. The evils implied in these statistics are distinctly less in those parts of France, where, as in Brittany, the Catholic religion is being maintained among the people.
Father Maurice Meschler's beautiful treatise on the Holy Ghost has been translated into Spanish under the title of Pentecostes b las Danes del Espiritu Santo. The translation is by the Jesuit Father Evaristo Gomez, and has ap- parently retained all the charm which is a feature of the German original, and which likewise characterizes the English version. The volume is an excellent meditation book for all seasons, although especially designed for the Pentecostal cycle (B. Herder).
In connexion with this work of Father Meschler we would direct attention to two other treatises well known of old, but recently republished in attractive form as part of the Bibliotheca ascetica mystica, designed by Cardinal Fischer of Cologne and edited by Father Lehmkuhl. They are the mystical theology of the Carmelite Father Joannes a Jesu Maria, together with his Epistola Christi ad Hominem; likewise the Latin version by Masotto of Father Scupoli's Spiritual Combat, which St. Francis de Sales seems to have valued above all other printed aids to progress in the spiritual life, next to the in- spired Word of God.
The old Venetian Luigi Comaro believed that all the spiritual doctrine necessary to make a man become a better servant of God, was contained in the principle of abstemiousness which he expounds in his fourfold treatise, Delia Vita Sobria. That famous book has indeed done much not only for the popularizing of the art of living long, but likewise for the promotion of natural virtue and the spirit of public benevolence. Curiously enough it is only within recent years that the work has become known in the United States. The poet George Herbert had made an English version of it in his day; rendered apparently from the Latin translation by Lessius (1613 and 1615), which seems to have been popular at the time. In the succeeding^ century a number of editions were issued in London, of which the best, ac- cording to John Sinclair, is the one of 1779. An enterprising Parisian pub- lisher had issued a critique of the work before that date under the name of L'Anti-Cornaro (Paris, 1702).
A few years ago Mr. William Butler, of Milwaukee, printed an amended translation, the result of original inquiry into Italian sources. Apart from being probably the most complete version in English of the four original tracts, with biographical notes and references, the volume contains a number of appreciations by Addison, Bacon, and Sir William Temple, who were fervent advocates of the Vita Sobria.
JSooks IRecelveb.
THEOLOGICAL AND DEVOTIONAL.
Das Zeugnis des fier Evangelisten fiir die Taufe, Eucharistie und Gcistes- sendung. Mit Entwiirfen zu Predigten iiber die Eucharistie. Von Dr. Johannes Evang. Belser, o. Professor der Theologie an der Universitat Tiibingen. St. Louis, Mo. : B. Herder. Pp. xii-294. Price, $1.30.
ViVRE, ou SE LAISSER viVRE? Conseils aux Jeunes Gens. Par Pierre Saint- Quay. Avec une lettre de Mgr. Baudrillart, Recteur de I'lnstitut Catholique. Paris : Pierre Tequi. 1912. Pp. xv-326. Prix, 3/r. 50.
Manuel Pratique de la Devotion au Sacre-Cceur de Jesus. Par I'Abbe Vandepitte, D.H. Paris: Pierre Tequi. 1912. Pp. 345. Prix, 1 /r.
Pensees Choisies du R. p. de Ponlevoy de la Compagnie de Jesus. Ex- traites de sa vie, de ses opuscules ascetiques et lettres. Par le P. Charles Renard. Paris: Pierre Tequi. 19 12. Pp. viii-363. Prix, i fr.
Le Pain 6vangelique. ifexplication dialoguee des 6vangiles des Dimanches et Fetes d'Obligation a I'usage des Catechismes, du Clerge et des Fideles. Tome II : Du Careme a la St. Pierre. Paris : Pierre Tequi. 19 12. Pp. 248. Prix, 2 fr.
Le Mystere d'Amour. Considerations sur la Sainte Eucharistie. Par le R. P. Lecomu, Provicaire du Tonkin Occidental. Paris: Pierre Tequi. 1912. Pp. viii-394. Prix, 3 fr. 50.
Manuel du Tiers- Ordre de Saint-Francois. D'apres le Directoire spir- ituel. Par P. Eugene d'Oisy. Constitution " Misericors Dei Filius ". — Expli- cation de la R^gle. — Ceremonial. — Catalogue des indulgences. — Conduite in- terieure. — Recueil de prieres franciscaines. — Cantiques. — Office de la Sainte Vierge. Deuxieme Edition. Paris : Librarie S. Frangois ; Couvin, Belgique : Maison Saint-Roch. 1912. Pp. 558.
Theologia Mystica et Epistola Christi ad Hominem. Auctore Joanne A Jesu Maria, Carmelita discalceato.
PuGNA Spiritualis secundam versionem Latinam ab Oljrmpio Masotto factam. Auctore Lauren tio Scupoli, O.Cler.Reg. — Friburgi Brisg., St. Louis, Mo.: B. Herder. 1912. Pp. 394. Price, $1.25.
Homilien und Predigten. Von Dr. Paul Wilh. von Keppler, Bischof von Rottenburg.— Freiburg Brisg., St. Louis, Mo.: B. Herder. 1912. Pp. 345. Price, $1.10.
Pentecostes o Los Dones del Espiritu santo. Meditationes espirituales por el Padre Mauricio Meschler, S.J. Traducidas por el Padre Evaristo Gomez, S.J.— Friburgo Brisg., St. Louis, Mo.: B. Herder. 1912. Pp. 505. Price, $1.50.
Gott mit uns : Theologie und Ascese des AUerheiligsten Altars sakramentes erklart von P. Justinus Albrecht, O.S.B. Den Eucharistischen Congressen gewidmet. Approb. Ergb. Freiburg. Freiburg Brisg., St. Louis, Mo.: B. Herder. 191 2. Pp. 122. Price, $0.55.
LITURGICAL.
The Office with the New Psalter. By Rev. John T. Hedrick, S.J., Georgetown University, Washington, D. C. Ratisbon, Rome, New York, Cin- cinnati. Frederick Pustet & Co. 1912. Pp. 32. Price, $0.10.
Organ Accompaniment to the " Cantata ". By J. Singenberger. Ratis- bon, Rome, New York, and Cincinnati. Fr. Pustet & Co. 191 2. Quarto. Pp.
128 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
The Holy Mass according to the Greek Rite, Being the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom in Slavonic and English. By Andrew J. Shipman, LL.D. New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons. 19 12. Pp. 44.
PHILOSOPHICAL.
The Science of Logic. An Inquiry into the Principles of Accurate Thought and Scientific Method. By P. Coffey, Ph.D. (Louvain), Professor of Logic and Metaphysics, Maynooth College, Ireland. Two volumes. Vol. I : Conception, Judgment, and Inference. New York, London, Bombay, Cal- cutta: Longmans, Green & Co. 1912. Pp. xx-445. Price, $2.50 net.
Handbook of the History of Philosophy. By Dr. Albert Stockl. Vol. I: Pre- Scholastic and Scholastic Philosophy. Second edition (1903). Trans- lated by the Rev. T. A. Finlay, S.J., M.A., National University, Dublin. New York, London, Bombay, Calcutta: Longmans, Green & Co, 1911. Pp. v-446. Price, $3.75, net.
The Five Great Philosophies of Life, By William De Witt Hyde, President of Bowdoin College, New York: The Macmillan Co. 191 1, Pp. x-296. Price, $1.50, net.
The Learning Process. By Stephen Sheldon Colvin, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois. New York : The Macmillan Co, 1912. Pp. xxv-336. Price, $1.25, net.
A Living Wage. Its Ethical and Economic Aspects. By John A, Ryan, S,T.D., Professor of Ethics and Economics in the St, Paul Seminary, With an Introduction by Richard T, Ely, Ph.D., LL.D. New York and London ; The Macmillan Co. 1912. Pp. xvi-346. Price, $0.50, net.
Introductory Philosophy. A Text-Book for Colleges and High Schools. By Charles A. Dubray, S.M., Ph.D., Professor of Philosophy at the Marist College, Washington, D. C. New York, London, Bombay, and Calcutta: Longmans, Green & Co. 19 12. Pp. xxi-624. Price, $2.60.
Socialism as It Is. A Survey of the World-Wide Revolutionary Move- ment. By William English Walling. New York : The Macmillan Co. 1912. Pp. xii-452. Price, $2.00, net.
Present Philosophical Tendencies. A Critical Survey of Naturalism, Idealism, Pragmatism, and Realism together with a Synopsis of the Philoso- phy of William James. By Ralph Barton Perry, Assistant Professor of Phil- osophy in Harvard University. New York, London, Bombay, and Calcutta: Longmans, Green & Co., 19 12. Pp. xv-383. Price, $a.6o, net.
HISTORICAL.
De Curia Romana: Ejus Historia ac hodierna disciplina juxta reforma- tionem a Pio X inductam. Auctore Monin, J.C.L., in Universitate Cath, Lovaniensi Juris Canonici prof, extraoid, — Lovanii : Josephus Van Linthout, 19 1 2. Pp. 394. Price, 5 fr.
St. Francois Xavier. Par A. Brou, Tome Premier: 1506- 1548. Tome Sec- ond: 1548-1552. Paris: Gabriel Beauschesne & Cie, 1912, Pp, xvi-445 et 487, Prix, 12 fr.
MISCELLANEOUS,
Vendeenne. Par Jean Charruau. Paris : Pierre Tequi. 1912. Pp. xiii-270. Prix, 2 fr.
My Lady Poverty. A Drama in Five Acts. By the Rev. Francis de Sales Gliebe, O.F.M. Fourth edition. Santa Barbara, Calif.: St. Anthony College. 1912. Pp. 78. Price, $0.35 ; 3 copies, $1.00 ; 12 copies, $3.00.
THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW
Fifth Series.— Vol. VII.— (XLVII).— August, 1912.— No. 2.
PULPIT ELOQUENCE AND THE SUPEENATUEAL.
THE minister of a Protestant sect feels that he has to devote himself assiduously to the composition and delivery of sermons ; for they are, he thinks, the only means which he can employ for the purpose of enriching the souls of his congre- gation with grace.
But a Catholic priest is tempted to neglect sermons by the very abundance of the means of grace at his disposal. Every statue in its niche around the church preaches Faith. The Crucifix speaks eloquently of the love of God. Stained-glass representations of the mysteries send rays of sacred light into the souls of worshippers. Flowers, altar-lights, stately can- dlesticks, and vestments help to diffuse grace through the congregation. But especially there are the Sacraments and the Holy Sacrifice to promote the work of salvation and sancti- fication. Yonder is the confessional, yonder the Tabernacle. Is it too much to say that the Catholic priest in the midst of this lavish abundance of grace is tempted to feel content? Why should he endeavor to perfect himself in the art of speaking, in general ; or in particular, why prepare overmuch for a sermon here and now, which after all will be only a rill in comparison with these floods ? And indeed he may be dis- posed to consider it not only as a rill, but even as a dry chan- nel, on the theory that natural eloquence like every other natural thing is incapable of producing a single degree of grace in the soul.
Again, in the midst of these holy surroundings he may possibly feel his insignificance. The heretical minister has
130 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
not the same background or pomp of circumstance to awe him into reverence. Four walls there are, a human audience and music in the choir-loft. But the tremendous Sacrifice, the rich sweet Sacraments, the company of imaged saints and angels are not around him. The sense of their infinite super- iority is not forced upon him to humble him. He stands alone, as preacher the central figure, with a feeling of mastery instead of insignificance. But the priest is overwhelmed b>^ glory. His eyes are blinded by heavenly rays. His im- portance dwindles in his own opinion, and he feels what may seem to him to be the inconsistency of mere man presuming to speak in the house of God. Just as a man with a heart to feel, realizes his littleness whilst he stands and looks around him at nature; and bows his head in solemn reverence in the presence of mountains, valleys, oceans, and skies, so the priest bends his head and would refrain from speech, thinking of the splendid supernatural world around him, walled and roofed in by his church.
Maybe too the futility of nature in the supernatural order will be invoked to justify neglect of eloquence. The Church has been clear in her depreciation of nature in works super- natural. She has taught us that there is no formal proportion existing between merely human faculties and the world of grace. The priest knows as a consequence that he could more easily draw a battleship with a silken cord, or quarry Gibraltar with a razor, or do any other deed ridiculously out of pro- portion with his means, than acquire the least degree of grace or glory for himself or for others with only natural energy. The poetical beauties of the mind of Shakespeare, the passion- ate strength of a Webster's soul, the keen intuitions of a Newton, sink into insignificance by the side of a single act of Faith in the soul of a child. For, after all, the accu- mulated splendors of imagination, passion, and intelligence, which beautify the mind of poet, orator, and scientist, could not merit by their own worthiness the slightest bit of God's love, a love which, however, he lavishes upon the faithful mind. Hence if poet, orator, or scientist went forth to reno- vate the world with his genius, he might succeed in imbuing his hearers' souls with ennobling thoughts and with stirring emotions, but he could not with all his gifts and energy sue-
PULPIT ELOQUENCE AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 131
ceed in inducing a single salutary act. Then why not dis- pense with the accoutrement of nature in the warfare of God and look only to the armor of God, the " breastplate of justice," the " shield of Faith," the " helmet of salvation," and " the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God " ? Such thoughts as these may perchance incline a priest k) become sceptical about the utility of the art of oratory on the level of the supernatural.
Why, he might continue, presume to throw light upon the sun with a lantern? Why try " to gild refined gold, to paint the lily," or daub the rainbow? Why try to increase the attractiveness of heavenly Faith with the vulgar cosmetics of an earth-grown art? Will keenness of mind, solidity of judgment, wide information, facility of expression, and melodiousness of voice help the orator in any degree to in- crease the objective value of Faith, or his own appreciation of it, or esteem for it in the hearts of his hearers? Can sharpness of intellect enable him to cut away the rust of mis- understanding and prejudice from the shining surface of Faith and show its divine glory to the world, more effectively than the simplest intellect, alive with Faith, could do the same? Can the sudden intuitions of his literary mind, re- fined by contact with the best of books, better fit a speaker to mount to the level of mysticism himself and draw his hearers after him, to partake in the intuitions of contemplatives, be it ever so slightly, — can, I say, the natural intuitions of such a mind do this work of prayer more successfully than it could be done by a mind dull and untutored, but close to God? Can a knowledge of history with a consequent insight into the development of Faith through the centuries, help an ora- tor to produce more and better salutary results in his au- dience than he could hope for, had he never devoted himself to the Muse of the past? Can the dialectical powers which he employs in dissipating objections urged against the Faith assist his flock in any wise in their preservation of the Faith? Can his knowledge of natural sciences minister to the pro- pagation of his supernatural trust? Can his smooth style soften hearts? Can his voice be assured of an entrance to the soul as well as to the ear? Can the warmth of his emo- tions beget glowing grace in other men? Maybe, alas, the
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THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
stream of golden eloquence that flows down from him to the people, instead of bearing upon its bosom galleons of heaven freighted with treasures of grace, only gratifies eyes with its glistening!
And if it be urged that eloquence can induce men at least to fly in a natural atmosphere instead of groveling, and to live like angels instead of indulging like swine; and can per- suade them to adorn the walls of imagination with canvasses of heavenly tints instead of debauching them with images that pander to the lowest feelings, what profits such chasten- ing, it may be answered, for life eternal? Even Crates, the pagan, despised riches, to keep his spirit clear; but to what advantage supernatu rally ? Even the highest principles of honor only naturally instilled from the pulpit, will not receive recognition at the eternal throne. Even sovereign contempt for sensuality, only naturally learned, will not be rewarded after death: and gentlemanly self-restraint, refined taste, and delicate attentiveness to others are of themselves no pass- port to heaven. No doubt many a man of nobler natural virtue pleases God less than many another on a lower level of the same kind of righteousness: because superior kindness, openheartedness, and industry, even with the help of a good motive behind them, many perchance be lacking in the ac- companiment of grace; whilst natural accomplishments the most meagre may, on the other hand, be blessed with it. The fine spirit of enthusiasm which Demosthenes infused into Athenian breasts, of what profit will it be to them in the final reckoning? And " cui bono?" may be asked of the moral fruit sprung of Cicero's planting in Roman souls.
But worse than the futility is the danger of this art. Grace of speech has been so closely allied to worldly ways that it is pressed into the service of religion not without a suspicion of treacherous results in the end. The possibilities of good in it are evident at a glance; but the chances of evil are written on the very face of it. It labors of course under the disadvantage of every other natural gift, — the disadvantage of being open to easy perversion from wholesome ends. But it has special drawbacks of its own. There is a touch of earth- liness in it which tends to keep it close to earth. It is allied to the senses, imagination, and passion, which are essentially
PULPIT ELOQUENCE AND THE SUPERNATURAL, 133
self-seeking. It depends a good deal for success on moods. It requires a close study of mere "words, words, words," which develop in many a speaker the habit of drawing " out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument." An enumeration of other possibilities of evil might be made. But enough has been said to show how one might plausibly oppose the study of oratory on the score of the dangers in which it abounds. Many a man has rid himself of gold, honor, and pleasure through fear of treachery in those honest things. Why not for the same reason do the same thing to this art of speech? And just as poverty and mortification have been man's best auxiliaries in the spiritual fight, why ought not the soul that is stripped of human graces in like manner, and toughened in like manner by abstention from the delicate draughts and toothsome morsels of a natural art, be less likely to be thrown down itself in its contest with the powers of evil, and better fitted also to lead other men to a successful issue. Moreover, we know that if we gaze upon a landscape through a stained-glass casement, the scene before us loses its native hue and assumes the color of the medium through which we gaze. In a similar manner, when, as artists, we look upon Divine Truth through the glowing windows of passion; through imagination.
All garlanded with carven imageries
And diamonded with panes of quaint device, Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes;
and through the ruby of our heart and heart's emotions, — the spectacle, far from appearing in its own proper light, is coated with the pigments of sense. Why not dispense with these dis- coloring casements, and have the people gaze upon Truth through the open window of simple speech, under the white light of Faith?
Such is the objection against oratory in its relation to the supernatural. It is an objection worth stating at length; for it contains, to say the least, the force of apparent truth ; and, though on examination it loses this force, I believe that^ in daily life it exerts a discouraging influence upon seminarists and priests.
To this objection, in spite of its content of truth, real or apparent, most decided exception must be taken. However,
134 ^^^ ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
before answering it, a clearing of the ground may perhaps be necessary, to avoid possible misunderstanding.
And first the question here discussed is not engaged with the production of personal sanctity in the preacher. The in- fluence of nature upon individual holiness may or may not be beneficial, as far as the present discussion is concerned. Does natural refinement make for his own holiness in the refined individual, or does it not, is a matter quite apart from our consideration. The point at issue lies along the line of apos- tolic effort. How does nature help the preacher in his work from the pulpit? What has art to do with his influence upon his audience? What sort of auxiliary is oratory for him in his efforts to convert souls ?
Taking into consideration this limitation of the discussion, I would say in the second place that the view is not entertained by the writer that a preacher's natural superiority, either inborn or acquired, insures superior supernatural effects in his audience. Twenty-five degrees of natural ability in him, working in union with five degrees of pulpit grace from God, are not of more avail for the conversion or sanctification of a congregation, ceteris paribus^ than only five degrees of natural ability in union with five degrees of grace. Webster with his wonderful genius, had he been a Catholic priest, could not have preached salvation more successfully than any of us with our mediocre talents, if (contrary to what I am convinced would have happened in the event of his preach- ing), he had been assisted in his efforts only by the same mediocre graces as ours. A poor musician cannot get better music out of a grand organ than out of a hand-organ, be- cause, on account of his very limited powers, he cannot ex- haust the full potency of the organ; he cannot toe its pedals and finger its keys and operate its stops masterfully; and so half of its music still sleeps in its bosom in spite of his frail efforts to arouse the mighty thing. In like manner a poor inconsiderable pulpit grace cannot elicit sweeter or mightier spirit-music from a superb human instrument than from a mean one, for the delight of listeners; because such a grace cannot supernaturally stir up the full forces of the preaching genius upon which it descends, but can waken only a fraction of them. And as an audience in the first case would grieve
PULPIT ELOQUENCE AND THE SUPERNATURAL.
to think of so much instrumental power unused, so the Angels of Heaven must often grieve, if they can, to think of the im- mense natural preaching abilities lying dormant in the super- natural life, because, for one reason or another, the better graces of the Holy Spirit are not allowed to descend upon those better natural abilities, to rouse them to their fullest life.
In the third place, neither is it maintained that superior natural abilities or accomplishment have the power of draw- ing to themselves from heaven superior graces with the aid of which superior results could be expected in an audience. Nature, even at its highest, has no attractive influence upon grace. There is not in the natural any exigency of the super- natural. A dunce is as worthy, as such, of God's best super- natural gifts as a genius is. Mountain and mole-hill are on the same level of insignificance in comparison with the Infinite God; so too are height and littleness of ability in comparison with grace. The soul in its native character whether little or transcendent, is not magnetic with regard to the outpourings of the Holy Spirit. It must be charged and have ite surface coated with grace before the electric sparks of new graces are forced to leap down from the sky to it. You cannot contemplate the natural abilities of an apostle and then tell a priori the measure of helping grace which will be poured out on him for his work. His capabilities are no index in themselves of the extent to which God will employ them. God is free to make this human dynamo hum with the electricity of grace, or to allow it to remain a lump of dead cold iron, free to make the souls of a congregation glow and shine with heat and light from the pulpit power-house like lamps on a line or to allow them to remain unthrilled.
Moreover, even if God should help a preacher with graces proportioned to his eminent natural abilities, no man could have any certain assurance, even in that supposition, of ex- traordinary results to follow. For, preaching-graces can be conferred without being employed, and talents of nature also can be given and then left by the recipient without being duplicated. Every element of success can be in readiness for operation without being operated. Graces can be lavished without effect. How many a case could be cited of remark- able inborn and acquired abilities, of an imagination kindling
136 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
with fire, of a comprehensive and intuitive mind, of logical powers, of a rare gift of speech and a fair style, all divinely vitalized by precious graces from on high, being allowed by their possessor " to rust unburnished, not to shine in use " ? How many a human craft, with noble keel, and sails full from heaven, is perversely turned by a free self-operating rudder from sailing down the lake with its stores of heavenly food for hungry mouths on yonder shore? Great natural abilities in God's servants have almost come to be suspicious things. Treachery to grace is often half-way expected. The pride of power frequently shadows power. Humility is many a time made sure of only through the medium of humble natural gifts and accomplishments; and the sanctification of a con- gregation often has to be procured by the heavenly Father through the instrumentality of mediocre preachers of the Word.
With these negative statements disposed of, the relation- ship of oratory to grace can now be expressed without much danger of being misunderstood. Oratory is a better disposi- tion in a preacher for the reception of pulpit-graces from heaven for his congregation than the lack of that art would be. Secondly, God regards this disposition, and if the human will does not place an obstacle to His bounty. He pours out larger graces for the good of the people, proportioned to the larger capacity of His well-disposed instrument. In the third place, just as a superior musician can draw more and better music from a better instrument than from a poorer one, so these larger graces can effect better results through the cul- tured soul of a holy priest than could be possible for them if he remained uncouth. And lastly, passing on from what can he to what does happen, though it be admitted that natural perfections are too often the occasion of ruin to their possessor through pride and vanity, instead of being a means of sal- vation, yet in view of the greater good produced by a thor- oughly refined and learned priesthood, it is considered best to acquire these perfections, provided this can be done in the spirit of prayer.
We should be inclined to believe all this a priori. For is it not consonant with propriety for God to wish to honor His own better natural gifts in His servants with better super-
PULPIT ELOQUENCE AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 137
natural complements? And since the supernatural is not the destruction, but the elevation of the natural, far from ex- pecting to find natural superiority shorn of its advantages on being raised to the levels of grace, should we not rather sup- pose that it would be allowed to retain those advantages for the greater profit of souls?
But, a posteriori, we assent to the truth before us on the authority of the Church, which has shown by Her attitude toward profane arts and sciences that nature is of invaluable aid in things of the spirit. She takes a boy and places him in a curriculum of pagan classics. He is supposed to get a delicacy of touch, a refinement of sentiment, an exquisite sense of the proprieties of life,— all of which are purely natural accomplishments. He is induced to form ideas, to combine ideas into judgments, to proceed unswervingly along the logi- cal groove from some general principle down to particular consequences, or up from an accumulation of observed facts to the establishment of some general principle. He is trained into steadying his mental gaze, and widening it and sharpen- ing it. He is told that abstract knowledge is to be applied to present practical exigencies and that hoarded information is to work itself out, in one way or another, into his daily actions. He is made to toughen his will by downing difficul- ties, to wisely choose a definite course of good deeds and then to keep to his choice unflinchingly in spite of allurements all around him. After this process, merely natural in itself, if he has a call, he is ushered into the Seminary where again natural culture is attended to for many years. To compre- hend, to defend, and attractively to explain the Word — a duty which is to be a great part of his lifework — all this requires an intuitive quickness, a patience of research, a steadi- ness of mental gaze, a solidity of judgment, an eloquence of exposition, which again, in themselves, are natural and noth- ing more.
Finally, her ideal minister is one that goes forth into the world rich in grace, but just as rich in profane accomplish- ments. I would that beauty should go beautifully, says the poet; and the Church would have the beauty of Faith enter the pulpit beautifully clad in the raiment of nature; so that non-Catholics on the one hand who for one reason or another
138 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
have identified Catholicity with ignorance and have consid- ered the Church to be the personification of esthetic mediocrity, and Catholics on the other hand, who have either been alien- ated from the right spirit of their faith or at least have not arrived at the perfection of their state, may be drawn first to love a preacher's natural gifts, and then his supernatural treasury and finally the God of it. These human attributes are the " cords of Adam " ; they are the bait with which the Divine Fisherman catches men and draws them out of the stagnant pools of earth to place them in the pellucid basins of heaven.
For further light, we may turn back to the day-dawn of Christianity. There stand the Fathers, those giants of the early Church. I see St. Augustine, not better known for his sanctity than for his knowledge and rhetorical skill. I see St. Jerome, the most learned man of his day in his combined knowledge of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew; and St. John Chrys- ostom, who spoke with his eyes as well as with lips, and ir- radiated magnetism from his whole person; and St. Gregory Nazianzen, who said : '' I have given up honor, riches, and pleasure; one thing only I cleave to, — that is eloquence. I have gone over land and sea to acquire it, and I am willing to make every sacrifice to retain it." Finally we may turn to the great Athanasius, who formulated the Creed for us. What natural acuteness of mind he must have had, and how his mind must have been sharpened still more by dialectical studies, to have been able to state Divine truth so succinctly and clearly and unerringly ! Now those men were taught by the Church ; they were her ideal ministers and she encouraged them to spend themselves not more in work purely super- natural than in the acquisition of human refinement for themselves and in its spread amongst others. Here is the answer to the " cui bono?" of sceptics with regard to oratory. For, since the Church, because of her supernatural mission, could not and cannot encourage profane arts merely for the sake of resulting natural advantages, it follows that she must consider them closely allied to heaven.
In her estimate of the value of the natural she was ante- ceded by a greater than she. For, the Creator Himself spread out the glorious panorama of the visible universe, in order that
PULPIT ELOQUENCE AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 13Q
all this natural beauty might catch our eyes and hearts and allure us to the knowledge and love of Himself. In the Scrip- tures, He graced his Word with the enticing charms of liter- ature, partially human, to win us to taste the sweetness of that Word Divine. In the Incarnation, He took to Himself a soul and body in order that we who shrink from His heavenly majesty might be softened into love at the sight of a heart connatural with our own. Finally, in the sanctuary, far from relying exclusively on His sacramental magnetism, He has surrounded Himself with every pleasant thing, — with marble altar, with bronze tabernacle, with flowers, lights and dreaming clouds of incense, with the cloth of gold of vest- ments, and laces of acolytes : for. He knows that if there be *' sermons in stones, and books in running brooks," there must be much eloquence also in all the pomp and circumstance with which the loving hand of nature banks the sanctuary of the Most High.
Here then, in the course which the Church has uniformly pursued in the education of her ministers in imitation of the economy of God Himself, we have, I presume to say, a suffi- cient answer to the objection against pulpit oratory. For, if it be urged that a priest's eloquence, when added to the other most abundant means of grace in his hands — particularly sacramental means — is like the addition of a drop of water to a lake, she denies the truth of the comparison and insists on the importance of eloquence. If the insignificance of the priest, standing in the midst of his grace-surroundings, is urged, she admits his personal insignificance, but denies his insignificance as ambassador of Christ and minister of the Most High. If the futility of speech in supernatural work is proposed for solution, she answers that natural gifts and ac- complishments cannot merit grace nor efliciently produce it in an audience; but that they are at least dispositions very favor- able to the outpouring of the supernatural grace of speech upon a preacher's soul for the benefit of listeners. If finally the danger of pride and vanity, involved in the cultivation of the art of speech, be placed before her as an objection, she answers : ** Prayerfully incur the danger that the ad- vantages of the art may not be lost to God." Here we may stop a moment to observe how different is her view of riches
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THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
and art. She understands the innate value of both in the economy of salvation; she understands the misuse to which both can be and are put : and yet, whilst to avoid the chances of misuse, she invites men in the name of Christian perfec- tion to forgo the personal possession and use of riches, she has, on the contrary, in the same high interests, systemati- cally encouraged even her choicest children to acquire and employ art.
These considerations, though speculative in flavor, are not without their practical importance. For, just as worldings overestimate the value of nature in comparison with grace, so supernatural persons are inclined to underrate its helpfulness in the work of God. The first set of men become so en- grossed in creatures as to forget the Creator; the second set grow so enamored of the beauty of the Most High that the contemplation and the use of finite things becomes a task to them. Devotees of the world employ the world as an end in itself; devoted children of God often neglect to use it even as a means to heaven. They wish to go straight to God; but sometimes forget that the path to Him is through the world. In their zeal they rightly repudiate the adoration of nature and of art; in their imprudence, at times they wrongly repudiate the employment of nature and of art in the adoration of Another.
Now is not a seminarian or a priest whose gaze is being constantly directed toward heaven, liable to forget earth ? Is he not in his high appreciation of grace liable to disparage art? "The children of the world are wiser in their gener- ation than the children of light"; and they show their wis- dom by setting high value on the use of creatures. Satan wields his power among men to-day because he approaches them in the silken garments and with all the graciousness of worldliness. Is not sacerdotal influence at a lower ebb than it would be if priests took more pains to array their holy souls in winsome natural drapery? And would not the su- pernatural Word they speak be doubly potent if it sprung from golden tongues ?
John A. McClorey, S.J.
Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin.
THE LATEST PROPOSAL IN CALENDAR REFORM. X41
THE LATEST PEOPOSAL IN OALENDAE EEFOEM.
IN the May issue of the Review some account was given ^ of the present status of the movement — an international one — looking to a reform of the Gregorian Calendar, and some slight appreciation was attempted of the various plans or suggestions offered by students of the question. It may prove of further interest to give attention to the newest proposal — that of Professor Alexander Philip — and to add, by way of complement to the former article, some details elicited by its publication.
The newest proposal deals, not with the Religious, but only with the Civil Calendar, although it is the hope and, indeed, the expectation of its author, that its adoption will facilitate a reform of the Religious Calendar as well.
The original proposal of Professor Philip dealt with both the week and the month and led to the introduction of two bills into the House of Commons in England; but the pro- moters went further than the original author, and ^offended religious sentiment. In a letter (dated 25 April, 191 2) to the present writer, Mr. Philip remarks that it has been ap- parent to him for some time, that the Churches " will not be favorable to any interruption of the succession of week days," and he therefore proposes " to limit the reform at present to the months." He thinks " the advantages of this are greater than will at first sight appear." Accordingly he has had a bill introduced in the House of Commons which concerns itself solely with the months, avoids the pitfalls of the ** dies non ", and nevertheless prepares the way, if religious senti- ment should care to make a change at any future time, for any desirable treatment of the question of Easter.^
1 See article on Easter and Calendar Reform.
2 "The object of the Bill is to establish a simple and symmetrical arrange- ment of the months and quarters within the year.
"Any symmetrical arrangement of the months involves a slight alteration in the calendar date of the vernal equinox, and would conveniently precede any decision as to the adoption of a fixed Easter.
" It is not proposed to interfere in any way with the regular succession of week days, but if subsequently found desirable, any such change would be in no way hindered by the previous adoption of the provisions of the Bill. Memorandum to the " Calendar Amendment Bill ", presented in the House of Commons (and by it ordered to be printed, 13 March, 1912) 'by Mr. Robert Harcourt and supported by Mr. John Deans Hope.
142 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
Before considering in some detail the features of this new proposal, we may note in passing some of the significant im- plications of this departure from all the schemes outlined in the May number of the Review. And first of all, there is the relinquishment, by one of the most earnest students, for many years, of the problem of Calendar Reform, and one of the most persuasive protagonists of one of the proposed re- forms,— the relinquishment (at least for the present) of the attempt to standardize the relation of the days of the week to those of the month. Mr. Philip early recognized the prob- able opposition of the Churches to any scheme which should contemplate the removal of Easter from its traditional situs of Sunday, or which should withdraw one or two days from the week-scheme of the year by making them dies non. In an address at the Fourth International Congress of Chambers of Commerce (London, 21-23 June, 1910), he argued that while confusion is undoubtedly caused by the great variabil- ity of the date of Easter, this fact was by no means the main consideration, since " there is infinitely more trouble caused by the ordinary working of the calendar than by the dis- turbance of Easter " ; that this last is but one incident in the year [although for Catholics it controls many others], and is but a secondary one for the reason that Easter cannot be really fixed before a perpetual calendar is adopted : " You can fix it more nearly, but you cannot fix it finally, until you have a perpetual calendar.'* He pointed to the fact that in the question of the date of Easter, religious sentiments were involved :
" I warn you that we must not disturb these sentiments. I am sure that every one of us here would be the last in the world to do anything to injure the feelings of anyone in matters which they regard as sacred. We cannot be too care- ful in this matter, and that is the reason why I have adopted this particular plan which you see foreshadowed in these pam- phlets which have been circulated. I mention that, not for the purpose of discussing the different schemes, but for say- ing one thing, and with that I shall conclude. The reform is after all divisible into two halves. You can deal with the month without touching the week. I have worked it out very carefully. . . ."
THE LATEST PROPOSAL IN CALENDAR REFORM. j..
His regard for religious sentiment was well-advised. In a letter to the present writer (dated 30 May, 191 2) he notes that a Committee has been appointed by the Church of Eng- land to consider calendar reform, and that its Report has been submitted to Convocation, two of whose recommenda- tions were unanimously adopted : first, '* that there shall be no alteration in the week of seven days, and that Sunday shall continue to be the first day of the week " ; and second, " that there shall be no alteration in the date of Christmas ". With' respect to the date of Easter, the third recommendation (de- feated by two votes) was that, if Easter should be made a fixeH date, it should be a Sunday in the first half of April. It is needless to point out here ths correspondence of these recom- mendations with the plan of reform which the Gaulois credited to the Holy Father. But it is interesting to know that reli- gious sentiment, whether Catholic or Anglican, still preserves such a strong influence; and this leads to the second signi- ficant implication in the argument of Mr. Philip.
This implication is that it is futile for scholars or business men to advocate a reform in the calendar which will not com- mend itself to the various religious bodies interested therein : ''Any reform in the calendar must be unanimous ", he argued in the Address (1910). And in his recent letter (30 May, 1912) he still is of the same opinion: " My original plan pre- served the Sunday as the first day of the week. I have, how- ever, understood for a good while that the dies non would not be acceptable to the Churches. That is why I drew the Bill which Mr. Harcourt has introduced. The Church of England have decided that they can not accept either of the others. It would be very foolish to attempt to go in opposition to the Churches in this matter, and accordingly I think attention should be concentrated upon the Harcourt proposal. That project deals exclusively with the secular calendar."
The proposal, therefore, of the new bill in Parliament con- cerns itself not at all with the question of fixing Easter or any other feast-day, nor does it attempt to relate the days of the week with those of the month. It is designed purely for secular purposes. Nevertheless, it would affect in some ways the calendar uses of the Missal and Breviary, a-nd this fact makes it of interest to priests, and worthy of study even by
144 ^^^ ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
those who have no special interest in the general question of Calendar Reform.
The scheme of Professor Philip, embodied in the Harcourt Bill, contemplates a business year consisting of four quarters, each of which should contain exactly thirteen weeks, or ninety- one days. This will account for 364 days. To these is added New Year Day (January ist), which in the previous schemes was to be a dies non, but is now to be a regular weekday, although it will be considered a public holiday, and will not figure in commercial computations, contracts, etc. (in which relationships it will be practically a dies non^ while remaining a weekday for religious purposes). In Leap Year, the extra day will be called Leap Day, and will be transferred from February 29th to the ist day of July. February, however, will contain thirty days, the additional two days being ob- tained by transferring them from the present 31st of August and of October, thus giving to July and October 30 days each. The purpose of these alterations will appear plainly by a glance at the tabulated scheme of the number of days in each month :
|
January, 31. |
April, 30. |
August, 30. |
October, 30. |
|
February, 30. |
May, 30. |
July, 30. |
November, 30. |
|
March, 31. |
June, 31. |
September, 31. |
December, 31. |
The year is thus portioned into quarters, each of which (omit- ting for the first quarter the first day of January, or New Year Day) will contain 91 days. In Leap Year, July would contain 31 days, but the ist day (Leap Day) would be civilly a dies non, and therefore this third quarter would also contain (civilly) only 91 days.
Another feature of the arrangement will appear evident by a brief study of the table — that there would be 91 days in any period of three consecutive months. Thus, for instance, if we begin with February we should have: February, 30; March, 3 1 ; April, 30 ; if we begin with March, we should have : March, 3 1 ; April, 30 ; May, 30, and so on — in every case a period of three consecutive months would comprise the stated 13 weeks or 91 days.
Again, in Leap Year, the calendar would be symmetrical for the half-years; and in ordinary years the calendar, both
THE LATEST PROPOSAL IN CALENDAR REFORM. j.^
weekly and monthly, would be symmetrical for each of the four quarters.
This proposal for a new calendar is practically the same as that referred to in the Review (May issue), as the " Normal Calendar ", from which it differs principally in allowing the weekdays to run on consecutively without any dies nofi, while in ordinary years one of the months will have a merely civil dies non, and in Leap Year still another month will have a merely civil dies non.
The advantages of the system are of commercial and statis- tical importance : " The calculation of apportionable pay- ments— wages, rents, interests, etc., would be standardized and greatly simplified by means of tables. The work of Governmental Departments, e. g. Old Pensions Act, National Insurance Act, etc., would be greatly simplified. Statistical returns would be simplified and made symmetrical. The keeping and auditing of accounts would be simplified."
All of these gains will appear in stronger light by a com- parison of this scheme with that of the present calendar, with its apparently haphazard assignment of the number of days to the various months.
A prominent feature of the proposed new calendar is the division of the year, for civil purposes, into four exactly equal quarters.
The four quarters of the year might be designated simply as first, second, third, fourth, or as the Winter, Spring, Sum- mer, Autumn quarters.
Finally, the Act of Parliament is meant to go into operation on the first day of January, 191 3, and to apply '* to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and to all the British Dominions beyond the seas."
It is unnecessary to go into the details by which the Bill undertakes to interpret existing or future contracts.^
It will be at once evident, that such a proposal simply leaves out of consideration (while not in any wise menacing) the ordinary traditions of the Religious Calendar of many de- nominations or religious bodies. The Sundays are not inter-
3 Those who are interested in this phase of the question may obtain a copy of the Bill, "published by His Majesty's Stationery Office", through any bookseller in the United Kingdom.
146 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
fered with, Christmas day will fall as usual on the 25th December, and Easter and Holy Week will recur annually in exactly the same relationships as at present. But in the Roman Calendar (used so very largely throughout Christen- dom), in the calendars of local dioceses, and in those of certain Religious Orders many changes would have to be made. Most of these changes are not of a fundamental char- acter, it is true. A few feasts now assigned to the beginning of one month will, unless the religious calendars are changed to agree with the proposed civil calendar, be celebrated at the end of the preceding month, or vice versa. The interval between March 25th (the Annunciation of Our Lad}, or the Conception of Our Lord) and December 25th would, in the new arrangement, be two days less than at present, but the symbolism of the " nine months " would not be greatly af- fected; and similarly the symbolism of the 8th of December (the Conception of Our Lady) and the 8th of September (the Nativity B. V. M.) would practically remain undis- turbed. But the placing of Leap Day on the first of July, in- stead of in February, as at present, would cause some embar- rassment in the church calendar, in the Breviary Offices, etc.
What would happen if the Bill were to be enacted into law in Great Britain and her possessions beyond seas? The Catholic clergy in those regions would be living under two quite distinct calendars; for it is hardly probable that the Roman Calendar would be changed locally for their con- venience. In civil and commercial affairs, England would quite isolate herself, chronologically, from the rest of the world, and especially from her American cousin, and the dis- advantages under which the Catholic clergy would live in England would seem to be, in some measure, duplicated for merchants doing a trans-Atlantic business.
What is of special interest to the Catholic priest, however, is the possibility of an international agreement based on Professor Philip's scheme, whose adoption by England and her possesions might lead the way (if it proved, in practice, as advantageous as it appears in theory) for the other civil- ized peoples of the world. In that case, the Roman Breviary and Missal might perhaps be subjected to the chronological or calendarial changes required to bring it into conformity
THE LATEST PROPOSAL IN CALENDAR REFORM. 147
with the civil calendar — a task of no great magnitude, if it be deemed appropriate, and of special feasibility just at the present time, when both Missal and Breviary are undergoing so many quietly performed revisions and alterations.
It is not the purpose of the present paper to go into a min- utely detailed investigation of the effect Professor Philip's pro- posal would have, if it attained the success of an international approval and were actually put in operation by international agreement, on the Religious Calendar and the daily Mass and Office. It is sufficient to have indicated briefly some of the results that would follow. Those who are interested in the practical details of the proposal would find matter for pleas- ant study in the scheme of the " Perpetual Adjustable Calen- dar " designed by Mr. Philip " to gain all the advantages of a Perpetual Calendar without any interruption in the weekly succession."
The remaining portion of the present paper will concern itself with various matters related in one way or another to the schemes outlined in the May number of the Review.
I. One correspondent has kindly furnished me with the text of the Address delivered by M. Pitot at the International Congress of Chambers of Commerce and Industrial and Com- mercial Associations, held at Prague in 1908. M. Pitot spoke on " La Reduction de la Variabilite de la Fete de Paques." He presents the subject with Gallic clearness, acknowledging indebtedness for very much of his material to the Abbe Th. Moreux, the director of the Observatory of Bourges (France). Some of this is of such interest and appropriateness to the present discussion of reform, that it may be quoted (in trans- lation) here:
'' The prescriptions of the Council of Nicaea exhibit another preoccupation — the wish to avoid having the Pasch celebrated on the same day by Jews as well as Christians. But the at- tempt failed.
" In the year 360, the Jewish Calendar was newly arranged, and the coincidence of feasts occurred several times.
" The, Gregorian reform of the calendar made the concur- rence still more frequent.
"The Evangelical Church of Germany decreed in 1700 that thenceforth the astronomical tables should be the basis
148 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
for the calculation of the full paschal moon; and the result was that in 1724 and 1744 there was a difference of a week between the Catholic and the Protestant Easter. A new de- cree issued in 1775 re-established the old rule. It had also been noticed that the use of the astronomical moon would have led, in 1778 and 1798, to a coincidence of the Jewish Pasch and the evangelical Easter, against what was deemed the desire of the Council of Nicaea."
According to M. Pitot, the Abbe Moreux was asked by a number of astronomers interested in calendar reform to dis- cover how Pope Leo XIII would be affected towards the move- ment; and accordingly the Abbe requested the Director of the Vatican Observatory to ask the Holy Father if he would ap- prove of the desire of astronomers that Easter be always cele- brated on the same Sunday; for example, that following the equinox. "The reply of Leo XIII was most encouraging: ' I perceive nothing improper ', he said, * in such a desirable change; but there should be one condition, that the Orthodox Russians be willing to abandon the Old Style and adopt the Gregorian Calendar.' This declaration is one of capital im- portance and ought to facilitate very much the fixing of Easter on a less variable date. The Evangelical Churches, simply following the order established by the Roman Church, would certainly not raise any objection to the principle of the reform we are preaching; nor do we suppose that such a reform could introduce any new divisions among Christians. As for the Russians, inasmuch as their calendar does not now agree with the Gregorian, it seems to me that we ought not much to care whether they accept or refuse. We ask, then, with the Abbe Th. Moreux, that Easter be fixed on the Sunday following the spring equinox ... or, at the latest, on the Sunday following the 4th of April."
2. Another correspondent quotes from Markham's The Incas of Peru (N. Y., 1910, p. 117) some highly interesting details of the Peruvian Calendar: The Peruvian year con- tained 12 months of 30 days each; five days were added at the end of the year, and every fourth year a day was added.
3. The Abbot of Farnborough contributed to the London Tablet two illuminating articles (20 and 27 April) on ''The Feast of Easter and the Reform of the Gregorian Calendar ",
THE LATEST PROPOSAL IN CALENDAR REFORM. j.g
of which the first (with excellent bibliography attached) dealt with the past history of the question, while the second came down to a consideration of one of the recent proposals, that of M. Grosclaude, which is similar to the one of Professor Philip, save that, as shown above, the dies non (New Year Day and Leap Day) are not counted in the week, whereas they do not interrupt the succession of days of the week in the plan of Mr. Philip. The Abbot does not discuss the proposal, but outlines it clearly, doubtless because it is the most feasible and the most championed of all. He notes the fact that our modern reformers of the calendar '' have had precursors since the sixteenth century. Thus amongst the projects of reform elaborated at the time of Gregory XIII there was one pro- posing to celebrate Easter on a fixed date. A century later Rene Ouvard, a Canon of Tours, proposed a similar system, which was favorably considered by Cardinal Sluze, and was on the point of being presented to Innocent XL Father Nau a short time afterwards made the same attempt." He calls special attention to the works of Father Tondini, whom he had mentioned also in the previous paper (20 April).*
Dom Cabrol states the arguments pro and contra clearly and effectively, and does not appear to lean strongly to either side. He contends, however, that the State cannot act with-
* Apropos of this longtime Catholic interest in the question of calendar reform, it is not amiss to quote here the editorial of the N. Y. Independent (6 June, 19 12), which may be divided into paragraphs for the purpose of brief comment.
" Six months ago we published the likelihood that the Pope would consider the question of setting a fixed date for Easter instead of letting it wander about for a full month, depending on the moon's changes." This is putting the attitude of the Independent rather mildly ; for it assumed that the Gaulots (see the May Review, page 513) had announced a fact in the assertion that Pope Pius X was to fix Easter on the first Sunday of April, and there was no intimation, in its comments on the assumed fact, that only a "likelihood" of papal action was in question.
"A commission has now been appointed, and the Catholic journals are beginning to discuss the matter." There seems to be here an intimation that Catholics had not discussed the broad question before the appointment of the commission. The bibliography in the papers of Dom Cabrol would be a sufficient answer to this, as also would have been the much briefer one given by Father Holweck in his article on Easter in the Catholic Encyclopedia (V., 225, 2nd col.). The remainder of the editorial is phrased more pleas- antly, and indicates a changed view of the Independent :
" Such a change is desirable ; and when decided on at Rome it will be interesting to see whether it will be followed at Westminster and York, or whether the Anglican Church will hold back, as has the Greek Church these centuries, unwilling to accept from Rome the reform of the calendar."
I50 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
out the concurrence of the Church — a contention which, as has been shown above, is put forward also by Professor Philip, and was made prominent in the May issue of the Review.
We shall not presume to discuss the argumentation of the distinguished Abbot of Farnborough, but may be permitted to question the practicability of the contention that " before do- ing away with our present calendar it would be well to wait until the system which it is proposed to substitute has given proof of its fitness." The theoretical proofs of the feasibility and availability and advantages of the " Normal " calendar, or of that proposed by Professor Philip, are many and of no little weight. Practical proofs cannot, of course, be had until the system advocated has been put in practice somewhere — indeed, everywhere (for, as the Abbot remarks, the reform " cannot be unilateral,'' but must be shared by both Church and State).
4. The June issue of the Review contained (pp. 726-8) a summary of a plan put forth several years ago in the Catholic World by a Catholic Astronomer, Father Searle. His scheme is ingenious and exact, and adds a new feature to the age-long discussion. It is so easily accessible that it needs not to be detailed here.
5. Mr. Charles Fisher, of San Francisco, permits me to re- print here his calendar of thirteen months. It was designed to go into effect last year. Although, in a letter to the pres- ent writer, he declares that he had definitely renounced his plan in favor of that presented by Professor Philip at the International Congress (London, 1910), it is worthy of repro- duction to illustrate vividly a plan much advocated in various forms but now definitely relinquished, even by the author of one of the variant forms, in favor of a Normal Calendar of twelve months.
From the details furnished by the article in the Review for May (pp. 513-529) and the supplementary matter contained in the present paper, it is permissible to indicate some reasonable
Conclusions
and, incidentally, to correct some misapprehensions which the present writer has encountered both in printed form and in
THE LATEST PROPOSAL IN CALENDAR REFORM.
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152 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
oral communications. The conclusions that may be grouped here are :
1. The project of having a fixed date for Easter is not one merely of recent discussion. It was advocated in the time of Gregory XIII, and a century later by Rene Ouvard, a Canon of Tours, and somewhat later by Father Nau. The project was again renewed, in very recent years, in pamphlets and periodical publications, until it was formally proposed, four years ago, in the International Congress of Chambers of Commerce at Prague.
2. Two things show that such a project is not, in its nature, an embarrassing one to speculate upon, from the standpoint of Catholic interests : first, the encouragement given by Leo XIII to the proposed discussion of the subject by astronomers and other interested parties, and his declaration that such a reform contained nothing improper in itself, but should be accompanied by a concession on the part of the Orthodox Russian Church — the surrender, namely, of its adherence to the Old Style and its adoption of the New Style of the Gregorian Calendar; second, the establishment by Pius X of a Commission to inquire into and report upon the feasibility of the fixing of the date of Easter.
3. The sentiment of Catholics, as also of non- Catholic religious bodies, appears to demand that Easter shall always have Sunday for a situs, although there is some warrant in Church history for such an absolutely fixed date as would necessarily permit Easter to fall on any day of the week. The reasons — liturgical, historical, devotional — for this de- mand for Sunday as the only possible site for the Feast of the Resurrection are simply overwhelming at the present day, and need not be discussed or even detailed here.
4. It is very comforting to know that the vast majority (in- deed, practically all) of the many proposals for fixing Easter (whether absolutely, in a reformed calendar, or with less variability, in the present '' unreformed " calendar) have re- spected scrupulously this sentiment (that Easter must fall al- ways on a Sunday) of Christian religious bodies. Thus the International Congress at Prague (1908) selected a Sunday for Easter in an unreformed calendar; and the various, schemes for a Normal Calendar have, almost without excep-- tion, carefully provided for a similar site.
THE LATEST PROPOSAL IN CALENDAR REFORM. 153
5. Whether or not the inclusion in the year of a dies non (and in leap years, of two such days) is such an essential in- fringement on the symbolism of the week of seven days, as to put all such proposals beyond the pale of Catholic discussion, is a matter for liturgiologists to discuss and for the authori- ties of the Church to pass upon. But here also it is comfort- ing to feel that the proposals including dies non in the calendar did not, in all probability, proceed either from a malicious desire to embarrass Christian worship or from a negligent contempt of Christian sentiment in the matter. Thus one of the most earnest students and protagonists of the Normal Calendar (Professor Alexander Philip), upon learning of the opposition of Christian sentiment to the dies non, not only promptly relinquished the point to the objecting party, but earnestly contended, at the International Congress at London (1910), that this sentiment should be scrupulously respected. He there advocated the desirability of confining the proposed reform to the months, leaving the weekly suc- cession of days undisturbed; and after much study of the problem, has at length had introduced in the British Parlia- ment a bill limiting the reform to the months, and has made such a proposed reform more feasible by the construction of a " Perpetual Adjustable Calendar ".
6. The advantages of a Normal Calendar or Normal Year, in which there would be a perpetual correspondence of days of the month and days of the week, are nevertheless many and weighty. For civil, statistical, commercial, and other purposes, these advantages have been pointed out in detail; and need not be repeated here. It might be fairly argued that for liturgical purposes, such a Normal Calendar would also be desirable (i. e. if the dies non feature could be eliminated). In such a Normal Year, every ferial day, every feast day, every Sunday, could have exact and unchanging rep- resentation; no interference of feasts could cause a feast to be absolutely eliminated (as at present) from the yearly succession; the Divine Office could be devoutly recited — and (unlike the present condition of things) with certainty of correctness in the Ordo — and could be freed from the daily recurring necessity of consulting intricate, complicated direc- tions showing how the merely material business of the Divine
154 ^^^ ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
Office shall be arranged; the simplicity of prayer would be increased, with a not improbable increase of devotion (for, naturally, where the mind is partly preoccupied with the merely material business of hunting up the various parts of the prayer in widely separated parts of the breviary, the at- tention to the spiritual content of the recitation of the Office may easily be embarrassed and handicapped).
Much humor has been expended by the clergy on the need of *' fingers " in the daily recitation of the Office — much humor and, we fancy, not a little occasional irritability; and yet it may happen (for in many respects mankind is notoriously illogical and inconsistent) that some clerical humor may even be directed against the present argument that simplicity would be gained by a Normal Year. We have indeed heard it argued that the very complexity of the Divine Office is something desirable. Undoubtedly it is, as the complexity of the pieces of glass of kaleidoscopic shapes and colors is desirable in a stained-glass window; for they contribute to the beauty and splendor of the window. The question here is not one of the complexity of the Office, but the complexity involved in hunt- ing up the various components of the Office. The complexity becomes thus translatable into perplexity, loss of time, dis- traction of the attention from the content to the material arrangement of it, occasional irritability, and the imposition of a new and daily complication of duty where the world and our sacred ministry already place inevitable complications on their own account. Thus the plea that complexity — not in the Office but in the material saying of it — is a good thing is not unlike the plea that fleas are good for the dog: they occupy his full attention and keep him from worse things.
Much more might be adduced in support of the argument for simplicity in the saying of the Office, but the simple con- crete fact that a priest will immediately prefer reciting his breviary during Holy Week, from the separate small volumes — one for each day — into which that Week is sometimes divided by publishers of breviaries, rather than from the bound volume of the Pars Verna, may be esteemed a sufficient an- swer to objectors. Accordingly we may place, with some confidence, conclusion number
THOMAS A KEMPIS AS A HYMN WRITER. j .
7. Father Searle's ingenious scheme makes it possible to have a perpetual calendar identifying days of the week with those of the month, and nevertheless avoiding the liturgical pitfall of the dies non. His proposal would appear to meet all objections, and to satisfy all needs.
H. T. Henry. O verb rook Seminary, Pa.
THOMAS A KEMPIS AS A HYMN WEITEfi.
KEMPEN in the Diocese of Cologne can claim a most illustrious son in the person of Thomas Haemerken, or Haemerlein, better known as Thomas a Kempis (of Kempen), the immortal author of the Imitation of Christ. Born about the year 1380, Thomas studied at Deventer, and his youthful ideas were molded by Florence Radewyn and Arnold van Schoonhoven. From his earliest biographer we know that his studies were Grammar, Latin, and Gregorian Chant. In his twentieth year, in 1399, he entered, as a novice, the mon- astery of Mount St. Agnes, near Zwolle, of which his brother John was Prior. The Order was that of the Brothers of the Common Life (founded in 1386 by Florence Radewyn at Windesheim), and Thomas was formally enrolled as a mem- ber in 1406, becoming a priest in 141 3, in his thirty-third year. In 1425 he was elected Sub-Prior of Mount St. i\gnes and was reelected to the same position in 1448. His death took place, in the ninety-second year of his age, on I May,^ 147 1, the Feast of St. James the Less.
It is not however with the life of Thomas a Kempis that I am concerned, but with his powers as a hymn writer. Num- erous biographers of the venerable writer have appeared, but until recently no hint was given as to his remarkable gifts in the matter of versifying. Probably the last word has been said by Sir Francis R. Cruise as to the authorship of the Imitation of Christ^ but it was not until 1 88 1 that Pastor Spitzen published ten hymns by a Kempis, six of which had previously been issued anonymously by Mone. These ten were printed from a MS. of about the year 1480. In 1882
1 Some authors give 26 July, and others 8 August, as- the date, but Sir Francis R. Cruise inclines to i May.
2 See Thomas a Kempis, published in 1887.
156 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW,
S. W. Kettlewell published in London a fine work, in two volumes, dealing with the biography of a Kempis and giving English translations in verse of his hymns by the Rev. S. J. Stone, Protestant Rector of St. Paul's, Haggerston, who died on 19 November, 1900. It was not, however, till 1905 that the true merits of a Kempis as a hymn writer were made public, by F. F. Dreves and Blume in the forty-eighth volume of the monumental Analecta Hymnica Medii Aevi (Nos. 458-493). Unfortunately, this work is not very accessible, and so it may prove of interest to make known to the many readers of the Ecclesiastical Review some of the con- clusions arrived at by two such able delvers in the science of hymnology.
It is now conclusively proved that Thomas a Kempis wrote a large number of beautiful hymns, which he adapted to existing plainsong melodies, as indicated in a most important Carlsruhe MS. of the fifteenth century. Space would not per- mit an account of all these, but the best known are " En dies est dominica ", "Apparuit benignitas ", *' Veni, veni. Rex gloriae ", " In domo Patris ", " Quisquis valet numerare ", "Adversa mundi ", " O qualis quantaque laetitia ", " Nee quis- quam oculis vidit ", and " Jerusalem luminosa ".
" En dies est dominica " was for long regarded as of doubt- ful authenticity, but Dreves and Blume ^ leave no room for further scepticism, as they prove that the cento, as found in MS. 368 of the fifteenth century at Carlsruhe, can be traced in the autograph MS. of Thomas a Kempis at Brussels, and again in the MS. copy at Zwolle. As indicated by its title it is a hymn to be sung on Sundays. In the original MS. it is adapted to the music of the Easter hymn "Ad cenam Agni providi ", the neumatic notation of which is to be found in MSS. of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In all, the lines of this hymn run to 116, and are printed in full by Mone, No. 247, from the Carlsruhe MS. The cento was translated by the Rev. J. M. Neale, and was published in 1854, but the English version in general use is that as given by the compilers of Hymns Ancient and Modern in 1904, commencing "Again the Lord's own day is here ". I here give the first and last verses of the Latin text of this noble hymn :
^Analecta XLVIII, 475.
THOMAS A KEMPIS AS A HYMN WRITER. j^-
En dies est dominica Summo cultu dignissima Ob octavam dominicae Resurrectionis sacrae.
Tibi factor! temporum Qui vera quies mentium, Sit laus, honor, et gloria Hac die et in saecula.
"Apparuit benignitas " is better known as " O amor quam ecstaticus ", being a cento from the longer poem, taken from the Carlsruhe MS., and is unquestionably the work of Thomas a Kempis. The cento comprises verses 2, 4, 9-12, and the doxology. There is no mistaking the tune to which it was sung, as a marginal note indicates the melody as "Agnoscat omne saeculum ", or '' Deus creator omnium ". The English translation of " O amor quam ecstaticus " is by B. Webb, in The Hymnal Noted (1854). Appended are the first and last verses of the original Latin text :
O Amor quam ecstaticus, Quam effluens, quam nimius. Qui Deum Dei filium Unum fecit mortalium !
Deo Patri sit gloria Per infinita saecula, Cujus amore nimio Salvi sumus in Filio.
" Veni, veni, Rex gloriae " is also an authentic hymn by a Kempis, and is to be found, with the musical notation, in the Carlsruhe MS. It was printed by Mone as No. 35, but with- out any clue to the author. The hymn runs to twenty-three stanzas, and was translated into English by Mr. T. G. Crippen in his Ancient Hymns and Poems (1868).
" In domo Patris " is the fourth of the hymns by a Kempis from the Carlsruhe MS. 368. Its authenticity is upheld by Dreves and Blume. The text was printed by Mone, No. 302, but no clue was furnished as to the author. A good English translation was made by the Rev. J. M. Neale, which appears as " My Father's Home Eternal " in his Hymns chiefly Medieval on the Joys ajtd Glories of Paradise ( 1 865 ) . It is
158 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
considerably tinkered in The English Hymnal (1906), but Neale's setting will be found in the Rev. G. R. Woodward'-s Songs of Syon (1910).
" Ouisquis valet numerare " is another cento from a longer poem by Thomas a Kempis, on the glory of the heavenly Jerusalem, in sixteen stanzas. The current cento consists of verses i, 2, 9, 10, 11, and 16. In the Carlsruhe MS. No. 368, the music of the hymn is also given, a fine tune in the Fourth Mode. I herewith subjoin the first and last stanzas of the Latin text, as printed by Mone:
Quisquis valet numerare
Beatorum nmnerum, Horum poterit pensare
Sempiternum gaudium, Quod meruerunt intrare
Mundi post exilium.
Vitae dator, summe Parens,
Tibi benedictio; Sit laus, decus semper clarens
Semper tuo Filio; Sit et honor fine carens
Inclyto Paraclito.
"Adversa mundi tolera " is found with the name of Thomas a Kempis in a MS. of the year 1480 at Zwolle, and is also to be found in his Opera^^ entitled " Canticum de virtute pa- tientiae ". It is in twenty-nine lines, arranged as eleven, but the full text has been printed by Wackernagel's Das deutsche Kirchenlied, Vol. I,. No. 377. Father Caswall translated five stanzas, in his Masque of Mary, under the title of " For Christ's dear sake with courage bear" (1858).
" O qualis quantaque laetitia " is to be found as the com- position of Thomas a Kempis in a MS. of the year 1480 at Zwolle, and also in his Opera (Niirnberg, 1494), under the title of " Hymn on the Joys of Heaven and the Nine Angelic Choirs ". Wackernagel prints the full text, but an excellent English translation of the cento has been furnished by the Rev. G. R. Woodward in his Songs of Syon (1910), under the title of " Quires of Angels stand before Him ". I cannot
* Niirnberg, 1494.
THOMAS A KEMPIS AS A HYMN WRITER. j.g
resist the temptation of quoting the first and last stanzas of this admirable translation, which faithfully reproduces the spirit of the original text, and serves to show the poetic powers of Mr. Woodward:
Quires of Angels stand before Him — God their Maker aye adore Him, See the King in all His beauty, Worshipping in bounden duty; While, in tune with holy voices, Ev'ry loving heart rejoices.
There fair folk in white apparel Love as brethren, seek no quarrel : There is knowledge, no temptation, No more toil and no vexation ; There is health, but sickness never; Fulness there of joy forever.
" Nee quisquam oculis vidit " is found in the oft-quoted Carlsruhe MS., and also in the Zwolle MS. of 1480, belonging to the Brethren of the Common Life, now in the library of the Emmanuelshuizen. It was printed by Mone, and is the third portion of a long poem on eternal life. It consists of eighty-four lines, and is headed "On the glory of the Heavenly Jerusalem ". A portion of it was translated into English by J. M. Neale, in his Hymns chiefly Medieval on the Joys and Glories of Paradise (1865).
''Jerusalem luminosa " is a cento consisting of Nos. i, 4, 5, 15-17, of seventeen stanzas, undoubtedly written by Thomas a Kempis, and it is one of seven which are to be found in both the Carlsruhe and the Zwolle MS. It was sung to the melody of '' Urbs beata Jerusalem ", and was translated by J. M. Neale, in 1854. I subjoin the original text of the first and last verses:
Jerusalem luminosa, Verae pacis visio, Felix nimis ac formosa, Summi regis mansio, De te O quam gloriosa Dicta sunt a saeculo!
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t Aeterne glorijficata Sit beata Trinitas, A qua coelestis f undata Jerusalem civitas, In qua sibi frequentata Sit laudis immensitas.
Neale's English translation of " Jerusalem luminosa " was written in 1854, and published in The Hymnal Noted, but the whole of the nine verses will be found in Songs of Syon (1910). I append the first verse, which can be compared with the Latin text.
Light's abode, celestial Salem, Vision whence true peace doth spring, Brighter than the heart can fancy, Mansion of the highest King; O how glorious are the praises Which of thee the prophets sing !
It may not be amiss to devote a concluding paragraph to the Brethren of the Common Life, the Congregation to which Thomas a Kempis belonged, and to the probable date of the hymns just mentioned. The community was founded by Florentius Radewyn, on the initiative of Gerard Groot, in 1836, at Windesheim near ZwoUe. Within a quarter of a century it absorbed over seventy houses of Augustinian Canons. From reliable sources we are safe in assuming that a Kempis wrote the Imitation of Christ between the years 1408 and 141 8. As before stated, he was ordained a priest in 141 3, and his magnum opus was completed about the year 141 8. Probably his hymns are from the same period, but they were certainly written before the year 1425. It is significant that Adrian de But, a Cistercian monk of Dunes Abbey, in 1459 (twelve years before the death of a Kempis) refers to the Imitation as " a metrical or rhythmical volume ", and in some old manuscripts the work bears the name of " Musica Ec- clesiastica ". In fact the rhythm and rhyme of the Imita- tion are among the internal evidences for a Kempis's author- ship. It has been proved by Dr. Carl Hirsche, of Hamburg, that in addition to the ordinary system of punctuation in the Imitation a Kempis adopted the clivis as used in the musical
BABYLONIAN LEGISLATION 4500 YEARS AGO. jgj
notation of the period, and he made use of musical signs to insure a certain rhythmical cadence to charm the ears of the listeners.
Perhaps at no far distant date some Catholic hymnologist will bring out a handy edition of the hymns of Thomas a Kempis, with music, and thus provide a feast for the thous- ands of readers of the Imitation who as yet are unacquainted with the great lyrical powers of the saintly Sub- Prior of Mount St. Agnes, Zwolle.
W. H. Grattan Flood. Enniscorthy, Ireland.
BABYLONIAN LEGISLATION 4600 YEABS AGO.
SOME years ago Father Scheil was elected a member of the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, by thirty votes out of thirty-three. He was the first candidate both of the College de France, and the Academie, the two constituent bodies. Yet he was passed over by the Govern- ment, against all precedent, in favor of one of the second candidates. " Father Scheil," wrote the Editor of the Satur- day Review by way of comment, " is the illustrious scholar who has deciphered the Laws of Hammurabi, but he has the fatal flaw, in the eyes of a French Republican Ministry, of being a Christian." ^ And we may add that he labors under a flaw still more fatal in the estimation of a Ministry whose motto is " Liberty and Equality ", by being a member of the great Order of St. Dominic.
But who was Hammurabi, and what about his laws? And how have they come down to us, cryptic, yet decipherable?
It was as recently as the winter of 1901-2, that M. de Morgan, the French explorer, was making excavations at Susa, in Persia. By a very happy accident, he unearthed a large block of black diorite (a kind of crystalline trap rock) on which were engraved, in cuneiform characters, forty-nine columns of writing, of which forty-four were sufficiently pre- served to be legible. Legible that is, to the exceptionally few scholars who, by talent and perseverance, had mastered
^ Saturday Review, 26 December, London, 1908.
1 62 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
the very ancient written symbolism of that very ancient period. The writing proved to be a complete Code of Laws, some 280 of them being readable. They relate to trade, agriculture, building, marriage, and the many interests which make up civilization. The writing occupies the lower part of the stone; on the upper, there is a relievo, representing Ham- murabi receiving a tablet, inscribed, from the Babylonian Sun-god, Shamash. This stone is now in the Paris Museum.
No discovery up till now, has shed so much light on those remote ages. It is as if a window had suddenly been opened, through which we look out directly upon the living Babylon, as it might have appeared to the eye of Abraham ; so it might well be, since he was a contemporary with Hammurabi, and like that illustrious man, a native of those cradle lands watered by the Tigris and the Euphrates.
Though in our own day they are mere swamps, the alluvial lands about the confluence of those two historic rivers, were once the well-ordered dwelling-place of highly civilized com- munities. The spade there has dug up some of the long- buried remains of an almost unknown race, the Sumerians, to whom we stand largely indebted, even though they loom but dimly on the horizon of history. Dwelling beside the Tigris and Euphrates, they do not seem to have been themselves the original inhabitants, for they came to those fertile plains as conquerors, bringing with them a quite advanced civilization. From them it was that their Babylonian and Assyrian con- querors gradually adopted most of their own later civilization. From the Sumerians, the Babylonians learnt how to manu- facture pottery, and some of the sculpture of the defeated race still survives, to give us evidence of the high level of their industrial art. The Sumerians had originated a system of writing, of which traces remain to show us a gradual de- velopment, from mere picture writing to conventional phonetic symbols. From this remote ancestry, our own alphabet can trace an irregular but distinct descent.
When or at what stage in the world's history did they live? Certainly, they appear as a civilized people some 4000 years before the birth of our Lord, quite 2000 years before Abra- ham went out from Ur of the Chaldees, and 3000 before Moses gave his Law to the children of Israel.
BABYLONIAN LEGISLATION 4500 YEARS AGO. 15,
This preface is necessary to bring home to us the venerable antiquity of customs which, in process of time, crystallized into Law, and were still further solidified when they were classified, arranged, and engraved on enduring stone by a great man. A truly great man, not great in the conventional phrase, by the wholesale slaughter of his fellow-man, and the widespread devastation of hearths and homes, but great because of his thought for the building up of peaceful social order and civic well-being. Yet, till quite a few years ago, his name was actually unknown. Unknown that is, by the name of Hammurabi, though it is practically certain that Hammurabi is the Amraphel of Genesis, the contemporary of Abraham, which gives his date as about 2200 before the birth of Christ.
Before the discovery of his Laws, many " letters " of Ham- murabi had been found, and a great number of these are now in the British Museum. Lest we be deluded by the familiar sound of a word, we must remember that in his time a "letter" was in the form of a tablet of baked clay, generally enclosed within a thinner case of similar hard clay, forming an earthen envelope on which were written names and addresses. This outer case had to be broken by the recipient. Now among the letters of this king, there is one of quite peculiar interest. We know from the eleventh chapter of Genesis, that Abraham was a native of the city of Ur, "And Thare took Abram his son, . . . and Sarah . . . the wife of Abram his son, and brought them out of Ur of the Chaldees."
This letter to which I am alluding was written to the gov- ernor of a province, and in it Hammurabi gives orders con- cerning some of his troops quartered in the city of Ur. It was doubted at one time whether Ur was a city or a district, so that this evidence is very much to the point in deciding the uncertainty. While Abraham was a wanderer in the land of Chanaan he was also the contemporary of a civilization al- ready old, and as Hammurabi speaks of a provision of com and wine and clothing, it proves that there was at the time a settled government, besides the knowledge of the textile arts.
Most probably, Hammurabi and his people were Arabs, certainly of Semitic race. The face sculptured on the stone, shows a civilized, shrewd, thoughtful, and kindly expression
1 64 T^HE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
with a pleasant half-smile on the finely cut lips. The upper lip is close shaven, while the beard is just shaven free of the lower lip, but leaving a full, long, flowing beard. It is a face one would not find out of place as the portrait of a modern man, charged with high employment.
Besides its positive legal enactments, Hammurabi's Code opens out volumes of information, directly and indirectly, as to the manner of life, the style of government (a paternal despotism), the manner of social life, the grades and classes into which society was at that time divided. From the laws, we learn how houses were leased, how maps of boundaries were drawn, how they assessed lands for taxation, how they held courts of Law, how witnesses were heard and summoned from distant localities to give evidence, and their just ex- penses repaid to them; also on what terms agricultural land was let, and bequeathed to posterity. In short, all the mul- titudinous interests of a civilized community are made to live again before us; all is explained to us, in the very words of those who bought and sold, who borrowed, and forgot to pay back, in those far-off days, very much as we ourselves do now.
When Hammurabi was King of Babylon, his population was divided into three distinct classes. Lowest in the scale, naturally, came the slaves; next the middle class, prosperous for the most part, small landowners, merchants, professional men, generally, and then the upper class, consisting of the great officials, the large landowners, governors of provinces, and ministers of State. The numerous slaves seem on the whole to have been well treated. It is true that they were bought and sold, yet they were not necessarily condemned to remain slaves for ever and aye. Under certain conditions, the slave could acquire property, and purchase his freedom. Often enough the slave was a man of good position in his own country, of allied race, sold into slavery by the fortune of war.
A man who was a slave could marry a free woman, and their children were free. If such a slave died, his widow could claim half his property for herself and her children. A female slave who had borne children to her master could not be sold for debt. In his master's house the lot of a slave was not hard; it was, evidently, the owner's best policy to keep his working household in good health. Any man who stole a slave, male or female, was put to death.
BABYLONIAN LEGISLATION 4500 YEARS AGO. 15.
The middle class was mainly commercial. Many of the laws which have been deciphered concern debtors and credi- tors, and tell us much about the business methods of those ancient days. Yet ancient as they are, the more we know about them the more we see that length of time makes but little difference in all that is essentially human, and we differ more from Esquimaux of to-day than we do from the Baby- lonian almost at the dawn of history. The Babylonian mer- chant of that time sent out agents to sell his corn, oil, wool, and so on. The agent did his best, using his own judgment, and on his return was paid a fixed proportion of the profits he had realized. He had to give a written and legal receipt for his trading transactions. Traveling was admittedly hazard- ous and many disputes arose from the loss of goods looted by wandering bandits. The agent made his statement, and deposed on oath as to the amount of his loss, and he was then held free from responsibility. But if he were found to have deceived his employer, he was compelled to restore threefold the value of his defalcations. In our museums there are many clay tablets which give the terms of contract between merchants and their foreign agents.
In the upper classes life was naturally more expensive. This appears incidentally in the way the Law treats the wealthy delinquent. One of the upper class who might be found guilty of stealing was bound to pay the lawful owner thirty times the value of the things stolen. For the same offence one of the middle class was obliged to restore only tenfold. The slave who was found stealing met with small mercy, and having no property, he was summarily put to death. The primitive law of " an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth," was enforced literally, when the aggressor and the aggrieved were both of the first rank. When the aggrieved was of inferior rank, his injuries were compensated by a fixed money compensation.
If the upper class had social eminence, they had to pay for it. Thus the upper class had to pay higher doctors' fees, which sounds profitable for the doctor till we find another law which enacts that any doctor who operated unskillfuUy, and caused death, was punished by the amputation of both hands. This law did not tend to encourage surgical oper-
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ations; it certainly thinned out the number of unsuccessful operators. But the surgeon was not wholly deprived of prac- tice. The middle class appear to have been considered fair game for the experimenting surgeon. No doubt they were fairly numerous, and a few more or less would not matter much to the nation. So if the unlucky patient who died under an operation was only of the middle class, the doctor was free from any penalty, just as he is amongst us, independently of the rank of the patient. If, however, the doctor killed a slave, the doctor had to give another slave to the owner, since a slave had a recognized value.
The housing of the population received due attention. Probably there had been defective building before the days of Hammurabi, but the jerry -builder did not flourish in his time; the great man saw to that. A Babylonian house was solid, of one story only, with a flat roof, on which the in- mates mostly slept. All houses were substantially built of hard brick. The law put all responsibility for bad building on the shoulders of the builder. If a badly built house fell, and killed the owner, the jerry-builder was put to death. If it chanced to be the owner's son who was killed, then was a son of the builder also killed. If the slain were slaves, the builder had to restore slave for slave. In addition, the builder had to make good any damage to property, and rebuild the house at his own cost. These laws may help to account for the fact that some of the work done in the days of Hammurabi has lasted down to our own times.
Agriculture and gardening were studied, and had their full measure of legislation. Land for gardens and orchards might be had free of rent for four years. After that period the planter might retain one-half of the garden, while the other half reverted to the original landlord. The tenant usu- ally paid his landlord in kind, assessed at a third of the yearly crop. Damage done by storm and flood was made good by the owner, not by the tenant alone. The ingrained habit of cattle to stray into pastures not their own was fully developed in Babylonian herds, and gave occasion to many laws and much wise legislation.
The owner of cattle which did damage was fined accord- ing to the loss incurred, provided it could be proved that he
BABYLONIAN LEGISLATION 4500 YEARS AGO. J57
had been careless and negligent in looking after his beasts; on the other hand he was not held liable for damage which he could not foresee and prevent.
Legislation shows us that there existed a well-organized family life, and that the marriage tie was held in special respect. The civilization of a nation is largely evidenced by the position it accords to its women, and woman's place is mainly fixed by the position held by her on her marriage, as it is by marriage that woman, naturally speaking, enters on her own peculiar empire. The Babylonians of that period did not lightly contract marriages. The various claims that hover about the matrimonial contract, were duly made sub- jects of careful legislation. No marriage was a legal and binding contract, unless it had been performed according to a fixed ceremony, and legally attested by a written marriage contract. Once this contract was signed, it was obligatory and inviolable. A woman who was unfaithful to her mar- riage oath, was punished by drowning, together with her guilty partner. But a husband could save his guilty wife by a special appeal to the king. Such merciful appeals must have been made, or we should not have found any legislation on the subject, as it would have been clearly useless to legislate for what could never happen. If a husband brought an accusa- tion against his wife, but could produce no sufficient evidence, the wife could rebut the accusation by her own oath as to her innocence.
All this legislation is testimony to the elevated position then held by women; and these laws are numerous. A husband was bound to support his wife, not in any way, but suitably to his position in life, and if a husband deserted his wife, he was still bound to maintain her in a suitable way. Under certain conditions a wife whose husband deserted her of his own accord, could become the wife of another man. The clause '' of his own accord " was inserted in the law, as in those warlike times husbands were not unfrequently made prisoners of war. Sometimes they came back; often enough they did not. The wife of a man taken prisoner was to live on the property of her captive husband, if he possessed property sufficient for her maintenance. In that case she could not contract another marriage. If a wife thus sufficiently
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provided for, nevertheless did contract a second marriage, she was prosecuted at law, and drowned as an adulteress. But the wife who was left destitute was allowed to marry again, for it was argued that, as she was thrown on her own resources, she could do nothing better. If the husband of the remarried wife eventually came back from captivity, he could claim his wife, but any children born remained with their father. If we bear the times in mind, all these laws show us woman in a position on the whole definite and in- tended to be honorable.
While marriage was legally protected, divorce was also the subject of many legal enactments. We are not surprised to find that divorce was easier for the husband than for the wife, still, if a wife was divorced, her quondam husband was obliged to make proper provision for her, suitable maintenance. If she had brought a marriage portion, it was returned, and she had the custody of her own children. While the divorced wife kept the children, the husband was to give sufficient both for the support and the education of the children. If she had not brought any marriage portion, the husband was bound to provide for her in accordance with his, and consequently with her, social position.
All this legislation quite favorable to the unappreciated wife, seems based on natural justice, and did not tend to make divorce too easy for those that way inclined. The woman who was legally blameless had not to suffer materially for the whims and fancies of her husband. The law allowed him to indulge his whim, but it was a costly indulgence, so he was made to feel where such a man is apt to feel most keenly, in his pocket.
When the wife was blameworthy, the fault had to be legally proved ; and if she had not observed her wifely duties, or was extravagant, divorce was a punishment for positive guilt, and the guilty wife might be divorced without compensation, or reduced to slavery within the household. But it seems that she could not be sold into slavery outside the family, taken in its wide sense. Permanent ill health on the part of a wife was not recognized as a ground for divorce. Under certain conditions a woman could divorce her husband, and if she could prove that her life had been blameless, she could re-
BABYLONIAN LEGISLATION 4500 YEARS AGO. i^g
turn to her family, and take back her marriage portion with her.
It is quite evident from these laws that Babylonian women enjoyed a freedom and independence unusual amongst the nations of antiquity. These marriage enactments also throw light on a passage in the life of Abraham, narrated in the 1 6th chapter of Genesis. If not of Babylonian stock, at any rate Abraham lived in touch with Babylonian civilization, and the conduct of both himself and his family would not unnat- urally be guided by Babylonian custom. When Sarah be- came jealous of her handmaiden, and complained to her hus- band about her, he answered : " Behold, thy handmaiden is in thy own hand, use her as it pleaseth thee.'' Now accord- ing to the Code of Hammurabi, the handmaiden who had borne offspring, still remained in subjection to the principal wife, who had the right, if the handmaid became too forward, of branding her as a slave. It is not too much to assume that both Abraham and Sarah were well acquainted with existing Babylonian laws and customs, and it was quite in accordance with these laws that Abraham said to Sarah his wife, when she complained of her handmaid. Agar, " Use her as it pleaseth thee " ; as this was only the acknowledgment of the power which a Babylonian lady of her time legally possessed. We do not know whether Agar was branded; probably she was not; but we are told that " Sarah afflicted her,'' and that Agar ran away.
The relatively high position of women in Babylon is in- cidentally brought out by the existence of a very peculiar institution, which does not seem to have any parallel in any Eastern country, ancient or modern. This was a sort of order of unmarried women, who were vowed to perpetual virginity. Many references have been found concerning them in the brick documents which have come down to us, and their position was at first quite misunderstood. They were thought to be Priestesses, a title which conveyed a meaning similar to that of Nautch girls in India, or Geishas in Japan. But from the laws of Hammurabi we find that they were really a sort of Vestal Virgin community. They were sometimes em- ployed in the service of temples; but their position was socially and morally most honorable; they had much inde-
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pendence, and great influence in social life. As a rule, they dwelt in communities, but this residence does not seem to have been essential. Near some of the greater temples, there were buildings set apart for them. They were apparently free to come and go, to engage in commerce, to own land and farms, and might contract legal matrimony, on condition that when legally married, their obligation to virginity always remained. The law provided that, should the husband desire posterity, while the Vestal herself might not undertake the duties of motherhood, she could provide a handmaiden, exactly as we find Sarah acting with respect to her Egyptian maiden Agar, already alluded to. " Now Sarah, the wife of Abraham, hav- ing a handmaid, an Egyptian named Agar, took the Egyptian . . . and gave her to her husband to wife." Here again, Sarah seems to be following the quite legal and recognized custom of the Babylonian days in which she lived. And this throws a favorable light on what seems to us a very abnormal, and reprehensible proceeding. Yet in Sarah's day it was quite correct and legally proper.
These Babylonian Vestals, if we may so call them for want of a more distinctive name, had many legal rights. Though unmarried, they had the legal status of a married woman. Their good name was carefully guarded by law. The law numbered 127 reads: " If any man has caused the fingers to be pointed against a Vestal, and has not justified it, they shall set that man before the judges, and mark his forehead." However good a woman may be, she can not always escape the scandalmonger, and the fact that such a law should exist is a proof of the care taken to safeguard this order of women, whilst it indicates the high standard of moral conduct ex- pected of her. Her considerable personal freedom is inci- dentally shown by the law numbered no, which reads : " If a Vestal who dwells not in a cloister, should open a wine shop, or enter a wine-house to drink, that female they shall burn." A very drastic punishment for the offence, but it proves the high status from which such a lapse was measured.
She had rights of property. Her father gave her the same dowry as if she had married. This property remained ex- clusively her own, and could not be appropriated by the temple to which she might be attached. Her relatives man-
BABYLONIAN LEGISLATION 4500 YEARS AGO. 171
aged her property for her. It could be let to tenants if she wished. She could inherit property ; yet she was free from the property tax. Property which she herself bought, she could bequeath at will on her demise; but all the property she had received from her father had to revert to her family when she died. A very wise law, and one evidently intended to prevent lawsuits. We find that ladies of the royal family were numbered amongst these Vestals, a sufficient proof that their social standing was distinctly high.
These various laws concerning marriage, divorce, property of widows and divorcees, as well as the social importance and independence given to the Vestals, all combine to show that a very honorable conception of womanhood existed in that ancient civilization; and it is not a little remarkable that, though the Babylonians treated women with such marked social distinction, they do not seem to have had any female divinity similar to the Assyrian ** Ishtar," held in such honor close by at Nineve.
Invocations to all manner of gods, in all vicissitudes, abun- dantly prove that the Babylonian was thoroughly religious. The letters of Hammurabi show that he took a great interest in the due worship of the gods; he saw to it that religious ceremonies were carried out with becoming respect, and with carefully observed ritual. No doubt, there was superstition at the base of all this ; but it also shows that he realized that all did not begin and end with man. In a dim way, an erron- eous way, he perceived the existence of a super-human power. Though his perception was distorted by the mists of polythe- ism through which he gazed, he was nevertheless true to his convictions, such as they were. He watched over the herds and flocks, and over the revenues of the temples, and exacted detailed reports from those in charge. We know that once, when he had to decide in a lawsuit concerning the title to some property, hearing that the plaintiff was the chief baker of the temple, whose duty it was to supervize certain offer- ings on an important feast day, he adjourned the trial, so that the baker should not be absent from his post on such an important occasion. He showed no less respect toward the gods of other nations. We possess a letter of his in which he gives orders for the safe return of some captured Elamite
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goddess, directing that sheep should be given to the captive priestesses, for the due performance of their own sacrifices, on their return from the captivity from which he freed them.
Laws may be excellent as laws, yet remain practically dead letters. As for the laws of Hammurabi, there have been found large numbers of his dispatches, addressed to local governors, instructions regarding the settlement of legal diffi- culties, and a larger miscellaneous correspondence to prove that his laws were not allowed to fall into desuetude.
Naturally, with altered types of civilization, the wording of l^ws has changed, points of view have shifted, the ease and frequency of international intercommunication have modified very much the outward conditions of life. But the social instincts of men, their tendency to overstep just limits, their need of authoritative guidance are to-day still much the same as they were of old in Babylon. The old laws of Hammurabi come like a message to our distant age, to awaken us from our self-sufficiency and to show us a model of sensible law for mankind as yet in the making.
W. D. Strappini, S.J.
Bournemouth, England.
ABOUT BELLS.
IN the books of Exodus and Ecclesiasticus the ornaments of the high priest's ephod include bells, so that *' their sound might be heard whenever he goeth in or cometh out of the sanctuary." Their use in the Eastern Church obtains even to this day, bells being found, as they were of old, on the fringe of priestly garments.
The oral law of the Jews, consisting of many traditions touching the Mosaic law, tells that the ancient Hebrews em- ployed also larger bells, which were called Megeruphita. These were used on different occasions by the multitude of temple officers, and caused frequently such noise in the streets of Jerusalem that it was hard to catch the words of a speaker. Their chief purpose was threefold. One was to call the priests for services, the second to summon the Levites to come and sing, and the third to apprize persons that the unclean might be brought to the gate named Nicanor. The great
ABOUT BELLS.
sound of these bells, so says the Mishna, when sounded at their fullest power, could be heard quite eighteen miles from Jerusalem.
When the age of the Christian Church was but three or four centuries, assemblage at divine service was necessarily done as quietly as possible, as during heathen persecutions, the use of bells or Semantrons would have dangerously ex- cited public attention. It is well known that owing to the necessity of safeguarding the lives of the Christians and above all the priests, during the early ages of the persecutions, ex- treme care was exercised that the " gatherings of the faithful might be entirely private." They were assembled by some secret signs known among themselves.
Semantrons, struck with a mallet of hard wood, are sound- ing boards or clappers, still used in many Oriental churches, particularly those within the Turkish dominions, since bells were not known among them until the ninth century. These contrivances are much like what we of the Latin rite use on Good Friday.
During the last days of Holy Week — called in old days, " The Still Week," and " The Week of the Suffering "—bells are not used, out of reverence for the passion and death of the Redeemer. Pope Benedict XIV alleges the mystic reason for this suspension of the use of bells, that they typify " the preachers of the Word of God, and all preaching ceased from our Lord's apprehension until after He had risen from the dead. The Apostles, too, when they saw His bitter torments, and the indignities to which He was subjected by the Jews, stole away from Him silently and left Him alone.
One Holy Week spent in one of the Castelli near Rome, when health reasons prevented me from going on foot to the Sepulchres at Albano, Aviccia, etc., the driver of our car- riage had taken the bells off the horse's harness. The clap- pers in those regions were of course used, called tavolette. Many pious peasants there make what is called the Fast of the Bells, i. e. they do not touch food between the Gloria of the Holy Thursday Mass until that of the one on Holy Satur- day. Those who have heard all Rome ring out her countless bells, can remember the wonderful thrill felt which the joy thus announced calls forth.
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There are wooden and iron semantrons, the ancient Syrian harking back to Noe as being the inventor of the former. For it is supposed that God spoke to him as follows : " Make for yourself a bell of boxwood, which is not liable to corrup- tion, three cubits long and one and a hcdf wide, and also a smaller one from the same wood. Strike this instrument three separate times every day : once in the morning to summon the hands to the ark, once at midday to call them to dinner, and once in the evening to call them to rest." " The peculiar symbolism," says O'Brien in his book on the Mass, " attached to this ' holy wood ', as the semantron is often denominated, is, to say the least, very significant. The sound of the wood, for instance, recalls to mind the fact that it was the wood of the Garden of Eden which caused Adam to fall when he plucked its fruit contrary to the command of God; now the same sound recalls another great event to mind, viz., the noise made in nailing to the wood of the Cross the Saviour of the world, who came to atone for Adam's transgression." This idea is beautifully expressed in the Preface of the Cross.
In monasteries after the time of their reunion under Con- stantine, the hours of the Office, prayer, etc., were announced by the blowing of a trumpet, or rapping with a hammer at the cells of the monks. In a celebrated work by Strabo on the Divine Offices, written about the ninth century, he speaks of bells not having been long in use, and having been introduced from Italy ; but as a fact, really little is known concerning the date when they were introduced. St. Paulinus of Nola and Pope Sabian in the seventh century are each credited with the introduction of bells at Mass. From what I can gather it seems probable that Pope Sabian first brought in the practice. Onuphrius Panvinius says of him : " This Pontiff introduced the use of the bells, and ordained that they be rung in the church at the canonical hours and during the Sacrifice of the Mass."
The history of St. Lupus of Sens contains the statement that church bells were said to be known in France quite two centuries before the time of Strabo.^ From the same source we learn that the Maronites adopted the ringing of church
1 Fleury, Hist., xlviii, 42.
ABOUT BELLS. j^^
bells from the Latins on their reunion with the Catholic Church in the twelfth century.
From the Campanian metal of which they are often made is derived the word campana. The large bells are termed campanae \ small ones nolae^ and very small ones tintinabulae. Cloccae first occurs in Bonifacius, and comes from the French word cloche, or possibly from the old German chlachan, Frangi are the large bells of cast metal that appeared first in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The largest in actual use in the world is the second Moscow bell, weighing 128 tons. The Kaiserglocke of Cologne Cathedral weighs 25 tons; the great bell of Pekin, 53 tons, the bell of Notre Dame, 17 tons; Big Ben of Westminster, 14 tons, and Tom of Lincoln, 5 tons.
Solemn ceremonies precede the dedicating of bells for sacred purposes, according to a form prescribed in the Pon- tifical called " the blessing of a bell," though the popular term, " the baptism of a bell " was used as early as the eleventh century. Only a Bishop can bless or baptize a bell.
The oil used is the oleum infirmorum for the outside of the bell, and the oil of chrism for the inside. The Bishop prays repeatedly that the sound of the bell may avail to sum- mon the faithful, that it may excite their devotion, drive away storms, and terrify evil spirits. Bells, being conse- crated, cannot be rung without the consent of the ecclesiastical authorities. Each bell receives a special name, and has its own sponsor.
We read that in England the ceremony of blessing a bell was up to the Reformation carried out with great pomp. The ecclesiastics followed all the ceremonies employed in the christening of children. " Costly feasts were given, and even in poor villages, a hundred gold crowns were sometimes spent on the ceremony." In the churchwarden accounts of St. Lawrence, Reading, 1499, occurs the following: "Payed for halowing of the bell named Harry, vjs. viijd. And over that, Sir William Symes, Richard Clech, and Mistress Smyth, being godfaders and godmother at the consecratyon of the same bell, and berying all other costs to the suffragon." ^
The object of ringing small bells at Mass is to arouse the attention and devotion of the faithful. The custom of ring-
2 Quarterly Review, 1854.
176 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
ing for the Elevation began in France during the twelfth century, whence it was introduced into Germany in the thir- teenth, by Cardinal Gui, legate of the Holy See. In England we find it, about the same time, to be a practice enjoined by several Councils, and the statutes of some monastic orders or- dained the ringing of the large bell during the Mass. Ivo of Chartres, whose death is recorded in 1 115, congratulated Maud Queen of England on having presented the church of Our Lady at Chartres with bells which were rung at the consecration.
The ringing of a bell at the Elevation came into use when the custom of elevating the Host had been generally adopted in the Church. In English-speaking countries the bell is also rung as the priest spreads his hands over the Host and chalice before the Consecration, and at the " Domine, non sum dignus,'' before the Communion of the priest. When the Blessed Sacrament is exposed a bell is never rung, nor in the private chapel of the Vatican when the Pope says or hears Mass.*
According to Dr. Rock, at the celebration of Mass, " as the priest said the Sanctus, etc., the custom formerly was to toll three strokes on a bell which was hung in a bell cote between the chancel and the nave, that the rope might fall at a short distance from the spot where knelt the youth or person who served at Mass." From the first part of its use this bell got the name of the " Saints ", " Santys ", or '' Sanctus ", bell, and many notices about it are to be met with in medieval church accounts. From the same source we gather that in many places there were two distinct bells, one for the Sanctus, the other for the Elevation. The latter bell, made of silver, was sometimes called the Sacring bell. On hearing the Sacring bell's first tinkle, those in church who were not al- ready on their knees, knelt down, and with upraised hands worshipped their Maker lifted high before them.
An old man, who died in Wiltshire at the age of no, remembered in the " time of the old law, eighteen little bells that hung in the middle of the parish church, which, the pulling one wheel, made them all ring." This was done at the Elevation of the Host. Pairs of ornamental iron discs
s Benedict XIV. De Miss., ii. 11, 19; 15, 31.
ABOUT BELLS.
177
of medieval character, supposed remains of such wheels, still exist at Yaxley in Suffolk, and at Long Stratton, Norfolk. A " Wakerell '' or '' Wagerell " bell is entered in inventories of 1552.
The Angelus bell, always rung thrice a day, obtains its name from the first word of the prayer. In Tuscany a bell is rung an hour before the evening Angelus or Ave bell, which on enquiry I discovered to be intended to remind its hearers to say the Creed, while the De Profundis bell sounds one hour after the Ave.
In Italy, on Friday afternoon at three o'clock thirty-three strokes are sounded in many churches and convents in memory of our Lord's death at the age of thirty-three; and probably the custom obtains elsewhere.
The power of a bell to drive away storms, etc., is due en- tirely to the solemn blessings and prayers of the Church, no superstitious efficacy being attributed to the bell itself, though some Protestant writers persist in believing that the contrary is intended. In old manuscripts as well as in many church- wardens' accounts, payments are entered as having been made for " ringing the hallowed bells in grete tempestes and lightn- inges," for " ringing in the thundering ", for the ringers' refreshments, for " ringing all the tyme of gret thunder ", etc., etc. It was at one time customary at Malmesbury Abbey during a thunder storm, to ring St. Adhelm's Bell ; and from Wynken de Worde we learn of the ringing of bells in thunder- storms '* to the end that fiends and wicked spirits should be abashed and flee, and cease the moving of the tempest ".
An old custom is now kept up on the eve of Corpus Christi, when the choir of Durham Cathedral go up the tower clad in their surplices and sing the Te Deum. This is done in commemoration of the miraculous extinguishing of a terrible fire which took place on that night, A. D. 1429. The miracle was attributed to the prayers of St. Cuthbert, whose body is said by some to be enshrined in the cathedral.
Many tales of the supernatural are told concerning evil spirits and the efficacy of bells in warding them off; likewise regarding the power of consecrated bells for bringing bless- ings. In an old chapel at Killin in Perthshire was a bell called that of St. Fillan, which had the reputation of curing
I 78 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
lunacy. After the sufferer had been dipped in the pool of St. Fillan and had spent a night in the chapel, he was in the morning placed with great solemnity, under the bell ; and in many cases recorded the act of faith was rewarded by cure. There are numerous legends that such bells would, if stolen, return to their own home, ringing all the way. Of an Irish bell in Leinster it is related that when a chieftain of Wicklow had obtained possession of it, he had to tie it up to prevent its escaping to St. Fillan's church in Meath, where it usually abode. A like tale is told of the bell of St. lUfyd which, having been stolen by a king, " The king was destroyed, but repenting before his death, he ordered the bell to be restored to its place in Wales. Without waiting to be driven, the horse with the bell about his neck set out for Wales, followed by a whole drove of horses, drawn by the melodious sound of the bell. The horse was even able to cross the River Severn and make its entry into Wales, the other horses following. Then, hastening along the shore, over the mountains and through the woods, it finally reached the banks of the River Taf, where a clergyman, hearing the sweet sound of the bell, went out to meet the horse, and helped in carrying the bell to the gate of St. Illfyd's church. As the horse lowered its neck, the bell fell on a stone, from which fall a part of it was broken." *
Among the records of other stolen bells is that of one from Soissons in Burgundy, which Clothaire carried away. The bell objected to the act by gradually becoming dumb on the journey to Paris, where its voice was discovered to be gone; but its voice returned in such full force when the bell was sent home, that its tone could be heard seven miles distant.
Spelman in his History of Sacrilege gives some interesting information about bells. " When I was a child I heard much talk of the pulling down of bells in every part of my county, the county of Norfolk, then common in memory ; and the sum of the speech usually was, that in sending them oversea, some were drowned in one haven, some in another, as at Lynn, Wells, or Yarmouth. I dare not venture upon particulars, for that, I then hearing it as a child, regarded it as a child. But the truth of it was lately discovered by God himself, for
* Wirt Sikes, British Goblins,
ABOUT BELLS. j ^
that in the year. ... He sending such a dead neap (as they call it) as no man living was known to have seen the like, the sea fell so back from the land at Hunstanton that the peo- ple, going much further to gather oysters than they had done at any time before, they there found a bell with the mouth upward, sunk into the ground to the very brim. They carried the news thereof to Sir Hamon L' Estrange, lord of the town and of wreck and searight there, who shortly after sought to have weighed up and gain the bell ; but the sea, never since going so far back as hitherto, they could not find the place again.'' He also tells us of a clockier or bell-house which in Henry VIIFs reign adjoined St. Paul's church in London, with four great bells in it called Jesus bells. Sir Miles Par- tridge, a courtier, once " played at dice with the king for these bells, staking £ioo against them and won them, and then melted and sold them, to a very great gain." But in the fifth year of Edward VI, this gamester had worse fortune, when he lost his life, being executed on Tower Hill, for matters concerning the Duke of Somerest.
In the year 1541, Arthur Bulkley, Bishop of Bangor, sacri- legiously sold the first five bells belonging to the Cathedral, and went to the seaside to see them shipped away ; but at that instant he was stricken blind, and so continued to the day of his death.
Any sacrilege or profanation of bells, so sacredly blessed and set apart for holy purposes, seems to have met with punishment. Forrabury church in Cornwall has a tower, often termed the Silent Tower of Bottreaux, because it has no bells. The reason for the absence of bells, as given by Hunt in his Popular Romances of the West of England, is as follows : Some years ago the Forrabury parishioners wanted to have a peal of bells which would equal those of the church of Tintagel, not far off. The bells were cast, blessed with the usual rites, then sent off to Forrabury ; but as the vessel, after making a good voyage, neared the northern part of the Cornish coast, the pilot heard the vesper bells of Tintagel, and thanked God for his quick and safe journey. This act of piety caused the captain to laugh and swear that the safe voyage was due to his own skill as a captain as well as that of his men, and not to what he termed the pilot's super-
l80 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
stitious prayer. While yet employed in swearing and cursing, the ocean swelled suddenly, and rolling toward the land, over- whelmed everything in its course. As the ship sank, muffled bells were heard tolling ; and now when storms are coming, the sound can be heard under the waves.
Of the twelve parish churches of the island of Jersey — each possessed costly bells. One of these churches sold its bells to defray the expenses of the troops in a long civil war. The ship on which the alienated bells were being sent to France, foundered and all was lost. Ever since then the bells ring from the depth of the sea, the fishermen of St. Ouen's bay always approaching the water's edge to listen for the sound which, if heard, prevents them trusting themselves to set sail. Similar traditions are connected with Tunstall in Norfolk, Blackpool, and Echingham, Sussex.
Mr. Thisleton Dyer, to whose work on ecclesiastical folk- lore I am much indebted, tells us: ^'At a place known as Fishery Brow, near Kirby Lonsdale, there is a sort of na- tural hollow scooped out, where, as the legend runs, a church, parson, and congregation were swallowed up, and here the bells may be heard ringing on a Sunday morning by anyone who puts his ear to the ground. A similar fate is said to have befallen the village of Raleigh, in Nottinghamshire, and it was formerly customary for the inhabitants oir Christmas morning to go out into the valley and listen to the mysterious chimes of their lost parish church."
One of the abbeys suppressed in 1539, and subsequently dismantled, was that of Whitby in Yorkshire. The bells, which had been sold, were put on board a vessel destined to take them to London, but the ship refused to move further than a little distance out of the bay, and then sank into the depths at a place within sight of the abbey ruins. The bells stay where they sank, and are heard from time to time. Mr. Phillips versifies the event thus :
Up from the heart of the ocean
The mellow music peals; Where the sunlight makes the golden path,
And the seamew flits and wheels. For many a chequered century,
Untired by flying time, The bells no human fingers touch,
Have rung their hidden chime.
ABOUT BELLS. , « ,
lol
A legend of Trefethin tells of a very wonderful bell in the church of St. Cadoc. A little child who had climbed to the belfry was struck by the bell and killed— not through the wickedness of the bell itself, but through a spell which had been put upon it by an evil spirit. But though innocent of murderous intent, the wretched bell became forfeit to the demons on account of its fatal deed. They seized it, bore it down through the earth to the shadowy realm of Annism, and ever since that day, when a child is accidentally slain at Tre- fethin, the bell of St. Cadoc is heard mournfully tolling un- derneath the ground where it disappeared ages ago.*^
One often hears of the " passing bell," which in English pre-Reformation times were rung for the dying, those in their agony, and after death. This practice grew out of the belief that devils and evil spirits not only troubled the dying but lay in wait to torment the soul when it had left the body. One writer thinks the passing bell " was originally intended to drive away any demon that might seek to take possession of the soul of the deceased '\ while Grose says it " was anciently rung for two purposes, one to bespeak the prayers of all Christians for a soul just departing, the other, to drive away the evil spirits who stood at the bed's foot and about the house ready to seize their prey, or at least to molest and terrify the soul in its passage; but by the ringing of that bell they were kept aloof, and the soul, like a hunted hare, gained a start." A Huntingdonshire superstition, found in Notes and Queries,^ tells of a neighbor who expressed great sorrow for a mother whose child was buried unbaptized, because " no bell had been rung over the corpse." The reason for the grief was : " because when anyone died, the soul never left the body until the church bell was rung."
After the Reformation the passing bell was discontinued. By the beginning of the eighteenth century it was never heard, though tolling the bell after a death continued as before. In 1605, Mr. R. Dowe left £50 to the parish of St. Sepulchre's on condition that some person should go in the still of the night to Newgate before every execution day " and standing as near as possible to the cells of the condemned, should with
5 Wirt Sikes, British Goblins. ^ 1st Series, v. 364.
l82 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
a hand-bell (which he also left) give twelve solemn tolls, with double strokes, and then deliver this exhortation :
All you that in the condemned hole do lie, Prepare you, for to-morrow you shall die; Watch, all, and pray, the hour is drawing near That you before the Almighty must appear.
Examine well yourselves, in time repent, That you may not to eternal flames be sent ; And when St. Sepulchre's bell to-morrow tolls, The Lord have mercy on your souls. Past twelve o'clock.
Dowe ordered that the great church bell should toll in the morning and that as the criminals passed the wall to Tyburn, the bellman or sexton should look over, and say: "All good people pray heartily unto God for these poor sinners who are now going to their death."
Mr. Thistleton Dyer thus writes of the Curfew, or Couvre- feUy rung in olden times as a signal for the extinguishing of all fires: " Its object, as far as can be traced, was exclusively political or social, and not religious. The most plausible conjecture as to the origin of the introduction of the practice into England is that it was to diminish the risk of conflagra- tions at a period when houses were principally of wood. Milton, it has been remarked, has described it in a quatrain, sonorous and musical as the bell itself,
On a plot of rising ground, I hear the far-off curfew sound. Over some wide, watered shore. Swinging low with solemn roar.
It is an instance, too, of the tenacity with which we cling to a practice once established, that, though for centuries its only use has been to " toll the knell of parting day ", it continues to be rung wherever there are funds to pay the ringer, for which purpose we find many curious bequests. Thus, at Barton, Lincolnshire, the tradition goes that an old lady, being accidentally benighted on the Wolds, was directed in her course by the sound of the evening bell of St. Peter's Church. When, after much alarm, she found
ABOUT BELLS. jg
herself in safety, out of gratitude she gave a certain piece of land to the parish clerk on condition that he should ring one of the church bells from seven to eight every evening except Sundays, commencing on the day of the carrying of the first load of barley in every year, till Shrove Tuesday next ensuing inclusive. At Ringwould, Kent, half an acre of land, known as " Curfew Land ", has always been held, says Edwards in his Remarkable Charities, by the parish clerk, as a remunera- tion for ringing the curfew bell every evening from the 2nd of November to the 2nd of February. In the parish of St. Margaret's in the same county, the story goes that, in 1696, an order was passed to ensure the proper application of the proceeds of five roods of pasture land, which had been given by a shepherd who fell over the cliff, for ringing a curfew bell at eight o'clock every night for the winter half year, which ringing had fallen greatly into neglect. Many similar be- quests occur in different parts of the country, and here and there the old custom still lingers on.
A singular instance of the various use to which church bells were put is given in Notes and Queries, as happening at Derby on the arrival of the London coach which brought fish to the town. The news was announced by the church bells, each belfry, as the coach passed by, taking up the story thus strangely made known. Close to the entrance of the town was a church with six bells, and it was the first to announce: *' Here's fresh fish come to town." All Saints, the next church, rang its peal of ten, supposed to say : " Here's fine fresh fish just come into the town." St. Michael's church had but three bells, one of which being cracked, was credited with saying: '' They stinkin', they stinkin ' ;" while a furlong off, the six of St. Alkmund's replied : " Put more salt on 'em then, put more salt on 'em then."
In many English parishes the " Shriving bell " used to be rung in the morning of Shrove Tuesday so as to remind the faithful to confess before Lent. This has now changed its name to " Pancake bell." At Daventry, Northamptonshire, the bell was muffled on one side with leather, or " buffed ", and was known as the " Panburn bell ". The tradition that the Northampton church bells were rung on that day is em- phasized by this bell doggerel :
1 84 T^^^ ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
Roast beef and marsh mallows, Says the bells of All Hallows. Pancakes and fritters, Says the bells of St. Peter's. Roast beef and boil'd, Says the bells of St. Giles'. Poker and tongs, Says the bells of St. John's."' Shovel, tongs, and poker, Says the bells of St. Pulchre's.
At Norton, near Evesham, after a muffled peal had been rung for the slaughter of the Holy Innocents, an unmuffled peal of gladness was rung for the deliverance of the Infant Christ. Instances are recorded of bells being tolled on Christmas Eve, as at a funeral, or in the manner of a passing bell, and any- one asking whose bell it was, would be told that it was the Devil's knell. The moral of it is that the devil died when Christ was bom.
Bells rung on Christmas Eve or Christmas morning are often called "Virgin Chimes." The "Judas Bell" dates from old Catholic days, doubtless in connexion with Holy Week ceremonies, as are the " Judas Candles ".
Thomas Nash evidently was of opinion that joy-bells at a wedding were not always suitable, and that, as a writer once said, " there have been sequels to such a beginning with which the knell had been more in unison !" So Mr. Nash in 1813 be- queathed £13 a year to the bell-ringers of the Abbey church, Bath, " on condition of their ringing on the whole peal of bells, with clappers muffled, various solemn and doleful changes on the 14th of May in every year, being the anniversary of my wedding-day, and also the anniversary of my decease, to ring a grand bob-major and merry mirthful peals unmuffled, in joyful commemoration of my happy release from domestic tyranny and wretchedness." In a Wiltshire village, when a young person died unmarried, wedding-peals with muffled bells were rung immediately after the burial. The custom of the induction of a new Protestant Vicar is kept up by his ringing the bell two or three times himself the number of
T St. John's Hospital.
STUDIES IN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY. jge
strokes, so tradition says, regulates the number of years he will stay in the parish.
There existed in the parishes of Rutland a custom of ring- ing the gleaner's bell in every church at eight or nine a. m. during harvest time, which meant that women and children might go into the fields to glean. The bell was again sounded at five or six, the hours when no more gleaning was to be done. A church bell is usually rung after a Coroner's inquest. At Goddington, Oxfordshire, there exists still, I believe, a custom of ringing the church bell after a Coroner's inquest certify- ing to the actual death of some person in the parish.
L. E. D.
STUDIES IN AMEEIOAN PHILOSOPHY. III. The Modem Schools : Kantism in America.
UP to the middle of the last century Scotch realism con- tinued to fight for a representative place in the field of thought. It enjoyed the unstinted support of several brilliant professors, such as Thomas Cogswell Upham (1799- 1867), o^ Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Me. ; Francis Wayland ( 1 796- 1888),^ president of Brown University; Lawrence Perseus Hickok (1798- 1 888), president of Union College, Schenec- tady, N. Y. ; J. H. Seeley (1824- 1895), president of Amherst College; John Bascom (1827), president of Wisconsin Uni- versity; James McCosh ^ (1811-1894), a Scotchman by birth, who became president of Princeton, reorganized the Univers- ity on modern lines, and showed himself a vigorous opponent of Kantism in his numerous writings, and also a staunch de- fender of Christianity; Noah Porter^ ( 181 1 -1892), president of Yale from 187 1 to 1887, who had familiarized himself with Kantism in Germany in 1853 but remained faithful to
1 His Elements of Moral Science published in 1835 went through several English editions, and was translated into Hawaiian, Modem Greek, Nestorian, and Armenian for the use of missionaries.
^ The Method of Divine Government, 1850, ii editions; Intuitions of the Mind, Inductively Considered, i860, 5 editions; An Examination of M. /. Stuart Mill's Philosophy, i860; The Scottish Philosophy, 1874; The Realistic Philosophy, 1887; besides numerous other books of lesser importance.
3 The Human Intellect, 1868 ; Elements of Moral Science, 1885 ; Science and Sentiment, 1885 ; Kant's Ethics, 1886.
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Scotch realism; Francis Bowen (1811-1891)/ editor of the North American Review from 1843 ^o 1^54 ^i^^ afterward professor at Harvard, a sworn enemy of " the dirt philosophy of materialism and fatalism " and a strong upholder of the be- lief in *' one personal God and one Lord Jesus Christ in whom dwells the fulness of divinity."
Others less known contributed their share in defending the older ideals of religion and morality, but theirs was a losing struggle. And it is to be regretted that they gave up the fight, for their withdrawal from the field has given free scope to the wild speculations whose pernicious excesses are becoming more and more evident and are now so widely de- plored in our institutions of higher learning.
But the day belonged to the all-conquering Kantism, — and the term is here taken in its widest meaning, to include also all post- Kantian systems.
Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft was published in 1781. At this late day, when here as in Europe Kantism holds full sway in the field of speculation outside the Catholic Church, it is interesting to trace its first appearance across the Atlantic at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
According to Prof. Creighton the very first reference to Kant in this country is found in the American reimpression of the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1797-99. The author of the article, however, the Rev. Dr. George Gleig, was not an American, but a Scotch clergyman. In 1 801 we find Dr. Dwight, president of Yale College, as the first native Ameri- can to make a brief and condemnatory reference to Kant in his Century Discourse : " The present state of literature and morals in Germany conspires to show that the principles of the Illumines respecting morality and religion have an ex- tensive prevalence in that country. From the philosophy of Kant to the plays of Kotzebue their publications appear to be formed to diffuse loose principles '\^
* Treatise on Logic, 1864 ; Modern Philosophy from Descartes to Schopen- hauer and Hartmann. For a more complete account of their works see : Van Becelaere, La Philosophie en Amerique, pp. 62 ff.
^ Dwight, Century Discourse, 1801, p. 50. Cf. Riley, American Philosophy, p. 315, note.
STUDIES IN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY. jg^
At about the same time Samuel Miller (1769- 1850) gives a fuller account of the Kantian philosophy. He had never read or even seen the works of the Konigsberg philosopher, but an echo had come to him of the fame he enjoyed in Europe. Finding a summary of his doctrines in Adelung's Elements of Critical Philosophy ^ which had been translated into Eng- lish and published in London, he proceeds to give us his own views on this new system :
When inquiry is made among the followers of this singular man respecting the general drift of his system, they answer chiefly in negations. It is not atheism, for he affirms that practical reason is entitled to infer the existence of a Supreme Intelligence. It is not theism, for he denies that theoretical reason can demonstrate the existence of an infinite, intelligent Being. It is not materialism, for he maintains that time and space are only forms of our perception, and not the attributes of extrinsic existences. It is not idealism, for he maintains that noumena are independent of phenomena, that things perceptible are prior to perception. It is not libertinism, for he al- lows the will to be determined by regular laws. It is not fatalism, for he defines this to be a system in which the connection of pur- poses in the world is considered as accidental. It is not dogmatism, for he favors every possible doubt. It is not scepticism, for he af- fects to demonstrate what he teaches. Such are the indefinite evasions of this school.
The complaint that all this is obscure and scarcely intelligible will probably be made by every reader. An English philosopher tells us that it would require more than ordinary industry and in- genuity to make a just translation, or a satisfactory abstract of the system in question, in our language; that for this purpose a new nomenclature, more difficult than the Linnaean botany, must be in- vented. This circumstance itself affords strong presumption against the rationality and truth of the Kantian philosophy. Locke and Newton found little difficulty in making themselves understood. Every man of plain good sense who is used to inquiries of that nature, readily comprehends their systems, in as little time as it re- quires to peruse their volumes. Even Berkeley and Hume, with all their delusive subtleties, found means to render themselves easily intelligible. Is there not reason then to suspect either that the system of Kant is made up of heterogeneous, inconsistent and incomprehensible materials ; or that, in order to disguise the old and well-known philosophy of certain English and French writers, and to impose it on the world as a new system, he has done little more
1 88 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW,
than present it under a new technical vocabulary of his own? Or, which is perhaps not the most improbable supposition, that, being sensible of the tendency of his philosophy to undermine all religion and morals, sis hitherto taught and prized in the world, he has studied to envelope in an enigmatic language a system which he wishes to be understood by the initiated alone; a system which has been pronounced ' an attempt to teach the sceptical philosophy of Hume in the disgusting dialect of scholasticism ' ? At any rate, notwithstanding all the unwearied pains which some of the disciples of this famous Prussian have taken, to rescue him from the im- putation of being one of the sceptical philosophers of the age, the most impartial judges will probably assign him a place among those metaphysical empirics of modern times whose theoretical jargon, instead of being calculated to advance science, or to for- ward human improvement, has rather a tendency to delude, to be- wilder, and to shed a baneful influence on the true interests of man.®
In strong contrast with this inimical attitude of the thorough-going Scotch realist, who aimed above all at " a safe and sound philosophy ", was the position of the first thoroughly sympathetic exponents of Kantism, the New Eng- land Transcendentalists. Unrestrained inquiry had been anath- ematized in the early American schools; foreign importa- tions that betrayed a dangerous tendency, had been fought tooth and nail, as the materialistic school had found to its detriment. Every thinker was to be " orthodox " ; he was imprisoned in custom, and bound to follow the lead of the church of which he was a member. Never in the history of thought was there a more complete parody of that highly ex- tolled principle of " free inquiry ". But the thoroughly Pro- testant mind had long since been straining at these artificial barriers, was battering them down very fast, and preparing the way for Kantism, the philosophy peculiarly adapted to the Protestant state of mind.
For the very spirit of Kantian criticism was a spirit of free inquiry ; it took nothing for granted, but imperiously claimed the right to probe into the very fundamentals of the human mind. Its adherents could not but make a clean sweep of all other systems.
6 Miller, Retrospect of the i8th Century, pp. 26-27, vol. 2 ; Riley, op. cit., pp. 512-514-
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As developed at first in New England, it had a meteoric career. Looked upon as a thoroughly original American edi- tion of Kantism, it was not a coldly intellectual system, but underlying it was a decidedly mystical tendency, and its ad- herents manifested the fervor of religious zealots. As such it was short-lived, but through it Kantism obtained a foothold in the land; nay, it appeared shortly that it had completely overmastered the thinking minds of the country from that to this present day. And it shows no signs of losing ground.
The first impulse toward a better understanding of Kant was given by young American scholars who went to complete their studies at German Universities, and came back as ardent champions of the new doctrines then already favorably known and taught at those seats of higher learning. The pioneers in this movement were Edward Everett (1794- 1865) and George Ticknor (1791-1871), both of whom went in 181 5 to spend two years at the University of Gottingen, and both of whom were afterward to follow brilliant careers as professors and writers. George Bancroft, the future historian, followed their example in 181 8. This temporary " emigration to Germany " has since grown to ever greater proportions; as a conse- quence, American philosophy during the nineteenth century has gone through all the metamorphoses of German idealism, and Kantism has continued to reign supreme, either as a criti- cal philosophy standing on its own merits, or in combination with the evolutionary philosophy of Herbert Spencer.
Transcendentalism,'^ the name under which Kantism invaded this country, did not find the way unprepared : other systems had lost their vigor, and positive religious beliefs had de- cayed. As the first philosophical systems in this country had sprung from speculations on the accepted religious truths and had been nourished by them, so did Transcendentalism origin- ate in the negation of these same truths. What Calvinism
■^ It was the name which Kant himself had given to his system : '^ Ich nenne alle Erkenntniss transcendental, die sich nicht sowohl mit Gegenstanden, son- dern mit unserer Erkentnissart von Gegenstanden, sofern diese a priori moglich sein soil, iiberhaupt beschaftigt. Ein System solcher Begriffe wiirde Transcendental-Philosophie heissen ". Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Edit. J. H. von Kirchmann, 7th. edit., Heidelberg, George Weiss, p. 65. " I term all cognition transcendental which concerns itself not so much with objects as with our mode of cognition of objects so far as this may be 'possible a priori. A system of such conceptions would be called Transcendental Philosophy."
I go
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had been to Mather and Edwards, Unitarianism became to Channing, Emerson, and their followers.®
In the terminology of Kant *' transcendent *' was employed to designate qualities that lie outside of all ** experience ", that cannot be reached either by observation or reflection or explained as the consequences of any discoverable antecedents. The term " transcendental " designated the fundamental con- ceptions, the universal and necessary judgments which trans- cend the sphere of experience, and at the same time are the conditions that make experience and scientific knowledge pKJSsible.
It was about 1820, according to Emerson, that the new ideas from which Transcendentalism developed, began to take root in New England. It was only in 1836 however that its followers had grown strong enough to band together, and on 19 September of that year was founded in Boston the Transcendental Club, at the house of William Ellery Chan- ning (1780- 1 842). Channing himself, a Unitarian minister of very liberal views and a fearless defender of the rights of the individual conscience,^ was the leader of the Club, and to him Emerson partly owed his education in the new doc- trines. Besides Channing and Emerson, the other most in- fluential members were Theodore Parker (1810-1860), a radical Unitarian minister; George Ripley (1802- 1880) ; Wil- liam Henry Channing (1810-1884); Henry D. Thoreau (1817-1862) ; Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) ; Bronson Alcott (1799-1888) ; Frederic H. Hedge (1805-1890), also a Uni- tarian minister; George Bancroft (i 800-1 891), the historian; James Freeman Clarke (i 810- 1 892), another Unitarian min- ister. Closely allied with them until his conversion to the Church in 1844, and even called " the coryphaeus of the sect ", was Orestes Augustus Brownson (1803-1876), whose Boston Quarterly Review was one of the greatest assets of the move- ment.^^ " We called ourselves the club of the like-minded,"
^ See : O. B. Frothingham, Boston Unitarianism, G. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1890 ; also : A History of the Unitarians in the U. S. ; Chas. Scribner's Sons, New York, 1903, pp. 170-220.
® " We must start in religion from our own souls. In there is the foun- dation of all divine truth." Barrett Wendell, Literary History of America, Scribner's Sons, New York, 3d edit., 1901, p. 284.
1" Cf. Van Becelaere, op. cit., p. 85. In his sympathetic but keenly critical
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declares James Freeman Clarke, " probably because not two of us professed the same doctrines."
For years this little coterie of enthusiasts succeeded in forc- ing itself into the limelight; their eccentricities of living, to- gether with their large literary output, focussed attention on them. Amongst them were found men of vigorous mind, schooled in using the written and spoken word to good ad- vantage, and so original in their conceptions as often to pro- voke sneers or pitiful smiles from the uninitiated. But all this they heeded not, but went their own way serenely confid- ing in the infallible intuitions of their own minds. Now their literary achievements are hardly remembered, and even the star of Ralph Waldo Emerson, once extolled as the very embodiment of American genius, is undergoing a decided eclipse. The factitious praise which the last generation heaped upon him and his apocalyptic outpourings, is coming to be looked upon as a mere '' fad ", the fact of a weak or blase mind professing to admire what it cannot grasp because it is unintelligible and without logical sequence or cohesion. Emerson's " lack of artistic finish of rhythm and rhyme " was noted even during his lifetime by one of his ardent admirers.^^ A writer with a brilliant style that expresses no thoughts is scarcely destined to endure.
But whilst the transcendentalist movement lasted, Emer- son was its towering figure. He contends for no doctrines, whether God or the hereafter or the moral law. He neither dogmatizes nor defines. On the contrary his chief anxiety seems to be to avoid committing himself to positive assertions. He gives no definition of God that will class him as an atheist, a theist or a pantheist; no definition of immortality that jus- tifies his readers in imputing to him any form of the popular beliefs in regard to it. Does he believe in personal immortal- ity? It is impertinent to ask: he will not be questioned; he will be held to no definitions; he will be reduced to no final statements. " Of immortality the soul, when well employed,
volume Transcendentalism in New England, New York, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1876, O. B. Frothingham calls Emerson " the seer " of the movement ; Alcott "the mystic"; Margaret Fuller "the critic"; Theodore Parker "the preacher " ; and George Ripley " the Man of Letters ". ^^ O. B. Frothingham, op. cit., p. 238.
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is incurious ; ^^ it is so well it is sure it will be well ; it asks no question of the supreme power . . . Immortality will come to such as are fit for it and he who would be a great soul in future must be a great soul now. It is a doctrine too great to rest on any legend, that is on any man's experience but our own. It must be proved, if at all, from our own activity and designs which imply an interminable future for their play." ^'
It is evident that for the '' scientific method " Emerson professes no deep respect, and for the " scientific assumptions " none whatever. He begins at the opposite end : scientists start with matter, he starts with mind : " science," he says, ** was false by being unpoetical." ^*
If we seek for any fundamental principles in his elusive pages, we might say that the first article of his creed is the primacy of mind: mind is supreme, eternal, absolute, one, manifold, subtle, living, immanent in all things, permanent, flowing, self -manifesting. The universe is the result of mind ; finite minds live and act through concurrence with infinite mind : '' There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same." ^^ " The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me. I am part and parcel of God." ^®
And the second article of his creed is only a restatement of the first: the individual intellect is so connected with the primal mind that it draws thence wisdom, will, prudence,
^2 This supreme indifference toward all time-honored Christian dogmas Emerson manifested for the first time in that historical sermon in which he resigned his pastorate of the Second Unitarian Church in Boston, 9 Sept., 1832, because he could no longer admit the distribution of the elements of the Lord's Supper to the people as an ordinance instituted by Christ and in- tended by Him to be perpetuated through the ages : " That is the end of my opposition that I am not interested in it. I am content that it stand to the end of the world, if it please men and please heaven, and I shall rejoice in all the good it produces ". O. B. Frothingham, op. cit., p. 380.
1* R. W. Emerson, Complete Works, Houghton Mifflin & Co., Boston and New York, 1904; Conduct of Life: Worship, pp. 238-239. This edition is always referred to in subsequent quotations.
14 « -phe best read savant becomes unpoetic. But the best read naturalist who lends an entire and devout attention to truth . . . will perceive that there are far more excellent qualities in the student than preciseness and infallibility ; that a guess is often more fruitful than an indisputable affirmation, and that a dream may let us deeper into the secret of nature than a hundred concerted experiments." Com. Works, Nature; Prospects, p. 66.
'^^ Com. Works, Essays, First Series: History, p. 3. i« Com. Works, Nature, p. 10.
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virtue, heroism, all active and passive qualities : " The rela- tions of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure that it is profane to seek to interpose helps . . . Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act of the soul ; the simplest person who in his integrity worships God, becomes God."
Emerson was never concerned to defend himself against the charge of pantheism, or the warning to beware lest he un- settle the foundations of morality, annihilate the freedom of the will, abolish the distinction between right and wrong, and reduce personality to a mask. He makes no apology; he never explains; he trusts to affirmation pure and simple.^^
And as the master thought and spoke, so did the lesser rep- resentatives of the movement teach and speaft in their own way.
The transcendentalist philosophy of man was of the sim- plest kind : it went back to the earliest Greek philosophers, when Christianity did not exist, and to the Eastern thinkers of India and China who had never caught a glimpse of the Christian revelation, and whom Emerson quotes with great satisfaction. It claimed for all men what Christianity claimed for its followers, and only in an analogical way : the words of St. Paul that " in God we live and move and have our being ", were seized upon and reiterated in a thousand different ways, especially in the pages of The Dial : ^® " Man is a rudiment and embryo of God . . . the perception now fast becoming a conscious fact, that there is one mind, and that also all the powers and privileges which lie in one lie in all . . . there is an infinity in the human soul which few have yet believed and after which few have aspired; there is a lofty power of moral principle in the depths of our nature which is nearly allied to omnipotence."
It was not by accident therefore that the transcendental philosophy addressed itself to the question of religion : it did so from the very nature of the case and could not avoid the issue. Kant had felt the necessity of reopening the problem of God; Fichte followed; Schelling and Hegel moved on the
1^0. B. Frothingham, op. cit, pp. 241-242.
18 This "Quarterly Magazine for Literature, Philosophy and Religion", under the editorship of Margaret Fuller and R. W. Emerson, appeared from 1840 to 1844, and is in itself a complete history of the movement for those years.
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same plane. They all insisted on the spiritual nature of man in virtue of which he had an intuitive knowledge of God as a being infinite and absolute in power, wisdom, and good- ness. And as for the immortality of the soul, holding it to be undemonstrable by the senses, it was made a postulate, a first principle.
The transcendentalists rendered justice to all religions,^® studied them, admired them, confessed their inspiration. Of these faiths Christianity was cheerfully acknowledged to be the queen. The supremacy of Jesus was granted with en- thusiasm; his teachings accepted as the purest expression of religious truth, His miracles regarded as the natural achieve- ments of a soul endowed with originality and force.
Thus Theodore Parker believed in the miracles of the New Testament and many others besides, more than the Christians were willing to accept: " It may be said that these religious teachers (Zoroaster, Buddha, etc.) pretended to work miracles. I would not deny that they did work miracles. If a man is obedient to the law of his mind, conscience and heart; since his intellect, character and affections are in harmony with the laws of God, I take it he can do works which are impossible to others who have not been so faithful and are not ' one with God ' as he is."
Transcendentalism denies the reality of supernatural pow- ers and influences simply by regarding man himself as a supernatural being; and Christianity, though dethroned and disenchanted, is dignified as a supreme moment in the auto- biography of God. The transcendentalist found in sacred literature thoughts which he himself put there. Parker, dis- coursing on inspiration, cites Paul and John as holding the same doctrine with himself; "though," as a keen historian
^® Margaret Fuller was perhaps the only notable exception. In 1832, writ- ing to a friend on the subject of religious faith, she expresses herself thus : " I have not formed an opinion ; I have determined not to form settled opinions at present. Loving or feeble natures need a positive religion — a visible refuge, a protection — as much in the passionate season of youth as in those stages nearer to the grave. But mine is not such. My pride is superior to any feelings I have yet experienced . . . When disappointed I do not ask nor wish consolation. I wish to know and feel my pain, to investigate its nature and its source ; I will not not have my thoughts diverted or my feelings soothed. ... I believe in eternal progression ; I believe in a God, a beauty and per- fection to which I am to strive all my life for assimilation." O. B. Frothing- ham, op. cit., pp. 286-287.
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of the movement candidly observes, " it is plain to the sim- plest mind that their doctrine was in no respect the same but so different as to be in contradiction."
Paul and John, it is hardly too much to say, set up their doctrine in precise opposition to the doctrine of transcendentalists. Paul de- clared that the natural man could not discern divine things, that they were foolishness to him; that they must be spiritually dis- cerned; that the Christian was able to discern them spiritually because he had " the mind of Christ ". The eighth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans contains sentences that taken singly, apart from their connection, comfort the cockles of the transcendental heart; but the writer is glorifying Christ the inspirer, not the soul of the inspired. He opens the chapter with the affirmation that "there is no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh but after the spirit " ; and follows it with the saying that " if any man have not the spirit of Christ, he is none of his ". This is the spirit that " quickens mortal bodies " ; that makes believers to be " Sons of God ", giving them " the spirit of adoption whereby they cry Abba, Father " ; bearing witness with their spirit that they are " the children of God ". This is the spirit " that helpeth our infirmities ", and " maketh intercession with groanings that cannot be uttered ". Transcendentalism de- liberately broke with Christianity. Paul said : " other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ ". Trans- cendentalism responded : ** Jesus Christ built on my foundation, the soul ", and for thus answering was classed with those who use as building materials " wood, hay, stubble ", which the fire would con- sume. In the view of Transcendentalism, Christianity was an il- lustrious form of natural religion; Jesus was a noble type of human nature; revelation was disclosure of the soul's mystery; in- spiration was the filling of the soul's lungs; salvation was spirit- ual vitality. ^*^
What made Transcendentalism especially remarkable in New England was that, whilst in Germany and France it was held by cultivated men and taught in the schools; whilst in England it influenced poetry and art, but all over left the daily existence of men and women untouched, here it blos- somed forth in every form of social life. Experiments in thought and life of even audacious description were made,
2 0 O. B, Frothingham, op. cit., pp. 203-204.
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not in defiance of precedent — for precedent was hardly re- spected enough to be defied — but in innocent unconsciousness of precedent. A feeling was abroad that all things must be \ new in the New World. There was a call for immediate ap- plication of ideas to life. There were no immovable pre- judices, no fixed and unalterable traditions. The sentiment of individual freedom was active; and the transcendentalist was by nature a reformer. He could not be satisfied with men as they were, and his perfervid appeals remind one of the mystics of the Middle Ages. Emerson, in his lecture on " Man the Reformer," does not dissemble his hope that each person whom he addresses " has felt his own call to cast aside all evil customs, timidities and limitations, and to be in his place a free and helpful man, a reformer, a benefactor, not content to slip through the world like a footman or a spy, escaping by his nimbleness and apologies as many knocks as he can, but a brave and upright man who must find or cut a straight path to everything excellent in this earth; and not only go honorably himself but make it easier for all who fol- low him to go in honor and with benefit." ^^
Brook Farm therefore was projected on the purest trans- cendentalist basis.^^ It was felt that in order to live a reli- gious and moral life in sincerity, it was necessary to leave the world of institutions and to reconstruct the social order from new beginnings. But what the members needed most to make their experiment a success, they lacked completely — religious abnegation. Instead they built on tKe supreme dignity of the individual man, a principle that expressed all too clearly the hallucinations under which these intellectuals labored.
For visionaries the transcendentalists were, even to their contemporaries. Lord Macaulay puts the case thus in his article on Bacon : " To sum up the whole, we should say that the aim of Platonic philosophy was to exalt man into God. The aim of the Baconian philosophy was to provide man with what he requires while he continues to be man. The aim of Platonic philosophy was to raise us far above our wants; the aim of Baconian philosophy was to supply our wants. The former aim was noble, but the latter was attainable. The
21 Complete Works, Nature, Man the Reformer, p. 228.
22 See the Constitutions in O. B. Frothingham, op. cit., pp. 159-164.
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philosophy of Plato began in words and ended in words, noble words indeed, words such as were to be expected from the finest of human intellects exercising boundless control over the finest of human languages. The philosophy of Bacon began in observations and ended in arts. The truth is that in those very matters for the sake of which they ne- glected all the vulgar interests of mankind, the ancient philoso- phers did nothing or worse than nothing; they promised what was impracticable, they despised what was practicable." Substitute " idealism " for " Platonism," and " Transcenden- talism " for " ancient philosophers ", and this expresses the judgment of sensible men of the last generation on transcen- dentalists.
And it expresses the judgment of posterity equally well. Transcendentalism was but a transient phase in the develop- ment of Kantian philosophy in the country. It opened the way for a wider diffusion of idealism as it came to be studied and understood in all its aspects.
The transcendentalists gave up their eccentricities of con- duct and settled down to merely intellectual occupations that gave a much broader scope to their work and drew new fol- lowers to their doctrines.
In 1878 Emerson, together with Prof. Peirce of Harvard, William Torrey Harris of St. Louis, Bronson Alcott, and F. B. Sanborn, organized the Concord School of Philosophy. Emerson remained at the head of it until his death in 1882. The aim of the school was to hold conferences on philosophi- cal subjects. These meetings attracted many thinkers who were later on to make their influence felt in the field of speculation. Emerson attended the opening of the school on 12 July, 1879, and in the month of August he gave his first lecture before the school, speaking on " Memory." He lec- tured there once more on 2 August, 1880, on "Aristocracy." This was the extent of his work for the institution, which however gave him much pleasure in his declining years, as he saw in it an earnest of the perpetuation of his doctrines. Plato and Aristotle were discussed, but Kantism in its various aspects was the theme underlying the majority of lectures.^^
23 Van Becelaere, op. cit., p. 99.
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One of the most active members of the school was William Torrey Harris (1835-1909)^* than whom few have done more to spread Hegelianism in this country. In 1866 he founded the Kant Club of St. Louis, and he was superintendent of that city's schools from 1868 to 1880, when he was appointed U. S. Commissioner of Education. In 1867 he started his Journal of Speculative Philosophy, which was published regu- larly until 1888, and intermittently from that year until 1893, when lack of support compelled it to cease publication. Harris- loved philosophical speculation for its own sake as an intellec- tual discipline. His restless mind was ever in search of the ultimate reasons of things; he possessed the happy faculty of infusing his own enthusiasm into others, drew many younger minds toward his favorite studies and generously opened the pages of his Journal to the results of their investigations.
Harris was broad-minded, and, when occasion offered, was not slow to pay a sincere tribute to the Church and her great teachers. " The great scholastic Fathers, commencing with Albertus Magnus and St. Thomas Aquinas, learned this in- sight of Aristotle and were able to defend Christianity against the Moslem pantheism which denied immortality to man. . . . The great era of scholasticism, an era of profoundest thought and clearest insight. . . . Christian thought had been almost completed ; very little has been added or is likely to be added to the ontological system of St. Thomas Aquinas." ^^
Harris was one of the first American exponents of Hegel's spiritual monism, and as such deserves further notice. He has himself told us how he came to champion Hegel's con- ception of the universe. "As early as 1858 I obtained my first insight into Hegel's philosophy in studying Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. I saw that time and space presuppose rea- son as their logical condition, and that they are themselves the logical condition of what is in the world, — not essentially but only in the expression or manifestation of his will, which expression he may altogether withhold. I saw also the neces- sity of the logical inference that the unity of time and space
24 Introduction to Philosophy, extracts from his writings, published by- Marietta Kies, 1889 ; Exposition of Hegel's Logic, 1895 ; Psychological Foun- dation of Edtication, 1898, besides numerous articles on philosophical subjects.
25 Hegel's Logic, by W. T. Harris, Chicago, S. C. Griggs & Co., 1895, pp. 34-36.
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presupposes one absolute Reason. God, freedom, immortal- ity, seemed to me to be demonstrable ever since the December evening in 1858 when I obtained my insight into the true in- ference from Kant's Transcendental ^Esthetic ... In 1863 I arrived at the insight which Hegel has expressed in his J^iir- sich-seyn, or Being-for-itself, which I called and still call in- dependent being ... I discovered afterward that it is the most important insight of Plato, and that Aristotle uses it as the foundation of his philosophy. It has in one form or another furnished the light for all philosophy worthy of the name since Plato first saw it. St. Thomas Aquinas presents it in the beginning of his Summa Theological^ Leibniz states it as the basis of his Monadolog^y . . . In 1873 I discovered the substantial identity of all East Indian doctrines. I un- dertook a thorough study of the Bagavad Gita in 1872, and for the first time saw that the differences of systems were su- perficial, and that the First Principle presupposed and even explicitly stated by the Sanscrit writers was everywhere the same, and that this is the Principle of Pure Being. It was in 1879 that I came to my final and present standpoint in re- gard to the true outcome of the Hegelian system, but it was six years later that I began to see that Hegel himself has not deduced theological consequences of his system in the matter of the relation of nature to the absolute idea." ^^ It is a fact worthy of notice that, following in the wake of Hegel and Emerson, Kantian idealists have almost uniformly ** gone be- yond " the Christian conception of God; and in search of au- thorities to uphold and confirm their teachings, have returned to Oriental speculation. Hence their vague notions of the Absolute Being ; or, as Harris himself puts it : " The Abso- lute is not an empty absolute, an indeterminate being, but it is determined. It is not determined through another, but through itself. If there is no independent being, there is no dependent being. If there is not self-determined being, there is no being whatsoever." ^*
28 It ought to be borne in mind here that Harris has failed to grasp the teaching of Aristotle and especially of St. Thomas on this point. The aseitas ascribed to God by the latter is not the Fur-sich-seyn of Hegel. The dis- tinction is made apparent from the very beginning of the Summa. Cf. S. Theol., la, Q. II, a. 3, and Q. Ill, a. 7-8.
^'^ Hegel's Logic, pp. viii-xiv. ^^ Ibid., p. x.
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But the nature and attributes of this being remain forever shrouded in mystery and it is in vain that we look for a clean- cut, sharply delimited conception of God such as the scholastic Middle Ages have left us.
And the same must be said of Harris's doctrine of immortal- ity. '* Let us note that science on teaching the doctrine of evolution and that of the struggle for existence, favors the doctrine that intelligence and will are the surviving and per- manent substance. For intelligence and will triumph in the struggle for existence and prove themselves the goal to which the creation moves. An individuality that does not exist for itself has no personal identity and hence is indifferent to im- mortality. When the self-activity in reproducing the impres- sion perceives at the same time its own freedom as energy, then it becomes conscious of itself. This takes place in the recognition of objects as belonging to classes or species. Here begins the immortality of the individual. Not before this, be- cause the individual is and can be only a self -activity, and cannot know himself except as generic. With the recognition of species and genera there is the recognition of self as per- sistent." '*
It is true that, as medieval philosophy had already recog- nized, the formation of abstract and universal concepts such as those of species and genera, is an argument in favor of the " simplicity " of the soul or its immateriality ; but Hegelian monism has yet to prove that this immaterial soul continues to endure as a self-subsistent being. Such was the philosophic creed of the man who has been called " the profoundest stu- dent of Hegel in this country." Around him and his Journal several other names 'group themselves because, with some shadings of thought, all defend the same fundamental doctrines.
Strange to say, when the centenary of the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason was celebrated in Saratoga, N. Y., in 1 88 1, it was publicly acknowledged that not a few amongst the professors of philosophy in America had a very superficial acquaintance with Kant, and Prof. Bowen of Harvard wrote '* that it was doubtful whether there were in the United States
^^Introduction to Philosophy, pp. 280-283.
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an even dozen who could understand Kant in the original." This defect, however, Prof. George S. Morris (1840- 1889), of Michigan University, tried to remedy. He himself had studied at Halle and Berlin. He translated Ueberweg's stand- ard History of Philosophy. He was in full sympathy with German thought, and in an effort to make it better known in this country and bring it within the reach even of those not familiar with the German language, he started the publication of Griggs's Philosophical Classics, " devoted to a critical ex- position of the masterpieces of German thought." ^^ They were not translations, but critical accounts, simple, brief and to the point, giving the key to a better understanding of the original. He himself wrote the volume on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. John Watson, of Queen's University, King- ston, Canada, wrote Schelling's Transcendental Idealism; Fichte's Transcendental Idealism was treated by Charles C. Everett, of Harvard; Hegel's /Esthetics by J. S. Kedney, of Seabury Divinity School, Faribault, Minn. ; Hegel's Philoso- phy of the State and of History by George S. Morris ; Hegel's Logic by W. T. Harris; Kant's Ethics by Noah Porter of Yale. Together with several other volumes this series gave in an English dress a fairly complete conspectus of German philo- sophy ; and taken in connexion with the works of the English exponents of German thought, prominent amongst whom were Edward Caird and Thomas H. Green, they contributed much toward popularizing Kantian and post-Kantian idealism.
The latter especially seems to have fascinated a host of American philosophers besides Harris, and they have exploited Hegel's doctrines in all their bearings. Amongst them must be mentioned: Charles C. Everett (1829-1900),*^ Bussey, pro- fessor of theology at Harvard and as thorough-going a monist as Hegel ever was; and John Watson (1847),^^ who in common with almost every member of the idealistic school in America
30 Published by S. S. Griggs & Co., Chicago.
51 The Science of Thought, 1869 and 1890; Fichie's Transcendental Idealism, 1884.
32 Kant and His English Critics, 1881 ; Schelling's Transcendental Idealism, 1882 ; The Philosophy of Kant, Extracts from his own Writings, 1888 ; Comte, Mill, and Spencer, 1895; Christianity and Idealism, 1896; An Outline of Philosophy, 1898 ; The Philosophical Basis of Religion, 1907 ; The Philosophy of Kant Explained, 1908.
202 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
strives to bring about a conciliation between " Christianity rightly understood " and idealism — his Christianity, it need hardly be remarked is but a shadowy ghost of what is gener- ally understood by it. William Caldwell (1863)^^ a sym- pathetic exponent of Schopenhauer. James McBride Sterrett (1847)^* of George Washington University; James Seth (1860)^^ formerly of Brown and Cornell Universities, now professor in Edinburgh University and co-editor of The Philosophical Review. George Stuart FuUerton (1859) of Columbia.^® If we are to judge from his latest work, this author shows signs of returning to the realist camp : " It is this truth which is recognized by the plain man, when he maintains that in the last resort we can know things only in so far as we see, touch, hear, taste, and smell them ; and by the psychologist when he tells us that, in sensation the external world is revealed as directly as it is possible that it could be revealed. But it is a travesty on this truth to say that we do not know things but know only our sensations of sight, touch, taste, hearing, and the like." ^^ Frank Thilly (1865)^* of Cornell University. James Hyslop (1854)^® of Columbia. James E. Creighton (1861) of Cornell University, editor of
*8 Schopenhauer's System in its Philosophical Significance, 1896.
^^ Studies in Hegel's Philosophy of Religion, 1890; Reason and Authority in Religion, 1891 ; The Ethics of Hegel, 1893; The Freedom of Authority, 1905.
^^ A Study of Ethical Principles, which had gone through ten editions in 1908.
3® The Conception of the Infinite, 1887; A Plain Argument for God, 1889; On Sameness and Identity, 1890; The Philosophy of Spinoza, 1894; On Spinozistic Immortality, 1899; A System of Philosophy, 1904.
^"^ An Introduction to Philosophy, p. 58. In connexion with this, the fol- lowing sensible remark of his should not go unheeded : after pointing out the contradictions in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and particularly in his ex- position of Antinomies I and II, he writes : " When the student meets such a tangle in the writings of any philosopher, I ask him to believe that it is not the human reason that is at fault, at least let him not assume that it is. The fault probably lies with a human reason." Ibid., p. 308.
*^ Introduction to Ethics, 1900 ; he also translated : Paulsen's Introduction to Philosophy, 1895; Weber's History of Philosophy, 1896; Paulsen's System of Ethics, 1899.
^^ Elements of Logic, 1892; Ethics of Hume, 1893; Logic and Argument, 1899 ; Syllabus of Psychology, 1899 ; The Problem of Philosophy, 1905 ; Science and a Future Life, 1905; Enigmas of Psychical Research, 1906; Bor- derland of Psychical Research, 1906.
STUDIES IN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY. 20^
The Philosophical Review.^^ Paul Carus (1852),*^ a con- vinced monist, expounder of Oriental, especially Chinese thought, and who aims, without any animosity to any of the established creeds of the world, to stand for conservative pro- gress based upon the most radical thought and fearless investi- gation; and holds that it is highly desirable to raise the in- tellectual level of the established churches to a higher plane by letting the matured results of science enter into the fabric of our religious convictions. George Trumbull Ladd (1842),*^ Professor at Yale, although guarded in his state- ments, admits that " the assumption of the immanence of Ab- solute Mind in that world of Nature to which both the human body and the human soul belong, is the only postulate which will make valid the whole realm of psycho-physical science . . . Out of this Universal Being, without seeming to be wholly accounted for by it, does every stream of conscious- ness arise. In the midst of the Universal Being — without getting all its laws of development from it, but on the con- trary showing plain signs of a certain unique, self-determined development — does every stream of consciousness run its course. Into ' It ' at the end, and so far as human observa- tion can follow, every stream of consciousness merges itself. . . . The Immortality of mind cannot be proved from its na- ture regarded as that of a real, self-identical, and unitary being; nor is its permanence, as known to itself, of an order to allow the sure inference of its continued and permanent existence after death."" Hugo Miinsterberg (1863),** pro- fessor at Harvard, for whom the monistic Absolute is not Mind but Will.
*oin collaboration with E. B. Titchener he translated Wilheltn Wundfs Human and Animal Psychology, 1894; and in collaboration with A. Lefevre, Paulsen's Kant, His Life and Philosophy, 1902.
*i His works, amongst which the subject of religion occupies a very large place, are too numerous to be quoted here. A complete list of them may be found in The Work of the Open Court Publishing Co., of Chicago, of which publishing house he is the Director. Se3 pp. 26-75.
^^ Elements of Physiological Psychology, 1890; Psychology Descriptive and Explanatory, 1894 ; The Philosophy of Mind, 1895 ; Philosophy of Knowledge, 1897; Theory of Reality, 1899; Philosophy of Conduct, 1902.
*8 Philosophy of Mind, pp. 319, 365, 398.
^^ Psychology and Life, 1899; Grundziige der Psychologie, 1900; The Eternal Life, 190S ; Science and Idealism, 1906 ; The Eternal Values, 1909- For further details about Miinsterberg's philosophy see Eccl. Review, January, 1909: " The Newest Philosophy."
204
THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
But perhaps the most remarkable and one of the most widely read and most influential of them all at the present time is is Josiah Royce (1855).*^ No doubt this is greatly due to the fact that, although dealing with the most abstract problems, he possesses the happy faculty of bringing his philosophy with- in the reach of the masses. The use of anecdote and story, an easy fluent style, a broad toleration of others' views that makes him quote with relish Thomas a Kempis on the vanity of philosophy ; a reluctance on his part to impose his own but to leave reader or hearer the widest liberty of choice, — all contribute to make him a unique personality that can draw around itself a host of admirers if it cannot make followers. Prof. Royce would gladly class himself with those whose doctrinal system is " an eternal interrogation " ; he is a per- sonality in short such as modern philosophy delights to point out as amongst its greatest representatives.
The philosophical tenets developed in his various works are those of post-Kantian idealism and particularly of Hegel, from whom he scarcely deviates, even if, according to his own confession, he states " Hegel's thoughts in an utterly non- Hegelian vocabulary." *^ It would be a sickening surfeit to repeat here a statement of those doctrines. But they lead into a wider field, that of religion, which Prof. Royce ever and anon invades with dogged insistence, together with all followers of idealism, as a glance at their published works, listed here for that very purpose, will sufficiently show. All through his career this particular subject seems to have oc- cupied a prominent place in his thoughts. His first volume took it up ex professo, and only recently he made an attempt to show '' What is Vital in Christianity." *^ His ideas may be taken as representative of the general attitude of his school toward this engrossing subject.
He warns us at the outset about his position : " The writer . . . has no visible connexion with any religious body, and no sort of desire for any such connexion, and he cannot be ex-
45 The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, 1885 ; The Spirit of Modern Philo- sophy, 1892; Studies of Good and Einl, 1898; The Conception of God, 1895; The Conception of Immortality, 1899; The World and the Individual, 19OC-1901.
*^ The Spirit of Modern Philosophy, Preface, p. xii.
*' The Harvard Theological Review, Vol. II, No. 4, pp. 480 ff.
STUDIES IN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY. 205
pected to write an apology for a popular creed. This con- fession is made frankly, but not for the sake of provoking a quarrel, and with all due reverence for the faith of other men. If the fox who had lost his tail was foolish to be proud of his loss, he would have been yet more foolish to hide it by wearing a false tail, stolen mayhap from a dead fox. The full application of the moral of the fable to the present case is moreover willingly accepted. Not as the fox invited his friends to imitate his loss, would the present writer aim to make other men loose their faiths. Rather is it his aim not to arouse fruitless quarrels, but to come to some peaceful un- derstanding with his fellows touching the ultimate meaning and value and foundation of this noteworthy custom, so widely prevalent among us, the custom of having a religion." *®
Yet he ends by stating for his own part a religious doc- trine. Why ? In so far as philosophy suggests general rules for conduct or discusses the theories about the world, philo- sophy must have a religous aspect. Kant's fundamental prob- lems : What do I know, and what ought I to do? are of re- ligious interest no less than of philosophic interest. There is no defence for one as sincere thinker, if, undertaking to pay attention to philosophy as such, he wilfully or thoughtlessly neglects such problems on the ground that he has no time for them. Surely he has time to be not merely a student of philosophy but also a man, and these things are amongst the essentials of humanity.
By the help of what method shall this study be pursued? By the rationalistic method. It is summarily taken for granted that " revelation ", the imparting to the human mind of any truth from without, is not even to be taken into con- sideration; in the modern world we must both act and think for ourselves. If the old solutions are to be considered at all, they must be judged with reference to the conclusions of philosophy. Only what the mind can evolve out of its own consciousness and ground at least temporarily on plausible proofs, shall be admitted as of any value. Now it is much more important to know how we should live, than to know what we should believe. The primacy of religious belief is
*8 The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, Preface, p. vi.
2o6 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
indeed a feature of highly developed religions; but for the mass of the faithful belief is relatively secondary to practice and may considerably vary, while the practice remains the unvarying and for them the vital feature. '' The appeal that every religion makes to the masses of mankind, is most read- ily interpreted in terms of practice." " The savage con- verted to the Roman Catholic Church is regularly taught that for his imperfect stage of insight it is enough if he is fully ready to say, ' I believe what the Church believes, both as far as I understand what the Church believes and also as far as I do not understand what the Church believes.' And it is in this spirit that he must repeat the creed of the church. But his ideas about God and the world may meanwhile be as crude as his ignorance determines. He is still viewed as a Christian, if he is minded to accept the God of the Church of the Christians, even though he still thinks of God as sometimes a visible and ' magnified and non-natural man,' a corporeal presence sitting in the heavens, while the scholastic theologian who has converted him thinks of Grod as wholly incorporeal, as not situated in loco at all, as not even existent in time, but only in eternity, and as spiritual substance whose nature, whose perfection, whose omniscience, and so on, are the topics of most elaborate definition. The faithful convert and his scholastic teacher agree much more in religious practices than in conscious religious ideas." **
Over and above these merely knowable or believable truths, religious philosophy seeks something else: it wants to know what in this world is worthy of worship as the good ; it seeks not merely the truth but the inspiring truth. It defines for itself goodness, moral worth, and then it asks: What in this world is worth anything? What in this world is worth most? It seeks the ideal among the realities ; it seeks the moral law in its application to this daily life. What is the real nature of the distinction between right and wrong? What truth is there in this distinction? What ideal of life results?
Greek thought did not give us a sufficient foundation for morality. Neither does Christianity : the ultimate motive that Jesus gives to men for doing right is the wish to be in har-
*» Harvard Theol. Review, ibid., p. 414.
STUDIES IN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY. 207
mony with God's love. And the doctrine that God loves us is a foundation for duty only by virtue of the recognition of one yet more fundamental principle: the doctrine that un- earned love ought to be gratefully returned. And for this principle theology as such gives no foundation: why is un- earned love to be gratefully returned?
The whole ethical truth however is found in the " moral insight," which is opposed to ethical dogmatism accepting one separate end only, the salvation of the soul in Christianity. The moral insight " involves the will to act henceforth with strict regard to the total of the consequences of one's act for all the moments and aims that are to be affected by this act." Thus the separate men will not know or care whether they separately are happy, for they shall have no longer individ- ual wills, but the Universal Will shall work in and through them.
This being the ethical norm which should guide us in our actions, the one highest activity in which all human activities are to join may be expressed as " the progressive realization by men of the eternal life of an Infinite Spirit." Or to put it in the form of a " categoric imperative " : " Devote your- selves to losing your lives in the divine life." ^^ And since our religious consciousness wants support for us in our poor efforts to do right, it finds this support in the concluding words of the 21st chapter of Mathew: " Inasmuch as ye did it unto the least of these, ye did it unto me." That is, if we may paraphrase the words of the judge: " I," he says, " rep- resent all beings. Their good is mine. If they are hungry or naked or sick or imprisoned, so am I. We are brethren; ours is all one universal life. That I sit in this seat, arbiter of heaven and hell, makes me no other than the representative of universal life. Such reverence as ye now bear to me is due, and always was due, to the least of these my brethren." The infinite sacredness of all conscious life, that is the sense of the story. Now the knowledge such as Job sought, the knowledge that there is in the universe some consciousness that sees and knows all reality, including ourselves, for which there- fore all the good and evil of our lives is plain fact, — ^this
^^ Religious Aspect of Philosophy, pp. 441, 442.
2o8 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW,
knowledge would be a religious support to the moral con- sciousness. The knowledge that there is a being that is no respecter of persons, that considers all lives as equal, and that estimates our acts according to their true value, — this would be a genuine support to the religious need in us, quite apart from all notions about reward and punishment.^^
This is indeed a dreary teaching to serve as a foundation for the morality of the masses. The Absolute of this Hegelian philosophy, on which morality is ultimately to rest, has surely nothing in common with the God of the Christians. '' It is the night in which all cats are gray, and there appears to be no reason why anyone should harbor toward it the least sen- timent of awe or veneration." *^^
The most recent developments of Idealism in this country have taken still another direction, and under the name of Pragmatism or Humanism have called forth a flood of acri- monious criticism and sharp retort.
Its exponents include F. C. S. Schiller (1864),*^^ formerly of Cornell University, now at Oxford; and John Dewey (1859)/* formerly of Chicago University and now at Colum- bia. But the most noted of them all is William James, the late Harvard professor (1842- 1 910).'*'' His philosophy has many points of contact with that of Hegel, and when he gave to his volume on Pragmatism the subtitle : 'A new Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking ', he acknowledged this indebted- ness. For both, scientific truths, religious truths, even moral rules, are all provisional ; they are working truths rather than finalities, the best to-date and yet liable to be superseded by something that will work better. This is the essence of Prag- matism. And the final conclusions of this philosophy, es-
51 Ibid., p. 220.
'^^G. S. Fullerton, Introduction to Philosophy, The Macmillan Co., New York, 1906, p. 192.
^'^ Riddles of the Sphinxy 189 1 ; Axioms and Postulates, 1902; Humanism, 1903; Studies in Humanism, 1907.
^*^ Psychology, 1886; Leibniz, a Critical Exposition, 1888; Outlines of Theory of Ethics, 189 1 ; Study of Ethics, 1893; Studies in Logical Theory, 1903.
5 5 The Principles of Psychology, 1890; The Will to Believe, 1897; Human Immortality, 1898; Talks to Teachers on Psychology, 1899; The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902; Pragmatism, 1907; The Meaning of Truth, 1909 ; A Pluralistic Universe, 1909.
STUDIES IN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY. jOQ
pecially as expressed in one of W. James's latest volumes, A Pluralistic Universe, if divergent at first glance from those of Hegel, are the same at bottom.
James writes : '' I am myself anything but a pantheist of the monistic pattern." ^^ Already Prof. G. Howison (1834),'^^ of the University of California had ki opposition to the monistic doctrine of Hegel, given currency to the theory of " personal idealism," admitting not one but a plurality of minds in the universe. Prof. James, however, developed this conception to its logical issue.
There are two very distinct types or stages in spiritualistic philosophy. The generic term spiritualism is subdivided into two species, the more intimate one of which is monistic, and the less intimate dualistic. The dualistic species is the theism that reached its elaboration in the scholastic philosophy, while the monistic species is the pantheism spoken of sometimes sim- ply as idealism and sometimes as *' post- Kantian " or " abso- lute " idealism. Dualistic theism is professed as firmly as ever at all Catholic seats of learning,^® whereas it has of late years tended to disappear at our British and American universities, and to be replaced by a monistic pantheism more or less open or disguised. The theistic conception picturing God and His creation as entities distinct from each other, still leaves the human subject outside of the deepest reality in the Universe. The theological machinery that spoke so livingly to our an- cestors, with its finite age of the world, its creation out of noth- ing, its juridical morality and eschatology, its relish for re- wards and punishments, its treatment of God as an external contriver, an intelligent and moral governor, sounds as odd to us as if it were some outlandish savage religion.^®
On the other side, the only way to escape from the para- doxes and perplexities that a consistently thought-out mon- istic universe suffers from as from a species of auto-intoxica-
^^ Human Immortality, p. vi.
5^ The Conception of God, 1897; The Limits of Evolution and Other Essays, 190 1.
ss Prof. James shows himself quite familiar with Catholic teaching, and although not agreeing with its conclusions, proves that he has taken the trouble to understand it and he exposes it without bias as found in Catholic manuals. Cf. Varieties of Religious Experience, pp. 436, ff.
^^ A Pluralistic Universe, pp. 23, 24, 29.
210 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
tion, — the mystery of the " fall " namely, of reality lapsing into appearance, truth into error, perfection into imperfec- tion, of evil in short, the mystery of universal determinism, of the block-universe external and without a history — the only way of escape from all this is to be frankly pluralistic and as- sume that the superhuman consciousness, however vast it may be, has itself an external environment and consequently is finite. In other words, there is a God, but he is finite.** We are internal parts of God, and not external creations. God is not the absolute, but is himself a part when the system is conceived pluralistically.*^
What is this " system conceived pluralistically" ? The prac- tical needs and experiences of religion *^ seem to me suffi- ciently met by the belief that beyond each man, and in a fashion continuous with him there exists a larger power which is friendly to him and to his ideal. Anything larger will do if only it be large enough to trust for the next step. It need not be infinite, it need not be solitary. It might conceivably be only a larger and more godlike self, of which the present self would be but the mutilated expression, and the Universe might conceivably be a collection of such selves, of different degrees of inclusiveness, with no absolute unity realized in it at all. Thus would a sort of polytheism return upon us.** We are glad for this outspoken confession.
If at the end of this study we try to pick some general ideas from this seething mass of contradictory theories, what do we find? In the first place, the postulates of God, human liberty, and immortality which Kant tried so jealously to put outside the pale of his destructive criticism, were, by the fatal logic of his own system, swept away by his successors, and American idealists have been in the front ranks of these ruth- less destroyers. The purest spiritualistic monism has been
«o Ibid,, p. 311. ®i Ibid., p. 317.
®2 Or, as Prof. James puts it on another occasion : " ' The satisfaction through philosophy ' of * Man's religious appetites '." Varieties of Rel. Experience, Preface.
^* Ibid., pp. 525-526. To bear out a point adverted to on previous occasions in this article, we register Prof. James's avowal that " notwithstanding my own inability to accept either popular Christianity or scholastic theism, as I appre- hend the Budhistic doctrine of Karma, I agree in principle with that." Varieties of Rel. Exp., p. 522.
STUDIES IN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY. 211
the result. Even the " pluralism " of Prof. James is but an ill-concealed monism, since he also admits that there is but one " kind of things in the universe, namely minds." In the second place, when the postulates of Kant were done away with, and all truth confined to those verities evolved by the human mind according to the categories of the understanding, all revealed truth and all morality founded on it had to be passed by as altogether irrelevant to a scientific conception of the world. " Modem idealism has said good-by to theology forever." ®* Dogmas are no longer attacked with the fiery zeal of the old heretics; they are looked upon as not worth attacking. And lastly, all American idealists who have ex- pressed themselves on the subject, profess open allegiance to the Oriental religions of India and China. Proclaiming on the housetops that they are intent on " proving all things and testing all things," they yet make their own the doctrines of the most unscientific and most unprogressive amongst the nations of the earth.
J. B. Ceulemans. Moline, Ills.
«* Ibid., p. 448.
Hnalecta*
AOTA PII PP X. Ad R. D. Philippum Fletcher, M.A., Sodalitatis Mode-
RATOREM QUAE "OF OUR LaDY OF RaNSOM" NUNCUPATUR, XXV ANNIVERSARIO ADVENTANTE EX QUO SODALITAS IPSA CONDITA FUIT.
Dilecte fill, salutem et apostolicam benedictionem. Solertiae qua in moderanda ista of Our Lady of Ransom sodalitate ve- rsaris, iampridem, dilecte fili, ad Nos fama manavit. Pro- positum tamen Nostrum tibi bene locates labores, uti suadebat caritas, gratulandi ad hanc distulimus diem, ut ab ipsa op- portunitate subeuntis vigesimiquinti anniversarii ex quo ad hanc ipsam condendam sodalitatem studia adiecisti, et uberior et gratior accideret paternae significatio voluntatis. Optimam sane, libet profiteri, tibi tuisque colendam elegisti christianae caritatis partem: et ista quae te, quae sodales tuos sollicitat, de iis cura qui a nobis dissident; preces quibus vel deviis ma- turum reditum, vel periclitantibus in fide constantiam, vel igni piaculari addictis gaudia superum imploratis, cum in vobis in- telligens arguunt de fratermtatis caritatae indicium, quae illuc promptior accurrit ubi opitulandi necessitas maior, tum Nostrae curae ac cotidianis precibus plane congruunt. Atque utinam communi prece exoratus, communibus Deus annuat votis !
ANALECTA. 2I2
Ad vos quod attinet, pergite hoc tarn sanctum, tarn frugi- f erum deprecandi officium diligenter, ut f acitis, urgere. Verum sinite ut ad illud vos hortemur quod decessor Noster f. r. Leo XIII, in Epistola apostolica Amantissimae voluntatis Angliae catholicos alloquens, commendatissimum esse volebat; nimirum ut ne quid ipsi " de se desiderari ullo modo sinerent quod impetrationis fructum officeret. Nam praeter virtutes animi, quas ipsa precatio in primis postulat, earn comitentur necesse est actiones et exempla christianae professioni consentanea. Qui sancte colunt ac perficiunt praecepta Christi, eorum scilicet votis divina liberalitas occurrit, secundum illud promissum: Si manseritis in me et verba mea in vobis manserint, quod- cumque volueritis petetis, et fiet vobis ".
Divinorum auspicem munerum Nostraeque testem bene- volentiae, tibi, dilecte fili, et omnibus sodalibus tuis, apos- tolicam benedictionem peramanter in Domino impertimus.
Datum Romae apud S. Petrum, die XXV aprilis anno MCMXii, Pontificatus Nostri nono.
PIUS PP. X.
S. OONGREGATIO EITUTJM. I.
Instructio super Privilegiis quae in Triduo vel Octiduo
SOLEMNITER CELEBRANDO INTRA ANNUM A BEATIFICATIONE
VEL Canonizatione PER Rescriptum Sacrae Ipsius Con-
GREGATIONIS A SUMMO PONTIFICE CONCEDI SOLENT.
I. In solemniis, sive triduanis sive octiduanis quae in honore alicuius Sancti vel Beati celebrari permittuntur, Missae omnes de ipsa festivitate ob peculiarem celebritatem dicantur cum Gloria et Credoy et cum Evangelic S. loannis in fine, nisi legendum fuerit ultimum Evangelium Dominicae aut feriae, aut vigiliae, quoties de his facta fuerit commemoratio.
II. Missa solemnis seu cantata, ubi altera Missa saltem lecta de Officio currenti celebretur, dicatur cum unica Oratione; secus fiant illae tantummodo commemorationes quae in dupli- cibus primae ciassis permittuntur. Missae vero lectae dican- tur cum omnibus commemorationibus occurrentibus, sed ora-
214 ^^^ ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
tionibus de tempore et collectis exclusis. Quoad Prefationem serventur Rubricae ac Decreta.
III. Missam cantatam impediunt tantum Duplicia primae classis, eiusdemque classis Dominicae, nee non feriae, vigiliae et octavae privilegiatae quae praefata duplicia excludunt Missas vero lectas impediunt etiam Duplicia secundae classis, et eiusdem classis Dominicae, et feriae, vigiliae atque octavae quae eiusmodi Duplicia primae et secundae classis item ex- cludunt. In his autem casibus impediment!, Missae dicendae sunt de occurrente Festo vel Dominica, aliisve diebus ut supra privilegiatis, prouti ritus diei postulat, cum commemoratione de Sancto vel Beato et quidem sub unica conclusione cum Ora- tione diei in duplicibus primae et secundae classis ; aliis autem diebus commemoratio de Sancto vel Beato fiat sub distincta conclusione post orationem diei.
IV. In Ecclesiis ubi adest onus celebrandi Missam conven- tualem, vel parochialem cum applicatione pro populo, eius- modi Missa de occurrente Officio nunquam omittenda erit.
V. Si Pontificalia Missarum de Festivitate ad thronum fiant, haud Tertia canenda erit, episcopo paramenta sumente, sed Hora Nona : quae tamen Hora de ipso Sancto vel Beato semper erit; substitui nihilominus eidem Horae de die pro satisfac- tione non poterit.
VI. Quamvis Missae omnes vel privatae tantum impediri possint, semper nihilominus secundas Vesperas de ipsa Festi- vitate solemniores facere licebit absque uUa commemoratione; quae Vesperae tamen de Festivitate pro satisfactione inservire non poterunt.
VII. Aliae functiones ecclesiasticae praeter recensitas, de Ordinarii consensu, semper habere locum poterunt, uti Homilia inter Missarum solemnia, vel vespere O ratio panegyrica, ana- logae in honorem Sancti vel Beati fundendae preces, et maxime solemnis cum Venerabili Benedictio. Postremo vero Tridui vel Octidui die Hymnus Te Denm cum versiculis B enedicamus Patrem, Benedictus es, Domine exaudi, Dominus vobiscum et oratione Deus cuius misericordiae cum sua conclusione nun- quam omittetur ante Tantum ergo et orationem de Ssmo Sacramento.
VIII. Ad venerationem autem et pietatem in novensiles Sanctos vel Beatos impensius fovendam, Sanctitas Sua, the-
ANALECTA.. ^^
sauros Eccleslae aperiens, omnibus et singulis utriusque sexus Christifidelibus qui vere poenitentes, confessi ac Sacra Synaxi refecti, ecclesias vel oratoria publica, in quibus praedicta tri- duana vel octiduana solemnia peragentur, visitaverint, ibique iuxta mentem eiusdem Sanctitatis Suae per aliquod temporis spatium pias ad Deum preces fuderint, indulgentiam plenariam in forma Ecclesiae consueta, semel lucrandam, applicabilem quoque animabus igne piaculari detentis benigne concedit : iis vero qui corde saltern contrite, durante tempore enunciate, ipsas ecclesias vel oratoria publica inviserint, atque in eis uti supra oraverint, indulgentiam partial em centum dierum semel unoquoque die acquirendam, applicabilem pari modo anima- bus in purgatorio existentibus, indulget.
Die 22 maii 1912.
Fr. S. Card. Martinelli, Praefectus.
L. * S.
■^ Petrus La Fontaine, Ep. Charystien, Secret.
11.
SOCIETATIS MiSSIONARIORUM SaCRATISSIMI CoRDIS IeSU.
DUBIA.
Hodiernus redactor calendarii Societatis Missionariorum sacratissimi Cordis lesu de consensus sui Rmi Procuratoris generalis, a sacra Rituum Congregatione humillime petiit solu- tionem insequentium dubiorum, nimirum:
I. Lectiones II Nocturni in festo S. Agnetis V. M. suntne historicae, ita ut legi possint et debeant tanquam IX lectio si idem festum ob occurrentiam festi superioris ritus vel dignitatis simplificetur?
II. In Completorio post II Vesperas Dominicae Palmarum debentne dici preces, quando in Vesperis facta sit commemo- ratio duplicis die sequenti occurrentis, proindeque simplificati ?
III. In locis in quibus festum Beati Gasparis del Bufalo, Confessoris, recolitur sub ritu duplici maiori vel minori, di- cendaene sunt lectiones I Nocturni propriae, an potius de Scriptura occurrente?
IV. 1° Antiphonae et psalmi ad Matutinum Commemora- tionis omnium Ss. Romanorum Pontificum, e communi Apos- tolorum desumpta, itane censenda sunt propria ut recitari
2i6 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
debeant etiam si eiusmodi festum celebretur sub ritu duplici maiori vel minori; an potius, utpote de communi desumpta, cedere debent antiphonis et psalmis de feria?
2° Idemque estne dicendum de responsoriis I Nocturni, ita ut, omissis lectionibus de Scriptura occurrente, recitandae sint lectiones " Laudemus viros " de communi?
V. Infra octavam Commemorationis solemnis sanctissimi Corporis D. N. I. C, si fiat commemoratio duplicis simplificati, debentne adiungi tertia oratio, an potius omitti?
VI. 1° In Missis de vigilia vel de feria propriam Praefa- tionem non habente, dicendane est Praefatio propria festi vel octavae cuius factum sit officium?
2° Itemque in eisdem Missis dicendumne est Credo ratione festi vel octavae symbolum habentis?
VII. In Missis pro Sponsis, sicut in aliis Missis votivis ex privilegio celebratis, in duplicibus adiungendane est tertia oratio ?
Et sacra Rituum Congregatio, ad relationem subscript! Secretarii, audito Commissionis Liturgicae suifrag^o, re se- dulo perpensa, ita rescribendum censuit:
Ad I. Affirmative.
Ad II. Negative.
Ad III. Serventur propriae, si fuerint concessae, iuxta novas Rubricas, tit. I, n. 4.
Ad IV. Quoad i^ affirmative ad primam partem, negative ad secundam. Quoad 2"™ affirmative.
Ad V. Omittatur tertia Oratio.
Ad VI. Quoad i^™ affirmative. Quoad 2^*" negative.
Ad VII. Negative.
Atque ita rescripsit ac declaravit, die 24 maii 191 2. Fr. S. Card. Martinelli^ 5. R. C. Praejectus.
L. * S.
■^ Petrus La Fontaine, Episc. Charystien, Secretarius.
III.
Litterae Circulares ad rev.mos locorum Ordinarios QUOAD Propria Officiorum Dioecesana. Illme et Rme Domine, uti Frater, Quum Sanctissimo Domino Nostro Pio Papae X magnae curae sit, ut Breviarii Romani reformatio ad unguem per-
ANALECTA. 21 7
ficiatur; opere pretium erit, etiam lectiones historicas cuique dioecesi proprias ad trutinam revocare. Quamobrem gratis- simum Summo Pontifici fecerit Amplitudo Tua, si pro virili curabit, ut in ista dioecesi Tibi commissa, viri periti eligantur qui, conlatis consiliis, historicas lectiones quas supra dixi, dili- genter examinent easque cum vetustis codicibus, si praesto sint, aut cum probata traditione conferant. Quod, si repererint eas historias contra fidem codicum et solidae traditionis in aliam formam a nativa degenerasse, omni ope adlaborent ut vera narratio restituatur.
Omnia vero maturius expendenda sunt, ne quid desit ex ea diligentia, quae collocanda est in reperiendis codicibus, in eorum variis lectionibus conferendis et in vera traditione ob- servanda. Nee profecto opus est f estinatione : putamus enim spatium ad minus triginta annorum necessarium, ut Breviarii reformatio feliciter absolvatur.
Interea cum opus in ista dioecesi perfectum fuerit; Ampli- tudo Tua ut illud ad banc Sacrorum Rituum Congregationem mittatur, pro sua pietate sataget: ita tamen, ut si quid in lectionibus historicis additum vel demptum aut mutatum fuerit, rationes quae ad id impulerunt, brevi sed lucida oratione afferantur.
Dum haec, de special! mandato Summi Pontificis, Ampli- tudini Tuae significo, diuturnam ex animo felicitatem adprecor.
Romae, die 15 maii 191 2.
Amplitudinis Tuae
Uti Prater addictissimus pR. S. Card. Martinelli, Praefectus.
L. * S.
•^ Petrus La Fontaine, Episc. Chary sti en., Secretarius.
NoTA. Hisce similes litterae missae sunt ad Praepositos generales Ordinum seu Congregationum Religiosorum, quoad Propria Officiorum ipsis concessa.
2i8 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
S. OONaEEQATIO INDIOIS.
I.
Decretum quo quaedam prohibentur Opera.
Feria II , die 6 mail igi2.
Sacra Congregatio Eminentissimorum ac Reverendissi- morum Sanctae Romanae Ecclesiae Cardinalium a Sanctis- simo Domino Nostro Pio Papa X Sanctaque Sede Apostolica Indici librorum pravae doctrinae, eorumdemque proscriptioni, expurgationi ac permissioni in universa Christiana republica praepositorum et delegatorum, habita in Palatio Apostolico Vaticano die 6 maii 1912, damnavit et damnat, proscripsit pro- scribitque, atque in Indicem librorum prohibitorum referri mandavit et mandat quae sequuntur opera :
Abbe Jules Claraz^ Le mariage des pretres. Paris igii.
IzsoF Ala JOS, A gyakori szent dldozds es az eletpszicho- logia. Budapest igio.
Th. de Cauzons^ Histoire de ['inquisition en France. Paris igog.
Itaque nemo cuiuscumque gradus et conditionis praedicta opera damnata atque proscripta, quocumque loco et quocumque idiomate, aut in posterum edere, aut edita legere vel retinere audeat, sub poenis in Indice librorum vetitorum indictis.
Quibus Sanctissimo Domino Nostro Pio Papae X pOT me infrascriptum Secretarium relatis, Sanctitas Sua Decretum probavit, et promulgari praecepit. In quorum fidem etc.
Datum Romae, die 9 maii 191 2.
F. Card. Della Volpe, Praefectus.
L. *S.
Thomas Esser, O.P., Secretarius.
II.
DUBIUM.
Sacra Congregatio Eminentissimorum ac Reverendissi- morum Sanctae Romanae Ecclesiae Cardinalium a Sanctissimo Domino Nostro Pio Papa X Sanctaque Sede Apostolica Indici librorum pravae doctrinae eorumdemque proscriptioni, ex- purgationi ac permissioni in universa Christiana republica
ANALECTA.
219
praepositorum et delegatorum, habita in Palatio Apostolico Vaticano die 6 maii 191 2, ad dubium :
" Utrum Episcopus loci, in quo aliquis auctor eidem non subditus " librum, a proprio Ordinario iam examinatum et praelo dignum iudicatum, publici iuris facere desiderat, istius libri impressionem permittere possit, quin eum novae censurae subiicere debeat "
respondendum censuit :
"Affirmative, apponendo iudicium * Nihil obstare ' censoris alterius dioecesis, ab istius Ordinario sibi transmissum."
Quibus Sanctissimo Domino Nostro Pio Papae X per me infrascriptum Secretarium relatis, Sanctitas Sua responsionem Eminentissimorum Patrum confirmavit et promulgari prae- cepit.
Datum Romae, die 9 maii 191 2.
F. Card. Della Volpe, Praefectus.
L. * S.
Thomas Esser, O.P., Secretarius.
S. OONGEEGATIO DE SAOEAMENTIS.
Decretum circa Impedimentum ex adulterio cum Atten- TATiONE Matrimonii proveniens.
Non raro accidit, ut qui ab Apostolica Sede dispensationem super matrimonio rato et non consummato, vel documentum libertatis ob praesumptam mortem coniugis obtinuerunt, ad consulendum suae animae saluti, novum matrimonium in facie Ecclesiae cum iis celebrare velint cum quibus, priore vinculo constante, connubium mere civile, adulterio commisso, con- traxerunt.
Porro quum ab impedimento proveniente ex adulterio cum attentatione matrimonii, quod obstat in casu, peti ut pluri- mum haud soleat dispensatio, Ssmus D. N. Pius Papa X, ne matrimonia periculo nullitatis exponantur, de consult© Emorum Patrum sacrae huius Congregationis de disciplina Sacramentorum, statuit ut in posterum dispensatio a dicto im- pedimento in casu concessa censeatur per datam a S. Sede sive dispensationem super matrimonio rato et non consummato, sive permissionem transitus ad alias nuptias.
220 1'HE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW,
Quoad praeteritum vero eadem Sanctitas Sua matrimonia quae forte ex hoc capite invalide inita fuerint, revalidare et sanare benigne dignata est.
Idque per praesens eiusdem sacrae Congregationis decretum promulgari iussit, quibuslibet in contrarium non obstantibus.
Datum Romae, ex aedibus eiusdem sacrae Congregationis, die 3 mensis iunii, anno 1912.
D. Card. Ferrata^ Praefectus.
L. * S.
Ph. Giustini, Secretarius.
OUKIA EOMANA. Pontifical Appointments.
24 April, igi2: The Rev. John Biermans, of the Missionary Society of St. Joseph, Mill Hill, is appointed Vicar Apostolic of the Upper Nile, with the title of Bishop of Gargara (Monzuradi).
J May J jgi2: The Rev. John Matthew Mahony, Vicar Gen- eral of the Diocese of Hamilton, made Domestic Prelate.
Mr. Charles Conrad Shaw, of Leamington (England) re- ceives the Grand Cross of the Order of St. Sylvester.
8 May, jpj2: The Rev. Canon Philip Choquette, Rector of the Seminary of St. Hyacinth, made Domestic Prelate.
Monsignor John Meany, of the Diocese of Aberdeen, ap- pointed Secret Chamberlain, supernumerary, of the Pope.
14 May, igi2: The Rev. Canon James Paul, of the Diocese of Aberdeen, made Domestic Prelate.
75 May, IQ12: The Rev. Dr. John D. Biden, rector of St. Joseph's Cathedral, Buffalo, made Domestic Prelate.
22 May, ipi2: The Holy Father appoints Cardinal Diomede Falconio Protector of the Third Order of St. Francis, having its Motherhouse at Glen Riddle, in the Archdiocese of Phila- delphia.
I June, igi2: Mr. James Prendergast and Mr. Henry Cun- ningham, both of the Archdiocese of Boston, made Knights of the Order of St. Gregory the Great (civil class).
Stubtes anb Conferences*
OUR ANALEOTA.
The Roman documents for the month are:
Pontifical Letter to the Rev. Philip Fletcher, M.A., commending his work as director of the Guild of Our Lady of Ransom for the Conversion of England, on the occasion of the Society's twenty-fifth anniversary.
S. CONCHIEGATION OF RiTES : I. Instruction regarding the privileges that are usually granted during a triduan or octo- duan celebration, when held within the year of the beatifica- tion or canonization of the person so honored.
2. Some liturgical questions referring to the calendar of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart.
3. Circular letter to all Archbishops and Bishops propos- ing the revision of the historical lessons which are proper to each diocese.
S. Congregation of the Index: i. Publishes a decree condemning three books.
2. Decides that a book, which is written by a priest of a diocese other than that in which it is to be published, need not be submitted afresh to his censor by the Ordinary of the diocese of publication, provided the volume gives the Nihil obstat of the author's diocesan authorities.
S. Congregation of the Sacraments issues a decree con- cerning the impediment that arises from adultery with at- tempted marriage.
Roman Curia gives list of recent Pontifical appointments.
Tl EMOI KAriOrnrNAli— WITHOUT COMMENT.
To the Editor, The Ecclesiastical Review.
Allow me a word on the time-honored question " Quid mihi et tibi." Every commentator claims that it is a very old question, and that no satisfactory solution has been given, except the one he may be writing. And the solution is not yet.
Where did this harsh, Puritanical interpretation arise? It goes back even beyond the days of the Puritans; it is almost
222 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
lost in history. Perhaps some old sour-visaged Rabbin, in whose heart there never was a spark of human or divine love, gave utterance to it. It is truly unworthy of Christian origin.
To say that this was a characteristic of the manner of speak- ing, an idiom of the language of the people of Palestine, or that the idiom is used to-day in Mesopotamia, or in the lands of Abbe Hue, does not change the interpretation, or give us any new light on the subject. It rather confounds. It also confesses that there is something wrong with the sentence or, properly, reply.
We have all been so taught that we hang our hat on this peg — " It is an idiom of the language." This is the very answer a professor gave us in class one day. We looked up to our professors then as oracles in all abstruse subjects. Many of us since have found those oracles to be about as re- liable as the oracles of ancient Rome.
But back to the question. What did Christ really say? You philologists turn to your Greek and tell us that St. John wrote the Gospel in Greek ; he was not writing a play ; he gave us no stage settings; he gave us no " asides"; he made no marginal nor foot-notes. He left these latter for the com- mentators, and they have spoiled the passage. They have covered it, so to speak, with smoke. Who was Christ, and what did He say on this occasion ? Christ was God, a Divine Person, walking among, and speaking to men. He was all love. Love itself. He was all amiability, all politeness. In polite conduct, and correct manner of speaking. He was an examplar for mankind for all time.
Christ was at the wedding by invitation. His mother was there also, presumably by invitation. She may have been a relative of one of the contracting parties; in which case she was more than ordinarily solicitous about the preparations and the banquet. There were also four of the Apostles pres- ent. St. John does not say whether he was present or not. If he were present, he afterward wrote down the words as he heard them. If he were not present, he wrote the words he was inspired to write. We do not know where Christ and His Mother sat at the banquet. All we know about it is that Mary saw that there was not a sufficient quantity of wine for the feast. How and where she told Christ about it we do
STUDIES AND CONFERENCES. ooo
not know. Did she come and whisper, or speak in an " aside " to Him, or did she call Him to the end of the room where the viands were prepared? We do not know. But we do know that she told Him of the small quantity of wine. We have Christ's answer as St. John wrote it. " t/ hfioi koX aoi yhvac— (Madam), (My Dear), Lady, what is this to me and to you?, My hour (to work wonders) has not yet arrived?" "Lady, this is no affair of ours, (we are only guests)." " Lady, we did not prepare this feast," (the material part). Or, " Lady, is it our affair?" (are we supposed to furnish wine?) Or still further, " Is this a part of the program you have arranged ?"
This was all said in a quiet manner. His inflection of voice is not given. His expression of face is not mentioned. Mary understood. She knew what He would do, as the resulting miracle proved. Why try to read into it something not there? As, " What is there between me and you ?"
Evidently all that was said was in a low tone of voice, or in an aside, as the bridegroom, and chief steward, and guests knew nothing about what was happening; "but the waiters knew ".
Did Christ not thus hesitate before the servants to put to test her importunity, to show her faith in what He could do, and to show indirectly that He would grant her any favor even inopportunely asked?
If we now examine the words closely, we will find that there is not a harsh note in any of those words used by Christ. The word " gunai " means something more than simply wo- man. It is also a term of endearment, a term of polite address. Used in such relations it was common among the Greeks. Christ might have said, " Mother " ; but Christ was polite. Christ used this same term while hanging on the cross. This same St. John tells us in the nineteenth chapter of this same Gospel, that Christ, while hanging on the cross, turned to Mary and asked her to be a mother to St. John, His beloved Apostle. He did not address her, " Mother," but Thvai, ide 6 viog gov — Lady, behold thy son." He used a more endearing term than Mother. Then He spoke to St. John, and said, '"i^J^ ^ wfjTvp ffov.~ Son, behold thy mother." There could be no mis- take about what He meant here. Christ is careful in His
224 ^^^ ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
dying moments to address His mother by the endearing term, Lady.
Read this passage just as it was written by a Greek scholar for Greek readers. True he used an ellipsis; but the genius of the language calls for, or rather permits, such.
Consider the time and place and all the settings, and then ask, could Christ, who was so kind to the lepers, and the fallen, be ungentlemanly, or seemingly rude, to His Mother? No.
" My dear. My Lady, O Mother, are we to furnish some wine for this feast?" " My Dear, did you really arrange for me to begin my work before time?" Such is what Christ said; but St. John wrote it in Greek.
J. J. LOUGHRAN.
Seward J Neb.
THE PBESORIBED EEVEEENOE IN PONTIPIOAL MASSES AND
VESPEES.
Qu. In Pontifical Mass and in Pontifical Vespers, the Baltimore Ceremonial provides that the ministers make their reverences to the bishop by bowing, when passing before the altar, or going to and from the throne. The Ceremoniale Episcoporum, however, provides that they genuflect when so doing.
Will you please advise me whether there is any decree from Rome authorizing the bows, instead of the genuflections provided for in the Ceremoniale, or whether custom in the United States makes it lawful to bow rather than genuflect?
Resp. The late P. Schober, C.SS.R., an authority on rubri- cal interpretation, in his quasi-official commentary, Caere- moniae Missarum Solemnium et Pontijicalium (edit. 1909), referring to the above matter, has the following note, imply- ing that the Baltimore Ceremonial overlooked a distinction which, though not applicable to all places alike, requires due consideration in a manual for general direction. The note referred to occurs in the Chapter " De Missa Solemni Pon- tifical! ab Episcopo in Ecclesia Cathedrali celebranda," and reads as follows :
Qui non sunt de gremio Capituli semper genuflectere debent trans- eundo tam ante altare quam ante Episcopum, sive pontificaliter sive Cappa tantiun aut Mozetta indutum; et reprobatur usus, ut solum-
STUDIES AND CONFERENCES. 221;
modo caput et humeros inclinent. (S. R. C, die 9 Maji, 1857, in Din. n. 3046.) Canonici vero, quoties ante altare vel ante Episco- pum transeunt, caput et humeros tantum profunde inclinant. Quare Assistentes et Ministri Sacri, nisi sunt Canonici, et omnes Ministri inferiores ante altare et Episcopum transeundo semper genuflectere debent; quod in sequentibus bene notandum est, quamquam postea dicetur : profunda facta inclinatione vel factis debitis reverentiis.
The distinction here made seems to settle the difficulty and show that it does not suffice to make a simple reverence in- stead of genuflecting at the Pontifical services, in cathedrals where there are no regular Canons.
INDULGENOE AND COMMUNION AT EORTY HOUES' DEVOTION.
Qu. At the close of Forty Hours' Devotion in a neighboring par- ish, several priests, my elders, firmly espoused the affirmative of the following query: Is it possible for those who make a visit to the Blessed Sacrament on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday of the Forty Hours' Devotion, to gain the Plenary Indulgence by receiving Holy Communion on Wednesday morning, the Devotion having closed with all solemnity the evening before? There was no particular reason suggested why the reception of Holy Communion did not take place on Sunday, Monday, or Tuesday. H. F. H.
Resp. The Indulgences specified in connexion with the Forty Hours' Prayer appear to require that the reception of the Sacraments take place on one or other of the days during which the Devotion lasts. A distinct concession has been granted, however, so as to extend the gaining of the Indul- gences to those who receive on the day before or on the morn- ing of the Exposition {Deer, authent. nn. 426 and 434.)
Behringer, however, in his great work on Indulgences {Abldsse, XIII ed. p. 84), cites the Raccolta (p. xv), to the effect that a Plenary Indulgence, issued in connexion with devotions that last throughout a month or for a number of days, may be gained if Holy Communion be received within the eight days which immediately follow the closing of the exercises. This concession would seem to apply to the Tri- •duum of the Forty Hours Prayer, since " ubi lex non dis- tinguit " and " favores ampliandi " are principles of general application, although there be no mention of it in the regula- tions for the Forty Hours' Adoration.
226 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW,
WHERE IS THE DIOOESE OP KEMPEN?
Qu. The July number of the Irish Ecclesiastical Record prints among its documents a letter from Cardinal De Lai in which he felicitates a bishop in the name of the Holy Father for founding a preparatory and a theological seminary in his diocese of Kempen. The Latin is Campinense ; but there is no Kempen diocese, the little town of the famous Thomas being quite too insignificant a place for such a distinction. From the context of the document it is not pos- sible to make out to what locality it is addressed. Can the editor of The Ecclesiastical Review throw light on the subject?
SCOTUS.
Resp. The name Kempen as mentioned above must be an error. The document referred to is addressed to the Bishop of Campinas, which city is located in Sao Paolo, Brazil, South America.
THE QUESTION OF MITIGATING THE EUOHAEISTIO FAST.
Although the subject of the Eucharistic Fast and the ad- visability of mitigating the present discipline have been dis- cussed in the Ecclesiastical Review at intervals during the last two years, by priests familiar with the conditions in missionary countries, there has been no decided voice among those to whom the Holy See must of necessity look for a proper representation and for an authoritative statement of facts on the subject. We understand that Bishop Gabriels of Ogdensburg, whose maintenance of ecclesiastical discipline and zeal for promoting Eucharistic devotion are attested by his public administration, had placed the question of the fast, among other difficulties likely to prevent the practice of frequent and daily Holy Communion, before our Holy Father, and that the latter, recognizing the reasonable- ness of the plea, under certain local conditions which obtain in the United States, had signified his readiness to modify the existing legislation, if the matter were presented in the proper manner as a request from the American Hierarchy.
That many thousands of our Catholic people, who would be anxious to profit by the invitation to receive the Bread of Life in their most dire need, are prevented from doing so by no other obstacle than the impossibility of observing the tradi-
STUDIES AND CONFERENCES. 227
tional fast, has been clearly demonstrated in these pages. The writers were not only from among our zealous and thoughtful priests, but also experienced and devout members of the laity, who hoped through the Review to reach the ears and hearts of the Clergy and the Hierarchy, with whom lay the remedy for the untoward conditions against which they pleaded. They pleaded in behalf of the laboring classes, notably the poor girls employed in the shops of our factory towns and in the department stores of our cities; the night- workers, and the little children. What was asked was, that, if the ancient discipline allowing those who could do so, to approach the Holy Table daily, was to be restored, then also the ancient mitigated discipline of the fast be restored where- ever necessity called for it.
Father Pernin's article on the subject in the May number of the Review convinced many that, if a Jesuit Father could defend such a plea, there can be nothing irreverent or dan- gerous about it from the standpoint of Holy Church, though it need not follow that every member in the Society would at once stand for the same plea. The Rev. A. Van Sever made a good practical comment in our June number upon the article by Father Perrin, S.J., and we are glad to accede to his and Father Pernin's request to print the following communication, in the hope that it may call forth expressions from other thoughtful members of the Clergy who have not settled the whole matter for themselves and for their congregations by putting the problem out of their minds.
We might add here that at our suggestion the topic was proposed as a subject for discussion at the last Eucharistic Congress in Madrid. We had hoped that the proposal might serve as a preparatory measure for later discussion at the Eucharistic Congress to be held some time in the United States. Among the Latin Bishops the principle " Nihil inno- vetur " would be likely to rule the question out of court, for they can hardly have any realization of the actual conditions calling for a change of the time-honored practice of European countries. But Pius X, who sees more of the American Church's needs than any individual Bishop, realizes that both our mode of living and our practice of religion are based not on a theory of traditions but upon a theory of advance-
228 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
ment, and that the Americans apply this theory to the question of the salvation of souls as to all other ques- tions. Of course we must have reverence and unity of discipline and a conforming obedience arising from respect for law and authority, but we must also have the liberty of spirit which our Lord meant to teach the Pharisees when he rejected their appeals to their Sabbath traditions and to their ceremonial customs, where the law of charity was being ne- glected. It is to be hoped that the matter will, under Divine Providence, fashion itself into proper legislation to meet our actual needs, through the next Eucharistic Congress, which we trust may be held in the United States in the year 191 3.
In the meantime we hope that Fr. Van Sever's appeal, which we here print at Fr. Pernin's request, may serve as a means of bringing the question from the theoretical to the practical stage.
AN APPEAL FOE AN EXPRESSION OF SENTIMENT AND ACTION.
To the Editor, The Ecclesiastical Review.
As many priests are interested in the movement which looks toward securing from the Holy See some mitigation of the Eucharistic Fast (as set forth in an article in the May issue of the Review), I beg leave to make the following practical suggestions.
1. It is evident that some concerted action should be taken to show a widespread desire on the part of the priests to se- cure this favor.
2. Hence I would respectfully ask that all priests interested in this matter should write to the undersigned at once, pledg- ing their support to this movement.
3. After a sufficient number of pledges have been secured, a Committee may be formed which will draw up a petition and forward it in the right way to the proper authorities.
4. As it is necessary to interest as many priests as possible in this movement, I would earnestly request that every priest anxious to secure this privilege should interest his friends among the clergy and induce them to forward their names to the undersigned.
5. If it is judged advisable to print circulars, etc., it will be a pleasure for me to write a substantial check.
A. Van Sever. Route 2, Grand Rapids, Wisconsin.
Ecclesiastical Xibrarig XTable*
SOME EEOENT APOLOGETIO WOEKS.
Monsignor Batiffol, whose Primitive Catholicism and History of the Roman Breviary in their English translations have made his name known to American readers, gave a series of lectures, the first in a course of Higher Religious Instruction, at Versailles, under episcopal sanction, during the early part of 1910. The subject he had selected was : What are the critical proofs of the general history of our Lord? The addresses were originally designed as an irenic appeal to the understanding of educated Frenchmen, by presenting the logical and historical evidence which attests the credibility of the Gospels. Owing to the publication, at the time, of a volume en- titled Orpheus by Salomon Reinach, which made a passionate on- slaught upon the credibility of the Gospel narrative, and which, because of its popular style, became the talk of the French public, Monsignor Batiffol somewhat altered the form of his lectures and turned them into a critical examination of Reinach' s statements. These he proved to be a series of arbitrary assertions, partly true, partly false, or resting on incomplete historical data and lacking the essentials of honest and enlightened scholarship.
In their present perfected literary form the lectures are admir- ably adapted for general argument in defence of evangelical truth. They trace the current of rationalistic polemics, and offer a suc- cinct and methodical series of proofs. The author prefers to draw his weapons of defence from admissions by the recognized historical authorities among the rationalist critics themselves. Thus he makes Hamack, Jiilicher, Schiirer, J. Weiss, and Wernle answer Professor Reinach, wherever they do not unite against the Catholic position, a process by which the traditional credibility of the Gospels be- comes clearer than by the simple appeal to patristic testimony. Batiffol states the case of early non-Christian testimony to the work of Christ, especially the testimony of Josephus and of the rabbis of Apostolic times, in a clear and unbiased manner, which must appeal to any unprejudiced reader who looks for historical accuracy. Under the author's method of examination the statement made by Reinach and others, that the historic Jesus is essentially intangible, turns into vapor. With Christ, in the Gospels, established as the Messiah and founder of a Church that was to rise upon the very foundation of the destroyed Jewish Church, the truths of Catholicity gain a new assertive strength, well calculated to dispel the popular
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scepticism that delights in deifying self. The translation, which is admirable, is by Father George Pollen, the English Jesuit, who has wisely made the incident references conform to English editions and versions of the works cited by the author.
An American Jesuit, Father T. W. Drum, through the Dubuque Apostolate publishes Christ is God, a lecture in which he goes ex- clusively to the New Testament for proofs. The value of the pamphlet in connexion with the demonstrations of Monsignor Batif- fol, is manifest. Father Drum brings together the evidence fur- nished by the sacred text for the Divinity of Christ, from the testi- mony of His enemies, His friends, His works, and from the fact of His resurrection from the tomb.
To these proofs may be added the statements of Christ who Him- self asserts His Divinity. These statements have been assumed by the older exegetes to find their ultimate and complete embodiment in the fourth Gospel ; and accordingly St. John has been referred to as the chief witness for the Divinity of our Lord. In recent years rationalistic criticism has sought to weaken the traditional confi- dence in the historical value of the Gospel of St. John, and we are referred to the Synoptics as the only acceptable source of historical information. Here too we have some strong statements attesting the Divinity of Christ in His own words, the most remarkable of which is found in St. Matthew's Gospel (11 : 27) : "All things are delivered to Me by My Father. And no one knoweth the Son but the Father ; neither doth any one know the Father, but the Son, and he to whom it shall please the Son to reveal Him." The passage is substantially found in St. Luke 10:22, not however in St. Mark (though St. Irenaeus seems to have seen a reading of it there — Haer. IV, 6, 1). It coincides, however, with different expressions in St. John (6 : 46 ; 7 : 28 ; 8 : 19 ; 10 : 15) . It is clear that in proportion to the growth of the sentiment which refuses to accept St. John as historical evidence for our Lord's Divinity, claimed by Himself and proved by His acts, the importance of the testimony of Saints Mat- thew and Luke grows apace.
In view of this fact the attempt of the rationalistic critics has been in the direction of destroying or weakening the force of St. Matthew's testimony as a later addition to the text. The answer to this assertion comes in a recently published study by Dr. Heinrich Schumacher (Freiburg: Herder) under the title Selbstoffenbarung Jesu bei Matt. lo: 2y {Luc. 10:22). The author succeeds in demonstrating by a process of critical exegesis that the passage re-
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ferred to in the above Synoptics is unquestionably as genuine as the remainder of the historical text. And if it be once established that the Apostolic witnesses stood for the Divinity of Christ, then the argument of a Christological development, attributed to the sup- posed later composition of the Johannine Gospel, falls to the ground, since it rests in large part on a petitio principii. Dr. Schu- macher examines every detail of the problem in the most approved fashion of higher criticism. His excursion into the literature of the subject is singularly wide, from the Apostolic writers down to the latest adept in philological critique. Popularized the work would complete the apologetic argument which Professor Batiffol makes in his defence of the Gospels.
TWO PEENOH NOVELS.
Davidee Birot, by Rene Bazin and recently translated into Eng- lish (Scribner's Sons, New York), gives us a glimpse of the con- ditions, social and moral, of the public lay teachers in the country towns of Western France. The people have little or no religion; many of them, especially the workmen, are quite godless and of the rude socialist type. But there is a remnant of the faithful, and there are Catholic traditions which still exercise a certain influence upon those of the community who are well disposed. The lay teach- ers are expected to eliminate these traditions from the young mind, to teach the children that there is no God or that He is the Unknow- able, and that the Catholic Church is merely a political institution, a remnant of the old monarchical regime, opposed to the State. Davidee Birot realizes the hopelessness of inculcating and preserv- ing womanly and manly virtue without belief in God and the sanc- tions of religion, and she exerts herself to vindicate the principle of morality to which she holds by instinct and by reflection, among the people with whom she lives. Romance runs of course into the story and gives it life and attraction. There is something in its woof that recalls De Toute son Ame (Redemption), which we regard as Bazin' s best work, although it was not one of those crowned by the French Academy.
Like most of the author's other novels, of which about half a dozen or a third of his productions have been translated into Eng- lish, Davidee Birofs chief worth lies in a certain realism with which Bazin describes the religious thought and feeling of the peasants and workmen of his country, chiefly of that district which, bordering on the Atlantic coast, lies between the Loire and the Garonne. It is a religious condition which has lost its sap and freshness, and which explains to a large extent the apparent apathy with which a Catholic
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people has allowed its churches and altars to be despoiled and its schools to be laicized. The fact that for generations a State-aided clergy has served the people, has left upon the latter the impression that when a priest is condemned by the State it is because he is inefficient for some reason or other; and the perfunctory ministry itself of the priests, who had nothing to urge them to special zeal, has in many cases no doubt confirmed the impression. Persecution has lifted this apathy and there is promise of the old seed ripening to bloom afresh.
Another French novel, the scene of which is set in the same dis- trict of Western France as is that of Davidee Birot, and which has the form of an autobiographical diary, is Vendeenne, by Jean Char- ruau (Pierre Tequi, Paris). It describes the conflict between the royal party and the revolutionists at the end of the eigh- teenth century. It was a conflict too between the old conser- vative principles of the Catholic faith and the assertion of so-called human rights against constituted authority. The author tells his story in the form of a diary written in 1852 by Madame Henriette Chambrun (nee Vernon) of Chateau-Thebaud in the dis- trict of the Loire. It is a pathetic account of a wife and mother who was called upon to make heroic sacrifices for the love of God and her country's honor, by seeing her nearest kinsfolk one after another torn from her amid the ravages of the revolution. P. Char- ruau has written many beautiful volumes, — ^biographies like those of P. Henri Chambellan and of Madame Pittar, and educational essays and romances, like Brother and Sister and Une Famille de Brigands. The reader will recognize in Vendeenne familiar thoughts and ideals of all the old stories reproduced in a new and fascinating form and with the vividness of deeply religious conviction.
AN INTEODUOTION TO THE HISTOET OP THE POPES.
Bell and Sons of London (The Macmillan Company, New York) publish A Chronicle of the Popes, from St. Peter to Pius X, which will serve as an excellent introduction to a history of the Popes, or, for that matter, to the study of ecclesiastical history in general. " The history of the Papacy," writes the author, A. E. McKilliam, is " almost synonomous with the history of the civilized world from the early centuries of the Christian era." To the ordinary student the popular works of Mann, Pastor, Grisar, or of Ranke, Milman, Creighton, Montor, either deal only with isolated periods and aspects of the Papacy, or are too voluminous to permit of a sufficiently com- prehensive survey and a just judgment of an institution which is
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not only based on the same fundamental principle, but whose con- tinuous and progressive activity is informed by a single motive. This is true, whatever the variety of forms may be which that motive has assumed in the course of twenty centuries. Mr. Mc- Killiam gives the names, dates, and chief facts concerning each Pope in chronological order, thereby establishing a chain of con- nexion which shows the record of the facts to be continuous, al- though he makes no attempt to trace the causes or motives of the events. There is not a vestige of theological prejudice in the vol- ume, nor any effort to settle unproved positions against the Catholic contention; indeed the author shows singular fairness both in his statements, and in not suppressing certain facts which throw favor- able light upon the policy and acts of the Popes. The sources to which the author appeals, are, besides the Regesta Pontificum Romanorum and other classic authorities, mentioned above, Bruys, Bower, de Rossi, Balzani, Stephens, Bryce {Holy Roman Empire), Gregorovius, Isaacson {Later Popes). Some of these might mislead the historical student if their inferences were not balanced also by reference to our best Catholic literature of recent date on the subject.
MANALIVE/
Manalive is a queer book, not unlike in this to The Ball and the Cross. As the latter goes to show the ubiquity of insanity, the former is an apology for craziness. Innocent Smith, the leading character, who calls himself Roland Oliver Isiah Charlemagne Arthur Hildebrand Homer Henry Danton Michael Angelo Shakes- peare Brakespeare Manalive, plays all kinds of practical jokes upon friend and foe alike. He is captured and subjected to a more or less burlesque sort of a trial, and finally acquitted. An extract from the plea for his defence presented by the inimitable advocate Michael Moon, may serve to give some idea of Manalive, both the character and the book. Innocent Smith, it is pleaded, behaves throughout all his career of crazy capering upon a plain and per- fectly blameless principle which, though " odd and extravagant in the modern world," is not more so than " any other principle plainly applied in the modern world would be." His principle is this: " He refuses to die while he is still alive. He seeks to remind himself by every electric shock to the intellect that he is still a man alive, walking on two legs about the world. For this reason he fires bullets at his best friends; for this reason he arranges ladders and col- lapsible chimneys to steal his own property; for this reason he goes
iBy G. K. Chesterton. New York: John Lane Co. Pp. 311. 1912.
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plodding round a whole planet to get back to his own home. And for this reason he has been in the habit of taking the woman whom he loved with a permanent loyalty and leaving her about (so to speak) at schools, boarding-houses, and places of business, so that he might recover her again and again with a raid and a romantic elopement" (p. 298).
As there is some obvious method in Smith's craziness, one naturally looks for its controlling idea. The idea is this : " Living in an en- tangled civilization, we have come to think certain things wrong which are not wrong at all. We have come to think outbreak and exuberance, banging and barging, rotting and wrecking, wrong. In themselves they are not merely pardonable, they are unimpeachable. There is nothing wicked about firing off a pistol even at a friend, so long as you do not mean to hit him and know you won't. . . . There is nothing wrong in bashing down a chimney-pot and break- ing through a roof, so long as you are not injuring the life or prop- erty of other men. . . . There is nothing wicked about walking roimd the world and coming back to your own house ; it is no more wicked than walking round the garden and coming back to your own house." And so on. " You associate such acts with blackguardism by a mere snobbish association, as you think there is something vaguely vile about going (or being seen going) into a pawnbroker's or a public-house. You think there is something squalid and com- monplace about such a connexion. You are mistaken." Now it was Smith's peculiar " spiritual power " that he discerned " between cus- tom and creed ". He broke the " conventions ", but kept the " com- mandments". He is like a man found gambling wildly in a gambling-hell, but you find he is only playing for " trouser but- tons ".
But if you ask, " Why does Innocent Smith continue far into his middle age a farcical existence that exposes him to so many false charges? " the answer is " He does it because he really is happy, be- cause he really is hilarious, because he really is a man and alive. He is so young that climbing garden trees, and playing silly practical jokes are still to him what they were once to us all. And if you ask me yet again why he alone among men should be fed with such inexhaustible follies," the answer is, whether you like it or not, " In- nocent is happy because he is innocent. If he can defy the conven- tions it is just because he can keep the commandments, it is just because he does not want to kill, but to excite to life that a pistol is still as exciting to him as it is to a school boy." And so on.
Mr. Chesterton has come to be known as a genius, to whom oddi- ties and whimsicalities are pardonable, balanced as they are by deeper intuitions. Paradoxes abound in Manalive as they do in
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The Ball and the Cross. From the very fact that men disregard the commandments while holding to the conventions — straining at gnats and swallowing camels — he takes occasion to defend the ignor- ing of conventions where commandments are obeyed. To effect this he naturally minimizes the value of the former when set over against the supremacy of the latter. But that happiness is determined by innocence is doubtless his own conviction. " If one could keep as happy as a child or a dog, it would be by being as innocent as a child, or as sinless as a dog" (p. 303).
We can hardly of course suppose that Mr. Chesterton means to despise or condemn all conventions; and it would be superfluous, perhaps ridiculous, for a reviewer to suggest that the violation of, say, the " convention " not to fire off a pistol at a friend, even though " you do not mean to hit him and know you won't," is irrational, to say the least, and therefore not " pardonable ", but decidedly "wrong". Mr. Chesterton, no more than Innocent Smith (Mana- live), means to be taken seriously. Both author and character have set themselves to amuse, perhaps also to confirm a truism, and in both these functions they have succeeded. Needless to say, the book is not only burlesque, grotesque, and funny ; it is also in some places vividly picturesque. Witness the wonderful painting of the freakish wind, at the opening of the story. Not even Dickens's classic de- scription in Martin Chuzzlewitt can equal it. Paradoxes and epi- grams of course start up everywhere. For instance : " As for science and religion, the known and admitted facts are few and plain enough. All that the parsons say is unproved. All that the doctors say is disproved. That's the only difference ..." (p. 146).
Criticisms anb IRotes^
SAINT PEANOIS OP ASSISI. A Biography. By Johannes Jorgensen. Translated from the Danish with the author's sanction, by T. O'Oonor Sloane, Ph.D. New York, London, Bombay, Oalontta: Longmans, Green & Oo. 1912. Pp. xvi-428.
Jorgensen's biography of the Seraphic Saint has already been widely praised as perhaps the best of the eminent Danish convert's numerous descriptive works. As the author himself confesses, it was the altogether new light of mystic asceticism, as it glows in the Catholic Church, which attracted him in his search after noble ideals, and which made him conscious that the highest poetry finds its truest expression in the humble realism of monastic sanctity. This conscious in-breathing of the atmosphere of truth and purity that surrounds the remarkable group of which St. Francis was the centre, gives a freshness and buoyancy to the northern artist, who, captivated by the newness of his theme, throws into its presentation an enthusiasm that reflects the unexpected beauty and marvel aroused within his soul. It is this sense of novelty which characterizes Jor- gensen's treatment of the old theme, pictured in such a variety of forms by artists of the pen as well as of the brush, and which per- mits him to keep the comprehensive viewpoint in his portraiture, often lost by artists who enjoy habitual intimacy with the Franciscan life.
Mr. Jorgensen pictures St. Francis in succession as the church builder, the evangelist, God's singer, and the solitary. The church builder is the youth who had dreamed at Gubbio of God's love for men, and who had then suddenly taken up the task of restoring the churches of S. Damiano, S. Pietro, and the Portiuncula. Then fol- low the journeys in the course of which he gathers his first disciples, writes his forma vitac, and elicits new forms of apostolic sanctity in followers like Brother Giles, Brother Juniper, John the Simple, and St. Clare.
The preaching of St. Francis is what our author styles his sing- ing of God's songs. It is distinct from the " Song of Praise " in gratitude for the wounds of Christ reproduced in his body, or the famous Canticle of the Sun which the Saint composed later, when blindness had overtaken him at San Damiano in the summer of 1225.
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Truly does Mr. Jorgensen seize the power of that preaching which captured by the attraction of its melody the listening birds and the beasts of the forest, no less than the " verse King ", Guglielmo Di- vini, who on hearing the wondrous voice cried out, " Brother, take me away from men and give me to God ! " And so it continued to charm men like the Florentine Dante a century later and others who, like Brother Pacificus, donned in time the grey clothes of the Order. Viri literati, and the banditti of the mountains were equally affected by the singular strains of the simple "poor little man" in the tattered garb. Yet the secret charm of the music was neither in the soft resonance of his voice nor in the persuasive plea of his doctrine, but in the undisguised threat of God's judgments which struck the hearts of men like well-aimed arrows shot by a master hand to pierce them through. " Despise the world, and be con- verted, so as to withstand the coming wrath " — this was his ordinary theme, we are told, and its effect was wondrous quick and lasting.
Those who heard and followed the simple admonition gradually formed the great body of men and women striving after perfection to whom St. Francis found himself obliged to give a rule of life and a permanent constitution for their government as a community. This included the organized mission work which soon brought, as its first fruits, martyrs whose memory gave the essential note of self- sacrifice to the spirit of the Order. These were triumphs to offset trials which threatened to disrupt the spirit of union from within. Dissensions, laxity of discipline, depreciation of the labors of the Saint, marked the tracks of the enemy in a field so rich in promise. The incidents of Gregory of Naples and Matthew of Narni in their attempt to change the rule by holding a chapter general in the ab- sence of the Saint, the memorable conflicts between the Brothers of Penance and the authorities, are chapters that allow us an insight into the sorrows that must have afflicted the heart of the Saint, whose one ideal was harmony and love.
As an offset to the thorns that hedged round about this freshly- planted tree, we have the fairest flowering of sanctity in such Saints as Anthony or Padua and Clare of Assisi.
The characteristic love of poverty in the latter is made the especial theme of beautiful reflections in Mr. Jorgensen's biography. No power on earth could minimize the estimate which she had of this virtue as a means for preserving evangelical sanctity. When Gregory IX, on the occasion of the canonization of St. Francis in 1228, came to Assisi and saw the severity of the life of the daugh- ters of the Saint, he offered to modify the rule, so as to release the nuns from their strict observance. " Holy Father," answered St.
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Clare, " absolve me from my sins, if thou wilt, but never do I wish to be released in any way from following Christ forever." It was a rebuke which the Pope could never forget, for he himself, as Car- dinal Hugolino, had arranged the -forma vivendi given to the Poor Clares by St. Francis.
As to the Rule of St. Clare, the statement of our author (page 130) that " Innocent III gave his approval to this Rule even more formally than he had approved the Brothers' Rule ", though it ap- pears to rest on the authority of Gonzaga and Wadding, is, as Father Paschal Robinson points out in his admirable sketch on the subject {The Rule of St. Clare, pp. 18 and 19), erroneous. The proofs for this are given in detail by Lemmens in Romische Quartal- schrift (XVI, 97).
The fourth part of Mr. Jorgensen's book describes, under the title of " Francis the Hermit ", the literary activity and the home life of St. Francis. It shows forth especially his personal virtues, — his truthfulness, his zeal, his obedience, his spirit of prayer, his evangelic joy, his love of nature, intensified if anjrthing by his blind- ness, and the reception of the Stigmata. Beautifully and touchingly does the author dwell upon the last scenes of the Saint's life, how he writes his Testament to the Brothers, sends his farewell to St. Clare, makes peace between the Bishop of Assisi and the Podesta, and then lets himself be carried down the olive-clad hill to his be- loved Portiuncula, blessing Assisi on the way ; and how, a few days later, he dies, amid the deep stillness and prayer of the Brothers in the little cell. " Mortem cantando suscepit," wrote Celano, — for the larks, his good friends, were twittering their last farewell around the house. Like Magdalen of old weeping over the dead body of her Master, " Brother Jacopa " fell weeping upon the life- less body of St. Francis, and with burning tears coursing down her cheeks, kissed over and over again the wounds in the feet and hands of the dead Saint. It all reads charmingly from first to last.
In the Appendix are gathered the authorities for the biography of the Saint — his own writings, prose and poetry, those of the various groups that cluster around Thomas of Celano, Brother Leo, St. Bonaventure, and the Speculum Perfectionis, the Legenda Antiqua and the Fioretti; besides these, the historical sources include au- thorities outside the Order and modern writers.
All lovers of St. Francis must be deeply grateful for this attrac- tive presentation of the unique figure; as also for the excellent translation of it into English by Dr. Sloane.
CRITICISMS AND NOTES. j^Q
SOCIALISM AS IT IS. By William Walling. New York: The Mac- millan Oo. 1912. Pp. 464.
WHAT IS SOCIALISM? An Exposition and a Oriticism with Special Eeference to the Movement in America and England. By James Boyle, Private Secretary to Governor William McKinley, former Consul of the United States at Liverpool, England. New York: The Shakespeare Press. Pp. 347. 1912.
There must needs be books that discuss Socialism as a philosophy and as a theory, economic and political; nor indeed can Socialism be properly imderstood unless these two distinct, if not entirely separable, aspects be abstracted and analyzed. When all this has been done, however, little more has been accomplished than an ana- tomical dissection of the skeleton, more or less articulated perhaps, of the system. The physiology, the account of the life processes, has been left out, and the vital principle ignored. True it is, of course, that the philosophical tenets underlying and permeating the system constitute its vital principle, its *' form ". On the other hand, those tenets are, to use a subtle distinction of the school, but the " meta- physical form ", which gives the esse rei, only in the abstract. The " physical form " that constitutes and determines the concrete es- sence is all that aggregate of ideas, convictions, beliefs, theories, tendencies, proposals which make the system live, move, act, work, — all that complexus of forces and processes that bind Socialism into the world-movement which it really is. But it is this whole com- plexus, not isolated for abstract discussion, but immanent, vital, ef- fective, urgent within the human movement itself, — this, at least, is living Socialism, the Socialism with which we have to reckon. Of course to understand this movement one must isolate, abstract, its principles, theories, programs, proposals; but one must remember that all these dwell together and are actually interfused, inextricably interblended in the real movement.
It is this sense of actuality, of objective real vitality that gives to Mr. Walling' s work an almost unique place in the superabounding literature of Socialism. The book is, as its subtitle indicates, " a survey of the world-wide revolutionary movement ". A " survey ", indeed, yet something more. Not over, but beneath the surface, from within not from without the current, does the vision run. Socialism is seen first in its formative stage, its being shaped by its present envirorunent — which is more and more tending from indi- vidual to collective capitalism, " State Socialism ". Next, the in- ternal processes, the political struggles within the movement, are
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brought to the surface, the internal dissensions and factions not being minimized in the interest of a theoretically unified outlook. Lastly, the reaction of Socialism on its environment, its essentially revolutionary outcome, is presented. These are the fundamental lines on which the work is built. Needless to say, Mr. Walling, an intensely convinced Socialist himself, is an advocate, not merely a chronicler or narrator. At the same time he has produced a work which neither friend nor foe should pass by unconsidered. It is the priest's business, his duty, to understand, understand not simply Socialistic party programs, Socialistic abstractions, definitions, views. To be sure, all these are to be included. But Socialism in the souls and the lives of human beings. Socialism in action, is that which he must consciously realize whilst he withstands, or rather in order that he may withstand and oppose its oncoming. Though therefore he can and must differ from Mr. Walling in his whole attitude toward Socialism, he none the less may have something to learn from his opponent. Fas est et ab hoste docere.
After reading Mr. Walling' s survey of the Socialist movement, it will be well to take up Mr. Boyle's answer to What is Socialism? The scope of his answer is determined by the subtitle, " Exposition and Criticism ". The former term covers the larger part of the treatment. The general significance of Socialism, the word, the thing, and the history of the movement in ancient days, and the var- ious stages and phases of its modern development, indicate the out- lines of some three hundred of the book's pages. Socialism in America and Great Britain receives principal consideration, its status in continental Europe being only briefly sketched. The criti- cism, though occupying but comparatively few pages, is qualita- tively good — just and objective. The impracticability of Socialism both in its establishment and its administration, its contrariety to himian nature, the enslavement of the individual which it would en- tail,— these and other such, while not novel, points of argument are clearly set forth and well illustrated. They are not likely to make much impression on the mind of the Socialist, for Socialism is prim- arily an emotional not a logical system, and only slightly pervious to argumentation. However, Mr. Boyle has written a book which the student of the world-wide movement should not fail to peruse. The concluding paragraph may here be quoted as illustrating the author's general temper of mind : " Socialism has its good side, al- though with characteristic effrontery it appropriates to itself as its peculiar possession attributes and forces which have been in benefi- cent operation through the long centuries by men who never heard
CRITICISMS AND NOTES. 24.1
of Socialism, and by agencies which have always had the scorn and even hatred of the greatest of Socialists from Marx and Engels to Bax and Bebel. Nevertheless, Socialism, extravagant and imprac- ticable though it be, has played a great part and is entitled to its share of credit in the ever onward and upward movement, limited to no class, no creed, no nationality, no theory of government or eco- nomics, for the amelioration of the lot of the sons of toil, the righting of wrong wherever found, and the uplifting of the race to higher places of life in all its aspects. But, as a universal condition of society, as a panacea for present evils, as the hope of the prole- tariat. Socialism in its complete conception is an absolute and a hid- eous impossibility " (p. 332). It is hardly necessary to subjoin that the author in the foregoing assignment of credit to Socialism for its " uplifting " beneficence, has generously omitted to attribute that in- fluence not to Socialism as such, but to the humanity of Socialists, which is wiser and better than their creed.
THE OOWAED. By Kobert Hugh Benson, author of " The Oonvention- alists ", " None other Gods ", " The Sentimentalists", etc. St, Lonis : B. Herder; London : Hutchinson & Go. 1912. Pp. 392.
Monsignor Benson continues to follow his manifest vocation — the presentation, namely, of Catholic truth to a non-Catholic public under the guise of the interesting stories which he is an adept in telling. He has the gift of writing novels that are sufficiently in the fashionable manner to attract the general reader, who, by the time he has finished one of the books, will have been not only enter- tained in a perfectly innocent manner, but also enlightened and instructed as to the true view to be taken of some of the problems of modem life. Also, whether he recognize it or not — and he can scarcely fail to do so — the attentive reader will have learnt that Catholic doctrine and practice offer a solution to many questions of which the insistence, we may safely say, is growing amongst thoughtful people. Sometimes, indeed, and particularly in one or two of his more recent novels, we have asked ourselves whether Mgr. Benson has been quite satisfying, and the speed at which he produces his books is such that the question is asked whether he is doing as good work as he can. Remembering his historical novels, we are tempted to wish for more of the same kind. But an author must follow his bent and inclinations, and Mgr. Benson doubtless feels he must strike while the iron is hot, or, to vary the metaphor, say what is in him when he feels moved to utterance.
The Coward is altogether an entertaining book, notwithstanding that it ends with the note of sadness. The hero, ii we may apply
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that term to Valentine Medd, is a member of an old Commoner family, in whose veins, as is sometimes the case with Commoners, flows much bluer blood than many titled families can boast of. He can trace his ancestry to times before the Norman Conquest. Mgr. Benson admirably describes the peculiar and unique atmosphere in which the children of such a family in England are brought up, and in doing so, shows a thorough appreciation of the character en- gendered by generations of such up-bringing. Of the stately Caro- line house in which the Medds lived, and of the family history we read :
" Altogether it is a tremendous place, utterly complete in itself, with an immemorial air about it; the great oaks of the park seem, and indeed are, nouveaiix riches, besides its splendid and silent aristocracy; for Medhurst has stood here, built and inhabited by Medds, pulled down and rebuilt by Medds again and again, centuries before these oaks were acorns. For, as Heralds' College knows very well, though the Medds never speak of it, it is reasonably probable that a Medd lived here — after what fashion archaeological historians only can relate — long before Saxon blood became tainted and debased by Nor- man.
" It is remarkable that they have never become peers (a baronetcy has always, of course, been out of the question) ; but the serious fact seems to be that they have consistently refused this honor. It is not likely that they would have accepted such a thing from the upstart Conqueror ; and after such a refusal as this, any later acceptance was of course impossible. In Henry VIIFs reign they remained faithful to the old re- ligion, and consequently in Elizabeth's reign were one of the few families in whose house that sovereign did not sleep at least one night of her existence; in fact they went abroad at that time and produced a priest or two, prudently handing over their property to a Protestant second cousin, whose heir, very honorably, handed it back when Charles I came to the throne. And then, when danger seemed more or less over, Austin Medd, about the time of the Gates Plot, in which he seems to have believed, solemnly changed his religion with as much dignity as that with which his grandfather had maintained it on a cer- tain famous occasion which it would be irrelevant to describe. "Now when a Medd has done a thing, deliberately and strongly, it naturally becomes impious for later Medds to question the propriety of his action ; and from thenceforth two or three traditions — moral heirlooms, so to speak — have been handed down at Medhurst. The objective reality of the Gates
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Plot, the essential disloyalty of Catholicism, the sacrosanctity of the National Church as a constitutional fact — these things are not to be doubted by any who bears legitimately the name of Medd" (pp. 4, 5).
Of two brothers, Austin, the elder, is of normal type, while Val- entine, the younger, is afflicted with a nervous temperament which, it turns out in the end, makes him physically, at least, a coward. Early in the tale we are introducted to a priest. Father Maple, a great pianist, who, before the story is done, has a great deal to do with Valentine. Austin and his younger brother do not get on well together, and there is a good deal of unpleasant bickering between them.
Val's unfortunate disposition has already made itself manifest at school. He had been openly called a "funk" at football, and had once " avoided a fight with extreme dignity and self-restraint ". He is introduced to us during a vacation at home, having just had a fall off his horse, with the result that he finished his ride in real terror, and was moved by this fact to a self-analysis which left him with the uncomfortable feeling that he really was a coward. This, of course, in such a family, would be simply an unpardonable sin.
Soon after this there comes an invitation to Switzerland. There Valentine and his brother are initiated into the delights and perils of mountain-climbing, about which Father Benson discourses elo- quently. Val is really very much afraid of this sport. His fear leads him first to re- act against it by rashness ; then, at a really bad jump which becomes necessary in the ascent of Matterhorn, his nerves give way entirely, and he collapses in the most pitiful man- ner. Later on he puts the seal on his disgrace by avoiding, at the last moment, a duel in Rome with a Roman prince who had insulted his lady-love ; and on this occasion his brother has to take his place, and is wounded. The disgrace is real, and this time final, and poor Val (now a Cambridge undergraduate) is practically ostracized by his family, and jilted by his sweetheart into the bargain.
The real motive of the story comes in when, in his despair, poor Val, who is tempted to disbelieve alike in God and man, and has found little comfort from placing his confidence in a materialistic pseudo-scientist, opens his mind at last to Father Maple. This is Monsignor Benson's opportunity, well prepared for by all that has preceded, for introducing to his readers the methods of a Catholic priest in ministering " to a mind diseased ". They were having tea in the priest's garden. After much "shying" on the part of the boy, who has been more than half won already by Father Maple's wonderful playing on the pianoforte, the good priest gains his Confidence at
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last, and Val unburdens his misery. He had resolved on suicide shortly before, but had drawn back at the last minute — afraid. This is what Father Maple says, after he has patiently listened to Val's woeful tale:
" The first point is. Are you a coward really? To that I say, Yes and No. It depends entirely upon what you mean by the word. If it is to be a coward to have a highly strung nervous system and an imagination, and further, in moment of danger to be overwhelmed by this imagination, so that you do the weak thing instead of the strong thing, against your real will, so to speak, then — Yes. But if you mean by the word coward what I mean by it — a man with a lax will who intends to put his own physical safety first, who calculates on what will save him pain or death and acts on that calculation, then certainly you are not one. It's purely a question of words. Do you see? . . . " Now it seems to me that what is the matter with you is the same thing that's the matter with every decent person — only in rather a vivid form. You've got violent temptations, and you yield to them. But you don't will to yield to them. There's the best part of you fighting all the time. That's entirely a dif- ferent case from the man who has what we Catholics call * malice ' — the man who plans temptations and calculates oa them and means to yield to them. You've got a weak will, let us say, a vivid imagination, and a good heart. . . . (Don't inter- rupt. I'm not whitewashing you. ... I'm going to say some 'more unpleasant things presently.) . . .
" Well ... a really brave man doesn't allow himself to be dominated by his imagination — a really brave man — the kind of man who gets the V. C. His will rules him; or, rather, he rules himself through his will. He may be terribly fright- ened in his imagination all the while ; and the more frightened his imagination is, the braver he is, if he dominates it. Mere physical courage — the absence of feau: — simply is not worth calling bravery. It's the bravery of the tiger, not the moral bravery of the Man.
" And you aren't a brave man — in that sense. Nor are you a coward in the real sense either. You're just ordinary. And what we've got to see is how you're to get your will upper- most.
" The first thing you've got to do is to understand yourself — to see that you've got those two things pulling at you — imagina- tion and will. And the second thing you've got to do is to try to live by your will, and not by your imagination — in quite
CRITICISMS AND NOTES. 2Ai,
small things I mean. Muscles become strong by doing small things — using small dumb-bells — over and over again; not by using huge dumb-bells once or twice. And the way the will becomes strong is the same — doing small things you've made up your mind to do, however much you don't want to do them at the time — I mean really small things — getting up in the morning, going to bed. . . . You simply can't lift big dumb- bells merely by wanting to. And I don't suppose that it was simply within your power to have done those other things you've told me of. (By the way, we Catholics believe, you know, that to fight a duel and to commit suicide are extremely wrong : they're what we call mortal sins. . . . However, that's not the point now. You didn't refrain from doing them be- cause you thought them wrong, obviously. We're talking about courage — the courage you hadn't got.)
"Now this sounds rather dreary advice, I expect. But you know we can't change the whole of our character all at once. To say that by willing it we can become strong, or ... or good, all in a moment, is simply not true. It's as untrue as what you tell me that Professor said — that we can't change at all. That's a black lie, by the way. It's the kind of thing these modern people say : it saves them a lot of trouble, you see. We can change, slowly and steadily, if we set our will to it."
He paused. Val was sitting perfectly still now, listening. Two or three times during the priest's little speech he had moved as if to interrupt; but the other had stopped him by a word or gesture. And the boy sat still, his white hat in his hands.
" Well, that's my diagnosis," said the priest, smiling. " And that's my advice. Begin to exercise your will. Make a rule of life (as we Catholics say) by which you live — a rule about how you spend the day. And keep it ; and go on keeping it. Don't dwell on what you would do if such and such a thing hap- pened— as to whether you'd be brave or not. That's simply fatal; because it's encouraging and exciting the imagination. On the contrary, starve the imagination and feed the will. It's for the want of that, in these days of nervous systems and rush and excitement, that so many people break down. ..."
"And . . . and about religion?" asked Val shyly.
The priest waved his hands.
" Well," he said, " you know what my religion is. At least, you almost certainly don't. And, naturally, I'm quite con- vinced that mine is true. But that's not to the point now. If you really want to know, you can come and talk some other time. With regard to religion, I would only say to you now,
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Practise your own : do, in the way of prayers and so on, all that you conscientiously can. . . . Yes, make a rule about that too, and stick to it. Make it a part of your rule, in fact. If you decide to say your prayers every day, say them, whatever you feel like. Don't drop them suddenly one morning just because you don't feel religious. That's fatal. It's letting your imagination dominate your will. And that's exactly what you want to avoid."
Poor Val makes up his mind to follow the priest's advice. He has hoped and prayed that some day he may have an opportunity of doing a brave act in some great danger — something that he can throw himself into without having time to think ; something from which, once he has acted, there can be no withdrawal. The oppor- tunity comes. He is left at home in charge of the house. A fire occurs, and he rushes to clear the muniment room of its family treas- ures. There he is caught by the flames. A terrible scene occurs, for he loses all control of himself, and raves madly and incoher- ently at the barred windows till the floor falls, and he with it. This dreadful scene deepens the opinion of his family that, all through, he was a hopeless coward. Father Maple takes another view. Physically, he was afraid; morally, he showed great courage. The priest tries to persuade Val's mother that this was so, but she can- not understand. The story conveys a lesson of charity — that one must not always judge by external actions, but look deeper, into the mind and soul, where we may discover unthought-of virtues.
Here and there in his book Mgr. Benson gives us amusing de- scriptions of highly respectable Anglicanism, and delivers a well- deserved hit at the behavior of English tourists in Roman churches. The following passage is a delightfully real picture of the way in which English people of the better class " do " Rome:
" And of real Rome, of course, they had seen nothing at all. Figures had moved before them — the insolent light-blue cloaks of soldiers who resembled French tram-conductors; seedy-looking priests who went hurriedly and softly with down- cast eyes; countrymen — real ones, not the sham ones of the Trinita — asleep in little canopied carts that roared over the cobblestones; endless companies of handsomely bearded bour- geois clerks and tradesmen, pacing slowly up and down the Corso and eyeing brutally every female figure in range. They had seen crumbling ruins against the sky ; little churches, rather dingy, looking squeezed and asleep, between new white houses with balconies and uncountable windows; and they had under- stood absolutely less than nothing (since they had miscon-
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ceived the whole) of all that their eyes and ears had taken in. They had believed themselves, for example, to be by nature on the side of the Government and the new hotels and the trams and the clean white squares ; they had not understood that that which they dismissed as ecclesiasticism and intransigeance was the only element with which they had anything in common, and that this, and this only, had developed their aristocracy in the past as well as being its only hope for the future. They had not understood that all this, in terms of Italy, was a translation of their own instincts and circumstances at home."
Finally, we cannot resist the temptation to quote one more passage, which shows that at least one educated English gentleman, the author himself, has learnt the inner meaning of the Eternal City. Valentine and his friends were standing on the Pincian Hill :
" What they saw from that place was certainly remarkable and beautiful, indeed ' very wonderful,' as Austin had most correctly observed. They stood on the very edge of a terraced precipice, their hands resting on a balustrade, looking out over the whole of medieval Rome bathed in a dusty glory of blue and gold ; the roofs, broken here and there by domes and spires, stretched completely round the half -circle to right and left, in a kind of flat amphitheatre of which the arena, crawling with cabs and pedestrians, was the Piazza del Popolo, where Luther walked after saying mass in the church on the right. All this was lovely enough — the smoke went up straight, delicate as lawn against the glorious evening sky; c)rpresses rose, tall and sombre, beneath them, and barred the sky far away like blots of black against an open furnace-door ; and sounds came up here, mellow and gentle^ — the crack of whips, bells, cries, the roll of wheels, across the cobbles of the Piazza. But that to which both eye and thought returned again and again was the vast bell of purple shadow, lit with rose, that dominated the whole, straight in front, and is called the dome of St. Peter's. It rested there, like a flower descending from heaven, and at this very instant the sun, hidden behind it, shone through the win- dows, clean through from side to side, making it as unsub- stantial as a shell of foam. It hung there, itself the symbol of a- benediction, as if held by an invisible thread from the very throne of God, supported from below, it seemed, by earthly buildings that had sprung up to meet it, and now pushed and jostled that they might rest beneath its shadow. Beyond, again, fine as lace work, trees stood up, minute and .delicate and dis-
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tant, like ragged feathers seen against firelight. Only, this fire- light deepened to rose and crimson as they looked, filled the whole sky with flame, satisfying the eye as water a thirsty throat.
" This then was what they saw. They would be able to de- scribe all this later, and even, after consulting Baedeker, to name the domes and towers that helped to make up the whole — the white dome of the Jewish synagogue, for instance, that mocked and caricatured the gentle giant beyond, like a street- boy imitating a king. They would be able to wave their hands, for lack of description. . . . They would be able to rave vaguely about Italy and its colors. Austin would be able to draw striking contrasts between modern Rome and ancient Athens (which he had conscientiously visited in the company of Eton masters two years ago ) . And they both would be able to show that they belonged to the elect company of the initiates, in that they would say that what impressed them far more than St. Peter's or St. John Lateran was the view of Rome at sunset from the Pincian.
"Now of course there is a great deal more to see from the Pincian at sunset than what has been set down here. It is the history of the human race, and the love of God, and the story of how One " came to His own and His own received Him not," and the significance of the City of the World, and the conjunction of small human affairs with Eternity, and their reconciliation with it through the airy shell of foam which, as a matter of realistic fact, consists of uncountable tons of masonry — in fact, the reconciliation of all paradoxes, and the solution of all doubts, and the incarnation of all mysteries, and the final complete satisfaction of the Creator with the creature and of the creature with the Creator — all these things, with their correlatives, find voice and shape and color in the view of Rome from the Pincian at sunset. For here, where the watchers stand, is modern Italy, gross, fleshly, complacent, and blind. There are white marble busts here, of bearded men and decadent poets, and wholly unimportant celebrities, standing in rows beneath the ilexes like self-conscious philosophers; and chattering crowds surge to and fro ; and men eye women, and women, with their noses in the air, lean back in rather shabby carriages and pretend not to see the men; and the seminar- ians go by, swift processions of boys, walking rapidly, as troops on alien ground, with the sleeves of their sopranos flying behind them, intent on getting back to their seminaries before Ave
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Maria rings; and belated children scream and laugh— thin- legged, frilled children, with peevish eyes, who call one another Ercole and Louise and Tito and Elena; and bourgeois fami- lies in silk and broadcloth, with the eyes of Augustus and Poppaea and the souls of dirty shrimps, pace solemnly about, arm in arm, and believe themselves fashionable and enlight- ened and modern. All these things and persons are here, and it is from this world and from this standpoint that one looks back and forward through the centuries — back to the roots that crept along the Catacombs, that pushed up stems in the little old churches with white marble choirs, and that blossomed at last into that astounding, full-orbed flower that hangs there, full of gold and blue and orange and sunlight; and on, from that flower to the seed it is shedding in every land, and to the Forest of the Future. . . ."
Here we must take leave of Mgr. Benson and his latest novel, which, if somewhat slight in structure, yet well repays perusal, and, we may hope, will carry more than one lesson home to the minds of those it is designed to reach.
THE MIEEOE OP OXPOED. By 0. B. Dawson, S.J., M.A. (Exeter Col- lege). With forty illustrations and a map. London and Edinburgh: Sands & Co.; St. Louis, Mo.: B. Herder. 1912. Pp. 265.
There are proportionately fewer Catholic students at Oxford, at the present time, than there are at any one of our leading American non- Catholic imiversities, such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn- sylvania, Chicago, Berkeley. Nevertheless there is a decidedly Catholic influence being exercised at Oxford by the gradual return of the Religious Orders, whose members act as licensed masters for undergraduate students. Among the houses of study opened by them are those of Parker's Hall, belonging to the Benedictines of Ampleforth Abbey, and Pope's Hall, established by the Jesuits, who also have built St. Aloysius's Church, a beautiful edifice, in which since 1875 upwards of a thousand converts have been recon- ciled to the Catholic Church; and a new Jesuit church, dedicated to SS. Edmund and Frideswide, has been opened at Oxford. The Capuchin Fathers also have founded a house of studies for stu- dents of their Order, although the institution still lacks the acad- emical authorization required for the reception of undergraduate students of the University. The University Catholic Board also provides for regular religious services by a priest for the general body of Catholic students, which does not exceed a hundred yet.
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Thus Oxford UBiversity is being reanimated with something of its ancient vitality, after nearly four centuries of delirium, during which it seems to have lost its true identity, retaining only the beau- tiful forms created by its Catholic founders. The Reformers, so- called, did their best to eliminate every vestige of the ancient faith imprinted upon the brow of the venerable mistress of learning. But the fashion of every cloister and the face of the old archways be- trayed the ancient habits of her interior, and confronted the searcher after truth in its halls with countless inconsistencies between the affirmation of modern teachers within and the indelible testimony of once taught truth written upon the noble walls.
What the Reformers proclaimed and pretended has been repeated by the historians of the guide-book, and the New World visitor to the ancient sites is informed about the past of Oxford in lines written to harmonize with the prejudices created by Protestant tradition. " Wherever questions arise regarding the religious storm which burst over the University in the sixteenth century, statements are made, and inferences drawn, which in the light of present knowledge can no longer be sustained." To counteract this misrepresentation is the author's chief reason for publishing his book.
The sources from which the present account of Oxford Univer- sity is drawn, are uniformly authentic, and Father Dawson has been helped not only by the widely-known literature on the subject, but likewise by the critical researches of the Oxford Historical Society. As a result he constructs a thoroughly reliable record of the origin, development, religious and scientific activity of the old foundations, together with the eliminations, modifications, changes, and additions made since the ancient seat of learning was wrested from Catholic control. There is a history of each of the twenty-one Colleges and Halls, a brief sketch of the religious Orders whose members were instrumental in developing the spirit of philosophical and theologi- cal teaching to a degree which made the name of Oxford synony- mous with all that is implied in the highest authority of human learning.
To avoid misconception, we should add that the volume is not in the least polemical, nor even didactic; it simply records facts, but facts that carry with them an immense evidence of the power of Catholic teaching and organization. The numerous illustrations give a distinction to the volume which increases its practical utility as a guide through Oxford or a reference book to its history.
CRITICISMS AND NOTES. 2; I
BREVIAKIUM EOMANUM ex Decreto SS. Ooncilii Tridentini etc. Editio septima post alteram typicam continens Novum Psalterimn. Qnattuor partes. Katisbonae, Komae, Neo-Eboraci et Oincinnati: Smnpt. et typis Friderici Pnstet. 1912.
In view of the Papal Constitution Divino afflatu, which ordains a different arrangement in the daily recitation of the Divine Office from that to which priests of the Latin rite have heretofore been ac- customed, it is a pleasure to have a new style Breviary. One of the best editions of the new Office book is being supplied by Fr. Pustet of Ratisbon, who takes first rank among the liturgical printers in Europe, not only on account of the excellent work produced by him in the past, but also by reason of the generosity with which the old head of the firm, Chevalier Pustet, undertook the expense of the various Medicean editions, at the time when Leo XIII, after reor- ganizing the liturgical services, could find no other European pub- lisher who was willing to run the financial risk involved in repro- ducing the more expensive books used only in exceptional choir services.
The Breviary before us, in flexible binding, about seven by four inches, of light weight, printed on toned paper, is in form and typography an ideal " priest's prayer book ". It is of course under- stood that when one speaks of an ideal Breviary, it is only in a relative sense. Some readers require large type; others want the volume in the smallest possible format, so as to make of it a real vest-pocket edition; and there are many other preferences due to the habits or tastes of the individual.
Apart from the excellences of form which we have mentioned, little is to be said about the volumes, as the matter is uniformly the same in all editions and placed as conveniently as experience and the requirements allow. We must note, however, since it may cause some annoyance to those who prefer this edition on other grounds, the faulty reference to the paging in the " Commune Sanctorum " ; thus, throughout we have the reference of the Te Deum to page 13, instead of page 7 ; the Antiphons at Lauds refer to Psalms on page 14 instead of 28. There are given also the old Votive Offices, al- though they with their rubrics have been abolished by the new rules, and are useless except as archeological information needlessly increas- ing the bulk of the book. Evidently the entire portion printed in bracketed numbers, that is, the " Commune Sanctorum " and the " Officia Propria pro aliquibus locis ", wherever these refer to the Ordinariinn, needs to be revised to make the references correct. In some instances this error of reference extends to the Proper, as in the Office of St. Elizabeth (8 July). The rubric ** et per horas " under Lauds should also be eliminated.
252 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
LIFE AND TIMES OF THE FATBIAEOHS, ABEAHAM, ISAAC, AND JAOOB. Being a supplement to "The Land and the Book". By William Hamid Thompson, M.D., LL.D. Illustrated. Funk & Wagnalls Oo. 1912. Pp. 285.
The fifteen chapters of this handsomely printed little volume are lectures or talks on Biblical topics which group themselves in a somewhat desultory fashion within the period of the patriarchs. The writer, who traveled with his father, the author of the well- known The Land and the Book, fills in certain recesses of the latter work by descriptions of Scriptural personages, places, and charac- teristics of patriarchal life, interspersed with reminiscences and ex- pressions of opinion which offer instructive and interesting reading. In the matter of criticism, though the book does not aim at scien- tific form, the author is wholly conservative.
OOMPENDIUM LITUEGIAE SAOEAE, jnxta Eltum Eomannm in Missae celebratione et Officii recitatione. Auctore Jos. Aertnys, O.SS.E., Theologiae Moralis et S. Liturgiae Professore emerito. Editio septima Oonstitntioni novissimae Pii PP. X ac recentissimis S.E.O. Decretis acoommodata. Tomaci: Libreria Oasterman (Galopiae: Firma M. Alberts). 1912. Pp. 180.
The clergy everywhere are familiar with the title of the venerable Father Aertnys' summary of liturgical rules and approved prac- tices, for the book has been before the public for many years and had been republished in six editions before the promulgation, last November, of the Pontifical Constitution Divino afflatu. The pres- ent edition of the Compendium incorporates the changes made neces- sary by this document and thus becomes practically a new work. It may be well to recall here that the author's purpose is to explain briefly the rites of the Mass and of the general rubrics of the Mis- sal, as well as the method of reciting the Breviary. It thus inter- prets the offices of the ecclesiastical year and makes clear their mutual relations. The method of exposition, to which the typo- graphical arrangement also tends, makes the manual particularly useful for classes in the final year of preparation for sacred orders.
Xtterar^ Cbat
The Histoire de I'Inquisition en France by T. de Cauzons, the second volume of which has just been issued by the publishers of the Nouvelle Bibliotheque Historique, has been censured by the S. Congregation of the Index. The con- demnation is dated 6 May of the present year, and specifically refers to the first volume issued in 1909. We printed an exhaustive and objective criticism of the book at the time, pointing out the attitude of the author. That attitude, whilst it was in no wise hostile to the disciplinary institutions, much less to the faith of the Catholic Church, was one of occasional strong censure of the churchmen who represented the Inquisition during the period of its greatest severity. This, we assume, is the chief reason for placing the book on the Index, albeit the S. Congregation does not assign any specific reasons in such cases, unless they are asked for by the author; for it is to be under- stood that the grounds of censure become patent when once indicated as contained either in the spirit or statements of the work.
The second volume, although it is not mentioned in the Index censure, since its appearance is simultaneous with the Decree, naturally shares in the censure of the Introductory History which forms the subject of volume one. In the second volume the author deals with the personnel, procedure, penalties and their execution, adopted under the authority of the Inquisition. A third and final volume was announced, to treat of the Inquisition within the borders of France. The student of history who abstracts from any opinion expressed by the author, and who takes the facts collated by him in the purely objective manner of the historian, must recognize the wide range of learning shown in the work. We trust the author may so modify his statements in a future edition as to divest his erudition of any taint of exaggerated conclusions, which must do harm to the uncritical reader and which offer weapons to the malignant critics against the legitimate and salutary discipline of the Church of Christ.
Professor Singenberger has published an English translation of Battlogg's Catechism of Liturgy. It will prove a useful adjunct in the work of our church choirs, inasmuch as it explains the Latin terms of the chant and of the rubrics used in divine services. The Catechism is perhaps a little too wordy, considering that the English tongue expresses thought more directly, if not more forcibly, than German or Italian or French. A page or so at the end of the volume by way of a brief epitome of definitions for quick refer- ence would increase the usefulness of the brochure.
New and interesting issues in the Octavo Edition of Liturgical Catholic Church Music published by Schirmer, of New York (Boston: Boston Music Co.) are: Mass in A, by J. Rheinberger, Op. 126, which is edited and re- vised by N. A. Montani, and can be sung by soprano and alto (with tenor and bass ad lib.) or by tenor and bass (singing the parts of soprano and alto) ; Mass in G in honor of Blessed Jeanne d'Arc, for four-part chorus (S.T.B.B.), by Pietro A. Yon; a Tantum Ergo (S.A.T.B.) in A minor, by G. J. S. White; a " Recordare, Virgo Mater Dei" by Abel A. Gabert, in- structor in ecclesiastical music at the Catholic University, Washington (for tenor and bass or soprano and mezzo soprano) ; and, in Schirmer's Collection of Masses and Vespers, the Missa " Orbis Factor " for unison chorus with organ, by Nicola A. Montani. The principal theme of this Mass (from which it derives its title) is taken from the melody of the Kyrie " Orbis Factor " of the Vatican Edition. It is so arranged that it can be sung by a choir either of boys or of men, or of both combined, the division of the choir into two sections providing a pleasing tonal variety in a unison melody which
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is melodic and simple, while the organ supports effectively by a sufficiently easy accompaniment.
August is not a time when the general reader looks around for books on philosophy. Even the devotee of the queenly wisdom remits something of his perfervidity during the dog-day season. However, at least the professional student has one eye open toward the approaching school term and takes enough actual interest in passing events in his line to keep in touch with coming studies. Several highly important works have recently appeared, men- tion of which should here and now be made in anticipation of more detailed description reserved for September.
First and above all there is an Introductory Philosophy, by Charles A. Dubray, S.M., Ph.D., professor at the Marist College, Washington, D. C. It is a text-book intended for use in colleges and high-schools, as well as in private instruction. It is not the highest praise to say that it stands easily in the first place amongst the books of its class. It is more just to add that absolutely, and not comparatively, it is a very excellent production, and that it were easier to understate than to exaggerate its merits. This will be shown in the next number of the Review. Suffice it here to recommend it in the strongest possible terms to those who are interested in the study or teaching of philosophy. (New York: Longmans, Green, & Co.)
Next there is The Science of Logic, in two large stately volumes, by Dr. Coffey, professor at Maynooth. The author is well known through his pre- vious contributions to philosophy — translations, namely, of De Wulf's History of Medieval Philosophy, and Scholasticism, Old and New. Disciple as he is of the Louvain school, he is endeavoring to do for English readers what Professor (now Cardinal) Mercier and his colaborers have done for the French, i. e. furnish them with thorough studies on the several parts of the philosophical system. He has certainly laid a solid foundation in the present two volumes, and professors and advanced students will applaud and profit by his undertaking. (Longmans, Green, & Co.)
A third notable contribution to philosophy is Present Philosophical Ten- dencies, by Ralph Perry, Ph. D., assistant professor of Philosophy at Harvard. As the sub-title indicates, it is a critical survey of Naturalism, Idealism, Prag- matism, and Realism. It contains also a synopsis of the philosophy of the late William James. Dr. Perry is a realist. His criticism of the opposite systems is frank and discriminating. (Longmans, Green, & Co.)
A translation of Rosmini's Theodicy has recently been issued by Longmans in three neat volumes. The work is a series of essays setting forth manifold aspects of God's providence. It is timely as well as solid. The translator has modestly omitted his name, but he has done his work well.
The translation of Dr. Stockl's well-known History of Philosophy by Fr. T. A. Finlay, S.J., now appears in one goodly volume, having previously been issued in two sections. The book covers the pre-scholastic and the Scholastic period. The second volume, to comprise modern philosophy, is in prepara- tion. The value of the book is too well established to need any commendation here. The translation is worthy of the text. (Longmans, Green, & Co.)
From Epicurus to Christ, a widely read book, by the President of Bowdoin College, Dr. De Witt Hyde, has recently been reissued under a new title and one that is more descriptive of the scope of the work. The Epicurean, the Stoic, the Platonic, and the Aristotelian conceptions of life are set over against the Christian spirit of love. The book is readable and stimulating. (The Macmillan Co.).
BOOKS RECEIVED. 255
The Learning Process, by Stephen S. Colvin, Ph.D., professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois, is a detailed psychological analysis of the funda- mental conceptions and facts relative to the process of learning and its application, especially in the elementary and the secondary school. The mature mind and practical conduct are also considered. (The Macmillan Co.).
Those who are interested in the Negro problem will find some of its aspects ably treated in a recent number of the Columbia " Studies in Economics " (124), entitled The Negro at Work in New York City, by George Haynes, Ph.D. Other issues in the same series are — British Radicalism, lygi-iygy ; A Comparative Study of the Law of Corporations (the legal protection of creditors and shareholders is principally considered) ; Provincial and Local Taxation in Canada (a description of the tax systems of the Canadian Prov- inces and their practical working) ; The Spirit of Chinese Philanthropy, by Yu-Yue Tsu, Ph.D. The last is a study in mutual aid that enlarges one's view of Chinese social conditions and makes one think much more kindly of the manifold forms of beneficence at work amongst his antipodal brethren. (Longmans, Green, & Co.)
Books TRecefveb.
BIBLICAL.
Christ's Teaching Concerning Divorce in the New Testament. An Exegetical Study. By the Rev. Francis E. Gigot, D.D., Professor of Sacred Scripture in St. Joseph's Seminary, Yonkers, N. Y., and Author of Several Works Introductory to the Study of the Holy Scriptures. New York, Cin- cinnati, Chicago: Benziger Bros. 1912. Pp. 282. Price, $1.50 net.
The Ezra- Apocalypse. Being Chapters 3-14 of the Book commonly known as 4 Ezra (or II Esdras) translated from a critically revised Text, with Critical Introductions, Notes and Explanation,s ; with a General Introduction to the Apocalypse, and an Appendix containing the Latin Text by G. H. Box, M.A., formerly Scholar of St. John's College, Oxford ; Lecturer in Rabbinical Hebrew, King's College, London ; together with a Prefatory Note by W. Sanday, D.D., LL.D., Litt.D., Lady Margaret Professor and Canon of Christ Church, Oxford ; Fellow of the British Academy. London : Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons. 1912. Pp. i4-lxxvii-387. Price, los. td. net.
Where we got the Bible. A Catholic Contribution to the Tercentenary Celebrations. By the Rev. Father Graham, M.A., Motherwell, sometime Parish Minister. St. Louis, Mo. : B. Herder ; Edinburgh and London : Sands and Co. Pp. 147. Price, $0.15.
The Scholastic View of Biblical Inspiration. By Hugh Pope, O.P., S.T.M., Doctor of S. Scripture, Prof. Collegio Angelico, Rome. Piccardo Garroni. 191 2. Pp. 52.
THEOLOGICAL AND DEVOTIONAL.
Geist und Feuer. Pfingstgedanken. Von Dr. Ottokar Prohaszka, Bischof von Stuhlweissenburg. Ins Deutsche iibertragen von Baronin Rosa von den Wense. Kempten und Miinchen : Jos. Kosel. 1912. Seiten viii und 152. Preis : gebunden in Leinwd., M. 1.20 ; in weichem, biegsamen Leder, M. 2.20.
Decreta Synodi Dioecesanae Kansanopolitanae Secundae die ix mensis Aprilis 1912 in Ecclesia Cathedrali Kansanopoli habitae ab Illmo ac Revmo Joanne Josepho Hogan, D.D., Episcopo Kansanopolitano, et ab Illmo ac Revmo Thoma Francisco Lillis, D.D., Episcopo Coadjutore. Atchison, Kansas: Abbey Student Press, St. Benedict's College. 1912. Pp. xxiii-121.
256 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
Sancti BENEDrcTi Regula Monachorum. Editionem Critico-Practicam ad- ornavit D. Cuthbertus Butler, Abbas Monasterii S. Gregorii M. de Downside. Friburgi Brisgov. ; B. Herder: St. Louis, Mo. 1912. Pp. 211. Pr. $1.10.
Praedicate Evangelium. Anleitung fur die Kanzel modemer Anforderung entsprechend mit einem Anhang von Predigtskizzen. Von Kurt Udeis. Zweite Auflage. Regensburg, Rom, New York und Cinicinnati : Fr. Pustet & Co. 1912. Seiten 213. Preis, $0.75.
Religion, Christentum, Kirche. Eine Apologetik fur wissenschaftlich Gebildete. Unter Mitarbeit von St. von Dunin-Borkowski, Job. P. Kirsch, N. Peters, J. Pohle, W. Schmidt und F. Tillmann herausgegeben von Prof. Dr. Gerhard Esser und Prof. Dr. Joseph Mausbach. Erster Band. Kempten und Miinchen : Jos. Kosel. 191 1. Seiten xx und 803. Preis: geheftet, M. 6. — ; gebunden, M. 7. — .
LITURGICAL.
The Mass. A Study of the Roman Liturgy. By Adrian Fortescue. New York, London, Bombay, Calcutta: Longmans, Green, & Co. 1912. Pp. xii- 428. Price, $1.80, net.
L'EucHOLOGiE Latine, etudiee dans la Tradition de ses Formules et de ses Formulaires. — P. 2, L'Eucharistia, Canon Primitif de la Messe ou For- mulaire essentiel et premier de toutes les Liturgies. Par Dom Paul Cagin. (Scriptorium Solesmense.) — Societe de Saint Jean L'Evangeliste. — Desclee et Cie. : Rome, Paris, Tournai. (Picard et Fils: Paris.) 1912. Pp. 334.
PHILOSOPHY.
The Science of Logic. An Inquiry into the Principles of Accurate Thought and Scientific Method. By P. CoflFey, Ph.D. (Louvain), Professor of Logic and Metaphysics, Maynooth College, Ireland. In two volumes. Vol. II : Method, Science, and Certitude. New York, London, Bombay, Calcutta: Longmans, Green, & Co. 1912. Pp. vii-359. Price, $2.50, net.
Theodicy. Essays on Divine Providence. By Antonio Rosmini Serbati. Translated with some omissions from the Milan edition of 1845. Three volumes. New York, London, Bombay, Calcutta: Longmans, Green, & Co. 19 12. Pp. xvii-475, vii-456, and 102 and 75.
What is Socialism? An Exposition and a Criticism with Special Refer- ence to the Movement in America and England. By James Boyle, Private Secretary of Gov. Wm. McKinley, former Consul of the United States at Liverpool, England, author of The Initiative and Referendum, Organized. Labor and Court Decisions, The New Socialism, etc. New York : The Shakespeare Press. 1912. Pp. 347.
Le Monisme Materialiste en France. Expose et Critique des Conceptions de MM. Le Dan tec, B. Conta, Mile. CI. Royer, Jules Soury, etc. Par J.-B. Saulze, Professeur de Philosophic au College Stanislas. Paris : Gabriel Beau- chesne & Cie. 19 12. Pp. 182. Prix, 3 fr.
Studies in History, Economics and Public Law, edited by the Faculty of Political Science of Columbia University : British Radicalism lygi-iyg?. By Walter Phelps Hall, sometime Fellow in History, Columbia University. Vol. 49, No. I. Pp. 262. Pr. $2.00. Law Corporations. A Comparative Study, with particular reference to the protection of creditors and shareholders. By Arthur K. Kuhn, Ph.D., LL.B. Vol. 49, No. 2. Pp. i73- Pr- $i-50. The Spirit of Chinese Philanthropy. A Study in mutual aid. By Yu-Yue Tsu, Ph.D. Vol. 50, No. I. Pp. 120. Pr. $1.00. Provincial and Local Taxation in Canada. By Solomon Vineberg, Ph.D., sometime Garth Fellow in Economics, Columbia University. Vol. 52, No. i. Pp. 171. Pr. $1.50. The Negro at Work in New York City. A Study in Economic Progress. By George Edmund Haynes, Ph.D., Prof. Social Science in Fisk University. New York : Columbia University. Vol. 49, No. 3. 1912. Pp. 158. Price, $1.25. Long- mans, Green and Co. ; London : P. S. King and Son.
THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW
Fifth Series. — Vol. VII. — (XLVII). — September, 1912. — No. 3.
STUDIES IN AMERIOAN PHILOSOPHY. IV. The Modern Schools : Evolutionism.
EVOLUTION ! The magical word thrilled the world two generations ago as no scientific discovery or philosophical system ever did before. Whilst the abstruse doctrines of Kant and the neo-Kantians appealed only to the intellectual elite, here was a theory that, reduced to its simplest expression, appealed also to the man in the street, with only a smattering of knowledge.
Its few and simple laws, easily intelligible; its all-embracing claims,'including, as they did, an account not only of the world and man, but of the far-away heavenly bodies, of the whole cosmos in fact, opened such wide vistas before the human mind, that, it was momentarily dazzled by the all-inclusive sweep of its vision. Taking airily for granted its subjectively evolved theories, it soon lost sight of the fact that in evolution it was dealing with an hypothesis, plausible indeed for the nonce, but one that needed to be objectively tested and estab- lished. Too often its language became colored with emotion, when admiring its deep insight, its now indisputable omniscience.
Fully confident that they had at last discovered the philos- opher's stone, the enthusiastic followers of Spencer and Darwin flung out their challenges, as the bold knights-errant of science, in the face of antiquated knowledge and religious superstition.
258 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
For our nineteenth century it is just the change, the flow, the growth of things, that is the most interesting feature of the universe. Old- fashioned science used to go about classifying things. There were live things and dead things; there were classes, orders, families, genera, species, all permanent facts of nature. . . . And the dignity of human nature lay in just this its permanence. . . . Valuable in- deed was all this unhistorical analysis of the world and of man, valuable as a preparation for the coming insight; but how unvital, how unspiritual, how crude seem to us now all these eighteenth cen- tury conceptions of the mathematically permanent, the essentially unprogressive and stagnant himian nature, in the empty dignity of its unborn rights, when compared with our modern conceptions of the growing, struggling, historically continuous humamity, whose rights are nothing until it wins them in the tragic process of civilization, whose dignity is the dignity attained as the prize of untold ages of suffering, whose institutions embody thousands of years of ardor and of hard thinking, whose treasures even of emotion, are the be- quests of a sacred antiquity of self -conquest ! ^
Thus was the new philosophy invested on all sides with a dignity which was wholly factitious, and which appealed more to the sentimental side of man than to his calmer intellectual judgment.
Like all great systems, the doctrine of evolution must be regarded, not as the special creation of some isolated thinker, be he Spencer or Darwin, but as the product of a slow growth. It had its rise in a twofold interest.
Idealism, losing itself in transcendental speculations about our knowing faculties, was no longer in touch with the scien- tific facts revealed by observation; it could neither point nor lead to any valuable discoveries in the material universe, when they pressed to the fore in rapid succession. Post- Kantian idealists had inaugurated an age for which the pro- cesses of the world were primarily spiritual processes, gradual unfoldings and manifestations of the absolute, revealing and integrating itself in and through them. But when the hey- day of their dazzling a priori constructions had passed, there manifested itself a strongly empirical interest, born of a dread of the extravagances of the idealistic period, the product of
1 The Spirit of Modern Philosophy, Josiah Royce ; Houghton, Mifflin & Co.^ 1897, pp. 274-275.
STUDIES IN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY. 25Q
a hard-learned lesson in caution, the embodiment of an un- willingness to take phantom for truth.
Hence, on parallel lines with the current of idealism, there started a current of speculation intent on studying not so much the mind and the laws that govern its faculties, as the objec- tive realities to which this knowledge is applied. Fragments were contributed from different sources, and Spencer gave them a common basis in the laws of Evolution which he elaborated.
Sir Charles Lyell, the English geologist, had shown in 1830 how enormous effects are wrought by the cumulative action of slight and unobtrusive causes. For the catastrophes which the early geologists had conceived he substituted relatively uni- form natural processes, whereby, as they worked through long ages, the earth's crust had been slowly modified. On the basis of this uniformitarian geology a doctrine of the transforma- tion of species began to look more reasonable.
The credit for the complete theory of evolution, however, belongs entirely to Herbert Spencer. Sometimes Spencer is supposed to be chiefly a follower and expounder of Darwin. No doubt this is because so many people mix up Darwinism with the doctrine of evolution, and have rather vague and hazy notions as to what it is all about. Darwin's great work was the discovery of natural selection and the demonstration of its agency in effecting specific changes in plants and ani- mals. In that work Darwin is completely original : he showed not so much that there is evolution in the world, but how evolution is effected within the sphere of life. But plants and animals are only part of the universe; and with regard to universal evolution, or any universal formula for evolution, Darwinism had little to say. The discovery of a universal formula for evolution and the application of this formula to many diverse groups of phenomena in the organic as well as the inorganic world, have been the great work of Herbert Spencer. Spencer did not even get his clue from Darwin, for the Origm of Species was published only in 1859. True, toward the end of this volume Darwin looked forward toward the distant future when the conception of gradual development might be applied to the phenomena of intelligence; but this was several years after Spencer had
26o ^I^E. ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
enunciated many of his own ideas in various magazines and especially in his Principles, of Psychology, published in 1855.
Spencer got his clue from the great German embryolo- gist Karl Ernst von Baer (1792- 1876), who published his Entwicklungsgeschichte in 1829. His conclusion was that the ovum is a structureless bit of organic matter. In acquir- ing structure along with its growth in volume and mass, it proceeds through a series of differentiations, and the result is a change from homogeneity to heterogeneity.
Proceeding further, Spencer held that the change from homogeneity to heterogeneity is accompanied by a change from indefiniteness to definiteness. In other words, integration is as much a feature of development as differentiation : the change is not simply from a structureless whole into parts, but is from a structureless whole into an organized whole. And this is what we call an organism.
There remained however the yawning chasm between or- ganic and inorganic matter. Spencer bridged" it without hesitation : the growth of organization is essentially a particu- lar kind of redistribution of matter and motion. This redis- tribution of matter and motion is going on universally in the inorganic world : from the simple elements of nature there is a gradual and continuous ascent toward the complicated living organism.
Finally, the psychical phenomena of instinct, memory, rea- son, emotion, and will, are shown to have arisen by slow gra- dation. Although mind is evolved from matter, Spencer re- fuses to be called a materialist ; for he maintains that you could not deduce mind from the primeval nebula unless the germs of mind were present already. All he claims to show is that mental philosophy can no longer confine itself to mere intro- spection of the adult human consciousness : it must deal with the whole range of psychical phenomena as manifestations of organic life; it must deal with them genetically and show how mind is constituted in connexion with the experiences of the past. '
The universal inclusiveness of this system leaves no nook or corner in the natural or speculative sciences that is not af- fected by the doctrine, not even the field of religion.
STUDIES IN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY.
261
With regard to religious dogmas Spencer himself preserves, he thinks, a respectful attitude. He grants that ** from the beginning religion has had the all-essential office of prevent- ing men from being wholly absorbed in the relative or imme- diate, and of awakening them to a consciousness of something beyond it." ^ There have of necessity been changes from a lower creed to a higher; and, speaking generally, the religious current in each age and among each people has been as near an approximation to the truth as it was then and there possible for men to receive.^ And if science is the enemy of super- stitions that cloak themselves with the name of religion, it is not the enemy of essential religion, which the superstitions darken. Doubtless in the science of to-day there is an irreli- gious spirit, but not in the true science, which, not stopping at the surface, penetrates to the depths of nature. With regard to human traditions and the authority that consecrated them, true science maintains a lofty attitude; but before the im- penetrable veil that hides the absolute, it humbles itself.' The sincere philosopher alone can know how high, not only above human knowledge, but above human conception, is the Uni- versal Power whereof nature, life, thought, are manifestations.
The great vogue enjoyed by Spencer* and his followers in this country was due very very largely to this, that their tenets were seemingly based on tangible scientific facts, — and science was the idol at whose altar everyone pretended to worship.
The early recognition by Emerson of evolution as the plan of the universe in his first book and everywhere in his prose and verse has often attracted notice. " The facts of as- tronomy and the nebular hypothesis early delighted him. The poetic teachings of the ancient philosophers, especially ' The Flowing of the Universe ' by Heraclitus and the ' Iden- tity ' by Xenophanes, and others, prepared his mind. He had undoubtedly early read of Leibniz's ' scale of being ' from minerals through plants to animals, from monad to man ; and from Coleridge he knew something of the speculations of Schelling and Oken. When Lyell's book on Geology came out,
2 H. Spencer, First Principles, p. 92; Rand, McNally & Co. edition.
3 Ibid., p. 105.
* His American editors sold three times as many copies of his works as did his British editors. Van Becelaere, op. cit., p. 121.
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it was read by Emerson, and in it the ideas of Lamarck first published in 1800 were mentioned. Emerson probably came on them there." ^ Yet, he never took to Spencer's interpreta- tion of the doctrine, based, as it claimed to be, on facts. He preferred to adhere to the interpretations his own fancy sug- gested, which gave him a freer scope to indulge his favorable flights of poetic imagination. Nay, in a moment of temper he once declared Spencer to be " nothing better than a mere stock writer who writes equally well upon all subjects." *
John William Draper ( 181 1- 1882) was amongst the first in America to profess allegiance to the doctrine of evolution. Professor of Medicine in the University of New York, and an authority on the then developing science of chemistry, he has left no connected expose of his philosophical creed. But he was a typical example of the narrow-minded scientific *' specialist ", who cannot see beyond the confines of his own particular branch. And in the case of Draper that defect of an irretrievably warped mentality was emphasized by a blind and stubborn opposition to Catholicism. What he wrote of Luther may be applied to his own case : " The vilification which he poured on Roman Catholics and their doings was so bitter as to be ludicrous." "^
Already in his History of the Intellectual Development of Europe ® he had freely given vent to these ideas ; but he ela- borated them ex professo in a subsequent volume. History of the Confiict between Religion and Science.^ He took for granted that there must of necessity be opposition between the two. He worshipped ''Science" with idolatrous fervor; he saw " that a divine revelation must necessarily be intolerant of contradiction," ^® but failed to see that any system of truths,
5 Emerson's Compl. Works, Edit. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1904; Nature, Biogr. Sketch by E. W. Emerson, pp. xxv-xxvi.
« Outline of EvoL Philosophy, by Dr. M. E. Gazelles, translated by O. B. Frothingham, Appendix by E. L. Youmans, M.D. ; New York, D. Appleton & Co., 1875, p. 117.
''' " The vilification which was poured on Luther and his doings was so bitter as to be ludicrous." J. Wm. Draper, History of the Conflict between Religion and Science, 5th ed., New York, D. Appleton & Co., 1875, p. 296.
8 London, 1863, 2 vol.
^ One of the volumes of the International Scientific Series, D. Appleton & Co., New York, 1875.
1^ Conflict between Religion and Science, op. cit., p. vi.
STUDIES IN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY. 26%
scientific as well as religious, must be intolerant if it is not to degenerate into an Arabian Nights' tale. What would the Copernican system amount to if it were not a scientific dogma? What would evolutionism amount to if, speaking from the viewpoint of its adepts, it were not scientifically un- assailable? The author claims to have written his book in an impartial spirit; but nowhere is there any reference to historical sources, and now it has only the value of a literary curiosity, showing how an otherwise keen mind, seemingly without any interested motives, can become obsessed by fixed ideas.^^
The influence of Draper does not seem to have been deep or lasting. That of Edward Livingstone Youmans ( 182 1 -188 7) was both.
One evening in i860 as Youmans was calling at a friend's house in Brooklyn, the Rev. Samuel Johnson of Salem handed him the famous prospectus of the great series of philosophical works which Spencer proposed to issue by subscription. The very next day Youmans wrote a letter to Spencer off'ering his aid in procuring American subscriptions and otherwise facili- tating the enterprise by every means in his power. With this letter and Spencer's cordial reply began the lifelong friend- ship between the two men. As long as he lived, Spencer had upon this side of the Atlantic an alter ego ever on the alert for the slightest chance to promote his interests and those of his system of thought.^^
^1 A few extracts will suffice to give an idea of the author's state of mind : " In the Vatican — we have only to recall the Inquisition — the hands that are now raised in appeals to the Most Merciful, are crimsoned. They have been steeped in blood" (p. xi). "When Halley's Comet came in 1456 it was neces- sary for the Pope himself to interfere. He exorcised and expelled it from the skies. It slunk away into the abysses of space, terror-stricken by the maledictions of Callixtus III, and did not venture back for 75 years" (p. 269), " Whenever, says the Bishop Alvara Pelayo, I entered the apartments of the Roman Court clergy, I found them occupied in counting up the gold-coin, which lay about the room in heaps" (p. 276). "The Protestants designed to bring back Christianity to its primitive purity, and hence, while restoring the ancient doctrines, they cast out of it all such practices as the adoration of the Virgin Mary and the invocation of Saints. The Virgin Mary, we are assured by the Evangelists, [note the pitiful cocksureness of the assertion] had accepted the duties of married life and borne to her husband several children. In the prevailing idolatry she had ceased to be regarded as the carpenter's wife; she had become the Queen of Heaven and the Mother of God" (p. 298).
12^ Century of Science, John Fiske ; Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1899, pp. 88, 92.
264 T^^^^ ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
Youmans' only published volume of philosophical import is a work on education, The Culture demanded by Modern Life^^ a series of addresses and arguments on the claims of scientific education. His literary activity found an outlet especially on the lecture platform. In 1868 he began his career as lecturer, and' soon made a name for himself as one of the ablest ex- pounders of Spencer's unified conception of nature. "As a lecturer Youmans was absolutely unconscious of himself, sim- ple, straightforward and vehement, wrapped up in his subject, the very embodiment of faith and enthusiasm, of heartiness and good cheer. In hundreds of little towns all over the land did his strong personality appear, make its way, and leave its effects in the shape of new thoughts, new questions and en- larged hospitality of mind, among the inhabitants. The re- sults of all his efforts are surely visible to-day, for in no part of the English-speaking world has Spencer's philosophy met with such a general and cordial reception as in the United States." ^* Youmans was truly " the interpreter of science for the people ".
In furtherance of this end he also set on foot the publication of '* The International Scientific Series ",^^ a collection of popular treatises by the foremost scientists of the day. And finally in 1872 he established The Popular Science Monthly. He believed that the mind of the people is not educated by dumping into it a great unshapely mass of facts, but that it needs to be stimulated rather than crammed. Hence he wanted a scientific magazine which would present articles from all quarters, and which should deal with the essential conceptions of science in such a manner that they may be read and under- stood " by him who runs ". That he gauged the popular at- titude aright is shown by the fact that his magazine is still doing the work he intended for it. All opinions of scientific, philosophical, or religious interest have found expression in its pages, the last named being always treated with the under- standing that " in the world to which we are coming there will neither be a place nor a use for orthodoxies ".
13 It was not an original work, but a compilation by Youmans of addresses by Spencer, Tyndall, Huxley, etc. New York, D. Appleton & Co., 1873. ^^ A Century of Science, John Fiske, op. cit., p. 86. ^^ Some fifty volumes were published, all by D. Appleton & Co., New York.
STUDIES IN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY. 265
Perhaps the greatest American expounder of the evolu- tionary philosophy in all its aspects was John Fiske (1842- 1901)/® who, being the master of an extremely lucid and attractive style, was also a thinker of great acuteness and depth. He knew how to mould the doctrines of Spencer and Darwin in a popular form. He surrounded them with fresh and vivid illustrations, pointed out their bearings upon great practical questions of the day ; and in his theory about the in- fluence of prolonged infancy on the social development of man made an original contribution to evolutionistic philosophy.
Fiske repeatedly disclaims that evolution is in any way materialistic or atheistic, and he takes Prof, Hackel severely to task for his blatant assumptions. He sums up Hackel's doctrines in the following theses :
1. The general doctrine of evolution appears to be already unas- sailably founded ; 2. thereby every supernatural creation is com- pletely excluded ; 3. transformism and the theory of descent are in- separable constituent parts of the doctrine of evolution ; 4. the necessary consequence of this last conclusion is the descent of man from a series of vertebrates ; 5. the belief in an immaterial soul and in a personal God are herewith completely ununitable [vollig imvereinbar) .
And then Fiske continues :
Now, if Prof. Hackel had contented himself with asserting that these two last beliefs are not susceptible of scientific demonstration, if he had simply said that they are beliefs concerning which a scientific man in his scientific capacity ought to refrain from making assertions, because science knows nothing whatever about the subject, he would have occupied an impregnable position. ... To a materialist the ultimate power is mechanical force, and psychical life is nothing but the temporary and local result of fleeting collocations of material elements in the shape of nervous systems.
Into the endless circuit of transformations of molecular motion, says the materialist, there enter certain phases which we call feelings and thoughts ; they are parts of the circuit : they arise out of motion
^^ Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, 2 vol., 1874; The Unseen World and Other Essays, 1876; Darwinism and Other Essays, 1879; The Destiny of Man, 1884; Excursions of an Evolutionist, 1887; The Idea of God as Affected by Modern Knowledge, 1887; E. L. Youmans, Interpreter of Science for the People, 1894; A Century of Science and Other Essays, 1899; Through Nature to God, 1899; Myths and Mythmakers, 1900.
266 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
of material molecules and disappear by being transformed into such motion. Hence, with the death of the organism in which such mo- tions have been temporarily gathered into a kind of unity, all psychi- cal activity and all personality are ipso facto abolished.^'
There are those that say in their hearts : " There is no God ", and congratulate themselves they are going to die like beasts. They lay hold of each new discovery of science that modifies our views of the universe, and herald it as a crowning victory for ma- terialism,— a victory which is ushering in the happy day when athe- ism is to be the creed of all men. It is in view of such philoso- phizers that the astronomer, the chemist, the anatomist, whose aim is the dispassionate examination of evidence, and the unbiased study of phenomena, may fitly utter the prayer: Lord, save me from my friends. ^^
For Fiske does not believe that there can be any possible conflict between religion and science. Is it not obvious, he says, that since a philosophical system must regard divine powers as the ultimate source of all phenomena alike, there- fore science cannot properly explain any particular group of phenomena by a direct reference to the action of the Deity? Such a reference is not an explanation, since it adds nothing to our previous knowledge either of the phenomena or of the manner of divine action. The business of science is simply to ascertain in what manner phenomena coexist with each other, or follow each other, and the only kind of explanation with which it can properly deal is that which refers one set of phenomena to another set. In pursuing this its legitimate business, science does not touch on the province of theology in any way, and there is no conceivable occasion for any conflicr between the two.^^
On the contrary, as Fiske sees it,
the result of the whole is to put evolution in harmony with religious thought, — not necessarily in harmony with particular religious dogmas or theories, but in harmony with the great religious drift, so that the antagonism which used to appear to exist between religion and science is likely to disappear. If you take the case of some evolutionist like Prof. Hackel, who is perfectly sure that materialism
"^"^ A Century of Science, p. 55. Also, Darwinism and Other Essays, p. 49, ff., and p. 62 fF.
18 The Idea of God, p. 43-44. ^^ Ibid., p. 101-102.
STUDIES IN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY. 267
accounts for everything (he has got it all cut and dried and settled, he knows all about it so that there is really no need of discussing the subject!), if you ask the question whether it was his scientific study of evolution that really led him to such a dogmatic conclusion, or whether it was that he started from some purely arbitrary as- sumption, like the French materialists of the eighteenth century, I have no doubt the latter would be the true explanation.^®
Fiske takes for granted the fundamental theories of Spencer and Darwin. He considers them as solidly established as any scientific theory can be : " There is no more reason for sup- posing that their conclusions will ever be gainsaid, than for supposing that the Copernican astronomy will some time be overthrown and the concentric spheres of Dante's heaven re- instated, in the minds of men.'' ^^ They form the basis of his own philosophical system, in which his original contribution about the influence of prolonged infancy is worth while examining.
Darwin in his Descent of Man did not, so Fiske holds, solve the question of the origin of man. In his work on The Origin of Species he undertook to point out a vera causa of their origin, and he did it In his Descent of Man he brought together a great many minor generalizations which facili- tated the understanding of man's origin. But he did not even come near to solving the problem; nor did he anywhere show clearly why natural selection might not have gone on forever producing one set of beings after another, distin- guishable chiefly by physical differences. But Darwin's co- discoverer, Alfred Russell Wallace, at an early stage in his researches, struck out a most brilliant and pregnant sugges- tion : that in the course of the evolution of a very highly or- ganized animal, if there came a point at which it is of more advantage to that animal to have variations in his intelli- gence seized upon and improved by natural selection, than to have physical changes seized upon, then natural selection would begin working almost exclusively upon that creature's intelligence, and he would develop in intelligence to a great extent, while his physical organism would change but slightly. And this applies especially in the case of man, who physically
20^ Century of Science, pp. 115, 1 16. 21 Destiny of Man, p. 20.
268 ^'^^^ ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
is changed but little from the apes, whilst intellectually he is separated from them by a stupendous chasm. Those accumu- lations of slight variations have brought about, in the case of man, a difference in kind, transcending all other differences.^^ Henceforth the dominant aspect of evolution was to be, not the genesis of species, but the progress of civilization.^^
And if there is any one thing in which the human race is signally distinguished from other mammals, it is in the enormous duration of infancy. The infancy of the animal is in a very undeveloped condition, with the larger part of its faculties in potentiality rather than in actuality ; this is a direct result of the increase of intelli- gence. First natural selection goes on increasing the intelligence, and secondly, when the intelligence goes far enough, it makes a longer infancy: a creature is born less developed, and therefore comes this plastic period during which he is more teachable. The capacity for progress begins to come in, and you begin to get at one of the great points in which man is distinguished from the lower animals ; for one of these great points undoubtedly is his progres- siveness. And I think that anyone will say with very little hesitation that if it were not for our period of infancy, we should not be progressive.
Then looking around to see what are the other points that are most important in which man differs from the lower animals, there comes the matter of the family. The family has adumbrations and f oreshadowings among the lower animals ; but in general it may be said that while animals lower than man are gregarious, in man have become established these peculiar relationships which constitute what we know as the family. And it is easy to see how the existence of helpless infants v,^ould bring about just that state of things. The necessity of caring for the infant would prolong the period of maternal affection, and would tend to keep the father and mother and children to.gether. Real monogamy, real faithfulness of the male parent belong to a comparatively advanced stage. But in the early stages the knitting together of permanent relations between mother and infant, and the approximation toward steady relations on the part of the male parent came to bring about the family and gradually to knit those organizations which we know as clans.
The instant society becomes organized in clans, natural selection cannot let these clans be broken up and die out ; the clan becomes the chief object or care of natural selection, because if you destroy it,
22 A Century of Science, p. 104.
23 Destiny of Man, p. 31.
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you retrograde again, you lose all you have gained. Consequently these clans in which the primeval selfish instincts were so modified that the individual conduct would be subordinated to some extent to the needs of the clan, those are the ones which would prevail in the struggle for life. In this way you gradually get an external standard to which man has to conform his conduct, and you get the germs of altruism and morality.^*
If such is man's origin, what is his nature, and his destiny? Fiske is fond of repeating that, '' Darwinism replaces as much teleology as it destroys " ; ^^ that " the process of evolution is itself the working-out of a mighty teleology of which our finite understandings can fathom but the scantiest rudi- ments." ^® Hence he holds that the doctrine of evolution is far from degrading man; but by exhibiting the development of the highest spiritual human qualities as the goal toward which God's creative work has from the outset been tending, replaces man in the old position of headship in the universe as in the days of Dante and Aquinas. " That which the pre- Copernican astronomy tried to do by placing the home of man in the centre of the physical universe, the Darwinian bio- logy profoundly accomplishes by exhibiting man as the ter- minal fact in that stupendous process of evolution whereby things have come to be what they are. In the deepest sense it is as true as it ever was held to be that the world was made for man and that the bringing forth in him of those qualities which we call highest and holiest is the final cause of crea- tion." ^^ Man is the chief object of divine care, the crown and glory of the universe; but loaded down with a brute in- heritance of original sin, his ultimate salvation is slowly to be achieved through ages of moral discipline; and herein we find the strongest incentive to right living.^^
Whence came the soul of man ? We no more know than we know whence came the universe. The primal origin of con- sciousness is hidden in the depths of the bygone eternity.^*
24 Op. cit., p. 109-110.
-^ The Idea of God, p. 160.
"^^ Cosmic Philosophy, Vol. TI, p. 406.
"^"^ The Idea of God, p. xxi.
28 Ibid., p. 165.
29 Destiny of Man, p. 42.
270 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
That it cannot possibly be the product of any cunning arrange- ment of material particles is demonstrated beyond peradven- ture by what we know of the correlation of physical forces. The Platonic view of the soul as a spiritual substance, an ef- fluence from Godhood, which under certain conditions becomes incarnated in perishable forms of matter, is doubtless the view most consonant with the present state of our knowledge.^^ As for its destiny :
It is not likely that we shall ever succeed in making the immortality of the soul a matter of scientific demonstration, for we lack the re- quired data. It must ever remain an affair of religion, rather than of experience. In the domain of cerebral physiology the question might be debated forever without a result. The only thing which cerebral physiology tells us when studied with the help of molecular physics, is against the materialist so far as it goes. .It tells us that during the present life, although thought and feeling are always manifested in connexion with a peculiar form of matter, yet by no possibility can thought and feeling be in any sense the products of matter. Nothing could be more grossly unscientific than the famous remark of Cabanis that the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile. What goes on in the brain is an amazingly complex series of molecular movements, with which thought and feeling are in some unknown way correlated, not as effects or as causes, but as concomitants. So much is clear ; but cerebral physiology says noth- ing about another life. Indeed, why should it? The last place in the world to which I should go for information about a state of things in which thought and feeling can exist in the absence of a cerebrum, would be cerebral physiology. The materialist assump- tion that there is no such state of things and that the life of the soul accordingly ends with the life of the body, is perhaps the most colossal instance of baseless assumption that is known to the history of philosophy. . . . When we desist from the futile attempt to in- troduce scientific demonstration into a region which confessedly transcends human experience, and when we consider the question upon broad grounds of moral probability, I have no doubt that men will continue in the future as in the past, to cherish the faith in a life beyond the grave.^^
Closely related to this is Fiske's theory about the existence of God. We have heard him repudiate atheism in the strong-
^^ Destiny of Man, p. 43.
81 Destiny of Man, pp. no, III.
STUDIES IN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY. 271
est terms; he admits a " cosmic theism." The idea of God has of course undergone many changes in the course of its evolution. From fetishism and polytheism it has finally de- veloped into monotheism. *^ The theory of divine action im- plied throughout the Gospels and the Epistles was the first complete monotheism attained by mankind, or at least by that portion of it from which our modern civilization has descended. In its fundamental features this theism was so true that it must endure as long as man endures." ^^
When we come to interpret this idea in the light of modern science, we must confess that, in dealing with the infinite, we are dealing with that which transcends our powers of concep- tion. Our experience does not furnish the materials for the idea of a personality which is without limits. But it does not follow that there is no reality answering to what such an idea would be if it could be conceived. And since the teleological instinct in man cannot be suppressed or ignored, the human soul shrinks from the thought that it is without kith or kin in this vast universe. Our reason demands that there shall be a reasonableness in the constitution of things. This demand is a fact in our physical nature as positive and irrepressible as our acceptance of geometrical axioms, and our rejection of whatever controverts such axioms.
Does this belief answer to any outward reality? Is there aught in the scheme of things that justifies man in claiming kinship of any kind with the God that is immanent in the world? For the conception of a God external to the world and who created the same is only a remnant of barbaric ages that can no longer be entertained. Yes ; but we can only con- ceive it or him in a symbolical way.
The universe as a whole is thrilling in every fibre with life, not indeed life in the usual restricted sense, but life in a general sense. The distinction once deemed absolute between the living and the not-living, is converted into a relative distinction, and the life as manifested in the organism is seen to be only a specialized form of the universal life.^^ . . . Nowhere in nature is inertness or quies- cence to be found : all is quivering with energy ; all motions of rtiat- ter are manifestations of force to which we can assign neither be-
32 The Idea of God, p. 78.
33 The Idea of God, p. 149.
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ginning nor end. Matter is indestructible, motion is indestructible ; and beneath both these universal truths lies this fundamental truth that force is persistent. All the phenomena of the universe are the manifestations of a single animating principle that is both infinite and eternal, a Power v^hich is always and everywhere manifested in phenomena. This Power is the source of what we can see, hear and touch; it is the source of what we call matter; but it cannot itself be material. The only conclusion we can consistently hold is that " this is the very same power which in ourselves wells up under the form of consciousness." ^*
This is the conclusion of Herbert Spencer. And thus, al- though he disclaims the appellation, Fiske's speculations end in a thinly veiled pantheism.
We have dvi^elt at some length on Fiske's theories, because his works form an encyclopedia of evolutionary philosophy in America. Many of his contemporaries professed and still profess adhesion to the theories he represented ; but often they lack his insight and his grasp of the philosophical import of the scientific doctrines on which evolution is based.
Edward Drinker Cope (1840-1889),^^ member of the U. S. Academy of Sciences, was especially engaged in zoological and paleontological work. In his chosen domain he is a pains- taking investigator. He does not however seem to realize the limits of scientific investigation ; whenever he invades the speculative domain, he becomes diffuse and falls into a philo- sophical logomachy. Feeling called upon, notwithstanding his limitations, to account for absolutely everything on the basis of evolution, he thus explains the state of innocence and the fall of our first parents :
If physical evolution be a reality, we have reason to believe that the infantile stage of human morals as well as of human intellect was much firolonged in the history of our first parents. This constitutes the period of human purity, when we are told by Moses that the first pair dwelt- in Eden. But the, growth to maturity saw the develop- ment of all the qualities inherited from the irresponsible denizens of the forest. Man inherits from his predecessors in the creation the buddings of reason ; he inherits propensities and appetites. His
a* The Idea of God, p. 154.
^^The Origin of Man, 188$; The Origin of the Fittest, 1887; Factors of Organic Evolution, 1889.
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corruption is that of his animal progenitors, and his sin is the law and bestial instinct of the brute creation. Thus only is the origin of sin made clear. ^^
And to clinch his argument, he mentions the fact that, ac- cording to some exegetical writer, the word *' serpent '' used in Genesis should be translated by " ape," ** a conclusion," he continues, "exactly coinciding with our induction on the basis of evolution. The instigation to evil by an ape merely states inheritance in another form." *^ Thus we are better prepared for the author's final conclusion: ''After we reject from cus- tomary religion cosmogony which belongs to science, and theogony which belongs to the imagination, we have left an art which has for its object the development and sustentation of good works and morals amongst men. If the teachers and professors of this art produce the results in this direction at which they aim, their great utility must be conceded by all. . . . Whether man possess the spontaneous power called ' free will ', or not, the work of supplying inducements for good con- duct is most useful to society." ^®
Joseph Leconte (1823-1901),^^ professor at the University of California, concentrates his efforts on a conciliation of re- ligion and evolutionary science, implicitly taking for granted that they must be opposed to one another. And indeed, he claims, they will remain so as long as we admit with the old religious creeds, now fortunately on the wane, that God is a being external to the world, interfering with it at times by miraculous suspension of its laws. But evolution has taught us to believe in a God immanent, resident in nature, at all times and at all places directing every event and determining every phenomenon; a God in whom, in the most literal sense not only we, but all things have their being, in whom all things consist, in whom all things exist. The phenomena of nature are naught else than objectified modes of divine thought, the forces of nature naught else than different forms of one omni-
3« Ed. D. Cope, The Origin of the Fittest; D. Appleton & Co., New York, 1887, p. 167.
»^ Ibid., p. 167, note.
38 Ibid., p. 238.
^^ Religion and Science, 1874; Evolution, its Nature, its Evidence, and its Relation to Religious Thought, 1891.
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present divine energy or will, the laws of nature naught else than the regular modes of operation of that divine will, un- variable because He is unchangeable.*^ The human soul is derived from God, not directly created indeed, but only by the natural process of evolution; it preexisted as embryo in the womb of nature, slowly developed throughout all geologi- cal times, finally coming to birth as a living soul in man. Thus it attains immortality at a certain stage of development, viz. at spirit birth.*^
Nathaniel Southgate Shaler (1841-1906),*^ professor at Harvard and rightly looked upon as one of our greatest geo- logists, hesitates to assert even that much. As a man accus- tomed to deal with facts he feels his limitations when he is about to state their philosophical implications. Anent that thorny question in evolution, the origin of life, he wrote to- ward the end of his long career :
In all the skilful and patient research which has been devoted to the task of proving the possibility of spontaneous generation, there has as yet been no instance found in which, from matter which was not already living, any organic being has been brought forth. The value of the evidence as to the separation of the living from the not-living, which became evident a century ago, has been increased by recent studies, with the result that naturalists have of late re- garded the barrier between two states as one of great permanence, — one seldom passed, and then only under very peculiar conditions, the nature of which is not yet discovered.*^
The only conditions we could think of in the present state of science are that life can have originally begun only in water, e. g. in a hot spring coming from lavas where there might have been a deposit of materials such as constitute organic bodies. But, he goes on, this hypothesis by no means explains the way in which these dissolved materials took on their organic form; it only provides for the gathering-together of the ele- ments necessary for the organization; in a word, it helps us
^^ Evolution, Its Nature, etc., D. Appleton & Co., New York, 1891, p. 301.
*i Ibid., p. 326.
^^ Nature and Man in America, 1891 ; The Interpretation of Nature, 1893; The Individual, 1900, besides numerous purely scientific studies.
*8 The Individual, A Study of Life and Death, D. Appleton & Co., New York, 1900, pp. 18-19.
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only a little way toward the critical point where the essentially lifeless becomes truly alive.**
When facing the ultimate problems which every evolution- ist must face sooner or later, unless he abdicate his power of reasoning, Shaler does not even seek recourse to blind faith or the demands of morality to establish the immortality of the soul or the existence of God. " The materialist conten- tion that mind is but a function of the body, and ceases when all the other functions cease at death, raises but a presumption against the continuance of mind after death." A presumption in favor of this continuance, he proceeds to say, is found in the fact that the rationality of the operations of nature cannot be explained except by supposing that a mighty kinsman of man is at work behind it all, who will also at the same time take care of us human beings.*^ In what way? We know not. But seeing a real, though impersonal immortality, in the past of our life, as it has come up through the ages, men will look forward with a perfect confidence to the future which awaits them, sure in their belief, with a certainty denied to their fathers, that the Power that has brought them here will deal well with them in the hereafter.*^
David Jayne Hill (1850), who was professor at several uni- versities, and our late ambassador to Germany, interprets the world,*^ man, and all the manifestations of his intellectual life, such as art, science, and religion, in accordance with evolu- tionary principles.
H. Fairfield Osbom (1857), of Columbia University, has always been the ardent champion of the same principles in numerous scientific and educational papers, and has besides given us a valuable outline of the development of the evolution idea in the history of thought.*®
As an indication of how deeply evolution has taken root in the scientific world, it is interesting to read Fifty Years of DarTvinism : Modern Aspects of Evolution ; Centennial ad-
44 Ibid., p. 19, note. ^^ ibid., p. 313. *« Ibid., p. 333-
*7 Genetic Philosophy, 1893.
*8 From the Greeks to Darwin, Outline of the Development of the Evolution Idea, 1894. The author's attempt to make St. Augustine one of the fathers of modern evolutionism seems to spring not so much from misrepresentation as from imperfect, second-hand acquaintance with Augustinian philosophy. Pp. 71 ff. .
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dresses in honor of Chas. Darwin before the American Asso- ciation for the Advancement of Science, Baltimore, Jan. i, 1909.*^ The volume contains papers by several American University professors, and one by Prof. Edw. B. Poulton, of Oxford, in which he pays high tribute to the part played by American scientists in the diffusion of evolution.
In the domain of ethnography American evolutionism is represented by Lewis Morgan (1818-1881),^® and Daniel G. Brinton (1837-1900).^^ The mind of man being a develop- ment of that of the brute, it becomes easy to find proofs of this a priori doctrine in the racial characteristics, especially of savage or little developed tribes, because these are supposed to manifest the various phases of evolution in their simplest forms.
It was but natural also that on account of its immediate practical consequences the study of ethics should be eagerly taken up by evolutionist philosophers. And this was done at times with manifestations of prejudice and temper ill-befitting so-called scientific treatises. A conspicuous example is found in C. M. Williams,^^ who not only decries the hypothesis of God as unscientific, but inveighs with great acrimony against Old Testament morals. Yet, if they are a mere passing phase in the evolutionary process, a lower stage which we have happily long since outgrown, they scarcely call for con- demnation.
P. Bixby ^^ and Sidney E. Mezes ^* are more moderate in the expression of their views, while giving the traditional evo- lutionistic theories on the foundations of morality.
If evolutionism enlisted illustrious names amongst its fol- lowers in this country, it also met with determined opposition
49 Henry Holt & Co., New York, 1909.
^^ Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family, 1871, in Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, Vol. XVII. This work was con- densed into : Ancient Society, 1873,
^1 The American Race, 189 1 ; The Myths of the New World, 1896; Races and Peoples; The Basis of Social Relations.
"2 A Review of the Systems of Ethics founded on the Theory of Evolution, 1893.
^3 The Ethics of Evolution, 1900.
^* Ethics Descriptive and Explanatory, 1901.
STUDIES IN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY. 277
from others. Already Helmholtz (i 821 -1894), the great German naturalist, had asserted that, " while natural selection might have been competent to produce varieties within the same species, and even many so-called species, the question of the descent of species in general and of man in particular is at present determined rather by the preconceptions of individual investigators, than by the facts themselves. And Virchow (182 1 -1902) with equal scientific authority wrote that "at the present time there is no actual warrant for taking the step from the theory of descent to the fact of descent." Even Prof. Huxley (1825 -1895), Darwin's friend and defender, reminds us that " our acceptance of the Darwinian theory must be provisional, so long as one link in the chain of evidence is missing ; and so long as all the animals and plants certainly produced by selective breeding from a common stock are fer- tile, and their progeny are fertile with one another, that link will be wanting. For so long selective breeding will not be proved to be competent to do all that is required of it to pro- duce natural species." ^^
In the face of such opposition, and representing as it did the most advanced opinions, while disturbing widely cherished beliefs at many points, it was natural that the evolutionary theories should be strenuously resisted and unsparingly criti- cized. Thus Col. Higginson wrote as early as 1864: "Mr. Spencer has what Talleyrand calls the weakness of omni- science, and must write not alone on astronomy, metaphysics, and banking, but also on music, dancing, and style. It seems rather absurd to attribute to him as a scientific achievement any vast enlargement or further generalization of the modern scientific doctrine of evolution." ^^
But these rather personal criticisms could not have the weight of a life-long opposition to the theory of a man like Prof. Louis Agassiz (1807- 1873) of Harvard, one of the greatest American naturalists of the nineteenth century. In his teaching as well as in his numerous scientific memoirs he consistently and relentlessly fought the Darwinian theory. He found nothing in his extensive scientific observations that
55 Compare : Huxley; Lay Sermons; D. Appleton & Co., New York, 1872, pp. 292-295.
56 Estimating Spencer; The Friend of Progress, 1864.
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compelled him to accept Darwinism as the only scientific ex- planation of biological phenomena; the personifications of nature and of natural selection did not appeal to him as verae causae \ and he was besides firmly convinced that Darwinism led to atheism and materialism. Evolutionists never could reconcile themselves to his hostile attitude, and certainly failed to grasp the weight of his arguments.
George Ticknor Curtis (1812-1894) ^^ and S. W. Dawson ( 1 820- 1 899)/® one time president of McGill University, Mon- treal, went deeper into the philosophical foundations of evo- lutionism than did Agassiz. They were not carried away by the brilliant novelties and the unreasoned enthusiasm born of plausible but unverified suppositions. Curtis especially points out with great acumen how, the theory of evolution having once been admitted, proofs have been made to suit the theory, whilst the latter is nothing more than an unstable aggregate of hypotheses.
Another clear-sighted and relentless critic of the evolution- ist position is Jacob Gould Schurman (1854),^^ president of Cornell University. When, he writes, we look at the philoso- phical significance of the doctrine of evolution, the main point is to determine what it precisely is that natural selection explains, as well as what is left unexplained by it in the origin of species of organic beings. A scientific explanation consists in the assignment of a phenomenon to its causes, which causes themselves must be known natural agencies, for science takes account only of secondary causes. Now Darwin asserts that the manifestation of life on the globe was through a process of evolution, of which natural selection was the proximate cause. He came to this conclusion by observing the results of man's purposive selection in breeding: ''As man can pro- duce a great result with his domestic animals and plants by adding in any given direction individual differences, so could natural selection, but far more easily from having incompar- ably longer time for action." ®^
^"^ Creation or Evolution, 1887.
58 The Earth and Man, 1886 ; Modern Ideas of Evolution as Related to Religion and Science, 1890.
59 Kantian Ethics and the Ethics of Evolution, 1882 ; The Ethical Import of Darwinism, 1887; Belief in God, Its Origin, Nature and Basis, 1895; Agnosticism and Religion, 1896.
6 0 Chas. Darwin, The Origin of Species, Rand, McNally & Co. edit., Vol. I, p. 62.
STUDIES IN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY. ^nr^
279
But can the results attained by man also be attained by the blind and purposeless operations of nature? Let us grant it for the nonce.
But then we are still in presence of the fact that natural selection or the survival of the fittest can accomplish nothing until it is sup- plied with material for " selection ", until there has appeared upon the field an antecedent "fittest", a fittest organ, function, habit, instinct, constitution or entire organism.®^ Natural selection pro- duces nothing ; it only culls from what is already in existence. The survival of the fittest is an eliminative, not an originative process. Darwin himself defines natural selection : " The preservation of favorable individual diflPerences and variations and the destruction of those which are injurious, I have called natural selection or the survival of the fittest." ®^
Nature then originates the modifications, nature propagates them and accumulates them through propagation ; but how all this is done is a mystery on which science throws no light; and the personification of nature, investing it with volitional attributes, serves only to disguise our real ignorance. Darwin writes : " It may metaphorically be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing throughout the world the slightest variations, rejecting those that are bad, preserving and adding up those that are good." ®^ And since natural selection is the name of an event that follows from physical causes, the reader gets the impression that the origin of species has at last been referred to a system of purely natural causa- tion. But the true state of the case is very different : no cause has been discovered for the origin of those variations, which through inheritance are accumulated into specific characters. And this attribution of superior potency to natural selection, in comparison with the purposive selection of man, involves the conception of nature as an intelligent, active being; na- ture seems to do so much only because you have personified her. Drop the use of metaphorical language and of italics, and you will never make it credible that blind natural processes can ever attain the end realized by human design. When
81 The Ethical Import of Darwinism, Chas. Scribner's Sons, New York, 1887, p. 77.
«2 Chas. Darwin, The Origin of Species, op. cit., Vol. I, p. 61. «3 Ibid., p. 63.
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trying to account for the origin of fitter beings that natural selection could seize upon to perpetuate, Darwin at first as- cribed their origin to the environment, the circumstances in which such beings live. But it was soon shown that similar varieties were produced from the same species in different en- vironments, and dissimilar varieties in the same environment. Hence he felt himself compelled to resort in the end to " an innate tendency to new variations " or to *' spontaneous vari- ability." But this assumed, everything is assumed. And ii is a frank admission that you return to the final cause, inherent in each being, which Aristotle had already pointed out, and the Scholastics had always defended.
If you pursue your questioning still further and ask, Whence those germinal organisms with their wonderful capa- bilities of differentiating into species? Darwin himself an- swers that *' life has been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one " ; ** so that ultimately the gradual development of species is but a mode of conceiving the action of supernatural causality.
Mere physical causality, by whatever name you may call it, without any fixed and predetermined end in view, will never account for the orderly phenomena of the cosmos. And it is this jugglery with causality, as though in time everything could be got almost out of nothing, which is the besetting sin of those evolutionists who refuse even to admit Darwin's " innate tendency ".
The masters of positive sciences cannot of course observe the final cause under their microscope; neither can they pre- cipitate or sublimate it in their testing tubes ; therefore their refutation, they think, need only consist in characterizing it as " metaphysical ".
It is in the same spirit that Spencer has made bold to re- construct ethics on the law of universal physical causation. Yet, though he postulates for ethics an immediate evolution like that which in the course of centuries has transformed em- pirical into rational astronomy, he fails to demonstrate the pos- sibility of such a development; still less does he accomplish it, or even make its accomplishment very credible to anyone who can resist the contagion of the evolutionist's scientific optimism.®^
«* Op. cit., Vol. II, p. i86. 65 j^ Q_ Schurman, op. cit., p. 19.
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The method of ethics generally employed by evolutionists is as follows :
Eschewing every attempt to deduce moral rules for the guidance of conduct, they institute an inquiry into the origin of that morality by which human life is actually regulated. It is not their business to tell men how they should act, or to supply them with motives for originating, or principles for regulating their behavior; still less to mete out esteem and affection or hatred and contempt upon what may be considered the estimable or the blamable qualities of men. On the contrary, their aim is purely theoretical. They seek only the genesis of those moral notions, beliefs, and practices which constitute an obvious phenomenon of the life of man. They dis- sect complex moral phenomena into simple elements, and under the guidance of evolution track these elements to their last hiding-place in the physical constitution and environment of the lower animals. ^®
But the phases of morality which the scientific moralist thus binds together in his theory of development, are, when not a part of human history, purely imaginary. We know nothing of the morals of. the first species that ceased to be non-moral; for surely the shape and size of fossil remains, however useful they may be in other regards, do not enlighten us on this particular subject.
You may indeed study the psychical attributes of the dog or the elephant; but however rich your harvest of observations, you will be no whit nearer the origin of human morality, so long at least as conscience continues the unique prerogative of man, the only moral being we know. Even if you imagine a moral sense in the higher brutes, descriptive ethics, though acquiring thereby a comparative character, would be as far as ever from that genesis of man's morality which evolutionary moralists profess to explain in their theories of physical ethics.*'
And the same must be said with regard to all evolutionary theories about primitive society in general and conjugal rela- tions in particular.
There is, for instance, not the slightest ground apart from the exi- gencies of a theory, for the assumption of an aboriginal promiscuity in sexual relations, which indeed both biology and archeology tend
6« Op. cit, p. 23. ®^ Op cit., p. 30.
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to disprove. It is a gratuitous concession to our methodology when the facts of the world are supposed to arrange themselves according to our mode of apprehending them. We have no evidence whatever that all the branches of the human family passed through precisely the same stages of development either in general or still less in the details of their social institutions.®^ Isolating the various conjugal relations from their historical settings, in which alone an explanation of each is to be found, the theorist generally puts them in an arbi- trary row as one might string beads, and then asseverates that this linear arrangement of contemporaneous phenomena in space cor- responds to the successive order of their evolution in time. Mean- while no one knows that there has been such a universal develop- ment, or that there ever was a time when all the forms of the family did not coexist as they do to-day.®®
In the hands of Darwin and his followers the historical method in ethics was less an independent instrument of inves- tigation in morals than an apt means of confirming a biological hypothesis and a foregone conclusion upon the derivative character of morality.*^® And no one acquainted with evolu- tionary philosophy, its methods, and its teachings, will gain- say this stringent conclusion.
To sum up. American evolutionism followed in the wake of the European theorists, with this exception that it always claimed to be frankly theistic, and in harmony with the reli- gious spirit of the people at large. At bottom however this theism differs only in name from pantheism, since all pheno- mena, both physical and psychical, are but manifestations of the Underlying Power, the Eternal Reality. Being wider in its scope than idealism, and adapting itself to every depart- ment of thought and action, evolutionism has rallied around its standard an army of docile enthusiasts, who will* question and deny anything but the fundamental principles of Spencer and Darwin. It has indeed been well said that " the belief in the ultimate perfectibility, if not the present perfection, of the doctrine of evolution has become a part of the scientific fanaticism with which our age matches the religious fanati- cism of the sixteenth century." ^^
J. B. Ceulemans.
Moline, Ills.
«s Op. cit., p. 231. «9 Ibid., p. 241.
■^0 Ibid., p. 31. "^1 J. G. Schurman, op. cit, p. 72.
ECCLESIASTICAL DRESS AND VESTMENTS. 28^
EOOLESIASTIOAL DEESS AND VESTMENTS.
THE older the world grows, and the more complex becomes the constitution of human society, the greater and more necessary is the tendency to adopt some distinctive dress or uniform to differentiate the various vocations.
The Church, the army, navy, diplomatic service, and the law (in its higher branches) have long had costumes peculiar to themselves. Medicine stands alone in possessing no dis- tinctive garb. This is doubtless largely, if not wholly, ex- plained by the fact that the doctor follows his profession un- ostentatiously, practising his skill and treatment in private.
In the public services, both governmental and municipal, we find the same rule exists. Postal and telegraph officials, policemen and commissionaires, prison and asylum officials, fire brigades and hospital nurses, railway employees of all grades, mayors and civic corporations, chauffeurs and mes- senger boys, these and others are recognizable by their pre- scribed costume.
Even private undertakings and philanthropic societies, when they have attained sufficient proportions to be of public im- portance, have, within comparatively modern times, adopted a uniform for their employees. We find instances of this among the officials of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; also among hotel and theatrical functionaries, and the Masonic and Friendly societies.
Turning to the scholastic world, we meet with many ex- amples. There is the quaint medieval costume still worn by the scholars at Christ's Hospital, the distinctive dress of the Eton boys; and the academic robes of the chancellors, vice- chancellors, proctors, professors, graduates, and undergradu- ates of the various universities.
The history of clerical dress claims, for many reasons, a pre- eminence of interest. The dignity of the priestly office gives an importance to all that concerns its ministrations. It is, moreover, the oldest illustration of the tendency in human society to adopt a distinctive class costume. In those far- back times when the warrior fashioned his armor according to his personal fancy, or the exigencies of the period — in those days when navies had not yet been dreamed of, and
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when medicine and law had no existence apart from the Church — the vestments of ecclesiastics had long been regu- lated both by custom and rule. For, if the divinely appointed costume of the Levitical priesthood be not the first instance in the world's history of the adoption of a distinctive dress for one order of society, it certainly is the first authentic and detailed record of such a practice.
Let us briefly glance at the sacred vestments of Judaism. Amongst the Israelites the Levites were the lowest in priestly rank. Until the time of Agrippa, they wore no distinguish- ing dress. Nor were the higher orders among the Jewish priesthood differently clad from the rest of the people, save when engaged in their holy ministrations.
The priests wore while performing their sacred offices four special garments: These were (i) the linen breeches, (2) the tunic or coat, (3) the girdle, and (4) the bonnet. Like the sacred robe worn by our Lord, the tunic was woven through- out in one piece and fitted close to the body. The girdle was worn round the back of the neck, then crossed upon the breast, and lastly twisted round the body, with the ends hanging to the ground. The girdle was the distinctive priestly vestment, and is (in its use) very suggestive of the stole of the Christian Church. It was worn only during the actual ministration of the sacerdotal office. The inverted calyx of a flower best de- scribes the form of the bonnet, which was a tall, peaked cap. These four vestments were all of the snow-white " byssus " (or cotton) of Egypt.
In addition to the above, the high priest wore four more, known as the " Golden Vestments '\ because golden threads, together with the four sacred colors (white, purple, blue, and scarlet) consecrated to the use of the sanctuary, were woven into them. These four high-priestly vestments were : ( i ) the meil or robe, (2) the breastplate, (3) the mitre, and (4) the ziz or frontlet.
The meil was of dark blue and reached to the knees, its edge being adorned with pomegranates, worked in purple, blue, and scarlet, alternating with golden bells. The breast- plate was, according to the Rabbis, originally a kind of burse or flat receptacle stiffened in front with gold and jewels, with- in which were borne the mysterious Urim and Thummim.
ECCLESIASTICAL DRESS AND VESTMENTS. 2^^
It was about twelve inches square, and on the twelve gems (set in front) were engraved the names of the twelve tribes of Israel. Although in the later days of the Jewish dispen- sation, not' only were the Urim and Thummim lost, but the real import of their names was forgotten, the high priest still continued to wear the jeweled breastplate, which was attached by golden links to his shoulders and by woven bands about his waist.
The ziz (or frontlet) was a golden plate, suspended from the mitre by a web of blue lace. It was the length of the forehead and the breadth of two fingers, and on it was en- graved '* Holiness to the Lord ".
The mitre of the high priest was more splendid than the bonnet of the priest, and of greater height. According to rabbinical tradition (for the Rabbis seem to delight in exag- gerating the size of their priests* vestments!) the mitre at- tained eventually to the absurd height of eight yards ; and the girdle to three fingers' breadth and sixteen yards in length.
Any sacerdotal function was regarded invalid by the Jews, if the officiating priest was not fully vested in all the above robes of his office. The high priest had a complete new set of vestments for the great day of Atonement each year. When the vestments had become soiled, they were not washed, but used for making wicks for the lamps of the sanctuary.
Some similarity may be traced between most of the vest- ments worn by the Jewish priests and those now in use by the Catholic clergy. The Christian priest of the New Dis- pensation bears, when vested in alb, girdle, and crossed stole, some resemblance to the Jewish priest of the Old Dispensa- tion, clad in his linen tunic. Again, any one of the more ornate vestments of the Christian Church — the cope, the chasuble, and (still more closely) the dalmatic — suggests the splendid robe of the high priest of the Jewish Church; while the episcopal mitre and the pectoral cross of to-day seem to have been foreshadowed by the tall bonnet and the breast- plate of Judaism.
But as mere likeness of sound has often proved erroneous in tracing the derivation of words, so may the mere resem- blance of form be as delusive a guide to the origin of vestments. Hardly a single ecclesiologist of note to-day contends that
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Christian ecclesiastical vestments owe their origin to those of the Jewish Church. True that on comparison points of simi- larity exist between them, but the weight of evidence leans toward the theory that this likeness is either accidental, or has possibly arisen, in one or two cases, from a medieval attempt to make the ecclesiastical vestments then in use conform more closely to those analogous of the older dispensation. Indeed, it is now conceded by almost every ecclesiastical antiquary of authority that the clerical dress of the primitive Church dif- fered neither in shape nor material from that worn by the laity; except that in their sacred ministrations the early Christian clergy assumed garments that were usual to a Ro- man gentleman on solemn or festive occasions.
The position in which the primitive Church found herself during the first three centuries of the Christian era rendered such a custom unavoidable. In those early days of the Chris- tian Faith, when persecution was so bitter and imminent even when not actually rife, it would have been a gross act of folly for the bishops and priests to have moved abroad in a garb which would at once have singled them out as leaders of the despised and hated religion of the Nazarene. The pulse of popular feeling, and the prerogatives of the powers, of that period must have precluded the early Christians from even hazarding an attempt at anything like a prescriptive at- tire for their clergy. Therefore, if we would examine the origin of clerical dress, we must seek it in that worn by per- sons of position in the first century, especially the chiton and the toga.
The chiton, or tunic, was the most commonly worn gar- ment of those times, and fitted fairly closely to the body. Its length varied, sometimes reaching to the ankles, at others barely covering the knees. In color it would in ordinary cases probably be of some serviceable dark tint. Not infre- quently it was ornamented with two stripes which ran down the front of the garment from either side of the neck. These stripes differed in breadth, and perhaps also in color, ac- cording to the dignity of the wearer ; a senator using a broad clavus, as it was called, and a knight a narrower one. This striped chiton is often met with in early frescoes, and sug- gests a striking resemblance to the surplice and black stole of
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287
a Protestant clergyman. This resemblance is, however, in no sense historical. Such a garment appears in a fresco of one of the catacombs in Rome : an aged man is seated on a chair, while before him stand two youths clad in tunics adorned with clavi. This has often been taken as a representation of an early Confirmation, but there is sound reason for rejecting the supposition. What here concerns us is to note the dresses of the three persons, two of whom certainly represent laymen.
The toga was a long and ample robe which, on state occa- sions, was worn by a Roman gentleman over his tunic. The toga was at one time the characteristic dress of every adult Roman citizen, and must, from its nature, have been almost always laid aside when any exertion was required, as in toil or travel. Furthermore, in the first century of the Christian era, it had been wholly dropped by the lower orders of society. However, it continued to hold its place as the recognized " court dress " for all who had an audience of the Emperor; as also the appropriate habit for religious or civil ceremonial. The toga was worn by the advocate when pleading in the Forum; it was seen at the public sacrifices; and in a white toga the dead were borne to their last resting-place, while the mourners followed in those of black. In the eyes of the world, therefore, there was one form of dress which, though not exclusively confined to the clergy, was regarded as spe- cially suited for all solemn occasions; and it was by the use of this (the toga) that the early Church was enabled to ex- press her sense of the dignity of her sacred rites, without ex- citing the notice or arousing the attacks of the heathen popu- lace by which she was then so dangerously surrounded.
There is, moreover, reason to suppose that the principle un- derlying the use of sacred vestments, i. e. the setting aside of certain garments for exclusive employment in the Holy Mys- teries, was from the first quite evident. The toga and tunic used at the altar became sacred vestments to be worn hence- forth for no other purpose. To this intent St. Jerome, writ- ing in the fourth century, but evidently expressing the feel- ing throughout the Church, says: " We ought not to go into the sanctuary just as we please, and in our ordinary clothes, defiled with the visage of common life; but with clear con- science and clean garments handle the Sacraments of the Lord."
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In the vestments worn by the early Christian clergy during their priestly functions, and perhaps in their secular dress, we must note one point of distinction, namely that the color was restricted to white, the stripes upon the tunic probably being black. In this restriction and choice doubtless the Church was influenced by the idea of purity and gladness which are so naturally suggested by that color; and also probably by a prevalent impression (with which the vestments of the Old Dispensation coincide) that white was peculiarly appropriate to the Deity. Proof of this is found in the writings of St. Jerome, who, in his refutation of the Pelagians, says : " What is there, I ask, off"ensive to God, if I wear a tunic more than ordinarily handsome; or if a bishop, priest, or deacon, and other ministers of the Church, in the administration of the Sacrifice, come forth in white clothing?"
Hegessipus, a Jew, who became a convert to Christianity about 1 80 A. D., tells us that St. James the Just, the first Bishop of Jerusalem, when about " to offer supplication for the people " was accustomed to " use garments, not of wool, but of linen."
Two early authorities, Polycrates and Epiphanius, seem to imply that at least some of the Apostles adopted part of the distinctive vestments of the Jewish high priest, to emphasize the analogous position to which they had been called in the New Dispensation. Polycrates, writing at the close of the second century, speaks of St. John the Divine " becoming a priest, wearing the golden plate." His evidence is of special value, because (i) according to the consensus of tradition, the first Bishop of Ephesus was St. John, who died there early in the second century; (2) Polycrates was all but a contem- porary of St. John. Epiphanius was Bishop of Constantia, or Salamis, in Crete, 367-403 A. D. He gives a similar testi- mony concerning St. James : " It was permitted him to wear the golden plate upon his head." Epiphanius refers also to Eusebius and St. Clement as supporting this statement. As Epiphanius was by birth a Jew of Palestine, he may be sup- posed to have been familiar with the local tradition on the subject; therefore his evidence is worthy of note.
Theodoret, who became Bishop of Syria in 420 A. D., has a passage among his writings which has often been quoted as
ECCLESIASTICAL DRESS AND VESTMENTS. 380
proof of the early use of distinctive ecclesiastical vestments. It is to the effect that the Emperor Constantine gave to Mar- carius, Bishop of Jerusalem, a sacred robe, woven of golden thread, to be worn by him when administering Baptism. But too much importance should not be attached to this statement. The passage does not necessarily imply that the robe was specially suitable for its sacred purpose in any other respect beyond its splendor; and, when Theodoret goes on to inform us St. Cyril of Jerusalem was charged with having sold the robe, and that a stage dancer had bought and used it, the probability is that the said robe did not differ in fashion from secular clothing.
There is still less evidence to support the contention that there is proof of a primitive use of sacerdotal vestments in St. Paul's message in II Timothy: "The cloak that I left at Troas with Carpus, when thou comest, bring with thee, and the books, but especially the parchments." In fact the at- tempt to make a chasuble of this cloak appears to be dis- tinctly modern.
Tertullian, in his treatise on Prayer, refers to the custom of removing the cloak during prayer; a practice which he counts among " empty observances ", not to be insisted on as if they were founded on Divine precept or Apostolic com- mand, of which there is no evidence — "unless indeed," he sarcastically adds, " anyone should think that it was in prayer that St. Paul threw off his cloak and left it with Carpus." Tertullian here regards the cloak as a garment which might conceivably be put off for divine worship, and certainly not as one to be specially donned for the purpose. St. Chry- sostom too, in one of his homilies, speaks to the same ef- fect; evidently regarding the cloak as an ordinary secular garment only.
Two conclusions, deducible from evidence concerning ec- clesiastical costume in the early Christian Church, force them- selves upon us: I. In the primitive ages of Christendom, the garments worn by the clergy in their public ministrations did not differ in shape from those used on certain occasions by the civil society around them; and that in everyday life their garments differed in color and material no more than in form. There would obviously be reason for this in the hostility and
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persecution that continually raged around the Church in her infancy. An exact and striking parallel was, centuries later, presented by the Reformation in England, when the Catholic clergy were, so far as their ordinary attire was concerned, compelled to mix among their scattered flock, during the reigns of the later Stuarts, in lay attire, because of the severe penal laws enacted against them. But in the case of the early Church, there would be an additional reason in the extreme poverty of the primitive Christians; which did, doubtless, make it well nigh impossible to provide costly ac- cessories for the public services of the Church.
2. In spite of all this, " the principle underlying the use of a special garb was, at least at the time of ministration, both felt and acknowledged so far as circumstances allowed ". While officiating, the clergy wore the dress which society recognized as most befitting solemn ceremonial; and which was in color esteemed especially appropriate for divine wor- ship. Thus by reserving this garb exclusively for sacred purposes they gave to it almost the character of an ecclesias- tical vestment. There is also the evidence proving the use, by at least some of the Apostles, of distinctly sacerdotal in- signia ; and to this testimony due weight should be given.
It is then from this dignified costume of imperial Rome that throughout the centuries has been evolved the priestly vestments of the Catholic Church; as also, for the most part, that fashion which is recognized as the distinctive dress of the clergy in their everyday life, an attire in the use of which the ministers of all denominations have almost universally imitated the example of the ecclesiastics.
In this development, the controlling influence has been the conservatism which naturally arises from that regard which all devout persons must feel for the customs of their fore- fathers in matters religious: a conservatism that is intensi- fied in this case by a sense of the impropriety which would be evinced by the Church were she to follow the frequent changes in the fickle fashions of the world. Thus, while the world has altered and re-altered the cut of its clothes from the mere passion for novelty, the Church has, from a reverential regard for antiquity, kept as near as possible to the older forms, and only with great deliberation has modified eccles-
THE TEMPLE OF JAHU IN SYENE. ^QI
iastical dress, yielding slowly, as if by protest, to the in- fluence of circumstances.
During periods of violent religious commotion and up- heaval, when the reins of discipline have been lax, and in- dividual caprice could venture to assert itself, changes have sometimes been initiated which have left their mark when regular and peaceful days have been restored. On the other hand, we find long tracts of time which have been scarcely marked by a change of any kind ; and this is yet another point of view which lends interest and importance to the history of clerical costume; for, comparatively unimportant as may be the cut of a coat, or the color of a vestment, such things have from time to time illustrated the drift of thought on other and more vital questions.
John R. Fryar.
Canterbury, England.
THE TEMPLE OF JAHU IN SYENE AND PENTATEUOHAL OEITIOISM.
THE revolution which has been effected in Biblical criticism by the " science of the spade " during the last twenty years is one of the marvels of the time. It would be as im- possible to erect a Tubingen School of exegesis now as it would be to hold the verbal inspiration of the Bible in the sense in which it was understood by a generation but little removed from our own. Studies which smell of the lamp rather than of the desert are no longer in vogue, and a critic who would be heard must take into full account what we may term the genius loci as revealed by the excavator's spade. And the amount of excavation which is being assiduously carried out by fully equipped men at the present day is literally amazing. The English Palestine Exploration Society was founded in 1869. Till about ten years ago it was practically alone in the field; now nearly every nation has its army of trained ex- cavators at work, whether it be in Crete, Egypt, Babylonia, the land of the Hittites, or the lands of the facile Greeks and practical Romans. And the output from these scenes of ac- tivity is enormous, so much so that it is well nigh impossible to keep intelligent pace with the information which is being
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thrust upon us. There is, too, at least in England, a certain amount of apathy begotten perhaps of a spirit of scepticism due to the hasty generalizations of some less prudent workers, and also due, in part, to a sense of disappointment that the excavations which were to do such great things — unearth for instance the very cuneiform tablets on which Moses scratched the Law of Sinai — have not fulfilled the expectations which wild dreamers had formed.
But putting aside the many results of doubtful value and the rash conclusions which have tended to throw discredit on the whole science (for it is a science), many very solid results have been obtained. It may be a convenience to the general reader to have presented to him in brief form the results of one of the most notable discoveries of the last two or three years.
The Papyri of Assouan or Elephantine, eleven in number, were discovered between the years 1 90 1-4, and ten of the eleven were found in the original box in which they had been placed by the owners. An accident, as is so often the case, led to the discovery, for they were unearthed by some road- menders. At the same time it is but just to remark that Prof. Sayce, who had rescued one of these precious relics from the hands of some sebakh diggers in 1901, urged that excavations should be made on the spot in the hope of finding more. This was done, but without result. Meanwhile the native dealers were offering for sale the remaining ten, and these were bought by Mr. Robert Mond and Lady William Cecil, and published with notes, etc. by Sayce and Cowley in 1906.^ In that same year the Germans and the French divided the site between them, and the former quickly published three Papyri,^ of which two were duplicate copies of a petition from the Jews in Elephantine to Bagoas, the Persian Governor of Judah; the third we shall mention directly. The publication of the more or less mutilated fragments which remained has been deferred till this year, when Dr. Sachau ^ has published
1 Aramaic Papyri discovered at Assuan; edited by A. H. Sayce with the assistance of A. E. Cowley and with Appendices by W. Spiegelberg and Seymour de Ricci, London, 1906.
^Notice sur un Papyrus Egypto-Arameen de la Bibliotheque Imperiale de Strasburg, par M. J. Euting. 1903.
3 Aramaische Papyrus und Ostraka aus einer Judischen Militar-Kolonie zu Elephantine. Edited by Eduard Sachau. 2 Vols. Leipzig, 191 1.
THE TEMPLE OF JAHU IN SYENE. 20^
a number of official letters and also two priceless documents one being the Story of Ahiqar, the Achiacharus of the Greek text of Tobias i : 21/ and the other being nothing less than an Aramaic version of the famous inscription of Darius I at Behistun, which played so important a part in the decipher- ment of the Babylonian cuneiform script.
It is easy to see how important this Aramaic version would have been in the early days of cuneiform decipherment. The discovery of the Story of Ahiqar or Achiacharus in an Aramaic version of the fifth century B. C. is of great interest. Prob- ably few legends have been more popular or more widely dif- fused. Hitherto it has been found only in comparatively late Syriac, Armenian, Arabic, Greek, and Slavonic recensions; but the recent discovery shows us that at least a portion of the material woven into the Book of Tobias was very niuch older than has hitherto been suspected.
Interest centers however chiefly round the Aramaic Papyri which refer to the Jewish establishment at Syene or Assouan. In a previous issue of the Review we have given a precis of their contents and have drawn attention to the importance of the data they furnish for students of the Pentateuch. As is well known, modern critics are practically at one in maintain- ing that the legislative portions of the Pentateuch, commonly known as the Priestly Code, are to be referred to a period posterior to the Exile, while the Book of Deuteronomy is said to have been not merely discovered in 621 in the reign of Josias but to have been actually composed at that time and presented to the nation as the product of Moses's pen. These two points may be regarded as the keystones of modern Pen- tateuchal criticism and the religious history of Israel has been re-written in accordance with this view. Practically no rap- prochement between the traditional view and this revolution- ary thesis has been possible, for the two Schools approached the question from such widely differing standpoints that the fundamental data of the one were met by a flat denial from the other. It has always been felt that nothing but the logic of the spade could ultimately decide the question. Hence the dream of many enthusiasts that one day excavations at
*The name occurs also in ii : 18 (LXX), and in 14:10 (LXX & Itala), The Vulgate has it only in 11 : 18, under the form Acior ; cf. Judith, 5, 6, 14: 6.
294 ^^^ ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
Kiriath-Sopher, or " Book-Town ", would present us with the actual tablets on which Moses wrote! But though this may be an enthusiast's dream it was surely no dream that one day there might turn up pre-Exilic tablets which would show us the Pentateuch in existence at a date anterior to the Exile. This has not occurred yet, though the recent excavations at Samaria seemed at one time to bring us extraordinarily near its realiza- tion. But though the pre-Exilic tablets are not yet forth- coming, we have in these post-Exilic (but still fifth century) Papyri some information which no Pentateuchal critic can af- ford to disregard.
Briefly, then, the Papyrus published by Sayce and Cowley in 1906 introduced us to the private life and affairs of a Jewish family settled at Syene in the fifth century B. C. The documents are all concerned with their legal affairs and may be described as the title-deeds of the family. These Jews are depicted as living in a garrison town, as being on intimate terms with the Egyptians, as intermarrying with them, and above all, as having a temple of their own which was dedicated to Jahu or Jehovah. This temple is sometimes spoken of, in Sayce and Cowley E. 14, and J. 6, as '' the chapel of Jahu," a rendering which is however not quite certain. Most of these deeds are concerned with the marriage and property of one Mibhtahyah, a daughter of Mahseiah, son of Yedoniah. The family is sometimes spoken of as being " Jews in the fortress of Jeb " (B), sometimes as "Aramaeans of Syene " (A).
This Mibhtahyah marries one As-hor, evidently an Egyp- tian, and a most interesting account of the trousseau he pro- vided for the occasion is given. It is surprising to find among the " properties " given to himself on the occasion " one ivory cosmetic box." Amongst the articles he bestows on his future wife is " one garment of wool, new, embroidered on both sides ( ?), 8 cubits long by 5 ". He also gives her cups and bowls of bronze, etc. In this deed of settlement full provision is made in case either party divorces the other, or in case the husband at any time repudiates his wife. It is somewhat re- markable that the wife seems to be at perfect liberty to divorce her husband, just as he is at liberty to divorce her; but it seems a hard provision that in either case she has to re- store the trousseau ! (G).
THE TEMPLE OF JAHU IN SYENE. jQi;
Later on we find legal enactments regarding Yedoniah and Mahseiah, sons of this same Mibhtahyah by her husband As- hor (H). It is of extreme interest to note that in a later Papyrus (J) he is called by the Jewish name of Nathan. Does this mean that he was converted to Judaism ? As an in- dication of the freedom with which the Jewish religion was practised in Elephantine we notice that the judges in the courts allowed them, even when in litigation with Egyptians, to " swear by Jahu the God in Jeb " (B). The inventory of the trousseau furnished by As-hor on occasion of his marriage with Mibhtahyah (G) shows that these Jewish families were certainly well-to-do. In the deeds drawn up regarding the property of Mibhtahyah's sons we find that this lady possessed slaves, and we read of one of them, ** I have tattooed a yod on his right hand, the writing being tattooed in Aramaic, like thac of Mibhtahyah" (K).
But the chief point of interest for us is undoubtedly " the temple of Jahu the God in the fortress of Jeb," and it is on this temple and its fortunes that the newly published Papyri found by the German explorers throw the most interesting light.
We give the text of the Papyrus as published by Gunkel in the Expositor for January, 191 1 ; but as we have been able to glance only at the original publication by Sachau, we cannot guarantee either its completeness or its absolute accuracy. We divide it into paragraphs A. B., etc. for convenience of re- ference.
A. — To our Lord Bagohi, ruler of Judah, thy servant — Jedonja, with his colleagues — the priests in the fortress of Jeb [the Aramaic form of the Egyptian " lb " i. e. ivory, whence Elephantine].
B. — May our God, the God of Heaven, bless thee richly, and for all time. May He grant thee increase of grace a thousandfold, be- fore King Darius,^ and before the Princes of the Royal House,* with length of life. Be ever glad and of good health.
C. — Further, thy servants Jedonja, and his colleagues, speak thus : " In the month Tammuz, in the 14th year of King Darius, when Arsham had departed, and had gone to the King, the priest of the God Chnub (Anubis), in the fortress of Jeb, made a conspiracy
5 Darius II, Nothus, 424-404 B. C. « Cf. Dan. 1:3.
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with Widrang, who was then Governor, to destroy the temple of the God Jahu in the fortress of Jeb.
D. — Thereupon this accursed Widrang sent a letter to his son, Nephajan, who was colonel in the fortress of Sewen, saying that the temple in the fortress of Jeb must be destroyed.
E. — Then Nephajan brought Egyptian and other troops; they, having weapons, entered the fortress of Jeb, forced their way into the temple, and razed it to the ground.
F. — They broke the stone pillars which were there; they also destroyed the five gateways hewn out of stone which were in the temple, and the doors with the bronze hinges; the roof, entirely constructed of cedar beams, and the remaining furniture, they burned with fire. The gold and silver ^ vessels for sprinkling,^ and the utensils of the temple they carried away and appropriated.
G. — In the days of the kings of Egypt ® our fathers had built this temple in the fortress of Jeb ; when Cambyses conquered Egypt, he found the temple already built. He destroyed the temple of the gods of the Egyptians ; but this temple was not injured.
H. — After the deeds of Widrang and the priests of Chnub, we, with our wives and children, ^^ wore sackcloth, and we fasted and prayed to Jahu, the Lord of Heaven.
I. — He granted us a spectacle of joy regarding Widrang; the dogs tore the fetters from oif his feet; all the treasures which he had amassed were lost, and all the men were slain who had wished evil to the temple; this we beheld with joy.
J. — Also at the time that this misfortune happened to us, we sent a writing to our lords, and also to Jehochanan,^^ the High Priest, with his colleagues, the priests of Jerusalem, to Ostan, the brother of Anani, and to the nobles of the Jews; but they returned no letter to us.
K. — We have worn sackcloth and fasted since the " Tammuz " day of the 14th year of King Darius unto this day; our wives have become like unto widows ; we have not anointed ourselves with oil, and we have drunk no wine.
L. — Also until the present day of the 17th year of King Darius no meal-offering, no offering of frankincense, or burnt-offering, has been brought to the temple.
M. — Thy servants now speak, Jedonja with his companions, and the Jews, all citizens of Jeb. If it appear right unto my Lord, have
"^ For weight and value of these cf. Nbs : 7, 19, etc. Esdras 7, 25, 33. * Lev. 8 : 30.
® This is previous to the Persian conquest in 525. The last Egyptian King was Psammetichus III.
10 Joel 1:13; 2:16. 11 Neh. 12:22.
THE TEMPLE OF JAHU IN SYENE, ^qy
regard to this temple, to reluild it, for we are forbidden to rebuild it. Behold us here in Egypt, who have received thy benefits and favors. We pray thee to send a letter to thy servants concerning the temple of the God Jahu, that it may be rebuilt in the fortress- of Jeb, as it was before.
N. — Then will we offer meal-offerings, frankincense, and burnt- offerings upon the altar of the God Jahu in thy name; and at every time we, with our wives and children, and with all the Jews here assembled, will offer prayer for thee if this be so, until the rebuild- ing of this temple.
O. — If thou continue thine aid, until the temple be rebuilt, thy deed will be acknowledged by Jahu, the God of Heaven, with the gift offered unto Him of a whole-offering, or part-offering; thou shalt receive a thousand talents of silver. As regards the gold, we have sent our message and communication.
All these things we have notified in our letter to Delaja and Shelemja, the sons of Sanballat, ruler of wSamaria.
Arsham has known nothing of all that we have suffered.
Dated 20 Marcheschvan, the 17th year of King Darius.
That this request was granted seems to follovir from a pro- tocol on a leaf of papyrus subsequently discovered :
A protocol on the reports of Bagohi and of Delaja: It is for thee to command in Egypt, before Arsham, concerning the Altar- House of the God of Heaven, which was built in the fortress of Jeb, before our days, and before Cambyses; and afterward destroyed by the cursed Widrang, in the 14th year of King Darius, that it be rebuilt on its own place, as it was before; meal-offering and frankincense to be again offered on the altar, as in ancient days.
It is easy to see how this document affects Pentateuchal criti- cism. For the critical argument has briefly been this : Deuter- onomy, Chapters I2 and i6, insisted upon one place of wor- ship as alone legitimate; but the subsequent history as given us in the Books of Kings shows no knowledge of such legis- lation, for we find sacrifice offered everywhere without ad- verse comment, therefore the Book of Deuteronomy did not exist during the reigns of the kings. Advantage is then taken of the statement in IV Kgs. 22 : 3, that " the Book of the Law " was discovered in the Temple, to assert that this was nothing else than Deuteronomy and that its " discovery '*" was but a polite way of saying that the ground was, so to say,.
298 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
" salted ", and the book which had been but just compiled in the interest of the priesthood, conveniently found. The argu- ment, it will be noted, is simply that from silence, — always a precarious one. But see the irony of fate. At the time when these Assouan Papyri were being written the Deuteronomic Law was, according to the critics' own statement, in full pos- session. Yet we find its provisions absolutely ignored by these Jews of Assouan who, as we shall see presently, probably knew the Book of Leviticus quite well. If the critical pro- cedure was justified in the case of the silence of the Books of Kings, it must logically maintain that in the face of the silence of these same Papyri, or rather of their writers as shown in their daily lives, Deuteronomy had not been written in the fifth century B. C. For the facts concerning these Jews in Egypt are these : they had erected a temple of Jehovah in Syene; the priests of the Egyptian Anubis were jealous, and on the departure of one Arsam (apparently the Persian Gov- ernor of the district), had induced one Widrang, the then Governor, to destroy the temple. This was in the year 411- 410 B. C. At the time this took place complaint was made by these Jews of Syene to the Hierarchy in Jerusalem; but with no result. They had also applied to their Persian suzerain; but equally without result. They now, in the year 408-7, appeal again to the Persian Governor.
Now these Jews either knew the Book of Deuteronomy or they did not. If they did not know it, then the critics who place the composition of that Book in the seventh century B. C. because of the disregard of its precepts shown in the Books of Kings — a silence from which critics argue the non- existence of the Book — must, if they would be consistent, apply the same principles and say that Deuteronomy was non-existent in the fifth century. The fact that these Jews in Egypt so readily communicated with those in Palestine will not allow us to say that Deuteronomy may have been known in Palestine but not in Egypt.^^ It is, then, practically certain that Deuteronomy was as familiar to them as any other part of the Bible. Yet according to the common interpretation of Deut. 12 and 16, these Jews of Syene flagrantly violated its precepts, for that law forbade the existence of more than
12 See Esther ii : i ; II Mace, i : i.
THE TEMPLE OF JAHU IN SYENE, 300
one sanctuary. Critics of the Wellhausen-Graf School mujt of course logically conclude that Deuteronomy did not exist at the time. But is it not much more likely that it is our interpretation of Deuteronomy 12 and 16 which is at fault? For, be it noted, we have absolutely no proof that the Jews interpreted those passages in the rigorous sense which alone it is generally assumed to bear. The Moabite Stone had al- ready told us of an "altar-stone (?) of Yahve," II. 17-18, in Nebo ; and this, too, would have been in contradiction to the Deuteronomic Law as generally understood. But both com- mon sense and the whole tenor of Deut. 12 and 16 demand that, whatever restrictions that law put upon the multiplication of the places of worship, they only applied to the Land of Promise itself. How could they have been enforced for a Jew or body of Jews who dwelt outside the limits of that land? And the way in which these Egyptian Jews ask for help from the Jerusalem hierarchy in the rebuilding of their temple is in itself a proof that they had no idea that this very temple constituted an infringement of the Mosaic Law. Are we to suppose that the failure of the Jerusalem priesthood to reply to their request was due to their indignant refusal to acknowl- edge such a temple since it was schismatic ?
These Papyri, then, serve to correct our interpretation of a passage of the Law which has been, according to its false in- terpretation, made the pivot on which the whole vast structure -of modern Pentateuchal criticism revolves.
Nor is this all. It would seem as though these same Papyri bear witness to an acquaintance with the so-called Priestly Code, or legislative portions of the Pentateuch, which critics affirm was only compiled after the Restoration. For these Jews write to Bagoas : "Also until the present day of the 17th year of King Darius no meal-offering (nn:D Lev. 2:1), no offering of frankincense ( nji:}^ Lev. 2:1), or burnt- offering {r6^}^ Lev. i: i) has been brought to the temple." They promise him, too, that if he comes to their aid, " then will we offer meal-offerings, frankincense, and burnt-offerings upon the altar of the God Jahu in thy name." Now it would be unscientific to see in these words as Prof. Sayce apparently does,^^ a quotation of Leviticus, and it would be perfectly
^^ Expositor, Nov., 191 1, p. 426.
300 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
justifiable to argue that these words only bear witness to the legislative tradition as opposed to the literary tradition of the Mosaic law. They show indeed that the thing existed, i. e. the sacrifices of which we read in Leviticus; but they cannot be made to show that the written account of them which is preserved for us in Leviticus was actually known to the Jews in Egypt. But we hardly need to be reminded that the criti- cal theory regarding the date of the composition of the Priestly Code is but a theory ; it has never been proved. The traditional view, that namely of the Mosaic authorship of the Code, remains in possession until disproved. When, then, a fact like the above reference to sacrifices, which are expressly named in Leviticus, is presented to us, it must be regarded as confirmatory of the tradition. Nor does this reference stand alone; the Marseilles Sacrificial Tablet, dating from the fourth or even the fifth century B. C, reads like a chapter out of Leviticus and we find there the very terms used in Leviticus for some of the sacrifices, e. g. whole-offering, ( bSj Lev. 6: 15), and thank-offering, (nVsy Lev. 17: 5).
These discoveries do not prove to demonstration the falsity of the critical hypothesis ; but they most certainly give us pause. A few brief notes on the several sections of this appeal must suffice us here:
A. This Bagohi is mentioned by Josephus (Ant. XI, vii, i), as "the Genera] of another Artaxerxes army"; he polluted the temple and forced the Jews to pay 50 shekels on every lamb offered in sacrifice. He seems to have been a stern ruler, for he inflicted condign punishment on the Jews for the murder of Jesus by his brother John the High Priest. Bagoses, as Josephus calls him, insisted, in spite of the pro- tests of the Jews, on entering the temple, saying: "Am not I purer than he who was slain in it?" i. e. Jesus, brother of the High Priest.
F. The temple must have been exceedingly fine. It was clearly not modeled on that at Jerusalem, as was the case with the temple at Onion discovered by Flinders Petrie; ^* for this Egyptian temple had five gates, as opposed to the one gate of the Jerusalem temple. The cedar can only have been brought from the Lebanon ; but the quarries of Syene are
1* Cf. Josephus, Ant. XIII, iii, 3; Wars, I, i, i ; VII, x, 3.
THE TEMPLE OF JAIIU IN SYENE. ^qj
famous, and Prof. Sayce has discovered in one of them the very bases of the columns hewn out for this temple; for the letters BI (an abbreviation in the Assouan Papyri for "house" or "temple") are cut on the rocks apparently to mark out the boundaries of the quarry which the Jews were permitted to use. The bases still standing measure nearly three feet in diameter and consequently the columns of this Jewish temple must have compared favorably with those in the great Egyptian temples. It is curious that its wealth should have proved a temptation, just as did that of the temple in Jerusalem.
G. This temple was then built before the Persian conquest of Egypt, i. e. before 525 B. C. The petitioners state that it was spared by Cambyses, though they do not here state the reasons for this act of mercy. Fortunately the fragment of Papyrus published by Euting comes to our assistance, for there we read : " When the Egyptians rebelled, we did not abandon our Lord, and no harm was found in us. In the 14th year of Darius after that our Lord Arsam fled ( ?) to that wicked king ..." The Papyrus is here defective, but it seems to imply that in addition to their act of loyalty when Cambyses came into the country, the Jews were also loyal when Arsam, if the text be correct, played the traitor. The antiquity of this temple confirms the history as given in Jeremias 43, where we are told that the Jews with Jeremias went down into Egypt, and in 44:1, that they dwelt in Migdol, Taphnes, Memphis and in the land of Phatures.^^ The too often scouted Letter of Aristaeus to Philocrates also receives singular confirmation, for Aristaeus says ^® that as many as 100,000 Jews were transplanted into Egypt to fight under Psammetichus against the Ethiopians. Syene was the gar- rison town established against the Ethiopians, hence the term which recurs so frequently in these Papyri, " the fortress of Jeb." The Papyrus published by Euting and unfortunately so much mutilated seems to show that these Jews were actual members of the garrison and that they were steadfast at a time when Arsam, the Persian Governor, went over to the king of ( ?) the Ethiopians, and when, too, the priests of the Sera- is cf. also Ezechiel 29: 10, where Syene or Assouan is especially mentioned i« See the Letter in Swete, Introd. to O. T. in Greek, p. 521, ist ed.
302 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
paeum had proved disloyal and had stopped up the well in- tended for the use of the garrison.
I. The Jews hardly afford us an edifying spectacle in their joy at Widrang's misfortunes; but we cannot judge them by Christian standards any more than we can condemn the Jews of Esther's day for their wholesale massacre of their enemies. ^^
O. The reference to Sanballat here is exceedingly inter- esting. He is called " the Ruler of Samaria," i. e. he was the Persian Governor there. He may well be identified with the Sanballat who proved so hostile to the Jews in Nehemias's days, Neh. 2 : 10, 19, 4: I, 7. For those events are expressly dated by Nehemias 2 : I as taking place after ** the twentieth year of Artaxerxes," i. e. in 445 B. C. The Jews of Syene send an appeal not to Sanballat himself, but to his sons, and we may .well suppose that in the year 408-7, when the appeal was made, Sanballat was already dead. It is worth while pointing out here a curious mistake on the part of Josephus. He assigns Sanballat, the enemy of the Jews and the father- in-law of Manasses, Neh. 12:28, to the reign of the last Darius, i. e. Codomannus, 338-331, B. C, and declares that he died after the siege of Gaza by Alexander the Great,^* thus making him live a century after he really died!
But why did the Jews of Syene appeal to the sons of San- ballat rather than to the Hierarchy at Jerusalem? We have seen, J, that their first appeal was to these latter; but that they had no answer. Their appeal, then, to Sanballat, the Ruler of Samaria, can only have been because the events detailed in Esdras- Nehemias were familiar to them and because they divined rightly enough that they would stand more chance of a favorable hearing from the anti-Judaistic hierarchy at Samaria than from the Jerusalem priesthood. The protocol cited al- ready shows that they were justified in their supposition. But what an extraordinary state of things it portrays. The silence of the Jerusalem priesthood may indicate that they regarded the temple at Syene as schismatic ; but the action of those same Jews in appealing to the schismatic temple authorities at Samaria certainly placed them in the position of schismatics.
Such is the picture of Jewish life in Egypt in the fifth cen-
1'^ Cf. Esther 9: 13, 18-24. 18 See Ant. XI, viii, 2-4.
THE MOTU PROPRIO " QUANT AVIS DILIGENT! A:' ^Ol
tury B. C. It serves to throw a vivid light on the history of the times, and incidentally it illumines and confirms the Bible history. It only remains for the French excavators at Syene to publish their " finds," when perhaps we shall have a further chapter in the history set before us.
Hugh Pope, O.P.
Collegio Angelica, Rome.
THE MOTU PEOPRIO "QUANTA VIS DILIGENTIA".
^^ \ A/ HATEVER be the diligence used in framing laws, it V V frequently proves impossible to obviate every doubt which may subsequently arise from the interpretation of them."" Of this the Motu Proprio Quantavis diligentia has been itself an example. Without speaking of wilful misrepresentations of its object for political ends, there has not been wantihg the usual controversy as to its real bearing and the extent of its application.^ As Pennacchi remarks, the law of the Church is essentially traditional and any particular decree can be best understood in the light of previous legislation on the matter.
The Motu Proprio Quantavis diligentia is not an isolated act; it is one of a series of measures taken by the Church to protect the honor of her clergy by securing for them, even in civil and criminal matters, as far as circumstances permit, a special tribunal before an ecclesiastical judge.
St. Paul considered it a shame for Christians to go and be judged before the unjust and not before the saints (I Cor. 6 : I ) ; and likewise it seemed repugnant to Christian sense that priests and bishops, the fathers and teachers of the faith- ful, should have to appear before laymen to be judged by them. There could be no question of exemption under the pagan emperors. But soon after the end of the persecutions synods commenced to ask that ecclesiastical causes be brought before the episcopal court.^ It is only gradually that the rights of the Church were recognized by the State, and not
1 The Motu Proprio " Quantavis diligentia " and its Critics, by the Arch- bishop of Dublin; Canoniste contemporain, December, 191 1; De religiosis et Missionariis supplementa et documenta Periodica, 15 December, 191 1; Monitore Ecclesiastico, January, 19 12.
2 III Carthage, c. 9 (397) ; Chalcedon, c. 9 (450 ; Agde, c. 32 (506) ; III Toledo, c. 3 (589).
304 ^^^^ ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
without occasional friction or struggle.^ At first it was the purely ecclesiastical matters that were withdrawn from the jurisdiction of secular courts, then the civil or lesser criminal causes of clerics, until finally the principle of the exclusive •competence of ecclesiastical judges over clerics, in any case whatsoever, was admitted in the law of Christian nations, as it was explicitly laid down in the canons of the Church. In England this was only in the days of the Norman kings, but much earlier in other countries. The Decretum Gratiani, after quoting from synodal decrees and papal constitutions, concludes: "From the above it is to be understood that a clergyman is not to be brought before public courts either in a civil or criminal case, unless, perhaps, the bishop would not decide the civil case, or in a criminal one, would have de- graded the cleric."
But if recognized in principle, the privilegium fori was not always respected in practice. Even in the ages of faith it met with great opposition on the part of kings, dukes, and baronets, always so jealous of the power of bishops. It was one of the main points in contest between St. Thomas a Becket and Henry II. Against the encroachments of material force the Church used her spiritual weapons, censures, excom- munications, and interdicts. The Councils of Toledo and of Chalcedon threaten with excommunication any cleric who .should cite another cleric before a secular tribunal. The Councils of Cologne (1266), of Exeter (1287), of Leyde (1293), and others pronounce the same penalty against lay- men guilty of the same offence. This was principally local legislation. The constitution of Martin V, Ad reprunendas insolentias (i February, 1428), emanating from the supreme authority, is of more universal application. The Pope de- plores therein the many violations of ecclesiastical immunity reported to him from different countries: lay judges do not Tiesitate to drag to their tribunal ecclesiastical persons and institutions, even in causes spiritual in themselves; and what is sadder still is that often this is done at the request of ec- clesiastics. Therefore the pain of excommunication is de- creed against those ecclesiastics, the judges and other officials, their accomplices, even private persons who took a leading
* Baronius : Annates "Ecdesiastici, a. 387.
THE MOTU PROPRIO '' QUANTAVIS DILIGENTIAP 30-
part in the proceedings against clerics. " Omnes et singulae personae seculares et regulares . . . omnes et singulos judices et executores . . . eoi;um officiales et consiliarios et personas privatas quae praemissorum principales perpetratores exis- terent." *
These somewhat severe measures were rendered necessary by abuses which called for energetic repression. Ordinarily the censures were incurred only by the judges and public au- thorities who presumed to exercise jurisdiction over clerics in defiance of the prescriptions of the canons. The common discipline of the Church for a long period of years was rep- resented by the Bulla Coenae, which the Popes used to publish annually on Holy Thursday (In Coena Domini), and parts of which at least remained in force even when it ceased to be thus published. In § 15 of that Constitution there is a sentence of excommunication against legislators who enact laws cur- tailing the liberty of the Church, and against public officials who bring before their tribunal clerics entitled to the privi- legium fori. " Quive ex eorum praetenso officio, vel ad in- stantiam partis, aut aliorum quorumcumque, personas eccles- iasticas . . . coram se ad suum tribunal Audientiam, Cancel- lariam. Consilium vel Parlamentum, praeter Juris Canonici dispositionem trahunt vel trahere faciunt, vel procurant di- recte vel indirecte, quovis quaesito colore: — necnon qui statuta, ordinationes ... ex quavis causa . . . ordinaverint et publicaverint, vel factis et ordinatis usi fuerint, unde libertas ecclesiastica tollitur, sen in aliquo laeditur vel deprimitur . . ." Private persons are not mentioned here. At a time when ec- clesiastical courts were organized everywhere and their au- thority recognized by the civil power, it was a great abuse on the part of secular judges thus publicly to disregard the law of the Church. It was a sacrilegious invasion of her domain which deserved to be visited with severe punishment. The offence of plaintiffs who appealed for justice to lay courts when they should go to the bishop's, was considered a less grievous disorder, and, under ordinary circumstances, it was not found necessary to deal with them with the same rigor.
* Bullarium Magnum. Vol. IV, p. 729.
3o6 '^I^E- ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
But in modern times the position of judges, in this matter, has changed. Often they are not free to cite or not to crte clerics to their tribunal; they have to do so or resign their office. Besides the hardships it would entail for many of them, this would tend to deprive society of the services of its most conscientious members in the administration of justice.
The ancient law had to be adapted to present conditions. This was done in the constitution Apostolicae Sedis. Chapter VII retains the essential dispositions of § 15 of the Bulla CoenaCj but with one modification. " Cogentes sive directe sive indirecte judices laicos ad trahendum ad suum tribunal personas ecclesiasticas praeter canonicas dispositiones ; — iien* edentes leges vel decreta contra libertatem aut jura Ec- clesiae." The censure strikes now those who compel the judges to bring the clerics before their tribunals (" cogentes "), outside the cases provided for by canon law. That it did not strike the judges and other inferior officials was suffi- ciently clear from the text and it was moreover declared explicitly by the Holy Office on 15 June, 1870, and on i Feb- ruary, 1 87 1. " Excommunicationem eos non attingere, qui subordinati sint, etiamsi judices fuerint, sed in eos tantum esse latam, qui a nemine coacti vel talia agunt vel alios ad agendum compellunt, quos etiam indulgentiam nuUam mereri facile per- spicies . . . ." ^
But who are the " cogentes " who incur now the excommuni- cation ? Many thought that it must be the parties who refer ecclesiastical suits to secular courts and thus oblige the judges to proceed against clerics. The letter of the law favored that interpretation. There seemed to be no one else to whom the word ** cogentes " could apply, since the lawmakers were the object of a special clause. Nor did there seem to be any other effective way of obtaining the end intended by this decree. Some of the best canonists (most of them, says D'Annibale), favored this view at first. Others however objected that this would be a considerable extension of the law, and an ex- tension in odiosis ought not to be admitted unless clearly ex- pressed. The parties, moreover, are not always without ex- cuse ; they are not " a nemine coacti ", when there exist no other but secular tribunals to obtain justice against clerics.
^Acta S. Sedis, 187X), Vol. VI, p. 433.
THE MOTU PROPRIO - QUANTAVIS DILIGENTIA^ 307
Whatever may have been the value of the arguments for the first interpretation, the second prevailed, and it became offi- cial by the decree of the Holy Office of 23 January, 1886, which was approved by Leo XIII. " Suprema Congregatio S. R. U. Inquisitionis non semel declaravit caput Cogentes non afficere nisi legislatores et alias auctoritates cogentes sive directe sive indirecte judices laicos ad trahendum ad suum tri- bunal personas ecclesiasticas praeter canonicas dispositiones. Hanc vero declarationem SSmus D. N. Leo Papa XIII pro- bavit et confirmavit, ideoque S. haec Congregatio illam cum omnibus locorum Ordinariis pro norma communicandam esse censuit. Ceterum in iis locis, in quibus fori privilegio per Summos Pontifices derogatum non fuit, si in eis non datur jura sua prosequi nisi apud judices laicos, tenentur singuli prius a proprio ipsorum Ordinario veniam petere ut clericos in forum laicorum convenire possint, eamque Ordinarii nun- quam denegabunt, tum maxime cum Ipsi controversiis inter partes conciliandis f rustra operam dederint. Episcopos autem in id forum convenire absque venia Sedis Apostolicae non licet. Et si quis ausus fuerit trahere ad judices laicos vei clericum sine venia Ordinarii, vel Episcopum sine venia S. Sedis, in potestatem eorundem Ordinariorum erit in eum, praesertim si fuerit clericus, animadvertere poenis et censuris ferendae sententiae, uti violatorem privilegii fori, si id ex- pedire in Domino judicaverint." ^ Here it was authorita- tively declared that the Chapter Cogentes affects only law- givers and other authorities who compel either directly or in- directly lay judges to bring ecclesiastical persons before judges of the civil courts.
But it was added, as if by way of corrective to the con- cession thus made, that in places where the derogation of the privilegium fori has not been obtained from the Holy See, if there is no other way of defending one's rights except recourse to the secular courts, the permission of the bishop has to be obtained by any one who wishes to summon a cleric before a civil judge, otherwise punitive measures may be taken against the offender. From this decision we can see how the legisla- tion of the Church concerning the privilegium fori had at this stage of its development become adjusted to the new conditions
« Cf. Instructio S.C.P.F., 17 May, 1886.
3o8 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
of society in the various countries. In some the privilege has been partially or totally abrogated by concordats or other pro- visions sanctioned by the Holy See. These determine the duties and rights of Catholics. In others,. episcopal courts are organized and ecclesiastical jurisdiction is exercised: the pri- vilegium fori is in full force and has to be respected by all under pain of sin ; but excommunication, latae sententiae, would be incurred by legislators only, and not by subordin- ate officials or private persons. In others again no special arrangements have been made with the State; but neither are there ecclesiastical courts from which justice could be ob- tained. Clerics may then be brought before the civil judges, although permission must be obtained first, under pain of sin and punishments to be determined by the bishop.
The Motu Proprio Quantavis diligentia refers to that legis- lation, the controversies about the chapter Cogentes, and the official interpretation of it given by the Holy Office. Then it goes on : ^
But now in these evil times when there is so little regard shown for ecclesiastical immunity that not only clerics and priests, but also the bishops and cardinals of the Holy Roman Church, are brought before lay tribunals, the situation imperatively demands of us that those whom the gravity of the sin does not deter from such sacrilegious crime be restrained within the bounds of duty by the severity of the punishment. Therefore by this our Motu Proprio, we enact and ordain that all private persons, whether of the laity or of the clergy, male or female, who without permission of ecclesias- tical authority cite before lay judges any ecclesiastical persons whomsoever, either in criminal or civil cases, and publicly compel them to be present thereat, incur also excommunication latae sen- tentiae^ reserved in a special manner to the Roman Pontiff.
The occasion and purpose of this decree are sufficiently clear from the text. Since existing sanctions were found inade- quate to secure respect for the law of ecclesiastical immunity, new ones had to be added. Nothing is said regarding legis- lators or judges. For them therefore there is no change. The new provision concerns only private persons. How far does it extend? According to some the Motu PropHo would seem
"' Ecclesiastical Review, January, 1912, p. 83.
THE MOTU PROPRIO " QUANTAVIS DILIGENTIA "
to be nothing more than an interpretation of the Chapter Cogentes. They would set aside the interpretation given by the Holy Office, which includes private persons among those who compel judges to bring clerics before their tribunals and who thereby incur excommunication. It would have force consequently under the same conditions and in the same places as the Chapter Cogentes. Several reasons however tend to prove that we have to do here with something more than a mere declaration of a previous decision. The more solemn form of the Motu Proprio, the motives assigned for its pub- lication, the formula used (" statuimus atque edicimus"), — all point to a formal and independent enactment. The dif- ference may not be very great between the two opinions as regards the practical results; still it may be of some import- ance. If the second one is correct, the interpretation given by the Holy Office of the seventh chapter of the Constitution Apostolicae Sedis retains its full value, and it remains true that the word cogentes in that chapter does not refer to private persons ; only now a special measure is taken against them, a new penal law is enacted whereby there is added to the obli- gation already existing the sanction of a censure — *' that those whom the gravity of the sin does not deter from such sacri- legious crime be restrained by the severity of the punishment." The Quantavis diligentia does not directly revoke the first part of the decree of the Holy Office (1886), which interprets the Chapter Cogentes, but it completes the second part, which forbids the bringing of a cleric before a secular court without permission of the bishop. This prohibition is henceforth under pain of excommunication " latae sententiae." It is also expressed, in the recent decree, in more absolute terms which suggest that a more rigid application of the law is expected.^ Formerly the bishops were directed never to refuse this par- ticular permission when asked for, and there was a tendency to consider the asking rather as a formality to be complied with, " only when it could be done conveniently, successfully and without prejudice to one's rights." ^ Now it is simply stated that any one who acts without proper permission is excommunicated.
^ Canoniste, supra, p. 73.
^ Menghini : An opinion ... on the Carmont case, p. 28. •
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THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
The questiion has even been asked whether under the present discipline the excommunication is not incurred also by those who cite clerics before civil courts simply as witnesses, not as defendants/" The letter of the present decree does not ex- clude that interpretation, and some of its expressions are gen- eral enough to seem to favor it. Here again may be invoked the principle that in penal matters extension of the law should not be admitted until clearly expressed. But is it not ex- pressed with sufficient clearness ?^^ On the same principle, odiosa sunt restringenda, there might be acts of complainants which would constitute violations of the privilegium fori and which would not come under the censure. ^^ The penalty of excommunication is incurred by those who cite clerics before secular courts and compel them to appear there publicly, " ad tribunal laicorum vocent ibique adesse publice compellant ". This would seem to exclude the cases when only a denuncia- tion is made to the public prosecutor that he may proceed ex officio, or when the defendant has not to appear publicly be- fore the court. This is another indication that, when fram- ing the decree, the legislator had also in mind the calling of clerics before civil judges as simple witnesses.
But the most vexed question of all has been that of the ap- plication of the Motu Proprio. Is it meant to be obligatory everywhere, even in those countries in which by concordats the secular courts are permitted to adjudicate ecclesiastical suits, or where the Chapter Cogentes and the prescriptions of the Holy Office have fallen into desuetude? The affirmative answer has staunch defenders who supported it by several arguments. We have here, they said, a formal and indepen- dent enactment; it was solemnly promulgated by the supreme authority, to be valid " all things whatsoever to the contrary notwithstanding." It is formulated in most general terms and does not contain the restrictive clauses of preceding de- crees : " Praeter canonicas dispositiones ... in iis locis ubi privilegio fori per S. Pontifices derogatum non fuit." It is intended to remedy evils which may exist anywhere, or at least
10 Cf. // Monitore Ecclesiastico, January, 19 12.
11 An answer of the Holy Office to the Bishop of Larino officially confirms that interpretation. // Monitore, 31 March, 19 12. Cf. Canoniste contem- porain, May, 19 12.
12 De Religiosis, 15 December, 1911, p. 108.
THE MOTU PROPRIO '' QUANTAVIS DILIGENTIAr ^n
there is no intimation that they are confined to a particular place. In all likelihood, it will be embodied in the new Code, one of the purposes of which is to establish as far as possible uniformity of discipline. By requiring Catholics everywhere to obtain the bishop's permission before using a privilege granted them, perhaps by concordat or custom, it would not impose upon them so very heavy a burden, nor would it directly derogate from existing contracts. Would not the decree on the other hand be rendered altogether nugatory if the proposed exceptions were admitted? And would not those very countries be exempted in which the reform is most needed?
Much as there may be of real value in the above arguments, they are not sufficient to prove that the intention of the legis- lator was to preclude all exceptions to his law. It is true, the restrictive clauses of preceding pronouncements are not repro- duced here; but from the nature of the case, the connexion of the questions, and the general principles of canon law, they should be understood even if they are not implied in the words " nullo ecclesiasticae potestatis permissu ". The penalty is incurred by those who act without any permission of the ec- clesiastical authority. Concordats entered into between the Holy See and civil governments contain that permission; al- though it is a general or indirect one, it suffices, and we have no proof that it has been withdrawn or that any thing has been changed even indirectly in those particular agreements by the present general enactment.
May a well-established custom be considered as equivalent to a general permission? Can there be a legitimate custom against the law of ecclesiastical immunity ? Many good canon- ists deny it, because such custom would be " irrationabilis, contra bonum ecclesiae, corruptela juris," and consequently without the necessary legal approbation of the legislator. ^^ Supposing such a custom be not repugnant in itself, will it not in this matter be practically impossible to ascertain its existence, i. e. to prove that it fulfills all requisite conditions, particularly in regard to criminal cases? ^* Might is not right,
13 Cf. Reiffenstuel, Lib. II, Tit. II, n. 240; Santi, Praelectiones, Lib. II, Tit. II, n. 28; A.A.S., 1910, p. 495. 1* De Religiosis, p. 109.
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and silence does not always give consent. And granting that such legitimate customs do exist, have they not been abolished by the Motu Proprio, which is binding, " all things whatso- ever to the contrary notwithstanding " ? To this last argu- ment one may reply that a general disposition does not abolish particular customs, especially immemorial customs; or, it may be urged, when the legislator intends to abolish them it is the practice of the Roman Chancery to use a formula more explicit than the one used in the present decree. Moreover, all these difficulties have been practically solved by the recent answers of the Holy See. It has been officially declared that the Motu Proprio does not affect Germany for the express reason that there exists in that country a custom to the contrary, and so it is safe to conclude that legitimate customs may be established against the privilegium fori, that their validity may be demonstrated with sufficient certainty, and that where- ever they do exist they are not abolished by the Motu Proprio Quantavis diligentia. The answer for Germany was not given as an exemption but as a doctrinal interpretation of the papal document by the application of the ordin- ary principles of canon law. Even if, as has been surmised,^^ it was a concession made for the sake of peace, it would retain its value and remain of universal application. And this all the more, because a similar declaration was made shortly after- ward for Belgium, and a little later for Holland. The reason assigned again is the existence of a custom to the contrary.
Hence it is lawful to conclude that wherever the same cus- tom exists the effect is the same; and without having recourse to the Holy See for further decision, it will suffice in each individual case to examine whether, in a given country, the privilegium fori has been in force and whether violations of it have been published or protested against. In this event, ordinarily a consuetudinary right has been created and the Motu Proprio does not apply to that place. It is on these principles that canonists have felt justified in holding that it does not apply to France,^^ Ireland,^'^ and English-speaking countries generally. In the United States the episcopal court
15 De Religiosis, p. 109.
16 Canoniste, December, 191 1, p. 712.
1''' Archbishop Walsh: The Motu Proprio.
THE MOTU PROPRIO " QUANT AVIS DILIGENTIAr j .
•J o
never could be fully organized, and it has been the practice of Catholics here from the beginning to have their contro- versies with ecclesiastics decided by lay judges. How far this practice has had the sanction of the Church, the Acts of Coun- cils may help to determine.
In the Third Provincial Council of Baltimore (1837) a de- cree was enacted " on the bringing of ecclesiastics before civil courts ". This decree, when submitted to the Congregation of the Propaganda for approbation, was found too severe.^^ "With regard to the sixth clause," the Congregation answers, " in which there is mention of avoiding the bringing of eccle- siastical causes before the civil courts, the Sacred Congregation decides that the decree should be modified, and if a cleric sues another cleric before a lay judge, upon a matter of strict ecclesiastical right, the Council says truly that any one so act- ing incurs the censures enacted in law. But in mixed cases where the persons may be ecclesiastical but the object in dis- pute may be temporal, the Council must deal a little more leniently, especially in countries in which the civil govern- ment is not in the hands of Catholics, and unless recourse is had to civil courts there is not the means of defending one's rights." Consequently the decree was amended and thus worded: "Cum grave Fidelibus oriatur scandalum, et eccle- siastico ordini dedecus, dum causae ecclesiasticae ad civilia deducuntur tribunalia, hortamur omnes, quorum interest, ut controversias inter eos forte orituras de rebus vel personis ec- clesiasticis, amice componant, vel saltem judicio Episcopi sub- mittant. Quod si ecclesiastica vel religiosa utriusque sexus persona, aliam personam ecclesiasticam vel religiosam utrius- que sexus, coram civili tribunali temere citaverit de re juris stricte ecclesiastici, noverit se in censuras a jure latas incidere."
The Bishops of the Baltimore Province, in 1837, desired to maintain intact the privilegium fori ; but prevailing conditions rendered it impossible, and the Congregation not only allowed but urged them to make the necessary concessions. What that somewhat greater leniency recommended to them was, we may judge from the decree as it stands after the correction.
isCollectio Lacensis, Vol. Ill, p. 56; Concilia provincialia, Baltimori. habita, p. 139.
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Cathollos are exhorted not to bring ordinary ecclesiastical suits before the civil courts. They are not forbidden to do so ; nor is there any question of a permission or any other formal- ity to be complied with. This is a toleration which amounts to an indirect approval of the practice and was no doubt com- monly understood in that sense.
The First Plenary Council of Baltimore (1852) endorsed that discipline and extended it to all the States which then formed part of the Union. The Second Plenary Council (1866) urges priests to avoid appearing before the secular •courts whenever their disputes can be settled otherwise, severely condemns all persons who violate the laws of the Church on ecclesiastical immunities, and quotes the above de- cree of the Third Provincial Council/® There is therefore :no new element introduced into the law by this Council, no previously admitted practices are reproved, and the custom existing now for many years against the privilegium fori continues legitimate. It was thus in full force when a few years later (1869) the Constitution Apostolicae Sedis was published; and the Chapter Cogentes did not revoke it. But it was one of those departures from the common law of which the Congregation of the Propaganda had said, in approving the decrees of the First Plenary Council, that " they were permitted by the Holy See because of the difficulties of the times, but only by way of toleration and provisionally, with the understanding that they should not be given greater stabil- ity or extension ; rather should measures be taken to endeavor to return to the common discipline."
It was precisely one of the purposes of the Third Plenary Council, as declared by Leo XIII in the letter ordering its convocation, to hasten that return to the law of the universal Ohurch, *' ut propius ad commune ecclesiae jus, quantum fieri potest, accedat." On the subject under consideration, conse- quently, a decision was taken which indicates the efforts made in that direction. In the chapter '' De vita et honestate cleri- corum," the Fathers of the Council again declare that it is a
19 " Ecclesiae honorem temnit et sacros canones conculcat, quicumque ec- clesiasticae vel religiosae personae, de rebus quae ad forum ecclesiasticum per- tinent, coram profano judice litem intenderit. Quo spectat decretum, quod sequitur, a praedecessoribus nostris latum, Cum grave . . . ". N. 155.
THE MOTU PROPRIO '' QUANT AVIS DILIGENT I Ar 31 e
source of grave scandal to the faithful to bring ecclesiastics before the civil courts; therefore priests are exhorted when- ever there arises some difficulty even with laymen and about temporal matters not to go before lay judges, either as plain- tiffs or as defendants, if it can be avoided. They are strictly forbidden to sue a layman before a civil court to recover money due to the church for pew rent or for any other cause, without the written permission of the bishop. They are re- minded of the divine law by which purely ecclesiastical mat- ters are under the exclusive jurisdiction of the Church, and of the censure which is incurred by all those who have recourse to the secular power to prevent the exercise of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Then a disposition which was not found in the acts of the preceding Councils is expressed in the following words : *'Ad tuendam porro immunitatem ecclesiasticam, qua- tenus inter nos fieri potest, districte iisdem prohibemus, ne contra sacedotem vel clericum de rebus etiam temporalibus coram judice civili litem intentent sine permissione scripto expressa ipsius Episcopi." The law is intended to protect ecclesiastical immunity, i. e. to enforce as much as is possible of the law of the Church concerning immunity; it is for priests ; not for laymen, for whom therefore the implicit per- mission to sue clerics before lay judges remains valid or is even indirectly confirmed. The custom remains intact; to them consequently neither the decree of the Holy Office of 1886, nor the Motu Proprio Quantavis diligentia applies. But for priests, whatever general, implicit authorization they may have had before, in common with the faithful, to sue other ecclesiastics before the civil courts, when the matter was not in itself ecclesiastical, is now withdrawn. As no new legitimate custom has been established since 1 884 a priest who sues a cleric before lay judges without leave of the bishop, or a bishop without leave of the Pope, falls under the censure enacted in the Motu Proprio, " nullo potestatis ecclesiasticae permissu ".
H. Ayrinhac, S.S. St. Patrick's Seminary, Menlo Park, California.
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REMINISOENOES OP MAYNOOTH. IV. " Vacat ad Deambulationem."
IN contrast to the " docetur " which in the college calendar meets the eye with ever recurring regularity, and which succintly sums up the scholastic program of each day, we find on Wednesday : " feria IV, post meridiem vacat ad deambula- tionem ". The weekly walk was an ever welcome relaxation from the monotony and routine of the students' daily day. The time ordinarily occupied by study and class was on Wed- nesday devoted to this. Arrayed in their ordinary clerical " shorts " and biretta, the students congregated after lunch and awaited the leader of the walk, who was usually one of the deans, but in the Junior House always a monitor. These monitors, six in number, were appointed from the Fourth Year's divines at the beginning of the academic year. They had their rooms in the Junior House, and had their places in the Junior refectory, but of course attended the daily lectures on Theology and Scripture in St. Mary's, with the other stu- dents of their year. Their duties were not onerous ; but they were always available to read morning or evening prayer on any occasion on which the dean was unavoidably absent.
The dean generally picked out two students to accompany him. Every student was obliged to go on the public walks save such as obtained express permission of the dean " to stay in." Those to whom such exemption was extended were not free to indulge in any other form of outdoor exercise or to practise music during that time. Latterly, I believe, the rule has been relaxed, so that now the Wednesday walk is entirely optional. There was one dean — he has since gone to adorn the episcopal bench — a very upright and strictly conscientious man, whose bete-noir was chicanery or subterfuge or double- dealing in any shape or form on the part of a student. As a certain old Roman senator was accustomed to begin and end all his forensic efforts with the fateful words " Delenda est Carthago ", so the alpha and omega of all Dean X's discourses to the students was : " Be men ; act as men ; be not eye-servers, but obey exactly the rule of the college. If you do happen to be detected in the violation of rule, then again I say be men,
REMINISCENCES OF MA YNOOTH. ^ j -
and don't try to hide your guilt by flimsy excuses which nobody believes."
The principle, it must be admitted, is sound and I have no doubt that in places where the violation of a rule entails less serious consequences than in Maynooth, it might appeal to the integrity and high sense of honor of those concerned; but stu- dents, even ecclesiastical students, are not quite angels, and violations of some rules there are bound to be from time to time. The consequences of these violations do not tend to enhance a student's reputation in the eyes of his superiors, and who will blame a student who, having violated a petty rule, tries by all fair and legitimate means to avoid detection or escape punishment? Of course there is no excuse for a student who violates serious or important rules. He deserves any punishment which his fault may entail.
I remember one occasion when, during the public walk, two students who had permission to remain in, prepared to have a quiet game of handball in the corner of one of the ball-alleys. The game had not proceeded far when Dean X. . . . was seen approaching. He was at a respectful distance, but there could be no doubt he had seen them. Whether however he was sufficiently near to recognize them was a question about which they were not very sure. One of them evidently concluded that the safest course to pursue in the circumstances was to make ofi". Accordingly he grabbed his soutane and biretta, and disappeared as quickly as he could; the other, in pursu- ance of the high and righteous principles which he had heard so often inculcated, and considering this an admirable oppor- tunity of putting them to the test, quietly remained where he was till the Dean came up.
" You are aware, Mr. O'Byrne, that you have been openly and deliberately violating the college rules. Have you any explanation to offer?"
" No sir!" came the answer of O'Byrne who did not con- sider his act a very serious violation of rule.
" Very well then. I must say I admire your manly and up- right conduct in not running away, but of course I must take a note of the offence all the same." And so it was done.
There were many students of sedentary habits, myself amongst others, for whom these weekly walks had little fas-
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cination, and who went only when they could find no adequate excuse for remaining behind. The country was flat, mono- tonous, uninteresting, and very sparsely populated. More- over the walks were frequently so very long and the pace so unnecessarily fast that they ceased to be a recreation. The students generally returned mud-bespattered, tired, and per- spiring, and occasionally late for dinner. To enter a house on the occasion of a public walk was looked on as a serious offence and punishable with the severest penalties — expulsion, I think ; whilst any student or students who got unattached and failed to return with the main body were liable to be called up for explanation and perhaps similarly dealt with. It was cus- tomary to arrange an exceptionally long walk on Easter Mon- day. This was a free day, and the walk generally started about eleven o'clock. Sometimes it lead to Clongowes Wood College, and sometimes to Wolfe Tone's grave or to Lucan, where you might regale yourself with a draught of sulphur- etted hydrogen for a nominal consideration. This Easter Monday walk was the only occasion on which it was not con- sidered unconventional and altogether outre for a junior to carry a stick or umbrella, although amongst the divines such a custom was the rule rather than the exception.
The time usually set apart for Spiritual Reading was on Wednesday evenings regularly devoted to a sermon preached by one of the divinity students. If not always a triumph in elocutionary art, these sermons were at least generally master- pieces of English prose. I have rarely heard or read finer compositions than were those sermons delivered by the stu- dents in Maynooth. From a rhetorical point of view, they left little to be desired, any slip or imperfection being more frequently due to extreme nervousness or to thoughtlessness than to want of preparation or ability. These sermons were always immediately after subjected to the public criticism of the presiding dean.
Besides the public walk, many forms of recreation were pro- vided for the students in the college, the principal being hand- ball, football (both Rugger and Soccer), hurly, tennis, and an open air gymnasium in each Division. In all of these branches of sport there was much good, not to say, first rate talent. Handball was the game most popularly indulged in,.
REMINISCENCES OF MAYNOOTH. ^^^
there being no less than eighteen first class ball-alleys, and in this department at any time might be found a team which would hold its own against any body of secular champions. Indeed Maynooth some i6 or 17 years ago was proud to own the champion handball player of the world in the person of Tom Jones, now Father Jones, a worthy priest of the Diocese of Kerry. In the ball-alley he was a marvel of speed, keen- ness, and dexterity, a clever strategist, always sure, accurate and alert, who when in form could be relied on to toss a prac- tically unplayable ball, or butt a flying ball with the back of his heel with greater accuracy than most players could da it with their hands. In other branches of athletics the stu- dents were almost equally prominent. Some of them, finding they had no ecclesiastical vocation, having passed " ad vota saecularia ", afterward figured as prominent international foot- ballers. Maynooth could at all times boast of pedestrians amongst its students, whose records for the mile, quarter mile,, or 100 yards, compared favorably with the best international championship performance. I wonder how many were aware that the runner who, under the pseudonym of ** P. O'Rourke ", won the international quarter mile at Celtic Park, Glasgow, in 1907, was a young Maynooth priest at the time just recently ordained. He was only one of many who might have success- fully aspired to championship honors.
In a vast institution like Maynooth where sickness and ac- cident were naturally unavoidable, the infirmary was a neces- sary and valuable equipment. Of such there were two, one attached to the Junior House and another for the benefit of St. Joseph's and St. Mary's. Each was under the care of a matron, and the doctor attended officially once a day and as often afterward as he was called in. Besides there was a visit- ing physician, a surgeon, and a dentist, all of them men of high standing in their professions.
An infirmary is an institution one does not generally as- sociate with happiness or pleasure, yet there are many of us who will feel that some of the happiest days of the students' college life were spent in the Maynooth infirmary. I should also add — some of the most miserable. Happiness — perhaps contentment is a better word — being a relative quantity, is entirely a matter of contrasts, reactions, and comparisons.
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The Maynooth infirmary was to me, and I have no doubt to many others, an oasis in the desert. After three or four months of the grind and the monotony of collegiate life, a week's respite is not only useful but sometimes necessary. A relaxation of the high pressure, to which the semper et pro semper cast-iron regulations of the Division subject one, is helpful both from a spiritual and material point of view. In my time the infirmary contained in the language of Susan Nipper both " permanents " and " temporaries ". The former, of whom there were only three or four, were delicate students who had permission to live in the infirmary, " cum privilegio ", and who consequently enjoyed all the advantages and preroga- tives which such residence brought with it. The six o'clock bell had no terrors for them, and they enjoyed other privileges and immunities from rule which helped to make tolerable what must have otherwise proved a very dreary existence. Apan from these the Infirmary patients were divided into two classes, the " Top List " and the " Low List ". The former embraced those whose ailments were serious enough to make residence in the infirmary a necessity, and while on the infirmary list they were not permitted to attend class. The " Low List " patients slept in their own rooms in the Division, were obliged to attend class, but took their meals in the infirmary and were permitted to sleep till 8 o'clock in the morning. A student going to the infirmary was of course obliged to give notice to the dean of the Division, otherwise complications might ;€asily arise, and marks of absence from duty be registered against a student. I was not a habitue of the Infirmary, go- ing there only when necessity compelled me, generally when I succumbed to an attack of influenza. But having been in- stalled there, I was equally reluctant to leave it, and it was always with a feeling akin to homesickness that I did so. Yet some of those days were dreary and lonesome enough, as when lying on the narrow bed, feverish and sick, one was trying to beguile the time by counting and mentally calculating all manner of arithmetical problems which the objects in the room suggested, from the number of spots on the opposite wall to the most accurate measurements which would place the sus- pended electric globe in the exact centre of the ceiling.
REMINISCENCES OF MA YNOOTH. .^ I
"A fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind ", and so the students became more friendly and intimate and in a short time got to know one another better in the infirmary than was possible during years in the Division. There is a rather conservative spirit in Maynooth. Each diocese keeps much to itself. Those who are fond of games of course mix freely in the ball courts and elsewhere, and become intimate friends ; but there may be and are students who during the whole six or seven years of their course never exchange even common greetings. Amongst the students, and more so between the students and professors, there is a surprising absence of free- dom of communication and a rigidity of convention which to one looking back on it seems hardly called for.
I have already said that in the infirmary the students got to know one another more thoroughly, and many who perhaps had previously never spoken to each other became intimate and life-long friends. During this convalescent stage, when the bed no longer claimed us by day, many kinds of harm- less and informal entertainments were indulged in, and every one who could contributed in his own fashion to the pleasure and enjoyment of the rest. Harmless relaxation of this kind was likely to be overlooked provided it did not develop into unnecessary boisterousness and gaiete de ccsur, or tend to the annoyance and inconvenience of a patient. There was always to be found varied talent — orators, humorists, singers, and musicians, in all of which departments considerable ability was displayed. Indeed we were a perfectly happy family ex- cept when we were disturbed by the unexpected apparition of one of the deans who resided permanently in the infirmary, while sometimes we were honored by a flying visit from the President or Vice-President, who were naturally interested in the general health of the institution.
This is the attractive side of the picture. But when — at rare intervals though it might be — Death, that "Angel of the darker Draught ", came to claim some young and promis- ing life from among us, it was very different. I can still see the procession of white- robed clerics slowly wending their way to the little cemetery, and hear the plaintive Dies Irae or the solemn strains of the Benedictus, mingled with the heart-broken sobs of sorrowing and bereaved relatives, as we
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carried to his grave some one from the halls of Maynooth College.
In the Maynooth infirmary too the old order of things has I believe, changed. Many time-honored traditions have passed; innovations have been introduced and the change is decidedly for the better. Confided to the matronly care of the good Sisters of Mercy, the sick are now assured of that sym- pathetic attention and considerate treatment which can hardly be always expected from professional matrons or nurses.
V. Some Stray Reflections.
What strikes you on being suddenly brought into communi- cation with the variety of types which constitute a great col- lege like Maynooth, is what for want of a more appropriate term one might call " provinciality ".
Some distinguished essayist has remarked that " all edu- cated and thoughtful people are confronted at times with modes of thought, with points of view, with systems of argu- ment, or with habits of expression which for one reason or another they call ' provincial ' ; it is equally certain that if asked for some definition of the term which should include all admitted instances of its application, and yet possess some historical and logical propriety, they would be severely posed for an answer." To the Londoner everything and everybody outside the great Metropolis is provincial, and although mod- ern conveniences of travelling and of communicating thought have established a close alliance, the term still retains much of its original significance, and to the dweller in the metropolis denotes the same coordinate extension as the term '* bar- barian " did to the ancient Greeks.
It is quite outside the scope of this paper to seek the vari- ous shades of meaning which can be read into the word. As it is sometimes taken to signify the antithesis of universal, it comes in this connexion quite near enough to comprehend that difference of tastes and habits, that variety of modes of speech and expression, that peculiarity of manner and idea, that spirit of rivalry shall we say which distinguish the Irishman of the West from that of the East and the Northern from his vis-a- vis of the South. It may seem strange that the rest of Ire- land has been taught to regard the denizens of the Black North
REMINISCENCES OF MAYNOOTH. ,o^
as being almost outside the pale of Irish nationality and look on him as a sort of hybrid product of Scotch and Irish an- cestry, possessing but little of the Celtic temperament and be- coming gradually nationalized only by long associations; but the stiff frigidity of the Northern, although in striking con- trast to the hot-blooded impetuosity of his brother Gael, will be found to shelter a warm and generous heart, a courage and unswerving devotion to his Faith, and an undying love for his country which the Catholic Church abroad has long since learned to appreciate at its proper value in the Celt.
There are of course the provincial peculiarities of which I spoke. On a first acquaintance the accent and speech of Cork or Kerry are as puzzling and unintelligible to the Northern as the proverbial Greek is to the " man in the street " ; while I have no doubt the flavor of the Doric of the " unspeakable Scot " which is traced in the speech of Ulster, is quite as be- wildering to him. The peculiarities of pronunciation and of language which are characteristic of the various Provinces are frequently the occasion of good-natured chaff and raillery among the students themselves, — the short i of the Northern in such words as " Wind " and " swim '', and the short " a " and redundant " h " of the Western being the subject of much comment. Professor Joyce in his book English as it is Spoken remarks that no Irishman can correctly pronounce the " h " in such words as " Three ", " thunder ", etc. This is an exaggeration, although it may be true that in many parts of Ireland the pronunciation " tree " and *' tunder " is quite common.
It was not alone in the matter of idiom and pronunciation that the North and West were wont occasionally to cross swords. There were other little traditional differences. The Westerns were accustomed occasionally to refer jocularly to their brethren of the North as the " foal eaters ", while they in turn would retort that some time away back in the twilight of history the Connaught people killed and ate St. Patrick's goat, an offence which must be deeply resented by all true and patriotic Irishmen.
Other phases of local and what Matthew Arnold would style " academic provinciality," such as are found in every college or university, might be here mentioned as peculiar to
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Maynooth, if space permitted it. Many incidents, pleasant and otherwise, come back to memory which at the time formed the subject of much discussion or perhaps good-natured rail- lery in the batches. Encounters with the dean, ridiculous and sometimes embarrassing situations, bon mots in class, the harmless fads and peculiarities of some of the students, natur- ally supplied a fund of interest and topics of conversation which in our restricted surroundings were always very welcome.
Apropos of peculiarities of certain students, there was a story current in Maynooth of one who had developed a mania for knocking doors. In the early stages he was satisfied with a gentle tap on the door of any empty room he might chance to pass; but as the idiosyncracy developed it didn't matter whose door it was. The violence of the impact varied too in proportion as the inclination increased. There was one venerable professor whose rooms were quite convenient to the stair-landing where the students were accustomd to go up and down. On one occasion this particular student happened to be passing down, and, embracing a favorable opportunity, he gave a loud sharp rap on the door, and disappeared down the stairs as quickly and as noiselessly as he could. Just at that particular moment another student happened to be com- ing up, who, having reached the professor's door, met the latter as he came out of his room to relieve his feelings by a few pertinent remarks on the conduct of students in general and the lamentable absence of ecclesiastical decorum in this student in particular, with mutterings about this thing going on too long, and threats (now that he had found the culprit) of an appeal to the administrative Council and the subse- quent pains and penalties which might be expected.
Many of the students in Maynooth devoted their leisure hours to music, either vocal or instrumental. In the corri- dors, the discordant and conflicting notes of nearly every known musical instrument might be heard at one and the same time. While some of the performers acquitted them- selves with a high degree of proficiency, in the majority there was a notable absence of that charm of " magic numbers and persuasive sound " which the poets tell us ** soothes the savage breast and softens rocks and moves the things inanimate with living souls ".
REMINISCENCES OF MAYNOOTH. ^2^
In the vocal order, however, the college choir under the tutorship of its distinguished professor was trained to a high standard of artistic production, as any one who has heard it will testify, the performances of the select choir in the college chapel on Sundays and great feasts representing the last word in musical harmony.
In this connexion there was a most impressive and informal little function that those who ever heard it must have a most pleasant recollection of. This was the singing of the Adeste on Christmas morning. The college choir assembled on the Square in the small hours of the morning when the rest of the students were still fast asleep, and as the harmonious strains of the beautiful hymn were borne to our slumbering senses on the wings of the dawn, one could almost fancy he was listen- ing to the " Gloria in Excelsis " of the angelic midnight chorus which proclaimed that first " far off divine event " that brought joy and happiness to the human race.
Most priests in glancing back over their student days will probably recall the deep satisfaction with which on returning from vacation they entered on the last term of their college career. Their years of striving were nearly at an end. The goal of their ambition was well within view ; the prize almost within their grasp. It is because of that eagerness I suppose that the last year seems to go by with the measured and pain- ful slowness of an hour hand. It is in more senses than one a year of preparation. Five or six years in an ecclesiastical college like Maynooth leaves little to be done in the spiritual and supernatural order. The ecclesiastic with a true vocation who has pursued his course with due regard for rule leaves his Alma Mater as well equipped for his task, spiritually and in- tellectually, as mortal may hope to be. If he should after- ward lapse from the path of virtue, it will be generally found to be a fall of gradual growth, a case where self-assurance and over-confidence override a due regard for that soundest of moral principles " obsta principiis ". '' Nemo repente fit turpissimus " is a principle which ascetics inform us recog- nizes no exceptions. It would be well if students realized more fully that the virtue they will require in the world is not of the " fugitive and cloistered order, unexercised and un- breathed ", but that after college days their lives, become a
326 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
" race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat ".
There are always in Maynooth not a few students destined temporarily for missions abroad, their own bishops not requir- ing their services for four or five years or perhaps longer. Most of the prospective young priests I think rather relished the idea of going abroad, and their interview with the various foreign bishops who called at Maynooth was always for them an interesting function, although in many cases, I am afraid, disappointing for the bishop, as the percentage that volun- teered for foreign dioceses, like those of Australia, South Africa, and the United States, was small in comparison with the numbers that preferred to accept missions in England and Scotland.
Whatever reluctance young priests may have to go abroad (very often due to family consideration), perhaps the great- est tribute that can be paid the Foreign Missions like America and Australia is the fact that the young priests who go to these countries manifest no desire to return again to the native heath, unless by way of vacation; whereas few Irish priests choose to remain permanently attached to a Scotch or English diocese when they can get one equally suitable at home.
As the end of the year approached, it was customary for many of the " fourth " divines to get a day in Dublin — not collectively of course, but individually. There were so many things in the way of clerical outfit that could not easily be procured without a visit to the metropolis. There was a stu- dent in my time who had a sort of carte blanche to go out as often almost as he liked — at least until his business was satis- factorily completed. He had been negotiating with, I think, the Bishop of Cleveland (Ohio) for a mission in that Diocese, which negotiations were to be finally determined after the prospective candidate had submitted to his Lordship six ori- ginal sermons and a photograph. The sermons were duly despatched. The photo of course necessitated a visit to Dublin, but whether the artist was unskilful or the lines of the young levite's features did not lend themselves to satis- factory reproduction, I know not ; at all events the photograph- ing had to be repeated several times. Whatever the ultimate result, it became known that negotiations with the American
REMINISCENCES OF MAYNOOTH ,^m
327
Bishop were eventually broken off, causing a good deal of chaffing, whilst everybody realized that it was a privilege for any young priest that his services should be required in his own native diocese.
The intellectual tests were of the usual order. The or- dination examination was the last fence. If a student stum- bled, which indeed very rarely happened, it was usually rather due to nervousness than to want of knowledge. An examin- ation is deemed necessary, but the authorities no doubt take consideration of the fact that a student who has come so far successfully through his course and satisfied his various pro- fessors, has acquired the necessary knowledge for the efficient discharge of his professional duties, however indifferently he may acquit himself at the examination for Orders.
In every ecclesiastical college ordination to Priesthood is the most important event of the year. For the ordinandi it is no doubt the most serious step of their lives, and one which leaves a lasting impression that time can never dim, a recol- lection which often amid the struggle and battles of after life brings back to them most pleasant and happy memories. One watching the ordinandi vesting in the cloister for the cere- mony might notice many whose demeanor betrayed unmis- takable signs of diffidence and anxiety almost approaching timidity, and whose apparently sleepless and anxious vigil of the night before showed how truly they realized the tremen- dous responsibility which is not to be lightly undertaken.
Somebody has remarked that " there comes to every human life a period when its cup of human happiness seems to be full to overflowing. That period may be long or short, but every- body drinks out of that cup once." Every true priest will agree that the realization of that happiness comes to him on that day when he hears pronounced upon him by the ordain- ing prelate those solemn and mysterious words : ''Accipe potes- tatem offerre sacrificium Deo, Missasque celebrare ... in nomine Domini," — surely the highest trust that can be re- posed in mortal man. Whilst it may be true of other kinds of happiness, that
The distant object which we covet most When once enjoyed is in possession lost,
328 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
the poet here leaves out of count this crowning glory of a student's life. Possession intensifies the happiness which was only vaguely realized in anticipation. With what pleasur- able memories every priest will call to mind the solemn and majestic strains of the Veni Creator whilst the bishop in sacred and imposing tones pronounced the form of unction " Con- secrare et sanctificare digneris, Domine, manus istas per istam unctionem et nostram benedictionem." And then the ceremony proceeded while the ordinati celebrated the Holy Sacrifice with the bishop, and seventy or eighty young priests were added to the Church to spread the light of Christ's Gospel, to carry His message of love and mercy, and minister to souls committed to their zealous trust.
The two or three days which intervened between the or- dinations and the final exodus from the college passed quickly. One felt a joyous sense of freedom, a new feeling of inde- pendence and emancipation such as could be appreciated only after six or seven years of confinement and obedience to rule.
On the eve of our departure the Te Deum in the college chapel was sung with all the power, effectiveness, and devo- tion which we could impart to it. After supper we had a few parting words of farewell with the companions of our studies, and next morning the great gates closed behind us as silently as they had before opened to receive us. The guardian sphinx looked down from its pedestal with its mysterious and in- scrutable gaze on the passing of another contingent of the soldiers of Christ into the battlefield of an incredulous and hostile world.
P. Sheridan.
Dungloe, Ireland.
-Hnalecta*
ACTA pn pp. X. Epistola ad r. p. d. Iacobum Duhig, Episcopum Rock-
HAMPTONENSEM, DE QUINQUAGENARIIS ILLIUS ECCLESIAE SACRIS SOLLEMNIBUS.
Venerabilis frater, salutem et apostolicam benedictionem. Faustum catholicis hominibus istius regionis proximum men- sem septembrem accepimus fore, exeunte anno quinquagesimo ex quo ecclesiae Rockhamptonensis initia sunt posita: cum quidem in id tempus festi soUemnes dies apparentur, atque in huius laetitiae societatem episcopi omnes ex Australia, cum magno praesertim sacerdotum comitatu, venturi sint. Scilicet hoc Nos perlibenter intelleximus ; tibique ac ceteris rei auc- toribus et ducibus prolixe, vestrum laudando et probando con- silium, suffragamur. Novimus religionis christianaeque hu- manitatis celeres istic progressiones factas; ut exiguam illam Missionem Rockhamptonensem ampla dioecesis eaque satis bene constituta, baud ita longo intervallo, exceperit: omni- noque est aequum vos propterea, cum facti memoriam cele- brare, turn debitas Deo persolvere gratias, atque ex com- memoratione beneficiorum eius fidenter ad maiora niti. Cete-
330 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
rum, vestram prospicientes diligentiam, itemque tantam cleri Australiani concordiam, quanta hie praeclare elucet, non solum de ista dioecesi, sed de tota Australia catholica melius sperare iure videmur. Itaque existimetis volumus, vestris Nos sacris sollemnibus animo praesentes adfore; quae ut fructus optatos pariant, tibi, venerabilis frater, et omnibus qui ea ipsa cele- brabunt, apostolicam benedictionem, auspicem divinorum munerum, amantissime impertimus.
Datum Romae apud S. Petrum, die ix mensis maii MCMXII, Pontificatus Nostri anno nono.
PIUS PP. X.
S. OONGEEGATIO S. OFFIOII.
I.
Decretum de Dispensationibus super Impedimento Dis- paritatis cultus absque debitis cautionibus nunquam concedendis.
In plenario conventu supremae sacrae Congregationis sancti Officii habito feria IV die i6 aprilis 1890, proposita quaes- tione: "An in concedendis ab habente a Sancta Sede potesta- tem dispensationibus super impedimento disparitatis cultus praescriptae cautiones semper sint exigendae ", Emi ac Rmi DD. Cardinales in rebus fidei et morum Inquisitores genera- les, re perdiligenti examine discussa, respondendum decre- verunt: " Dispensationem super impedimento disparitatis ciil- tus nunquam concedi, nisi expressis omnibus conditionibus seu cautionibus ".
Eademque die ac feria Ssmus D. Leo PP. XIII, in solita audientia R. P. D. Adsessori eiusdem supremae sacrae Con- gregationis impertita Emorum Patrum resolutionem benigne adprobare et confirmare dignatus est.
Contrariis quibuscumque non obstantibus.
Datum Romae, ex aedibus S. Officii, die 21 iunii 19 12.
L. *S.
Aloisius Castellano, 5. R. et U. L Notarius.
ANALECTA. ^-j
II.
Decretum de Dispensatione super Impedimento Dispari-
TATIS CULTUS ABSQUE DEBITIS CAUTIONIBUS IMPERTITA.
In plenario conventu supremae sacrae Congregationis sancti Officii habito feria IV die 12 iunii 191 2, propositis dubiis :
I ° Utrum dispensatio super impedimento disparitatis cultus, ab habente a Sancta Sede potestatem, non requisitis vel de- negatis praescriptis cautionibus impertita, valida habenda sit an non ? Et quatenus negative :
2° Utrum hisce in casibus, cum scilicet de dispensatione sic invalide concessa evidenter constat, matrimonii ex hoc capite nullitatem per se ipse Ordinarius declarare valeat, vel opus sit, singulis vicibus, ad Sanctam Sedem pro sententia definitiva recurrere?
Emi ac Rmi DD. Cardinales in rebus fidei et morum In- quisitores generales, omnibus mature perpensis, respondendum decreverunt :
Ad i.^ Dispensationem prout exponitur impertitam esse nullam.
Ad 2.™ Affirmative ad primam; negative ad secundam partem.
Et sequenti feria V die 13 eiusdem mensis Ssmus D. N. D. Pius divina providentia PP. X in solita audientia R. P. D. Adsessori eiusdem supremae sacrae Congregationis impertita Emorum Patrum resolutionem benigne adprobare et con- firmare dignatus est.
Contrariis non obstantibus quibuscumque.
Datum Romae, ex aedibus S. Officii, die 21 iunii 191 2.
L. * S.
Aloisius Castellano, 5. R. et U. L Notarius.
III. Decretum de Parochi Adsistentia Matrimoniis Mixtis
IN QUIBUS PRAESCRIPTAE CAUTIONES A CONTRAHENTIBUS PERVICACITER DETRECTANTUR.
Cum per Decretum Ne temere diei 2 augusti 1907, n. IV, expresse ac nulla facta distinctione edicatur parochos et lo- co rum Ordinarios valide matrimonio adsistere, dummodo in- vitati ac rogati . . . requirant excipiantque contrahentium con-
332 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW,
sensum; graves in praxi difficultates ortae sunt relate ad mixtas nuptias in quibus, denegatis pervicaciter a partibus debitis cautionibus, Sancta Sedes, attentis peculiaribus quo- rumdam locorum circumstantiis, materialem tantum parochi praesentiam, per modum exceptionis ac veluti ultimum tole- rantiae limitem, antea aliquando permiserat.
Re delata ad supremam banc sacram Congregationem sancti Officii, cui ex praescripto apostolicae Constitutionis " Sapienti consilio " Integra manet . . . facultas ea cognoscendi quae circa .. . . impedimenta disparitatis cultus et mixtae religionis ver- santur, atque in plenario conventu habito feria III, loco IV, die 21 maii 1912, praevio Rmorum DD. Consultorum voto, perdiligenti examine discussa, Emi ac Rmi Dni Cardinales in rebus fidei et morum Inquisitores generales, omnibus mature perpensis, decreverunt :
" Praescriptionem Decreti Ne temerCy n. IV, § 3, de re- quirendo per parochum excipiendoque, ad validitatem matri- monii, nupturientium consensu, in matrimoniis mixtis in qui- bus debitas cautiones exhibere pervicaciter partes renuant, locum posthac non habere; sed standum taxative praecedenti- bus Sanctae Sedis ac praesertim s. m. Gregorii PP. XVI (Litt. app. diei 30 aprilis 1841 ad episcopos Hungariae) ad rem concessionibus et instructionibus : facto verbo cum Ssmo ".
Et sequenti feria V die 23 eiusdem mensis Ssmus D. N. D. Pius divina providentia PP. X, in solita audientia R. P. D. Adsessori huius supremae sacrae Congregationis sancti Officii impertita, relatam sibi Emorum Patrum resolutionem benigne adprobare ac suprema sua auctoritate in omnibus ratam habere dignatus est.
Contrariis quibuscumque, etiam speciali atque individua mentione dignis, non obstantibus.
Datum Romae, ex aedibus S. Officii, die 21 iunii 191 2.
L. * S.
Aloisius Castellano, S. R. et U. I. Notarius.
S. OONGEEaATIO INDIOIS.
Decreto S. Congregationis diei 6 maii proxime elapsi lauda- biliter se subiecit E. Th. de Cauzons. Romae, die 15 iunii 1912.
Thomas Esser, O.P., Secretarius.
ANALECTA.
333 S. OONGEEGATIO EITUUM.
I.
Decretum praefixum Volumini VI, SEU AppENDici I (ab
ANNO 1900 NUM. 4052 AD ANNUM I911 NUM. 4284, CUM SUO INDICE GENERALI) OPERIS GUI TITULUS : " D EGRET A AUTHENTIGA CONGREGATIONIS SaGRORUM RiTUUM EX AGTIS EIUSDEM GOLLEGTA EIUSQUE AUGTORITATE PRO- MULGATA ".
URBIS ET ORBIS.
Decreta, quae in hoc Volumine sexto (Appendice I) Col- lectionis Decretorum sacrae Rituum Congregationis continen- tur, sanctissimus Dominus noster Pius Papa X, referente in- frascripto Cardinali sacrorum Rituum Congregationi Prae- fecto, apostolica Sua auctoritate approbavit, atque authentica declaravit. Contrariis non obstantibus quibuscunque, etiam speciali mentione dignis.
Die 24 aprilis anni 191 2.
Fr. S. Card. Martinelli, Praefectus.
L. * S.
■^ Petrus La Fontaine, Episc. Charystien., Secretarius.
II.
Degretum seu Deglarationes girga novas Rubrigas.
Ad praecavendas dubitationes, quae super recta interpre- tatione tituli X, n. 2 et 5 novarum rubricarum quae sequuntur constitutionem Divino afflatu oriri possunt, R. Rituum Con- gregatio, audito Commissionis Liturgicae suffragio, sequentes declarationes evulgare censuit, nimirum :
I. Quandocumque in feriis maioribus Missam propriam habentibus ceterisque diebus, de quibus tit. et num. supracitatis, Missa de feria celebretur, dummodo reapse pro defunctis ap- plicetur, addi potest oratio pro defunctis in quorum suffragium celebratur, etiamsi in ea agenda sit commemoratio de occur- rente festo duplici minori vel maiori.
II. Huiusmodi oratio pro defunctis non excludit in casu orationes de tempore, nisi occurrat commemoratio duplicis.
III. Quando additur ista oratio pro defunctis, non est at- tendendus numerus orationum utrum sit dispar an non.
334 ^^^ ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
IV. Haec eadem oratio pro defunctis, semper recitari debet poenultimo loco inter orationes ea die a rubricis praescriptas vel permissas, non computatis collectis ab Ordinario imperatis.
V. Oratio pro defunctis in quorum suffragium Missa de feria applicatur, addi potest, etiamsi ea die a rubricis prae- cipiatur oratio Omnipotens sempiterne Deus pro vivis et de- functis, vel Fidelium pro omnibus defunctis.
VI. Ut rite legitimeque applicari possit pro defunctis in- dulgentia altaris privilegiati, oportet ut, diebus in quibus a novis rubricis permittitur, missa de feria omnino celebretur, addita ut supra oratione pro defunctis pro quibus Missa ipsa celebratur.
VII. Licet iuxta novas rubricas tit. VIII, n. 2, cessata sit obligatio recitandi in choro officium defunctorum, nihilominus adhuc servari debet rubrica missalis tit. V, n. i et 2, circa Missam pro defunctis celebrandam, sive in cantu cum prae- sentia choralium, si agatur de Missa conventuali, sive lectam extra chorum iuxta novas rubricas tit. XII.
Die 12 iunii 1912.
Fr. S. Card. Martinelli, Praefectus. L. * S. •^ Petrus La Fontaine, Episc. Charystien., Secretarius.
III.
De Dispositione Festorum juxta Novas Rubricas.
Sacrae Rituum Congregationi pro opportuna solutione se- quentia dubia proposita f uerunt, nimirum :
I. Quando Dominica occurrit a die 25 ad diem 28 decem- bris inclusive, Rubrica praescribit Officium huius Dominicae die libera 30 decembris celebrandum. Nunc vero pluribus in dioecesibus dies 30 decembris impedita est aliquo festo novem Lectionum. Quaeritur: Quid agendum in casu?
II. Iuxta recentem Constitutionem " Divino afflatu ", tit IV, n. 3, festum sanctissimi Nominis Mariae perpetuo as- signatur diei duodecimae mensis septembris. Quaeritur ergo : Num ecclesiae quae hoc festum tamquam Titulare usque ad hodiernam diem coluerunt Dominica infra octavam Nativitatis beatae Mariae Virginis sub ritu duplici I classis cum octava, ipsum recolere in posterum debeant die duodecima Septembris
ANALECTA. ^
cum Ecclesia Universal!, servatis privilegiis quae Titularibus competunt ?
III. Pluribus in locis festum sanctissimi Nominis Mariae ritu duplici I classis cum octava recolitur. Quaeritur: An istis in locis Octava Nativitatis B. Mariae Virginis cesset omnino, adveniente festo sanctissimi Nominis; an potius sus- pendatur tantum, ita ut die decimaquinta septembris agendum sit de die Octava ipsius Nativitatis, omissa commemoratione Octavae sanctissimi Nominis?
IV. Ex novis dispositionibus saepe accidit ut festa, sive duplicia maiora, sive sanctorum Doctorum simplificanda sint ob occursum alicuius festi translati ritus duplicis II classis. Quaeritur ergo : Num symbolum addendum sit in Missa de isto festo translate quod per se symbolum non admittat, si in ea facta sit commemoratio alicuius festi occurrentis ritus duplicis maioris aut minoris quod ius habeat ad symbolum in Missa ?
V. Collectae ab Ordinario imperatae, ex novis rubricis, tit. XI, omittendae sunt, quandocumque in Missa dicendae sint plusquam tres Orationes a rubrica eo die praescriptae. Quae- ritur ergo : An Collectae omittendae sint, quando in Missis privatis, post tres Orationes eo die praescriptas, addita est oratio sanctissimi Sacramenti publice expositi, vel pro Papa aut episcopo in respectivis anniversariis electionis, seu con- secrationis aut coronationis ?
VI. Cum in tabella Occurrentiae perpetuae nuper ab ista S. Congregatione edita, evidenter mendum irrepserit typo- graphicum in quadrangulo in quo sibi invicem occurrunt Sim- plex cum Simplici, ubi legendus est numerus 7, et non 8, dubium oritur, an aliud pariter mendum sit in quadrangulis in quibus sibi invicem obveniunt Duplex mains et minus, cum Vigilia Epiphaniae, ubi loco numeri 3 videtur quod legi de- beat numerus 6, eo quod Officium ipsius Vigiliae gaudeat privilegiis Dominicae, ac proinde praevalere debeat, ex novis Rubricis, Duplici minori et maiori quod non sit festum Domini. Quaeritur: An revera in praedictis duobus quadrangulis le- gendus sit numerus 6, ita ut in casu agi debeat de Vigilia Epiphaniae, cum perpetua repositione Duplicis occurrentis?
Et sacra eadem Congregatio, ad relationem infrascripti Se- cretarii, audita sententia Commissionis Liturgicae reque ac- curate examine perpensa, rescribendum censuit:
336 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
Ad I. Officium Dominicae infra Octavam Nativitatis trans- ferendae ea die ponatur quae festum minus nobile in occur- rentia, a die 29 usque ad 31 decembris, secus peragendum foret, salvis Dominicae iuribus in concurrentia. Quod si omnia festa a die 29 ad 31 decembris occurrentia ritum dup- licem I aut II classis obtineant, commemoratio Dominicae fiat in Festo ut supra minus nobili. In paritate nobilitatis Offi- cium aut commemoratio Dominicae fiat in festo prius oc- currente.
Ad 11. Affirmative.
Ad III. Negative ad primam partem; affirmative ad secundam.
Ad IV. et V. Affirmative.
Ad VI. In tabella Occurrentiae perpetuae menda corrigan- tur, ita ut in quadrangulo in quo sibi invicem occurrunt Sim- plex cum Simplici, ponatur numerus 7, et in quadrangulis in quibus occurrunt Duplex maius et minus cum Vigilia Epi- phaniae, ponatur numerus 6: et Vigilia Epiphaniae, privi- legiis Dominicae gaudens, tam in occurrentia quam in con- currentia, Duplici etiam maiori semper praeferatur.
Atque ita rescripsit et servari mandavit, die 21 iunii 191 2. Fr. S. Card. Martinelli, Praefectus.
L. * S.
■^ Petrus La Fontaine, Episc. Charystien., Secretarius.
OOMMISSIO PONTIPIOIA DE EE BIBLIOA. I.
De Auctore, de Tempore Compositionis et de Historica Veritate Evangeliorum secundum Marcum et secun- dum LUCAM.
Propositis sequentibus dubiis Pontificia Commissio " De Re Biblica " ita respondendum decrevit:
I. Utrum luculentum traditionis suffragium inde ab Ec- clesiae primordiis mire consentiens ac multiplici argument© firmatum, nimirum disertis sanctorum Patrum et scriptorum ecclesiasticorum testimoniis, citationibus et allusionibus in eorumdem scriptis occurrentibus, veterum haereticorum usu, versionibus librorum Novi Testamenti, codicibus manuscriptis
ANALECTA. .^
antiquissimis et pene universis, atque etiam internis rationibus ex ipso sacrorum librorum textu desumptis, certo affirmare cogat Marcum, Petri discipulum et interpretem, Lucam vero medicum, Pauli adiutorem et comitem, revera Evangeliorum quae ipsis respective attribuuntur esse auctores? R. Affirmative.
II. Utrum rationes, quibus nonnulli critici demonstrare ni- tuntur postremos duodecim versus Evangelii Marci (Marc, XVI, 9-20) non esse ab ipso Marco conscriptos sed ab aliena manu appositos, tales sint quae ius tribuant affirmandi eos non esse ut inspiratos et canonicos recipiendos ; vel saltern demon- strent versuum eorumdem Marcum non esse auctorem?
R. Negative ad utramque partem.
III. Utrum pariter dubitare liceat de inspiratione et canoni- citate narrationum Lucae de infantia Christi (Luc, I-II), aut de apparitione Angeli lesum confortantis et de sudore sanguineo (Luc, XXII, 43-44) ; vel solidis saltem rationibus ostendi possit — quod placuit antiquis haereticis et quibusdam etiam recentioribus criticis arridet — easdem narrationes ad genuinum Lucae Evangelium non pertinere?
R. Negative ad utramque partem.
IV. Utrum rarissima ilia et prorsus singularia documenta in quibus Canticum Magnificat non beatae Virgini Mariae, sed Elisabeth tribuitur, ullo modo praevalere possint ac debeant contra testimonium concors omnium fere codicum tum graeci textus originalis tum versionum, necnon contra interpreta- tionem quam plane exigunt non minus contextus quam ipsius Virginis animus et constans Ecclesiae traditio?
R. Negative.
V. Utrum, quoad ordinem chronologicum Evangeliorum, ab ea sententia recedere fas sit, quae, antiquissimo aeque ac constanti traditionis testimonio roborata, post Matthaeum, qui omnium primus Evangelium suum patrio sermone conscripslt, Marcum ordine secundum et Lucam tertium scripsisse testatur; aut huic sententiae adversari vicissim censenda sit eorum opinio quae asserit Evangelium secundum et tertium ante graecam primi Evangelii versionem esse compositum?
R. Negative ad utramque partem.
VI. Utrum tempus compositionis Evangeliorum Marci et Lucae usque ad urbem lerusalem eversam differre liceat; vel.
338 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
eo quod apud Lucam prophetia Domini circa huius urbis eversionem magis determinata videatur, ipsius saltern Evan- gelium obsidione iam inchoata fuisse conscriptum, sustineri possit ?
R. Negative ad utramque partem.
VII. Utrum affirmari debeat Evangelium Lucae praeces- sisse librum Actuum Apostolorum (Act.^ I, 1-2) ; et quum hie liber, eodem Luca auctore, ad finem captivitatis Romanae Apostoli fuerit absolutus (Act., XXVIII, 30-31), eiusdem Evangelium non post hoc tempus fuisse compositum?
R. Affirmative.
VIII. Utrum, prae oculis habitis tum traditionis testimoniis, turn argumentis internis, quoad fontes quibus uterque Evan- gelista in conscribendo Evangelio usus est, in dubium vocari prudenter queat sententia quae tenet Marcum iuxta praedica- tionem Petri, Lucam autem iuxta praedicationem Pauli scrip- sisse; simulque asserit iisdem Evangelistis praesto fuisse alios quoque fontes fide dignos sive orales sive etiam iam scriptis consignatos ?
R. Negative.
IX. Utrum dicta et gesta, quae a Marco iuxta Petri prae- dicationem accurate et quasi graphice enarrantur, et a Luca, assecuto omnia a principio diligenter per testes fide plane dignos, quippe qui ah initio ipsi viderunt et ministri fuerunt sermonis (Luc, I, 2-3), sincerissime exponuntur, plenam sibi eam fidem historicam iure vindicent quam eisdem semper praestitit Ecclesia; an e contrario eadem facta et gesta cen- senda sint historica veritate, saltern ex parte, destituta, sive quod scriptores non fuerint testes oculares, sive quod apud utrumque Evangelistam defectus ordinis ac discrepantia in successione factorum haud raro deprehendantur, sive quod, cum tardius venerint et scripserint, necessario conceptiones menti Christi et Apostolorum extraneas aut facta plus minusve iam imaginatione populi inquinata referre debuerint, sive demum quod dogmaticis ideis praeconceptis, quisque pro suo scopo, indulserint?
R. Affirmative ad primam partem, negative ad alteram.
ANALECTA. ^^g
II.
De Quaestione Synoptica sive de Mutuis Relationibus
INTER TrIA PrIORA EvANGELIA.
Propositis pariter sequentibus dubiis Pontificia Commissio " De Re Biblica " ita respondendum decrevit:
I. Utrum, servatis quae iuxta praecedenter statuta omnino servanda sunt, praesertim de authenticitate et integritate trium Evangeliorum Matthaei, Marci et Lucae, de identitate sub- stantial! Evangelii graeci Matthaei cum eius originali primi- tivo, necnon de ordine temporum quo eadem scripta fuerunt, ad explicandum eorum ad invicem similitudines aut dissimili- tudines, inter tot varias oppositasque auctorum sententias, liceat exegetis libere disputare et ad hpotheses traditionis sive scrip- tae sive oralis vel etiam dependentiae unius a praecedenti seu a praecedentibus appellare?
R. Affirmative.
II. Utrum ea quae superius statuta sunt, ii servare censeri debeant, qui, nullo fulti traditionis testimonio nee historico argumento, facile amplectuntur hypothesim vulgo duorum fontium nuncupatam, quae compositionem Evangelii graeci Matthaei et Evangelii Lucae ex eorum potissimum depen- dentia ab Evangelio Marci et a coUectione sic dicta sermonum Domini contendit explicare; ac proinde earn libere propugnare valeant?
R. Negative ad utramque partem.
Die autem 26 iunii anni 1912, in audientia utrique Rmo Consultori ab Actis benigne concessa, Ssmus Dominus noster Pius Papa X praedicta responsa rata habuit ac publici iuris fieri mandavit.
Romae, diei 26 iunii 191 2.
L. * S.
FULCRANUS ViGOUROUX, Gr. S. Sulp.
Laurentius Janssens, O. S. B. Consultores ab Actis.
340 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
OUEIA EOMANA. Pontifical Appointments.
6 May: The Rev. Patrick Ryan, Vicar General of the Diocese of Pembroke, appointed Titular Bishop of Clazomene.
J7 May : Mr. William Dooley, of the Archdiocese of Boston, appointed Private Chamberlain of Cape and Sword.
II June: The Rev. Donald Aloysius Mackintosh, Vicar General of the Archdiocese of Glasgow, appointed Titular Archbishop of Chersoneso.
14 June: Monsignor Francis Bickerstaffe-Drew, of Salis- bury, appointed Protonotary Apostolic ad instar partici- pantium.
15 June: The Rev. Joseph Gabriel Pinter, V.G., Diocese of Saulte Ste. Marie and Marquette, appointed Domestic Prelate.
22 June: His Eminence Cardinal Sebastian Martinelli ap- pointed Protector of the Dominican Tertiaries, whose mother- house is at Sinsinawa, Wisconsin.
24. June: The Rev. John Mclntyre, of the Archdiocese of Birmingham, appointed Titular Bishop of Lamas and Bishop Auxiliary of the Archbishop of Birmingham.
28 June: The Right Rev. John J. McCort, Vicar General of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, appointed Titular Bishop of Azota and Auxiliary to the Archbishop of Philadelphia.
J July: Mr. James J. Ryan, of Philadelphia, awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of St. Gregory the Great.
6 July: The Right Rev. Thomas F. Kennedy, Rector of the American College, Rome, appointed Assistant at the Pontifical Throne.
Stubies anb Conferences*
OUE ANALEOTA.
The Roman documents for the month are :
Letter of Pope Pius X to the Right Rev. James Duhig, Bishop of Rockhampton, Australia, on the occasion of the Golden Jubilee of the first mission of this now flourishing diocese.
S. Congregation of the Holy Office decides : ( i ) that the dispensation from the impediment of disparity of cult is never to be granted unless the prescribed guarantees and safe- guards are explicitly given; (2) a dispensation from the im- pediment of disparity of cult is null, if the prescribed guaran- tees have either not been asked for or have been refused; (3) the prescription of the decree Ne temere on the presence of the parish priest at mixed marriages in which the regular guarantees are obstinately refused by the contracting parties (No. IV, § 3), is revoked.
S. Congregation of the Index makes known the submis- sion of E. Th. de Cauzons to its decree of 6 May last.
S. Congregation of Rites : i . The decrees contained in Vol. VI (Appendix I) of the Collection of Decrees of the S. Congregation of Rites are officially declared to be authentic.
2. Decree regarding the new Rubrics.
3. Arrangement of feasts according to the new Rubrics.
Pontifical Biblical Commission answers ( i ) nine ques- tions regarding the authorship, date of composition, and his- torical truth of the Gospels of SS. Mark and Luke; (2) and two other questions on the mutual relations of the first three Gospels, — the Synoptic Question.
Roman Curia gives the recent Pontifical appointments.
DE VASEOTOMIA.
Quaestio de vasectomia ej usque liceitate hisce ultimis tem- poribus tantopere sollicitos habuit theologos, medicos, juris- peritos et legislatores, in America praesertim Septentrionali, estque quaestio tum practice turn theoretice adeo momentosa ut, non obstantibus pluribus articulis (in hoc signanter perio-
342 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
dico) circa illam jam scriptis/ adhuc opportunum visum fuerit hanc controversiam reassumere, principiis magis in- sistendo, quae totam litem moderate videntur. Occasione data, per decursum dissertationis, occurremus rationis mo- mentis quae contra doctrinam alias a nobis propositam in- ducenda censuerit doctissimus Dr. O'Malley.^
Ansam praebuit huic controversiae lex recenter inducta in variis Statibus Foederatis Americae Septentrionalis, signan- ter in Indiana, California, Utah et Connecticut, tenore cujus legis vasectomia imponitur peragenda in variis viris de- generibus, defectivis, alcoholicis et aliis hujusmodi, ex quibus procreanda timetur adulterata ac degener progenies.^
Successive exponemus i. in quo consistat sic dicta Vasec- tomia, 2. quinam sint ejusdem effectus et 3. quousque licite peragi valeat tam publica quam privata auctoritate.
^ Hue spectant articuli de hac re script! sequentes :
Donovan (professor in coUegio Franciscano Universitati Washingtonensi adnexo), Circa liceitatem cujusdam operationis chirurgicae, apud Ecclesias- tical Review., torn. XLII (1910), p. 271 ss., coUatis ibidem, p. 599 ss., nec- non torn. XLIV, p. 571 ss., ac torn. XLV, p. 313 ss. ; Laboure (professor Seminarii in San Antonio), De Vasectomia, ibidem, torn. XLIII, p. 80 ss., collatis, p. 320 ss. et 552 ss., necnon torn. XLIV, p. 574 ss. et torn. XLV, p. 355 ss. ; Rigby (professor in collegio Dominicanorum, Romae), De liceitate Vasectomiae, ibidem, p. 70 ss. ; Schmitt, Vasectomia, eine neue Operation und ihre Erlaubtheit, apud Zeitschrift fur kath. Theologie, 191 1, p. 66 ss. et 759 ss. ; coll. Ecclesiastical Review, torn. XLIV, p. 679 ss. et torn. XLV, p. 86 ss. ; Ferreres, De Vasectomia duplici noviter inventa, apud Razon y Fe, t. XXVII, p. 374 ss., torn. XXVIII, p. 224 ss., torn. XXXI, p. 495 ss. et torn. XXXII, p. 222 ss., coll. EccLES. Rev., torn. XLVI (1912), p. 207 ss. ; Gemelli (Dr. medicus et professor theol. pastoralis), De liceitate Vasectomiae, apud La Scuola Cattolica, torn. XXI (1911), p. 396 ss. ; Stucchi, ibidem, p. 417 ss. ; Eschbach, ibidem, torn. XXII, p. 243 ss. ; Capello, ibidem, p. 246 ss. ; De Becker, The casus " de liceitate Vasectomiae ", apud Eccles. Review, torn. XLII, p. 474 s. et torn. XLIII, p. 356 ss. ; Dr. medicus O'Malley, Vasectomy in Defectives, apud Eccles. Review, torn. XLIV, p. 684 ss., coll., torn. XLVI, p. 219 ss. ; idem, Inseminatio ad validum matrimonium requisita, ibidem, torn. XLVI, p. 322 ss. ; Roderer, apud Eccles. Review, torn. XLIV, p. 742 s. ; Wouters, De Vasectomia, apud Nederl. kath. Stemmen, 191 1, p. 19 ss. ; Nouv. Rev. theo., 1910, p. 417 ss. ; Revue eccl. de Liege, VI, p. 203 ss. Addi possunt quaedam dissertationes seu adnotationes hue spectantes anony- mice aut pseudonymice vulgatae in Eccles. Review, torn. XLII, p. 346 ss. ; torn. XLIII, p. 310 ss. (sub pseudonomine Neo-Scholasticus) ; torn. XLIV, p. 562 ss. ; torn. XLV, p. 71 ss. et p. 599 ss. (sub pseudonomine Philokanon) ; accedit tandem Consultatio theologica RR. PP. Vermeersch, De Villers et Salsmans, in Eccles. Review, torn. XLII, p. 475.
2 Eccles. Review, tom. XLVI, p. 332.
8 In Indiana, ut testatur Dr. O'Malley, apud Eccles. Review, tom. XLIV, p. 684, peracta fuit vasectomia, inde ab anno 1907 ad finem anni 1910, in 800 circiter viris. Cf. etiam Eccles. Review, tom. XLII, p. 347 s.
/
STUDIES AND CONFERENCES.
343
I. In quo consistat Vasectomia.
A pud virum, consistit in sectione transversa peracta in utroque canali (vase deferente nuncupate), quod viam sternit a testiculis ad vesiculas seminales : incisione nempe facta per scrotum, forcipe prehenditur funiculus spermaticus, atque ex denudato vase deferente parvum fragmentum exsecatur, sedulo servatis nervis, venis et arteriis, quae vas deferens cir- cumcingunt et simul cum ipso funiculum spermaticum con- stituunt.*
A pud foeminam, consistit in simili resectione utriusque oviducti, i. e. canalis ab ovariis ad matricem ducentis et ova matura deferentis. Vocatur haec operatio speciali nomine oophorectomia seu fallectomia^ denominatione vasectomiae peculiariter reservata operationi peractae in viro.
Vasectomia viri brevem ac omni periculo expertem importat operationem chirurgicam, sola provocata anesthesia locali, quin opus sit chloroformio aliove medicamento somnifero; oophorectomia vero gravem et sat periculosam exigit laparo- tomiam.
II. Effectus.
A. Inducitur apud virum et mulierem sterilitas. Via enim ^praecluditur omnimode elemento foecundanti virili ac respec- tive elemento foemineo foecundando, adeo ut omnis foecundatio sit physice impossibilis, tarn in congressu viri vasectomiaci quam in copula habita cum muliere oophorectomiam passa.
Quod autem spectat sterilitatis perpetuitatem: equidem physica praesto est possibilitas foecundandi potentiam resti- tuendi, extremitates resuendo oviducti vel canalis resecti ; * non desunt etiam experientiae quae, testibus medicis, felicem in hunc sensum exitum sint nactae; ® sed non est negandum, attenta exiguitate luminis seu interioris diametri canalis de- ferentis,^ difficilem esse hujusmodi restaurationem, etiam in
* Intimiorem operationis descriptionem videsis apud Drem. O'Malley, EccLES. Review, torn. XLIV, p. 687 ss. et apud Gemelli, La Scuola cattolica, torn. XXI, p. 403 ss.
5 Dr. O'Malley, Eccles. Rev., XLV, p. 720, suadet potius connectendam esse superiorem partem resecti canalis cum epididymide.
« Cf. Eccles. Review, torn. XLV, p. 720 s. ; La Scuola Cattolica, t. XXI, P- 415.
'^ Non excedit dimidium millimetri ; cf. Razon y Fe, torn. XXVIII, p. 230.
344 ^^^ ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
viro, eamque non modo expertam exquirere manum, sed et raro succedere, signanter quando vasectomia non fuerit re- centius peracta.®
B. Vehemens exsurgit controversia utrum oophorectomia et praesertim vasectomia importet, ultra sterilitatem, etiam im- potentiam, eamque perpetuarny matrimonium dirimentem.
Ad cujus controversiae solutionem haec duo praemittenda volumus :
a. Litem coarctamus ad solam vasectomiam viri.^ Mulie- rem fallectomiam passam facile concedimus non reddi im- potentem, siquidem manet, non secus ac mulier excisa, apta ad habendam copulam ex parte actus ad generationem de se idoneam, juxta notionem datam apud Collat. Brug., t. XV,
p. 695-705.''
b. Sedulo notandum vasectomiam non sequi testiculorum inertiam et atrophiam : horum quidem activitas minuitur, sed non abrumpitur seminalis secretio, sicut etiam activitas serva- tur in aliis glandulis ad seminis elaborationem cooperantibus, et manet membrorum genitalium perfecta erectibilitas. Salvis namque remanentibus nervis et sanguineis vasculis funiculi spermatid, integra servatur nutritio testiculorum ac Integra manet nervorum consociatio inter varias glandulas sexualis organismi. In hoc erraverunt non pauci falso nitentes con- ceptu vasectomiae, quasi consisteret in resectione integri funi- culi spermatici.^^
Quibus praenotatis :
1° Inhaesitanter contendimus vasectomia induci impoten- tiam, eamque non relativam, uti patet, sed absolutam, im- potentiam intelligendo ad normam juris canonici.
Revera impotens est vir qui non est capax exercendi copulam ad generationem per se idoneam; sufficit autem ut apta sit copula ex parte ipsius actus, abstractione facta a reliquis or- ganis, praeter copulae actum, ad foecundationem requisitis; sufficit etiam, uti in notione dicitur, ut copula sit per se apta,
8 Cf. EccLES. Review^ t. XLIV, p. 690, et t. XLV, p. 720 s. ; La Scuola Cattolica, t. XXI, p. 413 ss. ; Razon y Fe, t. XXVIII, p. 230 s. et t. XXXII, p. 225 s.
® In sequentibus c"'e hac sola erit quaestio.
^^ Cf. etiam Tractatum de Sponsalibus et Matrimonio, ed. 2a, n. 276 ss.
^1 Cf. Schmitt, 11. cc. ; Ferreres, Razon y Fe, torn. XXIII, p. 224; Rigby^ 1. c, p. 70 s.
STUDIES AND CONFERENCES. ^ .-
quin nempe attendantur ilia quae possent, in ipsis copulae ele- mentis, procreationem impedire per accidens, i. e. prouti sunt in tali vel tali individuo.^^
Jamvero ad illam copulae aptitudinem ex parte actus re- quiritur et sufficit ut elementa praesto sint quae in ipso coeundi actu ad generationem postulantur: penetratio scil. vaginae cum emissione seminis natura sua et per se foecundi, i. e. non liquoris cujuscumque, sed veri seminis ad foecundandum per se idonei.
Quid autem est semen a vasectomiaco emissum nisi semen natura sua et per se prorsus infoecundumf Solum et unicum elementum foecundans est in spermatozoidis, et haec praecise physico et ineluctabili impedimento prohibentur quominus seminationi misceantur, cum via totaliter occludatur ipsis.
Neque invocetur paritas cum senihus qui censentur canonice potentes.^^
Et sane, si sustineretur paritas, non dubitaremus ipsos senes declarare impotentes. Ast neganda est undecumque paritas. Nimirum senes, quos supponimus aliunde erectiones capaces et organis sexualibus instructos, habent semen per se foecundum; et si contingat illud esse infoecundum, hoc est per accidens. Semen namque dici debet per se foecundum, quod derivatur a glandulis ad semen foecundum secernendum natura sua des- tinatis, quod, attenta provenientia sua, natum est foecunda- tionis principium secum ferre.
Ulterius, siquidem non omnibus placet distinctio inter ea quae sunt per se et quae sunt per accidens,^* alio modo arguere liceat. Esto scil. plurimos senes non jam habere spermato- zoida, aut ea habere adeo inertia ut foecundationi videantur inepta,^'^ non est negandum plures etiam dari quibus praesto sit foecundurn sperma, cum non desint exempla senum qui,
12 " Rectitude naturalis in humanis actibus non est secundum ea quae per accidens contingunt in uno individuo, sed secundum ea quae totam speciem consequuntur." S. Thomas, C. Gentes, 1. Ill, cap. 122.
13 Haec paritas potissimum invocatur a Gemelli, 1. c, p. 412 s., necnon a Dr. O'Malley, Eccles. Review, t. XLVI (1912), p. 332 ss., ubi referens doc- trinam apud Collat. Brug., t. XV, p. 695 ss. propositam, nos inconsequentiae arguit quod ex una parte senes uti potentes habeamus, et ax alia parte vasec- tomiacos ut impotentes.
14 Cf. Dr. O'Malley, Eccles. Rev., t. XLVI, p. 336 s.
15 Cf. Ferreres, apud Eccles. Review, t. XLVI, p. 210 ss., et Razon y Fe, t. XXXI, p. 498 s.
346 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
aetate provecta, prolem procreaverint.^^ Porro quodnam, quaeso, erit criterium quo secernantur senes foecundi ab aliis? Aliud criterium quaeri nequit nisi analysis microscopica ; quod sane criterium admitti nequit: requiritur norma observation! de se pervia eo vel magis quod impotentia, positis ponendis, constituat impedimentum matrimonii, de cujus praesentia vel absentia obvie constare debeat/'^ Hujusmodi criterium de se obvium et naturale est praesentia membrorum quae ad semen foecundum elaborandum requiruntur et sufficiunt, non autem praesentia spermatozoidorum aut horum energia, quae variis in adjunctis individuis deficere potest ac regulariter sola micro- scopica inspectione observari potest.
Ideo potentes censentur viri omnes, quantum vis senescentes, qui obvie innotescunt erectionis capaces ac organis instructi quae noscuntur ad semen foecundum secernendum et ejacu- landum necessaria et de se sufficientia; impotentes autem re- putantur quibus deficit omnis erectibilitas, vel qui organis carere apparent quibus ineluctabiliter indiget vir ad seminis foecundi elaborationem vel ejaculationem. Vasectomiaci proinde inter impotentes sunt adnumerandi, cum ex peracta operatione chirurgica obvie constet ipsos organo destitui ad seminis foecundi, non quidem secretionem, sed ejaculationem insupplebiliter necessario, canali scil. deferente pervio.
Neque dicatur: ad hoc ut quis aptus existat ad validum matrimonium, sufficere ut matrimonium possit ipsi esse in remedium concupiscentiae}^
Profecto si hujus finis consecutio sola esset attendenda, sufiiceret ad validum conjugium potentia, in nupturientibus, copulam exercendi cum seminatione qualicumque, etiam per se infoecunda, adeoque vasectomiaci, etiamsi abruptae com- municationis restitutio esset in perpetuum impossibilis ( de quo
1^ Cf. ffxta relata apud Brouardel, Le Mariage, Paris, 1900, p. 131 ss. ; Topai, De Necessitate uteri in generatione et in Matrimonio, Pustet, 1903, p. 75 s., collate tamen Dre. O'Malley, Eccles. Rev., t. XLVI, p. 221 s.
1'^ Ipse Dr. O'Malley, Eccles. Rev., t. XLVI, p. 324, scribit : " Nequaquam opus est recursum habere ad observationes microscopicas vel chimicas ut norma stabiliatur."
1^ " Ratio fundamentalis cur matrimonium . . . viri vasectomiam passi vali- dum dicendum sit, quaerenda est neque in iis quae sunt per se, neque in iis quae per accidens contingunt, sed in hoc quod potentia sexuali gaudet perfecte apta ad remedium concupiscentiae habendum" Ita Dr. O'Malley, Eccles. Review, t. XLVI, p. 336.
STUDIES AND CONFERENCES. ^ .7
mox infra), essent habendi uti potentes et ad matrimonium contrahendum idonei. Ast illud suppositum falso nititur funda- mento, quasi sedatio concupiscentiae esset finis operis proprius et independens matrimonii, quod falsum esse ostendimus in Tractatu de Sponsalihus et matrimonio, 2* edit., sub n. 54: unicus finis proprius operis, cui finis medendi concupiscentiae est obnoxius et subordinatus, dicendus est generatio prolis; ac proinde nullum matrimonium, quantumvis concupiscentiae sedativum, potest valide iniri, nisi salva ordinatione ad ilium finem, supposita scil., in utroque contrahente, aptitudine ad copulam de se idoneam generationi.
Caeterum si in matrimonio ej usque usu sola attendenda esset concupiscentiae sedatio, absque ordine ad finem procreationis, legitimari posset et pro valido haberi matrimonium ab eunucho contrahendum, in casu nonnunquam, esto infrequenter, ob- tinente, quo in illo eunucho salvatur erectibilitas et seminalis liquoris emittendi potentia.
Ex ipsa igitur ins pe eta natura impotentiae eruendum est eam vasectomia induci.
Quod confirmatur obvia analysi textus in hac re classici, Constitutionis nempe Sixti V Cum frequenter, de die 27 Junii 1587, in qua eunuchi authentice declarantur impotentes."
Nimirum non arguimus ex eo quod vasectomiaci aequi- parandi sint eunuchis, spadonibus seu castratis: in praeno- tandis namque vidimus per vasectomiam rite peractam testi- culos non reddi inertes nee atrophiam pati; manent vasec- tomiaci ad erectionem et foeminei vasis penetrationem perapti, necnon idonei ad seminalem liquorem emittendum, a prostata, vesiculis seminalibus et glandulis Cowperianis elaboratum, dum eunuchi plerique, ut videtur, etiam illi qui in adulta aetate fuerunt evirati, amiserunt, saltem post aliquod temporis spa-
1® " Cum frequenter in istis regionibus eunuchi quidam et spadones, qui utroque teste carent, et ideo certum ac manifestum est eos verum semen emittere non posse ; quia impura carnis tentigine atque immundis complexibus cum mulieribus se commiscent, et humorem forsan quemdam similem semini, licet ad generationem et ad matrimonii causam minime aptum, effundunt, ma- trimonia . . . contrahere praesumant . . . mandamus ut conjugia per dictos et alios quoscumque eunuchos et spadones utroque teste carentes . . . contrahi prohibeas, eosque ad matrimonia quocumque modo contrahenda inhabiles auctoritate nostra declares . . . et matrimonia ipsa sic de facto contracta nulla, irrita et invalida esse decernas."
348 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
tium, potentiam copulam qualemcumque exercendi, deficiente erectibilitate vel etiam seminalis liquoris secretione.^^
Unice nitimur in principio a Sixto V posito, vi cujus prin- cipii impotentes declarantur eunuchi : quod idem principium vasectomiacis applicando, ad eamdem conclusionem admitten- dam urgemur. Et sane eunuchi non declarantur impotentes quia incapaces sunt vas foemineum penetrandi aut seminalem liquorem emittendi (S. Pontifex hypothetice supponit quod id facere valeant) ; sed ideo quia " certum ac manifestum est eos verum semen emittere non posse ", i. e., quemadmodum ex oppositione ad alium seminalem humorem liquet, " ad gener- ationem et ad ynatrimonii causam minime aptum ". Sunt igitur impotentes quia semen de se foecundum emittere non valent.
Ulterius autem progrediendo : undenam inepti sunt ad semen foecundum emittendum?
Manifeste docet Sixtus V id ex eo provenire quod utroque teste carent, siquidem explicite dicuntur ideo praecise verum seu foecundum semen emittere non posse. Jamvero, in or dine ad seminis foecunditatem, idem prorsus est quod testiculi de- sint, et quod omnis inter ipsos et ejaculationis organon abrum- pitur communicatio.
Caeterum conclusionem nostram circa effectum vasectomiae impotentiam inducendi, tuentur plerique canonistae et theo- logi qui partes habuerunt in praesenti controversia.^^
2° Si nobis indubium videtur impotentem esse virum vasec- tomiam passum, non adeo liquet utrum hujusmodi impotentia sit dicenda perpetua, adeoque utrum vel non impedimentum inducat matrimonii dirimens. Id pendet a possibilitate restau- randi abruptam communicationem inter testiculos et versiculas seminales.
20 Cf. Dr. O'Malley, Eccles. Review, t. XLIV, p. 695; t. XLV, p. 719; t. XLVI, p. 334 s., et p. 22 s., quo ultimo loco arguit contra Ferreres (Eccles. Rev., t. XLVI, p. 217 s.).
21 Ita De Becker, Eccles. Rev., t. XLIII, p. 357; Ferreres, Eccles. Rev., t. XLVI, p. 207 ss. ; Razon y Fe, t. XXVIII, p. 376 ss., et XXXI, p. 496 ss. ; Rigby, 1. c, p. 76; Stucchi, 1. c. ; Eschbach, 1. c. ; Capello, 1. c. ; Ojetti, Syn- opsis rerum moralium et juris Pontificii, 3ia ed., n. 2425.
Contrarium opinantur Donovan (licet haesitanter), Eccles. Rev., t. XLII, p. 602 ; Laboure, ibidem, t, XLIII, p. 82, et praesertim Gemelli, 1. c, p. 410 ss., et Dr. O'Malley, t. XLIV, p. 691 s., ubi ait per vasectomiam non magis induci impotentiam quam per tonsionem barbae, collatis torn. XLVI, p. 219 ss. et 332 ss.
STUDIES AND CONFERENCES. ^ .g
Probe tamen notetur non sufficere absolutam et physicam restaurandi possibilitatem, quam caeteroquin admittendam jam vidimus; manet impotentia in sensu canonum perpetua, quamdiu nonnisi per media extraordinaria vel ope peculiaris artificii sanari valet.
Quibus attentis, et spectatis supra notatis de reparationis difficultate, potius inclinamur in asserenda impotentiae per- petuitate, saltem si agatur de vasectomia parum recenti." Cum tamen in hujusmodi negotio tanti momenti ac adeo intime praxim spectante, singulari prudentia est opus, cumque solutio multum pendeat ab artis chirurgicae perfectibilitate, nolumus alteri sententiae, temporaneam dumtaxat impotentiam admit- tenti, probabilitatem denegare, donee lis per decretum S. Se- dis dirimatur.
Quousque igitur stare videatur concessa probabilitas, stricto jure non posset vasectomiacus, nisi probe constiterit restaura- tionem vasis resecti et abruptae communicationis in casu par- ticulari esse impossibilem, a matrimonio prohiberi, siquidem, juxta principia in citato Tractatu, n. 240 et n. 279, proposita, non potest a matrimonio arceri ille cujus impotentia proba- biliter non est perpetua. Ex alia autem parte, cum pro hujus- modi persona, quousque mutilatio vasectomiaca fuerit sanata et impotentia inde consequens ablata, usus matrimonii, salvo meliori judicio, sit illicitus declarandus, practice foret matri- monium passim interdicendum donee restauratio fuerit per- acta: tale namque conjugium, absque eo utendi facultate, gra- vissimis periculis esset plenum. ^^
C. Seposita sterilitate vel impotentia, refertur a medicis et hujus rei peritis notabiles effectus eosque faustos et beneficos ad vasectomiam consequi in viri organismo. Et quidem bonus ille influxus observari videtur potissimum in illis qui ante ope- rationem chirurgicam sexuali erethismo, quem vocant, labora- bant, quatenus qui prius incorrigibiles masturbatores existe- bant, aut quasi irresistibiliter ad venerem provocabantur,
22 Hanc impotentiae perpetuitatem, inter alios, urgent Ferreres, Wouters, Stucchi, Capello ; impotentiam potius habet ut temporaneam Ojetti, 1. c.
28 Haec practica solutio convenit cum doctrina proposita apud Collat. Brug., t. XV, p. 698, licet haec doctrina, theoretice spectata, aliquatenus mitiganda videatur ad normam dictorum.
350
THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
sensim evadant minus erotici et ad venerem minus proclives, ac magis normalem vitae rationem sequi videantur.^*
Descriptus influxus deberi videtur, in quantum conjicere licet, tum imminutioni secretionis seminalis operationem con- sequenti, qua secretionis imminutione removetur congestio ilia cerebralis cum nervosa excitatione sexuali, per excessivam secretionem producta; tum etiam absorptioni seminalis secre- tionis a testiculis elaboratae, quae absorptio noscitur oeco- nomiae corporali valde proficua.
III. LiCEITAS.
Attenta notione superius data de vasectomia ejusque ef- fectibus, habenda est ut mutilatio gravis, cum ratio sit habenda non tantum resectionis in se et materialiter spectatae, sed etiam effectus immediati et ineluctabilis, abruptae nempe communi- cationis urethri cum testiculis : quae abruptio indubie gravis apparet, quod eam dicas sterilitatem dumtaxat vel et im- potentiam inducere; in utraque hypothesi privatur vir notabili functione physiologica foecundandi.
Nee levis efficitur mutilatio ex eo quod functio suppressa restaurari queat, eo vel magis quod passim difficilis sit, uti vidimus, ac dubii exitus hujusmodi redintegratio. Non pendet proinde instituenda controversia ab ilia quae modo fuit instituta sub II, ad B; severae tamen conclusiones quae pro- ponentur magis stringunt respectu illorum qui censent vasec- tomiam impotentiam inducere.^*^
Applicanda igitur sunt vasectomiae principia quae mode- rantur moralitatem gravis mutilationis corporalis, quae prin- cipia exposita videsis apud Auctores theologiae moralis, et signanter apud 111. Waffelaert, Tractatus de Justitia, Brugis, 1886, I, nn. 91-95 et II, nn. 100-106.
Nimirum.
A. Quod spectat vasectomiam privata auctoritate per- agendam :
1° Vasectomia indirecta licet proportionata de causa.
24 Cf. prae caeteris O'Malley, apud Eccles. Rev., t. XLIV, p. 689 ss. ; t. XLV, p. 717 ss. et t. XLVI, p. 325 s. ; Gemelli, 1. c, p. 400 s. et 408 ss. et 415, ubi et varia testimonia referuntur.
2^- In sequentibus passim abstrahimus ab hac disputatione, vasectomiam pro- ponendo ut actionem sterilizantem.
STUDIES AND CONFERENCES. ^^^
Vasectomia indirecta est quando ex operatione canalem re- secante, quae est actio in se indifferens, duplex effectus se- quitur aeque immediate, communicationis scil. abruptio steri- lizans et alius effectus bonus, ac prior effectus malus non in- tenditur. Ita si pars canalis deferentis esset gangrena in- fecta, partis infectae exsectio constitueret vasectomiam in- directam.
Talis vasectomia, si praesto est justa causa, i. e. si bonus effectus est proportionatus malo effectui, ut in casu proposito, declaranda est omnino licita; ratio est quia resectio, in se in- differens, non potest dici mala ratione effectus pravi, cum ef- fectus ille per alium effectum proportionatum et aeque imme- diatum compensetur.
2° Vasectomia directa non licet nisi ad bonum corporis.
Vasectomia directa est quotiescumque solus effectus imme- diatus resectionis chirurgicae est abruptio communicationis inter vesiculas seminales et testiculos; ipsa namque violenta ilia interruptio constituit ipsam actionem sterilizantem, non secus ac ipsa expulsio foetus nondum viabilis constituit ipsam actionem occisivam. Unde sicut non est abortus indirectus, licet ex ipsa expulsione immediate sequatur salus matris, et non ex morte prolis; pari modo vasectomia seu mutilatio ste- rilizans directa est, licet bonus effectus seminalem secretionem minuendi et organismum male affectum moderandi sequatur potius ex ipsa communicationis interruptione quam ex sterili- zatione.
Porro dicimus hujusmodi vasectomiam directam non licere, excepto casu quo in bonum corporis ordinetur.
Quod generatim non liceat vasectomia directa, patet ex eo quod gravem constituat mutilationem sterilizantem, quodque omnis mutilatio directa, salva exceptione adducta, importet inordinationem : laedit nempe dominium Dei, utpote qui sibi reservavit proprietatem vitae humanae ejusque organorum.^^ Quemadmodum non possumus nobis auferre vitam, utpote in quam Deus sibi retinuit dominium, sic non possumus nobis membrum amputare vel functionem aliquam vitalem sup- primere.
Exceptio habetur pro casu quo mutilatio membri vel organi admittitur propter bonum totius corporis. Ratio est *' quod
26 111. Waffelaert, o. c, I, n. 91.
352 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
homo sit suipsius gubernator et membrorum administrator ad bonum totius ; neque enim membra singula sunt propter se sed propter totum, et ideo in bonum totius petunt dirigi, et possunt abscindi vel incidi propter bonum totius." ^^
Quod autem bonum corporis sit sola causa directam muti- lationem legitimans, inde est quod '* membra ex natura sua immediate non subordinantur nisi toti naturali seu corporis bono et conservationi." ^^
Directa proinde mutilatio, et in specie vasectomia, non licet immediate ad bonum procurandum spirituale animae; et ita non liceret manum amputare ne deinceps illicitos tactus admittat, nee oculos eruere ne amplius videant vanitatem, nee licet seipsum castrare ad hoc immediate ut continentia ser- vetur. Non datur nempe immediata subordinatio et con- nexio inter membra corporis et salutem animae ; et ideo etiam, uti notat S. Thomas,^® '' saluti spirituali semper potest aliter subveniri quam per membri praecisionem ", moderando scil., voluntatis imperio, usum membrorum, oculos avertendo, manum cohibendo.
Dicitur: non licet vasectomia, eam ad bonum spirituale or- dinando immediate ; quia, si immediate conducit ad bonum corporis et requiritur ad boni corporalis conservationem, simul mediate proficiendo saluti animae, profecto salvatur debita ordinatio et nihil obstat quominus vasectomia legi- timetur.
Jamvero, si confidere possumus testimoniis supra invocatis et experientiis factis, non auderemus dicere nunquam licitam esse posse vasectomiam directe provocatam auctoritate privata.
Pone scil. virum aliquem abnormi secretione seminali con- tinuo laborare et inde continuum pati erethismum sexualem, ita ut inde valetudo ejus male afficiatur. Nonne, in supposito quod ejffectus supra descripti ad vasectomiam consequantur, nonne, inquam, dici posset vasectomiam immediate conducere ab bonum corporis, et mediate tantum ad bonum spirituale?
Posito hujusmodi abnormi corporis conditione vere patho- logica, posito etiam quod frustra alia remedia fuerint ad- hibita, non auderemus, donee S. Sedes aliter judicaverit, vel
27 Ibidem, II, n. lOl.
28 Ibidem, n. 103.
29 2a 2ae, qu. LXV, art. i, ad 3m.
STUDIES AND CONFERENCES. ..^
donee circa effectus physiologicos et psychicos vasectomiae accuratius instruct! fuerimus, damnare virum qui illam opera- tionem sollicitaret nee medicum qui ad illam peragendam operam suam praeberet.*^
Extra descripta omnino exeeptionalia adjuncta, plane as- sentimur illis qui direetam vasectomiam, auctoritate privata peraetam, reprobandam ducant. Vix notandum est, post ea quae modo exposuimus, illam operationem privata auctoritate nunquam adhiberi posse ad ipsam sterilitatem obtinendam, ad vitandam prolis multitudinem, et ad alios fines istius generis.
B. Quod speetat vasectomiam auctoritate publica insti- tuendam :
Princeps non habet directum dominium in vita vel membris subditorum, nee cives sunt habendi quasi in bonum reipublicae ordinati, cum contra respubliea sit in bonum et utilitatem civium. Ideo non potest a Principe vita auferri civis inno- centis et innocui, licet ejus mors in commune bonum cederet, puta ilium oecidendo ad placandum tyrannum, qui civitatis exeidium minitatur nisi caput illius innocentis tradatur.
Ex alia parte agnoscenda est Principi potestas jurisdictionis in cives, quatenus, tanquam vindex suorum subditorum et curam gerens boni communis ac reipublicae conservandae, po- test et debet vitam et jura civium tueri contra invadentes, ac media adhibere quae ad conservationem reipublicae et vitae socialis integritatem exiguntur, etiam, si opus sit, oecidendo aut mutilando illos qui vitam socialem in discrimen vocant.
Quo pacto jus habet Princeps, positis ponendis, mutilandi aut etiam oceidendi, sive in punitionem criminum, quae punitio necessaria est ad reliquos a sceleribus deterrendos, sive directe ad societatis vel individuorum defensionem contra nocentes.
Porro juxta haec principia solvenda est quaestio nostra. Ex illis autem liquido apparet Principi non esse agnoscendum jus ut vasectomiam peragendam jubeat, nisi in quantum con- stiterit illam mutilationem (in uno alterove individuo vel in civium eategoria) esse necessariam vel i. ad tuendam vitam seu jura individuorum, vel 2. ad conservandam ipsam reipub-
3 0 Conveniunt in hoc Schmitt, Zeitschr. /. k. TheoL, 191 1, P- 7^3 s., et EccLES. Rev., t. XLV, p. 88 s. ; Donovan, Eccles. Rev., t. XLV, p. 318 s.; Laboure, ibidem, p. 355 ; Stucchi, 1. c, p. 418 s. ; O'Malley, ibidem, t. XLIV, p. 696; necnon Auctor sub pseudonomine (Perplexus), scribens apud Eccles. Rev., t. XLII, p. 602 s., ac Auctor Anonymus, ibidem, t. XLV, p. 76.
354 ^^^ ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
licae vitam socialem, sive per modum punitionis, sive per mo- dum directae defendonis contra el em en ta nociva ejus incolumi- tatem in grave discrimen vocantia.
Quae conditio, pro legitimanda qualibet gravi mutilatione necessaria, strictius hie est urgenda pro majori gravitate muti- lationis vasectomiacae, signanter si censetur esse non modo sterilizans, sed et impotentiam ac matrimonii impedimentum inducens.
Jamvero opinamur hanc indispensabilem conditionem neutra sub parte verificari. Et sane.
1° Quod spectat vitam et jura privata individuorum : re- licta in viris defectivis foecundandi potentia, nuUius individui jus laeditur quod a Principe vindicetur; vel, si locus sit juris laesioni, alia praesto sunt in manu Principis media opportuna et efficacia, quibus juris violationi occurrat eamve praeveniat, quin opus sit ut ad vasectomiam recurrat.
Nimirum non est a Statu vindicandum jus prolis forsan nascendae ex hujusmodi viro, in statu debiliori aut infirmiori, cum proles ilia, utpote nondum existens, non sit subjectum juris, cumque illi semper melius sit esse infirmam quam non esse.
Nee regulariter tuendum assumere debet jus mulieris, cui conjungi contingat talem virum, cum in hujusmodi unione regulariter et per se dictae mulieris jus non laedatur.
Dicitur : regulariter, quia exceptionaliter potest esse locus juris violationi e parte talis viri. Casus esset si contagiosa lue esset infectus, puta lepra aut syphili in tali gradu ut proxi- mum contagionis periculum inducat pro muliere cui copuletur; vel si ageretur de viro qui tanto passionis aestu laboret ut primam quasi occurrentem foeminam invadat et violento stupro violandam aggrediatur.
In hisce exceptionalibus adjunctis, partes essent auctoritatis socialis illos viros cohibere eosque impedire quominus morbo inficiant alios eorumve pudicitiae et castitati attentent.
Ast non est integrum Statui qualecumque medium pro lubitu in hunc finem adhibere, et ad occisionem aut mutilationem non potest recurrere nisi deficiente alio medio efficaci. Patet autem efficax remedium praesto esse in reclusione, quemad- modum reclusione impediuntur ne noceant furiosi et rabidi, quos etiam occidere et mutilare non liceret, quousque alio
STUDIES AND CONFERENCES. ^ec
medio cohiberi valent. Imo non esset ad reclusionem deve- niendum nisi cum viris alterius speciei, pudicitiae scil. violenter attentantibus ; periculo contagionis sufficienter provideretur, virum morbo contagioso affectum prohibendo, sub poena nul- litatis, a matrimonio contrahendo : quae potestas hujusmodi impedimentum inducendi auctoritati publicae non videtur deneganda.
2° Quod spectat directe bonum commune societatis:
a. Vasectomia non est, pro reipublicae salute, infligenda in poenam et punitionem criminis admissi. Attenta namque natura operationis facilis et parum dolorosae, non habet vasec- tomia rationem poenae; quod et experientia confirmatur, cum, teste D^® O'Malley, pro 800 viris, in quibus, in Indiana, pera- genda erat, vi legis, vasectomia, i "j^ eam ultro postulaverint.^^
Caeterum si vasectomia imponeretur ut punitio, restringenda foret ejus applicatio solis delinquentibus et criminosis stricte dictis, non autem defectivis, abnormibus et degeneribus, ea latitudine qua applicatur in quibusdam Statibus Foederatis.
b. Vasectomia non est medium necessarium quo societas sui incolumitatem directe protegat et defendat contra nocentes.
In hoc praeprimis insistunt liceitatis patroni, quatenus timendum velint ne defectivi et abnormes, si servetur eorum foecundandi potentia, proles generent defectivas et ad crimina proclives, quarum multitudine ipsa societatis existentia in dis- crimen vocetur. Jamvero.
a. Non admittimus ex procreatione prolium degenerum ex illis viris periclitari societatis existentiam. Numerus namque hujusmodi virorum et prolium inde nascentium, in Statu ali- unde rite moderato, semper manebit relative exiguus, et so- cietatis integritas stare potest cum existentia quorumdam membrorum abnormium et degenerum. Exaggerationem etiam sapit dicere ex patre vitioso non procreari nisi vitiosam progeniem, nee desunt exempla in contrarium.
b. Etiamsi societas ex dicta causa periclitari videretur, nondum legitima foret dicenda lex ad normam illius quam in quibusdam Statibus Americae Septentrionalis vigere vidimus.
Equidem, juxta statuta principia, posset Status, in boni communis tuitionem ac suae conservationis tutelam, quem-
31 EccLES. Rev., t. XLIV, p. 699 s., coll. p. 742 ; coll. etiam Schmitt, 1. c, p. 76.
356 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
cumque cohibere a mortifero vulnere inferendo societati ; sed rursus ordo esset servandus in electione remediorum, nee posset ad mortis illationem et mutilationem procedi nisi exhaustis aliis remediis; non posset ad functionis generativae suppres- sionem deveniri quousque sufficere appareat usus interdictio.^^
Jamvero Status occurrere posset periculo ex hac parte mini- tanti, descriptos viros a matrimonio arcendo, contra eos in- ducto impedimento dirimente, vel, in quantum hoc remedium non est satis efficax, eos recludendo et libertate privando. Pravae etiam dispositiones et inclinationes quae saepe observ- antur in prolibus ex defectivo et vitioso patre procreatis, magna ex parte curari possunt per virilem et christianam educationem qua in virtutibus exerceantur et habitus acquirant bonos, malis dispositionibus contraries.
Multiplici igitur nomine denegandum est sociali auctori- tati jus vasectomiam imponendi civibus suis degeneribus. In quam conclusionem plerosque Auctores, qui banc quaes- tionem tractaverunt, invenimus consentientes.^^
Caeterum obvie apparet quomodo juris hujusmodi exer- citium facile ansam praeberet abusibus gravibus atque applica- tioni in dies frequentiori, ac timendum est ne brevi assumatur vasectomia quasi instrumentum selectionis ad normam eorum quae fiunt inter bruta animalia.^* Quem abusum, dignitati
32 Pari modo potest qui vis homo particularis propriam vitam suam defen- dere contra injustum agressorem (sive formaliter in Justus sit, sive materia- liter, ut in casu insanientis) ; sed, in hac vitae suae defensione, servare tenetur moderamen inculpatae tutelae, nee ilium agressorem occidere potest si valet se salvare eum mutilando, nee mutilare potest si fuga sufficit ad vitae periculum evitandum.
33 De Becker, Eccles. Reviev^^. t. XLII, p. 474 s. et t. XLIII, p. 355 ss. ; Vermeersch, Salsmans, De Villers, ibidem, t. XLII, p. 475 ; Schmitt, Zeitschr. f. k. TheoL, 1. c, et Eccles. Rev., t, XLIV, p. 679 ss. et t. XLV, p. 86 s.; Ferreres, Razon y Fe, XXVII, p. 378 s. et XXVIII, p. 224, quo altero loco adducit in eumdem sensum sententiam Lehmkuhl, privatis litteris ad ipsum propositam; Rigby, 1. c. ; Roderer, 1. c. ; Dr. O'Malley, Eccles. Rev., t. XLIV, p. 699 ss. ; Wouters, 1. c. ; N. R. th., 1. c. ; Stucchi, 1. c, p. 419 ; Capello, 1. c, p. 247 s. ; Eschbach, 1. c, p. 243 ss.
Contradicunt Laboure, Eccles. Rev., t. XLIII, p. 80 ss., 320 ss., t. XLIV, p. 574 ss., t. XLV, p. 88 ss. et p. 355 ss. ; item, salva restrictione facta, Dono- van, Eccles. Rev., t. XLII, p. 271 ss., p. 599 ss., t. XLIV, p. 571 ss. et t. XLV, p. 313 ss. Accedunt Auctores anonymice aut pseudonymice scribentes respective apud Eccles. Rev., t. XLIII, p. 310 ss., t. XLV, p. 76 s. et t. XLV, p. 599 ss.
34 Cf. O'Malley, apud Eccles. Rev., t. XLIV, p. 705 ; Schmitt, Zeitsch. f. k. TheoL, 191 1, p. 66 s. et p. 77, cum nota ; Ferreres, Razon y Fe, t. XXVII, p. 374 s. ubi refert " quod etiam in Hispania non defuerint aliquae medicae ephe-
STUDIES AND CONFERENCES. 3^7
humanae adeo contrarium, tarn vehementer timet Donovan ut, postquam theoretice vindicaverit legitimitatem vasectomiae ab auctoritate sociali imponendae, practice urgeat a juris ex- ercitio esse abstinendum."
A. De Smet. Brugis.
OLEKIOS BEFOBE THE OIVIL TEIBUNAL.
S. Congregation of the Holy Office.
TO THE BISHOP OF LARINO : ON THE INTERPRETATION OF THE MOTU PROPRIO " QUANTAVIS DILIGENTIA."
In answer to the esteemed letter of your Lordship, dated 11 December last, I hasten to inform you that on the 11th instant the two questions proposed by your Lordship in regard to the Motu Proprio Quantavis diligentia were submitted to the Holy Father as follows:
( 1 ) Is it lawful, without permission of the ecclesiastical authority, and therefore without incurring the censure enacted by the Motu Proprio Quantavis diligentia, to bring a civil action against a cleric prosecuted for crime by public authority?
(2) Is it permitted to summon ecclesiastics to appear as witnesses before a lay tribunal, in civil or criminal causes?
His Holiness by a decision of the same day commanded to answer : Ad utrumque — Negative.
M. Cardinal Rampolla.
The above is a translation of a Letter which appears in the Monitore EcclesiasticOy and which is referred to in the article on the Decree Quantavis diligentia in this number of the Review. Thus far it has not been published in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis, which is the official organ of the Roman Congregations, and we are therefore inclined to assume that it has a merely local bearing. Larino is one of the oldest dioceses in Italy and has enjoyed certain canonical traditions for nearly eight hundred years. Its inhabitants are presum- ably all Catholics, who, whether good or bad, can get a hear-
merides quae hanc operationem laudibus extollant, veluti medium aptissimum ad social em quamdam selectionem faciendam, vi cujus probis tantum et cor- pore sanis generatio sit permittenda ". 3 5 Cf. EccLES. Rev., t. XLV, p. 317 s.
358 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
ing against an ecclesiastic if need be in the ecclesiastical court, and furthermore, the syndicos and avvocatos represent a mag- istracy of an inferior order expected to check the criminal and recalcitrant elements of the population distinct from the clerical element. The prohibition to appear against a cleric might well be in place under such circumstances. But for the rest, the answer to the Bishop of Larino, whether it be lawful to bring action against a cleric in the civil courts, or whether it is permissible to summon an ecclesiastic to appear as a wit- ness before a lay tribunal in civil or criminal cases, does not possess the force of a general interpretation of the Motu Proprio Quantavis diligentia.
Indeed we should deprecate any such interpretation in a mixed population, such as we have in the United States. Though we surely owe loyalty and respect to ecclesiastical superiors, it is neither prudent nor just to appeal to the privi- legium fori where such appeal is not likely to be understood or heeded. Ecclesiastical privileges which are the result of mutual agreement between the Church and the civil Common- wealth, where both authorities profess and accept, the same religion as a basis of public action and the same interpretation of personal rights, cannot be asserted and claimed where such mutual recognition does not exist, except to the detriment of public peace and order. In the United States the Govern- ment, of which the law courts are an essential part, assumes to protect churchmen in the free exercise of their rights of con- science, i. e. of their religion; and it expects, as a matter of course, in return for the civil protection accorded them, that the churchmen as citizens observe the common law and ab- stain from criminal interference with the rights of their fellow citizens, whether these be Catholic or not. If then a cleric violates justice or perpetrates a crime against a fellow citizen, or disturbs the public peace, the law may call him to account, and in doing so it may require the testimony against the delin- quent, as witness or juror or advocate, of any citizen who en- joys the protection of our Commonwealth, whether he is a Catholic or not. To refuse to testify, under plea that the ecclesiastical authorities will deal with the case, is simply to obstruct the order of the lawfully constituted civil order. The same would be applicable to an ecclesiastic called into
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court to testify to any violation of law. He is bound to present himself sub poena, and no ecclesiastical law or privilege may set aside this duty unless there be some sort of mutual under- standing which would make it just to refuse obedience to the civil authority, where that authority exercises its right to punish criminals and enforce the observance of public morals. The Holy Father could not mean anything else for us. And as to the requisite permission of the ecclesiastical authority, it can only signify that the Ordinary will give his consent to a just suit against a cleric, unless it be a case where scandal can be avoided by adjusting a compromise or keeping the matter entirely out of court.
THE OEATIO AFTEK THE LITANY OP LOEETO.
Qu. Can you tell me what authority there is for saying after the Litany of Loreto the Oremus beginning with " Concede " instead of the " Gratiam tuam"? All our Office books have the latter. But some years ago we saw a comment on this subject in The Eccles- iastical Review. I have tried in vain to find it in the back num- bers. If you can give me any light on the subject you will greatly oblige.
S. S.
Resp. The Sacred Congregation of Rites decided that the prayer after the Litany of Loreto might be varied in accord- ance with the forms of the liturgical year. " Litaniae Lau- retanae concludendae sunt uti in Appendice Ritualis Romani, omissis Christe audi nos etc. Versiculus autem, Respon- sorium et Oratio post dictas Litanias mutari possunt pro tem- poris diversitate." ^ Whilst the prayer " Gratiam tuam " etc. has been popularly added to the Litany (perhaps because it is recited after the Angelus and also occurs in the Mass of the Blessed Virgin during Advent), it is not the one which the Roman Ritual as well as the Roman Breviary add to the text of the Litany. Both of these have the prayer: " Concede nos famulos tuos, quaesumus Domine Deus, perpetua mentis et corporis sanitate gaudere: et gloriosa beatae Mariae semper Virginis intercessione, a praesenti liberari tristitia, et aeterna perfrui laetitia. Per Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen."
1 S. R. C. 7 Dec. 1900, apud Ephem. Liturg. May 1901, pag. 265.
360 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
This is likewise the prayer in the Mass of the Blessed Virgin Mary during the greater part of the ecclesiastical year, namely from the Feast of the Purification to Advent.
It may be opportune to state here that for the purpose of gaining the indulgences attached to the Litany of Loreto it is not necessary to add either versicle or prayer. The Litany simply ends as given in the Raccolta, with the "Agnus Dei " etc.
THE " OAEREMONIALE EPISOOPOEUM " AND AMERICAN CUSTOM.
In the August number of the Ecclesiastical Review (p. 224) appeared the following query, together with our answer:
In Pontifical Mass and in Pontifical Vespers, the Baltimore Cere- monial provides that the ministers make their reverences to the bishop by bowing, when passing before the altar, or going to and from the throne. The Caeremoniale Episcoporum, however, provides that they genuflect when so doing.
Will you please advise me whether there is any decree from Rome authorizing the bow instead of the genuflection provided for in the Caeremoniale, or whether custom in the United States makes it law- ful to bow rather than to genuflect?
To this query we replied that " it does not suffice to make the simple reverence instead of genuflecting at the Pontifical services, in Cathedrals where there are no regular Canons," since there is no decree authorizing the reverence.
In this matter we now receive the following communications from different dioceses the names of which it is not necessary to give here.
From a Cathedral in the State of Pennsylvania :
The custom of bowing instead of genuflecting to the bishop during Pontifical ceremonies has obtained in this diocese for more than thirty years. It seems to be the practice generally in the United States.
From a Cathedral in the State of New York :
Here we follow the usual custom of bowing in the United States. We have a feeling that most of our faithful in this country have come to connect the genuflection with the Altar and the Blessed Sacra-
STUDIES AND CONFERENCES.
361
ment. There seems to be no doubt that custom makes it lawful for us to continue the bowing.
From a Cathedral in New England :
I do not hesitate to have the bow used in this diocese, as it has been the custom in New England for many years.
From a Cathedral in Ohio :
Here in the United States the inclination is the common usus, brought about no doubt by the fact that a genuflection with us is considered as an act of adoration simpliciter. Hence because of our Protestant surroundings and consequent danger of misinterpreta- tion of such ceremonial, I believe the American Bishops have been loath to permit the genuflection.
From a Cathedral in Michigan :
The custom of substituting bows for genuflections seems to be quite general in this country, but it is not absolutely imiversal. It has hitherto been followed in this diocese.
It is quite evident from these communications that there exists in the United States a custom contrary to rubrical authority, and although there is no doubt that the present usage in many dioceses of the United States is due to a faulty interpretation of the Caeremoniale Episcoporum by the compilers of the Baltimore Ceremonial, it appears suflficiently established to make it lav^^ful. But it would hardly do to carry this same custom into places where the Caeremoniale Episcoporum has been the norm in the past, on the ground that the American people associate genuflection with the idea of adoration, or that we must defer to Protestant prejudice for fear of being misinterpreted. Such an argument would do away with all similar manifestations of reverence to the hierarchical repre- sentatives, such as genuflecting in kissing the Ordinary's ring, and other habitual genuflections prescribed in the Ritual, and recognized in the Church as the mark of reverence to Christ's representatives. Moreover it is not simply a question touching manifestations of personal reverence, but of the ceremonial of the Church, and it need hardly concern us what Protestants may think of our form of worship or our rever-
362 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
ence. The court ceremonial of the Old World is not less exacting and requires genuflection in certain public or solemn functions not only before the person of the sovereign but even before the vacant throne. While we must recognize some freedom regarding traditions which are the mere outcome of local or temporary conditions, and when they concern only outward ecclesiastical show, we ought to be tenacious in main- taining the honor of the sanctuary. The merely temporal honors shown to ecclesiastics outside the sanctuary, where they are not only contrary to democratic traditions, but distinctly a mark of foreign citizenship, rightly yield to public custom in America, whatever their significance may be in Catholic countries where they are properly understood and valued.
PRIVATE EXPOSITION OF BLESSED SAOEAMENT NOT PERMITTED rOR PRIEST'S PERSONAL DEVOTION.
Qu. My assistant is a really edifying and zealous young priest who is doing much good in the parish by his advocacy of greater devotion to the Blessed Sacrament. I was pleased to introduce at his solicitation not only the practice of daily Communion, but also more frequent devotions at night for our working people. At these devotions we have " private " Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament, in the manner explained in the Review some years ago; for the bishop did not think it advisable to allow Benediction more than once a week and on the principal feasts. But lately my young saint has adopted the method of making his Hour of Adoration as a mem- ber of the Eucharistic League in a way which I question whether it has the approval of the Church. He lights two wax-candles, opens the tabernacle, and makes his prayer vested in surplice, at the foot of the altar. He tells me that private Exposition of this kind is allowable for any cause whatever without permission from any- body. Is it all right?
Resp. No. Private Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament is indeed permitted without special sanction of the Ordinary for any good cause, and may be made at the request of any person for a private intention, such as the recovery of the sick, or in thanksgiving for some particular benefit ; but it may not be made at the priest's private discretion. It requires in all cases the pastor's explicit or tacit permission. The reason for this is that the pastor is the regularly appointed guardian
STUDIES AND CONFERENCES. ' 353
of the Tabernacle and he is responsible for the functions re- lating to external worship in the church and the parish. He dispenses the Treasure of the Blessed Sacrament either per- sonally or through his assistants. He uses It rather as the minister of others than for his own personal convenience. That such is the sense of the Church is evident from a decision of the Sacred Congregation, which by decree of 17 July, 1894, forbids Exposition for a priest's private devotion. "An liceat sacerdoti pro sua privata devotione sacrum Taberna- culum aperire pro adorando Sacramento, precibus ad libitum fundendis ac postea illud claudere? Resp. Negative." ^
Where two or three, priests or others, combine in the hour's adoration, the act would undoubtedly be lawful, as it like- wise would be where a priest represents some public interest, — a purpose which might enter into the objects of the Holy Hour by members of the Eucharistic League. But in any case the pastor's permission or consent is required for Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament whether private or public.
OONOLUSION OF THE PEAYER AFTER DISTRIBUTING COMMUNION OUTSIDE MASS.
Qu. In distributing Holy Communion outside the Mass the priest is to say the Antiphon " O sacrum convivium " and the Versicle " Panem de coelo ", with the prayer " Deus qui nobis sub Sacra- mento," etc. Does this prayer end with the ordinary conclusion, " Per Christum Dominum nostrum ", or has it the longer ending, " Per Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum filium tuum qui tecimi ", etc., as some contend? Some priests also kiss the altar before giving the blessing, " Benedictio Dei omnipotentis ", etc., after the prayer. Is this correct?
Resp. The prayer referred to has the long conclusion, ac- cording to a decision of the S. Congregation (11 June, 1880, No. 3915). It should be noted that the prescribed blessing is not " Benedictio Dei omnipotentis Patris et Filii etc. . . . descendat super vos et maneat semper ", but the ordinary blessing used in the Mass, " Benedicat vos Omnipotens Deus, Pater" etc. (S. R. C. 23 May, 1835, No. 2704).
1 Decreta authent.. No. 3832.
364 ^^^^ ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
DISPENSATIONS IN MIXED MARRIAaES WITHOUT THE EEQUIRED "OAUTIONES".
In the current number of the Review we publish a Decree of the Holy Office on the assistance of pastors at " mixed marriages " when the contracting parties have refused to make the usual promise regarding perfect liberty in the exer- cise of religion and education of the children in the Catholic faith.
This Decree has been discussed by the secular press in a way calculated to spread an altogether false impression; and much harm has been done by the fact that some Catholic journals have circulated the misinterpretation of the secular papers, suggesting that the antenuptial promises formerly re- quired in the case of mixed marriages are no longer necessary.
We wish to say that the announcement, that " the ante- nuptial pact in mixed marriages has been removed by the Pope, and that it is no longer necessary to make an agreement to rear the children in the Catholic faith ", which has been printed in various papers and which some priests have wel- comed as a concession to the liberal spirit of our age and coun- try, is entirely misleading. Indeed such concessions are or- dinarily incompatible with the maintenance of Christian prin- ciples and can obtain only a passive consent on the part of the Holy See.
To remove all doubt on this subject we shall have in the next issue of the Review a full exposition of the correct bear- ing of the Decree, which as a matter of fact makes no practical change in the application of the general law of the Church. If in some European countries concessions have been made so as to permit assistance of the pastor or delegate at mar- riages in which the " cautiones " are not given, it is done only to avoid greater evils. It is to these places that the Decree of the Holy Office makes reference. But such forced concessions are by no means necessary in the United States. Hence our Bishops are not expected to alter the practice prescribed by the Plenary Councils of Baltimore, of insisting upon the " cautiones ", and of refusing dispensation as well as the as- sistance of the priest at any marriage in which these " cau- tiones " have not been duly made.
STUDIES AND CONFERENCES. 355
ADVERTISEMENTS IN " THE EOOLESIASTIOAL REVIEW."
Subscribers to the Review cannot but be aware that the advertisements which appear in our pages are of an excep- tional and superior character, wholly in keeping with the aims of the magazine and the special class of readers to whom it ap- peals. This is because we exercise rigorous supervision in re- gard to the firms that ask for our space. Certain classes of advertisements are absolutely debarred from appearing in our pages by reason either of the kind of goods which they offer or of deficient guarantee which they give to the purchaser, and no amount of money or influence could secure an inch of our columns for concerns which deal in doubtful mer- chandise or which employ questionable methods in obtaining the confidence of the clergy. Whilst we cannot in every case guarantee that purchasing from advertisers in the Review will afford absolute satisfaction, we take every care to secure only the most reliable of firms for our advertisers, irrespective of the accidental prospect of profit which such announcements hold out to a publication like ours.
Occasionally we have received inquiries from members of the clergy which indicate that they have been prejudiced against some reputable firm. Some years ago we were led to make an investigation in the case of the altar wines advertised by us. Recently charges have been circulated about the Daprato Statuary Company, of New York and Chicago, to the effect that the firm was a *' Jewish concern " doing business, for Catholic churches. We are in position to state that the rumor is absolutely false and apparently the invention of trade jealousy. The firm has sent us a full account of its personnel, certified by affidavit, and showing that their com- pany is under entirely Catholic auspices and controlled by well-known Catholic artists and business men, all members of Catholic parishes in different parts of the United States. Whilst religious conviction is not a qualification of good workmanship or business ability, nor its profession always a guarantee of honest dealing, yet in the matter of Christian art and the use of ecclesiastical goods it is of great importance that the product offered to Catholic devotion be under the direction of men who are both competent and conscientious.
Criticisms anb Botes*
rOE OUE NON-OATHOLIO TEIENDS. The fairest Argument. By the Eev. John F. Noll, Hantington, Indiana.
The plan of this volume is excellent. Its purpose is to bring together a number of creditable witnesses in behalf of the doctrine and practice of the Catholic Church, who themselves are not pro- fessing Catholics, and who may not be supposed to be influenced by partiality in speaking well of it. Thus we have in the first place a number of Protestant divines like Dean Stanley, Dr. Schaff, Charles Starbuck, and others, who praise the Church for its general attitude on moral issues and for the principles of Unity, Catholicity and Holiness, which characterize her activity. Next the author adduces witnesses to attest the reasonableness and conformity to Scriptural precept of her doctrines and practices. He brings into strong relief the misstatements of the enemies of the Catholic Church, against the actual facts of her teaching and discipline, as seen and interpreted by men who are beyond the suspicion of bias in her favor, and whose word may not be questioned in point of knowledge or veracity. Finally he makes a brief examination of the character and trustworthiness of those who array themselves against the Church, among them the self-styled ex-priests and ex-nuns who have been filling the ears of a credulous public with their inventions and exaggerations of Catholic doings and beliefs.
All this is excellent and furnishes the reader with a weapon of defence and with information by which to disarm the bigotry and timidity of those who come under the influence of such organi- zations as the so-called " Guardians of Liberty ", the latest form of the old " Know-nothings " or the A. P. A., and a host of secret and semi-secret agitators who, like Major-General Sickles, have a grievance against Catholics in general or against the Irish Brigade in particular, because these have borne witness against him for unpatriotic conduct.
The usefulness of Father Noll's book is marred however by the fact that he does not give in every case the precise and accurate source of his information. To refer to the testimony of Renan, for example, by saying " Renan writes from Rome ", without tell- ing the reader, who may wish to verify the quotation, where he can do so, is practically valueless, except for those who are already convinced that Father Noll as a Catholic priest and as a con- troversialist is to be trusted when citing the words of a dead man.
CRITICISMS AND NOTES,
367
What the reader to whom the author addresses his book wants, is an accurate and precise reference to some accessible edition of book or magazine or newspaper, to which the man or woman who chooses to doubt the veracity of the collator of the arguments, can go or at least appeal. Where such accurate legitimation is wanting the passport is without the proper signature and were better not used at all.
Perhaps the author can supply this defect in all cases in which he proposes to rest his assertion on the testimony of non-Catholics ; for this constitutes the main value of the collection. In that case it would not be difficult to get a respectable non- Catholic publisher to make propaganda for the work among those whom it is intended to benefit in the first place. We notice that the author is also his own publisher, which fact necessarily limits the sale of the book. An experienced publisher would make such a volume some- what lighter, bind it in flexible cover, change the title, and put the price at the lowest possible figure. Such a book should sell in great numbers.
DE OURIA EOMANA. Ejus Historia ac hodiema Disciplina jnxta Ee- formationem a Pio X inductam. Auctore Arthur Monin, J.O.L., in Universitate Oatholica Lovaniensi Juris Oanonici Professors Extra- ordinario. Lovanii excudebat Josephus Van Linthout. 1912. Pp. xx-394.
The author divides his historico-canonical dissertation upon the Roman Curia into two main parts. In the first, which comprises 154 pages, he presents the history of the Roman Curia, tracing its origin and subsequent development. In the early ages of the Church the Sovereign Pontiff was accustomed to perform personally the various duties of the Holy See, using however, occasionally, the assistance of the clergy of Rome. Afterward, when the business of the Church had much increased, the Consistory was established to aid him in its government. In the sixteenth century when the ec- clesiastical business was still more augmented, the Roman Congre- gations were instituted. The author describes with considerable detail (pp. 9-151) the various Congregations, Tribunals, and Offices which were established, and likewise the numerous altera- tions which these institutions have undergone during the more than three centuries since the Constitution, Immensa, of Sixtus V, until their reorganization in 1908 by Pius X. For this portion of the volume he draws chiefly from eminent writers such as Cardinal De Luca, Bangen, Bouix, and Philips, rather than from original docu- ments of the Holy See.
368 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
The second part of the work (pp. 155-377) deals with the present status of the Roman Curia, as remodeled by the present Pontiff according to the Constitution Sapienti consilio. The au- thor has evidently made a thorough study of this branch of his subject, and shows himself to be familiar with the numerous works which have been published within recent years upon the Roman Curia, among which may be mentioned chiefly the commentary on the Sapienti consilio by Leitner issued in 1909. The next year, Ojetti published a volume, De Romana Curia; while in 1911 Capello brought out his De Curia Romana '' Sede Plena^\ Other volumes, as well as many series of articles in various languages, dealt with the same subject-matter, the Roman Curia as reorganized by Pius X.
While the author of the volume under review has made excellent use of the commentators who preceded him, he does not hesitate on occasions to differ from them. The question (p. 248), whether the S. Congregation of the Sacraments possesses authority to decide upon the validity or invalidity of Matrimony has been variously viewed, some writers holding that cases of this kind demanded judicial treatment and could not therefore be settled by a Congre- gation which has no authority to decide questions judicially. Others, insisting upon the text {Sapienti consilio')^ have maintained that this Congregation possesses ordinary faculties for settling diffi- culties concerning the validity of Matrimony whenever such settle- ment would not involve judicial procedure. The author is in favor of this view and declares that the practice of this Congregation confirms it (p. 250).
One of the best handled topics in the volume is the chapter (pp. 191-194) "De ratione adeundi Sanctae Sedis Officia cum iisque agendi generatim." It touches a very practical question. Indeed, we wish that the writer had gone even farther and applied the solidity of his treatment to certain details of the questions. Many priests are acquainted with the special province of each of the Con- gregations and Tribunals, but when the occasion arises for making application to any of them, some experience difficulty in determin- ing the form in which the petition should be expressed. If Dr. Monin had added, as he might easily have done, some formulas of petition to the Roman Congregations, the S. Penitentiary, and the S. Rota, the practical advantages of his work would have been much enhanced.
It would also be convenient for readers of this volume to have the text of the Constitution, Sapienti consilio, and indeed other Pontifical documents, such as the " Lex propria ", " Normae com- munes ", and " Normae peculiares ", incorporated in it, so that the
CRITICISMS AND NOTES. ^5g
exact words of the legislator might be seen at once without the need of consulting other commentators, such as Capello, Ojetti, and Leitner, who supply their readers with these texts of the Church's legislation upon the Roman Curia.
In the beginning of the volume the reader will find a useful bibliographical index under the following headings " Jura citata ", "Auctores citati ", and " Periodica citata ". At the end of the volume there is appended a complete analytical index alphabetically arranged. Dr. Monin's work is certainly an important accession to the literature upon the Roman Curia, and many of the clergy will find in it numerous items of information not easily procurable elsewhere.
INTRODUOTOBY PHILOSOPHY. A Text-book for Colleges and High Schools. By Oharles A. Dubray, S.M., Ph.D. New York: Long- mans, G-reen & Oo.
PRESENT PHILOSOPHICAL TENDENCIES. By Ralph Barton Perry. Same Publishers.
THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC. By P. Coffey, Ph.D. Same Publishers. Two volumes.
Of books introductory to philosophy there are many types. Three such are here presented. While only the first on the list is so in name, the other two are likewise so in fact, though from variant viewpoints.
Dr. Dubray's Introductory Philosophy guides the student through the temple of philosophy, acquainting him with the edifice in all its departments, and familiarizing him with its principal contents. Whoso has mastered it will find himself at home therein and be perfectly oriented and equipped for further exploration. The au- thor conceives philosophy to be " the science of the higher prin- ciples of things" (p. 8). But why "the higher" and not "the highest " ?
Modestiae causa, just as good old Pythagoras, so the legend goes, refused to be called sophos, contenting himself with the modest appellative Philos-sophiae? We like still the old-time " scientia causarum altissimarum," for there is no rest for philosophy, human philosophy (of only such do we speak), until it has climbed the highest peak and seen its territory from the upmost summit.
But what are those " things ", whose higher and highest principles it is the ambition of philosophy to explain and establish? The
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answer to this question may best be seen by the aid of the following schematic outline :
{world = cosmology; man = psychology; God = theodicy.
Philosophical study of the \ transitional = epistemology.
{thought = logic; expression = esthetics; action = ethics.
The higher principles of the real, the ideal, and their inter- relations in knowledge, these therefore form the subject-matter, the field of philosophy, to which the student is introduced.
In the traditional program of the philosophical curriculimi logic usually occupies the first place, epistemology being included therein as material logic (critics, criteriology) . The student advances thence through metaphysics general (ontology) and special (cos- mology, psychology, theodicy) to the final goal, ethics. The basis of this order is obvious and solid. There are however som« equally obvious and solid objections against it, and many writers, especially in France, have changed it considerably. Amongst these is the author of the work at hand. His arrangement is outlined as follows :
I. The empirical study of the self = 1. psychology —
(a) Cognitive consciousness = knowledge
(b) Affective consciousness = feeling
(c) Conative consciousness = activity and will.
II. The normative science —
(a) of the intellect = 2. logic
(b) of the expression of ideals to arouse certain feelings =
3. ESTHETICS.
(c) of will and action = 4. ethics.
III. The study of the relations of cognitive processes to the real world and hence a transition to the following = 5. epis- temology.
IV. Philosophical study —
(a) of the world = 6. cosmology
(b) of man = 7. philosophy of mind
(c) of God = 8. theodicy.
V. (9) History of philosophy: 1. psychology, 2. logic, 3. esthe- tics, 4. ethics, 5. epistemology, 6. cosmology, 7. rational psychology, 8. theodicy, 9. history of philosophy. Such is the order of the program.
Its justification is manifest. While the mind does not ordinarily begin with self-scrutiny, it must in the pursuit of philosophy be dis-
CRITICISMS AND NOTES. 37I
ciplined therein. Moreover, an examination of the mind's pro- cedure in the quest of consistency and truth, in other words the study of the ideal logical processes, supposes some familiarity with the real phenomena, the actual workings, of the mind. Hence the grounds for beginning philosophy with psychology instead of logic. The study of ideal thought (logic) leads naturally to the study of ideal expression (esthetics) and ideal conduct (ethics). From investigation into the subjective phenomena of mind, into that of the objective nature of the world, the soul, and God, the way naturally passes across the bridge between thought and thing, mind and object, a bridge which, if not laid, is secured, by epistemology, the science of knowledge. Finally philosophy in act is exhibited in its history. Rightly then should the study terminate with the history of philosophy. So much for the author's program.
A few words now as to the execution. Supposing it to be compre- hensive in its matter, a text-book of philosophy should be ( 1 ) logi- cally coherent in its essential as well as its integral parts or details^ (2) lucid in its explanation and expression; (3) solid in its reason- ing. These qualities stand out unmistakably in the book before us. The work from start to finish is an organic whole, a totum per se. It is in no sense a compilation, an aggregation, a totum per accidens. Its members throughout articulate, move easily, naturally, gracefully on their junctures. And this living coherence extends to every tissue and cell of the organism, showing how well the author has thought out and lived into his intelligence the system he has be- gotten. Begotten, not created ; for, it need hardly be said, he has not evoked it "ex nihilo sui et subjecti."
The book embodies the essential Catholic philosophy, not, however, recast or ** adapted " from Latin manuals, but assimilated, vitalized, issued through a soul and born anew. Developed too, " evolved ", if you will, not into a new " species ", but a new " variety ", shaped and perfected by contact with the recent scientific environment. All that is permanent in " the old philosophy " is set forth in its strength. Nothing vital or essential is passed by, though the anti- quated and worn-out is of course eliminated. Moreover, the im- portant developments resulting from the experimental sciences are given their due place and influence in the philosophical system. Lastly the style is a model of lucid expression. Never verbose or diffuse, it is always clear. No student capable of studying philo- sophy at all will fail to understand the author's meaning. If the thought demand mental effort, this is as it ought to be; but it will not be the fault of the style.
Primarily intended as a text-book for use in college, it will prove a valuable instrument to form and strengthen the miiids of our
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THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
Catholic young men and women, to help them to realize the solid foundations of truth that underlie and support the rational and therefore the theistic and consequently Catholic world-view, and the reasonable bases of morality, faith, religion, life. It will also prove a most desirable adjunct to collateral reading in the seminary course of philosophy, not supplanting, but supplementing in this respect, the excellent series of Stonyhurst Manuals. Moreover, the clergy who may desire (and what intelligent priest does not do so from time to time?) to review their philosophical studies will find in this clean-cut, solid, up-to-date manual a most available auxiliary.
Students schooled in " the old philosophy " will miss from the author's system the department of ontology. The material usually assigned to this branch of metaphysics is divided amongst other sections — psychology especially, and cosmology. This secures of course to some extent the elucidation of these fundamental notions, the groundwork of all science and philosophy. At the same time their supreme importance and the fact that they are so generally denied or ignored by non- Catholic systems would seem to make it desirable if not essential that they should receive separate and proportionate treatment. We might note that there appears to be some slight confusion of " analytic " with " immediate " judg- ments at pages 109 and 395.
One who has deepened and broadened his mental vision by the study of such a work as the foregoing, will find the process still further extended and perfected by perusing Dr. Perry's Present Philosophical Tendencies. He will here see philosophy at work in the minds of men to-day, in systems that differ toto coelo from his own. And in this respect will it help him, showing him at once his own strength as well as his limitations, and enabling him to estimate the opposite ways in which many gifted minds have inter- preted our world of experience — minds naturally more gifted than his own, though devoid of the priceless heritage of the philosophic perennis which accompanies, because it underlies, the still more price- less heritage of Catholic theology.
Professor Perry's work cannot be called an " introduction to philosophy " in the usual sense of the term. Some seven years ago he wrote a book more aptly so entitled. The Approach to Philosophy^ a highly interesting and suggestive guide that points out the avenues leading up to the temple and indicates the chief character- istics of the interior. The standpoint and leading ideas embodied in the latter book are on the whole theoretically sound and prac-
1 New York : Scribner's Sons. IQ05.
CRITICISMS AND NOTES. 07^
tically sane. The same can be said of the work at hand. Dr. Perry, though (assistant) professor at Harvard, differs as widely from the elusively idealistic Royce, as he does from the brilliantly wayward pragmatist James. Professor Perry carries onward the saner real- ism, the " common sense philosophy ", defended in a past genera- tion by Porter and McCosh, and, substantially at least, still by Ladd and Ormond. His present work is a critique of naturalism, prag- matism, and idealism from the realistic standpoint. The student who has not the time or opportunity to familiarize himself with these contemporary tendencies of reflective thought by study of their sources, will be helped to whatever acquaintance may be de- sirable therewith by the clear analyses here presented. The author, it need hardly be said, is eminently just to his opponents. His positive statements are truly representative, whilst his criticism is perfectly objective, though frank and incisive.
The volume contains also a succinct but clear outline of Professor Jgimes's philosophy.
Though not caring to stand sponsor for every statement embodied in the book, the reviewer is gratified to find so much with which a student of Catholic philosophy can agree ; and it is still more inspir- ing to him to meet in the defence of absolute truth against the in- sidious attacks from the side of naturalism, monism, and pragma- tism, so uncompromising a champion as Professor Perry.
So much space has been given to the foregoing works that we must defer for another occasion Dr. Coffey's two splendid volumes on Logic. Books on Logic are not usually " splendid ", but these are; and that too in every respect, outwardly, inwardly, quantita- tively, qualitatively, materially, formally, in every way. It is a pleasure to recommend the two goodly tomes to professors and ad- vanced students. They are not in style and method beyond the capacity of an intelligent beginner, but they might prove a strain on his courage. However, of this work more anon.
THEODIOY. Essays on Divine Providence. By Antonio Rosmini Serbati. Translated from the "Milan edition of 1845. Three volumes. New York and London: Longmans, G-reen & Co. 1912.
The essays here translated belong in part to Rosmini' s Opusculi Filosofici, though they were subsequently collected under the title of Theodicea. The term Theodicy is taken literally (Justice of God), and indicates that the purpose of the book is "to vindicate the Equity and Goodness of God in the distribution of good and evil in the world ". The erroneous judgments that men form regarding the
374
THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
ways of Divine Providence are traced by the author to three prin- cipal causes: first, to the lack of logical knowledge, that is to a failure to measure the capacity of the finite mind for confronting such an infinitely vast and complicated problem. To meet this want the first volume at hand establishes the principles that must be followed in order to avoid the pitfalls into which the unguided mind inevitably stumbles. The second cause of error is the lack of physi- cal knowledge regarding the working out of the cosmical order. The aim therefore of the second book is to show that, since every created nature is finite, he who would escape from certain evils should have to change that order and thus run the risk of incurring greater evils. The end of the cosmical system and its Author is not and cannot be objectively perfect, but a maximum result of good from a balance of good and evil — on the earth a broken arch, in the heavens a perfect whole. Lastly, the third cause of error is the lack of theo- logical knowledge, namely, that the constant miraculous interference by God in the working out of natural law would contradict His wis- dom and by consequence His absolute goodness. Against this erron- eous conception of Providence the third book is directed.
That even these thousand pages, thought out by the brilliant in- tellect and poured forth from the devout soul of the great Italian philosopher, will suffice to solve the world-old mystery of pain and sin one may not venture to assert. That they logically vindicate God's ways with man and the universe, and that they will serve to enlighten darkened minds and comfort troubled hearts can safely be prophesied. And this surely suffices to justify their existence and to warrant their being recommended to intelligent readers, cleric and lay. The translation is modestly ascribed in a footnote to the " patient labors of Father Fortunatus Signini." " Opus laudat arti- ficem."
HANDBOOK OP THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY. By Dr. Albert Stockl. Translated by the Eev. T. A. Finlay, S.J., M.A. Vol. I. New York and London: Longmans, Green & Oo. 1911. Pp. 450.
HISTOIRE DE LA PHILOSOPHIE. Par Gaston Sortais. Vol. I. Paris: P. Lethielleux. 1912. Pp. 645.
THE PIVE GREAT PHILOSOPHIES OF LIFE. By William de Witt Hyde. New York: The Macmillan Oo. 1911. Pp. 306.
The history of ancient, including herein the early Christian and medieval, philosophy possesses a distinctly intellectual or specu- lative, as well as a distinctly ethical or practical, interest. The two
CRITICISMS AND NOTES. 375
aspects are of course not mutually exclusive, but rather inclusive, though withal sufficiently different to lend a character to individual works. Accordingly Dr. Stockl's Handbook is dominantly, though not solely, expository and didactic. The same is true of Fr. Sortais' Histoire, while President Hyde's essays are primarily moral and idealistic.
Comparing Fr. Finlay's translation of Stockl's well-known Lehr- buck with Professor Morris's version of Ueberweg's equally, perhaps better, known Grundriss, the relative merits of the two standard works appear at a glance. For distinct apprehension of the essen- tials of the pre-modern systems the former author is unsurpassed. For critical erudition and bibliographical apparatus the second writer should be given precedence. Both authors devote substan- tially equal space to the same subjects on the whole, though on special topics one is more comprehensive than the other. Compare for instance Stockl on St. Thomas with Ueberweg on the same sub- ject. Naturally of course the Catholic student will prefer the former author, especially for his account of Scholasticism. For the rest, the book is too well known to call for commendation here. Suf- fice it to say that Fr. Finlay has accomplished the difficult task of translating with singular success. The student will no doubt echo the hope that the second volume, on modern Philosophy, may not be long in coming.
Those who are familiar with P. Sortais' Traite de Philosophic (Paris, Lethielleux) will find in his recent History of Ancient Phil- osophy a worthy complement of that excellent manual. The method pursued in both works is the same. Synthetic tables present the leading outlines at a glance, and are followed by an analytical ex- hibition of details in clear-cut divisions. The plan is a model of didactic procedure that greatly facilitates the student's work, while the luminous style in whigh the succinct paragraphs are written " makes philosophy [almost] easy ". The most noteworthy feature of the work, however, is its copious bibliography. In this respect it surpasses even Ueberweg, at least in the English translation of that author, the recent editions of the German original being much en- larged in their apparatus. Besides the special bibliographies at- tached to the individual sections there are supplementary lists cover- ing some seventy-five pages. Another special feature deserving notice is the unusually large space devoted to the Renaissance (pp. 282 to 459), while the bibliography appended to this alone occupies some twenty-five pages. The student therefore finds himself almost embarrassed by the wealth spread out before him.
376 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
A second volume in course of preparation will treat the history of Modern Philosophy.
Dr. Hyde is concerned with illustrating certain dominant prin- ciples working in the ancient systems of philosophy. " The five centuries from the birth of Socrates to the death of Jesus produced five such principles: the Epicurean pursuit of pleasure, genial but ungenerous ; the Stoic law of self-control, strenuous but forbidding ; the Platonic plan of subordination, sublime but ascetic ( !) ; the Aristotelian sense of proportion, practical but uninspiring; and the Christian spirit of Love, broadest and deepest of them all" (p. v). These are the principles — principles of personality. Dr. Hyde lets their " masters talk to us in their own words ; with just enough of comment and interpretation to bring us to their point of view and make us welcome their friendly assistance in the philosophical guid- ance of life ". Study of our Lord's teaching viewed simply as " a philosophy of life " shows that in its embodiment of love as the supreme and universal law are found the only adequate solutions of life's problems, the only secure norm for mind and heart and con- duct. This of course is no new conclusion. However, it is attrac- tively and suggestively drawn out and developed in the present volume.
While love is indeed the fulfillment of the law, love itself is tested only by obedience; and obedience involves subjection of the intellect to Christ's positive teachings. The Creed as the formulation of that teaching is the law of love as well as of faith. Dr. Hyde's ideas on this subject are somewhat confused, to say the least (pp. 241 ff.), but they are those with which everybody is familiar and they are not likely to do any harm.
It should be noted that the book is on the whole a reissue of an edition which appeared about eight years ago under the title of From Epicurus to Christ.
LOS 6EEMI0S. By Estanislao Segarra, Abogado. Barcelona; Imprenta de P. Altes y Alabart. Pp. 395. Indice (tabulated contents).
A Spanish advocate's analytical review of medieval guilds (gremios: corporations, Ziinfte). Some emphasis is also to be at- tached to the author's expressed adjunct, Abogado ] because his work not only presents a succinctly detailed study of guilds from their early Hellenic and Roman antecedents forward, but is also frankly a special pleading, or propagandist advocacy of " our institution ", the medieval trade corporation. Its positive merits are commended, as they deserve to be; and not, perhaps, with un-
CRITICISMS AND NOTES. 377
due bias, even in a declared " advocate " of his theme ; whilst furth- ermore, the guild is upheld in challenge against all other economic modes of production, whether individual, communistic, or " corpor- ate " in the sense of modern trusts and exaggerated monopolies. Dispassionate readers will probably concur with his general findings in favor of the guilds, and share his aspirations for a salutary re- action from our contemporary domination by monopolistic " in- famies " : yet one may not forget that it is not possible at will to reproduce this or that admired golden age of human affairs ; tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis.
Catholics, indeed, might altogether gratefully welcome some genuine and practical recovery of that common religious back- ground of faith and Christian ideals which pervaded medieval so- ciety, and ethically leavened its industrial exponent, the guild. In its best estate, the medieval guild was but an elaborated Christian family at work in shop or factory, whose conscientious " master " bore much the same " patriarchal " relation to his foremen, officers, craftsmen, and apprentices, as the father of an orderly household to his children and faithful servants. There was no shadow of such sullen or fermenting disaffection as too often mars the lot of modern " bosses " and their subjects or dependents. Restrictions on ap- prentices were hardly more stringent than those which everywhere govern the conduct of minors and subordinates with a view to their own good and public morality, in Christianized communities. Neither, in turn, did a medieval guild " patriarch " draw the fabul- ous emoluments nowadays proper to corporate magnates, trust presi- dents, vice-presidents, treasurers, directors. Under patronage of Our Lady and the Saints, observing the Calendar festivals and fast days, providing for special Mass in honor of the guild patron, and remembering the poor by particular bounties on such pious occasions, the guild officers would have stood aghast and confounded at the grade of salaries in vogue with modern corporation chiefs. The very notion, too, of a medieval Catholic boss, counting his gains by round hundreds of millions, while some passing depression in the market forced his workmen to strike in behalf of bare hand-to- mouth subsistence, would have moved the reflective conscience, for- sooth, to deeds of signal penance, for in those days charity and justice were twin postulates of action.
The author oi Los Gremios quite conclusively fixes the distinc- tion that, whereas everything shaping the economy of a well regu- lated medieval guild tended to protect the consumer and safeguard the worth of the product, besides ministering to the welfare of the craftsmen and relieving accidental misery among the poor and un- fortunate, everything devisable in the economy of modern mono-
378 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
polies inexorably strives to fatten the producer, irrespective of spurious quality in the product, or principles of equity in mani- pulating the market. After a studious analysis of the guilds and their development (more specifically in Spain, from the Visigoths down to the nineteenth century), several chapters are applied to a survey of modem industrial processes, both in Europe at large and in the United States; and there is a lucid outline of the na- tional differences which modify trusts and monopolies in various countries.
Perhaps the most interesting chapter in the volume, despite the array of technical terms in it, is Chapter V: El Arte. As here considered, " art " broadly includes the entire domain of technical craftsmanship; wherein, to be sure, the medieval guild, even apart from Catholic conscience of execution, had a subjective advantage over modern machinery labor. There was inmiensely richer in- centive to pride of artistic excellence where each workman wrought according to trained ideals of perfection, instead of mechanically, or as mere feeder and attendant in connexion with automatic pro- cesses, little or nothing dependent on his native bent and faculties. As is naturally to be expected in a Spanish survey of the guilds, we find large space reserved for wool and leather products, the silver- smith's trade, and the multitude of ways and means employed in maintaining the renown of Spanish markets, at home and abroad, for articles in those branches of conomerce. For illustration of the importance of wool and leather alone, we are told that the Spanish flocks, in the sixteenth century, numbered 30,000,000 sheep, besides 7,000,000 migratory sheep (of nomadic habits for change of pasture, winter and summer). Even where modern progress has hugely distanced medieval rudiments, as in printing facilities, the author justly notes the point that a select Elzevir still nowadays prompts respectful attention; let alone the disastrous fate awaiting modem wood pulp paper, which threatens to perish while antiquarian Elzevirs remain freshly intact whole centuries hence. A vile heath- enish sneer by apostate Renan, to the effect that your consistent Christian despises beauty, out of homage to a macerated Culprit, " suspended by four nails ", impels the author to eloquent defense of " the first painter in the world, our Velasquez."
Those who depreciate the Middle Ages as landmark eras of ignorance and corruption, ought to study the merely moral vir- tues everywhere cultivated, prized and fruitful, in the guilds at their best estate; since, notwithstanding the pretensions of ra- tionalistic sociology, the guilds exhibited a high level of reverence toward God, of charity and honesty toward man, putting modem reformers to the blush for their feeble achievements in contrast
LITERARY CHAT. ^yg
with social conditions where the guilds normally flourished. If there were few " colossal " fortunes, neither were there slums of tenement squalor; and the scale of wages indicated a purchasing value so much as twice to four times that of monopoly wages to- day: this, in Spain, at least. The working hours were usually twelve, but this included an allowance of three hours for meals, leaving nine hours net; and holidays, of course, were far more frequent. Medieval society knew little of nervous high pressure, nor feverishly struggled for anxious to-morrow. Yet there was ample solidity and stability of living; and which of our sky- scraper American cities, peradventure, will survive so fairly secure against the wear and tear of time, say by A. D. 2300, as Nurem- berg, Gothic Toledo, Rouen, medieval remnants of Paris and Brussels, from 1500 to 1900. For that matter, the old Spanish mission structures, firmly surviving many shattered modem edifices after Califomian earthquakes, are no mean apology for medieval Catholic " traditionalism ". Pope Leo XIII endorsed a return to the guild in solution for current labor troubles, inordinate mono- polies, intermittent surfeit and famine of production ; only, one must needs realize the appalling obstacles to Church corrections in modem society, through breach of Catholic unity, waste and contempt of Christian forces under the twofold assault of overt unbelievers and quicksand relaxations consequent upon Protestant schisms never ceasing.
Xitetari2 Cbat
The cheaper reissue by the Macmillan Co. of Dr. John Ryan's A Living Wage places within the reach of even the most impecunious this thoughtful and timely study of one of the most vital problems of present economic organi- zation. The clergy interested in the wage question are doubtless familiar with the work. The small price ($0.50) at which it is now republished (and in style and material not inferior to the original issue) will enable them to spread the book amongst intelligent laymen and women and thus help to disseminate true ideas concerning the relations of ethics to economics.
Such hazy as well as erroneous conceptions of rights prevail these days that there can be no solution of the wage question without a broader diffusion of the truth concerning this fundamental idea. Not the least meritorious por- tion of Dr. Ryan's little book is the chapter on the basis and justification of rights. In a simple straightforward style he there lays down the philosophy of the juridic claim, the " facultas moralis in rem suam," and thus establishes an unshakable groundwork for the ethics of the wage question.
We have previously called attention to the Studies in Social Reform issued by the Catholic Social Guild in London. They are well written, thoughtful, and timely monographs, and can be had in their neat make-up through Herder (St. Louis) at two dimes each. Of the two numbers published, the first deals
38o THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
with the difficult problems of destitution; the second with sweated labor. In the latter, good use is made of Dr. Ryan's Living Wage.
Story books for children are hardly less serviceable allies to pastoral activity than are brochures on economics. Perhaps, too, they are more difficult to find, or at least to select. Told in the Twilight is a collection of some fifty tales most of which are tellable as well as readable. When we have said that they are made up (?), no, told, by Mother Salome, we have said enough to assure the priest that he may spe jelicis exitus put the book into the hands of small boys and girls (Benziger Brothers).
" Jinks " was just a little gutter waif, but somewhere near his middle there was a spot that not even all the mud, physical and moral, of Paradise Alley could keep from breaking out on the surface now and again ; and when Jinks once came to recognize " the inside " of him, " the God-spark radiating into his consciousness ", he held on to it, nourished it till it grew warm and bright, — when it became a lamp to his feet that never faltered along whatever way, howsoever rough and thorny, it led him. All this is charmingly told by Harriet Hobson in a somewhat recent book entitled Jinks' Inside (Philadel- phia, Jacobs & Co.). The characters of Jinks and Sis; Jinks's waking-up to his " inside ", and Sis's pluck in fight and right are well drawn and sustained. Peter Flanagan, the big and rich grocer, also finds his " inside " and it leads him to deeds of beneficence both beautiful and enduring. Jinks' Inside is a book that tells the story of the poverty and misery that stalk within the shadow of princely mansions — tells it graphically, but naturally. There are smiles and tears, vivid realism touched by noble idealism in this book, which grips you tight and holds you so to the finish.
One always finds it worth while to glance over at least, but better still to study, the pages of the Italian bi-monthly Rivista di Filosofia neo-Scolastica. The neo- and the scolastica, the new and the old, are sure to be found blend- ing harmoniously and supplementingly in its programs. One recognizes the mind of an editor back of it, a mind for organic unities and not simply for mechanical connexions. Happily, too, the Rivista is in the hands of a pub- lisher who knows how to give good shape and neat appearance to worthy con- tents (Florence, Editrice Florentina).
The Dark Beyond is a short treatise on the reality of hell and the paths that lead thereto.
The first book to treat of politeness, good breeding, and good manners is said to have been issued by the Bishop of Benevento in the sixteenth century, and Lord Chesterfield is supposed to have made good use of the volume in formulating his rules for polite society. Dean O'Brien, of Kalamazoo, has induced the Sisters of St. Joseph, who are directed by the rule of their Institute to teach their pupils politeness, to write a little brochure under the title of Politeness. It is a part of pastoral care which it is wise to cultivate, and it is this feature of the small booklet which strikes us as most important in showing the interest of the priest who uses the adjuncts of social training to perfect the work of religion.
Entreiiens Euckaristiques by the Abbe Jean Vaudon is now published in a new and improved edition (Pierre Tequi, Paris). It is meant especially for priests, and besides reflections on the sacerdotal life in reference to its central interest, the Blessed Sacrament, the volume contains a number of discourses suitable for the first Mass of a newly-ordained priest. The book has been quite popular before and will be more so with the additions.
There are two volumes now published of the five contemplated for the completion of The Beauty and Truth of the Catholic Church bv the Rev.
LITERARY CHAT.
38r
Edward Jones. The work is a translation from the German, but made with due discretion so as to keep the English idiom free from the peculiarities of expression and imagery to which the German language lends itself. It is highly praised in the Introduction by Archbishop Ireland. The author does not apparently follow any special line of catechetical development, but treats of dogma, liturgy, and devotion, in a popular form. (Herder.)
The Dominican Mission Book is a practical manual of devotion, compiled, as its name indicates, from sources chiefly Dominican, such as St. Thomas and Blessed Henry Suso. It has several methods of devotion for the Holy Hour, devotions to the Holy Ghost, etc., and gives particulars regarding the various Dominican Confraternities. (Benziger Brothers).
With God, a book of prayers and reflections by the Rev. F. X. Lasance, to whom we owe many good devotional manuals, prepares the way to habitual meditation, and at the same time furnishes all sorts of practical directions for spiritual and missionary work. It is a good vade-mecum for the parish priest, and very useful in the sacristy, since it contains the various novenas, litanies, hymns, blessings, the method of giving the " pledge," etc. A good index adds to its usefulness. (Benziger Brothers.)
The volume of Meditations for Every Day in the Month by Fr. Francis Nepveu, S.J., though a translation from the French, is thoroughly practical, and, we may say, an exceptionally good setting forth of the traditional themes for reflection. The volume is handy, the language concise, the print good, — which is saying much for a meditation book.
Of handsome manuals that serve as aids to devotion before the Blessed Sacrament, there is now no dearth. Come, Let Us Adore, a Eucharistic prayer book compiled by the well-known Franciscan Father Bonaventure Hammer, contains Instructions on the Blessed Sacrament, a Triduum of Meditations, Prayers especially for Holy Communion, Indulgenced Devotions, and a series of thirty visits to the Blessed Sacrament by St. Alphonsus. (Benziger Bros.)
Another manual, constructed on a somewhat diff"erent plan and consisting chiefly of meditations under the title of Eucharistic Soul Elevations, is by Father William F. Stadelman of the Holy Ghost Fathers. It deals also with the motives for frequent Communion and dissipates the scruples which are often experienced by devout souls in regard to the daily reception of the Bread of Life. This is not a very recent publication ; though that does not lessen its value. (Benziger Brothers.)
Communion Prayers of the Saints, compiled by the Redemptorist Father Peter Geiermann, assembles within a handy compass the considerations and affections that serve as preparation and thanksgiving for Holy Communion. They are chiefly drawn from St. Alphonsus, with devout aspira'tions from the writings of St. Francis de Sales. (B. Herder.)
A charming little Spanish manual, consisting of reflections upon the dignity, duties, and the right manner of the clerical life, is Mision Sacerdotal by Padre Eutimio Tamalet, a member of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts and of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. The sublimity of the priesthood, its need for the purifying and enlightening of the world to-day, the requisite qualities for its right fulfilment, and the means, are set forth in certain practical rules of life, mainly for seminarists. The second part, " Directorio Pastoral," speaks of the priestly life in the parish, in the church, in the world at large, and is full of thoughtful suggestions for pastoral activity. (B. Herder.)
382 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
Stay-at-homes who were able to make a 'round-the-world tour by the aid of Fr. Roche's letters as they appeared serially " in a half-dozen Canadian and American newspapers", can renew the pleasures of the journey by means of the compact volume wherein those letters are now permanently collected {Around the World. By the Rev. J. T. Roche, LL.D. New York, P. J. Kenedy & Sons). The letters deal with the essentials — with human beings more than with things and with vital problems, religious, social, economic, not with the " canned " goods of the guide book ; hence their value and their interest. A new edition will give opportunity to correct some " infelicities " of the types, such for instance as " Pneumonic plague " for Bubonic (pp. 206 and 211); " moonsoon " for monsoon (p. 198); "ghastly" for beastly (p. 199), and others.
Lourdes is first and last a hallowed spot, a sanctuary. None the less, how- ever, is it a scene redolent of beauty upon which the imagination may feed forever, a centre of marvels from which fancy may take its flight in dreams that can never be so strange as the reality. The charming story that has recently been woven out of the material supplied by Dr. Boissarie's UCEuvre de Lourdes, and entitled The Unbeliever, a Romance of Lourdes, blends all the colors of a chaste literary art with the facts of the history of the Pyrenean sanctuary. The facts are the restoration to health of a young girl suffering in the last stage of consumption, the restoration to health and conversion of a paralytic who had also been a blasphemer almost to the moment of his re- ceiving the boon of health, and lastly the singular conversion of an infidel. These facts, together with some others belonging to the history of Lourdes, are gracefully woven into a romance whose interest wins and holds the reader on to the end. The story is written by " a non-Catholic ", and with the sole aim of giving an honest account of the impression Lourdes and its miracles can make, even on an " unbeliever ". How the author could remain a non-Catholic, after having once accepted the evidences and motives of faith accumulated in the book, is not easy to understand, although the story itself presents incidents that help to make the problem less perplexing (London, Washbourne; New York, Benziger Brothers).
Books IRecefveb.
- BIBLICAL.
Das Evangelium nach Lukas. Uebersetzt, eingeleitet und erklart von E. Dimmler. M. Gladbach : Volksvereins-Verlag. 1912. Pp. xiv-364. Preis, M. 1.20.
Das Evangelium nach Markus. Uebersetzt, eingeleitet und erklart von E. Dimmler. M. Gladbach: Volksvereins-Verlag. 1912. Pp. vii-217. Preis, M. 1.20.
Die Ethik des Apostels Paulus. Von Dr. Karl Benz. (Biblische Stu- dien) — Freiburg Brisg., St. Louis, Mo. : B. Herder. 1912. Pp. 187. Price, $1.35.
Searching the Scriptures. By the Rev. T. P. Gallagher, S.T.L., B.C.L. Dublin: M. H. Gill & Son. 1912. Pp. xx-431.
La Didascalie des Douze Apotres. Traduite du syriaque pour la premiere fois. Par F. Nau, Professeur a I'Institut Catholique de Paris. {Ancienne Litter ature Canonique Syriaque. Fascicule I.) Deuxieme edition. Revue et augmentee de la traduction de la Didache des douze apotres, de la Didas- calie de I'apotre Addai et des empechements de mariage (pseudo) apostoliques. Paris: P. Lethielleux. 1912. Pp. xxxii-264.
BOOKS RECEIVED.
383
THEOLOGICAL AND DEVOTIONAL.
God, the Author of Nature and the Supernatural (De Deo Creante et Elevante). A Dogmatic Treatise by the Rev. Joseph Pohle, Ph.D., D.D., Formerly Prof, of Fundamental Theology in the Catholic University of America, now Prof, of Dogma in the University of Breslau. Authorized trans- lation, based on the fifth German edition ; with some abridgment and many additional references by Arthur Preuss. St. Louis, Mo. : B. Herder. 1912. Pp. 365. Price, $1.75.
The Living Flame of Love. By St. John of the Cross. With his Letters, Poems, and Minor Writings. Translated by David Lewis. With an Essay by Cardinal Wiseman and additions and an Introduction by Benedict Zimmer- man, O.C.D., Prior of St. Luke's, Wincanton. London : Thomas Baker. 1912. Pp. iv-317. Price, 6s. 6d. net.
Sermon Notes. A Scheme for a Course of Three Years on the Chief Points of Christian Doctrine with Synopses and References. By F. P. Hickey, O.S.B., author of Short Sermons (Two Volumes). With a Preface by the Right Rev. F. W. Keating, D.D., Bishop of Northampton. New York, Cin- cinnati, Chicago: Benziger Bros. 1912. Pp. xiii-162. Price, $0.90 net.
How TO Get Married. By the Rev. John A. Schmitt, St. Andrew's Cathe- dral, Grand Rapids, Michigan. Grand Rapids: F. H. McGough & Son. Price, $0.10; postpaid, $0.12; 25 copies, $2.00; 50, $3.75; 100, $6.50.
GoD Made Man. By the Rev. P. M. Northcote, author of Thoughts of the Heart, The Idea of Philosophy, etc. New York, Cincinnati, Chicago : Ben- ziger Bros. 1912. Pp. 231. Price, $0.90 net.
La Predication contemporaine. Pensees et Conseils homiletiques. Par Mgr. de Keppler, l&veque de Rottenburg. Traduit de I'allemand par I'abbe Leon Douadicq. Paris: P. Lethielleux. 1912. Pp. viii-139. Prix, 2 fr.
Le Pain ^vangelique. Explication Dialoguee des :6vangiles des Dimanches et Fetes d'Obligation a I'Usage des Catechismes, du Clerge et des Fideles. Par I'Abbe E. Duplessy. Tome III : De la St.-Pierre a I'Avent. Paris : Pierre Tequi. 1912. Pp. 240. Prix, 2 fr.
Practical Marriage Laws. Some Aids in the Application of the Marriage Laws of the Church. For the Use of Priests and Laity in Arkansas. By the Right Rev. J. M. Lucey, V.G., Pastor of St. Joseph's Church, Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Pp. 59. Price, $0.10; 25 copies, $0.08 apiece; 100, $0.07, all post- paid.
The Darkness Beyond. By John Haw, of Treves, Germany. Transl. by the Rev. James Walcher. St. Louis, Mo. : B. Herder. Pp. 102. Price, $0.15.
La Vocation au Mariage, au Celibat, a la Vie Religieuse. Par le R. P. J. Coppin, Redemptoriste. Troisieme edition, onzieme mille. Paris : Pierre T^qui. 1912. Pp. vii-389. Prix, 3 fr. 50.
La Vraie Politesse. Petit Traite sous forme de Lettres a des Religieuses. Par I'Abbe Francois Demore. Nouvelle edition. Paris: Pierre Tequi. 1912. Pp. xi-226. Prix, 2 frs.
A Practical Guide to the Divine Office. By Andrew B. Meehan, St. Bernard's Seminary, Rochester, New York. 1912. Pp. 132. Price, $0.60.
The Reign of Jesus. Being an Abridgment of the Work of the Blessed Jean Eudes. By the Abbe Granger, Honorary Canon of Bayeaux, Formerly Missioner of Notre Dame de la Delivrande. Translated from the second French edition by K. M. L. Harding. New York, Cincinnati, Chicago : Ben- ziger Bros. 1912. Pp. xxxvi-370. Price, $1.25 net.
Peronne Marie. A Spiritual Daughter of Saint Francis of Sales, 1586- 1637. By a Religious of the Visitation. New York, Cincinnati, Chicago : Benziger Bros., London: Burns & Oates. 1912. Pp. 256. Price, $1.25 net.
384
THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
PHILOSOPHY.
HiSTOiRE DE LA Philosophie Ancienne. Antiquite Classique. ^poque Patristique. Philosophie Medievale. Renaissance, Par Gaston Sortais, An- cien Professeur de Philosophie. Paris: P. Letheilleux. 1912. Pp. xviii-627. Prix, d fr.
Catholic Studies in Social Reform. A series of Manuals edited by the Catholic Social Guild — I. Destitution and Suggested Remedies. With a Pre- face by the Right Rev. Monsignor Henry Parkinson, D.D., President of Oscott College, Birmingham. — II. Sweated Labour and the Trade Boards Act. Edited by the Rev. Thomas Wright, President of the Hull Branch of the Catholic Social Guild. London: King and Son; St. Louis, Mo.: B. Herder. Pp. 69 and 58. Price, $0.20 each.
HISTORICAL.
The History of the Royal Family of England. By Frederic C. Bag- shawe, Barrister at Law. In two volumes. London : Sands & Co. ; St. Louis, Mo.: B. Herder. 1912. Pp. 704. Price, $6.00.
Lettres de Louis Veuillot a Mademoiselle Charlotte de Grammont. Suivies d'un Appendice contenant le Preface des Lettres d'Espagne et un Choix de Lettres de Mile. Ch. de Grammont a Louis Veuillot. Publics avec une Introduction et des Notes. Par J. Calvet, Professeur Agrege des Lettres au College Stanislas. Paris: P. Lethielleux. 1912. Pp. xxiv-260. Prix, 3 fr- 50.
Early History of the Christian Church from its Foundation to the End of the Fifth Century. By Monsignor Louis Duchesne, de 1' Academic Frangaise, Hon. D. Litt. Oxford, and Litt. D. Cambridge, Membre de I'ln- stitut de France. Rendered into English from the Fourth Edition. Volume II. New York and London: Longmans, Green & Co. 1912. Pp. xix-544. Price, $2.50 net.
The Pilgrim's Guide to Lourdes and the Chief Places en route. By the Rev. G. H. Cobb. With a Preface by the Cardinal Archbishop of West- minster. St. Louis, Mo. : B. Herder ; Edinburgh and London : Sands and Co. Pp. 74. Price, $0.40.
Prosperity, Catholic and Protestant. By Rev. Father Graham, M.A., Motherwell, author of Where we got the Bih'e. With an Introduction by the Right Rev. John Vaughan, D.D., Bishop of Sebastopolis. St. Louis. Mo. : B. Herder; Edinburgh and London: Sands and Co. Pp. 116. Price, $0.15.
The Life and the Religion of Mahommed, the Prophet of Arabia. Com- piled from the best and most trustworthy authors. By the Rev. Fr. J. L. Menezes, Priest of the diocese of Mangalore, India. With a familiar and friendly talk at the end as an appeal to candour and common sense. London : Sands and Co. ; St. Louis, Mo. : B. Herder. 1912. Pp. 194. Price, $0.60.
A Chronicle of the Popes from St. Peter to Pius X. By A. E. Mc- Killiam, M.A. New York: The Macmillan Co.; London: G. Bell & Sons. 1912. Pp. xiii-487. Price, $2.50, net\ Ts. dd.
The Mirror of Oxford. By C. B. Dawson, S.J., M.A. (Exeter College). With 40 Illustrations and a Map. London and Edinburgh : Sands and Co. ; St. Louis Mo. : B. Herder. Pp. 265. Price, $1.50.
The Sodality of Our Lady studied in the Documents. By Father Elder Mullan, S.J. Third edition (first in English). Revised and enlarged by the author. New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons. 1912. Pp. xxv-180-326.
Une Petite Sainte. Visite au Carmel de Lisieux aux Reliques a la Tombe de Sceur Therese de 1' Enfant Jesus. Par Jean Saint- Yves. Dfeuxieriie edition. Paris: P. Lethielleux. 1912. Pp. 85. Prix, i fr.
THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW
Fifth Series. — Vol. VII.— (XLVI I). —October, 19 12.— No. 4.
THE SIXTEENTH OENTENAEY OF OONSTANTINE'S PEOOLAMATION OF RELIGIOUS LIBERTY.
WE American Catholics naturally look upon our religious liberty as a thing to be taken for granted. Some few of us possibly recall the bigotries, great and small, of " Know- nothing " days. More of us are aware of trifling, sporadic, local, anti-Catholic opposition. But most of us have never been really touched at all by violent public antipathy in the matter of our religion. As we know it is but just and reason- able, so we may think it is but ordinary and commonplace that the Church of God should be free and untrammeled. We may forget that it was once far otherwise indeed; that we trace our history back through a succession of fierce local and national persecutions to a time of universal persecution; and that in the beginning the Church of Christ, like the mustard- seed to which its Founder had compared it, was quite literally buried in the earth. In this month of October we commem- orate the sixteen-hundredth anniversary of the first great change from persecution to liberty, when the mustard-seed that had been developing and sending out roots in the dark earth, suddenly and miraculously burst forth into a great tree, to shelter all nations and peoples.
For nearly three hundred years persecution after persecu- tion, with little breathing-spells between, had raged against the Church. In all that time, to be a Christian was to be little better than a hunted animal. Nero, Domitian, Trajan, Decius, Valerian, are names that almost sum up -for us the terrible yet glorious history of the " gens lucifuga ", the heroes
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of the Catacombs, of the waste places of earth, of the savage amphitheatre. Through it all the gospel teachings marched steadily across the world, spread amongst the lowly and the exalted, in obscure villages, in great Rome, in the army, the senate, the households of the emperors.
Then came the last, and in some ways the most dreadful, of assaults. On 23 February, 303, Diocletian published at Nicomedia new edicts against the Christians. Again the fires of torture blazed and the sands of the arena were reddened with the blood of martyrs. But the end was already in sight. Only nine years were to elapse before imperial Rome itself should be subdued to Christ. The 28 October of this year 191 2 marks the sixteenth centenary of the battle of the Mil- vian Bridge, the turning-point in the external history of Christianity; a battle which gave to Constantine the empire^ and to the Church peace and protection under the power which had so long persecuted it.
On I May, 305, Diocletian, in pursuance of his unselfish broad policy for the empire, abdicated the purple and in- duced his colleague, Maximian, to follow his example. Con- stantius Chlorus, the father of Constantine, and Galerius, the Caesar of the East, succeeded as Augusti. But the following year Constantius died, and his army proclaimed Constantine. Galerius unwillingly acknowledged Constantine, not indeed as Augustus, but as Caesar, raising to the higher rank his friend, Licinius.
For six years Constantine ruled his provinces of Gaul and Britain with great skill and humanity. He built up a formid- able army, and by his courage and brilliant generalship won its steadfast devotion. Meanwhile, Maxentius, the son of the ex-emperor Maximian, claimed the empire. With the aid of the Pretorians he seized Rome and became master of Italy. Campaigns made against him by Severus and Licinius were defeated or fell short. But in 312 Maxentius declared war upon Constantine, and thereupon affairs took quite a different turn. Although he had only some 40,000 men to oppose to- Maxentius's 180,000, Constantine came down from the north with masterly rapidity, in sixty days took Susa, Turin, Milan,. Verona, and driving in the outposts of Maxentius, advanced upon Rome.
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Three miles to the north of Rome the Flaminian Way crosses the Tiber over the Milvian Bridge, then swings north- east and up through the plains of Italy. Maxentius, with profound ignorance of strategic principles, drew up his forces north of the bridge, with the Tiber in their rear. He was not a soldier, nor was he distinguished for courage, but under the taunts of the Romans and in the misleading hopes of the oracle which prophesied that " that day would fall the enemy of the Romans ", he went forth himself with his troops. Con- stantine, still outnumbered more than three to one, met the enemy at Saxa Rubra, five miles north-east of the Milvian Bridge. The battle was fiercely contested ; the Pretorians, as a contemporary orator says, " dying where they stood ". But the seasoned veterans of Constantine, lead by the young gen- eral in person, charged irresistibly, broke and routed the vast army of Maxentius, and drove them into the Tiber, where Maxentius himself perished ignobly in the mud.
Constantine gave the credit for his victory to the God of the Christians, and in March of the year following issued the famous edict of Milan, guaranteeing absolute civil and reli- gious freedom to Christians and assuring the Church of im- perial protection and favor. Although Constantine was not baptized until he was on his death-bed, twenty-five years later, he identified himself from that time forth with the Christian cause and interests.
A tradition, which for over 1300 years was received every- where without question, which Godefroy first attacked in 1643, ascribes the conversion of Constantine and his victory over Maxentius to the miraculous intervention of Providence. Eusebius of Caesarea, in his Life of Constantine written in 338, a year after the emperor's death, is the only con- temporary who gives a complete and detailed account of this miracle. After recounting Constantine's misgivings before his campaign against Maxentius, and his realization of the need of other than natural help, his recalling how, whilst those who had worshipped a multitude of gods perished miser- ably, his own father Constantius had been blessed in the wor- ship of the one God, Eusebius goes on to tell us, in Bk. I, cc. 28, 29 :
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Therefore he [Constantine] began to implore the aid of this God, with earnest prayer and supplication that He would reveal to him who He was and that He would reach forth a helping hand in the present difficulties. And whilst the emperor was thus praying with fervent entreaty, there appeared to him a wonderful sign sent from God. And this indeed, if it had been related by any other, could not easily be believed. But since the victorious emperor himself told it long afterward to the writer of this history, when he was received into his familiar acquaintance, and confirmed his account with an oath, who shall hesitate henceforth to accredit the relation, especially since the testimony of after-time has established its truth?
He said that at midday, when the sun was beginning to decline, he had seen with his own eyes the trophy of a cross of light in the sky, just above the sun, and bearing the inscription, " Conquer by this " ; and that at this sight he himself was utterly astounded, as were all the soldiers who were following him on some expedition or other and who were witnesses of the miracle.
He said, moreover, that he marvelled what this vision might mean. And whilst he continued to ponder and reason greatly upon the matter, night imperceptibly drew on. Then as he slept, the Christ of God appeared to him with the same sign which he had seen in the sky, and commanded him to fashion a standard in the likeness of that sign and to use it as a safeguard in his battles.
Naturally, this account of Eusebius has been fair game for the rationalists, to v^hom all miracles are as a red rag to a bull. Naturally also, much of rationalistic opposition to the tradition has taken the form of mere sneering charges of men- dacity, with little or no attempt at argumentation. Gibbon, for instance, in his discussion of what he calls " the secret vision of Constantine ", says : '' The philosopher, who with calm suspicion examines the dreams and omens, the miracles and prodigies, of profane or even of ecclesiastical history, will probably conclude that if the eyes of the spectators have some- times been deceived by fraud, the understanding of the readers has much more frequently been insulted by fiction." ^
As applied to Eusebius, such an accusation scarcely merits s'erious consideration. His reputation for veracity is uni- versally accredited. He is far from being an over-zealous de- fender of the miraculous ; even omitting from his pages many events, the miraculous character of which is asserted, and not
1 Decline and Fall, c. xx.
PROCLAMATION OF RELIGIOUS LIBERTY. ^gg
without good reason, by other grave historians. The plea that he was influenced by a desire to praise at any cost his imperial friend must be disallowed both on intrinsic and ex- trinsic grounds.^
So obviously futile is this attack that most opponents of the miracle abandon it, and shift the burden of falsehood rather upon Constantine himself. Gibbon bluntly declares : " The Protestant and philosophic readers of the present age " — the two adjectives being, as all the world knows, inseparable — " will incline to believe that, in the account of his own con- version, Constantine attested a wilful falsehood by a solemn and deliberate perjury." Yet even Gibbon, a little later, is compelled to add: "A conclusion so harsh and so absolute is not, however, warranted by our knowledge of human nature, of Constantine, or of Christianity." *
When we consider the contemporary evidence supporting the testimony of Constantine, we shall see that Gibbon's re- luctant admission is well within the limits of truth and honesty.
The author of the book '' De Morte Persecutorum," who is rather generally assumed to be Lactantius, touches upon the miracle in his forty-fourth chapter. '' Constantine," he says, " was warned in sleep to mark upon his shields the heavenly sign of God, and so to begin the battle."
This was written about a year after the battle of the Milvian Bridge, and of course is entirely independent of Eusebius's account. It is true, the writer speaks only of a vision in a dream, and makes no mention of a cross appearing at noon- day in the sky. But to what do the words " coeleste signum " refer, if not to some such portent? Moreover, the whole treatise is very brief and condensed, and hence we should not look for any but a summary mention of the miracle.
Other testimonies are found in the written speeches of two pagan orators. The first of these, supposed by many to be
2 Marion briefly dismisses it thus : " His [Eusebius's] narrative is given after the account of the motives for Constantine's conversion. These motives are portrayed as by no means lofty, as of the earth earthy. Eusebius does not flatter his hero. The emperor was dead when the '' Life of Constantine " was published. The historical probity of Eusebius is well known. The Father of Church History could exaggerate in his appreciations, he could also sin by omission; but he never gives as true mere facts of his own inventing and of which he knew the falsity." Hist, de I'Eglise, Vol. I, p. I59-
3 Decline and Fall, Vol. II, p. 200.
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Eumenius, speaking at Treves in the presence of Constantine, and less than three months after the battle, addresses the emperor thus : '' What God, what Divine Presence encour- aged thee, that when nearly all thy companions in arms and commanders not only had secret misgivings but had open fears of the omen, yet against the counsels of men, against the warn- ings of the diviners, thou didst by thyself perceive that the time of delivering the city was come? Thou hast surely, O Constantine, some secret pact with that Divine Intelligence, which, leaving to lesser gods the care of us, deigns to manifest itself to you alone."
He speaks of an omen, which he seems studiously to avoid specifying; an omen which was a public fact; which Con- stantine's soldiers and officers were cognizant of; and from which, not all indeed, but nearly all, shrank in fear and horror. Now, of all omens of bad augury amongst the Ro- mans the most dreaded was the cross. What more reasonable then, than to conclude that the orator is speaking of a cross seen by Constantine and all his army, and disturbing the minds of that great majority of the beholders who were not Chris- tians? Moreover, it is quite evident from his words that this omen was not some obviously natural phenomenon, but some- thing which all at once considered a distinctive manifestation of Divinity and of a special Providence in Constantine's regard.
The second pagan witness is Nazarius, an orator of high re- pute in his day, who on I March, 321, nine years after the battle and seventeen years before Eusebius wrote his account, recalls the great victory and says with rhetorical flourish :
It is the talk of all the Gallic provinces that hosts were seen who bore on them the character of divine messengers. And though heavenly things use not to come to sight of man, in that the simple and uncompounded substance of their subtile nature escapes his heavy and dim perception, yet those, thy auxiliaries, bore to be seen and to be heard ; and when they had testified to thy high merit, they fled from the contagion of mortal eyes. And what accounts are given of that vision, of the vigor of their frames, the size of their limbs, the eagerness of their zeal ! Their flaming bosses shot an awful radiance, and their heavenly arms burned with a fearful light ; such did they come, that they might .be understood to be thine. And
PROCLAMATION OF RELIGIOUS LIBERTY. 3Q1
thus they spoke, thus they were heard to say, " We seek Constantine ; we go to aid Constantine ".
In these three accounts, of Lactantius, Eumenius, and Nazarius, there are both vagueness and wide diversity. In the last there is a hint also of the pagan myth of Castor and Pollux. But still there is in all three confident reference to some heaven-sent sign, some token not of this earth, of vic- tory for Constantine. And the vagueness and diversity are not hard to explain. In the speech of Nazarius, note the statement, '' It is the talk of all the Gallic provinces " and the exclamation, " What accounts are given of that vision !" Evi- dently, this speaker is no eye-witness of the events he speaks of. He has only heard from others. And from whom? His very words indicate clearly that he is repeating a current or popular version of the facts now some nine years past; facts received originally from an army which was here to-day and gone to-morrow; spread, by word of mouth only, amongst a pagan people, who had no written account to check their own imaginings, who embroidered the truth with popular super- stitutions as they passed it on, one to another. No wonder it has come to him in such strange guise ! But all its strange- ness does not lessen the moral certainty that it rested pri- marily upon an historic happening of a marvelous nature. This method of propagation of the story accounts in a very obvious way for the vagueness and discrepancies in Lactantius and Eumenius as well ; and cannot be too strongly taken into consideration. We are apt to forget in this twentieth cen- tury the crude conditions of sixteen hundred years ago and the awkward inefficiency of preserving truths by popular re- petition alone.
Finally, as testimony to the striking occurrences that sur- round the victory of Constantine, we have the Labarum itself, the standard which Constantine declared upon oath was fash- ioned in the likeness of the cross seen in the vision, and which became the acknowledged imperial emblem; we have the statue of Constantine, which he had erected in Rome almost immediately after the event, with the Labarum in its hand, and bearing on the pedestal this inscription, *' By the aid of this salutary token of strength I have freed my city from the yoke of tyranny and restored to the Roman Senate and People
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their ancient splendor and glory " ; we have the triumphal arch which he erected also in Rome, less than three years after the battle, and which still remains, with an inscription testi- fying that he had gained the victory " instinctu divinitatis " ; we have medals struck by Constantine, stamped with the figure of the Labarum and with the words of the vision, " By this sign thou shalt conquer ".
What motive could have urged Constantine, still a pagan, under no obligations to Christianity save such as the Divine vision itself might have put upon him, to expose himself to ridicule in the eyes of his pagan army by monuments and medals commemorating with solemn falsehood a Christian miracle which never occurred? Constantine's attesting oath may be lightly dismissed by " Protestant and philosophic readers " as a gratuitous perjury: but Constantine's public ap- peal to a merely pretended Divine aid demands in explanation the charge of frank idiocy; and that charge has not yet been made.
In these contemporary accounts of the miraculous vision, it is to be observed that the time and place of the vision are not given explicitly. Nor do their implicit indications agree. Some lead us to believe that it occurred near Rome and im- mediately before the battle of the Milvian Bridge. Eusebius gives the impression, more probably the correct one, that it took place earlier in the campaign and, in all likelihood, be- fore Constantine and his army had entered Italy. There are no contradictions in the matter, because there simply are no assertions.
As to objections to the truth of the vision, outside of a priori rejection of all miracles and sheer prejudice, there are a few genuine arguments. In the first place, it is urged that Eusebius does not mention the miracle in his Ecclesiastical History. In reply we must note two things : first, that al- though Eusebius in his History does not speak expressly of the vision, he does say that Constantine invoked '* the God of Heaven, and His Son and Word, our Lord Jesus Christ ", and that the emperor was " stimulated by the divine assist- ance " ; second, that his Ecclesiastical History was written at least thirteen years before his Life of Constantine, at a time when Eusebius's knowledge of the vision was probably no
PROCLAMATION OF RELIGIOUS LIBERTY. 303.
more than the popular versions, which he, as is abundantly- evident throughout his History, in general regards with mis- trust and scepticism. So that his silence in regard to the vision, offset as it is by his plain reference to some *' divine assistance " granted to Constantine, and easily explained by his severely critical attitude toward all popular traditions of the marvelous, by no means proves either that no such miracle occurred or that Eusebius was unaware of it.
Another objection is based on the fact that in the writings of the Fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries not a single testimony is found in favor of the visions. But this again is easily accounted for. As Newman has pointed out, " the only writer of note extant during the first fifty years of the (fourth) century, besides Eusebius, is Athanasius; and his writings are taken up with later transactions and a far differ- ent subject " — namely, with the rise of Arianism and the de- fence of Catholic dogma. And Gibbon himself who ad- vances the objection, also supplies the explanation; on the ground that the Fathers of the succeeding century simply did not know of the Life of Constantine by Eusebius. '' This tract," says Gibbon, " was recovered by the diligence of those who translated or continued his Ecclesiastical History."
Attempts have been made, with the persistent inanity char- acteristic of rationalists, to explain the cross seen by Con- stantine as a natural phenomenon, a halo about the sun. The first of these attempts Gibbon, in a curt note, ridicules thus : " Fabricius, who is abused by both parties, vainly tries to in- troduce the celestial cross of Constantine among the solar Halos." Nor have those who followed him succeeded any better. No solar halo can account for the words, rovTL> viKa, which accompanied the cross in the sky, or for the apparition and command of Christ in the night following.
In conclusion, we may sum up the discussion thus. Con- stantine, engaged in a perilous campaign against vastly su- perior forces, implores aid of the God of the Christians, and thereupon wins a remarkable victory. He publicly makes acknowledgment of divine assistance in his victory, by monu- ments erected and medals struck immediately after the battle. The tradition of a miraculous intervention spreads every- where, with great rapidity, and evidently disseminated by the
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testimony of his own soldiers. Contemporary pagan orators and Christian writers refer with easy confidence to some such miracle, though with a vagueness entirely natural in view of the circumstances and the news-mongering limitations of the age. Eusebius, a cann}^, critical man, makes only cursory mention of the divine interference in his History, written thir- teen or fourteen years after the event. Later, having in the meantime become intimate with Constantine and learned from his own sworn testimony the details of the vision, he embodies these details fully and circumstantially in his Life of Con- stantine. This Life is published after the emperor's death, but whilst thousands were still living of those whom he cites as eye-witnesses of the miracle. The narrative is lost for a time, and recovered only a century or more later, so that ecclesiastical writers immediately succeeding make no men- tion of his account. After the recovery of the Life of Euse- bius, the miraculous vision is universally accepted. Even the Centuriators of Magdeburgh uphold it strongly. It is only after more than a century of Protestantism that it is first denied, and neither then nor since then upon any arguments not known to all the world during the thirteen centuries in which no voice was raised against it.
Hence, that some marvelous sign occurred, witnessed by Constantine and his army, is as certain as any fact in history. That this sign was of a miraculous character is equally certain. For these truths are decided by a variety and weight of testi- mony which leave no room for doubt. But that all the details narrated by Constantine to Eusebius are exactly correct, is not equally certain, since it rests finally upon the sole word and oath of one man, Constantine. And whilst that word and oath, taken in all the accompanying circumstances, is amply sufficient evidence to the present writer, still he does not venture to damn incontinently those who- may demand more convincing proof, or who may agree with Father Funk when he says that some undeniably " real phenomenon — may have been enlarged upon and explained in the light of subsequent events." *
William T. Kane, S.J.
St. Louis University.
* Manual of Ch. Hist., Vol. I, p. 48.
STUDIES AND DISCIPLINE IN SEMINARIES. 39;
THE OOUESE OP STUDIES AND DISCIPLINE IN THEOLOGICAL
SEMINARIES.
THE Sacred Congregation of Consistory ^ through its offi- cial secretary, Cardinal De Lai, addresses to the Or- dinaries of Italy a circular letter in which the subject of the general discipline and the course of studies in the diocesan seminaries is brought to the attention of the Bishops. What the prevailing custom in this regard has been in the Roman Seminaries is made plain in an article on the subject which appears in this number of the Review^ and which comes from one who has gained his knowledge by actual experience dur- ing years of study and residence in one of the chief and typical institutions of the Roman Propaganda.
Whilst the Instruction of the Sacred Congregation is ad- dressed directly to the Italian Bishops, its lessons are by no means confined to the provinces of Italy. It has a message for outside countries, as it indicates certain fundamental re- quirements in the proper management of institutions for the training of ecclesiastics. The lessons it contains have indeed been anticipated in some instances by the zeal and forethought of our American Bishops ; but there is still room for improve- ment in many respects, and the present document gives a good opportunity to direct attention to the fact. The first point of which the Roman instruction speaks is
The Lack of Vocations. In Italy as elsewhere there is an evident decrease of voca- tions to the ecclesiastical state. The Sacred Congregation finds the reason for this defection partly in the hostile atti- tude toward the Clergy on the part of an infidel and anti- religious society, which attitude discourages parents from urging their sons to enter a state of life that promises only persecution and hardships. On the other hand, the youth find opened to their aspiration and ambition a large and ever- increasing number of avocations which promise success and prosperity. The clerical calling, now that the State has ap- propriated to itself most of the endowments, holds out at most the prospect of a modest livelihood, with continuous respon-
1 See below, under Analecta, or the Acta Apostolicae Sedis,.Vo\. IV, num. 14 for the Italian text of the document.
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sibilities amid a constant demand for sacrifice. These rea- sons may be found everywhere, and the fact that they are advanced indicates that the former system of endowments (which caused the Church to prosper in temporals), whilst it multiplied the number of priests, did by no means always in- crease their efficiency, a thing which the generous impulses of the princes who furnished the endowments did not foresee. To counteract the apparent lack of vocations the Bishops are admonished to encourage the youth by preaching and example to assume the yoke of Christ, to labor for the conversion of souls in a generous spirit of self-denial, and, by emphasizing the great merit and the eternal reward of such noble devotion as the priesthood imposes, to draw the young to the sanctuary.
The Preparatory Seminary to be separated from the Theological Seminary.
The next step to be taken to secure the permanency of voca- tions to the priesthood is to have the junior students of the Preparatory Seminary separated entirely from the candidates of the theological department, in order that each may receive that special training which their mental condition and dis- position of heart demand. For the lessons of discipline and piety, the exhortations and readings in common, the lectures and classes, and even the recreations which befit the senior semi- narists are not always suited to the younger students, whose minds and habits are not as yet fully developed and who need special supervision and direction. On the other hand young students require a greater amount of freedom so that they may manifest their dispositions and allow the early correction of their faults. The training of the younger boys in the rudi- ments of spirituality, likewise, aims less at details of conduct than does the training of the students who approach more closely to the sanctuary. The daily exercises of piety to which the juniors are bound need to be less exacting than in the case of those who are no longer fed with the milk of babes but receive the stronger food of men for the warfare in which they are soon to engage. The same professors moreover are not suited for both departments, since those who devote them- selves to the teaching of the higher branches are rarely pre- pared to give that attention and time to the details of ele-
STUDIES AND DISCIPLINE IN SEMINARIES. 397
mentary classes which are absolutely necessary for the proper instruction of the young. A point not to be lost sight of is likewise the fact that there exists also in most institutions of a conservative character a spirit unconsciously aiming at the perpetuation of certain traditions. Sometimes these traditions stand in the way of needed reforms. The combination of Preparatory School with the Higher Seminary makes it often impossible to eliminate abuses in the form of long-standing traditions.
Continuous Residence in the Seminary and Vacations.
It has long been the custom in European, and especially in the Italian, seminaries to transfer the seminarists during the hot season to some country house, where they may enjoy not only rest and recreation, but also that freedom from academic restraint and scholastic associations without which it is diffi- cult to relax the mind after the tense application to the regu- lar curriculum during the greater part of the year.
The long vacations are therefore to be spent in the country, but under the supervision of the directors of the Seminary. A brief furlough of ten or fifteen days is allowed the student during the year to visit his parents or guardians,' and to pro- vide himself with the required means for carrying on his studies uninterruptedly during the remainder of the scholastic year.
There are evident advantages in this method of keeping the seminarist under the discipline which in a certain sense is to become his life habit even after ordination. In this way he is not exposed to the necessity and danger of conforming for three months to the spirit of the world, against which he does not yet possess those safeguards which priestly life in some recognized field of pastoral labor provides for the or- dained cleric. The home circle too is in many cases relieved from embarrassments caused by having to entertain a mem- ber of the family who, however much beloved and attached to the home, finds there neither the occupation nor the as- sociations quite suited to his present and future sphere of life. Furthermore there are advantages in remaining in touch with the teachers and fellows of one's seminary, life during the period of a vacation which, without lessening the fullest
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enjoyment of liberty and recreation, helps the student to sup- plement the scholastic work of the year by that liberal culture which comes from spontaneous exchange of views and opinions with others, from the easy method of familiar repetitions, and from the coaching and reading without scholastic restraint for which this kind of vacation offers every opportunity.
Some of our Bishops, following the Roman method, have introduced this system of vacation in the seminary, no doubt with good results. The S. Congregation wishes that it be observed for all the Italian seminaries, both preparatory and theological.
Of course there is something to be said for the custom which permits the student to go out into the world for some months each year, to recreate after the confinement and routine life of the seminary, and to exercise his moral strength in maintaining a stand as cleric which proves him to be the chosen material for the pastoral service no less than for the seclusion of the sanctuary. The young oak takes a firmer hold upon the soil by means of its roots in proportion as its slender trunk is swayed by the buffeting of the storm, and its exposure to the winds becomes an advantage rather than a danger to its sturdi- ness of growth. Hence there may be good reason why many of the ecclesiastical educators in Germany prefer to maintain the system of the university freedom for theological students, assuming that the candidate who elects to apply for sacred orders after years of deliberate and persevering study, and without supervision or moral coercion of any kind, is much more to be trusted as a man of convictions and principles than the youth who, once having entered the seminary, is prac- tically coached along the lines of perseverance until his ordin- ation without having given any proof that he could endure the test of temptations that are sure to beset him in the actual life of the ministry.
To our mind it is a question of individual temperament, in which probably nationality plays some part. The German is by nature more sturdy, less impulsive, rather given to reason- ing than to feeling his way. His habits remain with him, and he lacks on the whole that sensitiveness which keeps asking itself what others think of his actions — an element which largely controls the Celtic temperament. The difference in
STUDIES AND DISCIPLINE IN SEMINARIES. 390
this respect may be noticed even in our American institutions among students who are the sons of German parents when compared with students of Italian, Irish, French, or Sla\ descent. The latter are often brighter and quicker to appre- hend, perhaps also more docile, because more impressionable and sensitive. But they lack the sturdiness, the capacity for continuous work, the reasoned consistency, which steady the course of the Teutonic student and make him reach results which he holds and exploits. All this would justify the German method of training under certain conditions, not to be found in Italian or French seminaries, and which exist only to a limited extent among ecclesiastical students in the United States.
Young Priests as Prefects.
The S. Congregation advocates likewise the employment of the newly-ordained priests as assistant masters of discipline in the seminary, before they are permanently appointed to parish work. The advantage of this method of securing dis- ciplinary supervision and in a measure of supplying a body of assistant tutors, especially in the preparatory seminary, is obvious. The young priest is thus given an opportunity of exercising a useful function in the diocese, while gradually reaching out and preparing himself for the practical ministry. He is given a breathing-spell during which he may gather his mental and moral forces, between his leaving the class- room and his going into the service of preaching, hearing confessions, and the other responsible work of the public ministr}^ For whilst he remains a resident in the seminary as prefect, he may yet from time to time be called on to assist in parish work wherever there is a demand.
There can hardly be any doubt about the beneficial influence both on the seminar}^ and the young priests themselves under this system, if carried out consistently in our large diocesan institutions. The objection that will leap up against the suggestion would be of course that the need of priests on the mission with us is, as a rule, so great and imperative as to allow no delay in placing the newly-ordained in active parish service. But the difficulty is only apparent, not real, since the priests who act as prefects during an intermediate year would be available in the regular course, just as they were when
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first ordained. Indeed there is a distinct advantage in hav- ing a number of young priests who may be called on to sup- ply temporarily a certain amount of mission service. In many of our smaller parishes there are at present assistants who are insufficiently employed. They are required merely for a certain number of Masses and in the confessional on Saturdays and Sundays. Beyond this they are free during the week. In all such places one priest could easily attend the sick and make other pastoral calls if he had some priest to assist him on Saturdays and Sundays. Here the prefects of the seminary could do occasional or regular service with- out detriment to discipline and with profit to themselves. It might mean, too, considerable saving in expense for the poorer parishes throughout the diocese.
By this means the young priest would be introduced gradu- ally to missionary service; would get an opportunity not only to observe, consult, and reflect upon his future pastoral duties, but would also be enabled to cultivate a habit of pastoral ac- tivity on perfect lines, alike beneficial to himself and to the flock over which he may be appointed.
Obviously the plan means simply the adding of a post- graduate year, in which the young priest will find opportun- ity for the exercise of direction and instruction in the office of prefect, and for the exercise of pastoral work by degrees in the cure of souls.
It would be necessary, of course, that the newly-ordained priest be assigned for a given time as prefect of some division in the seminary, and likewise for a definite service at some parish church as supernumerary, with the understanding that a fixed (not voluntary) compensation be made for such ser- vices. The reason for this latter condition is the necessity of preventing local and personal preferences, which could only harm the candidates and give rise to scheming and nepotism.
Recreation and Studies.
Among the subjects which appertain to the training of ec- clesiastical students is that of inculcating in them the spirit of devoutly observing the liturgical feasts with such conform- ity to ceremonial and ritual interpretation as is apt to foster piety and edification. Hence these feasts are to be observed
STUDIES AND DISCIPLINE IN SEMINARIES. ^qI
without taking account of the time which they draw from the routine work of studies or classes. Nor are the holidays spent in observance of the ceremonial of the Church to cause a les- sening of the requisite recreation of the students. They shall have one full day of every week, besides Sundays and holi- days, to rest from class-work and from the course of studies assigned for the other days of the week.
As to the order of classes, the S. Congregation ordains that the hours be so arranged as not to make the lectures conse- cutive, nor to allow them to extend over more than four (or at most four and a half) hours each day.
A certain conformity to the standard and demands of public -education is likewise to be kept in mind in the matter of secular and classical teaching. This is important. If the clergy are to direct and influence public opinion it is neces- sary that they possess a well-rounded education so as to en- able them to meet on equal ground the men of culture around them who are the natural leaders of the less educated. Be- yond this, however, special attention is to be given to Latin, not only as a medium of exact thinking during the study of philosophy and the scholastic branches of theology, but also because it is the liturgical language and the mother tongue of the Catholic priesthood throughout the Western world. But apart from the classes of philosophy, or dogmatic and moral theology, Latin need not be made the medium of the teaching, and even in these classes some liberty must be al- lowed so as to render the study of practical service.
Another point, mentioned in the Instruction of the Sacred Congregation, which may serve us in the improvement and perfecting of our seminary education is the method of teach- ing the philosophical and theological braitches. The prevail- ing system of imparting knowledge in the higher studies by means of lectures, which is the vogue in most of our universi- ties, needs to be supplemented by oral examinations and by discussions, whether in the form of the German seminars or in that of scholastic " disputations." According to the Roman program, one hour of the five given to the study of philosophy each week is to be devoted to " repetition," and one hour each fortnight to debate, in the form of a defence of a thesis. The customary branch of " propaedeutics," which covers one year's course, is entirelv abolished.
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The Course for the Students of Theology.
The course of theology prescribed for the students of the higher seminary comprises the dogmatic and moral disciplines, Sacred Scripture, and ecclesiastical history.
To the study of dogma is assigned one hour daily during the entire four years' course. But this includes the apologetic branches of theology, which are to supplement the scholastic matter as hitherto taught from such texts as the Summa of St. Thomas, etc.
In like manner Moral Theology is to be supplemented by the study of Fundamental Sociology and Canon Law.
Four hours a week are to be given in the theological depart- ment to the study of Sacred Scripture; the first two years to be devoted to Introduction, the last two years to Exegesis, — in particular of the Psalms, the Gospels, and the Epistles.
For the study of ecclesiastical history the special recom- mendation is made that it consist not merely of a retailing of historical facts, but that the supernatural character of the life of the Church be duly considered in connexion with the events, so that the student be led to a due consideration of the philoso- phy of history^ as it was regarded by the Christian Fathers of old and by men like Cardinal Newman of our own times. For the Church is not merely a human institution but rather one that bridges the human and the divine, a semblance of the Incarnation of the Son of God.
Adequate time is to be allowed for the mastery of sub- sidiary studies, such as that of the Biblical languages, homi- letics, liturgy, sacred art, and music. The rector and prefect of studies are directed to see that the professors cover the entire matter of the prescribed program during the allotted years of the course. Hence the teachers are cautioned to avoid disproportionate discussions of special topics at the expense of the full course.
These regulations seem well calculated to improve the dis- cipline and teaching in ecclesiastical seminaries ; and that there is room for improvement, not only in Italian seminaries but amongst ourselves as well, must be allowed by all who are familiar with the instruction and the methods in use, the de- fects of which have been pointed out from time time by men of unquestioned authority in such matters.
ROMAN SEMINARY LIFE. .q^
ROMAN SEMINARY LIFE.
THE following remarks on Roman seminary life are based upon the experience of a student who spent five years in a Roman college. With but few, if any modifications, none of them essential, they will apply to any of the numerous na- tional colleges in the Eternal City, for these are all under the same method of management. This article does not regard any particular institution, since the system is contemplated as a whole. The Propaganda is the only University mentioned. The purpose of the remarks is to present the main features of student life in Rome in a general way and in an objective manner, without any personal reference to individual super- iors, or students; to state existing conditions with candor and sincerity, and with a due and reverent regard for the authority entrusted with the actual status of affairs then and now pre- vailing. A broad classification will throw what follows under four heads, each with a number of subdivisions, — A. Dis- cipline; B. Intellectual Life; C. Recreations; D. General Observations.
A. Discipline.
CAMERATA SYSTEM.
Each Roman seminary has a rector and vice-rector, who exercise a general supervision over its government. The dis- cipline, however, is to a large extent in the hands of the stu- dents themselves, and forms a striking and characteristic fea- ture of Roman seminary management. All the students in the college are divided into camerate. Each camerata has a prefect and an assistant prefect, both appointed by the rector, who are in charge of from eight to fourteen men, more or less, there being no fixed number. The prefect is the respon- sible person, and only in his absence has the assistant prefect any authority. The prefect is ordinarily, although not al- ways, of a higher class, and theologians are always placed in charge of philosophers. Under no circumstances may a stu- dent leave his own camerata and go to another camerata for any purpose whatsoever, except with the permission of the rector. Each man must keep to his own room during the time the rule requires him to be there. Not even during recreation
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may he go to his own room, but is required to take recreation in common with the members of his own camerata. Every exercise must be attended by the entire camerata in a body, all its members waiting for the signal of the prefect before starting for chapel, meals, class, or walks. No man may en- ter another's room. Even to leave chapel during a religious exercise requires the previous permission of tlie prefect of the camerata to which the student belongs, and the granting of such permission must afterward be reported to the rector. To be late for any common exercise requires similar report, as does sickness, whilst absence from class requires the previous con- sent of the rector. Since the students are so largely occupied in maintaining the discipline of the seminary, it comes to pass that in a great measure they take care of themselves, as the prefects are also students, and they too must study, and cannot be about watching the members of their camerata con- tinually. A man feels that he is not watched, nor subjected to petty surveillance, and is left largely to his own honor. Even when an infraction of the rule does occur, unless it be a grave offence, it is usually, though not always, settled directly between the prefect and the man himself, without bringing the affair to the attention of the rector at all. In grave mat- ters, where the intervention of the superior is deemed neces- sary, the offender himself is sent to the rector, \to whom he presents his own case, making his own accusation and his own defence. The rector sometimes, though not always, sends for the prefect to hear the other side, but in the majority of cases the prefect does not find it necessary to go to the rector at all to report a man. This saves the prefect from the accusa- tion of tale-bearing, and insures a first-hand report of the infraction of the rule by the offender himself.
The camerata system by its very nature imposes the neces- sity of constantly associating during one's entire course with practically the same group of from eight to fourteen men. The camerata always moves as a; unit, and always preserves its individuality. The men composing it go in a body to chapel ; they are so grouped there, as well as in the refectory, and on the walks; and with but few exceptions they rarely meet members of other camerate. It does not take long to exhaust the information that one man can impart to another, and after
ROMAN SEMINARY LIFE. .qh
the first two or three months it is probable that the conversa- tion will be confined to trivialities, and the little round of each day's duties. Newspapers are forbidden, and as a result there is a temptation to talk of nothing except the day's work. That, however, could be made a source of great profit, should the students avail themselves of the opportunity. But it is only in exceptional cases that any great intellectual advant- ages are derived from camerata life. Recreation is just as obligatory as any. other duty, and to be forced by the rule to take exercise with students who are clever, splendid, virtuous men, but, nevertheless, with whom one may have little in com- mon, and whose intellectual tastes run along different lines, thus being deprived of the opportunity to choose congenial and stimulating companions, is no small trial to a man's char- acter. He may complain, or he may comport himself with Christian resignation, and practise patience often in an heroic degree. But after a course of four years or more, if he makes the most of the situation, he will leave the seminary a trained man, able to adapt himself to, and rise above, almost any en- vironment.
The camerata system contemplates having a prefect with his students continuously. They do not go out alone until they are in major orders, although this rule admits of some few and occasional exceptions. To go out jn the city to purchase a book or to consult a physician, or to attend to any business, even the most trifling, requires that the student be accompanied by his prefect. In some colleges in order to economize the time of the prefect, or for other reasons, the students are sent out with the servants of the college, a practice deplored by the entire student body.
RECTOR AND STUDENTS.
Even though the students are the subordinate disciplinarians, the rector is the animating and controlling spirit, and it is his personality that gives a character to the college. The rector has regular office hours when he may be consulted by any of the students, whilst the prefects interview him weekly and even oftener. Without unduly intruding himself, or play- ing the part of an ecclesiastical gendarme, or scrutinizing the minutiae of daily life, the rector knows what is going on, and
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he is able, if he desires, to test the intellectual, moral and spiritual fibre of every man under his control, so that at the end of four, five, or six years, living under the same roof with the students, observing them under various conditions, at work and at recreation, studying, playing, and praying, he can measure their fitness for Holy Orders. The man who after such a period of trial can succeed in deceiving the rector of a Roman seminary would deceive the rector and combined faculty of any seminary in the world.
The relations between the rector and the students, however, can scarcely be called intimate or familiar. It is possible (although indeed it would be a very exceptional case) for a man to live within a few feet of the rector's apartments for weeks at a time and yet not find it necessary to exchange a dozen words with him, the rector exercising his' authority meanwhile through the prefects. The rector and students neither associate with one another, nor do they recreate in common; and whilst it is done in some few cases, it is not a general rule for the rector to be accompanied on his after- noon walk by one or two of his students. Such a practice would, however, lead to more friendly relations between the rector and his men. The rector judges of the intellectual ability of the students from the notes furnished by the Pro- paganda. If the rector never sees nor hears of a man break- ing a rule, or getting into difficulty with his prefect, or with other students, and there is no unfavorable testimony from the Propaganda, he is justified in arriving at the conclusion that the man must be a good student, because he gives no cause for complaint. There is no vote of a faculty of professors or other superiors when the time arrives for receiving minor or major orders: the decision in this momentous step rests with the rector.
SMOKING.
In some colleges the use of tobacco is absolutely prohibited; in others snuff is allowed, but smoking is put under the ban. Other seminaries, however, are to be found where smoking, while not encouraged, is tolerated. The vast majority of students learn to smoke before entering the seminary, and they will continue to smoke in spite of all regulations to the contrary. Breaking the smoking rule paves the way for the
ROMAN SEMINARY LIFE. .qT
violation of other regulations, and there is a belief gaining ground that the moral force of college discipline will be strengthened by lifting the interdict on smoking.
VISITORS. Paradoxical as it may seem, it is very often quite as difficult to visit a Roman seminarian as it is to see the Pope. " Visi- tors not welcome " is substantially, if not actually, written over the entrance to every national college in Rome. Receiv- ing callers is discouraged; and whilst an hour, more or less, on Thursdays and Sundays is set apart for the purpose of re- ceiving visitors at the college, unless callers conform to this regulation, they and the students will be disappointed. For men 5,000 miles from home, suffering now and then from homesickness, scarcely any self-denial can be compared to the inability to have a few brief words with relatives or friends who bring news of their families across the broad Atlantic. Many a student returns to his native land after a residence of four, five, or six years in the Eternal City, to learn for the first time that several friends called upon him at his college in Rome, but were denied the privilege of seeing him because they failed to come on the regular visiting day or hour. This creates the false impression on the part of outsiders that the superiors are tyrannical, and that Roman seminary life is in a prison. Grave reasons are put forward by seminary au- thorities for this procedure, although the arguments are not conclusive to the vast majority of students. From the rec- tor's point of view, visitors are a distraction ; they wish to- in- vite the students out for lunch, or to take them for a holiday in the city or country, when they really desire them to be the party conductor through the wonders of Rome. Valuable time is thereby lost, and an opinion is created in Rome that there is no discipline at all in that college whose students are frequently seen on the streets in the company of tourists.
B. Intellectual Life.
LECTURE SYSTEM.
The lecture system is employed. Few classes have an offi- cial text-book that is used to such an extent that a student can afford to dispense with taking notes in class. In the majority
40 8 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
of classes notes are relied upon to the exclusion of any text- book whatsoever, thus developing an absolute dependence on class notes, an author being consulted but rarely. There is^ therefore, too frequently no work upon which a student can rely if he be compelled by sickness, retreat, or other cause ta be abse»t from class. To acquire the matter covered during his absence, he must either study from another student's notes, or copy the notes himself. Those who have experienced the tedious labor of transcribing back notes have had ample reason to wish for a text-book to which they could refer in such a necessity. The very drudgery of supplying lost lectures has tempted many students to omit them altogether, taking a risk on the matter at the examination. Each class has its own instructor, a specialist in that department. There are ordin- arily five scheduled class days each week, Thursdays and Sun- days being free. The actual number of class days for the scholastic year, after making all deductions for vacations, holi- days, and examinations, will not reach much beyond 130. There are four hours of class every day, Iwo in the morning and two in the afternoon; but with intermissions and delays between classes, incident to the assembling of the various, national colleges for the lectures, it is rare that any professor lectures longer than 50 minutes.
The professors come to class at the appointed time, de- liver their lectures and leave, and except for those students who speak Italian or Latin easily and who can talk to the: professors in the corridors while waiting for class, there is but scant opportunity for the students to meet them or consult them either before or after the lecture; and even should the occasion offer, it is so brief as to be scarcely sufficient for in- structors and students to become well acquainted. The pro- fessors do not seek out the students to learn the mental strength and weakness of each individual. They do not live in the same college with them, much less visit them, and the seminary regulations forbid the students making calls in the city. In this way it is possible for a backward student to spend half a dozen years in Rome and, except for a formal salutation occasionally, only speak to his professors whilst he is being examined. The professors are ordinarily unaware of the capabilities of the students, for repetitions in class,,
ROMAN SEMINARY LIFE. .rM^
dissertations, and disputations are usually not given by the same man twice in succession, and they are thus unable to give direction or stimulus to their studies. This is another char- acteristic phase of Roman seminary training. It leaves men largely to themselves, and what they make of themselves is due in great measure to their own unaided efforts. Develop- ment comes from the inside. This may have its disadvantages, but it has its good features, and not the least of its results is that it tends to make men self-reliant, self-supporting, able to stand alone on their own merits, and to make their way themselves without constant external assistance and stimulus.
LATIN LANGUAGE.
Latin is the language used by the professors in their lec- tures. It is so, not only because Latin is the official language of the Roman Church, but also from the very nature of the complex student body attending the classes. To teach simul-' taneously the representatives of nearly half a hundred nations requires a universal medium of intercourse. To these might be added a further reason, the voluntary choice of both pro- fessors and students. The immense literature of Scholastic Philosophy and Theology is so intimately bound up with Latin, its terminology is so precise and well-defined, its expressions so direct and forceful, that the vernacular is scarcely adequate to express its full meaning. Four hours a day of Latin lectures for four, five, or six years, ought to give a man a fair command of the language, so that at the completion of his course he should be able to think in it, to write it, and speak it easily and correctly. As may be expected, the language of the professors lecturing on a technical subject is not always classical, but often in bursts of eloquence one may catch phrases and sei^ences having all the warmth and terseness and all the energy and sonorousness of the finest Latin prose.
Latin, however, has its disadvantages. The professors do not talk slowly for beginners, nor do they wait on laggards. They enunciate with the rapidity of an ordinary lecturer in the vernacular, with a speed varying from 125 to 250 words a minute, and as a result there are many students who lose in whole or in part the first two months or more of class while their ears become accustomed to what is for them a new Ian-
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guage. Shorthand is gaining favor as a means of economiz- ing labor and increasing the efficiency and quantity of notes. From six to ten per cent of the students now use with great satisfaction some of the many standard systems of phono- graphy. Class notes are mimeographed and multigraphed, and typewriters are being introduced. A more formidable obstacle, which is never really overcome, arises from the in- ability or impracticability of conversing freely with the pro- fessors in order to solve a difficulty, or to clarify a point in study. Not every student can speak Italian with fluency and the fear of making grammatical blunders in Latin prevents many from approaching their instructors to secure additional information. This difficulty is increased in the oral examin- ations. Students who lack the " facultas dicendi " sometimes obtain a lower mark than their actual knowledge of the matter justifies. Professors, however, reply to this by saying that the ability to speak Latin is in itself a matter for examination. The Italian pronunciation of Latin is also a source of some annoyance, but it soon disappears. At the end of from four to eight weeks, even though the student has been previously unaccustomed to Latin lectures, he should be able to take full and reliable notes.
TIME AVAILABLE FOR STUDY. The great majority of Roman students bitterly lament the deplorable lack of time available for study. The very fact of being required to assemble daily at the Propaganda for lectures is in itself a loss of many valuable minutes. The journey to and from the various national colleges and the Propaganda, the waits and delays incident to the camerata system of discipline, dressing and undressing, going to and returning from class, all this consumes much valuable time, greater or less according to the distance of the respective col- leges from the Propaganda. A concrete case will illustrate this. Suppose a college is seven minutes distant from the Propaganda (and there are very few colleges so close as that to it), its students must leave their college at 7.53 A. M. to be in time for the first class at 8 A. M. Allowing but four minutes for emptying the class rooms at ten o'clock and assem- bling the camerata groups, it will be 10. 11 before the stu-
ROMAN SEMINARY LIFE. . j I
dents reach their college after the morning session. They have been absent 138 minutes, during which time they have had two lectures of perhaps 50 minutes each, or 100 minutes. There is, therefore, a difference of 38 minutes to be accounted for. Repeat this for the afternoon session, and the result is jG minutes, or an hour and a quarter each day spent in going to and from class. This time would be available for study were it not cut up into such brief periods as to practically preclude the possibility of utilizing it. These figures are very conservative, and any one who has spent several years in Rome could easily augment them. There are some students who do manage to utilize some of these odd minutes by studying while walking to and from class, or while waiting on the bell at the Propaganda, but to do so requires an extraordinary force of will, a vast quantity of patience and concentration, and con- genial walking companions, a combination not always to be found.
The time available for study never exceeds four hours a day, and the interruptions incident to the ceaseless round of each day's duties, such as letters, confessions, barber, inter- viewing superiors, etc., often diminish this. To attend class practically four hours every day at the Propaganda, and per- haps an hour or two at home, as the National College may be called, and then to have less than four hours a day to as- similate and digest the matter there treated is scarcely suffi- cient for the intellectual requirements of the average student. It has a tendency to create weak nerves, since students who are conscientious are always in distress about their studies, and they begin to neglect necessary recreation and sleep in order to keep pace with the advancing tide of matter for the examination.
The time available for study is further diminished by the various classes in the respective colleges or elsewhere, in- dependent of the course at the Propaganda. Italian, Music, Liturgy, Moral Theology, Canon Law, and Philosophy con- sume from one to three hours a week, and often more. And as if this were not enough to swallow up what little time is left, in some of the colleges, and for some of the classes, there is what is called a " Repeater " who reviews the matter treated in the Propaganda. The purpose is to make it easy
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for the students ; but what the students need is not more pro- fessors, but more leisure to study and absorb and make their own the vast mass of material given them day by day at the Propaganda.
SPIRIT OF STUDY.
This condition so lamentable in theory, and a constant source of complaint in practice, produces in earnest students such a thorough aversion to idleness that they scarcely waste a mo- ment. Every possible opportunity for study is utilized, often to the utter neglect of necessary physical exercise. How to keep students from applying themselves too closely is one of the problems of a rector of a Roman seminary. Men are not ashamed to study hard and long, and they do so at all times, in all places, and under the most varied circumstances. The shady walks on the Pincio, the broad avenues in the Villa Borghese, the open sunny square on the Janiculum, or the en- closed gardens of the Villa Mattel, become so many open air study halls, especially as the time for examination approaches. Incessant activity and patient industry become the order of the day, by reason of the constant effort to make the most of every moment of time, and while there is a penalty of an hour and a quarter or more exacted every day for attending the lectures at the Propaganda, the very fact of having so little time to study makes the student appreciate what a really precious thing time is, and the constant hunting for minutes for four or five years forms habits of industry and concen- tration that should last through life.
The fact that so many different colleges attend the lectures affords a stimulus for a man to study. Legitimate pride in his own college and his native country leads him to prepare himself well for a repetition or a dissertation, in order to reflect credit upon both the one and the other. There are frequent opportunities during the year for the display of talent by appearing in one of the many disputations held in all the classes at the Propaganda. Occasionally the professors ap- point at random a man from some college, but as a rule the first prefect of each college chooses the student to represent his college. In some classes matter not of prime importance is left to the diligence of the students, a man from one of the colleges being appointed to treat it in class in concise form.
ROMAN SEMINARY LIFE. . j ^
Such dissertations often occupy the time of two classes, and are usually delivered from memory. They greatly develop fluency in Latin and cogency in the grouping of arguments, results which more than repay the great amount of extra work that the student is required to expend upon them.
This spirit of study naturally has its reflection in all of the national colleges. No college cares to be eclipsed, and as a consequence there is a constant striving for points and places and the rewards of intellectual supremacy. The inter- collegiate written examination at the end of the scholastic year affords field for individual and collective effort, and the an- nouncement of the prize winners is awaited with interest both by rectors and students of the different colleges.
CHANGE, IN STUDY HOURS.
Another difficulty which disturbs new students and some old ones, for it sometimes requires many months to become accustomed to it, is the obligatory change in the hours de- voted to study. The afternoon life of a Roman student is regulated by the Angelus, called the Ave Maria, which rings half an hour after sunset. At that time all students must be home in their respective colleges. As there are no recreation grounds surrounding the colleges of Rome, the students are obliged to take walks every day as their exercise. These walks last one hour and a half, and the time of walk depends upon the Ave Maria, ending at that time every night. Two hours of class must be attended every afternoon, which, if added to the hour and a half for walk, make three hours and a half of fixed employment every afternoon. By deducting three hours and a half from the time of the Ave Maria, the time for reporting at the Propaganda for the first lecture in the afternoon is obtained. For example, when the Ave Maria rings at 5 P. M., the earliest it ever rings, the first class at the Propaganda commences at 1.30 P. M., and the second at 2.30, ending at 3.30. The walk begins immediately after class, lasts one hour and a half, ending precisely at the Ave Maria, at the college of the students, and brings them home for the night. But as the Angelus does not ring at the same hour always, since it depends upon the changing time of the setting sun, the Ave Maria drops fifteen minutes every ten days or two
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weeks, and instead of going to class every day at 1.30 during the autumn, and studying from five o'clock until 7.30 in the long winter evenings, the whole thing becomes reversed about the middle of June, when the Ave Maria rings at 8.15 P. M., the latest it reaches. At that time the students must go to class at 4.45 P. M., start on their walk at 6.45 P. M., and ar- rive home for the night at 8. 15. As a consequence of this all study must be done in the heat of the afternoon before class, and at this time the customary siesta of an hour cuts down the time available for study. Thus in the winter there is a stretch of two and a half hours in the evening after class to study. At other times in the year half the afternoon's study is before class, and half after class. In June, however, there is absolutely no time for study after class, the students return- ing from their walk just in time to partake of the evening meal. Consequently to adapt oneself to do effective study in the morning, afternoon, or evening, or at any other time, and not to wait until evening exclusively, is in itself a distinct advantage, making a man independent of local conditions, and fitting him for study at all times.
EXAMINATIONS.
The examinations are held about Easter time and at the end of the scholastic year. Both are oral, and to obtain permis- sion to pass to the next higher class, six points are required, notes being given on a scale of ten. At the end of the oral examinations in July, there is held a written Concursus, par- ticipated in by nearly all the colleges and religious orders attending the Propaganda. A theme is proposed; five hours are given to write the paper, and the results are announced six months later, upon publication of the official catalogue of the Propaganda.
Each candidate for Holy Orders must previously pass an examination at the Vicariate of Rome. One examination suf- fices for Tonsure and Minor Orders, but a separate test is required for each of the three Major Orders. One tract is required for Subdiaconate, two for Diaconate, and three for Priesthood, making six different tracts chosen at the option of the student from a list of about a dozen prepared by the Vicariate. The personal equation enters largely into these
ROMAN SEMINARY LIFE. .jc
examinations. For Priesthood some men are detained an hour or more, whilst others are rushed through in from seven to ten minutes. It depends upon who you are, where you are from, and what examiner you draw. A retreat of ten days for each major order is required, the retreats being ordinarily made in the house of some religious order or congregation. There are from twelve to fourteen ordinations held every year, St. John Lateran and Sant'Apollinare being the places most frequently selected. The ordinations at Trinity and Easter are the largest, at which time it is not rare to see lOO candi- dates for Major Orders in the prostration at St. John's, a truly solemn spectacle.
DEGREES.
The Degree of Bachelor of Theology is obtained at the end of the first year of Theology, and embraces the entire year's work. The Licentiate is obtained at the end of the third year ,and likewise embraces one entire year's work, while the Doctorate is awarded at the end of the fourth year, and embraces the work of the entire four years' course. All the degrees are obtained only after examinations, oral for all three, and a written one in addition for the Doctorate. The Doctorate embraces lOO theses taken from Scripture, Dogma, Sacraments, Apologetics, Moral Theology, Canon Law, His- tory, and Liturgy. This is not the place to dwell upon the relative merits of the Roman Doctorate. The least that can be said of it is that, being the diploma awarded at the com- pletion of a four years' course of studies, and having been obtained after both written and oral examinations before the entire board of professors, it is a certificate of application, and those who attain that diploma are able to produce documentary evidence that they have finished their course.
The proportion of doctors to the total number of yearly graduates at the Propaganda is not very large; only from thirty to forty per cent of the total number of graduates ob- tain the degree. In 1904 but seventeen doctors were created, and the figures are almost the same every year, notwithstand- ing the fact that about sixty men are annually graduated from the Propaganda.
At the Propaganda the Philosophy course embraces two years, including Mental Philosophy, Mathematics, Physics,
41 6 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
and Chemistry. Philosophy is taught in Latin, but the science classes are taught in Italian. The Bachelor degree is obtained after an oral examination at the end of the first year. The Licentiate can be obtained after an oral exarnination at the end of the second year, while to secure the Doctorate an examination, both written and oral, is required covering the two years' matter, the written examination embracing 80 theses.
ITALIAN LANGUAGE
It is not easy^ although it is possible, for a Roman student to acquire proficiency in the Italian language, one or two hours' class a week being devoted to it. The vernacular of each country is spoken in the respective national colleges, and as the seminary rule forbids speaking not only to persons outside the college, but also to the Italian servants in the house, it is an uphill struggle to get such practice in Italian conversation as will fit a man for preaching in Italian upon the completion of his course.
C. Recreation.
WALKS. There is a walk of an hour and a half every day, weather permitting. On free days the walk is an hour and a half in the morning, and three hours in the afternoon. Very often the morning and afternoon walks are extended to visit some distant point of interest, or to visit a gallery or museum. Not all the time is spent in walking. The chief exercise of a Roman student consists in these walks about the city. The walks may be taken to a different place every day, being under the control of the prefect of each camerata. They fur- nish untold capabilities for independent study outside class, unless those opportunities be thwarted and nullified. To con- crete one's idea of history by standing in the theatre of great events, to tread the ground sanctified by saints and heroes, to visit repeatedly for years, churches, galleries, museums, and monuments, with their stupendous treasures, is to acquire leisurely and without much effort a liberal education. The very richness of the possibilities for private study simply be- wilder the observer. Paintings, sculpture, architecture, their birth, gradual development, culmination, and decline, for more
R OMA N SEMINA R Y LIFE. a j y
than twenty centuries, can be traced in Rome. In perhaps no other gallery in Europe can some features of the history of Italian Renaissance art be studied so well as in the Sistine Chapel. Archeology, pagan and Christian, has its home pre- eminently in the ruins and excavations of ancient Rome, and nowhere else on earth can life and color be given to some periods of the vanished past so clearly and so distinctly as in the Eternal City. History, ecclesiastical and profane, can be learned from the very stones, as they call out to us across twenty centuries of time from the ruins and existing monu- ments of popes, emperors and kings. All this can be drunk in and absorbed almost unconsciously, and with but ordinary powers of observation. The only difficulty is in choosing when there is such an overwhelming mass to attract and en- chant the beholder. In this way it comes to pass that an ob- servant student, and one who is intellectually curious, may in a few years acquire a vast amount of information at first hand concerning many objects altogether extraneous to his studies at the Propaganda.
The enforced walks are, however, a great source of annoy- ance. The system of discipline makes it obligatory for every man to go out on the walk at the appointed time, and to be ex- cused from that duty requires the permission of the rector. It is sometimes not expedient to see the rector, because repeated requests to make exceptions to the general rule may engender the suspicion in the minds of superiors that the student is dis- satisfied, or desires special treatment, and other inconveniences or prejudices may arise. The consequence is that many times students who are of a retiring backward disposition will go out on long walks of three hours or more when they ought to be in bed or resting, and the disinclination of such students to ask for permissions and special privileges will prompt them to put up with such inconveniences, even if they be required to rest from their exertions when they should be studying. In this way the enforced walks become a great burden, and de- feat the very end for which they were designed.
DISADVANTAGES OF THE CAMERATA SYSTEM.
While the daily walks open up many advantages to a serious student, those very possibilities for education may be mini-
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mized or almost nullified owing to circumstances over which the student himself has no control. For instance, the walks are under the control of the prefect. The entire camerata must go where he directs. In this way it is possible, and, alas how many regret it! to see a prefect send his whole camerata to the Pincio or the Villa Borghese day after day for years at a time, so that after a residence of four or five years in Rome a man may actually forget all he ever learned during his first year, when it was in a limited degree prac- tically obligatory for the prefect to take the men, who are all new students, to the various points of interest during their walks. Under such conditions a studious man may desire and thirst for knowledge, without even a chance to quench his thirst. There are many students who have a taste for archeo- logy, but as the Catacombs are a long distance outside the walls, and an extension of time is required to visit them, his prefect may, or his fellow students may influence his prefect to, deny him this privilege. In this way it is possible for a man to spend several years in Rome and never visit the Catacombs at all ; and although the case is very rare, it has actually hap- pened, to the personal knowledge of the writer.
The conditions of the camerata system of discipline obliging each camerata to maintain its individuality, and precluding the possibility of different groups of students associating to- gether for the purpose of visiting libraries, museums, galleries, or historic ruins, make it impossible for serious students of different camerate with a special aptitude for painting, sculp- ture, architecture, music, archeology, history. Christian or pagan antiquities, to go out together, even in charge of a prefect, for the purpose of studying at first hand the immense treasures drawing them with an irresistible impulse and at- traction. It must be confessed, however, that many students desire to study nothing but the bare class work assigned at the Propaganda. They do that and do it well, but think it suffi- cient. Such men might just as well be in Timbuctoo or Zanzibar as in Rome, for they could study their class matter as hard elsewhere. Hence those who wish to profit to the utmost by their residence, all too brief, in the Eternal City, are penalized by reason of being denied permission to develop whatever special talent they may have or desire to cultivate
ROMAN SEMINARY LIFE, .jg
in the realms of knowledge lying altogether outside their work at the Propaganda.
VACATIONS.
Classes cease about 21 June, the time between that date and 15 July being spent in preparing for examinations. Immedi- ately after the last written examination the students leave Rome for the extremely long summer vacation, which lasts un- til about 5 November. This vacation period of more than three months and a half is spent in the mountains, the delight- ful woody slopes of the Sabine and Alban Hills being the favored places for the summer villas. The routine of villa life is but slightly different from that of the life in the City, if the attendance at classes be excepted, although even dur- ing the vacation there are classes in Italian, Music, Homiletics, etc. With but few exceptions, there is the same system of camerata discipline; the same rules must be observed; there are the same companions, the same food, the same mode of life. It would be a welcome change to a large number of students if the long vacation were shortened a full month.
SUMMER TRAVEL.
All students desire to travel during the summer vacation and they are often disappointed at being denied this privilege. The refusal may arise from a multitude of causes. The per- mission of the Ordinary is required, and in almost every case the bishops grant such permission subject to the decision of the rector. Consequently in a last analysis it resolves itself into the pleasure of the rector. There is much to be said in favor of students traveling. Travel is unquestionably a great educator, provided a man is capable of receiving all the edu- cation that traveling is capable of imparting, and there are few persons indeed to whom even the most hurried trip through Europe will not teach something. From the point of view of the individual student, and apart from his mem- bership in a community whose general good he is bound to regard and promote, there can be no doubt that travel in vacation is a magnificent opportunity to study. After a year's residence in Italy a man ought to have acquired sufficient of the Italian language to enable him to make his way with ease. Not only this, but while he is a student, the vigor and
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enthusiasm and buoyancy of youth are still upon him, his receptive capacity is larger, his powers of locomotion are greater, and he can put up with the inconveniences of travel better than at any other period of his life. For many men it is well-nigh impossible to return to Europe until after the lapse of many years, if even then, when they are past the age of enjoying things so intensely as they would have done in their youth or early manhood.
If a student has any interest at all in art, architecture, or history, if he desires to visit famous places, if he wishes to know the great galleries of Italy and Europe, if he longs to see the glorious buildings which are the envy and the admir- ation of the world, then certainly to deprive him of that pleas- ure and that profit is simply to stifle his intellectual progress. Who, for instance, standing in the vast sunny square of St. Mark's at Venice, and looking at that ecstasy of sculptured spray has not experienced a tonic and ennobling efl'ect akin to that produced by classical music? Or who, from the Via del Proconsolo, in Florence, gazing on Brunelleschi's Dome, has not felt tingling in every fibre the unique beauty of that wondrous curve?
And yet there are students who have traveled in their vaca- tions when they have had every opportunity that leisure could present to study, and who after returning from Venice will look with a blank stare if they are asked the style of archi- tecture of St. Mark's. The writer has known men who, after seeing and visiting the Church of Santa Teresa in Rome re- peatedly for years, have actually argued that it is a Gothic structure. Upon such men travel is no educator at all, and they might just as well stay at home, if we contemplate only their artistic education.
There are multitudes of serious students who feel no thrill as they gaze on the Pitti Palace, and who experience no in- crease of devotion at the deep religious atmosphere of San Zeno in Verona. If nature has not so constituted them, they should not on that account be denied the opportunity to travel in vacation. Art is not the only thing for which one travels. The routine of seminary life, with one day the same as an- other, year after year, is, to say the least, monotonous, even with the best intentions to submit to it with the highest spirit-
ROMAN SEMINARY LIFE. .3 1
ual motives. Therefore to have a complete change of air, scene, food, companions, and of occupation for several weeks cannot but be beneficial physically and intellectually.
The intellectual profit to be derived from a trip in the summer will of course depend upon the student himself. Travel is able to inipart just what the traveler is capable of receiving. " Quidquid recipitur, ad modum recipientis re- cipitur." The almost fabulous treasures of Italy and con- tinental Europe cannot be studied in one visit. To put off seeing them until one is leaving for his native country after completing his course is simply to neglect them. How many men with the very best intentions have been compelled by circumstances over which they had no control to devote a scant hour or two to the Louvre, and never see the Bargello at all, simply because they were denied the opportunity of traveling during their course when they had the leisure to study what they desired.
All the numerous advantages of travel are not unknown to the rectors of the various colleges. They are themselves stu- dents and men of culture and experience, and they are anxious to educate their students in the fullest sense of the word. No rector would willingly stifle a man's intellectual growth. The prohibition to travel, therefore, often arises from the abuses to which the practice may easily give rise. If the students would guarantee their rectors that they were always the same, in college or in Munich, Milan or Paris ; that their recreations while traveling were always legitimate; that they conducted themselves always like seminarians; that the care- less habits acquired in the brief vacation would not throw out of balance the whole spiritual edifice built up during a semi- nary course, — there is little doubt but that summer travel would be encouraged rather than prohibited.
D. General Observations.
SPIRITUAL DIRECTION.
Every Roman seminary has a resident spiritual director, who has nothing whatever to do with the discipline of the college. He is always at the disposal of the students for consultation, advice, and counsel. He hears confessions at any time, and regularly throughout the year he holds conferences,
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gives retreats, preaches sermons, and largely directs the medi- tations. The methods employed are the same fundamentally in all colleges. In addition to the resident spiritual director, there are other confessors called in every week and before feast days. Hence the most ample opportunity is afforded for spiritual development. Whenever possible, the feasts of the numerous illustrious Roman saints are celebrated by all or nearly all of the students going to the shrine of the saint, whether in basilica, church, chapel, or the Catacombs, and there receiving Holy Communion in a body, an event that will be indelibly impressed upon the memory. Who that has once enjoyed this privilege can ever forget the feast of St. Thomas Aquinas, of St. Aloysius, St. Stanislaus, St. John Berchmans, St. Philip Neri, St. Agnes, St. Cecilia, or St. Catharine?
CLIMATE. The inconveniences occasioned by the climate are a factor to be reckoned with. It must be said with truth that for the greater part of the school year mere existence in Rome is a delight. The days in autumn and early winter and spring are incomparable; but strong lights have their dark shadows, and it often happens that the winters are very trying. The rooms of the students are not heated at all, and the thick walls and the stone, tile or brick floors produce a chilly atmosphere but little conducive to effective study during the winter, more especially as these cold days come at a time when the students must be in their rooms from 5 P. M. until 7.30 P. M. As a contrast to the chilly winters, another difficulty is met with in the heat of the summer. While it is not extremely warm in the shade and in the cool rooms of the houses not exposed to the sun, the enforced walks are very trying, and after a walk on a hot day it is almost a necessity for a student to change his clothes for dry ones.
HEALTH.
From a medical standpoint the climate of Rome should not present any inconvenience to a healthy student endowed with the most elementary prudence. If he obeys the rule of the college by sleeping the required number of hours every night, if he takes a reasonable amount of recreation and observes the simplest maxims of hygiene, he should be as healthy in
ROMAN SEMINARY LIFE. ^33
Rome as anywhere else in the world. It is not at all necessary to drink wine in Rome to be healthy. A respectable percent- age of Roman students never taste wine during their entire course, and their number is increasing. Some men are obliged by their physicians to abstain from wine altogether in Rome, and many would not drink wine at all were tea, coffee, or chocolate served at meals.
UNIQUE FEATURES.
In spite of the camerata system of discipline, men do man- age by connivance and without permission, at the Propaganda, at public functions, and in the parks to rub elbows with their companions from every corner of the world and occasionally for brief intervals to steal a word, and to glean ecclesiastical chit-chat from the ends of the earth.
Within the narrow limits of a single class-room at the Propaganda, for instance, containing less than 250 men, more than 40 languages are spoken, by students from every quarter of the globe. They come from the frozen steppes of Russia and the burning sands of the Sahara; from China, Egypt, Australia, and the Islands of the Pacific; from pagan India and infidel Turkey; from Catholic Spain and Protestant Eng- land. One meets newly converted Jews from the United States, as well as Syrians, speaking the same language as Christ himself, and who were Catholics at a time when history seems all but lost in the twilight of fable. The white race, of course, predominates, but here and there one may see ebony-hued negroes from the very interior of Africa, red- skinned North American Indians, yellow Mongolians from Japan, and brown-skinned Filipinos from the remotest verge of the outer world.
Hence an observant student should soon learn that whereas he had been originally unable to see beyond the narrow con- fines of his own country or his own diocese, his horizon has become widened; he realizes more thoroughly that he is a member of the universal Church ; and without becoming a par- ticle less loyal to his own country, he will begin to view things in their just proportions, acquiring an interest and a sympathy in the vast world-wide organizations- of which he is a member.
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A Special advantage growing out of Roman seminary train- ing is the opportunity it affords of occasionally seeing the Holy Father, and of attending some of the many great reli- gious functions of the Eternal City. Students of the national colleges are frequently invited out to assist the Pontifical Masters of Ceremonies on these occasions. To attend a Papal Mass in St. Peter's or in the Sistine Chapel, to be present at the functions in the great Basilicas of Rome, to see and have an occasional word with the Cardinals and other prelates composing the Roman Curia, the men who as the instruments of the Holy Ghost are ruling the Church of Christ, is in itself an education that no amount of reading can supply.
Thomas F. Coakley.
Pittsburg, Pa.
ST. VINOENT DE PAUL AND THE FOUNDATION OF SEMINARIES.
THE old order was rapidly changing when in the first half ^ of the sixteenth century an apostate Friar flung into the dry wood of European society the torch which set the Old World aflame and cut off from the Rock of Peter nearly two- thirds of its Catholic peoples. It was a master-stroke, al- though the chief actor did not realize all its significance. He was successful because the material was ready. The mass was fit for the blaze. For two centuries and more forces had been at work, tending to disrupt the divine constitution of the Church. Schism, heresies, dangerous opinions, abuse of poli- tical power, exaggerated nationalism, corruption in high places, simony, concubinage, all had weakened the bond of union with Rome. The gold had become dim, the finest color changed ; the stones of the Sanctuary were scattered.
Those evils might have been offset by a well-trained clergy, who would have thrown themselves into the breach, and beaten back the onslaught; but the clergy and even the monastic or- ders had lost their primitive fervor. Those earlier nurseries of ecclesiastical training, the episcopal and the monastic schools were in decadence, and the universities, while still centres of intellectual life, had become in many instances hot-beds of false doctrine and of renascent paganism. There remained indeed, even amid the grossest corruption, a leaven of sanctity
.-^
ST. VINCENT DE PAUL AND SEMINARIES. a 2c
in the Church. A light kept burning, which the flood of many waters could not quench. Saints raised their voices against the prevailing corruption, and cried out for reform of the Church in its head and in its members.
It was high time then for change, when Paul III convoked the great Council which was to mark the beginning of a new era and impart an impulse to reform which has never since been lost. But, even at the outset, there was danger that the work of the Council would be nullified by the interference of the most powerful ruler in Europe at that time ; for Charles V sought to control its order and its decisions in the interest of his political problems. The Holy Spirit was, however, with the Council. The Church's doctrine was restated, and placed beyond cavil on all controverted points. Above all, the clergy were to be reformed from top to bottom.
In their zeal for this reform the Fathers of Trent decided that no better means could be adopted than the training of candidates for the priesthood in strictly ecclesiastical semi- naries. The needs of the time imperatively cried out for a stemming of the tide of ignorance and indiscipline. Keenly alive to those needs, the Fathers of that Holy Synod drew up the Decree (Sess. 23, C. 18) which, with the changes sug- gested by time and place, set up a standard of priestly science and sanctity that has ever since been followed. Paul IV is reported to have said that the Decree was enacted " by Divine Inspiration ", and the prelates assembled declared that that alone would have repaid all their labors. Saint Charles Borromeo, who had been the controlling spirit of the last ses- sions of the Council, at once set about the establishing of a seminary in his diocese. And the Venerable Bartholomew of the Martyrs did the like in Braga in Portugal. But their ex- ample was not successfully copied elsewhere until nearly a century later. Several obstacles stood in the way: relics of older systems, decay of piety among the people, an indifferent and often vicious clergy, and the inertia to be overcome in every effort at reform.
Serious attempts were made in France toward the close of the sixteenth century to comply with the Tridentine Decree. The Councils of Rouen, Bordeaux, Tours, Bourges-, Aix, Tou- louse, all held between 1581 and 1586, ordered the institution
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of seminaries without delay. But although seminaries were opened in many dioceses, they either failed altogether or be- came lay colleges. An assembly of the French clergy in 1529 decreed that four national seminaries should be opened, but the project was never realized.
When the efforts of so many and so zealous bishops proved abortive, the cause of the seminaries seemed to be hopeless. Providence, however, was just then raising up holy priests whose labors in that field were to be crowned with remarkable success.
Adrian Bourdoise, while yet a student in the College of Rheims, formed a small society of Bachelors in Theology, who should lead a common life in the practice of ecclesiastical vir- tues. After his ordination to the priesthood his home became the centre of a choice band of students, who were joined by a few priests and doctors of theology. His community began the work of reform by wearing the cassock in public. But they attracted attention chiefly by their modest and virtuous lives. As Rheims proved too narrow a field for his burning zeal, Bourdoise transferred his society to Paris, near thie Church of St. Nicholas-du-Chardonnet. There he undertook the education of young clerics, with the approval of the Arch- bishop. Funds were furnished by pious friends and by the Assembly of the French clergy.
Bourdoise's zeal for the reformation of the clergy, and his blunt straightforward character prompted him to use rather bold language on his favorite subject, even to such a Bishop as St. Francis de Sales. On one of the Saint's visits to Paris, Bourdoise wrote him a long letter in reference to the com- paratively slight results of St. Francis's preaching and writ- ing, while his clergy and people remained so ill-instructed. The Saint read the letter twice with close attention, and then discussed it with his zealous friend. In the course of the conversation, Bourdoise made the pointed remark : ** I am surprised that a Bishop whom the Lord has so richly endowed does not use his gifts in forming good priests, and that he devotes so much time to the direction of pious women ". With charming modesty and humility, St. Francis replied : " I agree, and am firmly convinced that nothing is more necessary in the Church than the formation of good priests; but that is a
ST. VINCENT DE PAUL ANB SEMINARIES. 427
ministry too high for my weakness. I leave it in more skilful hands. De Berulle has taken it up; and he has greater ability and more leisure than I have, burdened as I am with the care of a vast diocese. I leave to the goldsmith the handling of gold and silver. A potter must be content to handle clay. Besides, I look upon the sanctification of women as a matter of great importance. When saintly and virtuous they can do great things for the Church, and spread abroad the perfume of piety. While their sex deserves great compassion, their fortitude merits great interest. They followed our Lord to the foot of the Cross, where there was but one Apostle to stand by Him."
Bourdoise's aim was not only the training of clerics; he strongly insisted also on community life for priests, in which mutual support and example would materially aid them in leading more priestly lives and in the performance of Church ceremonies. While in this latter respect he achieved a large measure of success, his efforts toward the permanent institu- tion of seminaries were but the prelude to the lasting achieve- ment of others. His failure was due in part, no doubt, to his rather domineering character, as well as to the spirit of worldliness and the mercenary aims of parents who entrusted their boys to his care.
Blessed John Eudes, a contemporary of Bourdoise, adopted milder and more successful methods. He too was devoured by holy zeal for the reformation of the clergy, and proceeded to carry out his designs by founding seminaries in the pro- vinces. He had been trained in the Oratory School under De Berulle and enjoyed that great man's friendship and favor. His Society, the Congregation of Jesus and Mary, was modelled upon the French Oratory, and is still carrying on its work with marked success.
De Berulle himself originally intended to establish semi- naries only; but, through a providential change made at Rome in his constitutions, his intentions were not carried out. The Oratorian schools became lay colleges. This was most fortunate; for if the Oratorians had control of the French seminaries, many more of the French clergy would have be- come tainted with Jansenism, as a considerable number of De Berulle's followers fell into the net of that pernicious sect.
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In their early essays to institute seminaries after the model proposed by Trent, the French Bishops sought to educate to- gether young boys in the humanities, and students of theology. But experience soon proved that that plan would not work. It became necessary therefore to establish separate institutions for each class. The first attempt at this separation resulted only in retreats for ordinands. Augustine Potier, Bishop of Beauvais, seems to have been the first French prelate to take up this phase of the subject. He was delighted and consoled at the success of the missions and the foundation of Con- fraternities of Charity by Saint Vincent de Paul and his com- panions in his diocese; but he deplored the ignorance and irregularities of his clergy. The zealous Bishop took St. Vincent into his confidence and asked him what could be done to remedy the disorders existing among his priests. The Saint answered : " My Lord, we must go to the root of the matter. It is impossible to do anything with priests hardened in vicious habits; for a bad priest is hardly ever converted. The work of reform must begin with those who are aspiring to the priesthood. Admit to Sacred Orders only those who show signs of a true vocation, and are endowed with the re- quisite knowledge for the discharge of the duties of the sacred ministry." This statement of St. Vincent fell in with the Bishop's own views; but how carry them out? Some time after, in 1628, while on a journey with the Saint, the Bishop outlined a scheme as the best that he could then devise. His idea was to bring together candidates for Holy Orders and give them conferences for about ten days on their duties and virtues. On hearing the plan thus briefly stated, St. Vincent exclaimed: " My Lord, this thought comes from God." The Bishop replied : " You must help me to realize it. I will have everything ready, but I depend upon you to draw up the order of exercises. Then come to Beauvais, fifteen or twenty days before the next ordination." St. Vincent was on hand in good time, accompanied by two doctors of the University of Paris, who were to give instructions in theology to the or- dinands. The Bishop himself examined the candidates, and opened the retreat. St. Vincent gave the conferences on the Decalogue with such clearness, force, and unction that all chose him for their confessor. Even Duchesne, one of the doc-
Sr. VINCENT DE PAUL AND SEMINARIES. 429
tors, at once fell on his knees to the Saint to make a con- fession of his whole life.
Such was the immediate result of the first regularly or- ganized retreat for ordinands in France. The Bishop of Beauvais was not slow in acquainting the Archbishop of Paris with his remarkable success; and the Archbishop promptly instituted like retreats for his own ordinands. St. Vincent was at first reluctant to undertake the work, deeming it in- consistent with the primary end of his Congregation, and believing that others were far better fitted for the task. But at length, urged by his friend Bourdoise and by the Arch- bishop, he opened his College of the Bons Enfants for retreats for ordinands. Later on, when Saint Vincent took possession of St. Lazare, the retreats were continued with manifest blessings. There Bossuet made his retreat for ordination in the Lent of 1652. There too De Ranee, the reformer of La Trappe, prepared to receive the priesthood. He afterward bore testimony that " St. Lazare was truly a House of God ; that nowhere else was the like to be found."
It was not brilliant learning in St. Vincent and in his priests that attracted such men. It was the solid virtue, unobtrusive piety, innocence of life, candor, disinterestedness, and humility, together with the clear and practical character of their instruc- tions, which recommended the Priests of the Mission to the bishops and clergy of France. In subsequent years Bossuet was invited to preach those retreats, and his appreciation of the honor does credit to his priestly soul. His relations with the sons of his saintly friend, M. Vincent, were always most cordial. It was one of them, Herbert, who received the great prelate's last will and testament; and the same Herbert, as Bishop of Agen, pontificated at Bossuet's funeral.
But obviously a retreat of ten days prior to ordination was not an adequate preparation for the work of the sacred min- istry. It was only a makeshift, excellent as far as it went, but falling far short of the long and regular discipline of a semi- nary. The failure of almost all previous efforts, due to causes already indicated as well as to the fact that the intentions of founders of seminaries were in great measure frustrated by wealthy families who wished to give their sons a good educa- tion at the expense of the Church, thus excluding poor boys
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of pious families, induced St. Vincent in 1635, conformably to the Tridentine Decree, to open a preparatory college for poor boys of from twelve to fourteen years of age. The Saint took a step forward when in 1637 he established the internal seminary, as he called it, for his own Congregation. He placed over it as director one of his earliest companions, John de la Salle. But the Saint, always eager to learn of others, first sent De la Salle to a Jesuit novitiate, where he should follow all the exercises, and become thoroughly imbued with the apostolic zeal which so distinguished the Jesuits in their foreign missions. The superior of St. Lazare had, however, no intention of changing the character of his Congregation. He insisted upon its being made up of secular priests living in community under perpetual vows. The course of studies introduced by St. Vincent into his seminary was almost exactly that which is now followed in all grand seminaries. It con- sisted of philosophy and theology with their kindred branches, pursued with a view to mission work, to the giving of retreats to ordinands, and to the direction of ecclesiastical seminaries. Aware of the danger of novelty, and of too great eagerness to acquire knowledge, St. Vincent put his students on their guard against these pitfalls. *' Desire to know is good," he wrote to one of his superiors, " provided it be moderated. Bear in mind the warning of St. Paul ' Be wise unto sobriety.' Knowledge puffeth up, and is disposed to shun simple, humble, familiar occupations. Learned and humble priests are the treasure of the Mission, as good and zealous doctors are the treasure of the Church."
An incident in which one of his best professors, James de la Fosse, played a prominent part, brought forth a sharp re- buke from St. Vincent to his too conspicuous son. At a dramatic performance in the Jesuit College of Clermont, De la Fosse took a seat destined for some distinguished person- age. No sooner was he seated than the rector sent a mes- senger to bid the missionary take a lower place. De la Fosse answered in Latin that the place suited him very well. The rector, taking him for an Irishman or a Pole, sent a scholastic to repeat the message in Latin. De la Fosse replied this time in Greek. The professor of rhetoric was next despatched with the rector's message, to which De la Fosse answered in
ST. VINCENT DE PAUL AND SEMINARIES. 431
Hebrew. Presently a friend of the missionary who enjoyed the joke, introduced De la Fosse, who was accordingly as- signed to an honorable place. On his return home, De la Fosse regaled his companions with the story of his experience; but his superior reprimanded him for conduct unbecoming a humble missionary, and promptly ordered him to go back and apologize to the rector. De la Fosse proved his virtue by instant obedience.
Saint Vincent's internal seminary was, after all, equivalent to a novitiate and scholasticate for his own Congregation. But the time was now ripe for the founding of regular semi- naries for the diocesan clergy. The first important step toward this end was taken in 1640, when through the bene- factions of friends, and the influence of St. Jane Frances de Chantal, Justus Guerin, Bishop of Geneva, invited Saint Vin- cent to found a grand seminary in Annecy. From a letter of the Saint to Codoing, superior of that house, we gather that as early as 1640 instruction had already begun. Another let- ter to the same in 1 64 1 shows clearly that the seminary was in working order before 7 September of that year. " It was expedient," writes the Saint, " that you let me know, how you intend to conduct the seminary which you have opened."
At almost the same time, the Venerable J. J. Olier, a special friend of St. Vincent, and formerly his penitent, who however abandoned the Saint's direction, because he wished to have him made a bishop, was laying the foundation of Saint Sulpice, the parent seminary of that numerous progeny to which the clergy of France and of America owe so much. Olier, under the direction of De Condren, superior of the Oratory, joined a society of priests in the rue Vaugirard, over which he was soon made superior. His purpose was precisely that of St. Vincent — the reform of the clergy by regular semi- nary training. In 1642 Olier transferred his Society to Saint Sulpice, of which parish he had been made cure. In 1645 ^^ obtained letters patent from the king for the erection of his seminary, and in 1654 it was approved by the Holy See.
A doubt exists as to the priority of the foundation at Annecy to that of the seminary established by the Venerable Olier. Opinions are divided. But no unworthy rivalry ever actu-
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ated those saintly priests, whose sole aim was the infusion of a true priestly spirit into the clergy of France.
The rule which Saint Vincent drew up for the seminaries under the direction of his community is in all essential features the same as that which is in vogue to-day. The Saint began by stating that the seminary is instituted to honor the priest- hood of Jesus Christ, and to form ecclesiastics to the virtue and science befitting their state. To this end seminarists are taught theology, the manner of administering the Sacraments, plain chant, church ceremonies, the method of catechizing, preach- ing, and hearing confessions.
But Saint Vincent could never be content with the dry bones of sacerdotal science. Students were above all to learn the science of the Saints, to become other Christs. Meditation, conferences, constant good example, frequent reception of the Sacraments of Penance and the Holy Eucharist were the prin- cipal means by which solid virtue was to be acquired. St. Vincent demanded that applicants for admission to the semi- nary should manifest a good will and a strong resolution to make progress in virtue and science ; that they should learn to be humble and obedient to their superiors ; that they should acquire fortitude and confidence to overcome obstacles, par- ticularly in the beginning. Seminarists should make special profession of honoring the most Holy Sacrament of the Altar, and they should confess and communicate at least once a week. Once a month each seminarist was required to consult his director for advice as to his difficulties and progress. Worldliness in dress and manner was particularly to be shunned; and purity should be cherished as the crown of priestly sanctity. At the end of the school year, as at the beginning, all should make a spiritual retreat, so as to be forti- fied against relaxation and against the engrossing nature of their studies.
An important question arose about the method of teaching to be employed in seminaries, — whether by lecture or by the use of approved text-books supplemented by explanations of the professors. With his customary caution, and after con- sulting the best professors of his Congregation, Saint Vincent decided that the latter method is the more useful and prac- tical for seminary courses. His reasons were that the teach-
ST. VINCENT DE PAUL AND SEMINARIES. 433
ing would thus be more reliable, the Bishops more conftdent, and that the students would labor with greater diligence, if required to learn and frequently repeat a text. Saint Vincent did not deny the efficacy of the lecture system for students in universities, where the courses are given by specialists in their respective faculties, to picked students. His contention was that ordinary students would profit more by the method which he adopted. It is worth noting that Cardinal Richelieu ap- proved of the Saint's plan. And in our own day Pius X has recommended that method for the Italian seminaries. The demand for Priests of the Mission to conduct seminaries be- came so great that Saint Vincent was hard pressed to meet it. But Providence came to his aid and supplied the needed sub- jects. After his death the demands increased, so that when the Revolution broke out in France fifty-three grand semi- naries and nine preparatory seminaries were in charge of the Congregation of the Mission. This was nearly one-half of all the ecclesiastical institutions in that country.
When the Concordat restored the regular organization of the Church, the number of dioceses was considerably de- creased ; but the sons of St. Vincent were requested to reopen many of their seminaries. When the Concordat was so ini- quitously dissolved by the French Government in 1904 twenty- six Lazarist seminaries were closed.
The present canonical standing of the Congregation of the Mission in regard to the conducting of seminaries rests upon a Brief of Pius IX, 28 February, 1873, in which the Pope authorizes that Congregation to accept from Ordinaries of dioceses invitations to take charge of their seminaries, with- out the need of recurring in each case to the Holy See.
The character of the discipline and instruction prevailing in French seminaries and in those modeled upon them has at times been severely criticized as being inadequate to the needs of the time. Students, it has been said, are prepared rather for the sacristy than for the active care of souls. It may, perhaps, be sufficient to say in answer that a system of eccles- iastical discipline and education which has produced the best of missionaries in the world ; which has prepared men to under- go hardships and sacrifices for the love of their Master, and for the salvation of souls, should be awarded its one meed of
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praise. Moreover, it has yet to be proved that priests who draw inspiration from the Tabernacle are not the best dis- pensers of the mysteries of Christ among the faithful.
Patrick McHale, CM. St. Vincent's Semmary, Germantown, Philadelphia.
THE IMAGINATION IN SAINT PBANOIS DE SALES.
NO reader of the works of St. Francis de Sales can fail to notice how plentifully comparisons and images fall from the pen of the holy writer. By them the driest subject, the highest form of theological speculation, the loftiest flight of mystical contemplation become interesting, clear, and glitter- ing; just as, after a summer's rain, the rays of the sun make the grass, the leaves, and the flowers brighter and more lustrous. Take, for instance, the very first words of the Pre- face of the Saint's immortal masterpiece. Introduction to a Devout Life : " Glycera, the nosegay-maker, knew so well how to diversify and arrange her flowers, that with the same flowers she could make a great variety of nosegays ... In like manner the Holy Ghost disposes and orders, with so much variety, the instruction of devotion which He gives us by the tongues and pens of His servants." Or, go now to the very end of the Treatise on the Love of God. The title of the last chapter runs thus : " That Mount Calvary is the Academy of Love." It may be said that it is well-nigh impossible to open at random any of the volumes of the lovable Saint, with- out meeting one or more images coloring the page as the rain- bow colors the skies.
Why did St. Francis make use of Comparisons ? From its very nature, a comparison obviously implies two terms coupled together by a relation. We might say that a comparison is a species of the genus sign, the characteristic of which, to quote St. Augustine's words, consists in this, that besides the thing itself which is presented to the senses, the mind is led to the knowledge of something else. This notion teaches us further that the two terms implied in a com- parison belong to two diflferent orders, — to the sensitive and to the intellectual. The senses are, as it were, the messengers
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through which the mind is addressed; a picture is formed by the imagination in order that an idea may be formed by the mind. Hence the law of universal art, — through the senses to the mind. This is the standard or the criterion according to which an artist must be judged. He must be thoroughly acquainted with the material and technique of his art; he must be a master of color, sound, words, as the case may be; but above all he must have an idea to express, a message to deliver. The same principle applies to the scientist who studies facts and phenomena, not merely in order to register them, but in order to discover through them the hidden laws of nature; and these are the message he has to deliver.
To restrict our attention to the poet (who stands in closer relation to our present subject), he must have eyes to see and words to describe. But shall we say that his work ends with describing what he sees? There is indeed a kind of poetry termed descriptive, which may bear witness to real skill and ingenuity, but such poetry is not of the highest order, because it lacks the inner meaning. Man may be interested in nature, but his chief interest is man. A descriptive poet may interest us; but if he is at the same time a psychologist, he will add interest to interest, — he will present to us the interior as well as the exterior world; he will combine the outer with the inner; above all he will please us by the subtle link he dis- closes between the two.
When the Word became Incarnate, He united His Divinity to our human nature, and when He began to preach the king- dom of God, something of the same kind took place in His teaching: the heavenly truths became, as it were, incarnate, uniting themselves to earthly and human things in the parables. So it was with St. Francis de Sales, to whom the text of St. Paul perfectly applies, that " his conversation was in Heaven ". God and divine things filled his mind, and formed, as it were, a background ever present, ever the same, against which the things of this world stand out clearly; or rather, these truths were for him the only truly real things, earthly things only their shadows and representations. His friend, Bishop Camus of Belley, says of him : " When they spoke to him of buildings, pictures, music, hunting, birds, plants, gardens, flowers, he did not blame them for occupying
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their minds with such things, but he would have preferred that they should use them as a means, or mystical ladder whereby they might rise up to God; and he showed them by his own example how to practise this elevation of the mind." ^ No wonder that he did the same in his treatises, sermons, letters, controversies, always seeking and making others seek the kingdom of God, endeavoring to lead them toward, and interest them in, things divine, using his vivid imagination to express and picture those things which his great mind under- stood so well and his burning heart loved so ardently. Truly, the things of the soul and the things of God are spiritual ; they are of those things which the eye of man hath not seen, nor his ear heard ; but man naturally desires and feels the need of seeing and hearing as far as he can. If then immaterial things are more adequately expressed in immaterial or ab- stract terms, they lose none of their truth but rather acquire greater clearness if they are likened unto material things, which are after all the first source of human knowledge and human speech. St. Francis knew this, and he acted accord- ingly. When explaining in his treatises the most intimate relations between the soul and God, or when expounding in his sermons the mysteries of the Christian religion, he multiplied comparisons without number, feeling that such a mode of treating spiritual truth was at the same time more satisfactory to himself and more beneficial to those whom he addressed. In him the saint and the artist complemented and helped each other.
Where did St. Francis get His Comparisons? Where did he obtain those similitudes which, as he says, in his letter (on preaching) to Andre Fremiot, Archbishop of Bourges, '' possess an incredible efficacy for enlightening the mind and for moving the heart " ? His first source was the Holy Scriptures. The literal sense is of course to be made use of first and foremost; but there is also the allegorical sense: it is this which at present concerns us. So familiar was St. Francis with the Scriptures that their pages con- stituted for him, as it were, a world of their own, at once historical and divine. The personages and scenes contained
1 Esfrit de S. Francois de Sales. Paris. 1840. t. I, p. 302.
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therein stand before his mind as so many types which can be applied to other things in order to illustrate them. Rightly did he distinguish between the allegorical sense proper, — that is, passages which are in the strict sense types, — and pass- ages which lend themelves for comparison according to the humor of the reader. He himself explains this when he says, in the same letter: "The juniper tree under which Elias fell asleep in his distress, is said by several writers to repre- sent the Cross; but, for me, I should rather say: as Elias went to sleep under the juniper tree, so must we also rest under the Cross of our Lord in the sleep of holy meditation; but I say this, not as though Elias was a type of the Christian, and the tree a type of the Cross; I would not affirm that the one represents the other, but I would compare the one with the other."
On the strength of this distinction, St. Francis makes a free use of the Holy Scriptures to draw many comparisons, some of which are most ingenious, whilst others are exceed- ingly impressive. For instance, the soul of man is compared to a paradise wherein the river of natural reason, made by God, flows. The water divides itself into four streams. Mortal sin is compared to the Dead Sea with its lifeless waters and barren shores. The divisions among Protestants are likened to a punishment sent by God to the builders of a new tower of Babel. Rebecca and her two children, Jacob and his two wives, illustrate the ways of divine love; in like manner does the Spouse of the Canticles. The angels on Jacob's ladder represent devout souls either ascending to union with God or descending to the help and support of their neighbors. And it would be a pity not to quote the following beautiful comparison taken from the same Biblical scene: " The ladder of Jacob reached from earth to heaven ; so also the soul of our Divine Master, whose higher part rested in the bosom of the Father, while the lower remained on earth, be- cause He had chosen to partake of our troubles, miseries and sorrows."
Not only did St. Francis draw comparisons from the Holy Scriptures, but he found in them an example of using what he himself quaintly calls "natural stories." He asks: Is it expedient for a preacher to use them ? " Certainly," he re-
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plies; "for the world created by the Word of God mani- fests that Word in all its parts. Each and all sing the praise of their Maker. It is a book which contains the Word of God, but in a language that all do not understand. Those who understand it by meditation, are right in using it, as did St. Antony, who had no other book. St. Paul says : * Invisi- bilia Dei,' etc. ; David also : * Coeli enarrant gloriam Dei.' It is a book that contains much useful matter for similitudes, comparisons a viinori ad majus, and a thousand other things. The ancient Fathers are full of them, and the Holy Scriptures abound in them : * Vade ad formicam ; sicut gallina congregat pullos suos,' etc., . . . and a thousand others."
St. Francis himself has an abundance of these figures; in- deed they are to be found almost upon every page of his writ- ings. Let us inquire into their source. Where did he get them from? In this as in other matters two means present themselves, — personal experience, and the experience of others. To begin with the latter, St. Francis relied upon the authority of men whose knowledge of nature was then un- questioned, but which nowadays is shown to have been de- ficient and very often incorrect. If we peruse the new and well-nigh perfect edition of his writings, in which the authors and books he quotes are noted in the margin, we shall fre- quently meet with Pliny's Natural History, and amongst others, we shall find Aristotle; and in nearly all cases we shall read the most extraordinary stories about animals and plants. From them, for instance, St. Francis cites the fabu- lous phoenix rising to a renewed life from its ashes ; the king of bees, which we now know to be really a queen ; the elephant whose anger is appeased by the sight of a lamb, and which, although being only une grosse bete, gives a good example to married people; the salamander which extinguishes fire; the serpent which stings with its tongue ; the partridges of Paph- lagonia which have two hearts ; the pearls which spring from the finest heavenly dew, and perish if one drop of salt water penetrates into their shells ; the small fish which is able to stop a ship, but is unable to set her in motion ; the herb dodecathos which cures all ailments, etc.
Although there can be nowadays no acceptance of these un- natural stories, St. Francis made good use of them, and prob-
SAINT FRANCIS DE SALES. .^q
ably they were never turned to better account. In spite of their falsity, they were clear, full of meaning, and, under skilful handling, most apt for illustration. How delightfully he treats some of them ! Listen, for instance, to this : " The halcyons form their nests like an apple, and leave only a little opening at the top. They build them on the sea shore, and make them so firm and impenetrable that, although the waves may come suddenly upon them, the water can never enter within. Keeping always uppermost, they remain in the midst of the sea, upon the sea, and masters of the sea. Your heart, dear Philothea, ought to be in this manner open only to heaven ..."
If we now turn from nature, as seen through the o-yoSy or rather the imagination, of others, to nature as seen through his own eyes, we find St. Francis and ourselves on more solid ground. In the thirteenth chapter of the second book of his Introduction to a Devout Life, entitled: On Aspirations, Ejaculatory Prayers, and Good Thoughts, he repeats the les- son he had learned from St. Paul, to see the invisible things through the visible, when he says : '* Such as truly love God can never cease to think of Him, breathe for Him, aspire to Him. To this all things invite them, as there is no creature that does not declare to them the praises of their Beloved." And he quotes the following examples. When walking on the seashore and beholding the waves dashing upon the sands and swallowing up shells and little periwinkles, stalks of weed and such little medley, while the adjoining rocks continued firm and immovable, St. Gregory Nazianzen thought of the souls of men, some feeble and faint-hearted, the others firm and courageous. Again, St. Fulgentius, when present at a general assembly of the Roman nobility, thought how glorious and beautiful must be the heavenly Jerusalem. St. Anselm while proceeding on a journey saw a hare, hard pressed by the hounds, run under his horse as a place of refuge, and thought of the soul pursued by her enemies.
Needless to say, this was also the practice of St. Francis, who always kept the eyes of his soul fixed upon God and the things of God, and at the same time those of his body open to things of nature, quite spontaneously adapting -the latter to the former. Of these natural things many were, we might
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say, objects of common experience, and likely to be used by other writers: the sun, the stars, the planets and comets, the seas and rivers, the birds of the air, the fishes of the sea, the beasts of the field, the proud and fiery steed, the humble and patient ass; men also, parents and children, soldiers and laborers. All these and many others suggested to the holy writer comparisons without number. Let us open the Intro- duction to a Devout Life and glance at a few examples : "As ostriches never fly, as hens fly low, heavily and but seldom, and as eagles, doves and swallows fly aloft, swiftly and fre- quently;" so is it with sinners, good people, and devout souls. '* Consider the bees upon the thyme ; they find there very bitter juice; yet, in sucking it, they turn it into honey;" so the de- vout soul converts her exercises of mortification into sweet- ness. " If charity be milk, devotion is the cream ; if charity be a plant, devotion is its flower; if charity be a precious stone, devotion is its lustre; if charity be a rich balm, de- votion is its odor." " The diseases of the soul, as well as those of the body, come posting on horseback, but depart leisurely on foot." The weak and faint-hearted penitents " abstain from sin, as sick men do from melons ; but it is troublesome to them to refrain; they would at least smell them; and they account those happy who may eat them." "As the daylight increases, we see more clearly in the glass the spots and blemishes of our face;" so does the light of the Holy Ghost manifest the imperfections of our soul. " Blind men, who see not the prince, behave themselves nevertheless with respect when they are told of his presence; but the fact is, because they see him not, they easily forget;" so is it with ourselves and God. " Such as have been walking in a beauti- ful garden, depart not willingly thence without gathering four or five flowers to smell during the whole day after;" so must we do after meditation.
If we now open the Love of God, we find the following subjects used as comparisons: the plumage of the dove, the plant called Angelica, the emerald, the doctoring of a child, the managing of a horse, the emperor and the electors, the wife assuming the condition of her husband, the bees, the lodestone and the iron, the water distilled from flowers. These and several others are to be read in the first fifty pages of a volume which contains five hundred pages more.
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Furthermore, we sometimes surprise St. Francis, as it were, in the very act of finding new comparisons. For instance, in a letter, he relates the following experience, which he at once applies to spiritual matters : '' Some time ago, I saw a girl carrying on her head a pail of water in the midst of which she had placed a piece of wood. I asked her the reason of this, and she told me that it was to prevent the water from being spilled. Then, henceforth, I said, must we place the Cross in the midst of our hearts ..." In another letter, he writes : " Not long ago I was standing near some beehives, and a number of bees settled upon my face. I was about to remove them with my hand, when a peasant said to me: * Be not afraid ; do not touch them and they will not sting you; but if you do, they will.' I believed him, and not a single one harmed me. Believe me, be not afraid of tempta- tions ; let them alone and they will not harm you."
In the Love of God, in order to show the excellence of the praise given to God by Our Blessed Lady, whose voice, as it were, rises above those of all other creatures, St. Francis relates from his own personal experience, how " two years ago at Milan we heard in different churches many sorts of music, but in a monastery of women we heard a religious whose voice was so delightful that she alone created an impression more agreeable, beyond comparison, than all the rest together, which, although otherwise excellent, seemed to serve only to bring out and raise the perfection and grace of this unique voice."
It is evident that St. Francis, just as he wished to make use of comparisons, so also he knew where to find them; and he found so many that the late editor of the CEuvres Completes, Canon Mackay, O.S.B., wrote in his Preface to the third volume of Sermons : " It seems that all things offer to the amiable preacher the opportunity of making delightful com- parisons, and of drawing practical applications as ingenious as they are unexpected."
How St. Francis Worked out His Comparisons.
If the subject in hand is vast and many-sided, he imme- diately distinguishes its many aspects, and illustrates each by comparisons, an abundance of which is always at his dis-
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posal. Let us take two instances. The first: Heaven, con- cerning which he speaks so profusely and so well in his Love of God. " In this mortal life the soul is truly espoused and betrothed to the Immaculate Lamb, but not as yet married to Him. But in Heaven the marriage of this divine union will be celebrated." — " Who would ever equal the pleasure, if there be any, of living amidst the perils, the continual tempests, the perpetual agitations and vicissitudes which have to be gone through on sea, with the contentment there is of being in a royal palace, where all things are at every wish, yea where delights incomparably surpass every wish?" — The holy and ardent desire of uniting oneself to God is compared by the Saint to the " hart, which, hard set by the hounds, greedily plunges into the waters which he panted after, rolling and burying himself therein." And we shall see God as we see the sun, but with this difference, " that the sun's rays do not fortify our corporal eyes when they are weak and unable to see, but rather blind them ; whereas this sacred light of glory strengthens and perfects our understanding." — There are however different degrees of union with God, just as " amongst many who hear excellent music, though all of them hear it, yet some hear it not so well, nor with so much delight, accord- ing as their ears are more or less delicate." — Nor shall any blessed or all the blessed together ever be able "to equalize their fruition to the infinity of God, no more than any fish or all the fishes ever saw all the shores of the sea, or any bird or all the flocks of birds together did ever beat all the regions of the air, or arrive at the supreme region of the same." — Sin will no longer be possible, on account of the fulness of divine love, just as " when a very full barrel is broached, the wine will not run unless it have air given above;" and also on ac- count of the purity acquired through our union with the in- finite God, as " the wine well purified and separated from the lees is easily kept from turning and getting thick." — Lastly, the soul aspiring to such blessedness is likened to " a heavenly nightingale shut up in the cage of his body : 'Alas ! O Lord of my life,' he cries, ' ah by Thy sweet goodness deliver poor me from the cage of my body, free me from this little prison, to the end that, released from this bondage, I may fly to my dear companions who expect me there above in Heaven '."
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We find the same plentifulness of figures applied to a prac- tical subject of spiritual direction; to wit, our desires. ** Do not fight with the monsters of Africa in imagination, and in the meantime, from want of attention, suffer yourself to be killed by every insignificant reptile that lies in your way." — " It is a good sign of health to have a keen appetite, but yoii must consider whether you can well digest all that you would eat." — **A variety of food, taken in any considerable quantity, overloads the stomach, and if the stomach be weak, destroys it." — " It is a disease of the mind not uncommon in persons ill in body, to desire physicians other than those at hand." — " The vine and fruit trees require pruning to enable the sap to produce more fruit." — "A traveller succeeds better, pro- vided he begins his journey well, instead of troubling at once about the end." — " We cannot go to our destination without touching the ground; but we must not sprawl, nor can we think of flying." — " Do not send your oxen and plough to the field of your neighbor, but work in your own; . . . and what is the good of building castles in Spain, since you must live in France."
Not only does St. Francis know how to multiply compari- sons about the same subject, but he knows — and he seems to take a special delight in this — how to use the same object for a great many comparisons. The bee is an example of this; children another. It is related in his life how much he loved children, whom he called " his little people," and how he was in return loved by them ; and it may be said that he was well inspired by his love. He uses them to represent the union of the soul with God. He says : '' We must not drop the comparison of the love of little children toward their mothers, because of its innocence and purity." But he alludes to them in connexion with many other subjects, and many are the pic- tures he draws from them — children awakened before they have slept enough; children unwilling to be put to bed; children holding their father's hand with one hand and gath- ering flowers with the other ; children running after butterflies ; children building their little doll's houses ; children licking off the honey and throwing away the bread ; children anxious to show their little companions a pretty feather they 'have found; children to whom their mother gives or refuses sweets; chil-
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dren who, by dint of stammering with their mother, learn how to speak; children who, when afraid, run to their father or mother, etc.
The reader may have already noticed the freshness and originality of not a few amongst the comparisons above quoted. Even those which are, as it were, the common property of all writers, become St. Francis's own by a certain felicity, gentle- ness, and even quaintness which they assume in his hands. But we find also a good many comparisons, quite original, some of which are truly grand and majestic; the invention of the latter as well as the treatment of the former betoken a literary artist of no ordinary standard.
Does not the following comparison echo our Lord's descrip- tion of death coming as a thief in the night? " Death comes with woollen feet, and thus it comes unheard and takes us by !5urprise." Another example on preparation for death : " One must quietly bid farewell to this world and withdraw little by little one's affections from creatures. The trees uprooted by the wind are not fit to be transplanted, as they leave their roots in the ground; but he who wishes to transplant them must skilfully little by little disengage their roots one after the other." One more instance, of a different character: "As the hungry hawk, seeing the fair prey and wishing to take flight to seize and feed upon it, instinctively dashes for- ward, but feeling itself bound down, in a fit of anger flaps its wings and struggles in such a way as to break its bonds; so the soul, having arrived on the green and gay hill of Hope, looks up toward Paradise as her prey, and endeavors to soar up, but feels herself bound down by sin."
This last comparison is not only original, but very beauti- ful, and many similar ones do we find, as though the imagin- ation of the writer grew with the grandeur of the subject. In one of his first sermons he feels himself quite inspired by the Descent of the Holy Ghost, and, thinking of the wrath of God which was hitherto threatening mankind and which was transformed into an abundance of blessings and graces, his imagination conjures up a dry land under a stormy sky, pictures peasants panic-stricken, lifting up to heaven their grimy hands, and behold! the clouds break and send down a much-desired and fruitful rain. In another sermon, the
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awful idea of the end of the world suggests the image of a public and solemn meeting, at the end of which servants go about extinguishing the torches, as God will extinguish the luminaries in Heaven ; or, as when a king comes to live in a palace, the tapestries are hung, the furniture is arranged, and when he departs, all breaks up. We may here note that sometimes the simile is extended into a kind of apologue, several of which are to be found in the Love of Gody as : the king's bride, the statue, the physician's daughter, etc.
Now, it must not be supposed that St. Francis was always hunting after comparisons. Because he thought they were an excellent means of clearly proposing spiritual things, and most adapted to human psychology, he wanted them, but they came quite naturally to him. A first proof of this is their abundance; another is their spontaneity. The proof of the latter lies in the fact that, while hurrying through his cor- respondence, which was a considerably heavy one, especially considering the many cares entailed by his position, sometimes in the course of a visitation in his diocese, or late at night after a day of uninterrupted or rather much-interrupted labor, or while the messenger was waiting who was to take his letters away, — then images come freely to him and flow gracefully from his pen. Let us choose a few short ones, as instances, from amongst very many. ''As long as the great seal of the Heavenly Court is on your heart, there is nothing to fear." " Our body is no longer ours, as the ivory of Solomon's temple belonged no longer to the elephants that bore it in their mouths." — " I feel particularly rejoiced at the promotion of that worthy friend, whose merit, like the brightness of the sun, will shine forth more and more as he rises."
Who would not think the following to be an extract from an elaborate funeral oration carefully and leisurely composed, instead of being simply, as it is, the spontaneous outpouring of his soul in a letter to a friend, soon after the murder of King Henry IV of France: '* Here he is dead, struck down by the hand of an unknown youth, in the middle of a street, with a contemptible stab of a knife! Who would have said that the river of a royal life, swollen by the affluence of so many streams of honor, victory, and triumph, on whose waters
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SO many people had embarked, should have perished and van- ished in this way, leaving them on the dry sands? Was it not rather to be expected that this river should have emptied itself into Death, as into a sea and an ocean, through more triumphs than the Nile has mouths ?"
The same spontaneity, naturally enough, showed itself in St. Francis's conversation. In the Spirit of St. Francis, his friend Bishop Camus has recorded many instances, and if some belong rather to his own invention (since he also had a fanciful and somewhat wild imagination), still the French proverb holds good : People lend only to the rich. Thus the Saint would say pleasantly, alluding to himself and his two brothers : " We three would make a good salad : John Francis would be the good vinegar, so strong is he; Lewis would be the salt, so wise is he; — and poor Francis is a good big fellow who would serve as oil, so much does he like meekness." Of those people who become conceited at a word of praise, he would say : " Weak is the head which aches at the smell of a rose;" and those who bustle about, attempting to do several things at once, he would compare to " one that tries to thread several needles at the same time." One day, toward the end of his life, when visiting the Priory of Talloires where he hoped to pass his last days, standing at a window which over- looked the wonderful mountain scenery, he exclaimed : " What a delightful situation! Great and beautiful thoughts will descend upon us thick and fast, as the snowflakes fall here in winter."
The conclusion now appears evident that inventiveness, fancifulness, gracefulness, and strength of imagination are among the features of St. Francis's writings; and, coupled with the learning of the theologian, the zeal of the apostle, the wisdom of the director, they contributed not a little to make him the man whom all Catholics admired, and whom, if many Protestants had learned to hate, many also had learned to love.
J. D. FOLGHERA, O.P.
Hawkesyard Priory, England.
Hnalecta.
AOTA PII PP. X. I.
LiTTERAE EnCYCLICAE AD ArCHIEPISCOPOS ET EpISCOPOS
Americae Latinae de misera Indorum conditione sub-
LEVANDA.
Pius pp. X.
VENERABILES FRATRES SALUTEM ET APOSTOLICAM BENEDIC-
TIONEM.
Lacrimabili statu Indorum ex inferiori America vehementer commotus, decessor Noster illustris, Benedictus XIV gravis- sime eorum causam egit, ut nostis, in Litteris Immensa Pas- torum, die XXII mensis decembris anno MDCCXLI datis ; et quia, quae ille deploravit scribendo, ea fere sunt etiam Nobis multis locis deploranda, idcirco ad earum Litterarum memoriam sol- licite Nos animos vestros revocamus. Ibi enim cum alia, turn haec conqueritur Benedictus, etsi diu multumque apostolica Sedes relevandae horum afflictae fortunae studuisset, esse tamen etiamtum " homines orthodoxae Fidei cultores, qui veluti caritatis in cordibus nostris per Spiritum Sanctum dif- fusae sensuum penitus obliti, miseros Indos non solum Fidei
448 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
luce carentes, verum etiam sacro regenerationis lavacro ablutos, aut in servitutem redigere, aut veluti mancipia aliis vendere, aut eos bonis privare, eaque inhumanitate cum iisdem agere praesumant, ut ab amplectenda Christi fide potissimum aver- tantur, et ad odio habendam maximopere obfirmentur ". — Harum quidem indignitatum ea quae est pessima, id est ser- vitus proprii nominis, paullatim postea, Dei miserentis mu- nere, de medio pulsa est: ad eamque in Brasilia aliisque regionibus publice abolendam multum contulit materna Ec- clesiae instantia apud egregios viros qui eas Respublicas gubernabant. Ac libenter fatemur, nisi multa et magna rerum et locorum impedimenta obstitissent, eorum consilia longe meliores exitus habitura fuisse. Tametsi igitur pro Indis aliquid est actum, tamen multo plus est quod super- est. Equidem cum scelera et maleficia reputamus, quae in eos adhuc admitti solent, sane horremus animo summaque calamitosi generis miseratione afficimur. Nam quid tarn crudele tamque barbarum, quam levissimas saepe ob causas nee raro ex mera libidine saeviendi, aut flagris homines la- minisque ardentibus caedere; aut repentina oppresses vi, ad centenos, ad millenos, una occidione perimere; aut pagos vicos- que vastare ad internecionem indigenarum : quorum quidem nonnullas tribus aocepimus his paucis annis .prope esse deletas? Ad animos adeo efferandos plurimum sane valet cupiditas lucri ; sed non paullum quoque valet caeli natura regionumque situs. Etenim, cum subiecta ea loca sint austro aestuoso, qui, languore quodam venis immisso, nervos virtutis tamquam elidit; cumque a consuetudine Religionis, a vigi- lantia Reipublicae, ab ipsa propemodum civili consortione pro - cul absint, facile fit, ut, si qui non perditis moribus illuc ad- venerint, brevi tamen depravari incipiant, ac deinceps, ef- fractis officii iurisque repagulis, ad omnes immanitates vitiorum delabantur. Nee vero ab istis sexus aetatisve im- becillitati parcitur: quin imo pudet referre eorum in con- quirendis mercandisque feminis et pueris flagitia atque faci- nora; quibus postrema ethnicae turpitudinis exempla vinci verissime dixeris.^Nos equidem aliquandiu, cum de his rebus rumores afferrentur, dubitavimus tantae atrocitati factorum adiungere fidem : adeo incredibilia videbantur. Sed postquam a locupletissimis testibus, hoc est, a plerisque vestrum, vene-
ANALECTA. ^^g
rabiles Fratres, a Delegatis Sedis apostolicae, a missionalibus aliisque viris fide prorsus dignis certiores facti sumus, iam non licet Nobis hie de rerum veritate ullum habere dubium. — lam dudum igitur in ea cogitatione defixi, ut, quantum est in Nobis, nitamur tantis mederi malis, prece humili ac supplici petimus a Deo, velit benignus opportunam aliquam demon- strare Nobis viam medendi. Ipse autem, qui Conditor Re- demptorque amantissimus est omnium hominum, cum mentem Nobis iniecerit elaborandi pro salute Indorum, turn certo dabit quae proposito conducant. Interim vero illud Nos valde con- solatur, quod qui istas Respublicas gerunt, omni ope student insignem banc ignominiam et maculam a suis Civitatibus depellere: de quo quidem studio laudare eos et probare haud satis possumus. Quamquam in iis regionibus, ut sunt procul ab imperii sedibus remotae ac plerumque inviae, haec, plena humanitatis, conata civilium potestatum, sive ob calliditatem maleficorum qui tempori confinia transeunt, sive ob inertiam atque perfidiam administrorum, saepe parum proficiunt, non raro etiam in irritum cadunt. Quod si ad Reipublicae operam opera Ecclesiae accesserit, tum demum qui optantur fructus, multo exsistent uberiores. — Itaque vos ante alios appellamus, venerabiles Fratres, ut peculiares quasdam curas cogitatio- nesque conferatis in hanc causam, quae vestro dignissima est pastorali officio et munere. Ac cetera permittentes sollici- tudini industriaeque vestrae, hoc primum omnium vos im- pense hortamur, ut quaecumque in vestris dioecesibus instituta sunt Indorum bono, ea perstudiose promoveatis, itemque curetis instituenda quae ad eamdem rem utilia fore videantur. Deinde admonebitis populos vestros diligenter de proprio ip- sorum sanctissimo officio adiuvandi sacras expeditiones ad indigenas, qui Americanum istud solum primi incoluerint. Sciant igitur duplici praesertm ratione se huic rei debere pro- desse: collatione stipis et suffragio precum; idque ut faciant non solum Religionem a se, sed Patriam ipsam postulare. Vos autem, ubicumque datur opera conformandis rite mo- ribus, id est, in Seminariis, in ephebeis, in domibus puellaribus maximeque in sacris aedibus efficite, ne unquam commendatio praedicatioque cesset caritatis christianae, quae omnes homi- nes, sine ullo nationis aut coloris discrimine, germanorum fra- trum loco habet; quaeque non tam verbis, quam rebus factis-
450 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
que probanda est. Pariter nulla praetermitti debet, quae of- feratur, occasio demonstrandi quantum nomini christiano de- decus aspergant hae rerum indignitates, quas hie denunciamus. — Ad Nos quod attinet, bonam habentes non sine causa spem de assensu et favore potestatum publicarum, earn praecipue suscepimus curam, ut, in ista tanta latitudine regionum, apos- tolicae actionis amplificemus campum, aliis disponendis mis- sionalium stationibus, in quibus Indi perfugium et praesidium salutis inveniant. Ecclesia enim catholica numquam sterilis fuit hominum apostolicorum, qui, urgente lesu Christi caritate, prompti paratique essent vel vitam ipsam pro f ratribus ponere. Hodieque, cum tam multi a Fide vel abhorrent, vel deficiunt, ardor tamen disseminandi apud barbaros Evangelii non modo non inter viros utriusque cleri sacrasque virgines remittitur, sed crescit etiam lateque diffunditur, virtute nimirum Spiritus Sancti, qui Ecclesiae, sponsae suae, pro temporibus subvenit. Quare his praesidiis quae, divino beneficio. Nobis praesto sunt, oportere putamus eo copiosius uti ad Indos e Satanae homi- numque perversorum servitute liberandos, quo maior eos necessitas premit. Ceterum, cum istam terrarum partem prae- cones Evangelii suo non solum sudore, sed ipso nonnumquam cruore imbuerint, futurum confidimus, ut ex tantis laboribus aliquando christianae humanitatis laeta messis efflorescat in optimos fructus. — lam, ut ad ea quae vos vel vestra sponte vel hortatu Nostro acturi estis in utilitatem Indorum, quanta maxima potest, efficacitatis accessio ex apostolica Nostra auc- toritate fiat, Nos, memorati Decessoris exemplo, immanis cri- minis damnamus declaramusque reos, quicumque, ut idem ait, " praedictos Indos in servitutem redigere, vendere, emere, commutare vel donare, ab uxoribus et filiis separare, rebus et bonis suis spoliare, ad alia loca deducere et transmittere, aut quoquo modo libertate privare, in servitute retinere; nee non praedicta agentibus consilium, auxilium, favorem et operam quocumque praetextu et quaesito colore praestare, aut id lici- tum praedicare seu docere, atque alias quomodolibet prae- missis cooperari audeant seu praesumant." Itaque potestatem absolvendi ab his criminibus poenitentes in foro sacramentali% Ordinariis locorum reservatam volumus.
Haec Nobis, cum paternae voluntati Nostrae obsequentibus, turn etiam vestigia persequentibus complurium e decessoribus
ANALECTA. ^^ I
Nostris, in quibus commemorandus quoque est nominatim Leo XIII fel. rec, visum est ad vos, venerabiles Fratres, Indorum causa, scribere. Vestrum autem erit contendere pro viribus, ut votis Nostris cumulate satisfiat. Fauturi certe hac in re vobis sunt, qui Respublicas istas administrant ; non deerunt sane, operam studiumque navando, qui de clero sunt, in primis- que addicti sacris missionibus; denique aderunt sine dubio omnes boni, ac sive opibus, qui possunt, sive aliis caritatis officiis causam iuvabunt, in qua rationes simul versantur Re- ligionis et humanae dignitatis. Quod vero caput est, aderit Dei omnipotentis gratia; cuius Nos auspicem, itemque bene- volentiae Nostrae testem, vobis, venerabiles Fratres, gregi- busque vestris apostolicam benedictionem peramanter im- pertimus.
Datum Romae apud S. Petrum, die VII mensis iunii MCMXII, Pontificatus Nostri anno nono.
PIUS PP. X.
II.
MoTu Proprio de Catholicorum in exteras regiones Emigratione.
Cum omnes catholicos Ecclesia materno studio complecta- tur, tum peculiari quadam sollicitudine caritatis eos prose- quitur, qui, ut victum labore quaerant, aut meliorem sibi for- tunam comparent, relicto natali solo in longinqua migrant, ubi saepius eis timendum est, ne, dum mortalis vitae rationibus prospiciunt, lamentabilem sempiternae iacturam faciant. Plura enim et illustris Nostri Decessoris et Nostra testantur acta, quanto opere Apostolica Sedes bonorum societates foveat in salutem emigrantium institutas, quantamque praesertim ad- hibeat curam, ne Antistites sacrorum patiantur in re tam gravi pastoralem industriam suam desiderari. lam vero, cum ob aucta populorum commercia et expeditiores commeatus aliasque causas plurimas, quotidie in immensum crescat emi- grantium numerus, intelligimus Nostri muneris esse idoneum aliquod reperire providentiae genus, quo quidem horum om- nium filiorum temporibus succurramus. Equidem valde com- movemur maximis periculis, in quibus religio moresque ver- santur tot hominum, qui, ut plurimum, ignafi regionis et
452 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
linguae, atque ope sacerdotum suorum destituti, spiritualis vitae adiumenta nee ipsi sibi parare possunt, nee, quantum satis est, exspectare ab Ordinariis locorum aut a consociationi- bus iis, quae in id sunt institutae. Quae vero ad medendum his tantis incommodis excogitata sunt, optatum non solent habere exitum, propterea quod eorum, qui in hac gravissima causa elaborant, laudabiles conatus aut operis magnitudine superantur aut consensum et unitatem saepe non assequuntur. — Nos igitur, tempus esse iudicantes necessitatibus tarn magnae multitudinis stabili quadam ratione in perpetuum subveniendi, cum S. R. E. Cardinales e Sacra Congregatione Consistoriali in consilium adhibuerimus, Motu Proprio ac de Apostolicae potestatis plenitudine, apud eam ipsam Congre- gationem novum Officium, seu Sectionem ut aiunt, de spiri- iuali emigrantium cura constituimus. Huius Officii partes erunt, quaerere et parare omnia, quaecumque opus sint, ut in iis quae ad salutem animarum pertinent, emigrantium latini ritus melior conditio fiat, salvo tamen iure Sacrae Congre- gationis Fidei Propagandae in emigrantes ritus orientalis, quibus eadem Congregatio pro suo instituto opportune con- sulat. Ac de sacerdotibus ipsis emigrantibus hoc idem unice cavebit Officium; ad quod propterea praescriptiones ea de re, decretis Sacrae Congregationis Concilii datas, avocamus. — Itaque Sacra Congregatio Consistorialis, accedente Ordina- riorum studio, quorum quidem ipsa confirmabit fovebitque in advenas auctoritatem, suffragante etiam opera consocia- tionum emigrantibus adiutandis, quarum beneficam actionem, quocumque res postulaverit, diriget, divino munere poterit et quae sint, pro varietate regionum, necessitates emigrantium cognoscere, et quae peropportuna visa fuerint malorum re- media decernere. Confidimus autem fore, ut quicumque catholicam rite colunt fidem, opus tam sanctum in salutem fratrum institutum precibus atque etiam opibus, pro sua quis- que facultate, promovere velint, praesertim cum pro certo habere debeant summum Pastorem et Episcopum animarum nostrarum sua ipsorum caritatis officia amplissimo in caelis praemio remuneraturum.
Datum Romae apud Sanctum Petrum die xv mensis au- gusti MCMXII, Pontificatus Nostri anno decimo.
PIUS PP. X.
ANALECTA. ^^^
S. OONGEEGATIO BITUUM.
I.
De Conclusione Matutini et Inchoatione Laudum pro Recitatione privata in Triduo Mortis Christi et in Officiis Defunctorum.
Novo edito Psalterio cum Ordinario divini Officii per apos- tolicam Constitutionem Divino afflatu, pluribus e dioecesibus sacrae Rituum Congregationi sequens dubium pro opportuna solutione propositum fuit, nimirum :
Quum in Ordinario divini Officii praescribatur modus Ma- tutinum concludendi et Laudes incipiendi quoties in privata recitatione istae ab illo separantur; quaeritur: Quid in casu agendum est sive in triduo Mortis Christi, sive in Officiis de- functorum ?
Et sacra eadem Congregatio, ad relationem infrascripti Secretarii, re accurate examine perpensa, respondendum cen- suit:
Ad omnem dubitationem tollendam, in futuris editionibus Breviarii Romani, singulis diebus tridui Mortis Christi, post IX responsorium, sequens rubrica inseratur:
Si Matutinum in privata recitatione a Laudibus separetur, subjungitur oratio Respice quaesumus Domine, etc.: Laudes verOj dictis secreto Pater noster et Ave Maria, absolute a prima antiphona incipiuntur.
Item in Commemoratione omnium Fidelium defunctorum, post IX responsorium, sequens addatur rubrica:
Si Matutinum in privata recitatione a Laudibus separetur, subjungitur:
V. Dominus vobiscum.
R. Et cum spiritu tuo. Oratio.
Fidelium Deus, etc.
V. Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine.
R. Et lux perpetua luceat eis.
V. Requiescant in pace.
R. Amen.
Tandem in Officio defunctorum, tam in Breviario quam in Rituali Romano, ante Laudes sequens rubrica inseratur :
454 ^^^ ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
Si Matutinunij cum unico vel cum tribus Nocturnis, in pri- vata recitatione a Laudibus separetur, post ultimum respon- sorium subjungitur:
V. Dominus vobiscum.
R. Et cum spiritu tuo.
Deinde dicitur oratio {seu oraiiones) ut ad Laudes, additis sequentibus:
V. Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine.
R. Et lux perpetua luceat eis.
V. Requiescant in pace.
R. Amen.
Laudes vero, dictis secreto Pater noster et Ave Maria, ab- solute inchoantur ab antiphona Exsultabunt Domino.
Atque ita rescripsit et servari mandavit, die 24 iulii 191 2. Fr. S. Card. Martinelli, Praefectus.
L. * S.
■^ Petrus La Fontaine, Ep. Charystien, Secret,
II.
Decretum circa modulandas Monosyllabas vel He- BRAicAS Voces in Lectionibus, Versiculis et Psalmis.
A quibusdam cantus gregoriani magistris sacrae Rituum Congregationi sequens dubium pro opportuna solutione ex- positum f uit ; nimirum :
An in cantandis Lectionibus et Versiculis, praesertim vero in Psalmorum mediantibus ad asteriscum, quando vel dictio monosyllaba Vel hebraica vox occurrit, immutari possit clau- sula, vel cantilena proferri sub modulatione consueta?
Et sacra eadem Congregatio, approbante sanctissimo Do- mino nostro Pio Papa X, rescribere statuit: Affirmative ad utrumque.
Die 8 iulii 1912.
Fr. S. Card. Martinelli, S. R. C. Praefectus.
L. * S.
^ Petrus La Fontaine, Episc. Charystien. Secretarius.
ANALECTA, ^^e
III.
Instructio seu Responsum Sacrae Rituum Congrega- TiONis Rmis locorum Ordinariis vel Superioribus or- DiNUM SEU sodalitatum postulantibus Kalendarii Proprii Reformationem, vel Expunctionem Festorum AUT Reductionem Ritus.
Mens sacrae Rituum Congregationis est, ut, rite postulante rmo Ordinario loci, seu Superiore Ordinis vel Sodalitatis, in posterum, de apostolica venia, relicto proprio kalendario, ad- hiberi valeat kalendarium Ecclesiae universalis, additis tan- tummodo Festis quae stricto sensu propria dici possunt, ad normam Constitutionis apostolicae Divino afflatu et recentium rubricarum, tit. II, num. 2, litt. e. Quo in casu elenchus Fes- torum, adductis rationibus de eorum proprietate, ad sacram Rituum Congregationem cum supplici libello transmittatur.
Ex Secretaria S. R. C. die 25 iulii 191 2.
•^ Petrus La Fontaine, Episc. Charystien. Secretarius.
S. OONaEEGATIO OONSISTOBIALIS.
I.
Litterae Circulares de Seminariis Italiae ad Reveren-
DISSIMOS OrDINARIOS.
Le Visite apostoliche fatte lo scorso anno nei Seminar! d' Italia hanno rilevato che per la premurosa e vigile cura degli Ordinari, la condizione di questi istituti, grazie a Dio, si e universalmente tanto avvantaggiata da far concepire le migliori speranze per I'avvenire.
E ben vero che alcuni Seminari si sono trovati cosi stremati di numero da ingenerare non lieve preoccupazione : e si e anche da taluni pensato, che questa diminuzione di alunni e di perseveranza nelle primitive aspirazioni alio stato eccles- iastico si debba attribuire sia ai nuovi sistemi di studi medi, ginnasiali e liceali, sia al concentramento per gli studi superiori.
Ma se si considera che questo fenomeno si e verificato anche in diocesi dove di concentramenti non vi fu mai pensiero; e viceversa in altre diocesi, dove gli studi medi erano in plena conformita alle norme pontificie, e dove avvenne il concen- tramento per la teologia, gli aspiranti alio stato ecclesiastico
456 2"^^^ ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
,non hanno fatto punto difetto; si deve necessariamente con- cludere che non sono queste le ragloni adeguate e sufficienti per spiegare il fatto, ma che esse debbono ricercarsi altrove. E certamente le ostilita, cui da tante parti ed in tanti modi e fatto segno il clero, le poche attrattive umane dello stato ecclesiastico nei nostri giorni, i maggiori vantaggi terreni che oifrono altri stati ed offici, talora anche con minori anni di studio e minori spese, non possono non stornare molti dal mettersi per la via del Santuario, e non tentare altri dal per- severare in essa, specialmente se durante gli studi medi non siasi avuta molta cura di fortificare le deboli volonta degli alunni del Seminario e di custodirle dai pericoli della sedu- zione.
Ed appunto in questo si deve riporre la causa ultima e vera della diminuzione degli alunni nei Seminari e della mancanza di perseveranza di molti nelle primitive aspirazioni.
Ma checche ne sia di cio, poiche per le divine promesse e certo che mai si inaridira in Israele la stirpe levitica, e che Tassistenza divina e le vocazioni alio stato ecclesiastico non mancheranno nella Chiesa usque ad consummationem saeculi, ne faranno giammai difetto anime generose che rispondano alia voce del Signore, anche quando le chiama alle privazioni od al sacrifizio ; non vi e da cadere di animo pel disagio presente di cui soffrono molte diocesi.
Ben piuttosto conviene pensare al riparo. Ed a tale effetto e necessario che gli Ordinari eccitino lo zelo dei parrochi e di zelanti sacerdoti, affinche cerchino nelle loro parrocchie giovinetti di buona indole, di sufficiente ingegno, inclinati alle cose di chiesa ; e trovatili, ne abbiano una cura speciale e li coltivino nella pieta e negli studi con pazienza, con amore, con ogni industria ed anche con qualche aiuto temporale, af- finche, se la voce di Dio li chiamasse, possano esser atti e preparati a rispondervi e ad entrare a suo tempo nei Seminari. In questa guisa in piu diocesi si e procurato alia Chiesa del Signore un drappello di eletti chierici e sacerdoti.
Ma cio che interessa piu ancora del numero e la santa e perfetta formazione dei futuri ministri di Dio. Ed e a questa che conviene sopratutto e con ogni studio mirare, non con- tentandosi dei miglioramenti sin ora ottenuti, ma cercando e di mantenerli e di accrescerli ognor piu.
ANALECTA. ^c;
A tale effetto il S. Padre, mentre in generale ed a tutti raccomanda Tosservanza delle norme pontificie e dei principi su cui si basa il Programma di studi pubblicato dalla S. C. dei Vescovi e Regolari, nonche delle disposizioni sia generali sia speciali susseguentemente emanate dalla S. Sede, com- patibilmente con cio che appresso si dira ; richiama I'attenzione dei Rmi Ordinari sui seguenti punti speciali, che, in seguito ai risultati delle Visite apostoliche, secondo il desiderio es- presso da molti Vescovi, e col voto degli Emi Padri di questa S. C, ha creduto necessario segnalare e stabilire.
1. In primo luogo, ottimo, per non dire necessario, consiglio sarebbe di separare nei Seminar! gli alunni grandi dai piccoli, e, dove fosse possibile, formarne due istituti. Cio e gia in uso da gran tempo in alcune grandi diocesi, come Torino. Milano, ecc, e si e recentemente attuato dove pei concentra- menti avvenuti gli alunni di teologia e talora anche di filosofia, di piu diocesi furono riuniti in un solo istituto interdiocesano, rimanendo nel Seminario diocesano gli altri.
La ragione di questo consiglio e data da cio, che non si pub convenevolmente ed utilmente appropriare la stessa disciplina, le stesse prediche, le stesse istruzioni, le stesse pratiche di pieta, le stesse comuni letture ai giovanetti di 12 o 15 anni, di limitata intelligenza, incerti ancora del loro avvenire, ed ai maggiori di eta, nel pieno sviluppo della mente e con propositi gia formati. Una disciplina poi media, atta a formare con- venientemente gli uni e gli altri, e cosa impossibile.
2. Non si ammettano mai nel Seminario, sia pure per le prime classi di studio, giovanetti che chiaramente professino di non volersi far sacerdoti; ma si esiga almeno che mani- festino un' iniziale inclinazione alio stato ecclesiastico. Coloro che positivamente aspirano alio stato secolaresco si trovano e debbono trovarsi necessariamente a disagio nel Seminario, dove tutto tende e deve tendere non a mire mondane, ma alia pieta, al raccoglimento, alia formazione ecclesiastica. Inoltre la promiscuita di alunni non chiamati e di altri chiamati alio stato ecclesiastico riesce sempre fatale a questi ultimi, e, secondo che I'esperienza ha dimostrato, causa la perdita di molte vocazioni.
Se quindi i Rmi Ordinari credono utile o necessario aprire a giovanetti laici un luogo di educazione sotto la tutela della
458
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Chiesa, formino un coUegio separate, interamente diviso dal Seminario. In questo caso pero ben si guardino, come di dovere, da cio, che le rendite destinate dalla pieta dei fedeli o per speciale grazia della S. Sede alia formazione dei chierici, siano devolute anche in piccola parte a vantaggio del collegio secolare.
3. fe di somma importanza che si abbia tanto per i piccoli quanto pei grandi Seminari un luogo di villeggiatura, e che siano accorciate al possibile le vacanze in famiglia. In altri tempi, con vacanze scolastiche autunnali ben piu limitate, il ritorno in famiglia poteva riuscire meno pericoloso. Oggi con tre mesi ed oltre di vacanze scolastiche, con la grande liberta di usi e costumi introdotta nella societa e nelle famiglie, e con la grande diffusione di libri e giornali perniciosi, la libera e lunga permanenza degli alunni nei loro paesi non pub non essere dannosa e spesso fatal e.
Dati quindi, secondo la prudente discrezione dei Rmi Or- dinari, un 10 o 15 giorni agli alunni affinche riveggano i loro parenti, e possano un poco conoscere che cosa sia il mondo, si richiamino nel Seminario o nella villeggiatura, ed ivi si dia loro il mezzo di ricrearsi onestamente per riprendere con mag- gior animo gli studi nel susseguente anno, in guisa pero che non abbandonino interamente i libri, e coltivino sempre collo stesso amore le pratiche di pieta.
4. Divisi i Seminari grandi dai piccoli, sorge il problema del come provvedere di prefetti le camerate del ginnasio. A questa difficolta si e in non una diocesi ottimamente ovviato colFapprovazione della S. Sede, affidando quest'officio ai gio- vani sacerdoti usciti dai Seminari teologici, compito gia il loro corso di studi.
Questa misura, mentre provvede al bisogno dei piccoli Semi- nari, ha anche il vantaggio di preparare meglio i nuovi sacer- doti alia vita pubblica, con un graduale passaggio dalla vita ritirata del Seminario a quella di una limitata liberta, quale essi possono avere come prefetti del piccolo Seminario.
Inoltre con tal mezzo essi potranno meglio coltivare gli studi supplementari tanto utili per la pratica del sacro minis- tero, come la teologia pastorale ed altro, secondo il prudente giudizio dei rispettivi Ordinari. Questi poi, avendo presso di se per uno o due anni i giovani sacerdoti, potranno meglio
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conoscerli, ed a suo tempo piu utilmente collocarli secondo le loro attitudini ; senza dire che intanto avrebbero sotto mano un piccolo drappello di sacerdoti pieno di forza e di vergini as- pirazioni, che potrebbero adibire per qualche opera o bisogno straordinario delle parrocchie di citta, o non lontane da essa.
L'unica difficolta che si e opposta e puo opporsi a questa misura e la necessita di provvedere subito a qualche chiesa, e di soddisfare quei fedeli che reclamano un parroco proprio od un coadiutore che risieda. Ma se si considera che e molto meglio dare un sacerdote perfettamente formato e sicuro col ritardo di un anno o due, piuttosto che lanciarlo ancor fresco dell'ordinazione in mezzo ai pericoli del mondo; e che i vantaggi che si hanno col ritenere uno o due anni i sacerdoti in questo stato di formazione transitoria sono im- mensamente maggiori del bene di provvedere subito a luoghi ed offici vacanti, non vi ha dubbio che, per quanto e possibile, conviene tener fermo all'accennato consiglio: tanto piu che il disagio dell'attendere non sara che per uno o due anni ; ed introdotto una volta il sistema, non riuscira piu sensibile. Si raccomanda quindi ai Rmi Ordinari di adottarlo con quei modi e temperamenti che riputeranno opportuni o necessari.
5. Quanto alle scuole si curera che esse siano interne e per i soli seminaristi od aspiranti alio stato ecclesiastico ; e cio sia per preservare gli alunni da dissipazione e da quelle pericolose relazioni che sono si facili in scuole frequentate da secolari, sia perche le scuole del Seminario, anche se ginnasiali e liceali e sostanzialmente conformi ai programmi di Stato, debbono avere un carattere ed un indirizzo loro proprio, quale si richiede per gli aspiranti al sacerdozio secondo le norme che si determinano qui appresso.
Potranno tuttavia gli Ordinari che hanno un collegio se- colare annesso al Seminario, permettere che gli alunni del medesimo frequentino le scuole ginnasiali del Seminario. Ma in tal caso e necessario che vi siano in queste scuole maestri civilmente patentati, e che si seguano in esse totalmente i pro- grammi dello Stato. Inoltre gli Ordinari dovranno curare con ogni studio che niun nocumento ne venga alio spirito ed alia disciplina dei seminaristi; e provvedere che questi ultimi in ore proprie distinte dalla scuola abbiano quella istruzione sup- plementare che si richiede sin dai primi anni per chi aspira al sacerdozio.
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6. Dovendo i giorni festivi di precetto essere dai semi- naristi in special modo dedicati al culto e servizio divino, e non potendosi quindi considerare come giorni di intera vacanza, e necessario dare agli alunni un altro giorno per settimana di riposo; non cosi pero che non si possa nel medesimo stabilire un'ora d'insegnamento per materie meno gravose o secondarie, secondo il prudente giudizio degli Ordinari, sentiti i depu- tati e superiori del Seminario. E quest'ora d'insegnamento dovra esser fatta dai maestri ordinari, e potra rientrare nell'ambito delle materie di esame e di premiazione.
7. Nei giorni di scuola le ore d'insegnamento saranno quat- tro (o tutto al piu quattro e mezzo, se si fara un giorno per settimana di intera vacanza), non consecutive, ma divise op- portunamente secondo il giudizio degli Ordinari, sentito il consiglio dei deputati e dei superiori del Seminario.
Un maggior numero di ore di scuola non sembra possibile, attesa la necessita di dare un tempo sufficiente alio studio pri- vato ed alle pratiche di pieta doverose in un Seminario, e di non recare nocumento al riposo e sollievo necessario per il benessere fisico degli alunni. D'altronde la vita di raccogli- mento durante Tanno, e lo studio non del tutto sospeso durante le vacanze autunnali, algono a ben compensare questa limita- zione.
8. Nel ginnasio, pur attenendosi in linea generale ai pro- grammi d'insegnamento civili, si dark speciale impulso alio studio della lingua latina: di piu in ogni settimana nelle ore di scuola vi sara un'ora di catechismo ed un'ora di storia del Vecchio e Nuovo Testamento.
9. Nel liceo vi sara in tutti e tre gli anni ed in ciascun giorno di scuola un'ora d'insegnamento di filosfia secondo il metodo scolastico, e di piu per questa stessa materia un'ora di ripeti- zione ogni settimana ed un'altr'ora di disputa ogni quindici giorni. Nel primo anno di liceo s'insegnera la logica e la filosofia del linguaggio : nel secondo la ontologia, la psicologia e la cosmologia: nel terzo la teodicea, I'etica e la storia della filosofia. In ciascuna settimana inoltre si fara un'ora di cate- chismo superiore e di apologia della religione.
Le residue ore di scuola saranno equamente divise secondo il prudente giudizio degli Ordinari, sentito il consiglio dei maestri, dei deputati e dei superiori del Seminario, cosi da dar
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luogo in giuste proporzioni alio studio delle matematiche, delle scienze naturali, delle scienze fisiche, della letteratura italiana, latina e greca e della storia civile. Neirinsegnamento letter- ario non si trascurera di far condscere i migliori fra i Padri e scrittori cristiani, latini e greci : e piu che all'analisi filologica si cerchera con la lettura e con le traduzioni e composizioni di formare gli alunni al buon gusto ed all'esercizio della lingua che studiano.
Applicandosi questo nuovo programma di liceo-filosofico, non sara piu necessario Tanno di propedeutica, il quale percio viene gradatamente ad essere abolito.
10. Per regola generale tutti gli alunni di ginnasio dovranno concorrere alia licenza di Stato, e conseguirla prima di essere ammessi alle scuole liceali. Le eccezioni al riguardo non dov- ranno essere che in casi rarissimi di eta inoltrata, pieta distinta e sicurezza di vocazione : dovendosi considerare la capacita di conseguire la licenza ginnasiale come prova di quella suffi- cienza di ingegno che si richiede per un ecclesiastico.
La licenza liceale di Stato non sara obbligatoria per tutti; ma bensi :
{a) per quel pochi che gli Ordinari crederanno utile o necessario avviare agli studi universitari di Stato, onde ivi conseguano una laurea in qualche f acolta ;
{^) per quelli della cui vocazione non fossero interamente sicuri.
Per tutti poi onde essere ammessi in teologia si richiede I'approvazione di passaggio nell'esame interno del terzo anno di liceo. Per coloro pero che avessero conseguita la licenza liceale di Stato questo esame potra essere limitato alia filosofia, catechismo ed apologia della religione.
11. Nella teologia si abbiano per materie principali la dom- matica nei vari suoi rami o trattati, la morale, la S. Scrittura, la storia ecclesiastica.
{a) Alia dommatica si assegnera un'ora In ciascun giorno di scuola e per tutti e quattro gli anni ; e nell'insegnamento di essa si seguira il metodo scolastico completato coi sani sussidi delFerudizione moderna di storia e Sacra Scrittura. All'ora di scuola giornaliera sara poi aggiunta per ciascuna settimana un'ora di disputa ed un'altra ora di ripetizione.
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(^) Nella scuola di morale, si avra cura di dare anche le nozioni fondamentali di sociologia, e si aggiungeranno le isti- tuzioni di diritto canonico.
(y) Per lo studio della Sacra Scrittura si assegneranno quattro ore di scuola per settimana, dedicandole tutte, nei due primi anni airinsegnamento detto di introdu^ioney e nei due ultimi anni all'esegesi. Nella esegesi poi quanto al Vecchio Testamento non si ometta mai lo studio di alcuni salmi prin- cipali, e quanto al Nuovo degli Evangeli e di alcune lettere apostoliche.
(^) Nella storia ecclesiastica si curi che neH'insegnamento orale e nei testi non sia trascurata od omessa la parte sopran- naturale, che e vero, essenziale, indispensabile element© nei fasti della Chiesa, senza di cui la Chiesa stessa riesce incom- prensibile: e si faccia si che la narrazione dei fatti non sia disgiunta da quelle alte e filosofiche considerazioni di cui furono maestri S. Agostino, Dante, Bossuet, che fanno vedere la giustizia e la provvidenza di Dio in mezzo agli uomini, e la continua assistenza dal Signore data alia Chiesa.
12. Alle materie second.arie, quali sono il greco biblico, Tebraico, la sacra eloquenza, la patristica, la liturgia, Tarcheo- logia ed arte sacra ed il canto gregoriano, si assegni nei quat- tro anni di teologia un tempo sufficiente, affinche gli alunni possano averne una giusta nozione, senza troppo distrarli dalle materie principali.
13. Cureranno gli Ordinari che almeno Tinsegnamento della teologia si dommatica che morale e, per quanto sara possibile, anche quello della filosofia, almeno in generale, sia impartito in latino.
Vigileranno inoltre, sia direttamente, sia per mezzo del ret- tore del Seminario o del prefetto degli studi, affinche i maestri nei tempo loro assegnato svolgano tutta la materia del pro- gramma, e che non si fermino a lunghe discussioni su qualche punto loro beneviso, sia pure importante, con detriment© del resto : considerando come inadatti alia scuola coloro che non si attenessero a queste norme.
14. Nei testi scolastici si abbia somma cura di scegliere i pill adatti e di sicura dottrina; escludendo nei ginnasio e liceo quelli che, benche civilmente approvati, fossero meno rispettosi della religione e della moralita : e nella teologia quelli che
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non avessero il comune suffragio e specialmente quello della Santa Sede per la sicurezza dei principi; ma andassero ac- carezzando idee peregrine o pericolose, contrarie alle sante e venerate tradizioni dei Padri, dei teologi, della Chiesa in gen- erale. I maestri poi curino di istillare con la scienza non solo la pieta, ma anche il rispetto e I'amore alle verita e all'au- torita della Chiesa e del Sommo Pontefice.
Ordinati con queste nuove norme la disciplina e gli studi nei Seminari, e da ritenere che si andra formando con la divina grazia un clero sempre piu degno della santa e sublime mis- sione sua, a santificazione delle anime ed a maggior gloria di Dio.
Confida il S. Padre che i Rmi Ordinari, e con essi quanti hanno cura di questi istituti, che sono tanta parte nella speranza della Chiesa, metteranno tutto il loro impegno perche queste norme siano nel miglior modo e nel piu breve tempo tradotte in atto.
Roma, dalla Segreteria della sacra Congregazione Concis- toriale, 16 luglio 191 2.
■^ G. Card. De Lai, Vescovo di Sabina, Segretorio.
II.
Decretum de Quibusdam Rei Biblicae Commentariis in
SACRA SeMINARIA NON ADMITTENDIS.
Cum semper et ubique cavendum sit ne quis Scripturas Sanctas contra eum sensum interpretetur, quem tenuit ac tenet sancta Mater Ecclesia (S. Trid. Syn., Sessio IV^) ; id maxime necessarium est in Seminariis inter alumnos qui in spem Ec- clesiae adolescunt. Hos enim prae ceteris oportet sanis doc- trinis imbui, quae venerandae Patrum traditioni sint conformes et a legitima Ecclesiae auctoritate probatae; arceri autem a novitatibus, quas in dies audax quisque molitur, quaeque quaestiones praestant magis quam edificationem Dei, quae est in fide (I^ ad Tim., cap. IV) ; si vero insolitae legitimeque damnatae, in destructionem sunt et non in edificationem.
lam vero evulgatum nuper est Paderbornae opus quod in- scribitur ** Kurzgefasstes Lehrbuch der speziellen Einleitung in das Alte Testament " auctore D. Carolo doct. Holzhey, in quo iuxta neotericas rationalismi et hypercriticae theorias de
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libris Veteris Testamenti fere omnibus, ac potissimum de Pentateucho, de libris Paralipomenon, Tobiae, ludith, Esther, lonae, Isaiae et Danielis, sententiae audacissimae propugnan- tur, quae antiquissimae traditioni Ecclesiae, venerabili Ss. Patrum doctrinae et recentibus pontificiae Commissionis Biblicae responsis adversantur, et authentiam atque historicum valorem sacrorum Librorum nedum in dubium revocant, sed pene subvertunt.
Hunc itaque lib rum S. haec C. de mandate Ssmi D. N. Papae prohibet omnino, quominus in Seminaria introducatur, ne ad consultationem quidem.
Cum vero alia habeantur similis spiritus commentaria in Scripturas Sanctas tum Veteris tum Novi Testamenti, ceu scripta plura P. Lagrange et recentissimum opus, cui titulus: Die Heilige Schrift des Neuen Testaments, editum Berolini an. 191 2, auctoreZ^r. Fritz Tillmann^ haec quoque expungenda omnino esse ab institutione clericorum Ssmus D. mandat et praescribit, salvo ampliore de iis iudicio ab ilia auctoritate ferendo ad quam de iure pertinet.
Datum Romae, ex aedibus sacrae Congregationis Consis- torialis, die 29 iunii 1912.
C. Card. De Lai, Episcopus Sabinen., Secretarius.
III. De Decreto " Maxima Cura ".
In generali conventu sacrae Congregationis Consistorialis, habito die 27 iunii 1 91 2, proposito dubio " An vigeat in Aus- tralia novissimum de amotione administrativa ab officio et beneficio curato Decretum Maxima Cura ", Emi PP., requisite Consultorum voto aliisque perpensis, respondendum censue- runt: "Affirmative '\
Facta autem relatione Ssmo D. N. Pio PP. X ab infrascripto Cardinal! Secretario In audientia diei 28 iunii 191 2, Ssmus re- solutionem ratam habuit et confirmavit.
Romae, die 12 augusti 191 2.
C. Card. De Lai^ Secretarius.
SciPiO Tecchi, Adsessor.
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S. OONGEEGATIO S. OFFIOn (Seotio De Indulgentiis)
Decretum de Indulgentiis pio viae crucis exercitio
ADNEXIS.
Pium Viae Crucis, ut aiunt, exercitium, ad salutiferam sanc- tissimi D. N. lesu Christi Passionem recolendam, a Romanis Pontificibus enixe commendatum ac pluribus indulgentiis dita- tum fuisse neminem latet. Et quoniam non semper nee ab omnibus, erectas regulariter Stationes obeundo, peragi illud poterat; non defuit apostolica Sedes, pro iis qui aut infirma valetudine aut alia iusta causa impedirentur, brevioribus precibus, ante simulacrum Ssmi Crucifix! per Fratres Minores — queis ex privilegio apostolico pii eiusdem exercitii modera- men spectat — ad hoc benedictum recitandis, easdem indul- gentias adnectere.
Cum igitur per huiusmodi concessionem omnium fidelium utilitati satis consultum fuerit; Emi ac Rmi DD. Cardinales Inquisijtores generales, in plenario conventu habito feria IV die 8 maii currentis anni, omnibus mature perpensis, con- sulendum Ssmo decreverunt, ut quascumque alias, praeter mox memoratam, hac super re concessiones, nominatim vero quae Coronas, quas vocant, Viae Crucis respiciunt revocare, abro- gare ac penitus abolere dignaretur: insimul declarando, facul- tates omnes Coronas supradictas hunc in effectum benedicendi, sacerdotibus quibuslibet, tam saecularibus quam regularibus, in praestantioribus etiam dignitatibus constitutis, hucusque quomodocumque impertitas, statim ab huius Decreti promulga- tione, nullius amplius esse roboris.
Et sequenti feria V die 9 eiusdem mensis et anni, sanctis- simus D. N. Pius divina providentia Pp. X, in solita audientia R. P. D. Adsessori S. Officii impertita, Emorum Patrum votis annuens, propositam ab eis resolutionem, suprema Sua auctori- tate, in omnibus et singulis adprobare et confirmare dignatus est.
Contrariis quibuscumque, etiam specialissima mentione dignis, non obstantibus.
Datum Romae, ex aedibus S. Officii, die 24 iulii 1912. M. Card. Rampolla.
L. * S.
■^ D. Archiep. Seleucien., Ads. S. O.
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S. OONGEEGATIO DE PROPAGANDA FIDE
Pro Negotiis Ritus Orientalis I. Epistolae Circulares ad locorum Ordinarios Latini
RlTUS^ DE NON PERMITTENDIS OrIENTALIBUS ELEEMOSY- NARUM EMENDICATIONIBUS ABSQUE VeNIA EIUSDEM S. CONGREGATIONIS.
Illme ac Rme Domine,
Sacrae huic Congregationi de Propaganda Fide pro Nego- tiis Rituum Orientalium persaepe recursum habent clarissimi Viri in ecclesiastica dignitate et iurisdictione constituti, sive Ordinarii, sive apostolicae Sedis Delegati, sive alii, a suprema Auctoritate remedium flagitantes contra impro'bandam agendi rationem quorumdam ad ritum Orientalem pertinentium, qui hac et iliac, per Europae et Americae praesertim regiones, cursitant ad eleemosynas colligendas, quaesito colore vel prae- textu propriae missionis necessitates sublevandi.
Huiusmodi viri pecuniam colligentes, qui fere semper ad clerum orientalem catholicum se pertinere dictitant, et quan- doque etiam vestium ornamenta et titulos ecclesiasticarum praeseferunt dignitatum, exhibent documenta Unguis et cha- racteribus in Occidente parum cognitis conscripta, et sigillis variis munita, quae ipsi asserunt a Praelatis, vel etiam a Patriarchis orientalibus prodire, et fidem facere de viri ea ex- hibentis honestate, et de necessitate eleemosynarum ad con- struendas vel reparandas ecclesias, ad scholas vel nosocomia aedificanda et sustentanda, ad orphanos alendos, aut populos clade vel fame perculsos adiuvandos, vel ad aliud pium opus promovendum.
Persaepe autem accidit documenta allata apocrypha esse, virum ipsum sic emendicantem fraudulenter dignitatem et in- signia ecclesiastica iactare et gerere (quae etiamsi constarent vere concessa a suis Patriarchis, tamen gestari non possent nisi intra limites territorialis iurisdictionis concedentis) ; quando- que etiam nee sacerdotio insignitum nee ad Ordines Sacros promotum esse: quinimo compertum est aliquando mendi- cantem non solum schismaticum sed et infidelem esse.
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Saepe etiam scopus ad eleemosynas captandas allatus fictus omnino deprehenditur; et generatim pecunia collecta in bonum privatum personale ipsius cedit, absque ullo beneficio vel leva- mine orientalium fidelium aut praedictorum operum.
Quam perniciosa sit et turpis haec agendi ratio, nemo est qui non videat ; nam bona fides et pietas catholicorum decipitur et fraudatur, Orientis gentibus et ecclesiis dedecus affertur, laeditur iustitia, et catholicum nomen non levem iacturam patitur.
Quapropter sacra haec Congregatio et ipsi summi Romani Pontifices semper conati sunt ut hi graves abusus fraudulentae emendicationis amoverentur, uti constat ex litteris Innocentii XI datis mense ianuario 1677, Clementis XII diei 26 martii 1736, et ceteris omissis, ex monitione ad apostolicae Sedis Nuntios anni 1875.
Cum autem temporis decursu, dispositiones et monita a su- prema Auctoritate lata in oblivionem decidisse videantur, Sedes apostolica etiam nuperrime rogata fuit, ut denuo supra memoratos abusus compesceret.
Attenta itaque hodierna itinerum facilitate, visum est non solum praeteritas de hac re dispositiones confirmare, sed etiam haec quae sequuntur statuere :
I. Ordinarii in sua dioecesi nullum Orientalem admittant pecuniae collectorem cuiusvis Ordinis vel dignitatis ecclesias- ticae, etiamsi exhibeat authentica documenta quolibet idiomate exarata et sigillis munita, nisi authenticum ac recens praebeat Rescriptum sacrae huius Congregationis, quo facultas eidem fit, tum a propria dioecesi discedendi, tum eleemosynos colli- gendi.
II. Quod si, neglectis hisce apostolicae Sedis mandatis, ali- quis Ori en talis ecclesiasticus vir, etiamsi commendatitiis Prae* lati sui literis munitus, Europam, Americam vel alias peragret regiones ad eleemosynas coUigendas; Ordinarius loci in quo versatur, eumdem moneat de vetita emendicatione, eumque non admittat ad Missae celebrationem nee ad aliorum eccle- siasticorum munerum exercitium.
III. Si autem pervicacem se prodat, Ordinarius, etiam per publicas ephemerides, clerum et fideles moneat huiusmodi pecuniae quaestus ut illicitos et reprobatos habendos esse.
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IV. Demum, si aliquod dubium oriatur, Ordinarii ad hanc sacram Congregationem referant, quae opportune providebit. Contrariis quibuscumque minime obstantibus. Datum Romae ex aedibus S. Congregationis de Propaganda Fide pro Negotiis Ritus Orientalis, die i ianuarii anni 191 2. Fr. H. M. Card. Gotti, Praefectus.
HiERONYMUS Roller:, a Secretis.
II.
LiTTERAE CiRCULARES AD SUPERIORES GeNERALES InSTITU-
TORUM Religiosorum Latini Ritus, de modo tenendo
ANTEQUAM OrIENTALES IN EORUM SODALITATES
admittantur.
Reverendissime Pater,
Per apostolicas Litteras Orientalium dignitas Ecclesiarum, datas pridie calendas decembres anni 1894, Leo f. r. PP. XIII quoad ingressum Orientalium in religiosas latinas Sodali- tates praecepit: " NuUi utriusvis sexus, Ordini vel Instituto religioso latini ritus, quempiam Oriental em inter sodales suos fas erit recipere qui proprii Ordinarii testimoniales litteras non ante exhibuerit."
Sapientissime quidem id cautum est, ut hac in re, et auctori- tati Episcoporum, uti par est, deferetur, et una simul prae- dictorum Ordinum bono prospiceretur, eisdem fide dignum documentum suppeditando de postulantium vita et moribus.
Ast per memoratam praescriptionem derogatum non fuit dispositionibus iampridem statutis, ac praesertim in generali Conventu sacrae huius Congregationis habito die la lunii anni 1885, quibus praecipitur in singulis casibus recursus ad apo- stolicam Sedem, seu ad S. Congregationem de Propaganda Fide pro Negotiis Ritus Orientalis, ad quam etiam pertinet facultatem tribuere ritum mutandi vel ad tempus, vel in per- petuum.
lamvero, cum postremis hisce temporibus compertum sit, non semel Orientales in religiosa Instituta latini ritus receptos fuisse cum testimonialibus quidem litteris Ordinarii orientalis, sed inconsulta prorsus apostolica Sede; sacra haec Congregatio opportunum ducit Superiorum omnium, Institutis religiosis latini ritus, cuiuscumque formae ac utriusvis sexus, praeposi-
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torum, in mentem revocare obligationem qua tenentur, consu- lendi nempe in scriptis sacram hanc Congregationem antequam inter sodales suos aliquis Orientalis cooptetur.
Porro in supplici libello casus perspicue proponendus est cum omnibus suis adiunctis; et exprimi non solum debent nomen, agnomen, aetas, ritus et dioecesis postulantis, sed, si de viro agatur, praecipue explicandum est utrum admitti pos- tulet in Institutum votorum solemnium vel simplicium, et an pro statu clericali vel laicali; nam pontificium Rescriptum, si favorabile sit, diversimode conceditur pro diversitate casuum.
Interim Deum precor ut te diutissime sospitet
Romae, die 15 iunii 191 2.
Tuus, Reverendissime Pater,
Addictissimus Fr. H. M. Card. Gotti^ Praefectus,
HiERONYMUS ROLLERI, Secretarius.
EOMAN OUEIA.
PONTIFICAL APPOINTMENTS.
A Pontifical Brief issued through the S. Congregation " de Propaganda Fide " nominates :
/ July, igi2: The Right Rev. Daniel Mannix, president of Maynooth College, has been made Coadjutor cum jure succes- sionis of the Archbishop of Melbourne (Australia), with the title of Archbishop of Pharsala.
75 July, ipi2: The Very Rev. D. Niceta Budka, Prefect of Studies in the Archiepiscopal Seminary of Lemberg (Leo- poli) in Galizia, of the Ruthenian Rite, Bishop for the Ruth- enian Catholics in Canada, with the title of Bishop of Patara (Furnas).
8 August, ipi2: The Holy Father appoints Mgr. John Dunne, Bishop of Wilcannia, in Australia, assistant to the Pontifical throne.
Stubies anb Conferences*
OUK ANALEOTA.
The Roman Documents of the month are:
1. Pontifical Letter addressed to the Hierarchy of South America regarding the condition of the Indian tribes. The Holy Father adverts to the inhuman treatment accorded to the Indians in South America and bids the bishops cooperate in every way with the civil government for the amelioration of existing conditions. He solicits the prayers of the faithful and other charitable aid to the same end ; he directs the estab- lishment of new mission centres or stations, whither the Indians may resort for protection. He brands as a heinous crime the sale, purchase, or exchange of slaves or in any way holding them in abject servitude. He prohibits likewise the forced separation of the Indians from their wives and children; the despoiling them of their goods; transporting them to other localities as slaves; or in any way depriving them of their God-given liberty. The same condemnation extends to those who, under whatsoever pretext, counsel, abet or favor the aforesaid practices, or who teach that they are permissible under any circumstances. The violation of the above injunc- tions involves ecclesiastical censure reserved to the Ordinaries.
2. " Motu Proprio " concerning Catholic immigrants. On account of the increasing emigration of Catholics to foreign lands, entailing frequently danger to their faith and morals, a new department has been established in the Congregation of the Consistory to direct the spiritual care of immigrants. It will be the duty of this section to ascertain and provide for immigrants of the Latin Rite whatever may be necessary to better conditions, in matters that relate to the salvation of souls. The jurisdiction of the Propaganda over Oriental im- migrants remains as heretofore. Immigrant priests will be under the exclusive jurisdiction of the Propaganda. Accord- ingly the rulings of the Sacred Congregation of the Council in this matter are revoked.
S. Congregation of Rites: i. Determines the manner of concluding Matins and beginning Lauds in the Offices of the Triduum of Holy Week and of the Dead.
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2. Decides that, in chanting the Lessons, Versicles, and the portions of Psalm verses marked by an asterisk, whenever a monosyllable or a Hebrew word occurs at the end, it is per- missible to alter the cadence, or to retain the customary mode of chanting.
3. Instructs Ordinaries and Superiors of Religious Orders and Communities that for the future, when asking permission to give up their special calendars and to use the general cal- endar of the Church, adding to it only those Feasts which can be called proper in the strict sense as laid down in the Apo- stolic Constitution " Divino Afflatu " and in the New Rubrics (Tit. II, num. 2, litt. e.), they will send with their requests the list of added Feasts, stating why they are proper.
S. Congregation of Consistory: i. Publishes a circular letter instructing the Bishops of Italy regarding the course of studies and discipline in theological seminaries.
2. Decree on the exclusion of a number of Biblical works from seminaries.
3. Decides that the decree " Maxima cura " applies in Aus- tralia.
Holy Office (Section of Indulgences) nullifies all con- cessions which permit the attaching of the indulgences of the Stations of the Cross to devotions other than the prayers to be said before a crucifix blessed by a member of the Fran- ciscan Order for that purpose.
S. Congregation of Propaganda issues two circular let- ters: I. The first is addressed to the Ordinaries of the Latin Rite and adds the following regulations to those already in force regarding Orientals who shall make collecting tours :
a. Ordinaries are not to admit them into their dioceses with- out a rescript from this Congregation authorizing them to leave their own countries for the purpose of collecting alms, no matter what other documents they present.
b. If it happen that a collector of this kind has overlooked the present order and visits Europe, America, or elsewhere, for contributions, the bishop of the place in which he happens to be will warn him that his collecting is forbidden and will not allow him to say Mass, nor admit him to the exercise of any ecclesiastical function.
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c. Should the person thus warned fail to heed the admoni- tion, the Ordinary will duly notify his clergy and people that the canvass for funds in the case is illicit.
d. In cases of doubt the bishop, before giving his approval, will consult the S. Congregation for direction.
2. To Superior Generals of Religious Orders and Commu- nities of the Latin Rite, reminding them of their strict obli- gation to consult the Propaganda in writing before admitting any one of the Oriental Rite to membership. Testimonial letters from the Ordinary of the applicant will not suffice. Further, in having this recourse, each case is to be set forth clearly and in all its circumstances. The name, surname, age, rite, and diocese of the candidate must be given. In case the candidate is a man, it is to be stated whether the community he desires to enter is one of solemn or of simple vows, and whether he aspires to be a priest or a lay brother.
Roman Curia gives list of recent pontifical appointments.
SIXTEENTH OENTENAET OF THE PEOOLAMATION OP OHEISTIAN LIBERTY. (313-1913.)
In connexion with the article, in the earlier pages of this number, on Constantine's Proclamation of Religious Liberty, it is pertinent to publish the following documents :
I.
Rome, Palazzo Altemps, 8 Via S. Apollinare, 3 May^ 191 2. Sir, The President of the Supreme Council appointed by His Holiness Pius X, in a letter of His Eminence the Cardinal Secretary of State, dated 24 January, 191 2, for the celebration of the Centenary Festival of the proclamation of the peace of the Church, has sent to all the Bishops, Vicars and Prefects Apostolic of the Catholic world a circular and a program of the festivities which the Supreme Council proposes to carry out in the year 191 3, in which the sixteenth Centenary of the Edict of Constantine occurs.
The undersigned has, therefore, the honour of sending you herewith this program, so that you may publish it in your
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paper or periodical, and give it the widest possible diffusion among Catholics, to invite them to take part in this solemn centennial celebration, wliich, according to the express desire of the Holy Father, should prove a world-wide manifestation of faith.
At the same time you are earnestly requested to report in your publication from the Osservatore Romano the communi- cations made to it by this Supreme Council, to make known the progress of the work. Yours, etc.
MARIO Prince CHIGI, President.
Prof. Orazio Marucchi, General Secretary.
II.
Letter of H. E. Cardinal Raphael Merry Del Val, Sec- retary OF State to His Holiness, to H. E. Cardinal F. Di Paola Cassetta, Bishop of Frascati.
Most Eminent and Most Rev. Lord,
It was to be expected that the Head Association of the Holy Cross and the Society for rendering Honour to the Christian Martyrs should take the initiative in a solemn and universal commemoration of the Sixteenth Centenary of the Edict of Constantine, by which the Church at last obtained official re- cognition and that liberty and peace of which the price was the Cross of Christ and the blood of the Christian Martyrs. The Holy Father has learnt of this initiative with lively satisfac- tion, and is much pleased that on the eve of such a memor- able date the happy idea has arisen of inviting all the Catho- lics of the world to celebrate a fact which, preceded by the glorious victory of Constantine over Maxentius, marked for the Church the first of those triumphs, numerous as its per- secutions, that have accompanied it in its career and will ac- company it till the end of time.
In order that these festivities may be worthy of the great event which it is proposed to commemorate after a lapse of sixteen centuries. His Holiness desires to entrust the program and its execution to a Supreme Council, of which He calls to
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form part, excellent Catholics, well known for their sincere faith, their zeal and activity, and assigns to them the different offices as follow :
Honorary President: H. Exc. Prince D. Marcantonio COLONNA.
President: H. Exc. Prince D. Mario Chigi.
Vice-Presidents: Count ViNCENZO Macchi, Mgr. LoHN- INGER, Mgr. Anthony De Waal.
Ecclesiastical Assistant: Mgr. Vincenzo Bianchi- Cagliesi.
Treasurer: Cav. Camillo Serafini.
General Secretary: Comm. Prof. Orazio Marucchi.
Secretaries: AuGUSTO Bevignani, for the Italian language; Cav. Dr. Pio Pagliucchi, for the Italian language; The V. Rev. Emmanuel Bailly, for the French language; Mgr. John Prior, for the English language; The Rev. Dr. John Jedin, for the German language; The V. Rev. Joachim ViVES Y TUTO^ O.M.C., for the Spanish language.
The August Pontiff entrusts the high protection of this Council to Your Eminence, well knowing that if the activity of its members is displayed under the wise guidance of Y. E.. the solemn commemoration of the Victory of the Cross will prove what His Holiness desires it to be a solemn manifesta- tion of faith and a warm appeal to all Catholics to draw nearer to this August Sign, in which is salvation for all, life and the hope of a glorious resurrection.
Lastly, while I beg Y. E. to make known to the aforesaid persons this gracious act of the Pontifical consideration, I communicate to you the Apostolic Penediction which the Holy Father gives them from His heart, and above all to Y. E.. in token of His fatherly benevolence.
With feelings of profound veneration, I most humbly kiss Your Eminence's hands and have much pleasure in signing myself
Your Eminence's most humble and most devoted servant,
R. Card. Merry del Val.
Rome, 24 January, 1912.
H. E. Cardinal Francis di Paola Cassetta, Bishop of Frascati.
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III.
Centenary Festival of the Proclamation of the Peace OF THE Church (313-1913).
the supreme council. Program.
The year 191 3 brings the sixteenth centenary of the grant- ing of freedom and peace to the Church, through the official recognition of Christianity and of the essential rights of Christian society, proclaimed by the Emperor Constantine in the Edict of Milan in the spring of the year 313.
This great fact, which followed closely the glorious victory won by Constantine over Maxentius under the walls of Rome on the 28 October, 312, has a weight and a meaning of the highest import in history and calls for a special commemora- tion in our own days. It changed the fortunes of the world, and in its centennial celebration all the nations should rejoice, for to Christianity they owe their highest glories, their chief progress in material and moral welfare, and generally their advance in civilization. Catholic nations have special reasons for joy in this commemoration, and above all Italy, which more than all the others felt the beneficent influence of the new civilization in religion, manners and customs, sciences, literature and the fine arts. And among all the cities of Italy, Rome has its own peculiar grounds for exultation, as this seat of the Successors of St. Peter shone with a new glory, and shed the light of its supremacy, of faith, of justice, and of charity over the whole civilized world.
Under the inspiration of these lofty ideas and noble sen- timents, two Roman Associations — the Head Association of the Holy Cross and the Society for rendering Honour to the Christian Martyrs — have initiated a movement to make a solemn commemoration in the year 191 3 of the great event of the year 313, which in its importance reaches far beyond the bounds of individual nations and belongs to the world's history.
The chief lines of the program which the Supreme Council appointed by the Pope intends, with the aid of local Com- mittees, to carry out, are the following :
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1. The erection of a sacred monument near the Milvian Bridge, where the Emperor Constantine defeated Maxentius, which will serve as a memorial of glorious deeds to future generations, and at the same time minister to the spiritual needs of the population in that new quarter.
2. The promotion in Italy and elsewhere of solemn acts of thanksgiving to God, and of special festivities, together with publications, learned as well as popular, so that all may know the importance of the great religious and historical fact that is being commemorated.
All Catholics, therefore, are invited to take part in this celebration, through the constitution of local Committees under the direction of their own Bishops, and in touch with the Supreme Council of Rome, so that everywhere there may be a common commemoration of so great an event in the manner best suited to each individual place.
A remembrance of this first triumph of the Church and of the liberty and true peace brought by Jesus Christ to the world with the conquering sign of the Cross, is all the more opportune in the times in which we live, that the powers of darkness are waging fierce war on all sides against the Chris- tian Religion, with tendencies and insinuations of a return to paganism.
The Cross of Christ was the banner under which were pro- claimed those principles that freed mankind from the shame- ful yoke of idolatry and from the barbarism of slavery, taught the true equality and brotherhood of men, raised woman to her noble mission in life, and gave rise to the marvelous for- mation of the nations, which, by virtue of the supernatural principles of Christianity they embraced, have for so many centuries been the safeguard of human society and the bul- wark of true civilization.
This solemn commemoration of the victory of the Cross should also be the expression of our heartfelt prayer that under this glorious sign all men may join with us in the pro- fession of the true faith, of sincere and ardent love toward the Divine Redeemer of souls, and that all may be united as brothers in that Christian charity which is the best pledge of
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enduring peace and the source of moral and material well- being.
The President MARIO Prince CHIGI.
The General Secretary ORAZIO MARUCCHI. Rome, 1st of March, 191 2.
THE NEW DEOEEE ON MIXED MAERIAGES.
Quite recently sensational reports were published in the secular journals to the effect that the ante-nuptial promises or cautiones required for the marriages between Catholics and non- Catholics were abolished by a decree of the Church. It does not enter into the purpose of the present article to refer to the grave guilt of causing or of immediately cooperating in the publication of such a false and mischievous statement. We are concerned rather with ascertaining the true interpre- tation of a decree which has been so grossly misunderstood as to produce the impression that the obligation of the ante- nuptial promises has been in any respect relaxed.
The decree to which reference is here made was issued by the Congregation of the Holy Office, 21 June of the present year. On the same date two other decrees were issued by this Congregation on the subject of marriage; but of these we shall have occasion to speak incidentally later on in the course of this paper. The decree whose scope and meaning we propose now to examine is entitled — " De Parochi Adsistentia Matri- moniis Mixtis in quibus praescriptae Cautiones a Contra- hentibus pervicaciter detrectantur." The Decree itself, like many other decrees of the Holy See, consists of two portions. One is expository in which is set forth the occasion for issuing the decree ; the other is statutory, expressing what the S. Con- gregation prescribes. It is obvious that the statutory portion of a decree is of greater import since it contains the legisla- tion enacted by the Congregation, although the expository or explanatory portion is not without utility. For the sake of brevity we shall quote only the statutory or legislative por- tion: " Praescriptionem Decreti Ne temere, n. IV,. 3, de requi- rendo per parochum excipiendoque, ad validitatem matrimonii,
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nupturientium consensu, in matrimoniis mixtis in quibus de- bitas cautiones exhibere pervicaciter partes renuant, locum posthac non habere; sed standum taxative praecedentibus Sanctae Sedis ac praesertim s. m. Gregorii PP. XVI (Litt. app. diei 30 Aprilis 1841 ad Episcopos Hungariae) ad rem concessionibus et instructionibus : facto verbo cum Ssmo." This quotation may be with substantial correctness translated as follows: The prescriptive clause in art. 4, n. 3 of the Ne temere Decree requiring that the pastor should for the validity of the marriage ask and receive the matrimonial consent of the contracting parties, does not hold henceforth for mixed marriages in which the parties obstinately refuse to present the necessary cautiones; but we are to stand strictly by the previous concessions and instructions given in the matter by the Holy See, and in particular by those of Gregory XVI in his Apostolic Letter to the Bishops of Hungary, 30 April, 1841.
There are two statements made in the words quoted, one of which is a modification of a particular clause of the Ne temere; the other expresses a rule of action to be followed henceforward. Each may be considered separately.
What is the modification introduced? Previous to the de- cree Ne temere it was sufficient, so far as the impediment of clandestinity was concerned, that the parish priest and two witnesses be present when the contracting parties expressed matrimonial consent. Let us suppose, for example, that a man and a woman went before their pastor and two others who could give testimony of the expression of matrimonial con- sent; and suppose that those parties wishing to contract mar- riage and having no impediment which would render their marriage invalid, expressed or manifested their matrimonial consent in the presence of the parish priest and two witnesses. As soon as this expression of consent was thus given, a valid marriage was contracted, even though the parish priest did not say a word or even though he declared most positively his unwillingness for the marriage to be contracted. These marriages (surprise marriages, as they were called) did some- times occur in Europe and were valid, since the law of clan- destinity only required that the contracting parties, otherwise free from matrimonial impediment, express consent to become
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husband and wife in the presence of the parish priest and wit- nesses. It is not difficult to understand how such surprise marriages, even though valid, might lead to abuses. Now to obviate this evil, the Holy See in the Ne temere introduced a clause whereby for the validity of a marriage it became nec- essary for the parish priest or his delegate to ask and accept the matrimonial consent of the parties wishing to contract marriage ; otherwise the marriage would be invalid. Accord- ing to this legislation it would be useless for parties to come before the pastor and witnesses to express matrimonial con- sent ; for if they did so without the pastor asking and accept- ing this consent, there would be no real marriage at all.
Now the new decree of the Holy Office quoted above pro- duces a certain modification, so that it is now possible to have a marriage valid without the pastor demanding and accepting the matrimonial consent of the contracting parties. The only case in which this could arise is mentioned in the decree itself. When a mixed marriage is contracted, in which the parties maliciously refuse to make the required cautiones or promises, the omission on the part of the pastor in asking and accepting the matrimonial consent of the contracting parties will not invalidate the marriage. When we say a mixed marriage we use the term in the sense in which mixtum matrimonium is used in the decree of the Holy Office, viz., to signify solely a marriage between a Catholic and a baptized non-Catholic. When the Holy Office has occasion to treat of marriages be- tween Catholics and unbaptized persons, it does not employ the expression, mixtum matrimonium, as may be seen from the two decrees on marriage issued by that Congregation on the same date as the decree under discussion.^ When then a marriage is attempted to be contracted between a Catholic and a baptized non-Catholic, the cautiones being obstinately re- fused, the omission on the part of the pastor to demand and accept the matrimonial consent of the intending contracting parties will not render the marriage invalid. There is no reference, as has been said, in this decree to a marriage be- tween a Catholic and unbaptized person. Hence if these parties after procuring the necessary dispensation in disparitas
1 Cf. EccLES. Review, Sept., 1912, pp. 330-1.
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cultus were to contract marriage without the pastor requiring and accepting the matrimonial consent, the marriage would be null and void. Similarly, of course, if two Catholics were to contract marriage without this action of the officiating pas- tor, the marriage would be invalid. The reason in both cases is that it is only when there is question of a mixtum matri- monium, in which one of the parties is a Catholic, and the other is a baptized non-Catholic, that the decree modifies the Ne temere. This is evident from the very words in which the modification is expressed in the decree, and no comment is needed.
A question of some importance may here be considered. What application has this modifying clause of the decree to the United States? Speculatively, it applies to this country as it does to the whole Latin Church; practically it effects here no change whatever. Notice the distinction. The omis- sion of the pastor to ask and accept the matrimonial consent does not now invalidate the marriage which is attempted to be contracted between a Catholic and a baptized non- Catholic, refusing the cautiones, just as that omission would not have invalidated such a marriage or indeed any marriage eight years ago, before the Ne temere was introduced. In other words, so far as a mixed marriage is concerned, we return to the condition of things existing before the Ne temere from the time of the Council of Trent.
In order to judge how far the modification above referred to will have any appreciable application in the United States, let us take a concrete case. Let us suppose that two persons, a Catholic and a baptized non-Catholic refusing to present the cautiones, want to get married by a priest. In the various States of the Union civil licenses are required for the cele- bration of marriage, and the officiating minister, priest or any other officer recognized by the State, is required to sign a certificate of the marriage at which he officiated. Now if such parties come before a priest to get married and refuse to make the cautiones, the priest will refuse to marry them, as he is strictly bound to refuse, and as he has been always in this country bound to do so. When the priest refuses to perform the marriage ceremony, he will also of course refuse to give any certificate of marriage, and the parties will have con-
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tracted no legal marriage by appearing before him. When it is known that they contract no legal marriage before the priest without his consent, they will surely not ask him to officiate, aware of the answer they must receive. It is there- fore evident that the first clause of the decree has no practical application to mixed marriages in the United States. Still the point will become, if possible, still clearer when we come to examine the second clause of the decree, which we now pro- ceed to do.
The second clause prescribes the regulation to be followed in mixed marriages when the contracting parties obstinately refuse to make the required promises. This regulation de- mands strict conformity with previous concessions and in- structions of the Holy See, in particular of Gregory XVI to the Bishops of Hungary in 1 841 : " Standum taxative prae- cedentibus Sanctae Sedis ac praesertim s. m. Gregorii PP. XVI Litt. app. diei 30 Aprilis — ad rem concessionibus et in- structionibus." We have carefully examined the Apostolic Letter of Gregory XVI referred to in the decree. It may be found in the Collectanea de Prop. Fide, n. 1428. It is clear from this document that the Roman Pontiff gave permission to the Bishops of Hungary for what is called material pres- ence of the pastor at a mixed marriage under certain circum- stances. In this Letter the Sovereign Pontiff mentions that through the dioceses of the kingdom of Hungary an abuse had commonly existed under which without any dispensation of the Church or previous cautiones marriages were performed with blessing and sacred rites by Catholic pastors. Then, after bewailing such a condition in which the most lamentable indifferentism in religion had prevailed through Hungary, His Holiness testifies to the consolation he received from the knowledge that the Bishops were striving to correct these abuses and that the rest of the clergy were carrying out the admonitions of their Bishops for that purpose. In the same letter His Holiness tells the Bishops that He could not avoid considering the exposition of the very grave difficulties indi- cated in their Letter to Him, difficulties on account of which they deemed themselves almost compelled to tolerate the practice, viz., that when a Catholic persists in the .attempt to contract a mixed marriage without the necessary cautiones
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and when the matter cannot be prevented without greater evil to religion, the pastor might assist passively, abstaining from all religious rite and from every sign of approval. The Pope then declares that on account of the calamitous circumstances of the country he permits the Bishops of Hungary to follow that course, and gives them the following direction : '* Siqui- dem igitur, Venerabiles Fratres, in Regni istius dioecesibus ex temporum, locorum, ac personarum conditione quandoque con- tingat, ut matrimonium acatholici viri cum Catholica muliere et vicissim, deficientibus licet Cautionibus ab Ecclesia prae- scriptis, absque majoris mali scandalique periculo, in reli- gionis perniciem interverti omnino non possit, simulque (ver- bis utimir gloriosae memoriae Pii VII in supranunciata epis- tola ad Archiep. Maguntinum) in Ecclesiae utilitatem et com- mune bonum vergere posse dignoscatur, si hujusmodi nuptiae quantumlibet vetitae et illicitae, coram Catholico parocho potius quam coram ministro haeretico, ad quem partes facile confugerent, celebrentur: tunc parochus Catholicus aliusve sacerdos ejus vice fungens poterit iisdem nuptiis materiali tan- tum praesentia, excluso quovis ecclesiastico ritu, adesse," etc.
Now it should be carefully noticed that Gregory XVI granted this permission to the Bishops of Hungary only in those circumstances in which the conditions expressed in the words quoted are found to be fulfilled. It should be also noted that the decree of the Holy Office we are examining does not give authority to the Bishops of other countries to permit the material presence of the pastor, when the circum- stances of such countries do not demand it. The word taxa- tive limits the faculties of the Ordinaries of those places to which it was formerly granted under most grave circum- stances ; or at least this faculty is not extended to any country not situated in the same sad conditions as Hungary in 1841.
Some light may be thrown upon the concession made by Gregory XVI to the Hungarian Bishops and upon the proper interpretation of the decree of the Holy Office referring to that concession, if we consult canonists and theologians who treat the question of that concession. Thus Gasparri, now a Cardinal, in his work De Matrimonio, Vol. i, n. 447, lays down the following practical regulation : " Caeterum etiam in his locis pro quibus istiusmodi declarationes a S. Sede datae
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sunt, parochus in praedictis casibus, antequam matrimonio mere passive assistat, consulat Ordinarium. Quod si prae- dicti casus occurrant in locis pro quibus S. Sedes declarationem non edidit, Ordinarius parocho assistentiam mere passivam non permittat, sed si tempus est, recurrat ad S. Sedem." Ac- cordingly, in those places from which passive assistance was permitted, the pastor was bound to consult the Ordinary ; while in places for which no concession of this kind was made by the Holy See, the Ordinary was not to permit passive assist- ance, but refer the case, if there was time, to the Holy See.
There is another writer, whose authority, especially in ques- tions relating to the United States, is of great weight, the late Fr. Putzer. In his commentary upon the Apostolic Faculties this author holds the same view as Cardinal Gasparri : "Si praedicti casus occurrant in locis, pro quibus S. Sedes dec- larationem non edidit, Ordinarius priusquam parocho assisten- tiam permittat, si tempus est, recurrat ad S. Sedem " (n. 219). Any one who takes the trouble will find other standard canon- ists and theologians holding the same opinion.
What then is to be held regarding the second clause of the decree quoted above? I. It is quite certain that a pastor could not render passive assistance at a marriage in which the cau- tiones are refused, without consulting his Ordinary. 2. It is beyond doubt that the Bishops of the United States have never asked for their dioceses any such concession as the one made to the Bishops of Hungary; it is equally beyond doubt that the Holy See has never made this concession to the United States; nor has the situation in the United States ever been such as moved Gregory XVI to grant to the Bishops of Hun- gary a toleration for passive assistance of the pastor without the required cautiones. 3. There is nothing in the new decree of the Holy Office which affords any grounds for the notion circulated in secular papers, viz., that by that decree the cau- tiones previously required for marriages between Catholics and non- Catholics were set aside.
Relative to this last point it must be maintained that the obligation of the cautiones or ante-nuptial promises is as grave now as it ever was; nay more, that it rests upon the natural and divine law, in which the Church herself cannot dispense. This latter statement, besides being the common opinion of
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theologians and canonists, is proved from various documents of the Roman Pontiffs. We may take, for example, the Apo- stolic Letter of Gregory XVI, in which he says : " Quae certe cautiones in ipsa divina et naturali lege fundantur, in quam procul dubio gravissime peccat quisquis se vel futuram sobolem perversionis periculo temere committit." The celebrated In- struction of the Holy See, 15 November, 1858, addressed to all the Bishops of the Church, referring to mixta matrimonia and the cautiones absolutely required to obtain a dispensation for such marriages, says: "Quae quidem cautiones remitti, seu dispensari nunquam possunt, cum ipsa naturali ac divina lege fundentur." We may here add what the Third Plenary Coun- cil of Baltimore (n. 120) declares: " Hinc fit ut quando de impedimento mixtae religionis agitur, Ecclesia sine gravi causa et absque promissione adhibendi Cautiones, quibus peri- culum pro parte Catholica et prole fiat remotum, nunquam dispenset." Hence there is no foundation for the statement that the ante-nuptial promises or cautiones are abolished; indeed this proposition is deserving of theological censure; it is at least temerarious ; and the S. Congregation of the In- dex would have no hesitation in condemning the newspaper or other publication defending it.
At the close of the paragraph containing the statutory part of the decree upon which we have been commenting, there are four words added, " Facto verbo cum Ssmo." These words are not found in every decree issued by a Roman Congrega- tion. In fact comparatively few decrees have this adjunct. The clause indicates that, if the Congregation should not have authority for issuing a decree upon a particular matter which might be outside its proper province, the Sovereign Pontiff confers by special act the requisite authority. The clause is employed whenever the decree certainly derogates from some law still existing, or exceeds the faculty habitually possessed by the Congregation; it is likewise used whenever it is doubtful whether the decree is opposed to some law or exceeds the faculty of the Congregation issuing it. The de- cree Ne temere had been enacted by another S. Congregation, that of the Council ; and before attempting to modify even in the slightest particular that decree, the S. Congregation of the Holy Office consulted the Roman Pontiff.
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From the exposition of the decree given above it is not diffi- cult to understand its purport and to perceive that it produces no practical change in the United States. What effects it may produce in some European dioceses is outside our pres- ent discussion.
When the popular excitement was at its highest regarding the meaning of the new enactment, the Archbishop of St. Louis was interviewed by some newspaper. The published reply was : " There are no changes whatever in the Ne temere decree concerning mixed marriages. Ante-nuptial promises will continue to be made. All announcements to the contrary are misleading and untrue, and particularly unfortunate, as they render even more difficult the enforcement of the law." His Grace's reply, it is superfluous to say, was entirely correct. He was speaking of the meaning and application of the decree in regard to the United States. Indeed the first part of the reply was the only one that could have been safely given to the public, since it would have been worse than useless — it would have been pernicious — to draw attention to a slight modification of the Ne temere which had no practical relation to this country, and which would have been misinterpreted to signify some relaxation of the cautiones. The other part of his answer was not only accurate like the preceding, but it was of immense importance for arresting the publication of false interpretations of the decree.
Here it may not be devoid of interest or utility to notice an objection which perhaps might be made to a statement given above, viz. that the cautiones for mixed marriages are strictly obligatory by natural law and that the Church has no power to dispense in these cautiones. It is to be remembered, although already familiar to most of the clergy, that this strict obligation regards a marriage to be contracted, matrimonium contrahendum, not a marriage already contracted, though in- validly. For instance, a Catholic and a baptized non-Catholic were married three or four years ago before a Protestant min- ister or a civil magistrate, and therefore invalidly, since the Ne temere decree, which came into effect in 1908, required for the validity of the marriage the presence of the pastor or his delegate. Let us suppose that the unfortunate Catholic con- sort, realizing his or her condition of concubinage, begins to
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repent and has recourse to the pastor. The non-Catholic agrees to renew matrimonial consent before the pastor and witnesses, but refuses to make any engagement regarding the Catholic training of the children already born or to be born. The grave circumstances of the case, e. g. the difficulty or im- possibility of separating the Catholic from the non- Catholic party, the impossibility of procuring subsistence for the chil- dren in the event of separation, etc., may form a sufficient reason justifying the revalidation of the marriage, even though the cautiones be not made. It is not that the Church attempts to dispense in the natural law, but the natural law which always prescribes the cautiones in a matrimonium contrahendum does not on account of altered circumstances always prescribe them in a matrimonium contractum. Hence the possibility of reval- idation without the cautiones of the non- Catholic party in no manner conflicts with the universal obligation sub gravi of securing the cautiones when there is question of a matrimonium contrahendum.
Enough perhaps has been said in this article to show that the new decree of the Holy Office neither expresses nor insinu- ates anything which would make mixed marriages to be more easily contracted henceforth than heretofore. The Church has always detested mixed marriages, as we know on the best authority, and must always detest them ; and there is no reason to fear that our Bishops will yield one iota in the law demand- ing the cautiones for mixed marriages. It would be an evil day for the Catholic Church in America to have that law weakened by non-observance. Although the law be now ob- served in this country, as it has always been, there is reason to fear that through the pagan notions about marriage preva- lent among non- Catholics, the cautiones are not always ser- iously made by the non- Catholic contracting party. To-day, as everyone knows, the civil courts all over the land attempt to dissolve the matrimonial bond so that the non- Catholic usually thinks that the bond of matrimony can be really broken. He makes the ante-nuptial promises in order to eff"ect a union with a Catholic, having the appearance of a marriage; and he intends to make a contract which he wishes to last just until circumstances render it convenient for him to procure a civil divorce. It belongs to the essence of matri-
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mony that there be a consensus matrimonialis such as God or- dained to be requisite for the validity of the contract. One of the essential properties of marriage as divinely instituted is that the bond cannot be dissolved. Hence if the non- Cath- olic party intended to make a contract whose bond he would hold himself free to determine, there would be no real mar- riage at all — only concubinage. Accordingly to secure a valid marriage between a Catholic and a non- Catholic, the latter should understand that there is no true marriage without in- terior consent to an indissoluble union, since this consent is di- vinely required for a valid marriage. There is much ground for fearing that a large proportion of the marriages between Catholics and non- Catholics are invalid from a defect of the essential consent. It is on this account chiefly that some Bishops have made regulations prescribing that before dis- pensations can be granted for the marriage of Catholics with non- Catholics, the latter should previously undergo a course of instruction. Whenever such a method is feasible, it seems to be an excellent means of securing the validity of the mar- riage. Some months ago there was an able article in the pages of this Review, showing the good results of requir- ing an interval for the instruction of the non- Catholic before contracting marriage with a Catholic. Apart from the consid- eration of procuring converts, which of itself alone is a matter of the highest moment, there is the other reason that an op- portunity is given to instruct the non- Catholic in the essentials of marriage so as to guard against its invalidity through a defect in the necessary consent.
In the foregoing article we have given what we consider the true meaning of the decree, and we can find no ground for the interpretation given to it by a certain Catholic journal edited by a priest. Let the reader judge for himself from the following extracts : " By this latest decree the requirements of the Ne temere regarding the ante-nuptial promises are abro- gated. Now in cases where the Protestant party stubbornly refuses to sign the promises the priest may go on and marry the parties to avoid the greater evil of an invalid marriage or a marriage before a heretical minister. This is a sweep- ing enactment, and in the given cases practically does away with the ante-nuptial engagements in mixed marriages." By
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the way, the author of the above statement does not appear ta have ever read the Ne temere decree, which makes no mention explicitly or implicitly of ante-nuptial promises. The poison of his statement is not, however, in the error of fact, which might be overlooked, but in the dogmatic falsehood that ante- nuptial promises are or could be abrogated. Another extract is as follows : " If the Bishops were to make the proper repre- sentations to Rome we feel sure that the provision of the Ne temere regarding the prenuptial promises would be abrogated in all marriages where one of the parties is a non- Catholic. In fact many of the Bishops would gladly see the impediment of disparity of cult abolished altogether, and we join in that sentiment." There is no comment needed for either of these statements; they are plain enough, un-Catholic enough, as well as calumnious. Quite a lengthy syllabus of errors could be easily drawn up from the articles on the decree by the same writer. But cui bono? The author of these errors may have intended no harm, and I can readily believe he did not; but harm is done by these errors independently of his intention "^ and the Church in condemning false and dangerous opinions regards the objective, not the subjective sense of the writer's words. This writer poses as the champion of Catholic doc- trine and repeatedly carps at a trifling and accidental lapsus calami of another, thinking thus to succeed in blinding the public to the most flagrant errors of his own, alike scandalous to the faithful, and disrespectful to the Hierarchy.
M. Martin, S.J. St. Louis University.
A PLEA POR OUE AGEING OLERGY.
To the Editor, The Ecclesiastical Review.
It has long been lamented among the Protestant clergy that a man past middle age is not wanted in the ministry ; but it is only of late, when, thanks to improved conditions, there is an interim in some priests' lives between full strength and death, that we see an increasing number of retired; and this even while hundreds of small places are without Mass on Sun- days, and hardly a parish that would not profit by fuller pastoral care.
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No sensible man likes to be or to see a " dog in the man- ger " ; and so when it is said : " Father So-and-so is growing^: old, and unable to do his work as formerly ", the conclusion is : " It would be well if he would retire ".
An old man has not the grip to hold the reins as tight as- before; the trouble is partly mental. " Cui bono?" he says, " to try and make water run up hill, to endeavor to make:- people good in your way." It is a thought from the devil,, but physical weakening is at the base of it.
He has at times the old enthusiasm to begin undertakings, but not the continued strength to carry them through. He becomes so tender-hearted that to oppose the sinner causes him pain. On the other hand, to shut his eyes to the evil, troubles his conscience. He has an exaggerated idea of his own responsibility for what goes wrong in the parish ; and this; may render him overcritical or cranky. Yes, he ought to retire.
And yet a priest is of all men the least fitted to carry the burden of life when he gives up his work. His education has not qualified him for anything else; his cloth almost forbids his taking up other occupation; few have even cultivated a hobby which they might continue to ride.
Nor has he the asylum of home to fly to ; the " art d'etre grandpere " which cheers the lives of so many aged men, is not for him. Retiring, he must either have laid by something or be a beggar for diocesan support; he has not even the hon- orary " half pay " of an army officer. It is not as if old ag^ made him " emeritus " : it comes almost as a disgrace.
If he is not past all capacity for work (for I am not speak- ing of those ready for the hospital and death), he must feel that he should still add the " one talent over and above ", since he is not equal to the five; that he should be allowed at least to glean in the field wherein he cannot any longer cut the larger sheaf. He feels that his retirement is an injustice to himself and a loss to souls. In some ways he could do more good than before, because he is not obliged to look far ahead to provide against the rainy days, and accordingly he need not be insistent for his salary; or he could even help the- parish by the savings from his past income.
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Must he be forced into the dilemma of either trying to keep up working beyond his strength or resigning himself to inglorious ease? I think not; and my reasons will appear in the following suggestions, which are along two lines: i. de- ferring the resigning age; 2. utilizing the retired priest.
1. The obvious thought is: (a) take an easier parish. This may be all right in some cases; but in most, where a priest has been in a parish twenty or thirty years, it breaks his heart to leave those he has loved and worked for ; and he is too old to make new friends, (b) Have an assistant. This is better. And though there are often raised objections that the parish cannot support two, that only exceptional priests can agree together, etc., I wish to say that this latter is a bogy which in most instances will be found non-existent, and is a slander on the good judgment of the old as well as on the submissiveness of the young, and on the charity of both.
(c) The third remedy will be indicated in reviewing the causes of too early retirement. A great deal is expected of an aged priest that should not be. While the parish was poor and he himself young he was willing to spend himself as fac- totum, architect, lawyer, purveyor of amusement, social leader, messenger, janitor, substitute teacher, and hardest of all — tax collector. A great deal of this should be taken off his shoulders, and it is not. Note the circumstances which caused the Apostles to abandon " ministering at the tables ". So a priest may still be fit for the real priestly work if lay- men could be got to do their part.
Again, the diocese could help a priest to lengthened use- fulness by a well-thought-out system of finance, and of paro- chial schools, etc., and by providing competent teachers would not compel each priest to make his own experience and his own mistakes, and fear the odium of enforcing diocesan rules which perhaps are not kept in the adjoining parish.
(d) A few months' rest when near nervous prostration from overwork would postpone a retirement of which the ageing priest might repent after he had regained his health.
2. When the time comes for the old man to give up his pas- torate, he must be willing to drop the command and not " in- terfere " in the young pastor's work. He must forgo money compensation for work which he cannot perform. But it
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should not be expected that he will drop interest in the saving of souls. Accordingly he should be able, without seeming to interfere in the work of the new pastor, to have his time for Mass, his hour for hearing confessions, an occasional sermon, etc. Circumstances would show other fields where he could be supplementary to the pastor. All that is necessary in both is good will and good sense. I trust that these hints may serve to keep some pastors longer as '' ben emeriti " among their people; they might then end their days as " emeriti ".
Senex.
THE OFFIOIAL OATHOLIO DIEEOTORY FOE 1913.
The difference between the official figures of the Religious Census Bureau of the United States and the Official Catholic Directory (Kenedy's), in computing the Catholic population of the United States, is sufficiently wide and important to elicit careful inquiry into the actual facts. The most reliable way of ascertaining the facts is without doubt the obtaining of authenticated statements from individual pastors of churches and from supveriors of religious communities.
We have before us this year's blanks which Messrs. Kenedy, the compilers and publishers of the Directory, are now send- ing out to the clergy, that is, to the pastors of churches, rec- tors of seminaries and colleges, superiors of religious com- munities. There are seven such blanks, each made to meet the particular requirements for information within easy reach of the parties to whom they are addressed. A polite note asking that the form be filled out and sent to the episcopal chancellor accompanies the blank. Thus the reports, if duly entered, would in every case have the approval of the diocesan authority. From the chancery they are sent to the publishers of the Directory who are thus assured of the correctness of the items, since the chancellor tias independent means of verifying the reports from the rectors. We can imagine no system more complete or reliable for ascertaining the true strength of our Catholic population. If the results are not satisfactory, the fault lies with those who are asked to make the reports, or with the chancery officials who fail to verify them. We feel quite sure that the publishers of the Directory
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are shirking neither labor nor expense to make the statistics thoroughly trustworthy and complete. It should be a matter of just pride for the clergy to do their part by supplying ac- curate and prompt information.
DEFENDING THE POLICY OF THE POPES.
Qu. Would you kindly shed some light on the following rather obscure question — How can we as Catholics defend the policy of the last three Popes expressed in the well-known prohibition " ne eletti ne elettori " ? In all other countries Catholics are urged to do their duty at the polls. It is owing to a sad neglect of this duty that we see poor France where it is. Is not this prohibition the un- doing of Italy? I confess I am at my wit's end in defending this policy and answering, as a priest ought, the criticisms of well-mean- ing people.
Resp. To defend the papal policy that prohibits participa- tion of Catholics in parliamentary elections requires full and accurate knowledge of the manner in which the so-called ple- biscite was organized by the provisional government in con- trol of the first popular vote in 1870, after the Piedmontese seizure of Rome. The facts connected with this vote are dis- cussed in such works as The Making of Italy by The O'Clery,^ who bases his statements upon information derived from Ital- ian government sources, such as official documents, despatches, and reports. The facts published by him show that the voting in Italy, under conditions as then existing, did not and could not record the suffrages of the people, though the rulers of the ballot would claim that they did. To prevent fictitious election returns, made ostensibly by the Catholic party, there was but one way to show that Catholics did not cast the vote. This is the chief reason for the original papal veto. What has transpired since then to direct the papal policy is of course best known to the Popes and their immediate advisers, and it is rather venturesome for any one not thoroughly familiar with their real motives to pass judgment upon the wisdom of their action.
That the last three Popes have measured properly the loss of Catholic influence due to abstention from the right of vot- ing needs hardly to be stated. Besides, it is not true that the
1 London : Kegan Paul, Trench, Triibner & Co. 1892.
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prohibition to vote in Italian elections is general and undis- criminating, as some suppose. Participation in the communal elections has not been interdicted. The communal elections are in fact the only open test of the will of the people; and through them a gradual awakening to duty on the part of the Italian Catholic elector is hoped for by the organizers of social action among Catholics who have been prepared to as- sert their rights. The Constitution Cerium consilium^ issued by Pius X on 1 1 July, 1905, shows that the veto is by no means an absolute one, for the Pope expressly permits parliamentary elections (and these have actually been held in certain dis- tricts) where the bishops had declared their conviction that fair play would be allowed to Catholic voters. The charge therefore of unreasonable restriction in the matter of voting is not borne out by the facts, but rests upon partial state- ments.
But even if these facts were not at hand, there appears no particular reason why we should feel bound to defend the policy, political or domestic, of the Popes. We might justly and reasonably say that we do not know, and that our ob- jectors know still less. The men who have to deal with politi- cal difficulties of that kind are apt to be best informed as to what they can and ought to do. It is wise to give them the benefit of the doubt until we know all the facts of the case.
But assuming that they were unreasonable or less intelli- gent than those who undertake to criticize their policy, how does that affect our religious convictions or our priestly mis- sion? A few Popes indeed have made mistakes, and prob- ably there will be others who will do the same, just as kings and priests and angels have taken wrong steps in policy. God ^ends us His necessary and infallible truth through some agency which can reach us, and that agency may be or may not be corruptible in other ways. If the policy of the last • three Popes were utterly wrong, it need not concern us any more than if a bishop were to insist on mending his own clothes badly, instead of employing a reputable tailor of his flock, who is bound to make his living by such work, and who pays his church dues in the fair hope that the bishop will re- spect his trade.
People who complain about the Pope and his acts as a rule know too little about them to be just. The gossipy evidence
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that we got from those who seek a pretext for condemning Catholic principle does not entitle us to sit in judgment here any more than in Purgatory. Italian Catholics are likely to ask for their rights, if they have a mind to exercise them ; and no one is more anxious to bring about such an event than the Pope, as is .plain from the above-mentioned Constitution ad- dressed to the Bishops of Italy and freely acted upon by them wherever they have found it possible or beneficial to do so.
USING A ORUTOH AT MASS.
Qu. May a priest who is afflicted with partial paralysis celebrate Mass if he is obliged to use a cane and to sit down during the reci- tation of the Canon? Or would it be necessary to get a dispensation from the bishop or from the Holy See?
Resp. To use a crutch or a chair in celebrating private Mass for parishioners who have no other means of satisfying the precept of the Church, would be permissible if it were necessitated by an accident, and if it were only a temporary expedient. In such case no special dispensation is needed, as it is supposed that the reason for the extraordinary mode of saying Mass is known and is not likely to give place to scandal or disedification. But if the celebrant's affliction, as appears to be the case here in question, be permanent, it would produce a quasi-irregularity and require dispensation from the Holy See, as creating a condition (not merely an act) which is con- trary to the decorum of the sanctuary.
HELPING THE OOUNTEY SCHOOL.
Father J. F. Noll, to whose volume " For Our non-Catholic Friends " we recently called attention, publishes a Parish Monthly and a weekly. Our Sunday Visitor, and further di- rects a Catholic publishing company in Huntington, Indiana. A short time ago he suggested through one of these publica- tions the organization of an institute for preparing Catholic teachers to help the poor country parishes which cannot af- ford to employ nuns, since these need to live in community. He wrote:
Many priests in small town parishes, and in rural districts would like to have parochial schools, but are unable for one of two reasons, or both. Either it would be impossible to procure members of a
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Sisterhood, because of a rule prohibiting fewer than three or four to go to one place ; or the parish could not afford to build, furnish, and maintain a home for the Sisters.
But such priests would like to have a good Catholic young lady- teacher, capable of teaching the common grades thoroughly. She could also be the parish organist and give music lessons in the parish. By this extra service she could earn sufficient to make her trouble worth while, and besides enjoy the consolation of lending herself to a grand work.
If we were sure that we could elicit ample interest, we would start a boarding school where good Catholic girls would be thor- oughly prepared for teaching the eight grades and a business course, and in addition receive a good training in music, on terms as reason- able as they could possibly be made. One of the best teaching Sisterhoods in the country would be employed for the prosecution of the work. . . .
Immediately there came to him a large number of appeals to carry out his project, from young Catholic women offering to demonstrate their ability and go heart and soul into the work. Some of them were teachers in public schools, anxious to take up work under Catholic auspices and from religious motives.
The idea is ripe with promise, since the religious teach- ing communities have their hands full, and are in demand beyond the possibility of supplying all our parochial needs. A Catholic school would be possible, in many places where it is wanting now to the great disadvantage of religion, if Father Noll's idea were supported.
OONOLUSION or THE PKAYER AND THE POEM OP BLESSING APTER DISTRIBUTING HOLY COMMUNION. (A OORREOTION.)
The Review, owing to a misplaced reference in the Septem- ber number, answered erroneously a very simple query, and thereby brought upon its Editor a deluge of letters calling at- tention to the error. Here is what we should have said : ( i ) The prayer " Deus qui nobis," etc., which the priest recites when he replaces the Blessed Sacrament in the tabernacle, ends with the long conclusion : " Qui vivis et regnas cum Deo Patre in unitate Spiritus Sancti Deus, per omnia saecula sae- culorum. Amen." (2) The blessing at the end of the cere- mony is " Benedictio Dei omnipotentis Patris et Filii et Spi- ritus Sancti descendat super vos, et man eat semper. Amen." All this is in the Roman Ritual and there ought to be no doubt about it. We regret having misled anybody.
Criticisms anb Botes,
THE SOIENOE OE LOGIO. An Inquiry into the Principles of Accurate Thought and Scientific Method. By P. Oof fey, Ph.D. New York: Longmans, Green & Oo. 1912. Vol. I, pp. 465; Vol. II,p p. 366.
THE LEARNING PKOOESS. By Stephen S. Oolvin, Ph.D. New Yorks The Macmillan Oo. 1912. Pp. 355.
Some mention of the former of these two books has already been •made in these pages. The importance and merits of the work claim for it a more extended account, and this may be conveniently given it in connexion with the second work above. The two books deal, at least in part, with the same subject, the mind's attainment of truth; and though that subject is viewed from widely different standpoints and approached by no less separate paths, they are mutually supplementary.
Dr. Coffey, it may be remembered, has previously enriched our English philosophical literature by translations of Professor de Wulf's Introduction to Scholastic Philosophy (Old and New) and the same author's History of Medieval Philosophy. He moreover belongs to the Louvain school of Neo-Scholasticism and the impress -of this authorship and discipleship is stamped upon his present work. The influence and thought of the founder of the school just mentioned are everywhere apparent. At the same time, the Science of Logic is in no sense a translation or adaptation of Mercier's well- known Logique, even when supplemented by the more profound Criteriologie Generate. It is, in so far as the attribute is applicable io such an undertaking, an original work, and its relation of indebt- edness to Louvain is alluded to here simply because it reflects the same design of showing the harmony subsisting between Scholasti- cism and whatever is best in modern mental science. Dr. Coffey has built into the edifice of the traditional logic the best materials that have been discovered or invented by recent logicians.
It is sometimes said that Aristotle was not only the founder but the completer of Logic. " Totum opus perf ecit ; nihil posteris absol- vendum reliquit." This of course is an exaggeration. More mod- derate and more exact is the estimate passed by Dr. Coffey in the (book before us.
*Tn Aristotle's theory of logic, Demonstration, as the ideally per- fect means of reaching Science, is his supreme concern. His view of logic is therefore not the narrower, but the wider view. He
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paid more attention however to the application of the syllogism to the necessary matter of metaphysics and mathematics than to the contingent matter of physical phenomena and the concrete facts of social life. His theory therefore as developed in after times, especially by the scholastic philosophers of the Middle Ages, tended toward a predominantly deductive and formal treatment of our thought processes. The advances made by the physical sciences in the seventeenth and subsequent centuries led men to concentrate their attention more carefully on the mental processes by which we gradually bring to light, from isolated ob- servation and experience of individual facts, a knowledge of gen- eral truths. Hence the prominence universally accorded to In- duction in the numerous logical treatises which saw the light dur- ing the course of the last century. Nor have the results of the analysis of those processes which lead to the discovery and estab- lishment of the general truths of the positive sciences been yet moulded into any one definite or generally accepted theory.
" Naturally, too, the excessive development of the purely formal side of Aristotle's treatment of logical processes led to a diminu- tion of the great esteem in which the Organon has been tradition- ally held. But the soundness of his logical theory as a whole has stood the test of centuries. His title as Founder of Logic has never been disputed. A careful and impartial study of the Or- ganon in our own times is convincing many that a great deal of fruitful and suggestive doctrine may still be learned from the Stagirite" (p. 41).
The foregoing passage embodies not simply a just estimate of the Aristotelian logic; it likewise reflects the character of the author's own logic and shows whereon its claim upon the attention of stu- dents may be said to rest. The work aptly combines the Aristotelian and hence the Scholastic logic with a discussion of those theories and hypotheses that have been the outgrowth of modern inductive sciences. Accordingly the first of the two volumes into which the work is divided is taken up entirely with the more or less familiar doctrine relating to the three mental operations — conception, judg- ment, and reasoning; whilst all the second volume is devoted to Methodology, Science, and Certitude. The subject of method in- volves of course a detailed study of induction and allied processes — hypothesis, analogy, observation, experiment, and so on; also sci- ence, which embraces the exposition of such difficult problems as those relating to certitude, probability, error, and fallacy. As re- gards the latter of these topics, fallacies, it may be noted that the author has supplemented the time-honored Aristotelian grouping by
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a modern classification based on the primary mental operations. Aristotle's well-known division of sophisms '* in dictione " and sophisms " extra dictionem " were admirably suited for the forensic purposes which he had in view. The recent classification has a more philosophical basis, and is a welcome addition. At the same time, one could wish that the author had set his mind to expunge once and for all the quibbles, absurdities, puerilities, that disfigure and belittle almost every treatment of the subject by text-book writers. The crafty Protagoras may possibly have felt his knees quake or his middle shrink quite away when he had to face such an awful dia- lectical monstrosity as the following : " What thou boughtest in the shambles yesterday thou didst eat to-day. But, thou wily man, thou didst buy raw meat in the shambles yesterday. Therefore, thou sly villain, thou didst eat raw meat for thy breakfast." Now while this miserable quibble may do duty as an illustration of the fallacy of " accident ", it is hardly likely to lead any sane mind into error. It is but just to say that the example is not used by the author before us, though not a few hardly less puerile illustrations of falla- cies ( ?) appear in his pages — illustrations for which the merit at least may be claimed of some humorous enlivenment.
If we consider the work before us from the point of view of " the learning process ", its philosophical comprehensiveness stands in the foreground and in this wise it distinguishes itself from the com- panion volume in the title above. Logic with the author is, as it is with St. Thomas and Scholastics generally, " the practical science which directs our mental operations in the discovery and proof of truth" (p. 38). As such it is a distinct branch of knowledge, but nevertheless inseparable from the other parts of the philosophical organism. As a thinker's metaphysics and psychology, so will be his logic. If he possesses a sound ontology, a clear vision that the bases of mental laws are rooted in the concept of being, his logic will be seen to rest on the objective order of things. If likewise he have a distinct perception of the differences between the intellect and sense, and consequently between the soul and the brain of man, his logic will be universal and immutable. It is this possession of a distinct ontology and a sound psychology which makes the system of logic before us the solidly and comprehensively philosophical work that it is and which differentiates it entirely from the a priori, subjective system of Kant and his older and newer followers on the one hand, and the empiricist school of Mill and Bain on the other. " The learning process" is thus studied from its distinctly logical and consequently philosophical aspects. The immaterial functions of the intellect are seen under the control of immaterial and absolutely
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universal laws. These the mind must obey not only to secure con- sistency but to reach, to learn, truth. Hence the correctness of thinking rests ultimately on principles that ground its truth.
But even as the study of the formal elements involved in the pur- suit of truth needs to be supplemented by attention to the concrete and material factors, so a work on logic may profitably be considered in connexion with a book dealing with the subject from a more empirical approach. Such a work is given us by Professor Colvin in The Learning Process introduced above.
The learning process may be briefly described, he says (p. 1), in its most general terms as the modification of the reactions of an or- ganism through experience (individual as distinguished from racial). This description, which by the way may seem more remarkable for succinctness than for clarity, obviously restricts the subject-matter to a relatively small portion of the learning process, as the latter term embraces the functions of logic. However, this very restricted- ness of area conditions the chief perfection of the book and makes it useful as either an introductioa or a supplement to the study of logic. Besides, the place of logic in the learning process has not been quite omitted by the author, the three concluding chapters of the volume being devoted thereto. These chapters, however, do not constitute the most valuable portions of the book, though they con- tain some useful suggestions. Much more replete with serviceable matter are the chapters on instinct and habits, the child's percep- tions, imagination and its pedagogical significance, memory and as- sociation with their applications, the transfer of training and atten- tion. These and some other kindred themes are studied from the viewpoint of empirical psychology. Many interesting details re- garding the working of the child's mind are brought forth and some wise practical suggestions of pedagogical importance are given. The author's ideas in the latter connexion are as sound as his analysis of mental phenomena is keen. By way of illustration we may instance his remark on the pedagogical significance of in- terest in securing the child's attention. After mentioning the recently growing emphasis on this factor, he adds : " Yet its benefits have been accompanied by certain disadvantages and many miscon- ceptions. The whole doctrine of interest has been misunderstood and perverted in many quarters. It has given rise to the * soft peda- gogy ' of recent days, which is as disastrous as it is futile and psy- chologically unsound. We have been told that we must interest the child if we wish to secure his attention, and to this we must assent ; but to interest him does not mean simply to amuse him, or to demand
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from him in his learning only those things which suit his immediate desires . . . genuine interest is by no means incompatible with ser- ious work when it is necessary ... the teacher should demand the pupil's attention to those parts of the school work that have in them elements of drudgery and routine. It is more valuable that the child should learti the lesson of controlling and directing his atten- tion, than that he should master in the easiest manner the materials immediately at hand" (p. 284). The italics are the author's. With such and kindred precepts of a sound pedagogy the book abounds. Of course it is obvious to ask, what motives does the author pro- pose in order to secure the execution of such precepts as entail self- denial? Motives, of course, that lie close to the learning process in its immediate results for good or ill on character and its more remote consequences for life. Moral and religious motives receive explicitly but a passing notice. This limitation may be obviously warranted by the scope of the work, which is principally psychologi- cal. At the same time no less obviously its educational applications lose much of their effectiveness through this curtailment.
The student who approaches " the learning process ", the mind's procedure in the acquisition of truth, from the purely logical side, finds himself somewhat at sea, somewhat astray in getting his bear- ing. To help him orient himself properly recent authors of books on logic are wont to start with a summary of psychological prolego- mena. Thus Dr. Coffey, following in this the example set by his master. Cardinal Mercier, begins in this work before noticed with a psychological survey of the human faculties. And indeed, as was said in the review (in the September number) of Professor Dubray's Introductory Philosophy, the latter author in common with French writers generally gives Psychology (empirical) the first place in the philosophical curriculum. Whatever may be said for or against this arrangement there can be no doubt that at least an elementary knowl- edge of Psychology is indispensable as an introduction to Logic. Though we would hesitate to say that such an introduction can best be obtained from a book such as the one before us, especially since it is very brief in its analysis of the immaterial functioning of the intellect, we venture to add that the reflective energy and attention to psychical processes which the reading of such a book demands, will go far to prepare the student to inspect for logical purposes the workings of his own mind. Or perhaps better still, having some- what mastered a treatise on Logic, especially such a treatise as that embodied in the work above, he might with still greater profit study a book like the present one on " the learning process ". Thus the more abstract contents of his mind would receive a fuller concrete
CRITICISMS AND NOTES. eg I
enrichment, whilst he would be able to notice in how far the work falls short of the logical ideal. Either, then, for preparatory or for supplementary study Professor Colvin's book, within the limits of its scope, should prove a highly serviceable instrument.
HIS GEEY EMINENCE. The True '' Friar Joseph" of Bulwer Lytton's " Eichelieu ". A Historical Study of the Oapuchin Priar Pere Joseph Prancois Le Oleic du Tremblay. With a true portrait of Priar Joseph. By E. P. O'Connor. Philadelphia: The Dolphin Press. 1912. Pp. 112.
Whatever difference of opinion there may be among literary critics about the merits of Lord Edward Lytton as a novelist, it is certain that he is still widely read and that his style has a certain fascina- tion for the youthful mind. But where his masterful art in the do- main of fiction is most widely felt, is in what are supposed to be his historical dramas, chief among which is the play of Richelieu. It holds its place on the dramatic stage, alongside of Shakespeare, with the masterpieces of our great classical playwrights, of whom Lytton is considered the greatest representative during the nineteenth cen- tury.
Catholics share this estimate to the extent that they are attracted to his Richelieu, in which a powerful churchman is represented with a magnificence of stage setting and character that flatters our vanity through its suggestion of priestly influence in its broadest estate. Our dramatic societies are pleased to reproduce the play for charitable and religious objects, where the young are invited to obtain often their first impression of the historical figure which gives the play its title. That impression, though partly true, is largely false, and the harm done thereby to our Catholic youth, not to speak of the larger number of theatre-goers and readers who have imbibed quite erron- eous notions about the Catholic priesthood from what they suppose to be a respectable source of literary history, is simply incalculable. The erroneous notions to which I refer arise not so much from a misrepresentation of the person of the Cardinal himself, as rather from the false picture of " Friar Joseph ", who is made to serve as a contrast to the great minister of state, and to typify a less reputable class of the priesthood. Friar Joseph leaves the impression of being a servile and ambitious tool, half knave and half imbecile, whom the great Cardinal " uses " for his projects. Catholics are apt to re- gard the character of Friar Joseph on the stage as a harmless cari- cature, or at most as a possible but not normal figure in religious life.
Now the fact is that there was a real Pere Joseph who stood in the closest relations to the great Cardinal. But it is likewise true
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that Lord Bulwer Lytton, under cover of dramatic exigency, gave vent to the religious -bigotry which the times in England suggested as most favorable to the success of his play. The dramatist was not any worse in this respect than his contemporaries of equal literary fame. But the point that we Catholics are bound to look to is, not to lend ourselves to perpetuate wrong historical portraits in certain popular forms of literature, by the encouragement, for instance, of such representations as Richelieu in theatres frequented by respect- able and intelligent people.
The true Capuchin Pere Joseph was a man of high distinction in the social, political, and ecclesiastical life of his time. His was a truly monumental figure that would have left its mark upon the his- tory of France, even if Richelieu had never existed; and in some respects he may be said to have been superior to the great Cardinal, and the inspirer of his noblest projects for the reform of political and religious life. This is brought out according to unquestion- ably trustworthy sources in Mr. O'Connor's historical sketch of Father Joseph, known in contemporary history as " Son Eminence Grise " — His Grey Eminence.
The same Father Joseph whom Lytton pictures to the world of literary students and to the better class of theatre-goers as a half- imbecile, was a member of one of the first families of France, the founder of a religious community of nuns, an eminent writer of theological and ascetical works, a poet and a saintly priest, whose deep insight into human nature and whose thorough religious disin- terestedness made him, like St. Bruno before him, a wise counselor to the great. It was he, as much as Richelieu, who saved France from ruin and gave her a name which is still her best asset in the history of nations to-day.
These things should be at least known to the students in our col- leges and academies, so that they may take intelligent part in any criticism that arises with reference to a drama so frequently pro- duced on our stages and considered a classic.
HOMILETIO AND OATEOHETIO STUDIES. According to the Spirit of Holy Scripture and of the Ecclesiastical Year. By A. Meyenberg, Oanon and Professor of Theology, Luzerne. Translated by the Very Eev. Perdinand Brossart, V.Q-., Covington, Kentucky. Eatisbon, Borne, New York, Cincinnati : Pr. Pustet & Co. 1912. Pp. 845.
Meyenberg's Homiletische und Katechetische Studien was first published ten years ago. Despite its bulky form, covering nearly a thousand pages, it became immediately popular so that seven edi-
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tions have already been exhausted. In its scope it may be said to take in the entire field of sermon writing and delivery, as well as the form, methods, and contents of catechetical instruction and the study of Bible history. Apart from this, the volume contains the phil- osophy and history of the two disciplines which it teaches and ex- emplifies. One hardly knows whether to admire more the minute and accurate analytical power of the author's mind in presenting all the possible phases of treatment of his subject, or the wide erudition which enables him to illustrate his principles and precepts. Hence the work may be said to be a text-book of pedagogics as well as a source of practical instructions for the preacher and catechist. A professor of homiletics and catechetics in the seminary may prefer to have a manual that summarizes the sources, laws, and rules of application within a brief compass. He will find it in this volume, though combined with what makes for practice in the life of the preacher and teacher. The author wrote for both students and pas- tors. His undeviating method as teacher for many years in the theo- logical seminary was to inculcate upon his hearers the principle sentire cum ecclesia; this led him to gather freely from Patristic as well as from Scriptural sources, and the work loses nothing of its modem aspect and serviceableness by the close observance of the principle.
A word should be said here about the use of the book for the two classes of readers and students for whom it is intended. The reading of the didactic portions for seminarists may be set aside by the pas- toral preacher and catechist, while the practical lessons contained in the exposition of the ecclesiastical cycle do not necessarily form part of a homiletic course in the seminary. In this respect the voliune is more of a repertory than a text-book.
Father Brossart, the learned Vicar General of Covington, apolo- gizes for his lack of English idiom. That is of course a matter of importance, and the lack of adaptation to the genius of the language into which a work is translated is always a serious drawback. But the reader will have little to complain of in this respect, especially as the matter is largely didactic, and one does not look for style in a hand-book of practical science. At all events, it must have been a difficult task to put into English a work of this kind, and our stu- dents and parish clergy will be grateful to the translator for having made accessible to them so admirable a tool in the workshop of the holy ministry. The printing and binding of the volume are in keep- ing with its excellent contents.
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THE STATUS OP ALIENS IN OHINA. By Vi Kyuin Wellington Koo, Ph.D. New York, Oolumbia University: Longmans, Green & Oo. 1912. Pp. 359.
In view of the constitutional changes recently effected and now progressing in China, changes that are likely to have an increas- ingly important international significance, a special interest attaches to the present monograph. The fact moreover that it emanates from an accomplished scholar, native to the country, who is also English Secretary to the President of China, may be presumed to lend to the work the authority of first-hand information, an au- thority further confirmed by the supervision which the book enjoyed at the hands of the Law Faculty of Columbia in its preparation and publication.
In an interesting way the writer traces the history of the entrance of foreigners into China from the earliest known date (probably about A. D. 120, though legend carries it much further back) down to 1842 ; and shows what was the varying policy of the govermnent during that, the pre- Conventional, period. With the Treaty of Nanking, in 1842, the first outcome of the Opium War, a new policy began. Prior thereto the foreigner enjoyed no legal status in China. He resided there under sufferance. But gradually the alien traders, " particularly the British began to withdraw themselves by open de- fiance from the operation of the local laws ", and succeeded " in pur- suing their course of sheer contumacy ". Thereupon followed a more or less stable extra-territorial immunity, which finally was wrung from the govermnent and officially recognized by the above- mentioned treaty. The progress of this policy, the various phases of extension, limitation, definition, and so on, of the privileges ac- corded from 1842 onward to the present day, are presented by the author in detail. Endless complications and conflicts have occurred, especially as regards foreign missions (Catholic and Protestant) and commerce. The origin and consequences of these are also indi- cated.
Of greatest interest to Catholics are the facts bearing on the his- tory of the Church in China and on that of the French Protector- ate. The indications of the author's impartiality in these delicate matters are manifest. " Church cases, as they are called by the Chinese, have occurred with a discomforting frequency; chapels have been burned, missionaries killed or injured, and Chinese Chris- tians have fallen victims to popular wrath. Many of these cases ended with disastrous consequences to China. Over a billion dol- lars have been paid, a number of strategic points of territory have been relinquished, the prestige of the nation has been seriously im-
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paired, hundreds of officials, high and low, have been humiliated and thousands of lives of a humbler order have been sacrificed." On the other hand, the author asserts that " hardly a single one of these has ever arisen out of a strictly religious controversy based on differences of the Chinese and foreign creeds. One and all they appear to have taken birth in those defects of personal under- standing and conduct, on one side or the other, accentuated by racial discrepancies, which would give rise to misgivings and conflicts everywhere as between individuals, or groups of individuals, of diverse races." More precisely, Dr. Koo declares that " church cases are all traceable to the ignorance of the masses which led them to- lend a credulous ear even to the most fantastic stories about the doings of the foreign ecclesiastics, or to the excess of zeal or want of prudence on the part of the Christian missionary." Whether the- causes here assigned be adequate to explain the numerous religious persecutions to which Christians in China have been subjected, we must leave to those more familiar with the actual local conditions to determine. At all events. The Status of Aliens in China is a. book which no one seeking to be informed on the subject should fail to read.
THE OATHOLIO ENOYOLOPEDIA. An International Work of Keference on the Oonstitution, Doctrine, Discipline, and History of the Catholic Ohurcli. Edited by Charles Gr. Herbermann, Ph.D., LL.D., Edward A. Pace, Ph.D., LL.D., Oonde B. Pallen, Ph.D., LL.D., Thomas Shahan, D.D., John J. "Wynne, S.J., assisted by numerous collaborators. In fifteen volumes. Vol. XIII; "Eevelation — Simon Stock" — pp.. 800; and Vol. XIV: " Simony— Toumely"— pp. 800. New Tork:. Kobert Appleton Company.
Our interest in The Catholic Encyclopedia grows as the work, comes to its conclusion. A number of the articles in these two vol- umes supply information that may have been looked for under re- lated titles in earlier portions of the work. The extraordinary care- of the editors is apparent from the numerous articles which deal with local ecclesiastical topics, not to be found in any other work of reference accessible to readers of English. This includes many geo- graphical sketches, as well as the histories of distinctly Catholic^ institutions in all parts of the world. The writers of these articles are uniformly such as may be relied upon for accurate information on the special themes which they treat.
The subject of theology as a special topic takes up -over eighty columns, and is treated not only in an exhaustive, historical way, but
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also with such discriminating conciseness as to satisfy the student on all the main points of scholastic controversy. Dr. Pohle, who writes on dogmatic theology in its doctrinal and historical aspects, is particularly satisfying. His article is supplemented by one on Christology, chiefly in its Scriptural interpretation, by Father Maas of Woodstock, whose studies for many years give to his conclusions the flavor of ripe scholarship. The article on Moral Theology comes from the veteran authority, P. Augustin Lehmkuhl, S.J., and is in its turn supplemented by one on Pastoral Theology from the pen of Father Walter Drum, S.J. Ascetical and Mystical Theology follow, the latter by the author of Grdces d'Oraison, recently trans- lated into English, who also writes the article on Private Revela- tions. Here the article on the Sacraments by Father Daniel Ken- nedy, O.P., deserves special mention for the clarity of its exposition. These theses suggest others in Bible studies by approved scholars like Gigot, Durand, James Driscoll, Merk, and Sauvay. In the studies on the Papacy the articles of Father Horace Mann, the author of the History of the Popes in the Early Middle Ages, are models of concise and judicious historical writing. Similar commen- dation is merited by articles on the Liturgies, the Greek and the Ruthenian Rite,! by Andrew Shipman, and also those on the Ritual and the Syrian Rite by the Rev. Adrian Fortescue.
Among the ethical papers we would single out the one on Social- ism by Leslie L. Toke and William Edward Campbell, with a notably good bibliography; and its complement by Dr. John A. Ryan on Socialistic Communities. The article on Secret Societies by Father W. Fanning, S.J., might be deemed incomplete if there were not one in a previous volume on Masonry, much of which article fits in with the present matter. Father Cathrein's article on Right and Dr. James Fox's on the Ethics of Slavery present their subjects in a clear and uncompromising way.
There are several articles dealing with Rosmini and his school of philosophy which we are glad to see give a just estimate of the saintly founder's character, despite the prejudices that have been aroused by his misleading system of philosophy and his outspoken attitude on the subject of the Temporal Power.
The various liturgical and canonical subjects within the scope of these two volimies receive the accurate and informing attention which names like that of Father Thurston, Benigni, Ojetti, Boud- inhon, Braun, and Andrew Meehan assure us.
Other articles of note are those that deal with psychology — ^the soul, spirit, spiritualism, by Father Bolland of Stonyhurst, and by Father Maher, S.J. ; the article on the Sulpicians in the United
LITERARY CHAT. ^O;
States, by Father John Fenlon; the various articles on our Cath- olic hymns, by Dr. Hugh T. Henry, than whom there is no better au- thority in America on the subject. Speaking of hymns we must not pass over the article on Syrian Hymnody by Dr. Chabot. Other names recur, on subjects like the Indian Tribes, Religious Com- munities, etc., to which we have referred on former occasions.
OOLLEOTIO KEKUM LITUEaiOARUM ad Normam Oonstitutionnm Novissimarum Apostolicae Sedis et Eecentiorum S.E.O.Decretorum, concinnata a P. Jos. Wuest, O.SS.R. Ilchester, Maryland: Typis Oongregationis Ssmi. Eedemptoris. 1912. Pp. xvi-270.
This manual brings within small compass, and under readily recognized topical sections, the numerous and involved liturgical precepts and decisions of the Holy See which the cleric is ordinarily obliged to gather from extended commentaries like those of Van der Stappen, Wapplehorst, Schober, De Herdt, etc., and from the official collections of decrees not always within reach of students and priests. It covers the entire liturgy of the Mass, Breviary, Sacraments, and other ritual observances. The pertinent decisions of more recent date about the liturgical Chant, Marriage, the Divine Office, etc., are brought together under brief heads. There is an excellent and de- tailed index. The little volume will be very useful in the hands of pastors as well as of students in theology, especially those preparing for sacred orders.
Xiterarie (That
A little brochure that ought to have a wide circulation, is entitled The Gospel in Africa. It is the translation of an address, on behalf of the Society de Propaganda Fide, delivered in Lyons, 3 May, 191 1, on the eighty-eighth anniversary of its foundation. It tells an inspiring story of splendid heroism. The figures have their eloquence. From 1812 to 191 1 the Society for the Pro- pagation of the Faith has distributed to missions in Africa the sum of $12,- 495,263. (How much, or how little, of this came from the United States is not mentioned.) The result? In 1822 there were eight centres of missionary work on the African shores and seven on the neighboring islands. Outside Egypt there were probably less than two hundred Catholic priests on the whole Continent. Now, in 191 1, there are in Africa eighty-five dioceses, vicariates, or apostolic prefectures, and 3,391 missionary priests. Besides the secular clergy, twenty-three religious orders or societies are represented. The total number of Catholics is given at 3,742,067. " Sed haec quid sunt inter tantos?" the approximate African population being 165,000,000. When we add that the address was delivered by the eminent African missionary, Bishop le Roy, C.S.Sp., author of the well-known work Les Religions des Primitifs, enough has been said in commendation of the pamphlet. (Issued by the Society for the Propagation of the Faith, 627 Lexington Avenue, New York City.)
The Parochial School. Why? is the title of a bright little booklet by the Rev. John F. Noll. Amongst the abounding and telling arguments in favor
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of Catholic schools not the least effective are those drawn from alien sources. The pity is that more explicit references are not given. It is no doubt inter- esting to read what President Taft or even ex-President Roosevelt has said in our favor. What Senator Tillman thinks of the moral education of " the nigger " is also inspiring, while the opinion of the Chinese Representative at Washington, of Judge Grosscup, the Presidents of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Chicago, and the rest, are worth knowing ; at the same time one would like to be able to just tie down all these utterances to time and place. Unfortunately this the pamphlet does not help one to do. But this is a negative fault in a booklet that is otherwise very useful. (The Parish Monthly Press, Hunting- don, Indiana.)
A brief account was given in the September number of the Review of a recent Romance of Lourdes. The miraculous events which form the ground- work of the story are taken from Dr. Boissarie's well-known books on the medical aspects of Lourdes. A recent book by an eminent Parisian physician, M. de Grandmaison de Bruno, embodies a critical study of certain typical cures duly authenticated to have been wrought at the favored shrine in the Pyrenees. The book is entitled Vingt Guerisons a Lourdes discutees medicale- ment. (Paris, Beauchesne & Cie.) The cures are thoroughly examined in their antecedents, progress, methods, and consequents, and the conclusion is drawn that " at the sanctuary of Lourdes and even outside the usual pilgrim- ages, on occasion of a novena or a visit paid to one of the numerous chapels consecrated to Our Lady, cures are effected which human science recognizes itself unable to explain." Their only rational interpretation lies in the super- natural. The conclusion is of course distasteful to unbelief, and many an objection has been urged against it. These are each in turn taken up by Dr. de Bruno and candidly discussed. Those who are interested in the medical phenomena manifested at Lourdes will find in the neat little volume (pp. 313, price 3^ frs.) a summary well arranged and critically sifted.
A small brochure that should be welcome alike to the priest and the lambs of his fold is entitled A Prayer Book for Sunday-Schools (by the Clergy of the Diocese of Brooklyn). It contains daily and special prayers suited to children, and a good selection of hymns. The chief point of merit is its method of conducting the Children's Mass. This is sound and practical and can hardly fail to foster piety and reverence (New York, P. J, Kenedy & Sons; price, $5.00 per hundred).
If one may judge by the work being accomplished thereby, L' Action Popu- laire de Rheims, a movement toward compact unity of action in religious and social matters must be going on in France that bids fair to rival the work of Catholic organization in Germany. The French organization is both an intel- lectual centre and an active propaganda. Its methods are association — re- ligious, family, professional — study circles, conventions, oral instruction and especially the dissemination of literature relating to social, industrial, and economic subjects. Amongst its publications there is in the first place Le Mouvement Social — a splendid Catholic international review (monthly) con- taining solid articles and surveys of matters social at home and abroad. Next comes the Revue de V Action Populaire, appearing every ten days and forming a kind of bulletin of intercommunication amongst the circles and other asso- ciations. The Brochures Jaunes is a library of monographs, studies, biog- raphies, etc. Over 260 of these pamphlets have been issued. Besides these there are " social guides ", almanacs, retreat manuals, and numerous other forms of propaganda literature — all betokening an intensely Catholic and social energy and, what is most important, an earnest striving for harmonious cooperation along social lines laid down and directed by Catholic principles. Surely these are amongst the motifs d'esperer. Detailed information concern- ing the movement can be had from the central bureau, 5 Rue des Trois Raisinets, Rheims, France.
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Those who have read the pamphlet entitled Revised Darwinism or Father Wassmann on Evolution, by the Rev. Simon FitzSimons will be interested in the rejoinder by the eminent entomologist which is now reprinted from the Catholic Fortnightly Review and published in pamphlet form by Herder (St. Louis, Mo.). The pamphlet is worth reading for various reasons.
The House and Table of God, a Book for His Children, Young and Old, by the Rev. W. Roche, S.J. (Longmans, Green & Co.), is a handsome little volume of considerations on the soul, God, the Church, the BleSsed Eucharist, Death, Grace, and kindred topics, told in a simple but very attractive fashion and prettily illustrated. It is dedicated to each of the ten thousand children who have been " in Retreat " with the author, and will help mothers and teachers to give their little wards an adequate and pleasing knowledge of those more difficult truths of religion of which the catechism gives them only barren outlines to be filled in by the experience and preaching of later life.
The Idea of Mary's Meadow by Violet O'Connor, with a Foreword by Vin- cent Armel O'Connor (Alston Rivers, London), is a sort of educational reverie in which the author sets forth her ideal of the surroundings, occupations and efforts likely to cultivate in her adopted child those lofty religious aspirations which she herself has learnt to value as the greatest boon of the present life and as the securest promise of future happiness. There is a strong personal note running through the " story of the cottage and garden of Mary's meadow," designed for " Betty's " spiritual development ; and the fact that it is ad- dressed, as a kind of epistolary series, to the husband of the author, adds to the impression that the sketches were meant only for the use of intimate friends of Betty and her guardians. Nevertheless, the volume is full of lofty thought and suggestions not unmixed with humor such as spiritual camaraderie invites among Catholic souls of a certain culture.
St. Anthony's Almanac for igi3, published by the Franciscan Fathers of the Eastern American Province for the benefit of deserving young students pre- paring for the priesthood at St. Joseph's College, Callicoon, New York, con- tains among other useful and entertaining matter some excellent biographical sketches of disciples of St. Francis. We note that of the late General of the Order, now Archbishop, Denis Schuler, and a delightful centenary appreciation of Brother Pacifico, the minstrel companion of St. Francis, by Father Paschal Robinson, O.F.M. The worthy object of the publication, apart from its good, readable contents and fine illustrations, commends it in an especial manner to the clergy. (St. Bonaventure P. O., New York.)
Great churchmen are rarely without the fnft that makes the man of letters. If their sayings are not always recorded as literature, it is probably because of set purpose they were not given that particular form which the reading world appreciates as literature ; or maybe it was because the other activities of their authors absorbed the attention which the printed word demands.
If Cardinal Bourne is to be judged by some of his more important ad- dresses, he possesses in a marked degree the art of writing. But his special task, which must have kept him from indulging his literary tastes, has been the administering of important ecclesiastical affairs. This work began early for him, for he was made bishop at the age of thirty-five, when he had been but twelve years a priest. "If you want to get anything out of the devil," quotes his biographer, " call him a Monsignore." In the case of Monsignore Bourne it became a matter of driving out devils. This he did by the energy with which he took up " rescue work " in London, aside of the late Cardinal, his devoted predecessor.
The foregoing remarks are suggested by a book by the author of Faith Found in London. The new volume is entitled Cardinal Bourne and gives a Record of the Sayings and Doings of Francis, Fourth Archbishop of West-
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minster. It is prettily illustrated with photographs. (Burns and Oates, Lon- don.)
Languid folk who were not as yet biases experienced possibly a new, even though slight, thrill when they read in their morning paper a few weeks ago that " the secret of life " was on the verge of being discovered. Life was found to be nothing but the outcome of physico-chemical processes. It is just crystallization, only a little more complex. We have learned how to fertilize eggs by means of chemical reagents, and it is simply a question of time when life can be mechanically produced. All this and much more was asserted upon no less an authority than the President of the British Association for the Ad- vancement of Science, Professor Schaeffer, of Edinburgh. But these are very old assertions, as every one knows who is at all conversant with the subject- matter. They may be found stated as objections against neo- vitalism — and answered — in almost any elementary manual of natural philosophy (cosmol- ogy). Nevertheless, since the assertions made by Professor Schaeffer are very bold (no proof is alleged) and perhaps disconcerting to some, and since the answers hidden away in the elementary manual are not widely known to the general public, it were desirable that some competent Catholic authority in science developed the whole subject at length. The matter is technical and calls for specialized knowledge of facts — as to what, namely, science has been able to do in the matter of fertilization. The interpretations and solutions proposed by philosophers need to be supplemented by the experience of the biological chemist. Driesch in his well-known The Science and Philosophy of the Organism dl.-uisses the subject with a passing allusion (Vol. I, p. 32).
One may well hesitate before recommending a new book on the Spiritual Life, especially when the book in mind is written in French. There seems to be already a superabounding spiritual literature in English, while that made familiar to us directly or indirectly through the French labors, perhaps too often, under the suspicion of lacking in robustness and solidity. Nevertheless we venture to bespeak. the claims of a recent work entitled La Vie Spirituelle ou I'ltineraire de I'Ame a Dieu. It is written by a quondam superior of the Seminary of Rouen, Pere Malige of the Congregation of the Sacred Heart (Picpus), and is evidently the fruit of much study and experience in the guid- ance of souls. The work has the merit of solidity, since it is based on the Masters, St. Augustine, St. Thomas, St. Francis de Sales, and Bossuet. It follows on the whole the Exercises of St. Ignatius and treats almost exclu- sively of the via purgativa and the via illuminativa. It is a model of orderly method and clarity of expression. Since it has good analytical tables of con- tents, the work will be found easily available for priests who have to give retreats or spiritual conferences to religious communities. It contains three volumes, averaging each about 350 pages, and is published by P. Lethielleux, Paris (price, 10 francs).
With the constantly growing claims of the Spanish missions upon priests from the United States the need of Spanish religious literature amongst us becomes more and more apparent. B. Herder's publishing house has for a considerable time been supplying our clergy with catechetical material for this purpose. The latest work of the kind is a small volume (219 pp.), Los Siete Pecados Capitales by Don Antolin Lopez Pelaez, Bishop of Jaca in the Province of Saragossa. The treatise lends itself readily to the preacher as material for sermons on the prevailing sins of the day, especially among the so-called cultured classes, to which nearly every Spaniard aspires.
The editor of The Independent (New York), speaking in a recent issue of that magazine on " the length of a sermon ", remarks that the modern preacher " often thinks that he must dilute his sermon as well as give short measure in order to satisfy his patrons, and for such half-pints of milk-and- water mixtures as are now sometimes served to us we have no use whatever."
Boohs IReceiveb.
THEOLOGICAL AND DEVOTIONAL.
Florilegium Hebraicum. Locos selectos Librorum Veteris Testamenti in usum scholarum et disciplinae domesticae, adjuncta appendice quinquepartita, edidit Dr. Hub. Lindemann, Professor in Gymnasio Trium Regum Coloniensi. Pp. xii-2i6. B. Herder: St. Louis. Pretium, $0.90.
The Idea of Mary's Meadow. By Violet O'Connor. With a Foreword by Vincent Armel O'Connor. London: Alston Rivers, Ltd. 1912*. Pp. viii-168. Price, 5/ net.
Educating to Purity. Thoughts on Sexual Teaching and Education pro- posed to Clergymen, Parents, and other Educators. By Dr. Michael Gat- terer, S.J., Professor of Theology, Innsbruck, and Dr. Francis Krus, S.J., Professor of Theology, Innsbruck. Translated by the Rev. C. Van der Donckt. Ecclesiastical approbation. New York, Cincinnati, Ratisbon, and Rome : Fr. Pustet & Co. 1912. Pp. 318. Price, $1.25.
On Union with God. By the Blessed Albert the Great, O.P. With Notes by the Rev. P. J. Berthier, O.P. Translated by a Benedictine of Princethorpe Priory. {The Angelus Series.) New York, Cincinnati, Chicago: Benziger Bros. 1912. Pp. III. Price, $0.50 net.
Communion Verses for Little Children. By a Sister of Notre Dame. Illustrated by M. G. Cooksey. New York, Cincinnati, Chicago : Benziger Bros.; London: R. & T. Washbourne. 1912. Pp. 31. Price, $0.05 net.
A Book of the Love of Mary. Compiled and edited by Freda Mary Groves. With Preface by His Eminence Cardinal Bourne. St. Louis, Mo. : B. Herder ; London : Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons. Pp. 109. Price, $0.75.
La Vie Spirituelle ou L'ltineraire de I'Ame a Dieu. Par le P. Pr. Malige, des Sacres-Coeurs (Picpus), Ancien Superieur du Grand Seminaire de Rouen. 3 volumes. Paris: P. Lethielleux; Rome: Fr. Pustet. 1912. Pp. xv-356, 420 et 327. Prix, 10 fr.
The House and Table of God. A Book for His Children, Young and Old. By the Rev. W. Roche, S.J. With 24 illustrations from drawings by T. Baines. New York, London, Bombay, Calcutta : Longmans, Green & Co. 191 2. Pp. X-150. Price, $1.00 net.
Los SiETE Pec ados Capitales. Por Don Antolin Lopez Pelaez, Obispo de Jaca. Con la aprobacion del Exemo Senor Arzobispo de Friburgo. St. Louis, Mo., y Friburg, Brisg. : B. Herder. 1912. Pp. 219. Price, $0.70.
La Journee Sanctifiee. Par I'Abbe Louis Rouzic, Aumonier " Rue des Postes." Lettre-Preface du R. P. Janvier, Conferencier de Notre-Dame. (Bibliotheque de la "Revue de la Jeunesse".) Troisieme edition. Paris: P. Lethielleux. 1911. Pp. xix-404. Prix, 3 fr. 50.
HoMiLETic and CatechetiC Studies. According to the Spirit of Holy Scripture and of the Ecclesiastical Year. By A. Meyenberg, Canon and Pro- fessor of Theology, Luzerne. Translated by the Very Rev. Ferdinand Bross- art, V.G., Covington, Kentucky. New York, Cincinnati, Rome, and Ratisbon : Fr. Pustet & Co. 19 12. Pp. 845. Price, $3.50.
Reasonable Service, or Why I Believe. By D. L. Lanslots, O.S.B., Prefect Apostolic of North Transvaal. St. Louis, Mo. : B. Herder ; London and Edin- burgh: Sands & Co. Pp. 177. Price, $1.00.
Retreats for the People. A Sketch for a Great Revival. By Charles Plater, S.J. With a Preface by the Bishop of Salford. St. Loruis, Mo.: B. Herder; London and Edinburgh: Sands & Co. 1912. Pp. 293. Price, $1.50.
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THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
MONISTISCHE EiNHEITSBESTREBUNGEN UND KATHOLISCHE WELTANSCHAUUNG.
^t. Louis, Mo., und Freiburg, Brisg. : B. Herder. 1912, Pp. 27. Preis, $0.15.
LITURGICAL.
CoLLECTio Rerum Liturgicarum ad normam Novissimarum Constitutionum Apostolicae Sedis et recentiorum S. R. C. Decretorum concinnata a Josepho Wuest, C.SS.R. Ilchester, Maryland : Typis Congreg. SS. Redemptoris. 1912. Pp. 283.
Messe fur dreistimmigen Chor (Sopran I, II und Alt) mit Begleitung der 'Orgel nach Motiven der Missa Brevis von Palestrina. Bearbeitet von Michael Haller. Op. 108. Partitur. Regensburg, Rom, New York und Cincinnati : Fr. Pustet & Co. 1912. Pp. 23. Price, $0.35.
Das Totenofficium mix Messe und Begrabnisritus nach der Editio Vaticana. Ausgabe mit Violinschliissel, geeigneter Transposition, Ueberset- zung der Rubriken und ausgesetzten Psalmen. Herausgegeben von Dr. Karl Weinmann, Direktor der Kirchenmusikschule Regensburg. Mit oberhirtlicher Druckgenehmigung. Regensburg, Rom, New York und Cincinnati : Fr. Pustet & Co. 1912. Pp. 126. Price, $0.45.
25 kurze und einfache Orgelpraludien fur den Gottesdienst. Kom- poniert von Johannes Diebold. Op. 106. Regensburg, Rom, New York und ■Cincinnati: Fr. Pustet & Co. 1912. Pp. 27. Price, $0.60.
The New Psalter and its Use. By the Rev. Edwin Burton, D.D., Vice- Rector and Professor of Liturgy at St. Edmund's College, Old Hall ; and the Rev. Edward Myers, M.A., Professor of Dogmatic Theology and Patrology at St. Edmund's College, Old Hall. {The Westminster Library.) New York, London, Bombay, Calcutta : Longmans, Green & Co. 1912. Pp. xii-258.
HISTORICAL.
ViNGT Guerisons A LouRDEs discutees medicalement. Par le Docteur de •Grandmaison de Bruno, Ancien Interne en Medecine des Hopitaux de Paris. Paris: Gabriel Beauchesne & Cie. 1912. Pp. 313. Prix, 3 fr. 50; franco 3 ir. 75.
Faith and Suggestion. Including an account of the remarkable experiences of Dorothy Kerin. By Edwin Lancelot Ash, author of Mind and Health, Nerves and the Nervous. Philadelphia : Peter Reilly ; London : Herbert & Daniel. 1912. Pp. xvi-153. Price, $1.25.
Abbot Wallingford. An Inquiry into the charges made against him and his monks. By Abbot Gasquet, D.D. St. Louis, Mo. : B. Herder ; London and Edinburgh: Sands & Co. Pp. 79. Price, $0.60.
Geschichte der Altkirchlichen Literatur. Von Otto Bardenhewer, Dok- tor der Theologie und der Philosophic, Apostolischer Protonotar und Pro- fessor der Theologie an der Universitat Miinchen. Bereits liegen vor : I. Band : Vom Ausgange des apostolischen Zeitalters bis zum Ende des zweiten Jahr- hunderts. Seiten xii und 582. Preis, $3.35 net. II. Band: Vom Ende des zweiten Jahrhunderts bis zum Beginn des vierten Jahrhunderts. Seiten xvi und 666. Preis, $3.80 net. Soeben ist erschienen : III. Band: Das vierte Jahr- "hundert mit Ausschluss der Schriftsteller syrischer Zunge. Seiten x und 666. St. Louis, Mo. : B. Herder. Preis, $4.00 net.
MISCELLANEOUS.
The Fool of God. A Historical Novel. By Andrew Klarmann, A.M., author of The Princess of Gan-sar, Nizra. etc. New York, Cincinnati, Rome, and Ratisbon : Fr. Pustet & Co. 1912. Pp. 533. Price, $1.50.
Statutes of the Diocese of Crookston. Enlarged edition. Record Press, St. John's Seminary, College ville, Minnesota. 1912. Pp. 160.
THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW
Fifth Series. — Vol. VII. — (XLVII). — November, 1912. — No. 5.
THE TRADITIONAL IDEA OP SAOEEDOTAL VOOATION.
CANON LAHITTON, professor of Dogmatic Theology in the Seminary of Poyanne in the diocese of Aire and Dax, published in 1909 a book on Sacerdotal Vocation/ which soon became the subject of a widespread controversy. To many his doctrine seemed new and dangerous, calculated to undermine what so many learned and pious men had built up, a high idea of the priestly vocation. Canon Lahitton, on the contrary, contended that his was the traditional view of the Church, and that the opinion now current did not go back any further than the seventeenth century, and consequently was really new in the Church. The question is one that has not merely speculative interest, but must exercise the deepest influence upon the selection of candidates for the holy priest- hood.
THE QUESTION.
Canon Lahitton does not raise the question of the necessity of a vocation to the priesthood. All grant this, and it is too clearly expressed by St. Paul : '' Nee quisquam sumit sibi hon- orem sed qui vocatur a Deo tamquam Aaron," as to admit of any controversy. Neither is there question of the gratuity of the call to the priesthood; this is also universally admitted. Father Bacuez ^ well expresses the universal doctrine on this
1 Lahitton, La vocation sacerdotale ; Lethielleux, Paris, 1909. Deux concep- tions diver gent es de la vocation sacerd. Paris, 19 10.
2 Bacuez, Instructions et meditations a I'usage des ordinands. Paris, 1906, PP- 37.
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point when he says: " If one had all virtues and all talents, the purity of an angel, the zeal of Elias, the austerity of John the Baptist, were one a genius or a worker of miracles, nothing could take the place of the character of the priesthood or give one a right to it. All theologians and spiritual writers teach that the vocation to the priesthood is a free gift of God, not depending on our own merits, and that no sanctity can give us a right to it. A vocation from God is, therefore, necessary that one be legitimately ordained to the holy priesthood." Naturally the question arises : How are we to know that God calls us to this high dignity? And it is here that Canon La- hitton differs from the opinion generally accepted.
The current teaching is that God places this vocation in the soul of the child, and that it will manifest itself in time by certain indications, called signs of vocation. The vocation is there, in germ as it were, and will by its own strength show itself sooner or later, provided it be not stifled by evil influ- ences and sin. The principal sign, according to these writers,, is a certain subjective feeling or inclination, an attrait, as the French call it, for the priesthood. One who has a true voca- tion feels himself, as it were, born to be a priest. The eccle- siastical superiors who are the judges of vocation attest merely its presence, and the official call to orders is but a sanction and approbation of a previously existing call from God.
Canon Lahitton differs radically from this view. Before the official call to orders we cannot properly speak of a vocation ; we can only speak of fitness, idoneity, or, if we be permitted, to use the word, vocability. It is the ministers of the Church who give the vocation in calling to orders. The recruiting of the priesthood belongs to the administration of the Church, and consequently to the forum externum. The signs of voca- tion may be signs of fitness or vocability, but without the actual external call there is no vocation in the proper sense of the word. If an unworthy candidate be called by the bishop, the vocation may be illicit but it is valid, as is also the ordination.
ST. THOMAS AND ST. ALPHONSUS. St. Thomas (Suppl. q. 36) treating de qualitate suscipien- tium hoc sacramentum i^sc. ordinis) knows nothing of the- necessity of a vocation previous to the official call of the
SACERDOTAL VOCATION. 515
bishop; all that is demanded by him is " bonitas vitae " and " scientia competens S. Scripturae " ; nothing further. " Idon- eitas " sums up all his demands on the candidate for orders. And this is true of all the earlier theologians. Beginning with the seventeenth century we find the demand for a vocation, but it is used in the sense of fitness for a vocation ; it is voca- tion " in potentia '\ That it is used in this sense is evident from the fact that these writers demand no more than St. Thomas did.
St. Alphonsus speaks of vocation and signs of vocation, but an attentive consideration of his doctrine will show that he has in mind only vocability. He demands of the candidate for orders " probitas vitae, scientia competens et recta intentio ". These constitute merely fitness and not a vocation for the priesthood. There is, then, between St. Thomas and St. Alphonsus a difference of terminology, not of doctrine. Those whom St. Alphonsus calls " vocatos " St. Thomas calls " dig- nos ". But this is not the case with some later writers ; they demand in addition a vocation in the candidate, and reduce the office of the bishop to recognizing and approving this previously existing vocation. They expect the candidate to have an attrait for the priesthood, that he should feel himself called for it.
The question, then, in a few words resolves itself to this : How does God make known to the candidate that He calls him to the priesthood? Is it by subjective means acting directly on his faculties or is it by an objective call that comes to him through the legitimate ministers of the Church? Is the call of the bishop the essential element of a vocation, so that the others are but '* praerequisita ut legitime vocetur " ? This latter view we believe to be the traditional doctrine of the Church.
THE ARGUMENT.
St. Paul makes the call of Aaron the pattern and exemplar of the call to the priesthood of the New Law. " Nee quis- quam sumit sibi honorem sed qui vocatur a Deo tamquam Aaron." How was Aaron called? Was it by subjective feel- ing or even the inspiration of the Holy Ghost? .Did he feel himself, as it were, born to the priesthood, or was he called
5i6 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
in an objective, visible, manner by his superiors? Let us read Exodus 28:1: " Applica quoque ad te Aaron fratrem tuum cum filiis suis de medio Israel ut sacerdotio fungantur mihi." The call came to him from God through Moses, his chief. In like manner the Apostles were called by Christ in an external way : ''Veni, sequere me." *'Non vos me elegistis," you did not come to Me led by your own inclination, " sed ego elegi vos ". There was no subjectivism in their call to be fishers of men; they had not even an idea of it, much less a strong, persever- ing inclination.
St. Paul in his Epistles to Timothy and Titus describes min- utely the qualities of the men to be chosen to the priesthood. Everywhere we find enumerated again and again marks of fitness : " probitas vitae et scientia competens mysteriorum Dei ". Nowhere is there the slightest hint as to the need of a vocation manifesting itself through subjective media.^ Like- wise deacons are chosen on account of fitness : ^ " Diaconos similiter pudicos, non bilingues, non multo vino deditos, non turpe lucrum sectantes [probitas vitae], habentes mysterium fidei in conscientia pura [scientia competens]". Not a word about vocation.
If we turn to the Acts of the Apostles to learn the practice of the apostolic Church, we find the same thing, namely an insistence on idoneity, silence on the question of vocation. Take the sixth chapter in which we have an account of the ordination of the first deacons : '' Considerate ergo, f ratres, viros ex vobis boni testimonii septem, plenos Spiritu Sancto [probitas vitae] et sapientia " [scientia competens]. Once this testimony is received, they are forthwith ordained : " oran- tes imposuerunt eis manus ". St. Paul did the same in regard to Timothy; he accepted the testimony of the faithful con- cerning his fitness and ordained him (Acts 16). It is this idea that fitness is sufficient for one to be called by the bishop to the priesthood that explains the custom of the early cen- turies, when men were compelled to receive Holy Orders, whilst others fled to escape the dignity ; and this was ac- counted in them as praiseworthy. We can well understand that
3 I Tim. 3 :i-7 ; Tit. 2:5; II Tim. 2 : 2. * I Tim. 3 : 8-10.
SA CERDOTAL VOCA TION.
517
a saint should out of humility refuse the priesthood, and even that he should sacrifice to humility an inclination for the priesthood ; but we cannot account it a sign of sanctity to con- tradict the will of God in his regard, had he felt himself called to the ministry by God. Evidently these saints had not that idea of vocation.
An examination of the teaching of the Church as expressed in her Ritual will lead us to the same conclusion. It may be taken for granted that no one will deny the authority of the Roman Pontifical in giving us the mind of the Church on Holy Orders. The Rite of Ordination is full of instruction con- cerning the requisites and duties demanded by the various orders. Now, if the Church required an internal vocation in the candidate presenting himself for orders, we have every reason to expect that such a requirement should be mentioned in the Pontifical. And yet we may read it ever so carefully, and not a word nor even an allusion that could be construed in this sense can be found in the whole Pontifical. On the con- trary, after the ordinands have been presented to the bishop together with the demand of the Church that he ordain them, the bishop hesitates and first makes inquiry concerning the candidates. The solemnity of the occasion makes it appear that a satisfactory answer to his question is the conditio sine qua non of his complying with the request put to him. Read- ing modern books on vocation we would expect that the ques- tion he is about to ask is concerning their vocation : ** Scisne illos vocatos esse?" It is not; he seems to know nothing of such a requirement. "Scisne illos dignos esse?" Are they fit, " idonei " ? that is the question asked concerning the can- didates.
It will be well to recall also the insistence of the Church upon the freedom of the candidate to accept or to refuse the call of the bishop. The candidates for sub-deaconship are told : " Hactenus liberi estis, licetque pro arbitrio ad saecularia vota transire." This freedom to accept or not is difficult of reconciliation with a divine call. Modern writers who insist on the difficulty of salvation for one who neglects his voca- tion to the priesthood are more logical; yet the Pontifical knows no such doctrine; licet vohis pro arbitrio;' whichever they do, licet. No one has a right to demand ordination on
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THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
the strength of a supposed call, and no one, be he ever so fit, is obliged to accept the call of the bishop, at least " de lege ordinaria ".
The Council of Trent gives us the same doctrine. Section 23, t/^ rejormatione, describes the qualities and conditions that should be found in men to be promoted to orders. Here again where we have every right to expect an insistence upon the necessity of a divine call before the selection of the bishop, we meet with absolute silence on the question. Nor can all these arguments be put aside by the objection that they are negative arguments; since all the passages both from Scrip- ture and ecclesiastical documents are such that silence is in- conceivable, except on the supposition of the non-existence of the subject in question. All the instructions of this session of the Council can be summed up in the *' Scisne illos dignos esse? " of the Pontifical. '' Ordinandorum genus, personam, aetatem, institutionem, mores, doctrinam et fidem diligenter investiget et examinet ", is the injunction put upon the bishop. Chapter 18 urges the bishops to found seminaries, to which are to be admitted only those '' quorum indoles et voluntas spem afferat eos ecclesiasticis ministeriis perpetuo inservi- turos ". It is a question of good character and good will, of idoneity, in a word. The Catechism of the Council of Trent may be considered the best commentary as regards the mind of the Council ; it certainly enjoys the highest authority. This tells us in plain words : " li autem vocati sunt qui a legi- timis ecclesiae ministris vocantur." Not they who feel them- selves called, nor yet they who have a strong inclination to the priesthood, nor even they who are '' idonei ", but they who are called by the legitimate ministers of the Church, have a vocation for the priesthood. The others may have the pre- requisites for a call, and thus in a wide sense and according to the usage of good authors may be said to have a vocation, meaning thereby " in potentia " ; much in the same sense as we refer to boys just beginning the study of Theology as theologians.
It would be too long to transcribe from the Council of Trent all the wise regulations laid down in this session which bear out our contention; one more will suffice. The Council enjoins that the bishop be guided in his choice by his re-
SACERDOTAL VOCATION. .519
sources and the needs of the diocese, and this prescription has been often repeated by the Popes, lately by Pius X : " Let bishops promote to orders guided not by the desire or preten- tions of the aspirants, but, as the Council of Trent prescribes, by the needs of their diocese." ^ By what right does the bishop close the doors of the sanctuary to one who comes to him called there by God? Evidently the viewpoint of the Council and that of the Popes on sacerdotal vocation is not that of certain modern writers. If God calls, why should man interfere and forbid the following of that call ?
THE DECISION.
The Acta Apostolicae Sedis of 15 July, 1912, contains a decree on this subject, the text of which is being published, I understand, in this issue of the Review. I translate it here for the greater convenience of the reader.
To the Rt. Rev. Charles M. A. De Cormont, Bishop of Aire, con- cerning the book entitled La vocation sacerdotale, written by the Very Rev. Canon Joseph Lahitton, of the same Diocese. Monseigneur,
On account of the controversies that have arisen by reason of the two works of Canon Joseph Lahitton on sacerdotal vocation, and on account of the importance of the doctrinal questions connected there- with, our Holy Father, Pope Pius X has deigned to nominate a special commission of Cardinals.
This commission after mature examination of the arguments for both sides, in its plenary session of 20 June last, pronounced the following judgment:
" Opus praestantis viri Josephi Lahitton, cui titulus La Vocation Sacerdotale, nullo modo reprobandum esse; imo, qua parte adstruit: 1° Neminem habere unquam jus ulliun ad ordinationem antecedenter ad liberam electionem episcopi. 2° Conditionem, quae ex parte ordi- nandi debet attendi, quaeque vocatio sacerdotalis appellatur, ne- quaquam consistere, saltem necessario et de lege ordinaria, in interna quadam adspiratione subjecti, sen incitamentis Spiritus Sancti, ad sacerdotium ineundum. 3° Sed e contra, nihil plus in ordinando, ut rite vocetur ab episcopo, requiri quam rectam intentionem simul cum idoneitate in iis gratiae et naturae dotibus reposita, et per earn vitae probitatem ac doctrinae sufficientiam comprobata, quae spem fun-
5 Encyc. Pieno I'animo, 28 July, 1906.
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datam faciant fore ut sacerdotii munera recte obire ejusdemque obli- gationes sancte servare queat : esse egregie laudandum."
In an audience of 26 June, His Holiness Pius X fully approved of the decision of their Eminences the Cardinals, and he charges me to notify your Lordship that you may kindly communicate this to your subject, the Canon Joseph Lahitton, and insert it in full in the Semaine Religieuse of your diocese.
I beg you, Monseigneur, to accept the assurance of my devotion, in our Lord.
R. Card. Merry Del Val. Rome, 2 July, 1912.
I call attention to the fact that this decree is issued by a special commission appointed to examine this question, and that^ it is approved by the Holy Father, which facts guar- antee its doctrinal importance. The decree insists on the gratuity of the call to the priesthood, brought into question, though not verbally denied, by the theory of a subjective call. It rejects the opinion that vocation consists in a subjective aspiration or inclination, even though v^e conceive this to be the work of the Holy Ghost, and insists that nothing further should be demanded in the candidate for a legitimate call from the bishop than idoneity, expressed in the three con- ditions of St. Alphonsus: '' probitas vitae, Fcientia competens et recta intentio ". Thus the controversy has been definitely settled in favor of Canon Lahitton's thesis.
THE PRACTICAL CONSEQUENCES.
The decree just quoted outlines clearly the duties of the seminary authorities who are the ordinary delegates of the bishop in the selection of candidates and in the giving of the call to orders. They are instructed to judge of the fitness of the candidate for the priesthood according to his knowledge, probity of life, and right intention. Of the knowledge re- quired they have continual proof in the various examinations held in the seminary. Of the probity of life they can easily judge, provided no evidence to which they have a right is withheld from them. Every Catholic Has an interest in the proper selection of candidates for the priesthood; and conse- quently has an obligation in conscience to make known any
SACERDOTAL VOCATION. 52 I
important fact that may have a bearing on it. What is true of the simple faithful is doubly true of the ecclesiastic, espec- ially the pastor ; the latter's letter of recommendation is an im- portant item in forming a judgment of the fitness of the can- didate, and must consequently give a true picture of him. The Apostles, as we saw, decided entirely according to the *' bonum testimonium " of the brethren. We do not hesitate to say that the revealing of important facts binds sub gravi.
These means of information, together with several years of continual contact with the student in the seminary, should make the decision of the superiors " de probitate vitae " fairly easy and correct. The right intention is closely bound up with character and piety ; where there are natural honesty and solid virtue we have no reason to suspect" worldly and unworthy motives.
The confessor is not to decide the vocation of his penitent. His role is to advise him to accept or to refuse the vocation he has received or is about to receive. He has no functions in foro externo, and has no right to vote on his penitent, nor has he a right to take any steps to obtain for him a call to orders or to prevent such a call being given ; in the matter of vocation he is one moral person with the penitent.
The candidate for orders has no reason to be anxious about his vocation ; all that is required of him is to show himself as he is, to deal openly and honestly with his superiors and to leave the judgment of his fitness to them. He need not enter into subjective, psychological analyses, by their very nature elusive and illusive. " Saepe sibi de se mens ipsa mentitur," says St. Gregory.^ The whole question is to be decided by his superiors on objective grounds upon which they can have the necessary evidence to form a correct judgment. One who has been honest and open with his superiors, avoiding all hypoc- risy, can accept the call to orders when it comes to him with good conscience, knowing that it comes from God through the bishop whom the Holy Ghost appointed to rule the Church. Such a consciousness of a true and legitimate vocation, not subject to doubt, will be for him a great consolation through life. He has no suspicion lest he deceived himself into think-
® Pastoral, c. g.
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ing that he had a vocation, but he knows that he received it honestly.
The priest on the mission is by his very office a recruiting officer for the priesthood. A true priest will be anxious to send good boys to the seminary, so that when his course is run he may say: " Non omnis moriar " : I have left others to take up my work in the vineyard of the Lord. When he finds a boy who is intelligent, docile, and pious, who gives hope that he will be a good priest, he will direct his mind and steps to the seminary. He does not seek a boy who has a vocation, but he seeks a candidate for a vocation. Fitness alone will decide the matter. He will not wait for the boy himself to speak first on the subject, for some of the best might be lost for the priesthood by this method. A boy of twelve cannot be ex- pected to have that knowledge of the priesthood that would enable him to form a rational judgment about his taking upon himself the obligations of the priesthood. Let him go to the seminary, where he will learn more about it and be better able to judge. Many a boy with a strong inclination to the priest- hood owed it to ambition, vanity, or other worldly motive, even unknown to himself. We should therefore not exag- gerate its importance. It should not be a matter of feeling or sentiment, but of rational decision. In the past the decision of entering the priesthood has often been allowed to hinge on childish fancy; not that we underestimate the importance of an inclination for the priesthood, but that its importance has been overestimated, especially when it was made the deciding factor.
If the priest be guided in his choice by the consideration of fitness only, he will no doubt find many candidates in his parish; the increase of students in the seminary will enable the bishop to make a more judicious selection and thus raise the standard of requirements. In this manner the right un- derstanding of the doctrine defended in the foregoing pages will work for the greater good of the Church, improving the priesthood both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Edmund J. Wirth.
St. Bernard's Seminary, Rochester, N. Y.
THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS. 523
THE BIBLIOAL COMMISSION AND THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS.
THE three recent decrees of the Biblical Commission empha- size for Catholics the importance of studying the ques- tions connected with our Synoptic Gospels. The first decree was issued 19 June, 191 1, and deals with the author, the time of composition, and the historicity of St. Matthew's Gospel. The second decree is dated 26 June, 191 2, and determines the au- thorship, the time of composition, and the historical character of our second and third Synoptic Gospels. The third decree was published on the same day, and serves as a guide to the student of the Synoptic Problem.
According to the Biblical Commission, our first Gospel has the Apostle St. Matthew for its author; it was written before the other Gospels, in the language of the Palestinian Jews; it was not written after the destruction of Jerusalem, and the words of St. Irenaeus ^ do not force us to place its composition after St. Paul's arrival in Rome; St. Matthew did not write a mere source of our present first Gospel, consisting of sayings and discourses of Christ, but the original Gospel of St. Matthew is substantially identical with our Greek Gospel ac- cording to St. Matthew; we cannot consider the contents of the first Gospel as untrue or at variance with historical real- ity; and there is no solid foundation for the opinion which throws doubt on the authenticity of the first two chapters of the first Gospel, or on Mt. 14: 33 ; 16: 17-19; 28 : 19-20.
The second decree of the Biblical Commission insists on the following tenets : our second and third Gospels were written by St. Mark and St. Luke respectively; this authorship of St. Mark and St. Luke extends to Mk. 16:9-20 and Lk. 1-2; 22 : 43-44; the canticle usually called Magnificat is not to be attributed to St. Elizabeth, but to Our Blessed Lady; as to the chronological order of the Synoptic Gospels, St. Matthew wrote first, St. Mark second, and St. Luke third, though St. Matthew's Palestinian Gospel may have been translated into Greek after the second and third Gospels had been written; the second and third Gospels were not written after the de- struction of Jerusalem; nor was the third Gospel composed after the siege of Jerusalem had begun; St. Luke's Gospel was
1 Adv. hser., Ill, i, 2.
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written before the Book of Acts, and therefore before the end of St. Paul's Roman captivity; St. Mark wrote according to the preaching of St. Peter, and St. Luke according to the preaching of St. Paul, though both evangelists had access to other sources either oral or written; the contents of both the second and the third Gospel are historically true.
In its third decree the Biblical Commission touches upon the Synoptic Problem. The resemblances and discrepancies found in the Synoptic Gospels may be explained by the hy- pothesis of dependence of a later Gospel on an earlier, or by the hypothesis of tradition whether written or oral. But the so-called hypothesis of two sources does not harmonize with the foregoing statutes of the Biblical Commission and cannot be freely defended.
We shall draw attention to a few points in which the late decisions of the Biblical Commission have a practical bearing on the study of the Synoptic Gospels. Until last year the student of these Gospels was not bound to assume any de- finite order of succession. In our former contributions on the Synoptic Problem we have shown that scholars have tried every possible combination of the first three Gospels in order to find a satisfactory solution. The decree of 19 June, 191 1, limits this freedom in so far as to assign the first place to St. Matthew's Palestinian Gospel, insisting however that this Pal- estinian Gospel is substantially identical with our Greek Gos- pel of St. Matthew. Even with this limitation, H. Pasquier, Superior of the Grand Seminary in Tours, was still free to publish his work La solution du prohleme synoptiqiie^ in which he partially revived the views of Clement of Alexan- dria and Griesbach. According to Pasquier, St. Matthew wrote his Palestinian Gospel A. D. 41, and St. Luke com- posed his "former treatise" between A. D. 50 and 54; St. Mark harmonized the two, after A. D. 55, during St. Peter's second journey to Rome. St. Luke did not know St. Mat- thew's Gospel, and does not depend on it for his facts; but in his report of our Lord's words he depends on the first Gospel indirectly, in as far as he utilizes written- extracts from St. Matthew which were circulating among the early Christians.
2 Tours, 191 1, Mame.
THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS. 525
The Abbe advances eight proofs for the fact that St. Mark wrote after St. Matthew and St. Luke; he considers each of the eight as convincing even when taken singly, and believes that they are simply unanswerable, when taken together.
But the Abbe's arguments are not as impregnable as he thinks they are; even the principal proof for his theory is un- sound. It consists of the consideration that the second Gospel contains nothing, if we except a few minor details, that is not contained in either of the other two Synoptic Gospels. Hence Pasquier argues: either St. Matthew and St. Luke, writing after St. Mark, divided the material of the second Gospel be- tween them so as to omit nothing excepting a few details of secondary importance, or St. Mark, writing after the other two evangelists, took his material from the first and third Gospels, adding a few minutiae not found in those Gospels. As the former of these two alternatives is practically impos- sible, we must admit the latter. The learned writer does not remember that this argument is advanced by those who solve the Synoptic Problem by the theory of tradition either written or oral. They maintain that St. Mark and St. Luke committed to writing the preaching of St. Peter and St. Paul respectively, and that St. Matthew adapted and enlarged the Jerusalem catechism for his Jewish readers. Now, St. Peter must have adapted the original Jerusalem catechism to his Roman audi- ence, adding for this purpose some parts from St. Paul's preaching; thus St. Peter's teaching, and consequently the sec- ond Gospel, present only material substantially contained in the first Gospel and the third. If it be considered improb- able that St. Peter himself should have adopted portions from St. Paul's preaching, we may suppose that St. Mark, who had been St. Paul's companion on part of his first missionary jour- ney, added portions from his former master's teaching to St. Peter's preaching. At any rate, it is quite certain that the Abbe Pasquier would not have expressed such unlimited con- fidence in the solidity of his arguments, if he had written after 26 June, 191 2, the date on which the Biblical Commis- sion published its last two decrees.
Before the decrees of the Biblical Commission, Catholics were free to discuss within certain limits the date'of composi- tion of the three Synoptic Gospels. Catholic critics were not
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wanting who placed the origin of St. Luke's Gospel and the Greek rendering of St. Matthew's after the beginning of the siege of Jerusalem, A. D. 70. Now it has been decided that the Gospels of St. Mark and St. Luke, and therefore also the Palestinian Gospel of St. Matthew, were written before the destruction of Jerusalem, and even before the beginning of its siege. The opinions of the critics as to the date of the Gospels (and of the other books of the New Testament) may be studied in Moffatt's Introduction to the Literature of the New Testament.^ The work belongs to the International Theological Library, and forms a counterpart to Driver's ex- cellent work on the literature of the Old Testament. The bibliography is quite good, extending even to Catholic works, and the survey of the literary problems concerning the New Testament is fairly satisfactory. It is, therefore, to be re- gretted that the tone of the writer is not more conservative in a book intended for students. For instance, Hebr., Ephes., and the Pastoral Epistles are said not to be written by St. Paul ; St. John is said to have suffered martyrdom rather early, so that he cannot be the author of the Johannine literature; among the Catholic Epistles, only I. Pt. is assigned to the first century. Mr. Moffatt assigns also to the Synoptic Gos- pels a rather late origin : the first Gospel he places between A. D. 70 and no; the second, between A. D. 60 and 70; the third, about A. D. 90.
When Mr. Moffatt wrote his work, he was not acquainted with the results reached by Harnack in his recent publication entitled Neue Untersuchungen zur Apostelgeschichte und zur Abfassung der synoptischen Evangelien.* Prof. Harnack maintains that the author of the so-called We-portions of Acts is the author of the whole Book of Acts ; there is no con- tradiction between the Paul of Acts and the Paul of the Epis- tles. Now, the Book of Acts was certainly written before the destruction of Jerusalem; hence the Gospel of St. Luke, and therefore also the second Gospel and the Logia, or Q, must have been written before Jerusalem's fall. Possibly even the first Gospel belongs to that early date. In fact, the Pro-
3 Edinburgh, 191 1: Clark.
* Beitrage zur Einleitung in das Neue Testament, Leipzig 19 lo, Hinrichs.
THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS.
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fessor places the Book of Acts before the death of St. Paul, A. D. 62] the third Gospel, about A. D. 60; the second Gos- pel, still earlier; the first, about A. D. 70. This is at first sight a long step back to tradition. To prevent any illusion, the writer warns his reader that the antiquity of a writing is no guarantee of its historicity; though he approaches the tenets of ecclesiastical tradition as to the dates of the Synoptic Gospels, he does not grant them any historical reliability. He compares the Gospels to shaking girders which do not be- come more solid because they are proved to be more ancient than had been believed. The legendary elements discovered by critics in the Synoptic Gospels do not demand that their composition be placed at the end of the first century. These legends could easily be developed at an early hour among the Jewish Christians of Palestine; even the first chapters of the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Luke do not require any Hel- lenistic influence. The Gospel story of the infancy contains an historical foundation which has been covered by legendary developments. But it must be remembered that Harnack's historical foundation is void of any miraculous element.
It may here be added that W. C. Allen has contributed to the Expository Times (XXII, 349-352) an article entitled " Harnack and Mofl'att on the Date of the First Gospel ". The writer shows from internal evidence that the first Gospel must have been written earlier than the date assigned to it by either Harnark or Mofl'att. The character of the Gospel shows that it was intended for Jewish Christian readers, and such a work would hardly have been composed after, or about, 70 A. D.
A third point important for Catholic students is the attitude of the Biblical Commission toward the so-called hypothesis of two-sources adopted by most modern non-Catholic critics as the best solution of the Synoptic Problem. Among its main adherents we may mention H. J. Holtzmann, Harnack, and Bernhard Weiss; even such Catholic scholars as Camerlynck, Coppieters, Ermoni, Lagrange, Barnes, Gigot, and Sicken- berger are not averse to it. But the hypothesis cannot be said to have been generally adopted by Protestant writers; Baur and his school, Th. Keim, Hilgenfeld, BoUiger, and Th. Zahn are not found among its patrons. And what are the two
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sources the use of which is said to solve substantially the Synoptic Problem, or explain the resemblances and discrep- ancies found in the first three Gospels? The first source is the Gospel of St. Mark, which is supposed to have been util- ized not only by St. Luke but also by the author of our Greek St. Matthew. The second source is the document called Logia and technically denoted by Q, written by St. Matthew in Aramaic, and utilized by St. Luke and the author of the Greek St. Matthew for the material common to these two evange- lists but not found in the second Gospel. These are the main outlines of the hypothesis of two sources; whether the first source was exactly identical with our present second Gospel, and whether the second source was utilized only by the first and third evangelists, or also by the second, these and similar questions indicate merely accidental variations of the theory of two sources.
How is this hypothesis affected by the decisions of the Bib- lical Commission? Three paragraphs of the decree issued 19 June, 191 1, appear to oppose it: St. Matthew is said to have written before the second and third evangelists ; the work thus written by St. Matthew was not a bare collection of sayings and discourses of Jesus Christ; furthermore, this work of St. Matthew is quoad substantiam identical with our present Gos- pel according to St. Matthew. At first sight, these decisions destroy the hypothesis of two sources; but Prof. Sickenberger, of Breslau, has tried to show how the hypothesis might be combined with the prescriptions of the Biblical Commission : St. Matthew, he tells us, wrote his Palestinian Gospel before the other Synoptists, so that St. Mark may still be regarded as prior to, and the source of, the third Gospel and the Greek St. Matthew; again, the moderate adherents of the hypothesis of two sources consider the Aramaic work of St. Matthew as a real Gospel, not as a mere collection of sayings and dis- courses of our Lord; finally, the substantial identity between the Aramaic and the Greek Gospel of St. Matthew may be ex- plained in a wider sense, so that the Greek Gospel may have received non-substantial additions taken from St. Mark.^ In fact, the Professor appears to believe that the Biblical Com-
^ Cf. Biblische Zeitschrift, 191 1, pp. 391-396.
THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS.
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mission ought to have denied the existence of a common source of the Greek Matthew and the third Gospel, if it had intended to oppose the hypothesis of two sources.
Prof. Sickenberger is not the only Catholic writer who maintained this opinion; L. Venard, for instance, harmonizes the hypothesis of two sources with the first decree of the Bib- lical Commission in the same way : ® St. Matthew wrote his Aramaic Gospel before the other synoptists published their Gospels; the Aramaic Gospel is identical with the Logia of Papias, and with Q of the critics, so that it is not a collection of mere sayings and discourses; its substantial identity with the Greek Gospel of St. Matthew must be understood in a wider sense.
Such is the harmony which certain Catholic writers have endeavored to establish between the decision issued by the Biblical Commission on 19 June, 191 1, and the hypothesis of two sources. M. Venard proposed it before he was acquainted with the decision of the Commission issued on 26 June, 1912. He proposed it, moreover, in order to reconcile with the teach- ing of the Biblical Commission the tenet of Fr. Lagrange ex- pressed in the author's recent commentary on the second Gos- pel : ^ "It is considered as settled," Fr. Lagrange writes, " that the second Gospel — or a gospel more like the second than any other — is the common source of the first Gospel and the third." Karl Kastner in his review of Fr. Lagrange's work ^ gives us perhaps a more satisfactory explanation of the author's attitude. Fr. Lagrange, we are told, does not wish to say the last word as to the value of the hypothesis of two sources, but in his discussion with the critics who are adher- ents of the hypothesis he must stand on a common basis with them. As far as the hypothesis of two sources is concerned, Fr. Lagrange argues with the critics just as a scholastic phil- osopher may argue with his opponent on a dato et non concesso basis.
In a Post-scriptum to his article, M. Venard tells us ^ that the Biblical Commission in last year's decree implicitly pro-
^ Revue du Clerge franfais, 15 July, 1912, p. 167, note. ''^ L'&vangile selon saint Marc, Paris, 1911, Lecoffre. ^ Biblische Zeitschrift, 1911, pp. 400 f. 9 Revue du Clerge franfais, 15 Aug., 1912, pp. 473 f.
^^O ^^^ii^ ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
nounced against the hypothesis of two sources by the very fact that it insisted on the substantial identity of St. Matthew's Greek Gospel with his Palestinian Gospel. Such a view of the substantial identity had been advocated by Fr. V. Murillo in his article contributed to the Civilta Cattolica; ^^ the writer maintains that the identity in question extends to both con^ tents and arrangement of material. Accidental differences between the Palestinian and the Greek Gospel of St. Matthew may be admitted to exist. If the differences were to extend to contents or arrangement, St. Matthew would be the author of the Greek Gospel in an indirect way, and such an indirect authorship is not a sufficient reason, according to Fr. Murillo, for calling the apostle simply the author of the Gospel pub- lished under his name. To return to M. Venard's Post-scrip- tum, the writer grants that in this year's decree the Biblical Commission formally declares that a main common depend- ence of our first and third Gospels on the Gospel of St. Mark and the collection called Logia cannot be admitted.
Did the Catholic student lose much or anything by this decision of the Biblical Commission? If any of the certain results reached by the adherents of the hypothesis of two sources are based on true principles of criticism, they will re- main true for the Catholic student too; but it is to be feared that many of the so-called critical results are in the last in- stance based on the principles of syncretism or of historical development. In this respect the criticism of the Synoptic Gospels resembles the Pentateuchal criticism; we must con- stantly distinguish between facts and inferences drawn from mere critical assumptions. By way of illustration, we may call to mind Prof. Harnack's four stages of early Christian de- velopment: first, Jesus preaches the kingdom of God; sec- ondly. He claims to be the Messias, and sets forth the doctrine of the atoning value of His death ; thirdly, there is the gospel of the early Christian community concerning the death of Christ; fourthly, St. Paul's theology completes the Christian system. Naturally, the sacred text will have to be adapted in one way or another so as to correspond to these a priori stages. ;
10 LXIII, I, 62-69; cf. LXII, I, 443
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What has been said about Harnack is eminently true of Loisy/^ Up to about ten years ago, the critics usually agreed that the Gospel of St. Mark was homogeneous, and was not composed of any other written documents. But M. Loisy, after examining its peculiarities of language and style, its in- consistencies of composition, and the main drift of its various parts, distinguishes four groups of documents in the Gospel : the first group contained only a simple account of Jesus of Nazareth with the essential facts of His Galilean ministry, of His Messianic manifestation in Jerusalem, and His death on Golgotha; the second group contained additions of miracles and prophecies; the third, sayings and parables illustrative of the teaching of Jesus; fourthly, the final redactor of the Gospel made a few additions, gave the second Gospel its actual form, and introduced its general point of view.
If M. Loisy's work had stopped here, it would be little else than an exhibition of critical acumen. But now begins his a priori work, and this poisons the whole process. The first document is said to correspond with the Christianity of St. Peter and the Galilean apostles for whom Jesus was only the Jewish Messias circumscribed by the horizon of Judaism. The second document is held to represent the legendary develop- ment of a few extraordinary cures of sick people whom Jesus had healed, together with a pious application of Old Testa- ment prophecies to Jesus. The third document too is sup- posed to be an enlargement of what the apostles remembered of our Lord's sayings and discourses. Lastly, the fourth ele- ment added by the final redactor, is regarded as derived from St. Paul's Christianity.
St. Paul's doctrine is said to be a poem of redemption de- termined as to place and time by the historical existence of Jesus Christ. The earthly career of Jesus has no meaning for the apostle ; his whole interest is centered in Christ's death and resurrection, for herein lies the principle of salvation which every believer must appropriate to himself by the mysterious rites of Baptism and the Eucharist. According to St. Paul, Jesus is no longer the king of a regenerate Israel, but He is a Divine Saviour of the world after the manner of Osiris,
'^^ Jesus et la tradition evangelique, Paris, Nourry ; L'&vangile selon Marc, Paris, Nourry.
^32 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
Adonis, Attis, and Mithra. Thus St. Paul universalizes the national Jewish hope, and creates a Christianity that can be propagated in the pagan world.
Loisy's views are dealt with in a special way by Fr. La- grange in his commentary on St. Mark. Fr. Lagrange differs from M. Loisy in the use of the sacred text; Loisy treats his texts as prisoners at the bar: Lagrange treats them as wit- nesses. Fr. Lagrange differs from Loisy also in his view of the so-called Paulinism of the second Gospel ; Lagrange does not find, any literary Paulinism in St. Mark, i. e. no influence of the Pauline Epistles on the vocabulary and the style of St. Mark; he does not find any doctrinal Paulinism in the second Gospel, i. e. the second Gospel does not contain any particular teaching that was truly originated, and not merely developed, by St. Paul; he does not find any partisan Paulinism in the second Gospel,. i. e. the second evangelist does not belittle the Twelve in order to emphasize the importance of St. Paul. Thirdly, Fr. Lagrange differs from Loisy as to the sources of the second Gospel; Loisy admits among* the sources documents different in age and tendency of doctrine, while Lagrange points out the relation of the second Gospel to the preaching of St. Peter, and insists on the unity of authorship of the Gospel.
If the sources of the second Gospel are uniform in their teaching, and if there be no Paulinism in the Gospel, the whole theory constructed by Loisy falls to the ground. The purely literary arguments advanced by Loisy for the exist- ence of four strata of documents in the second Gospel are not strong enough to prove such a tenet; Loisy himself would be the first to proclaim their inconclusiveness, if his a priori theories of syncretism and historical development of Chris- tianity did not agree with a composite Gospel of Mark.
While the decrees of the Biblical Commission safeguard Catholic students against such extravagances as those of Har- nack and Loisy, they also point out the direction, less spec- tacular but more solid than the critical hypothesis of two sources, in which the solution of the Synoptic Problem may be found.
A. J. Maas, S.J.
New York City.
THE CURE OF INTEMPERANCE. THE OUEE OP INTEMPERANOE.
533
If weakness may excuse, What murderer, what traitor, parricide. Incestuous, sacrilegious, but may plead it? All wickedness is weakness : that plea, therefore, With God or man will gain thee no remission.
Milton : Samson Agonistes.
AMONG the questions that have recently engaged the serious attention of national charity conferences, civic reform clubs and medical science is the modern treatment of inebriety. The clergy must claim undoubtedly the largest share in the responsibility of undertaking and furthering a reform which must rest chiefly on a moral basis. The vice of intemperance, with its integral parts, gluttony, drunkenness, and unchastity, brings to the priest for healing more sin and misery than any other form of revolt against the law of God. The concupiscence of the flesh is the predominant sin of the vast majority of the human family, and is the cause of at least one-third of all the pauperism and crime in civilized nations. There is good reason for the opinion that this vice also is the main source of insanity and other diseases directly or indi- rectly. Gluttony alone (overeating is the euphemism) fills a thousand graves whilst war and pestilence together fill ten. An amazing number of " martyrs to pain ", who pass through life in an incense cloud of sympathy, are martyrs to their bellies ; and most of those eminent citizens that have " broken down from overwork ", and are constrained to take long vaca- tions and distant voyages, are broken down from overwork, with the knife and fork. Work, when honest, is a cure for dis- ease, not a force to break one down ; worry, which is a vicious lack of confidence in God and of other virtues, and intemper- ance, break men down.
Drunkenness, the second part of intemperance, in all north- ern nations is found in every caste of society; and that form of the vice wherein the offender is a tippler rather than an evident drunkard, and shows symptoms of all the physical and moral lesions of the drunkard, is commonest where it should be least known. Over ninety per cent of the Bright's disease, rheumatism (whatever that is), neurasthenia, unfit- ness for duty, brought to the medical man for cure by mer- chants, lawyers, physicians, and clergymen, is caused by over-
534 ^^^ ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
eating and more or less whiskey for the stomach's sake. The theories in medicine on whiskey as a panacea for all the ills of middle life, inflicted upon suffering physicians by gentlemen (otherwise intelligent) are infinite. No person has ever yet taken habitually two or three drinks of whiskey daily, or a pint of claret, and escaped chronic alcoholism ; and when such a patient comes to a physician and prates about " breakdown from overwork ", or " the will of God ", and the like, he is a hypocrite or a fool — usually both.
These tipplers are often almost as resistant to treatment as the public drunkard, but the real drunkard is more important to the readers of this Review; he is more helpless, and his reformation depends largely on the charity of the priest. A drunkard will listen to his pastor when the advice of a layman would be deemed intolerable meddlesomeness. Despite, how- ever, the zeal of the priest, who strives honestly to cure the soul of the drunkard, the results are discouraging. The chief reason for this failure is that the efforts commonly made in opposition to alcoholism are too specialized. They try to plant sobriety in a soil not fitted for it. Sobriety is only a part of temperance, and temperance itself is but one indivisible phase of that spiritual unity called the cardinal virtues. The drunk- ard must aim at the acquisition in the natural order of all the cardinal virtues, or their reception in the supernatural order, since he is lacking in each of these almost as much as he fails in temperance, and temperance will never come to anyone un- accompanied by the other virtues. When the drunkard, striv- ing toward a new life, acquires these virtues, sobriety is added as a matter of course.
Again, it is impossible, short of a miracle of grace, to cure a drunkard whilst the physical effects of the drug he is tak- ing are present. Therefore before applying moral treatment, physical elimination of the poison must be accomplished. In this series of articles, therefore, the physical side of alcoholism will be first given, and a sufficient untechnical explanation of its pathological effects to show the gravity of this evil, and thereafter the methods of physical and moral treatment to bring about a cure. The physical treatment will be given in detail, because even physicians are not yet conversant with the late successful methods, since they are not in the text-books.
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This first paper, on the Physiology and Pathology of Alco- holism, describes the various alcohols, alcoholic beverages, and alcoholic patent medicines; the action of ethylic alcohols on the circulation, respiration, digestion, muscular and mental energy, and the thoracic organs; alcoholism in the infectious diseases ; the alcoholic insanities ; the marks of insanity ; de- lirium tremens, alcoholic mania, melancholia, persecutory in- sanity, amnesia, dipsomania, and Korsakow's psychosis.
The second part, on Heredity and the Medical Treatment of Alcoholism, will discuss alcoholism and heredity; the ex- aggeration of the influence of heredity in morality ; parental alcoholism and physical degeneracy in offspring; alcoholism and general insanity; racial alcoholic insanity; idiocy, imbe- cility, crime, pauperism, occupation, in their connexion with alcoholism ; legislative opposition to alcoholism ; the treatment of alcoholism in English and American institutions ; the physi- cal or medical treatment of alcoholism.
The third article, the Ethics of Intemperance and its Op- posing Virtues, will treat of intemperance and free will, the nature of intemperance; the notion of morality; the ethics of drunkenness, general anesthesia, and chronic alcoholism from recent physical data; the passions and thfeir control; the car- dinal virtues, their inseparability, their allied virtues, and op- posing vices.
The fourth article, the Natural and Supernatural Cure of Drunkenness, will present the natural moral means for curing drunkenness in the man that is not a Christian ; the classifica- tion of drunkards; and it will show that after the physical craving for alcohol has been removed by medical means the patient must aim at the acquisition of the four cardinal vir- tues to secure sobriety, and it will point out the error of con- centrating on sobriety alone; it will suggest also the super- natural moral means for curing drunkenness; discuss briefly the fundamental notions of the supernatural life, grace, sin, redemption, the gifts of the Holy Ghost, the supernatural vir- tues, the sacraments, and describe the use of these means by the person striving toward sobriety.
The Physiology and Pathology of Alcoholism.
In a person given up to chronic alcoholism, all physical organs and tissues, and every spiritual faculty, show symp-
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toms of absolute or relative deterioration. He has physio- logical and extramental faculties, as sensation, imagination, and the conservation of sensible experience; he has intellectual cognition, and spiritual memory; and in appetitive, or con- ative, activity he has sensuous desires and organic appetite, spiritual desires and volition, intellect, memory, and will. All these undergo degenerative changes as effects of his phy- sico-moral disease. As the disease is both physical and moral its treatment is physical and moral. Therefore in the first part of this study of alcoholism the physical lesions caused thereby, and that medical treatment of the drunkard which is an essential preparation for the moral treatment, are con- sidered. In the second part of the treatise the method for attempting a cure of the moral degeneracy incident to chronic alcoholism is developed.
In the production of the physical symptoms grouped under the title Alcoholism the chief intoxicants are ethylic and methylic alcohols. Propyl, butyl, and amyl alcohols, and certain aldehydes also have influence, but ethylic alcohol is the most important toxic agent.
Methylic, or wood, alcohol (called also Columbian, Colonial, Union, Eagle, and 'Green-Wood Spirit) is used to adulterate cheap whiskey. The characteristic odor of the " dive ", and sometimes of the breath of the common sot, is like that of methylic alcohol, but is usually from amylic alcohol in cheap new whiskey. E. Harnack ^ found that methyl alcohol in itself is not very toxic (not nearly so much as the other alco- hols that contain more carbon), but it becomes very toxic in tlie body tissues by gradual oxidation into formic acid. Methyl alcohol selects the nervous elements, and the oxida- tion affects especially the nervous system.
This alcohol is, then, in its final results very poisonous; and more so to some individuals than to others — two teaspoon- fuls have caused full and permanent blindness. In one series of 275 cases of methylic alcohol poisoning there were 122 deaths, and 153 instances of complete and incurable blindness.^ In New York City, in the winter of 1904- 1 905, there were 25.
1 Deutsche medizinische Wochenschrift. Berlin. Vol. 38, n. 8. ^ Osier: Modern Medicine. Philadelphia. 1907. Vol. i, p. 161.
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537
known deaths from methylic alcohol used in cheap whiskey. In all poisoning by this drug there is a fatty degeneration of the liver.
Propyl, butyl, and amyl alcohols, and an aldehyde, fur- furol, in combination make fusel oil. In England amylic al- cohol is sometimes called fusel oil. This oil may be present in new whiskey and cause evil effects, but the group of alcohols in old whiskey are oxidized into various flavors.
Ethylic alcohol, as has been said, is the chief cause of the group of symptoms called alcoholism. The distilled liquors, whiskey, brandy, gin, rum, contain from about 25 to 80 per cent alcohol; fortified wines, like Sherry, Madeira, and Port, from 15 to 22 per cent; champagne and clarets, about 9 per cent; Rhine wines, 7 to 12 per cent; malt liquors, from 5 to 8 per cent; and beer, 2.5 to 5 per cent.
The table complied for the Committee of Fifty, and pub- lished in their report on The Liquor Problem is as follows, with variants added in the last column from Wood's Thera- peutics:
Percentage of Alcohol.
AVERAGE. RANGE. WOOD's TABLE.
French claret 8 6—12 9.10—17.1
French white wines 10.3 9 — 12
Burgundy . 10.1 —14.5
Rhine wines 8.7 . 7—12
Sherry 17.5 16—20
Madeira 15.4 15—16 19—24
Sauterne ■ 14.2
Champagne 10 8—11 12.6—14.8
Port 16.8 —25.8
American champagne 8 6 — 10
American lager beer 3.8 1 — 7
Vienna and Munich beer 4.8 3 — 5
English ale and porter 5 3 — 7
Hard cider . 5 4—8 5.2 — 9.8
Brandy 47 40—50 53.9
Whiskey, American, best 43 41 — 48
Whiskey, American, common .... 35 25 — 43
Whiskey, Scotch, Irish 40 36—43 53.9 —54.3
Rum 60 40—80
Gin 30 20—40 ' 51—60
538
THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
In the table in Wood's Therapeutics ^ the averages made by Brande, Julia-Fontenelle, Christison, and Bence-Jones, are somewhat higher than those in the table compiled for the Committee of Fifty.
Alcohol is used in all medicinal tinctures, and it is the chief ingredient in most of the popular proprietary tonics. The chemist of the Massachusetts State Board of Health * analyzed about sixty of the American proprietary tonics, and found that the weakest is twice as strong in alcohol as beer, most of them stronger than the heaviest wines, and a number as strong as whiskey.
Percentage of alcohol by volume.
" Best " Tonic 7.6
Carter's Physical Extract 22
Hooker's Wigwam Tonic 20.7
Hoofland's German Tonic 29.3
Hop Tonic 7
Howe's Arabian Tonic, " not a rum drink " 13.2
Jackson's Golden Seal Tonic 19.6
Liebig Company Coca Beef Tonic 23.2
Mensman's Peptonised Beef Tonic 16.5
Parker's Tonic, " recommended for inebriates " 41.6
Schenck's Sea Weed Tonic, " entirely harmless " 19.5
Atwood's Quinine Tonic Bitters 29.2
L. T. Atwood's Jaundice Bitters .' 22.3
Moses Atwood's Jaundice Bitters 17.1
Baxter's Mandrake Bitters 16.5
Boker's Stomach Bitters 42.6
Brown's Iron Bitters 19.7
Burdock's Blood Bitters 25.2
Carter's Scotch Bitters 17.6
Colton's Bitters 27.1
Copp's White Mountain Bitters, " not alcoholic " 6
Drake's Plantation Bitters 33.2
Flint's Quaker Bitters ^ 21.4
Goodhue's Bitters 16.1
Green's Nervura 17,2
Hartshorn's Bitters 22.2
3 Eleventh edition. Philadelphia. 1900. P. 828. * Docuntient No. 34.
THE CURE OF INTEMPERANCE. 539
Hoofland's German Bitters, ** free from alcoholic stimulants" 25.6
Hop Bitters 12
Hostetter's Stomach Bitters 44.3
Kaufmann's Sulphur Bitters, " no alcohol " 20.5
Kingsley's Iron Tonic 14.9
Langley's Bitters 18. 1
Liverpool's Mexican Tonic Bitters 22.4
Paine's Celery Compound 21
Pierce's Indian Restorative Bitters 6.1
Puritana 22
Porter's Stomach Bitters 27
Pulmonine 16
Rush's Bitters 35
Richardson's Concentrated Sherry Wine Bitters 47.5
Secor's Cinchona Bitters 13.1
Shonyo's German Bitters 21.5
Job Sweet's Strengthening Bitters 29
Thurston's Old Continental Bitters 1 1.4
Walker's Vinegar Bitters, " contains no spirit " 6.1
Warner's Safe Tonic Bitters 35.7
Warner's Bilious Bitters 21.5
Wheeler's Tonic Sherry Wine Bitters 18.8
Wheat Bitters 13.6
Faith Whitcomb's Nerve Bitters 20.3
Dr. William's Vegetable Jaundice Bitters 18.5
Whiskol, " a non-intoxicant stimulant, whiskey without its
sting " 28.2
Colden's Liqufd Beef Tonic, " recommended for the treatment
of the alcoholic habit " 26.5
Ayer's Sarsaparilla 26.2
Thayer's Compound Extract of Sarsaparilla 21.5
Hood's Sarsaparilla 18.8
Allen's Sarsaparilla 13.5
Dana's Sarsaparilla 13.5
Brown's Sarsaparilla 13.5
Corbett's Shaker Sarsaparilla 8.8
Radway's Resolvent 7.9
These tonics are a source of alcoholism ; but now the United
States government obliges their makers to indicate on the label the alcoholic content. This trick of making tonics popular by putting alcohol in them is old. The Philadelphia Medical Society in 1 82 1 protested against the use of certain' tinctures
^40 T^HE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
because they led to alcoholism, and in 185 1 popular alcoholic patent medicines were Bateman's Pectoral Drops, Jesuit's Drops, Huxham's Compound Tincture of Bark, Duffy's Elixir, Squier's Elixir, Friar's Balsam, and many others; all of which contained much alcohol and caused drunkenness.
Many of the elixirs used to-day in medicine have a high alcoholic content. The official Aromatic Elixir has about 25 per cent; the official Elixir of Calisaya and the Digestive Elixir, also official, are strongly alcoholic. The official Beef, Wine, and Iron is a popular beverage in prohibition districts.
The action upon man of spiritous drinks is in ratio to their alcoholic content, but ingredients other than alcohol also have marked intoxicant influence: malt liquors, for example, irri- tate far beyond their alcoholic strength. Beer contains, be- sides alcohol, extractives, salts, sugar, dextrose, lactic acid, and lupulin, which is the active principle of hops. Lupulin depresses the nervous system. Lager beer has less alcohol and less sugar than other beers; stout and porter more sugar. Sweet cider contains sugar, and after this ferments rough or hard cider is formed. Sour cider is an intestinal irritant. This liquid dissolves lead, and may cause lead poisoning if run through lead pipes. Malt liquors tend to store fat in the body. They are a common source of gout. Sweet cider causes gout; hard cider does not. The ordinary adulterants of beer are picric acid, strychnia, quassia, chiretta, and Cocculus In- dicus — all as substitutes for hops.
In the fermentation of wine, when all the sugar has been changed into alcohol the wine is said to be " dry " ; if some sugar remains, the wine is " sweet ". The " body " of a wine is the amount "and blending of the sugar and extractives. The " bouquet " is the perfume; when this bouquet is perceived in the mouth it is called the " aroma ". The bouquet comes from ethers formed in the process of maturing. Roughness is due to tannic acid. Only red wines have tannic acid, and this acid and the red color come from the skins of the grapes which are left in the fermenting juice or must. Sparkling wines con- tain free carbonic acid. Champagne has less alcohol than is found in the heavy wines, but more sugar.
The acrid taste of new and cheap whiskey is caused by amylic alcohol, and this alcohol causes headache, and a pecu-
THE CURE OF INTEMPERANCE. 541
liar smell of the drunkard's breath. Ethylic alcohol has not these effects.
Gin is obtained by the distillation of unmalted grain. It has from 20-40 per cent alcohol (sometimes much more) and a little sugar. Oil of juniper is used to flavor it, and this oil acts as a diuretic. Unlike other spirit, gin does not improve by keeping.
Rum is obtained from molasses; it is flavored with butylic ether, and it contains from 40-80 per cent alcohol. The best brandy is distilled from wine; but some is obtained from malt. Arrack is the fermented juice of the coco-nut tree, palmyra, and other palms ; sometimes it is made from rice. It contains 52 per cent alcohol. Koumiss is from fermented mare's milk. Liqueurs are strong spirits, sweetened with sugar and flav- ored with aromatic substances, as orange peel and cherries.
Absinthe, a drug introduced into France from Algiers about 1848, contains 50 per cent absolute alcohol, 45.65 per cent water, a trace of chlophyl, which gives it its green color, a little sugar and essential oils, and 0.33 per cent of oil of worm- wood. This oil of wormwood is the chief poison in absinthe. It has a convulsive action, attacks the brain and causes epi- lepsy, and it injures the nervous motor centres. In chronic absinthism there are digestive disturbances, thirst, emacia- tion, loss of hair, tremor, vertigo, a tendency to melancholy or to epilepsy, and sometimes to dementia. The absintheur is liable to auditory and visual hallucinations, and degenerates physically and morally to a very low grade. In 191 1, 53 per cent of the French murderers were absintheurs. Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland have prohibited the sale of absinthe and France is trying to do so.
Ethylic alcohol in moderate doses modifies the circulation of the blood, and in large doses it paralyzes the control of the vessels and the heart-action. It dilates the skin capillaries, and gives a deceptive sensation of warmth; nevertheless it really reduces the body-temperature by radiation from the blood driven to the surface of the body. The ordinary reduc- tion is only a degree or two, but a large dose of alcohol re- duces it from five to nine degrees. Reductions of twelve to eighteen degrees are on record where drunkards have been exposed to cold; and a fall of twenty-six degrees has been ob-
542
THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
served. A hot alcoholic drink warms by the heat from the water much more than by the alcohol. Arctic and antarctic explorers avoid the use of alcohol altogether; they will not even carry it with them for fear they might be tempted to use it.
Small doses of alcohol stimulate respiration; large doses paralyze the respiratory centres, and the breathing becomes stertorous and slow. This is the cause of death in some cases of poisoning by rattlesnake venom in the United States, where overwhelming doses of whiskey are ignorantly given.
A moderate quantity of alcohol, when taken unfrequently, aids digestion ; frequent use, especially of an acid wine, tends to disturb digestion. A large quantity of alcohol prevents the assimilation of food, and it retards or fully inhibits diges- tion. It partly restores the power of fatigued muscles, but the reaction depresses them below the original degree of fatigue. It lessens endurance, and when given to marching troops it diminishes the total amount of work done.
There has been much discussion of the question whether alcohol is a food or not.^ The chief differences between food and alcohol are :
1. The same quantity of food will always produce the same effect in a healthy body ; the quantity of alcohol must be stead- ily increased to produce the first given effect.
2. The habitual use of food does not induce a desire for an ever-increasing amount; such use of alcohol induces this de- sire.
3. After habitual use of a food a sudden abstinence causes no derangement of the central nervous system ; such abstinence from alcohol after habitual use causes this disturbance.
4. Foods oxidize slowly in the body; alcohol oxidizes rapidly.
5. Foods are stored in the body; alcohol is not stored.
6. Food increases the activity of the muscular and cerebral cells; alcohol diminishes this activity.
7. Food increases the excretion of carbonic acid; alcohol lessens it.
8. Food strengthens and steadies the muscles ; alcohol weak- ens and unsteadies the muscles.
5 Vid. Wood's Therafciitics, Eleventh edition, pp. 279 fF.
THE CURE OF INTEMPERANCE.
543
There are other minor differences.
Wholesome foods are composed of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen : so is alcohol ; but so also are strychnia, morphine, and other poisons. In a hundred parts of ethylic alcohol there are 52.17 parts carbon, 13.03 hydrogen, and 34.79 oxygen. The formula is C2H6O. Alcohol is derived from starches or sugars by fermentation. Glucose is CgHiaOc, and by fermen- tation two atoms of carbon and four of oxygen are set free, making two molecules of carbon dioxid, CO2, and leaving two molecules of ethylic alcohol.
Alcohol is not a practical source of energy in physical work. Schnyder ^ made a series of twelve experiments, carried over some space of time, in which he tested with Mosso's Ergograph the muscular work of a normal index finger, one of the best- trained muscular organs, (i) after no food had been given;
(2) after a readily digestible nitrogenous food had been eaten ;
(3) after a, glass of Burgundy wine containing 14.7 grammes of alcohol had been drunk. He found the food increased the total muscular energy 6 per cent above the result obtained when no food had been given, and that alcohol finally re- duced it 4.6 per cent below the average reached when no food had been given. By combining a meal of soup, meat, vege- tables, and a glass of Bordeaux wine, he found as a final re- sult that the quantity of alcohol (29.4 grammes) in that glass of wine caused a loss of 8 per cent of energy, as compared with the work done after the same meal without the wine. Destree some years ago arrived at results similar to those reached by Schnyder. Frey said ^ he found that alcohol markedly restored exhausted muscles; but this is contrary to the experience of all athletic trainers.
Schnyder, and Hellsten of Helsingfors, found that half an ounce of alcohol raises the muscular activity for from 12 to 40 minutes after ingestion, but that then a depression follows, which lasts for two hours, and which is below the normal standard. Professor Hodge, of Clarke University, discov- ered that dogs to which alcohol had been given have only two-thirds the resistance to fatigue a dog without alcohol has.
^ Archiv fur die gesammte Physiologic, xciii, pp. 457-484. "^ Annates Suisses, Sciences med. i8g6.
544 ^^^ ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
A dog to which alcohol had been given with its food recov- ered its strength gradually after the use of alcohol had been discontinued, but a year passed before the animal returned to its normal strength. He found also that dogs to which alco- hol had been given become timid. The sound of whistles and bells that caused normal dogs to bark, threw the alcoholized dogs into panic. One of the alcoholized dogs had fits of causeless fear with some evidence of hallucination. Timidity became a characteristic of these dogs afterward, when the use of alcohol had been discontinued. Fear is a chief quality in all human alcoholic mental derangements. The " Dutch courage " from alcohol is merely an effect of stupidity : the drinker does not know enough to be afraid in real danger; his intellectual appreciation of the circumstances in which he may be is blunted. As Professor James said, " The reason for craving alcohol is that it is an anesthetic even in moderate quantities. It obliterates a part of the field of consciousness and abolishes collateral trains of thought."
It is not a cerebral stimulant in the sense that it enables one to do better intellectual work, but the contrary. Von Helmholz, the physicist, said that the smallest quantity of alcohol checked in himself all creative mental activity. Exner of Vienna, Dietl, Vintschgau, Kraepelin, Ach, and Maljar- ewski, and more recently (1907) Dr. Frederick Peterson, found that alcohol in minute quantity quickened mental action for a short time, but then slowed it below the normal stand- ard. In larger quantities it retarded the activity primarily. The more complicated the mental process the greater the con- fusion when alcohol was given to the operator. When tested by exact instruments, an operator showed marked decrease in accuracy after drinking even one glass of beer. The physi- cal part of the action was, on the average, quickened after small doses of alcohol, but the mental part was slowed or con- fused.
If alcohol is used for some time there is a cumulative action. Kiirz and Kraepelin found ® that after giving 80 grammes of alcohol (a pint and a half of ordinary wine) daily for twelve successive days the working capacity of men was lessened
^ Psychologische Arheiten, Vol. III.
THE CURE OF INTEMPERANCE.
545
from 25 to 40 per cent. Kraepelin in 1900 experimented upon a normal man, giving him 80 grammes of alcohol daily. The first series of experiments was in adding columns of figures. One man went through a period of thirteen days without al- cohol, and later through a like period using the alcohol. When he used alcohol his work decreased 3.1 per cent in the first eight days. In a final period of thirteen days, although the quantity of alcohol had been reduced 50 per cent, the loss in energy was 15.3 per cent.
In a second experiment a more complicated mental action was tested. The men were given nouns arbitrarily, and were obliged to write down as rapidly as possible all the associated words that these given nouns suggested to them. It was a test in association of ideas. For example, if the word horse were given the man was supposed to write words like bay, black, roan, pony, saddle, etc. In thirteen days' use of alco- hol this kind of work fell 27 per cent below the non-alcoholic average.
The third series of experiments was in memorizing. The persons tested were set at memorizing groups of twelve-place numbers, say, 315,784,231,675. Without alcohol they im- proved as the experience developed; with alcohol they fell back 6.2 per cent daily. That decrease would be much more marked, at the least doubled, as time went on, as is evident from a calculation of the mean in a series of experience- factors. In any increasing series (accumulation effect of al- cohol) of four numbers the arithmetical mean of the first and third (say, the first and thirteenth day — ^the actual time used by Kraepelin) would be less than the mean of the second and fourth (say, the tenth and twenty-sixth day). This is true no matter how variable the increase due to the experience- factor.
Professor Gustav Aschaffenburg ® made an experiment on four typesetters, which is often mentioned. He used experi- enced workmen, and gave them the same printed copy to work from. The first day they worked without alcohol ; the second day each man drank one ounce of alcohol in the form of a Greek wine; the third day no alcohol was taken; the fourth
® Psychologischen Arbeiten. Leipzig, 1906. Vol. I, p. 608.
546
THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
day they received the ounce. The reduction of the final result on the days they received alcohol amounted to 14 per cent m all. One man did 10 per cent less work on the days he took the ounce of alcohol. The loss was markedly cumulative in all the men.
It is now an established medical fact that chronic alcoholic intoxication can, except in rare cases, be induced by the daily consumption at one sitting of from 40 to 100 grammes of alcohol (one and a quarter to three and a half fluid ounces). There are about 50 grammes of alcohol in 1.430 litres of Pilsen beer, 1.35 1 litres of Munich Hofbraii, 1.564 litres of Spatenbraii, 1.020 litres of English porter. A litre is practi- cally a quart; and about three pints of German beer, or a quart of English porter taken at one sitting, say at dinner, induces chronic alcoholism. A pint of champagne, French claret, or of mediumly strong Rhine wine, about a tumbler and a half of sherry, and about half a tumbler of brandy or whiskey contain the 50 grammes.
Persons drinking these quantities habitually may show no noticeable symptoms of drunkenness in speech or action for some time, but most of the various lesions of the body de- scribed in these pages hereafter can be induced by the quan- tities given here. A man that takes a pint of claret at dinner habitually is a chronic alcoholic and is certainly injuring his health. The old Roman saying was true : " When you fill your cup the third time you are a drunkard." I have fre- quently seen marked symptoms of chronic alcoholism in men that take three drinks of whiskey daily at different times, not at once. The test in these cases is to shut off the alcohol en- tirely, and if within a week or two there is no craving for alcohol the person is not a chronic alcoholic — ^but there always is a craving.
Wood's summary ^^ of the psychological effects of alcohol is as follows : " Alcohol in small doses acts as a stimulant to the ganglionic cells of the cerebrum, and perhaps also to the motor tract of the spinal cord. In large amounts it certainly is a depressent to the cerebral and spinal ganglionic cells, as well as the nerve-trunks. The action of small doses upon the
10 Loc. cit., p. 287.
THE CURE OF INTEMPERANCE. 547
respiratory centres is not thoroughly established, but is prob- ably stimulant; large doses depress the respiratory centres, and finally they cause death by centric paralytic asphyxia. Upon the heart a small dose of alcohol acts as a direct stimu- lant, the large dose as a depressent or paralyzant. The influ- ence of minute doses on the vasomotor system is not thor- oughly worked out, but there appears to be a widening of the blood-paths at a time when the heart is still stimulated, so that there is a marked quickening of the blood-movement. The toxic dose of alcohol paralyzes the blood vessels, probably both centrally and peripherally. The peripheral temperature is often increased by small amounts of alcohol, and there may be even a slight increase in the central temperature, probably caused by quickening of the circulation; the large dose of alcohol lowers the animal temperature, probably by causing vasomotor paralysis, and thereby increasing heat-dissipation. In regard to the effect of alcohol upon the nutrition there is much contradictory evidence, but the present probabilities are that the drug has no specific influence upon the production of heat or of carbonic acid, or upon nitrogenous elimination, and that therefore it has little or no direct effect upon the nutri- tion, unless it be in poisonous doses, when it certainly disturbs all nutritive processes. After absorption into the blood, alco- hol is in part eliminated through the lungs, the skin, and th€ kidneys unchanged, but is largel^^ burnt up in the system, probably yielding force to the working needs of the organism. Whether as a food it is in health of as much or more value than other hydrocarbons is not at present positively known."
In the early stage of chronic alcoholism there is a general lack of energy, a disinclination to work; even routine work is done carelessly. After that stage there is headache, mental depression, and a feeling of impending misfortune. The men- tal processes are weakened. The drug appears to act most strongly, even in very small quantities, on the most elevated mental processes, those spiritual activities that have been built up through education and experience — the power of self-con- trol, the appreciation of responsibility. The patient can not make up his mind even in trivial affairs; he grows irritable, peevish, irascible; he sleeps badly or not at all; tremors show in the hands, lips, and tongue. Sometimes the- tremor ap-
548
THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
pears first in the feet, and may be worse in the morning in cases where there is insomnia. The tremor is " fine ", a quivering rather than a shaking, and made worse by exertion or by an attempt at manipulative skill. To stop this tremor the patient commonly has recourse to a morning drink of alco- holic liquor: food, however, will stop it. Any sudden noise makes an alcoholic in this stage jump and sweat.
Later the features grow flabby; acne rosacea (the red nose and cheeks of the drunkard) may occur; the skin is pale and smooth, the tongue may be furred, flabby, tremulous, marked by the teeth; the breath is foul; the mouth and throat dry; the throat catarrhal. There may be fits of wheezy coughing, a loss of appetite for food, especially in the morning; morn- ing nausea ; alternate constipation and diarrhoea.
In chronic alcoholism the bodily lesions vary ; in one patient the brain is chiefly afl"ected ; in another, the heart and arteries ; in a third, the kidneys; in a fourth, the liver; and all or sev- eral of these organs may be attacked at once in the same per- son. Fatty degeneration and other diseases of the heart are common. In young drunkards sudden death from a fatty heart is a common occurrence. Probably an inflammation of the vagus nerve is also a cause of sudden death. When the lungs are involved, oedema (dropsy), pneumonia, and tuber- culosis are the forms of attack. The spleen and pancreas sufl'er from chronic congestion and consequent degeneration.
The liver is probably never normal in a confirmed drunk- ard. One of the chief functions of the liver is to neutralize poisons coming from the gastrointestinal tract, and the poison from alcohol may inhibit this function. Fatty liver can be brought about by alcoholism among several possible causes, especially by the use of malt liquor. The liver in this disease is enlarged; sometimes to twice or thrice its normal size, and if the source of irritation is not removed the disease is fatal. After the disease has been well established even abstinence from alcohol will not save life. Acute congestion of the liver is a common effect of alcoholism. This condition in itself is important, because its frequent recurrence can result in cir- rhosis, which, if unchecked, is fatal in about three years.
In the group of hepatic diseases called the cirrhoses, the liver degenerates, and scar-tissue forms which obstructs the
THE CURE OF INTEMPERANCE.
549
passage of blood. Distilled alcoholic liquors are the chief cause of portal cirrhosis. The liver may be found very small, but usually it is enlarged; it may be " hobnailed " in appear- ance, covered with small bosses like the top of a fruit-cake. The liver-cells are destroyed. The spleen is enlarged and congested in most cases of hepatic cirrhosis. The gastrointes- tinal tract is also congested, and may bleed; the kidneys and heart are congested. Fatal tuberculosis of the belly is a com- mon complication. The ordinary symptoms of cirrhosis are those of gastrointestinal inflammation, nausea, and vomiting; later there is vomiting of blood, and bleeding from other parts of the body. There may be apathy, stupor, and coma, or active delirium, convulsions, paralyses, and contractures. Dropsy of the belly is common in the last stages of this disease.
Alcohol is one of the common causes of the inflammation of the kidneys called acute or chronic Bright's disease. The most typical form is chronic interstitial nephritis, with chronic inflammation throughout the organ. The onset is insidious, and the disease is commonly far advanced when first discov- ered. The heart is exhausted through the increased blood pressure. Uraemic conditions are observed toward the end — drowsiness, neurasthenia, dizziness, apoplectic hemorrhages into the brain, vomiting, diarrhoea, coma, and death. The prognosis depends upon the condition of the heart and blood vessels, and the habits of the patient. Careful treatment may prolong life in a tractable patient for many years; active al- coholism, of course, makes short work of the death.
A curious symptom of perverted judgment in alcoholics is that if the physician shows them that the kidneys are dan- gerously afi*ected, that even dropsy is setting in, or that the liver is cirrhotic, they are likely not to pay the slightest heed to this information ; they are not even interested in it as a bit of news. If an insurance-examiner refuses the alcoholic as a risk because of his kidneys, the patient, instead of becom- ing frightened, is likely to accuse the examiner of ignorance or fraud.
Neuritis, an inflammation and degeneration of the nerve- fibres, is a not infrequent disease, and alcohol is its commonest cause. In most cases it begins in the muscles of the legs. The muscles along the shin grow weak, the foot drops, and
550 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
this forces a high step. The muscles waste, and walking be- comes impossible. The arms also may be involved. The optic nerve sometimes is attacked, and the diaphragm may be para- lyzed, causing death by suffocation. Loss of memory, halluci- nations, and delirium, not seldom occur. There is a possibility of full or partial recovery, or the disease may be fatal. Dr. H. Eichorst ^^ in a series of 67 cases of alcoholic neuritis found that all the patients were over twenty years of age except one boy eight years old, who for two years previously (from his sixth year) had complained of pain in his loins, and in- creasing weakness in the muscles of his legs and back. The child was finally caught stealing out of his bed at night to drink the alcohol in lamps, and when treated for alcoholic neuritis he recovered health.
Alcoholism lessens the power of resistance to infectious dis- eases. The mortality from pneumonia in non-alcoholics is about 23.9 per cent, in alcoholics it is 50 per cent. All severe systemic diseases are much more fatal in alcoholics than in others. Diabetes is frequently associated with alcoholism, but it is also common in persons that are not given to alcoholism in any degree. The lack of resistance to infection makes a trivial wound very dangerous in an alcoholic. A cut in the scalp that can be closed with two or three stitches, a broken kneecap, or similar accident, in alcoholics very frequently re- sults in death.
Delearde of Lille proved that alcoholized rabbits are not protected against rabies by the Pasteur serum as normal rab- bits are. Laitenau found that alcohol increases the suscepti- bility of animals to splenic fever (anthrax), tuberculosis, and diphtheria. The proportion of alcohol used in these animals was equivalent to what a man would be obtaining by drinking a half-pint of beer daily. Professor Abbott of the University of Pennsylvania found that the erysipelas coccus acted on alco- holized rabbits as it does on human alcoholics. Alcohol keeps the protecting leucocytes out of the circulation. Fillinger " examined the blood of two healthy young men before and after drinking champagne, and he found the resistance-quo-
^1 Correspondenz-Blatt /. Schweizer Aertze, Vol. 401, No. 29.
^^ Deutsche medizinische Wochenschrift, Berlin, 38:21. ;
THE CURE OF INTEMPERANCE,
551
tient of the red corpuscles dropped from ^^ to 43 in one hour in one of the men.
Tuberculosis patients that use alcohol resist much less than non-alcoholics. Baudron found that in those districts of France where the annual per capita consumption of alcoholic liquors was 12.5 litres, the mortality from tuberculosis was 32.8 per 1,000; when the per capita consumption of alcoholic liquors was 34.6 litres the mortality was 107.8 per 1,000. In Prussia, Guttstadt found the mortality from tuberculosis per 1,000 in gymnasium teachers 126, in physicians 113, in Prot- estant clergymen ']6, in hotel keepers 237, in brewers 344, in waiters 556. In the Sixth Annual Report of the Phipps In- stitute for Tuberculosis in Philadelphia (1911) of one group of 442 tuberculous patients that gave a history of alcoholism, 20.81 per cent died; of a second group of 1,900 cases that did not use alcohol, 10.10 per cent died. According to this re- port alcoholism in tuberculous patients raises the mortality of the disease. Of a group of 483 tuberculous patients that had alcoholic parents, 15.31 per cent died; of a second group of 1,835 patients whose parents were not alcoholics, 10.78 per cent died. In these two particular groups the difference is less marked than in other groups examined.
The statistics of the United Kingdom Temperance and Gen- eral Provident Institute of Great Britain covering forty years (1866- 1 905) show that among total abstainers the deaths actually amounted to 71.54 per cent of the calculated probable deaths, whereas among the moderate drinkers the deaths were 94 per cent of the calculated probabilities. Other life insurance companies get about the same results. Nearly 40 per cent of the " bad risks " rejected by the insurance com- panies are alcoholics. In confirmed alcoholics the insurance mortality runs 25.5 per cent over the calculated probability, and now no reputable insurance company will insure any alco- holic. The best insurance actuaries calculate that a man of twenty years of age who is a total abstainer will live 42.2 years longer, but that a drinking man will live only 15 years longer. C. P. Huntington, of the New York Life Insurance Company, says that the mortality of liquor manufacturers (workmen, brewers, and the like) between fifty, and sixty years of age is three times higher than ordinary. The Con-
^^2 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
necticut Mutual Life Insurance Company's tables of mor- tality in <^^,']^^ policies that came up for adjustment was^ among professors and teachers 6i per cent of the expected; lawyers 79 per cent, manufacturers 81 per cent, liquor dealers 142 per cent. The liquor dealers came next below seamen.
Alcohol tends to cause sterility. In five among twelve au- topsies on alcoholic women between 20 and 30 years of age, the ovaries were markedly atrophic, and in women between 31 and 40 they were atrophic in five among eight. Simonds ^* observed that 60 per cent of male chronic alcoholics on post- mortem examination show azoospermia — inert sterile sperma- tozoa.
Austin O'M alley.
Philadelphia, Pa.
HOW BISHOP KETTELEE OOKEEOTED THE SCANDAL GIVEN BY ONE OP HIS PEIESTS.
MUCH attention has been given of late to the interesting figure of the Bishop of Mayence, Baron von Ketteler, who fifty years ago began a systematic warfare upon the un- christian teaching of Socialism in Germany. There is another side to his character, not less interesting to the clerical reader, which shows forth his courage as a shepherd of souls and as a leader among his pastoral clergy. An incident of his life chosen almost at random will indicate alike the prudence that guided him in his episcopal office and the whole-souled zeal which made him shirk no labor for the good of his flock.
It was not his custom, as it is with us, to combine his regu- lar pastoral visitation, in which he was engaged for about six months at a time, with the periodical administration of the Sacrament of Confirmation. For this latter function he se- lected other times, when he would also frequently take part in the celebration of local church festivals, pilgrimages, and missions. Nor was his participation in these exercises of popu- lar devotion limited to the celebration of pontifical Mass, or preaching. His purpose of studying the religious and social conditions of the community in which he happened to be at the time, was manifested by his going into the confessional,
18 Osier's Modern Medicine, Vol. I, p. 173. Philadelphia. 1907.
BISHOP KETTELER AS PASTOR.
553
visiting the working people and the sick as well as the local clergy of the neighborhood, and by his making himself felt everywhere as an active participant in all that interested the community.
We get a glimpse of how he deported himself on such occa- sions from some of his letters. Thus on one of his Confirma- tion journeys, under date of 14 September, 1875, he writes:
Since your departure from here last July I have been continually away administering Confirmation. I returned for the Congress in Freiburg, and after that went to Dieburg for the feast of Our Lady's Nativity. There was a great concourse of people there on a pilgrimage. I heard confessions from half -past one in the after- noon until half-past nine at night, and was up again at half-past two in the morning to hear the people who were waiting. They kept us in the confessional until twelve at noon, excepting the time for Mass and sermon. We had five Capuchin Fathers helping, besides twelve of our own priests.
In another letter, dated 31 July, 1872, he writes :
Since Easter I have been on the go all the time, and just now am in the midst of a group of merry children. Apart from the fatigue and the great heat at this season, I find much to give me joy in the different parishes so far as conditions admit of such a thing as joy. . . . Since I left you I have spent most of the time in the Odenforest district, where the churches and the parish schools lie widely apart from one another, so that I have difficulty in getting to them. But I like the country here and am fond of its people, and I know pretty well every nook and corner of the region, so that so long as the weather is good I enjoy life here in the mountains.
It was in this way that Bishop Ketteler came to know his flock and to enjoy their fullest confidence. But there were trials also with which he had to cope single-handed.
Toward the end of the year 1875 the Bishop was suddenly notified that one of his priests, a pastor in a country district, had been accused of a dastardly crime and arrested by the civil authorities. Immediately, the Bishop repaired to the presbytery, took charge of the parish, and on the following Sunday appeared in the pulpit of the bereaved church. The priest's arrest and the Bishop's sudden arrival had brought everybody to the late Mass. The Bishop preached on the text
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of St. Matthew i8: 7, ** Woe to the world because of scan- dals." He had carefully thought out what he wished to say and there is a record of the notes he had sketched for the occasion among his papers collected by his Jesuit biographer, Father Pfulf.
My coming to you at this time [he said] is caused by an occur- rence that affects me with bitterness of heart, and I have made the journey at a great sacrifice. But I have been urged by the thought that my visit to you might be of profit to your souls and at the same time prove a consolation to you. And in this I feel that I am fulfilling my duty to you as your Bishop. It would be futile to pass unnoticed the sad incident which has taken place among you, and I shall speak of it with perfect frankness. May God grant that my words enter your hearts unto salvation.
First of all, let me say that the time is not yet ripe for passing judgment as to whether your pastor is guilty of the crime which is laid to his charge or not. That is a matter still to be proved by the authority which has taken in hand his trial. When the com- petent tribunal has pronounced its judgment, I as your Bishop shall have to deal with the matter, and I shall do so as I am bound by my responsibility to God.
But whatever may be the measure of his guilt, he unquestionably deserves to be reprehended in this that his conduct permitted the bringing against him of a charge, the very suspicion of which is a crime in a priest. The minister of God is bound to avoid not only foul crime but even the appearance of it, so far as that is possible. The conduct of a priest must be such as to contradict the very sus- picion of evil in him. Such is the wish and intention of the Church. In this your pastor has failed; his action was calculated to arouse suspicion against his integrity. That itself is a crime, inas- much as it involves the sin of scandal.
How great a calamity this sin of scandal is you may realize if you will reflect with me upon the words of our text, " Woe to you be- cause of scandals ". . . . Although scandal is the subject of Christ's awful malediction, we must guard against the error of making the Church responsible for such a calamity, when its cause is the bad conduct of a priest.
Yet this is what the enemies of the Church will do when they point the finger of scorn at the unfortunate minister of Christ who has brought about the scandal. How unjust it is to fix the stigma of this evil upon the Church you will readily see if you will follow me attentively.
BISHOP KETTELER AS PASTOR. 555
1. God has appointed men in all conditions of life to be His representatives among their fellows. Such representatives are, in the first instance, parents with reference to their children ; like- wise in all Christian society the civil magistrates and other officials of the secular order; finally, such representatives in the communi- cation of things spiritual are the clergy.
2. To all men God gives sufficient grace, natural and super- natural, to overcome sin and to fulfil the duties of their state of life. This grace is accorded in a special manner to parents and to priests. To the former God imparts grace in the Sacrament of Matrimony, and to the latter in the holy Sacrament of Orders.
3. Those who cooperate with this special grace in the exercise of the sacred priesthood are faithful and good priests. But since God does not take away from the priest his freedom of will, it may hap- pen that a priest fails to correspond with the divine gift of the Sac- rament of Holy Orders, and thereby becomes a bad priest.
4. You see then how unjust it is to lay the blame for the actions of an unworthy priest to the charge of the Church. The Church takes her priests from among the people. They are not sent to her from heaven, but are called from among your own children. She warns us at all times,' lest anyone enter the priesthood who has not an earnest conviction that he is really called to her service. Those who have shown signs of a vocation she reminds of the dangers and difficulties which encompass the priest in the midst of the world. She is utterly adverse to a spirit of false or feigned virtue, and she exhorts the priest, as she does each of you, to be faithful ministers and to practise constant vigilance in the exercise of the sacred obli- gations imposed upon him. She does not gloss over his sins, but bids him remember that in him sin is a more grievous fault than in those of less exalted dignity.
6. What then are we to do under the present circumstances?
(a) In the first place remember the warning of Christ not to judge too hastily. Refrain then from much needless gossiping about the sad matter which has occurred in the parish.
(b) Above all things do not discuss it in the presence of your children.
(c) But silently recommend the matter to God in earnest prayer.
(d) Take warning to be more than ever faithful in the fulfilment of your own duties.
(e) All the more as I, your Bishop, am helpless in the matter, however much I desire to heal your wounds.
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Such were the thoughts which the zealous Bishop placed before his deeply humiliated flock with all the burning elo- quence of which he was capable. But he was not satisfied to have spoken to them. He would act for them. For the time being the duties of his extensive diocese called him home, where he remained until the functions of Lent and Holy- Week were over. Then he returned to the parish which had suffered from its shepherd's disgrace. He announced to the people that love toward their children had drawn him back, and that he wanted to perform himself the task of preparing them for their approaching first Communion. " For twenty- six years," he said, " I have not had an opportunity of leading the lambs of my flock to the Holy Table, since this duty does not properly belong to the Bishop ; but a special tenderness for your children has awakened in my heart the desire to prepare them for this sacred step."
The preparation of the children, however, was merely the occasion of the much more important work which he had in mind for the reawakening of Catholic zeal in that same con- gregation. In fact he opened a mission for the parish, which he himself directed, preaching, instructing, hearing confes- sions, and meeting each individually, that he might remove the impression which their priest's conduct had left in their minds.
In other words, the entire community was engaged to take active part in the preparation of the children for their first Communion. Confessions were heard from very early morn- ing, for the people, seeing their Bishop so willing to labor for them, responded promptly to the call. Besides the instruc- tions given to the younger children, there were separate in- structions for the older school children, and devotions to suit the condition of the parents and other adults. The Bishop himself undertook to bring Holy Communion to the sick in the parish, in order that they too might participate in the re- newal of spirit which he hoped to effect in the congregation. He left the people enamored of their chief pastor, only to re- turn a few months later to administer Confirmation and exhort them to perseverance. Once more, the following year, he found his way back to them, when again he prepared the- little children for first Communion and assured himself that
JAM TOTO SUBITUS VESPER EAT POLO.
557
the scandal given by an unworthy priest had yielded to the zeal of their Bishop and had been turned into a blessing.
Such was the interest which he took in the spiritual welfare of his flock; and this at a time when his mind was engrossed with cares requiring ceaseless activity in a wide field of eccle- siastical and national affairs. Among his published works there are some two hundred Pastoral Letters and other im- portant appeals touching the educational and social as well as religious necessities of his people. To hear him in the pulpit of his cathedral or in the tribune of the national par- liament one would have thought that he was absorbed in public affairs to such an extent as neither to allow nor to in- cline him to take the place of his humblest curate among the poor and the workmen of the factory towns and farming dis- tricts of his diocese. But his power of adaptation was mar- velous, undoubtedly for the simple reason that it was fed by the love of his priestly heart for the salvation of souls.
Innumerable instances might be recounted in his life of this humble zeal in a man born amidst the aristocratic sur- roundings of an ancient nobility, with the spirit of the soldier in his veins, yet endowed with a simplicity and meekness that must have come from frequent communings, amidst all his labors, with the Sacred Heart of the great Shepherd of souls.
JAM TOTO SUBITUS VESPER EAT POLO.
HOW should this, the first line of the Matins Hymn of the Seven Dolors (third Sunday of September), be translated? Two English renderings give diametrically oppo- site interpretations. Father Caswall was the first translator. In his Lyra Catholica (1849) we read:
Come, darkness, spread o'er heaven thy pall.
The line appears unaltered in his Hymns and Poems (1873) and in the posthumous (1884) edition of the Lyra. It may be that Wallace, the next translator (1874), had not seen Cas- wall's version. At all events, he differs from Caswall toto coelo (or polo) :
Let darkness vanish from the heavens now.
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THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
Caswall invokes darkness. Wallace invokes daylight. Which is correct?
It is not unlikely that the assignment of the hymn to Matins led Wallace to his conception of the meaning, for in olden times that canonical hour was recited before dawn ; and the poet's indirect invocation of light would then seem appro- priate, while any invocation of darkness would indeed have been superfluous. The hymn, however, is quite modern — a product, apparently, of the eighteenth century.^ Whoever was its author, it is likely that he took advantage of the mod- ern permission to anticipate the Matins of the following day. In his afternoon prayer, the appeal to the vesper-darkness (so near at hand) to overshadow the heavens, would be wholly appropriate.
Recalling the words of St. Matthew (28 : 45) describing the Divine Tragedy : " Now from the sixth hour there was dark- ness over the whole earth until the ninth hour," shall we lightly dismiss the view of Wallace as simply a mistaken one? and the whole question of the Matins hour in relation to the hymn as a futile one? We should then encounter the notable figure of J. F. Schlosser, the able translator of the Breviary Hymns into German verse, who gives his support to the in- vocation of daylight : ^
Die nacht'ge Dunkel fliehe fern aus des Himmels Hohen, Schnell fiihr' heran die Sonne den Tag der herben Wehen, etc.
If the question could be settled by a majority vote, Wallace and Schlosser would appear to be hopelessly in the wrong. With Caswall are ranged all the other translators that have come under the notice of the present writer : *
(a) The Marquess of Bute* translates:
1 It has been attributed with probability to the Servite Callisto Palumbella.
^ Die Kirche in ihren Liedern, etc., I. p. 319.
3 Including Caswall, Wallace, and Schlosser, there are ten translators. Eight of these invoke " darkness " ; two invoke " daylight ". It is curious that not one of the ten seems to be aware of the existence of an opposite interpre- tation to his own, or feels called on to discuss the possibility of another view, or to justify his own rendering.
* The Roman Breviary, etc., 1879.
JAM TOTO SUBITUS VESPER EAT POLO. 559
Come, let us stand to pray when now
The darkness of the night Recalls the awful gloom that wrapt
Golgotha's fatal height.
He gives his vote for " darkness ", but meanwhile omits the invocation implied in the words eat and praecipitet:
Jam toto subitus vesper eat polo Et sol attonitiun praecipitet diem, Dum saevae recolo ludibrium necis Divinamque catastrophen.
And he voices an appeal, not to " darkness " or to " daylight ", but to those who are to recite the Office (for during the sing- ing of a hymn they must "stand to pray"). He seems to imply that the poet's muse was not very clear in her ideas (as, indeed, she may not have been).
(b) Archbishop Bagshawe '^ translates:
Let evening's gloomy dusk pervade the sky, And let the astonished sun remove the day, While I the scorn and mortal suffering Recount, which from God's Son took life away.
This very literal rendering throws light on Bute's version, and appears to exhibit the involved character of the muee's thought and imagery. For does the poet really hope that Nature will repeat her tremendous miracle of the darkening of the sky at his mere meditation on the mystery of Calvary? The sun might well be astonished at the Great Tragedy itself, but hardly at its annual commemoration in the Divine Office.
(c) Judge Donahoe * translates:
Swift from the heavens the stricken daylight flies. The gloom of midnight overpowers the skies, The God of life, 'mid infamy and shame, A culprit on the cross forsaken dies.
He avoids the " recolo " of the original, paints a picture of Calvary, and gives a coherent, but scarcely faithful, rendering.
^Breviary Hymns and Missal Sequences, 1900, p. 112. « Early Christian Hymns, 1908, p. 260.
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THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
(d) As the view of Wallace is opposed to that of Caswall, Bagshawe, and Donahoe, so is the concurrent view of Schlos- ser opposed to that of Dr. Schulte/ who gives a version in German prose: "Now let evening come suddenly upon the whole heaven, and the sun, benumbed with sorrow, dispatch the day." ® Schulte endeavors to clarify the poet's thought in a further explanation : '' As the earth quaked and the sun was darkened at the death of the God-Man, the poet now calls for the sympathy of inanimate nature at the recollection of that tragedy on Golgotha."
(e) The Abbe Portanier '^ invokes darkness:
Dans les cieux consternes que Tombre se condense!
Precipitant son char de feu, Dans la nuit, eperdu, que le soleil s'elance:
Je vais chanter la mort d'un Dieu !
(f) Thus, too, Albin:'''
Retirez-vous du ciel, astres des nuits ;
Soleil epouvante, precipitez votre course, etc.
(g) To end quotations with an Italian rendering, G. Belli ^^ gives his suffrage to darkness :
Ratta s'avanzi per lo ciel la sera, E stupefatto ne rifugga 11 sole, etc.
The weight of numbers (or of "authority") is thus seen to be against the view of Wallace and Schlosser. Against that view there is also the obvious poetical appropriateness of in- voking darkness rather than daylight as a background for an imaginative contemplation of the Divine Catastrophe at which the sun was obscured and " there was darkness over the whole earth."
Will Virgilian usage help us to a decision? The " vesper eat polo " of the hymn is like the " ruit oceano nox " of the
■^ Die Hymnen des Breviers, etc., 1898, p. 311.
® " Moge nun am ganzen Himmel plotzlich der Abend eintreten und die Sonne vor Schmerz betaubt den Tag beschleunigen. . . ."
* Chants Sacres au Hymnes du Brev. Rom., etc., 1866, p. 109.
^® La Poesie du Brev. Rom., etc., p. 333.
11 Inni Ecdesiastici . . . del Brev. Rom., 1856, p. 298.
JAM TOTO SUBITUS VESPER EAT POLO, 561
yEneid (II. 250). Are polo and oceano datives or ablatives? Is the vesper to go to or from the heavens? Is the night to rush to, or from, the ocean? The learned commentator who edited the Delphini Virgil votes for the dative, interpreting the phrase by " nox cadit in oceanum ", and is directly con- tradicted by Henry (^neidea, II, p. 137) : " Inasmuch as the ancients always represented night as following the course of the sun, i. e. as rising in the east, traversing the sky, and de- scending or setting in the west, . . . the words ruit oceano nox, applied to the commencement of night, are to be under- stood, not as presenting us with the ordinary English image, of night falling on the ocean, but as presenting us with the directly reverse image, of personified night rising (rushing) from the ocean'' He quotes Dante, Shelley, Schiller, in illus- tration of the classical imagery, and Leopardi in illustration of the " vulgar error "/^ Now, if nox ruit oceano means rising from the ocean, the eat polo might well be interpreted (be- cause of its closeness of phrase to Virgil's) as " going from the heavens " ; and Wallace and Schlosser could therefore say something for their solitary view.
The Virgilian suggestiveness is heightened by the figure in the second line of the hymn :
Et sol attonitum praecipitet diem,
which finds its counterpart in the iEneid (II. 8, 9) : "... . nox humida coelo praecipitat " — the (personified) night has passed the zenith and is now rushing down to the (western) ocean. In the hymn, however, praecipitet is transitive : the sun is asked to urge on the day {up ^^ from the east, or down to the west — which?), or, doubtless more properly, to cast it headlong down. But, if this latter be correct, then the eat polo must mean that darkness {vesper or nox^ is invoked to
12 Henry seems to have been the first commentator to advance (in his Notes of a Twelve Years' Voyage of Discovery in the First Six Books of the Eneis, published in Dresden in 1853) t^e view that Night is pictured as rising from the ocean, rather than falling upon the ocean. The extract from his /Eneidea (published in 1878) given above represents an unchanged view, as it adds merely the reference to Leopardi ; and the view is, we believe, the one uni- versally adopted at the present time.
13 Schlosser translates in this sense of "bringing on the day":
" Schnell fuhr' he ran die Sonne den Tag der herben Wehen ".
562 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
cover the sky, and the perplexed eommentator will cry out with Macbeth : " Then comes my fit again ! "
However much the commentator may be perplexed, a trans- lator is free to choose either extreme, and may properly leave the original author to solve his own riddles. In the following translation, the Asclepiads are broken in two, in order to bring in more rhyme than a four-line stanza permits ; but the number of syllables is exactly equal in the Latin and English stanzas.
Jam Toto Subitus Vesper Eat Polo.**
Now let the darkling eve Mount suddenly on high, The sun affrighted reave His splendors from the sky, While I in silence grieve O'er the mocked agony And the divine catastrophe.
^* AD MATUTINUM.
Jam toto subitus vesper eat polo, Et sol attonitum prsecipitet diem, Dum saevge recolo ludibrium necis,
Divinamque catastrophen.
Spectatrix aderas supplicio Parens, Malis uda, gerens cor adamantinum: Natus funerea pendulus in cpuce
Altos dum gemitus dabat.
Pendens ante oculos Natus, atrocibus Sectus verberibus, Natus hiantibus Fossus vulneribus, quot penetrantibus
Te confixit aculeis !
Heu ! sputa, alapse, verbera, vulnera, Clavi, fel, aloe, spongia, lancea, Sitis, spina, cruor, quam varia pium
Cor pressere tyrannide !
Cunctis interea stat generosior Virgo Martyribus : prodigio novo. In tantis moriens non moreris Parens,
Diris fixa doloribus.
Sit summae Triadi gloria, laus, honor, A qua suppHciter, sollicita prece, Posco virginei roboris aemulas
Vires rebus in asperis. Amen.
JAM TOTO SUBITUS VESPER EAT POLO.
Grief -drenched, thou dost appear With heart of adamant, O Mother ; and dost hear The Great Hierophant, Upon His wooden bier Locked in the arms of Death, Utter in groans His parting breath.
What lookest thou upon, Mangled and bruised and torn? Ah, 'tis the very Son Thy yearning breast hath borne ! Surely, each breaking moan '
And each deep-mouthed wound Its fellow in thy heart hath found!
Surely, the taunts and woes, The scourge, the dripping thorn, The spitting and the blows. The gall, the lance, the scorn — Surely, each torment throws A poison-dart at thee. Crushed by their manifold tyranny.
Yet thou with patient mien Beneath His cross dost stand. Nobler in this, I ween. Than all the martyr-band : A thousand deaths, O Queen, Upon thy spirit lie, Yet thou, O marvel ! dost not die.
O Holy Trinity, Let earth and heaven raise Their song of laud to Thee The while my spirit prays: — When evil comes to me, The strength do Thou impart That erst upheld Thy Mother's heart !
H. T. Henry. Overbrook Seminary, Pa.
563
^54 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
THE STOfiY OF ST. OEOILIA AND ITS VALUE.
THE visitor to the Eternal City is almost overwhelmed with the memories of an immortal past, prehistoric, an- cient, medieval, modem, pagan and religious. Let us accom- pany him on a well-known route from the centre of the great metropolis across the high-banked Tiber, the same yellow flood yet in surroundings completely transformed from the days when, at a spot a little further down, " Horatius defended the bridge in the brave days of old ", across the little island, where rest the bones of St. Bartholomew recalling a later Rome, on to the Trastevere, the city-beyond-the-river. It is a district bringing to memory Benedict the boy, soon to be known as Patriarch of the West, and Francis, Spouse of Lady Poverty, and again later still Frances, model of motherhood and widowhood. Passing down a narrow street he enters a large square courtyard not unlike that on the Coelian Hill before the church whence Gregory sent his prior and forty monks to evangelize the English people. He notes perhaps as he passes through it a large cantharus or vase on the right- hand side. It is the relic of a house, pagan at first and Chris- tian afterward, of which we shall speak soon. He enters an old Roman basilica. Near the door he sees a tomb, unpre- tentious but interesting, if he comes from the West, as being that of Adam of Hertford, faithful administrator of the Lon- don Diocese toward the close of the fourteenth century. But his attention is arrested by the beautiful statue of a recumbent figure lying conspicuously before the high altar, some thirty of forty paces off. Who is this so honored? It is a thing of such great beauty. Who is the artist, and what may be the meaning?
He is in the Church of Saint Cecilia. This is a picture of the Virgin Martyr, one who with Saints Agnes, Agatha, and Lucy has appealed in an especial way to every heart through- out the Christian centuries and who is remembered again each day by priest and faithful in the Canon of every Mass. It is the purpose of these pages to give her story ; not to discuss its value with scientific arguments but rather to present the results arrived at to-day of criticism and archeological dis- coveries. And first will be given a summary of her history,
THE STORY OF ST. CECILIA AND ITS VALUE. 565
as we may gather it from the full " Acts of St. Cecilia " (which are some io,cmdo words in length), partly because these are generally less accessible than the popular story as found in Chaucer or the Golden Legend/
First it must be stated briefly, what will be remarked more fully later on, that these Acts, though founded on undoubted facts, and true also, we think, in many details, are largely the work of a pious rhetorician of a later century.
Cecilia was a Roman maiden born of noble blood. Very exact is the description of her lineage in the more authentic copies of the Acts; the Saint is described as ingenua, nobilisj clarissima, showing the senatorial rank of her family. She is made to tell us in the Acts that she had received the Christian doctrine from her childhood, from which we may infer that her mother was a Christian; though we may gather that her father was a pagan, from the fact that she was given in mar- riage to a pagan. Richly clad as became her rank, secretly she wore the hair-shirt and fasted rigorously, two or three days a week taking no food at all. Grown up to womanhood, she was forced to marry Valerian, noble of birth and noble also in character, as we shall presently see. This entirely against her will, for secretly she was espoused to Jesus Christ, bound by the sacred ties of a vow of perpetual virginity. The day of her nuptials arrived and while all the company were rejoicing, with the harmony of music (" cantantibus organis ") she sang in her heart to God alone, renewing her vows in David's words (Psalm 118) : " Fiat cor meum immaculatum, ut non confundar — May my heart and my body be undefiled, that I may not be confounded." Her prayer was heard and as she and her spouse entered the secrecy of their bedchamber, she thus addressed him : " O sweet and loving youth, I have a secret to confide. I wish thee to know that I have an angel of God for my lover, who guards me with exceeding zeal. Wherefore if thou drawest nigh with an unholy love, his anger will be enkindled and thou wilt lose the flower of thy fair youth. But respect my firm purpose and he will love thee as he loves me." Then Valerian was struck with fear: "Show
i Yale Studies in English: Life of St. Cecilia, by B. E. Lovewell (Boston, 1898), gives various versions of the medieval story. The volume contains also an excellent introduction.
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me this angel. If truly angel of God he be, I will do as you ask, but if you love another man, I will slay both you and him." " If you will become purified in the everlasting foun- tain of regeneration and believe in the one living and true God, then shall you see the angel." The consent of the noble youth was given and he was directed to an aged man in hiding at the third milestone along the Appian Way. As an indica- tion of the spot he would find some poor people asking an alms •from passers-by. — " These have I always cared for and they know my secret. Give them my blessing and say, Cecilia has sent me to you that you may show me the holy man Urban. Then come back and you shall see the angel and whatsoever you ask of him you shall obtain."
He found St. Urban, the Bishop, called in the Acts Pope, already twice confessor of the faith, lying hid amongst the tombs, who rejoiced with exceeding joy and raising his hands to heaven prayed: "O Lord Jesus Christ, sower of chaste counsel, receive the fruit of the seed which Thou hast sown in Cecilia, for the spouse whom she received as a fierce lion, she has sent as a gentle lamb." Then there appeared a venerable old man white as snow with a tablet written in letters of gold which he read : *' One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, above all and in us all." " Believest thou this? say yes or nay." Valerian confessed, the old man disap- peared; baptized by Urban, clad still in the white robes of a neophyte, he returned to Cecilia and saw the angel standing beside her " in glorious plumes with wings and shining as fire ". Two crowns he held and gave one to each, crowns of red roses and white lilies, a significance which Valerian did not yet perhaps realize. " These flowers will not fade nor their sweetness diminish ; nor will they be visible save to those who delight in chastity." Asked to choose what favor he would, Valerian replied : " To me the sweetest thing in life is to be in company with my brother Tiburtius," He must be brought out of darkness. As the angel disappeared Tiburtius happened to arrive. The scent of the roses and lilies, the offer of an incorruptible crown if he would believe seemed to him but a dream. Not so, he is told. But rather hitherto his life had been a dream, worshipping statues of plaster which spiders cover with their webs and birds with their dung, on
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whose heads storks build their nests, — gods receiving their being from criminals quarrying marbles. The Bishop Urban, in aspect angelic and venerable in age, would baptize him. Tiburtius has heard of him, condemned a second time to death, and this thought leads Cecilia to contrast the evils of this short life with another life, an eternal one. Tiburtius still an unbeliever, with the practical sense of a man of the world, demands : " But who has returned from this other life to tell us?" Cecilia enters into a somewhat lengthy exposition of the doctrines of creation and redemption, and the Trinity which she exemplifies by the curious psychology of the age in which the Acts were written : Just as a man has wisdom but that wisdom we divide into capacity, memory, and intel- lect; by capacity we discover what we have not learnt, by memory we retain what we are taught, by intellect advert to matters we have seen and heard; the gift of wisdom is the possession of these three faculties. But Tiburtius, impatient, returns to his former question. Who has returned to tell us? Cecilia then explains the coming of Jesus Christ, in a graphic account, a loose and exaggerated paraphrase of the Gospel scenes. For instance: Jesus said, " If I show you the dead come back to life will ye not belie\e? " Then He went to the sepulchres and called forth those who had been dead three or four days, even those who were already in corruption and gave them back life. And so other miracles are told and in an account of the Passion she shows how He by dying had sub- dued and fettered death and " this is why we glory in perse- cution ". Tiburtius is completely converted and finds life in- supportable, unless he is baptized by Urban, and remains seven days with him until, casting aside the white garments, he is consecrated a soldier of Christ. Henceforth he sees angels daily and whatsoever he asks he instantly obtains. Then say the Acts : It is too long to describe all the marvels that happened, so we will return to their glorious martyrdom. Turcius Almachius the Prefect slew the Saints. Tiburtius and Valerian buried them and gave alms. They were de- nounced and arrested. Almachius is treated to a discourse on the fleeting nature of worldly goods and the conversation is variously elaborated in different texts of the Acts, but they usually contain a very beautiful parable, some forty lines in
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length, in answer to Almachius's conviction that the Chris- tians are mad to despise the pleasures of life. In a garden in spring-time a group of peasants were toiling hard when a band of pleasure-seekers stopped and jeered and clapped their hands in derision. " Throw aside all this useless work and amuse yourselves with laughter." But spring with its cold and rain quickly passed, and roses, grapes, and honeyed fruits . in beauty and abundance were the reward of toil. Then in- deed were heard the rejoicings of those who had seemed to work in vain, and the loud lamentations of those who had boasted wisdom, a repentance then too late. The moral was pointed : " After this shall we reap a thousandfold." The two heroes are called upon to sacrifice, but instead they con- trast Jupiter with God, whom Almachius cannot discover even if he had wings. " It comes to this then," says the judge, with an apparent show of reason, " all the world is wrong, and you two alone are right." " Not so in truth," exclaim the brothers. '' Countless are the multitudes of Christians who have embraced holiness and few indeed are ye, who are like the planks left from a shipwreck, fit for nothing but to be cast into the flames." They are scourged with rods and a herald standing near proclaims aloud in rivalry with the sufferers : " Beware of blaspheming the gods and goddesses ; " but they : " Grind to powder those gods of wood and stone, worshipped by Almachius."
Valerian and Tiburtius, condemned to instant death, are handed over to Maximus, the notary of the Prefect. He weeps with pity and, persuaded that man's body, an earthly seed, must be reduced to dust that it may rise again as the phoenix, is converted. All his household, too, are afterward baptized by many priests, brought by St. Cecilia. The noble maid then sends forth the two Christian warriors to their crown. At Pagus, the fourth milestone from the city, they pass through the gate of the Temple and refuse to burn incense, the declaration of apostasy, before the image of great Jove. Maximus bewails their fate and is beaten with scourges loaded with lead until he gives up the spirit. St. Cecilia buries him in a new tomb near Valerian and Tiburtius (in the Catacomb of St. Praetextatus) and orders a phoenix to be carved upon it.
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Officers are next despatched to the house of the wealthy- widow but are far from inducing her to offer incense. Mounted on a stone she persuades these " Citizens and brothers ", who weep that such a beautiful damsel so noble and discreet should of her own accord be put to death, that she is but exchanging copper coins for gold, pebbles for a jewel, a place strait indeed for a vast palace. Then Saint Urban came and baptized within her house more than 400 of every age, sex, and condition, and amongst them Gordianus^ who took the house of Cecilia under his protection that it might be a church.
The next scene in the Acts is a graphic and precise dialogue between Almachius and his prey. In the sparring St. Cecilia always gets the better of her adversary. To quote one idea as given in Chaucer's " The second nonnes tale " :
" Your might," quod she, " ful litel is to drede ; For every mortal mannes power nis But lyk a bladdre, ful of wind, y-wis. For with a nedles poynt, whan it is blowe May all the boost of it be leyd ful lowe ".
He has not the power of life and death, as he proudly as- serts. " Thou canst, 'tis true, take away life from the living; thou canst not bestow it upon the dead. Therefore art thou but ' dethes lord '." But fencing of words is cut short. The humble prefect can overlook all insults against himself but cannot brook those against the gods, whom Cecilia declares are stone, and wood, and lead. Besides being unjust and fool- ish he has in this shown himself to be blind. " Put out your hand and touch if you cannot see that it is but stone. It is disgraceful that the whole population should laugh at you, Almachius, since they are all aware that God is in heaven."
In a violent rage, yet in order to avoid too much publicity,, he commands the maiden to be closely shut up in the bath- room in her house and sevenfold quantities of wood are heaped on the furnaces beneath. But for a whole day and night she remains marvelously protected from on high, as in a cold place, so that no member of her body shows the slightest trace of discomfort. Foiled again, Almachius orders a cruel and barbarous lictor to smite off her head. Whether overcome with fear to do so pitiful a deed or held back by ah Angel as
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Abraham of old, we do not know ; but thrice he smites her on the neck. The law allowed no further stroke, so that she lies half alive, half dead, bathed in her own blood. For three days she strengthens all the devout in the faith, some of whom gather up her blood " with linens as though with sponges ". At last St. Urban comes. " I have sought yet this delay of three days," she says, " that I might give into thy charge both these people and this my house to be consecrated as a church for ever." Then the holy Urban and his deacons bury her among his colleagues the bishops, where all the confessors and martyrs are laid [that is, in the catacomb of St. Callixtus] . " He hallowed her house into a church, in which unto this day is said the service unto our Lord."
We may conclude in the words of Caxton's Golden Legend : " She suffered hir pasyon about the year of our Lord two hundred and xxiii in the time of Alexander the Emperour and it is redde in another place that she suffred in the time of marcii aurelii which reygned the yere of our Lord two hondred and twenty."
Concerning the authenticity of these Acts let a few words suffice. Unlike the Acts of St. Polycarp, the Martyrs of Lyons, of Scillium, or the forty of Sebaste, of Saints Perpetua and Felicity, and others which can be proved undoubtedly, at least for the greater part, most authentic, those of St. Cecilia are a late compilation, evidently " written up " by the editor. As Alban Butler says, " The Acts of St. Cecily are generally considered of very small authority." But as in the case of St. Agnes, whose Acts are spurious, but the chief facts of whose story we have in the writings of St. Ambrose, Pope Damasus, and the poet Prudentius, so too the chief facts of St. Cecilia's life given in her Acts are confirmed beyond doubt by the ancient martyrologies and archeological discoveries. It is pos- sible to disengage from the pious rhetoric of the " discourses " the true facts of her story. We may conclude that they took their present form in the fifth century, an age of rhetoricians who composed romances, beautiful and most Catholic, at a time when the rhetorical writing of history was accepted. If so, they represent the devotion of the Roman Church, perhaps at the time of St. Leo, to one of her greatest martyrs. More-
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over it is not difficult to think that they are accurate in many details. The Church was careful to gather up records of the martyrs as we know from the division of the city into seven districts with a notary for each, by Clement I in 93. Antheros (235-236), we also know, sought for the Acts of the martyrs and laid them in a church, for which reason he suffered mar- tyrdom. Perhaps the writer had access to documents, or at least drew from a vivid tradition. The interrogatory, in which we note, besides its precise and legal form, the men- tion of the Emperors (in the plural) and the citation of the exact words of the imperial rescript addressed to Lyons in 177, bears marks of authenticity. And we shall presently see what archeological discoveries have to tell us in confirmation.
About the date of her martyrdom we may notice that many modern writers, departing from the generally accepted state- ment of the medieval legends, are inclined to place it about the year 177, in the reign of Marcus Aurelius and Commodus, a time of persecution. The mention of Pope Urban would fix it fifty years later, in the reign of Alexander Severus, when the Christians were unmolested. This anachronism has given the Acts a bad name. It is easier to think that the early men- tion of Bishop Urban — a Bishop in the city of Rome — became by a natural process of exaggeration Pope Urban, especially as the pope confessor was buried close to St. Cecilia in the catacomb of St. Callixtus. The St. Urban, who we know was martyred about 180 and who was buried in St. Praetextatus, may well have been a coadjutor of the reigning Pope, and the friend of St. Cecilia.
So far the Saint's story has been given as it has come down to us in the Acts and, in the main features, in the medie- val legends. But there is an interesting sequel which bears more clearly the stamp of historical fact.
The modern pilgrim, or sightseer, may go along the Ap- pian Way leaving behind the gaunt ruins of the palaces of the Caesars on the Palatine, past St. Xystos's on the left where St. Dominic lived, and leave the city by the Gate of St. Sebas- tian. He is on the road by which St. Paul first entered Rome with his companions. He passes beyond the " Quo Vadis " Church which now stands to mark the spot where St. Peter, as the beautiful legend given in St. Ambrose's Sermons tells
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US, met his Divine Master going into the city to be crucified anew, and beyond that small earlier chapel built or rebuilt by Cardinal Pole. At a spot a little more than a mile from the City Gate a door in a high vineyard wall marks the present entrance to what was once the property of the Cecilian gens. We know that many members of this noble family became Christians in the early days of Christianity and we have reason to think that they gave this vineyard to Pope Zephyrinus for the use of the Church, as one of the places of Christian burial. From the Apostolic times to the persecution of Domitian the faithful were buried without secrecy in private tombs, which besides having all the immunity of private property were^ though Christian, regarded as " religious places " and held as inviolable as the temples and tombs of the pagan dead. But, as the second century grew older, underground cata- combs were built or burrowed in the beds of soft volcanic stone or granular tufa which is found in irregular formations in the neighborhood of Rome. In the course of three hundred years no less than fifty such cemeteries, great or small, were formed and it has been estimated that no less than 587 miles of galleries have already been discovered. The cemetery to which we refer receives its name from St. Callixtus, who as deacon to Pope Zephyrinus (+ 223) was made superintendent of this burial place, which he considerably enlarged and beau- tified. As the pilgrim passes on beyond a grove of cypress trees he observes a surrounding district of little interest, slightly undulating, marked by a few low buildings. He is given a taper by the kind Trappist monk who becomes his guide and descends by a broad stairway a long flight of steps, not indeed the narrow way by which Valerian was led to Urban, but a more commodious one to admit the throng of pil- grims of later centuries. Yet another flight to the right and he is in the catacombs. It is an Egyptian darkness. There is a mysterious silence too, broken only by the dull sound of human voice or tread. It is not terrible as the " fauces Averni ", and very mistaken are those who avoid what they think may be found too gruesome. This is sacred ground, and very difi'erent are the emotions stirred in the true Christian heart as he draws near the former resting place of our fore- fathers in the faith, those heroes who by being Christians
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carried daily their lives in their hands, who with a joyful fear laid to rest their brethren, some in the narrow loculi which tier upon tier line the narrow passages, and others in more honored tombs with arched roofs under which the Holy Sac- rifice might be offered; for they were saints, bearing their palm branches before the throne of the Lamb. Their mangled remains, as the custom was, had been thrown out in heaps out- side the Coliseum, while the fierce beasts lay sleeping in the dens below gorged with Christian blood. Rescued by faith- ful hands, laid to rest in triumph, these hallowed remains were here honored by a score of generations of pious pilgrims, as we may see from the two itineraries or guide books which have come down to us from the seventh century. Here many Popes lay buried in the chapel we enter first, known as the Papal Crypt, where the good St. Xystos was murdered in his chair. Here heroic souls listened to the burning words of confessors; here they assembled for the sacred Liturgy and received the Bread of Life; here the sinews of the faith grew strong — all scenes so graphically described in the pages of Fabiola. But our Trappist guide would have us keep our reflections for some other time, for he has much to show in this vast city of the dead, gallery after gallery, in places three stories high or deep, frescoes of the Good Shepherd, of countless saints, of symbolic or sacramental representations of the mysteries of the Christian faith, inscriptions without num- ber in Latin or in Greek, speaking to those who passed be- fore, the triumph gained, from those who had yet to fight. " Live in peace and pray for us " ; — " Sabbatius, sweet soul, pray and entreat for thy brethren and comrades " ; — " Ana- tolinus, may thy spirit rest well in God, and do thou pray for thy sister ".
From the papal crypt, by a narrow doorway we come upon a more spacious room, irregular, twenty feet square. It has a long and interesting history, which must be told in brief. It is now ascertained beyond any doubt that this is the chapel in which the relics of St. Cecilia were laid.
In the ninth century the catacombs were fast falling into decay. Goths, Vandals, and Lombards had wrought destruc- tion and carried off many treasures and as far .back as the "days of Constantine, who built the Basilica over the catacombs
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of SS. Peter and Paul, it had become the practice to inter no longer in subterranean burial places. In January, 817, one zealous for the honor of the martyrs had become pope under the name of Paschal. In the following July he translated with great ceremony the relics of 2,300 martyrs from various catacombs to churches within the walls, for Saracens were even then threatening Italy. He was most eager to find the relics of St. Cecilia, especially as he was rebuilding her church in the Trastevere. He was however baffled in his efforts and gave up the search. He acquiesced perhaps in the belief that the precious remains had been carried off by Astulfus the Lom- bard King in 755. But four years later, according to the account he has left and his biographer Anastasius who con- tinued the Liber Pontificalis, he had a vision or dream. St. Cecilia encouraged him to continue the search, for at one time, she told him, they were so near that they might have conversed together. He had already transferred the bodies of the former popes from the papal crypt, and from the itin- eraries of the seventh century, in which she is mentioned 'either immediately before or immediately after the popes, it is clear that pilgrims visited her tomb near this spot. By some it has been thought that his investigations came to a successful end in the crypt we have referred to, now known by her name, and that in the large recess toward one corner, near what is now the main entrance, to the right of the posi- tion where a temporary altar is placed that priests may offer the Holy Sacrifice to-day, her relics were found. This was the opinion of De Rossi and Dr. Northcote, and Dom Leclercq is still inclined to uphold this. On the other hand, Mgr. Duchesne and Dom Quentin, arguing from a corruption in the text of the Liber Pontificalis, think that the relics were translated, previous to PaschaPs time, for fear of desecration, to the catacomb of St. Praetextatus, where the bodies of the other three saints lay. We are disposed to agree with this latter suggestion; but, be this as it may, St. Paschal found, either in the recess already mentioned in St. Callixtus, or with the other bodies in St. Praetextatus, a large sarcophagus. Within a cypress coffin, clad in rich garments interwoven with gold, with blood-stained linen cloths at the feet, lay the beau- tiful form of the Virgin-Martyr, to their wonder and joy
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fresh and perfect as when more than six hundred years before she gave up her pure soul to God lying on the floor of her bath-room. He tells us that he lined the coffin with fringed silk, spread over the body a cover of silk gauze and carried it with reverence in a sarcophagus of white marble and placed it together with the other bodies under the high altar of her church in the Trastevere. This church, which we have al- ready mentioned, was consecrated, as we know by reliable authority, under Pope Sixtus III (432-440), and occupies the site of St. Cecilia's house. We find it first mentioned in refer- ence to a council held by Pope Symmachus in 499, and later on by the Venerable Bede in his History as the church where the English Wilbrord was consecrated. We can well believe that it was held sacred from the day of the martyr's death in accordance with the wish she is said in the Acts to have made known, and that the large room recently discovered ten feet below the central part of the nave was a place of rendezvous for the faithful to attend the Holy Mass. It is interesting to wander from room to room of the ancient house below the church, beneath our feet in many places the tessellated pave- ment still intact, to see the small statue of Minerva with the altar before it as in the days of the pagan Valerii, to look down upon the seven great amphorae set in the floor for stor- ing grain, wine, and oil, such as we frequently see in the little shops surrounding the old Roman palaces in Pompeii, now brought to light by excavation after nearly two thousand years. Above the ground-floor of the ancient house, in what was once the second story of the building, now a side-chapel in the church beautified with a variety of marbles, there has been shown from time immemorable that caldarium or bath- room where St. Cecilia breathed her last attended by Urban and her household. This room Paschal I preserved when he demolished or covered up the other parts of the house. There we may see the leaden pipes coming up from below and run- ning round the room once " sevenfold heated " to suffocate the martyr, and the slab, now the altar-stone, upon which she was struck down by the executioner. Guido Reni has left a beautiful picture of her martyrdom which is hung above the altar, and on the opposite wall we see a representation by Domenichino of the angel bestowing the crowns on the youth-
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ful Spouses. In the church itself, on the wall of the apse, appear with their ancient freshness some gigantic mosaics, in the Byzantine style of the period, of our Lord, Saints Peter and Paul, Cecilia, Agatha, and Valerian. Our Saint stands clad in rich garments, as patroness of Pope Paschal, about whose head is the square nimbus in place of the round one which marks a saint. This signifies that he was still alive and makes clear to us the date of the mosaic.
We must now return to her crypt in the catacomb of St. Callixtus. By the eleventh or twelfth century, no longer the resting places of the saints' relics, it had fallen into decay and even its memory was forgotten. Not until 1848 was the catacomb rediscovered. Encouraged by significant signs, Signor de Rossi petitioned Pio Nono to buy the vineyard under which it was found to be. The story is too long to tell, but it may be mentioned concerning St. Cecilia's crypt that it was necessary for him to begin to dig from the level ground above, the very top of a wide luminare or air-shaft formed at a comparatively late period, and so gradually to unearth the crypt. First a figure of a woman praying, next a Latin cross between two sheep, and in the crypt itself, three later saints, and then on the wall close to the entrance from the papal chapel, facing the priest as he offers Mass to-day, a painting, perhaps of the seventh century, of a woman saint richly attired with bracelets and necklaces, and below on the same wall a niche, as is common in the catacombs, to receive a large shal- low vessel of oil. Here too is a figure in full pontifical dress with name attached of St. Urban — the Pope and confessor, be it noted, and not the martyr — and a scroll added '' Decori Sepulcri S. Caecilias Martyris." None of these are the original ornaments of this place. St. Cecilia is painted on the surface of a ruined mosaic, and another fresco, our Lord's head, in Byzantine type with rays of glory in the form of a Greek cross, is on a niche once encased with marble. This and St. Urban are probably not older than the tenth or eleventh cen- tury. Such continued decorations, especially when prolonged beyond the eighth and ninth centuries, are a sure mark of great religious and historical interest. De Rossi next discov- ered the recess where once stood the large sarcophagus which, as we have seen, had been transferred to the Trastevere, and a
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grave stone which lies there to-day, bearing the name of Septimus Prsetextatus Caecilianus pointing perhaps to some connexion between the family of Valerian (buried, as we learn from the Acts and the seventh century guide-books, in the cemetery of St. Praetextatus) and that of Cecilia laid to rest on the property of the gens Caeciliana, on the other side of the Appian Way.
Lastly it is interesting to note what seems to be a confirma- tion from archeology of the translation of the relics by Pope Paschal. The walls of the catacombs are frequently marked with graffiti or the scribblings of pious pilgrims. Those on the picture of St. Cecilia in her crypt De Rossi found to be of two classes. The first kind he says are irregular in place and time, several being those of strangers, e. g. Spaniards. The second class, regular, in four lines, and almost exclusively the names of priests, the last one being a secretary. This sug- gests some official act. Several of these names appear on the painting of St. Cornelius in the same catacomb, translated in the time of Paschal ; and also on a painting discovered in the subterranean church of San Clemente, and in the decrees of the Roman Council held in 826. Most names, it is true, are common and signify but little, but stranger names appear, as George and Mercury, written too with the same peculiarity of writing, some letters square, others in a running hand. Such perhaps may not be held as substantial proof, yet they help to carry our minds back to the reality of Paschal's connexion with our Virgin Martyr Saint.
The next scene in the story of St. Cecilia is seven and a half centuries later. Her church had grown. The bell-tower we now see dates from 11 20; but in the year 1599 Cardinal Sfondrati of the " title " of St. Cecilia made very considerable alterations for the beautification of the building. During these he came across a large vault under the high altar and in this he found two large sarcophagi. Trustworthy wit- nesses were summoned and the tomb was opened. First was seen the cypress coffin, next the linen cloths stained with blood, and through the transparent gauze, faded in color, in which Paschal had wrapped the relics, could be seen the rich gold- threaded robes, with blood-stains visible, and the beautiful form of the young Virgin Martyr, in all its grace and mod-
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esty, incorrupt after 1400 years. It is not difficult to imagine the enthusiasm of the ardent Roman people who came in crowds during the space of four or five weeks to renew their devotion to one who had been amongst the most popular of saints from very early times. Clement VIII, who lay sick at Frascati in the hills beyond the flat Campagna, deputed Baronius, the well-known annalist, with Bosio his friend, to draw up faithful accounts of all they saw for us in later cen- turies. The tomb was closed on St. Cecilia's day, 22 Novem- ber, amidst jubilant celebrations, Clement himself singing the High Mass. The body had been laid in a heavy silver casket. The high altar as it stands to-day was erected, and the Pope ordered Moderna, a leading sculptor of the day, to execute with scrupulous fidelity a statue of the Saint as he saw her in the tomb, in the position in which once she lay expiring on the bath-room floor, and later in the catacomb on the Appian Way, and later still in her church in the Trastevere in the time of Paschal I. The inscription left for future generations, written in Latin, may now be read : " Behold the image of the most holy Virgin Cecilia whom I myself saw lying incorrupt in her tomb. I have in this marble modeled for thee the same Saint in the very same posture of body."
A most beautiful work of art. The maiden lies on her side, with limbs a little drawn up, her arms stretched out by her side, her hands, delicate and fine, lying before her, not locked but crossed at the wrists, the drapery beautifully modelled and modestly covering her limbs — a statue perfect in form, and the whiteness of the marble reflecting in some distant way the purity of her soul. It does not seem to be the body of one who is dead but rather asleep. Her head is bound with a cloth, the face turned to the ground where her forehead rests, and upward, the back of her neck is adorned, not marred, by the hideous gashes of the axeman, the trophies of her triumph.. Miniature replicas of this statue we are glad to find in increas- ing numbers on the prie-Dieu of the devout, or sometimes life- size copies, as we may see in the Oratorian Church in London.
It is of interest also to note that in the other sarcophagus opened at the same time were found the bodies of three men, two apparently of the same age and size, who had manifestly been decapitated; but of the third, the skull was broken, and.
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the abundant hair was thickly matted with blood. It seems that he had been done to death by those plumhatce or leaden scourges, of which a specimen has been found in the cata- combs. Precisely in this way, we are told in the Acts, St. Maximus the notary was martyred. Of the three sarcophagi now seen in the Trastevere, that which contains the remains of Lucius and the martyred Urban, held those of Maximus be- fore the ninth century, and it is decorated with a phoenix. If the mention of the phoenix belonged to the original Acts, and is not a later addition, it points once more to the accuracy of their details.
In the year 1900 the saintly Cardinal Rampolla, of this " title ", greatly enlarged and adorned the crypt. It is indeed a beautiful chapel, supported by 34 columns of oriental gran- ite, containing a full-sized statue of St. Cecilia and frescoes of the saints; on the one side, if we remember rightly, the three saints together, on the other the angel bestowing the crowns on the faithful spouses. Two other virgin saints, Agnes and Agatha, are fittingly represented, and somewhere the inscription in mosaics " Erunt sicut angeli Dei '\ In the centre of the large adjoining room of the subterranean house of Valerian and Cecilia, now a museum of early Christian re- mains found during excavations, may be seen the large marble front of one of the tombs from the catacombs, the centre in- laid with a rich mosaic cross.
It remains to say a few words of our Virgin Martyr as the patroness of music. In the early mural painting in the cata- comb of San Lorenzo (sixth or seventh century), in the fresco of her crypt already mentioned in St. Callixtus, in the colossal mosaic in her church in the Trastevere of the time of St. Paschal, and in the tryptich of Cimabue at Florence and the decorations of Fra Angelico, we find no emblems beyond a palm branch and a book. Yet in poems and panegyrics, in pictures since the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and al- most universally to-day, she is represented as a musician with reeds or an organ. In Romanelli's picture of the middle of the seventeenth century, she even has a violin.
What is the origin and how may we account for the growth of this, now accepted, tradition? We can but, conjecture. Perhaps it arose from a misunderstanding of the words of
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the Acts : '' Cantantibus organis Cecilia Virgo in corde suo soli Domino decantabat." That whilst on her nuptial day all were making melody with mouth and minstrelsy Cecilia sang in her heart to the Lord alone, renewing her vows of virginity. As Chaucer puts it in the *' second nonnes tale " :
And whyl the organs maden melodye To God alone in herte thus sang she.
Or in Caxton's English version of the Golden Legend of Jacopo di Voragine :
And she heerying the organes making melodye, She sang in hir herte onelye tu god.
The connexion between the Latin organis and the general word denoting the precise instrument called an organ gives a plausibility to the above suggestion. Baillet in his Vie des Saintes prefers to connect the tradition with the celebrations at the time of her translation by Paschal.
It would seem preferable to connect it with the monastery which we know this Pope founded when rebuilding hef church in the Trastevere for the perpetual celebration of the divine Liturgy. The School of Music thus associated with her church and name might easily have become associated with the Saint herself. May we not think that she, who ever guarded the interests of the church founded in her house where her relics lay, frequented by the poor she especially loved and the monks gathered to celebrate the praises of their Patroness — she who was but thinly veiled from mortal eye — appeared, if not in reality, at least in the imagination of those who devoutly celebrated the praises of God in union with the heavenly court. And in the days of fervor and, we must add, of pious credulity, when the marvelous was not only possible, but probable — and often an undeniable fact — stories of her apparition, in the place of honor or more likely of direction, would soon gain ground and her reputation as a musician be- come a fixed tradition.
Yet that this alone is not the explanation, we have a proof in the mention, as early as the end of the seventh century, of her musical powers by Aldhelm, Bishop of Sherborne. What- ever the origin, a growth is certain and perhaps the famous
THE STORY OF ST. CECILIA AND ITS VALUE. 581
picture of Raphael in the gallery at Bologna, representing her with an organ, encouraged the tradition.
In 1502 we find mention of a musical society at Louvain bearing her name, and when the Royal Academy of Music was founded in Rome in 1584, St. Cecilia was chosen as patroness. In 15 71 we find the first authenticated occasion when her feast was celebrated with musical performances, and toward the end of the seventeenth century musical festivals on her natal day were widespread through England, Scot- land, Ireland, France, Germany, and Italy — a tradition which is becoming more stable and with more direct reference to the Virgin Martyr by the setting to music of poems in her honor such as Dryden's well known " Ode to St. Cecily's Day " or Pope's " Ode to St. Cecilia ".
S. A. Parker, O.S.B.
A mple forth House of Studies, Oxford, England.
Hnalecta*
ACTA PII PP. X.
I.
LiTTERAE Apostolicae: Committitur Episcopo Ritus Ru-
THENi Adsistentia Spiritualis Ruthenorum in
Canadensi Regione Commorantium.
Pius pp. X. Ad perpetuam rei memoriam. — Officium supremi Aposto- latus Nobis divinitus commissi, id ante omnia postulat, ut ea sedulo studio decernamus quae catholico nomini provehendo, aeternaeque fidelium saluti in universo terrarum orbe pro- curandae, bene, prospere ac feliciter eveniant. Quare in omnes ipsius orbis partes, Nos ex hac Principis Apostolorum Cathe- dra, tamquam e sublimi specula, mentis Nostrae oculos con- vertimus, et quae Fidei propagationi vel rei Sacrae procura- tioni magis opportuna videantur, nulla interposita mora, ad exitum perducere maturamus. Hoc moti consilio, cum, per- crescentibus in dies Rutheni ritus fidelibus in regione Cana- densi, venerabiles fratres Archiepiscopi et Episcopi illius re- gionis, admirabili zelo de eorum salute soUiciti, eorumdem spirituali adsistentiae propter ritus et disciplinae diversitatem, sufficienter et adaequate providere non possint, quumque prop- terea Nos enixis precibus rogaverint ut huic iacturae oppor-
ANALECTA.
583
tunam medelam afferre dignemur, Nos, auditis VV. FF. NN. S. R. E. Cardd. Congregatloni praepositis de Fide Propa- ganda pro negotiis Rituum Orientalium, omnibusque rei mo- mentis diligentissime perpensis, spiritualem fidelium Ruthe- norum in Canadensi regione degentium adsistentiam, Epis- copo Rutheni ritus demandandam esse existimavimus. Quae cum ita sint, apostolica Nostra auctoritate, praesentium vi, per- petuumque in modum, Motu proprio deque certa scientia et matura deliberatione Nostris, fidelium Ruthenorum in Cana- densi regione nunc et in posterum degentium spiritualem ad- sistentiam, Rutheni ritus Episcopo committimus; ea tamen servata lege: I. Ut Episcopus Ruthenus plenam iurisdictionem personalem exerceat in omnes fideles Rutheni ritus in prae- dicta regione commorantes, sub dependentia dumtaxat vene- rabilis fratris Apostolici Delegati. II. Ut ipse Episcopus Ru- thenus residentiam suam ordinariam in urbe " Winnipeg " sibi constituat. Haec concedimus decernentes praesentes Lit- eras firmas, validas, atque efficaces iugiter extare ac manere, suosque plenos atque integros effectus sortiri atque obtinere, et Rutheni ritus fidelibus nunc et in posterum in Canadensi regione degentibus plenissime suffragari; sicque rite iudican- dum esse ac definiendum, irritumque et inane fieri, si secus super his a quovis, auctoritate qualibet, scienter sive ignoranter attentari contigerit. Non obstantibus Nostra et Cancellariae apostolicae regula de iure quaesito non tollendo, aliisque Con- stitutionibus et Ordinationibus apostolicis, etiam speciali atque individua mentione ac derogatione dignis, ceterisque omnibus in contrarium facientibus quibuscumque.
Datum Romae apud sanctum Petrum, sub annulo Piscatoris, die XV iulii MCMXII^ Pontificatus Nostri anno nono.
R. Card. Merry del Val, a Secretis Status.
XL
Epistola ad R. p. Leopoldum Fonck, S.J., Pontificii In-
STITUTI BiBLICI PrAESIDEM, DE DiPLOMATIS FORMULA DiSCIPULIS OPTIME MERITIS AB EODEM InSTITUTO ApOSTO-
LiCA Auctoritate tribuendi.
Dilecte fili, salutem et apostolicam benedictionem. — Ad Pon- tificium Institutum Biblicum, operi feliciter inchoato fastigium quodammodo imponentes, cogitationes iterum curasque conver-
584
THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
timus. Cum enim sit in exitu primum triennium quo studiorum ibidem curriculum absolvitur, neque desint qui periclitata, superioribus annis, laudabiliter doctrina se pares sentiant ul- timo eique maximo subeundo experimento, tempus iam postu- lat ut diploma, cuius impertiendi fecimus Instituto facultatem per litteras lucunda sane die xxil martii mcmxi^ qua sit per- scribendum formula decernamus. Eam igitur hisce verbis conceptam volumus :
" Cum Reverendus Dominus . . . condicionibus omnibus a legibus Pontificii Instituti Biblici requisitis satisfecerit et legi- timis Doctorum suffragiis in triplici doctrinae experimento . . . probatus fuerit, vi facultatum ab Apostolica Sede Nobis concessarum, ipsum lectorem seu professorem Sacrae Scrip- turae declaramus et pronunciamus, eidemque authenticum do- cumentum hisce concedimus testimonialibus litteris, sigillo In- stituti ac Praesidis subscriptione munitis."
Visa quidem haec est formula Academiae proposito congru- ere eique opinionem conciliare maiorem ; cum eorum qui facto periculo statuta retulerint suffragia, non doctrinam tantum commendet, sed ius quoque iisdem tribuat ad rei biblicae ma- gisterium, suffragantibus Ordinariis, gerendum. Inde autem hoc etiam sequetur commodi ut qui diplomate aucti sint, do- cendo, scribendo sibi viam muniant ad academicos gradus, quos conferendi uni pontificiae Commissioni Biblicae ius po- testatemque reservamus.
Auspex divinorum munerum Nostraeque testis benevolentiae apostolica sit benedictio, quam tibi, dilecte fili, ceterisque In- stituti doctoribus peramanter in Domino impertimus.
Datum Romae apud S. Petrum, die ii iunii MCMXII, Ponti- ficatus Nostri anno nono.
PIUS PP. X.
III.
Epistola ad R. p. D. Carolum M. A. de Cormont, Episco- PUM Aturensem, de Libro qui inscribitur " La Voca- tion SaCERDOTALE " EDITO A REVMO CANONICO lOSEPHO LaHITTON, EIUSDEM DIOECESEOS.
Monseigneur, En raison des dissensions qui se sont produites a Toccasion du double ouvrage du chanoine Joseph Lahitton sur La voca-
ANALECTA.
585
tion sacerdotale, et de rimportance de la question doctrinale y soulevee, Notre Tres Saint-Pere le Pape Pie X a daigne nommer une Commission speciale d'Emes Cardinaux.
Cette Commission, apres avoir murement examine les ar- guments en faveur de Tune et de Tautre these, a prononce, dans sa reunion pleniere du 20 juin dernier, le jugement sui- vant:
*' Opus praestantis viri losephi canonici Lahitton, cui titulus La vocation sacerdotale, nullo modo reprobandum esse; imo, qua parte ads-truit: 1° Neminem habere unquam ius ullum ad ordinationem antecedenter ad liberam electionem episcopi. — 2° Conditionem, quae ex parte ordinandi debet attendi, quae- que vocatio sacerdotalis appellatur, nequaquam consistere, sal- tem necessario et de lege ordinaria, in interna quadam ad- spiratione subiecti, seu invitamentis Spifitus Sancti, ad sacer- dotium ineundum. — 3° Sed e contra, nihil plus in ordinando, ut rite vocetur ab episcopo, requiri quam rectam intentionem simul cum idoneitate in iis gratiae et naturae dotibus reposita, et per eam vitae probitatem ac doctrinae sufficientiam compro- bata, quae spem fundatam faciant fore ut sacerdotii munera recte obire eiusdemque obligationes sancte servare queat : esse egregie laudandum/'
Sa Saintete Pie X a pleinement approuve, dans I'audience du 26 juin, la decision des fiminentissimes Peres, et Elle me charge d'en donner avis a Votre Grandeur qui voudra bien la communiquer a son sujet M. le chanoine Joseph Lahitton, et la faire inserer ex integro dans la Semaine Religieuse du Dio- cese.
Je prie Votre Grandeur, Monseigneur, d'agreer Tassurance de mes sentiments tres devoues en Notre-Seigneur.
Rome, 2 juillet 191 2.
R. Card. Merry del Val.
S. OONGREaATIO DE EELIGIOSIS. Decretum de Postulatu in Monasteriis Votorum
SOLEMNIUM.
Quo propositum vitae religiosae perpetuo profitendae melius exploretur, et dignitati status religiosi uberius consulatur, im- minutis, in quantum fieri possit, defectionibus, Emi ac Rmi
586
THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
Patres Cardinales sacrae Congregationis de Religiosis, in ple- nariis comitiis ad Vaticanum habitis die 2 augusti 1902, se- quentia statuerunt, nempe :
1. Quaelibet Postulans in Monasteriis votorum solemnium et clausurae papalis poterit admitti, sine praevia S. Sedis venia, servatis tamen aliis de iure servandis.
2. Quaelibet Postulans, antequam Novitiatum ingrediatur, probanda erit per tempus, et iuxta modum, in propriis cuiusvis Monasterii Constitutionibus praescriptum.
3. Si nihil in istis quoad haec statuatur, tunc probatio fa- cienda est saltern per sex menses, ita tamen, ut Postulantes, intra septa Monasterii, probationis causa, admissae, utantur veste modesti colons, diversa ab habitu Ordinis, quem non in- duant, nisi quando Novitiatum proprie dictum inchoaturae sint.
Facta autem de his omnibus fideli relatione sanctissimo Do- mino nostro Pio Papae X per infrascriptum sacrae Congrega- tionis Secretarium die 5 augusti 191 2, Sanctitas Sua eadem approbare et confirmare dignata est. Contrariis non obstanti- bus quibuscumque.
Datum Romae, ex Secretaria sacrae Congregationis de Re- ligiosis, die 15 augusti 191 2.
Fr. I. C. Card. Vives, Praefectus.
L. * S.
•^ DoNATUS^ Archiep. Ephesinus, Secretarius.
S. OONGEEGATIO S. OPFIOII. I.
Decreto S. Congregationis diei 6 maii proxime elapsi lauda- biliter se subiecit Aloisius Izsof. Romae, die 8 iulii 191 2.
Thomas Esser^ O.P., Secretarius.
II.
Decretum quo prohibentur Liber et Inscriptio quaedam. Feria IV, die 28 augusti 191 2. In general! Consessu habito in aedibus sancti Officii emi- nentissimi ac reverendissimi DD. Cardinales Inquisitores ge-
ANALECTA 587
nerales damnarunt ac proscripserunt, et in Indicem librorum prohibitorum referri mandarunt opus cui titulus: Cenni bio- grafici delta Serva di Dio Paolo Mandatori-Sacchetti per Val- eriano Abb. Ferracci parroco m Vallecorsa, Roma, Tipografia Sociale Polizzi e Valentini, 1905. Insuper vero reprobarunt ac proscripserunt inscriptionem : Un portrait merveilleux, ap- positam imagini Ss. Cordis lesu, editae a Petro Brion (26, Rue Auguste Merillon, Bordeaux) ; eamque ita prohibuere ut nulli liceat ipsam imaginem in posterum imprimere aut edere, nisi ex ea penitus deleatur quaevis mentio assertae portentosae originis.
Et insequenti feria V, die 29 eiusdem mensis et anni, sanc- tissimus D. N. D. Pius divina Providentia Papa X, in audi- entia R. P. D. Adsessori sancti Officii impertita decretum emi- nentissimorum ac reverendissimorum Patrum adprobavit et confirmavit.
Datum Romae, ex aedibus sancti Officii, die 7 septembris 1912.
L. * S.
Aloisius Castellano, S. R. et U. I. Notarius.
OUEIA EOMANA.
PONTIFICAL APPOINTMENTS.
2 September: The Very Rev. Pietro Pisani appointed Sec- retary of the new department of the S. Congregation of Con- sistory for the spiritual care of immigrants.
J September: The Rev. Bernard Richter, parish priest in the Diocese of St. Cloud, Minnesota, nominated Domestic Pre- late of His Holiness.
Stubies anb Conferences^
OUR ANALEOTA.
The Roman documents for the month are :
Pontifical Letter placing the spiritual interests of the Ruthenian Catholics in Canada under the special care of a Ruthenian Bishop, who is subject to the Apostolic Delegate directly. The official residence of the Bishop is at Winnipeg.
Letter of the Holy Father to the Rev. Leopold Fonck, S.J., regarding the diploma to be conferred upon graduates of the Pontifical Biblical Institute, Rome.
Letter of the Cardinal Secretary, in which the Holy Father commends Canon Joseph Lahitton's book on priestly vocations. (See pp. 513-22 of this number.)
S. Congregation of Religious publishes the following regulations touching admission to religious communities of solemn vows :
1. Other requirements being fulfilled, postulants may be admitted to the " clausura papalis " in religious communities of solemn vows, without special permission of the Holy See.
2. Before entering the novitiate they are invariably to un- dergo a probation, for the time and in the manner prescribed by the Constitutions of the Order.
3. Unless otherwise determined by the Constitutions, the aforesaid probation is to last at least six months. In the meantime postulants may live in the monastery and wear a suitable habit, different however, from the habit of the Order; they are not to receive that habit until they enter the novitiate.
Congregation of the Holy Office publishes Aloysius Izsof's withdrawal of his work, previously placed on the Index of Forbidden Books.
The same Congregation censures a book by Valerian Fer- racci, published, under the title Cenni biografici della Serva di Dio Paola Mandatori Sacchetti, by the Tipografia Sociale Polizzi e Valentini, Rome; likewise a picture of the Sacred Heart styled " Un portrait merveilleux '*, published by Peter Brion, Bordeaux.
STUDIES AND CONFERENCES. 589
A LEAGUE rOR PRIESTS.
Some French papers are publishing the following docu- ments in which all priests doubtless will be interested.
A League for Priests
PRO PONTIFICE ET ECCLESIA.
I earnestly recommend the institution of this international work the object of which is entire devotedness to the Holy See amongst priests. I have examined the work in compliance with the desire of the Holy Father and I consider it most providential in our times.
F. V. Card. Dubillard,
Arch, de Chambery.
OBJECT OF THE LEAGUE.
The object of the sacerdotal league " Pro Pontifice et Ec- clesia " is completely expressed by the recommendation of his Eminence Card. Dubillard. It aims at promoting amongst the clergy and by them amongst the faithful a generous de- votedness to the Holy Apostolic See in moving the minds to be willing to undertake everything and to suffer everything if needs be for its cause and the cause of Holy Church.
MOTIVE OF THE LEAGUE.
The principal motive of the sacerdotal League '' Pro Pon- tifice et Ecclesia " may be expressed with marvelous force in one energetic word which His Holiness Pius X recently ad- dressed to the Right Reverend Archbishop of Como : *' De Gentibus non est vir mecum." The Holy Father complains, with mingled affection and sadness, of a certain abandonment and isolation in which priests and faithful through human respect or indifference too often leave him in regard to de- fending the doctrines, interests, and rights of the Holy Roman Church. Is it not, as it were, asking the courageous and gen- erous ones, chiefly in the priesthood, to re-act by a holy league against this abandonment and isolation ?
QUALIFICATIONS FOR MEMBERSHIP.
I. Every priest who desires to become a member of the
League *' Pro Pontifice et Ecclesia " obliges himself by vow
to give annually twenty francs ($5.00) for Peter's-pence.
Those who are able to give more without obliging themselves
590
THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
by vow should be glad to give more generously in propor- tion to their means.
2. The priest member of the League is to recite every day the following liturgical prayer :
Tu es Petrus et super hanc petram aedificabo Ecclesiam meam.
V. Constituit eum Dominum domus suae.
R. Et Principem omnis possessionis suae.
Oremus. Deus, omnium fidelium pastor et rector, etc.
3. He promises to celebrate every year at least one Mass for the Pope. If he has charge of souls, he will invite the faith- ful to attend this Mass and will take up a collection for Peter's- pence.
4. In the confessional he will exhort the penitent to receive daily Communion if possible or at least frequent Communion, and to offer up at least one Communion every week for the Holy Father.
5. He will himself or by a substitute preach at least once every year on the Holy Father or on current pontifical docu- ments— for example, on daily Communion, or professed Cath- olic action in public life, " sub vexillo crucis," etc.
6. He explicitly obliges himself not to read, except for grave reasons, such as the necessity of refutation requires, any newspaper or magazine that is more or less tainted with Catholic liberalism or modernism, also to discourage by all possible means such reading amongst others.
7. He will use his best efforts to get readers for Catholic and papal newspapers and magazines.
8. He will make every endeavor to diffuse the acts of the Holy See which condemn modern errors, especially the Syl- labus of Pius IX, the encyclicals against Liberalism, Mod- ernism, and false Christian democracy.
9. He will earnestly strive on all suitable occasions for the reestablishment of the union of States with the Church, for religious teaching in schools, and also for the official recogni- tion and for the advancement of all religious orders.
10. He will persistently oppose the conspiracy of silence on the Roman question, and will make known, whenever occasion offers, the intolerable condition of the Roman Pontiff, " sub hostili potestate constitutus ".
STUDIES AND CONFERENCES. 50 1
11. He will further pledge himself to speak of the Holy Father, of his official acts, and of his directions, as often as opportunity presents itself, in meetings, congresses, and in the assemblage of Catholic unions.
12. And lastly, in order to conform himself to the urgent and reiterated declarations of the Holy See on the necessity of sound training, scholastic philosophy and theology accord- ing to the doctrine of St. Thomas, he will apply himself to these studies as much as time allows, and he will defend amongst his confreres and flock the directions of the Holy See regarding this subject as well as all other instructions.
Read and approved at Chambery (France), this 20th day of July, 1912.
F. ViRG. Cardinal Dubillard,
Archbishop of Chambery. I hereby agree to become a member of the League '* Pro Pontifice et Ecclesia ", and I promise with God's grace to fulfil its obligations.
Christian name in full
Address
Date of obligation
THE VALUE OP METHOD IN TEACHING OHILDKEN TO HEAE MASS AND KEOEIVE THE SAOEAMENTS.
The problem of the age is the child. The world knows that the condition of the State and of society depends on its children. The Church is wiser than the world. She knows what the world ignores, that the happiness of both this life and the future life depends upon the training of children. Her doctrine on education shows her conviction, and her prac- tice proves her consistency.
Now, our children need training not merely in doctrine: they need it in what we may call practice. By practice is meant here prayer, whether public or private, and the use of the Sacraments.
It may be worth while to describe the methods employed in one of our city parishes and to relate the efl'orts and results.
In this parish, like most others, there is a children's Mass on Sunday at nine o'clock. All the children of the parish
^^2 ^^^^ ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
must attend this Mass. At first we found it hard to secure at- tendance. Some parents chose to bring their children with them to the other Masses. Some found the hour inconvenient. At the beginning, in 1906, we had an average attendance of about 100 out of the 600 children of school age resident in the parish.
Those children behaved rather badly. They did not know the service. They had no prayer-book, or, if they had, they did not know how to use it.
We prepared a method of hearing Mass for the children. The prayers were as near as possible a translation of the prayers of the sacred liturgy. They were short and simple. We tried to use monosyllables as far as possible. Those prayers and a few hymns were printed on tough cardboard, and placed in racks in the pews. We trained the children in Sunday school to sing the hymns and read the prayers aloud. Then we began our public rendering or following of the ser- vice. When the priest appears in the sanctuary, the children stand and recite this prayer aloud:
Prayer before Mass.
This church is the house of God. I have come here to worship Him by offering the holy sacrifice of the Mass. I offer this holy sacrifice, O Lord, to adore Thee,' to praise Thee, to thank Thee, to atone for my sins and to obtain from Thee virtue, health, and happiness for myself and for all my friends.
This prayer reminds them where they are, " in the house of God." It brings to their minds the purpose of their pres- ence : " I have come here to worship Him." It tells them how they are to perform that act of worship, — " by offering the holy sacrifice of the Mass." It directs their intention : '' I offer this sacrifice to adore Thee, to praise Thee, to thank Thee, to atone for my sins and to obtain from Thee virtue, health, and happiness for myself and for all my friends."
By the time they have said this, the celebrant is ready to begin Mass. With him they make the sign of the cross, say- ing:
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
STUDIES AND CONFERENCES. 593
I kneel before Thy altar, Lord. Thou seest my body and my soul. Thou knowest all my thoughts. My sins make me unworthy to appear before Thee. I confess my guilt and beg Thy pardon.
This prayer contains something of the thought there is in the Psalm " Judica me Deus ". It tells the child that he is face to face with God, who knows the most hidden things and be- fore whom the best of us should tremble at the thought of our guilt. It leads to the Confiteor, which is recited with the priest.
A hymn follows and occupies the time until the Gospel, when all stand, make the sign of the cross on forehead, lips, and breast, and listen to the sacred words read in English while the celebrant reads them in Latin.
In our church the announcements and the instruction fol- low the Gospel. The instruction is for the children. We try to be plain, simple, and interesting.
At the Credo, they stand and recite the Apostles' Creed.
At the Offertory, they say this prayer :
Thy priest offers bread and wine to Thee, Lord. Soon they shall be changed into the body and blood of Thy Divine Son, who will offer Himself here on this altar as He once offered Himself on Mount Calvary.
At the offering of the bread they say :
Receive, Holy Father, Almighty and Eternal God, this spotless host which I, Thy unworthy servant, offer to Thee. I offer it to atone for my sins. I offer it, too, for all good Christians, present and absent, living and dead. May it bring me and them to ever- lasting life.
At the offering of the wine:
We offer this holy chalice to Thee, Lord. Accept it, we pray, for our salvation and for the salvation of the whole world.
Come, Holy Ghost, and bless this sacrifice which we have pre- pared for the honor and glory of God.
A hymn keeps us busy until the consecration, during which, of course, there is silence. As soon as the elevation is over, we say these prayers :
594
THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
Lord Jesus Christ, I believe Thou art now really and truly present on this altar under the appearance of bread and wine. I adore Thee, for Thou art the Son of God. I thank Thee, for Thou hasi died to save my soul. Enable me always to love Thee and serve Thee.
Receive, Holy Trinity, this sacrifice which we offer in memory of the Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension of our Lord Jesus Christ, and in honor of our Blessed Mother, Mary, and of all the saints. May it add to their glory and bring salvation to us, and may they pray for us in all our necessities.
Look down. Heavenly Father, upon Thy Divine Son. He is now present on this altar. Remember His wounds. His prayers. His death. He offers Himself for us now as He once offered Himself on the Cross. For His sake have mercy on us.
Remember, Lord, the souls of the faithful departed. Have mercy on my deceased relatives and friends, and on all the souls in Purga- tory, particularly on those who have no one to pray for them.
We are careful to proceed slowly. While we pray aloud, we are reverent and we follow the celebrant.
We recite the Lord's Prayer when he says the Pater Noster, the Agnus Dei, in the vernacular of course, with him, and we have time for only one of the three prayers before the " Domine non sum dignus," the prayer for peace. Three times we protest, " Lord, I am not worthy,'* etc., and say the follow- ing prayer before Holy Communion :
Dear Jesus, I desire to receive Thee. Thou art really and truly present in the Blessed Sacrament. Come to me, I pray, and fill my soul with Thy holy grace. Give me light to know my duty and strength to do it. Enable me to love Thee and serve Thee all the days of my life. Amen.
While the priest is distributing Holy Communion, we sing an appropriate hymn.
During the ablutions and closing prayers we recite the acts of faitti, hope, charity, and contrition.
We kneel for the blessing, and during the last Gospel we stand and recite the closing prayer :
May this holy sacrifice which I have offered please Thee, Lord. May it bring Thy blessing upon me, and upon all for whom I have offered it, through the merits of Christ, our Lord. Amen.
STUDIES AND CONFERENCES. 595
While the adults are passing out, we sing the final hymn and then dismiss the children. All genuflect together, and then pass out pew by pew, the public school children proceed- ing to the class-rooms for Catechism, the rest going home. They have religious instruction every day in school.
Now, as to the results. It was not long before the hundred children we started with had grown to five hundred. Dis- order was absolutely at an end. The children were kept oc- cupied all the time. They knew what they were doing. They got to love their own Mass. In fact, it became so attractive to adults that we no longer have room for all those who wish to be present.
For the past five years we have had practically all our chil- dren at this Mass, and the church is left to the grown people at all the other services.
It was not of course long before we observed the need of a book for the children. First of all, we had several cards to provide a variety of hymns. These cards are somewhat ex- pensive. They are easily soiled and therefore not sanitary. They are soon damaged, so as to be unfit for use. Then, if men and women should always use a prayer book at Mass, we must teach the habit to the children. For these reasons we got out a little book containing the various prayers for morn- ing, night. Mass, Confession, and Communion, with a collec- tion of some 70 hymns. By ordering a quantity at a time, we can sell these books for five cents each. We urged every child to procure a book. If a child could not afford it, we gave him one. Then on Sunday morning we stand in the aisle and mark those who are not provided with a book. Of course, many children forget their books, but the fact that their forgetful- ness is recorded soon breaks up the habit.
Surely, every priest has seen that many grown people and naturally many more children receive the Sacraments of Pen- ance and of Holy Eucharist without due preparation or thanks- giving. We can talk to the adults and perhaps secure some improvement, but children need to be shown how.
We began in April of 1906 to have a Children's Com- munion once a month. We explained our plan at all the Masses. The children come to the church on Friday after- noon at 3 130. There is an instruction, a careful examination
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of conscience, and an exhortation to contrition, — all conducted by one of the priests. The children then go to confession, and after it, go before the Blessed Sacrament for a short thanks- giving and the recitation of at least a part of their penance. In this they have the supervision of one of the nuns.
Next morning at eight they have their Mass, at which pews are reserved for them. They hear Mass according to the method given above, and go to Holy Communion in order and with proper reverence. After Communion and Mass we re- cite the prayers of thanksgiving, about ten minutes, and dis- miss in an orderly manner. As the children leave the church, we give each one a neat card :
Church of the Nativity
The bearer received
Holy Communion
Saturday, September 28, 1912.
This card is to be taken home for the satisfaction or edifi- cation of parents. Next day that card with the child's name written on the back is returned to the pastor, who stands at the head of the aisle as the children pass out after their Mass. With these cards we check our list, and by the aid of some twenty young ladies of the Blessed Virgin's Sodality call at the home of the absentees, inquiring why the child did not receive Communion " last Saturday ".
Now for the results. The figures for 1906 are:
April 15 boys 20 girls
May 45 " 65 "
June 20 " 45 "
No figures kept in vacation.
Sept 55 boys 85 girls
Oct 85 " 130 "
Nov 95 " 125 "
Dec ^(i " 130 "
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From Oct., 191 1 to Oct., 191 2, the figures are:
Oct 161 boys 263 girls
Nov 200 " 270 "
Dec 186 " 272 "
Jan 178 " 253 "
Feb 191 " 275 "
Mar 190 " 285 "
Apr 170 " 237 "
May 165 " 215 " :i
June. 225 " 295 "
No figures kept in vacation.
Sept 215 boys 287 girls
Oct 225 " 290 "
Of course the little children who are now receiving Holy Communion have swollen these figures. But even allowing for that feature it is apparent that system and " keeping ever- lastingly at it " are needed not merely to prepare children for Communion but to keep them regular in their attendance.
Fully 100 of our children still miss their monthly Com- munion in spite of all our efforts. They attend the public school. I know no argument more damning than this of the system that seeks to educate children without religious train- ing.
Finally, if we miss so many from Communion, what must it be in parishes where the children go to Communion when they please and as they please.
John L. Belford.
Rector J Church of the Nativity, Brooklyn, N. Y.
PERE LAGRANGE, O.P., AND THE SAOEED OONGEEGATION.
Considerable difference of opinion has been expressed dur- ing the past month touching the censure passed by the S. Congregation of Consistory upon some writings of the emi- nent Dominican scholar, Pere Lagrange. His own letter ad- dressed to the Holy Father must have cleared him of any suspicion of disloyalty to the Holy See. But there remains some doubt as to the character of the works which he has written during the past decade on the subject of Biblical inter- pretation. The association of his name with writers charged
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with rationalistic prepossessions appears to have caused a misapprehension in the public mind, as if Pere Lagrange were guilty of having advanced " rationalistic " theories opposed to the declared decisions of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, an attitude which would place the erudite Dominican in the position of slighting or opposing the disciplinary decrees which determine for the Catholic teacher the limits of what is sound doctrine in the Church. The wording of the decree rightly indicates the condemnation of " neotericas rationalismi et hypercriticae theorias " and specifies '* sententiae auda- cissimae . . . quae antiquissimae traditioni Ecclesiae, vene- rabili SS. Patrum doctrinae et recentibus pontificiae Commis- sionis Biblicae responsis adversantur, et authentiam atque his- toricum valorem Sacrorum Librorum nedum in dubium revo- cant, sed pene subvertunt." This is aimed against the re- cently-published volume of the Schoningh Theolog. Lehr- hucher by Professor Holzhey, whose views of inspiration as well as of the historicity of some of the Old Testament books are undoubtedly of a nature to trouble the Catholic mind. And when in the same connexion the S. Congregation adds that " alia habentur similis spiritus commentaria in Scrip- turas Sanctas turn Veteris tum Novi Testamenti, ceu com- menta plura P. Lagrange," it may easily seem that the author thus designated is charged with rationalism and contumacy against the decisions of the Biblical Commission as a disci- plinary authority in the Church. But such has not been the attitude of the Dominican scholar.
Pere Lagrange's dignified yet truly humble remonstrance against any implication that the grounds for the judgment con- demning the erroneous views expressed in his book are to be found in rationalistic theories maintained in defiance of pro- nouncements of the Biblical Commission, places him beyond the suspicion of the determined liberalism attached to K. Holzhey's bold utterances in his text-book. The position of the humble son of St. Dominic is, we take it, that of a defender of the integrity and authenticity of the inspired Text as set forth by the unquestionable authority of the Church. If, as a Catholic scholar, he is disposed to make any concessions which do not harmonize with the accepted traditional teach- ing of the Fathers, it is not that he yields to the rationalistic
STUDIES AND CONFERENCES. egg
Spirit of the ultra critics, but rather because he aims at find- ing in what he considers non-essential elements of Biblical criticism a basis for refuting the objections and alleged con- clusions of the rationalists. In this Pere Lagrange, Battifol, and other scholars of avowed orthodoxy differ entirely from men like Loisy, who declare their absolute independence of the Church, and who make their private judgment supersede any doctrinal declaration of the Holy See.
That such books, however, should not be put in the hands of tyros who need to study the positive element of Scriptural science before they can appreciate and use without danger the critical investigations of expert exegetes, is plain enough. We do not allow youths, however intelligent and studious they may be, to handle drugs before they have mastered a full course of positive physical science. In the matter of Biblical criticism, too, it is to be remembered that the spirit of scepti- cism and doubt which marks the attitude of minds of to-day, renders a premature examination of the hypothetical phases of historical criticism, when applied to the inspired writings, particularly dangerous to the young and the partially edu- cated. Hence the S. Congregation very properly proscribes such works for our seminaries, not only as text-books, but even when used for the purpose merely of consultation. They can only serve to unsettle the immature judgment of the students.
We append Father Lagrange's letter addressed to the Holy Father. The translations which have been made of the same hardly do justice to some of the discriminating expressions it contains :
Tres Saint Pere,
Prosterne aux pieds de Votre Saintete je viens Lui protester de ma douleur de ravoir contristee, et mon entiere obeissance. Men premier mouvement a ete, et mon dernier mouvement sera tou jours de me soumettre d'esprit et de coeur, sans reserve, aux ordres du Vicaire de Jesus Christ. Mais precisement parceque je me sens le coeur du fils le plus soumis, qu'il me soit permis de dire a un Pere, le plus auguste des Peres, mais a un Pere, ma douleur des con- siderants, qui paraissent attaches a la reprobation de plusieurs de mes ouvrages d'ailleurs indetermines, et qui seraient entaches de rationalisme. Que ces ouvrages contiennent des erreurs, je suis
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pret a le connaitre, mais qu'ils aient ecrits dans un esprit de de- sobeissance a la tradition ecclesiastique ou aux decisions de la Com- mission Biblique pontificale, daignez, tres Saint Pere, m'autorizer a Vous declarer, que rien n'etait plus loin de ma pensee. Je demeure a genoux devant Votre Saintete pour implorer la benediction. De Votre Saintete,
Le plus humble fils,
Fr, J. M. Lagrange,
des Peres Precheurs.
None of the works of Pere Lagrange has thus far beea placed on the Index ; but their circulation, especially as hand- books used in seminaries, has been wisely restricted. Further- more, the note of warning is given that the tendency of such writings is full of danger. The fact that in his admissions to- the demands of so-called Higher Criticism, the author has gone at times so far as to place him in conflict with the Patristic traditions generally accepted in the Church, cannot be doubted ; but in what measure this fact places his teaching outside the pale of orthodoxy is still to be decided, and it is no proof of Catholic loyalty to anticipate the judgment of the Sacred Con- gregation by publishing the erroneous statement that " Father Lagrange's works have been put on the Index ".
THE PASTOEAL EIGHTS OP A CONVENT OHAPLAIN.
Qu. In the September issue of the Review at page 362, I read the excellent solution of the difficulty proposed by a certain honor- able Reverend Pastor, as regards Private Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament during the Hour of Adoration as prescribed for the members of the Eucharistic League, to which evidently his " young saint " belongs. In the praiseworthy reply your definite decision was in favor of continuing this practice, providing there be a sufficient reason and the consent of the local pastor have been previously secured.
Now I will go further: I was at the moment of reading struck by the idea as to whether a chaplain of any institution, such as a con- vent or an academy, stationed there permanently and exercising there his duties, is also invested with the power of a pastor, concern- ing the practice of the Exposition. In a word, can he make use of (and grant permission to others as he may desire) such a privilege in, the chapel in which he exercises his duties?
STUDIES AND CONFERENCES. 60 1
Resp. The chaplain of a convent or similar institution is not subject to the local parish priest, but receives his jurisdic- tion directly from the Ordinary to whom he is accountable for the performance of the ecclesiastical duties belonging to his office. Hence he enjoys, independently of the local pastor, the right of giving Private Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. In the exercise of this right he is limited however by the canonical rule of the religious community to whose spiritual necessities he ministers. This rule, usually explicitly ap- proved by the Holy See, gives to the community a certain autonomy, with which the chaplain or the confessor or even the bishop may not interfere. Ordinarily the chaplain is bound to conform in the exercise of his community services to the conditions of time and place marked by the convent hor- arium. There is a decision of the S. Congregation of Bishops and Regulars to the effect that, " chaplains who meddle be- yond the affairs of their office are to be removed "} Accord- ingly a chaplain must use his right to give Private Benediction conformably to the discretion of the local administrator or superior of the community to whom it belongs to preserve the order of the house.
The chaplain of a religious community is not at liberty to delegate another priest to perform his duties, without the con- sent of the Ordinary; though this consent may be presumed in the case of a substitute who has the ordinary diocesan facul- ties.
THE MALTESE POK "QUID MIHI ET TIBI EST, MULIER?"
To the Editor, The Ecclesiastical Review.
Dr. Alfonso M. Galea, the translator of Father Zahm's works into Italian, has written me from Malta : " A propos of a correspondence in the June and July numbers of the Eccle- siastical Review ... we Maltese would perhaps translate the 'Quid mihi et tibi, mulier,' into: ' schem (quid est) bijni u bijnec, mara,' — which is similar to man bain anta u ana. This we could very well read thus: ' min (who) bijn (between) inti (you) u (and) iiena (I). The / is pro- nounced like the Italian /.' "
1$. C. E. R., 15 June, 1604. Cf. Taunton, Law of the Church.
602 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
Maltese is most likely a Semitic language that has under- gone transformation according to each change in the history of the little island. The oldest elements of the language are probably Phenician; a later Semitic influence was that of Arabic. However, as the Romans, Arabs, Normans, and other successive conquerors of Malta were never numerous in the island and kept pretty much to the port, the inhabitants of the interior have ever been such as Diodorus Siculus described in the first century — a Phenician colony ; and the language of the Maltese has been Phenician. Hence the Maltese equiva- lent of a New Testament phrase is of much worth exegetically.
Have we here a Maltese equivalent of a New Testament phrase? There is the rub. That the Maltese phrase is the equivalent of the Arabic for " What is between thee and me?" there is no doubt: schem is the modern Arabic shu, what, — and this is cognate very likely to the Hebrew and Aramaic she and the Assyrian sha; bijni is the Maltese for baini; hijnec is bainak. Hence the Maltese schem bijni u bijnec is the Arabic shu baini we bainak, " What is between me and thee? " In like manner, the Maltese mtn bijn inti u jiena is the Arabic 7nan bain enta we ana, " Who is between thee and me? " But have these two Maltese and Arabic idioms anything at all in common with the Greek original of " Quid mihi et tibi est? " That remains to be proved. The Maltese idioms are no new light unto our darkness.
New light seems really to have been shed upon our exegeti- cal problem by F. C. Burkitt, in the Journal of Theological Studies, July, 191 2, page 594. He says that the phrase Ti inoX Koi aoi is common enough in Greek and Aramaic and gives us three things : " something " (n), the speaker (^fioi), and the person spoken tav((ToO, and asserts that there is a gap or a disagreement. But the phrase does not tell us between whom the gap is. It may be between me and thee; it may be between us and the thing. Here the gap is between us and the thing. The phrase ri kfiol koX aoi means precisely the same as Tt ijfuv^ that is, " What have I and thou to do with that?"
This interpretation fits in well with Corluy's, that the phrase in both the Old and the New Testament, always means sur- prise at some one's importunity, either praiseworthy or blame- worthy. Here the Blessed Mother's request is an importunity.
STUDIES AND CONFERENCES.
603
— " My hour is not yet come," — but a holy importunity. The context shows that our Lord's words either were toned down by voice and expression or in themselves implied no rebuke. They were probably like to the modern Arabic phrase, ma 'alesh, — which literally means, " the thing is not unto me ", " it is none of my business " ; and yet idiomatically means : " Do not worry ", '' Beg pardon ".
Walter Drum, SJ. Woodstock College, Maryland.
THOMAS A KEMPIS AND THE BROTHEES OF THE COMMON LIFE.
To the Editor, The Ecclesiastical Review.
In the interests of historical accuracy allow me to correct some misstatements, arising from the confusing of two distinct bodies, which occur in the otherwise instructive article of W. H. Grattan Flood on Thomas a Kempis as a Hymn Writer in the August number of the Review. The contributor states that Thomas became a novice in a monastery of the Order of the Brothers of the Common Life, in which his brother John was Prior. As a matter of fact the Brothers of the Common Life had no monasteries, no novices, no priors, and they were not an Order or even a Congregation; they were not Religious at all. The Brothers (and Sisters) of the Common Life, other- wise the Devout Brothers and Sisters, were a confraternity of clerics and layfolk, who under the spiritual direction of Gerard Groote and Florentius Radewyn were emulous of the perfect life of the primitive Christians ; at first they did not even live in community, and they never took vows. For the more per- manent guidance and protection of this pious association a Congregation of Canons Regular was founded, the members of which at first were chiefly recruited from among the De- vout Brethren. This was the Institute founded mainly through the instrumentality of Florentius Radewyn at Winde- sheim in 1386. John a Kempis was one of its first professed members, and Thomas its most shining light. The early years of both John and Thomas were passed with Radewyn and the Brothers at Deventer. It was this Institute also which " ab- sorbed over seventy houses of Augustinian Canons ", and not the association of the Devout Brethren, who, as such, had no
604 ^^^ ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
more chance of " absorbing " houses of the Canonical Order than, say, the Sodality of Mary is likely to " absorb " the Society of Jesus to-day! All this will be found treated at large in Criuse & Kettlewell, cited by your contributor, and other works, not a few, which treat of a Kempis, the Brothers of the Common Life and the Canons Regular of Windesheim.
Vincent Scully, C.R.L. St. Ives, Cornwall, England.
MITIGATION OF THE EUOHAEISTIO FAST.
To the Editor, The Ecclesiastical Review.
Quite a number of letters favorable to a mitigation of the Eucharistic fast have been received by me in answer to the request for an expression of sentiment from priests. They come from many States, from California to Florida, from Texas to New York. Among the writers are regulars, representing eight religious orders, and secular priests of all ranks and belonging to twelve dioceses. One correspondent writes: " Whatever I can do for the furtherance of this most timely movement will be cheerfully done." Another: " I hope that you will succeed in obtaining a modification for the spiritual benefit of thousands of souls and the temporal health of the poor missionary pastors." Another pledges his name " in sup- port of this great movement." Another says : " I gladly pledge my support to the movement. I shall try to interest all I can in the matter."
• There are other letters to the same effect as the above. Some priests add explanations or make practical suggestions. The fol- lowing extracts from their letters will be read with interest.
" I have had under my charge for nearly twenty years a parish and from six to ten missions. Nearly all the people have to come from three to ten miles to church in all these places. Their teams are slow work-horses and the roads generally rough. When they receive Communion they have to fast till from one to three o'clock P. M. unless they bring a cold lunch and eat it on the wagons outside. A dispensation from the fast would, in my opinion, greatly increase the number of Communions and thereby strengthen faith and virtue in these outposts. Nor do I think it would lessen reverence for the Blessed Sacrament, because they firmly believe in the Real Presence and also in the power of the Keys. They know the Church can make and unmake disciplinary laws, and those who do not fully understand this can easily be taught."
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605
" I attend to nine missions and as a rule circumstances over which I have no control do not permit me to begin Mass earlier than nine or ten o'clock. Furthermore many of my parishioners must drive from ten to seventeen miles. Consequently it is extremely difficult for them to receive Holy Communion and I know that some of them would communicate oftener if the fast were mitigated. Though myself I' am young and robust, nevertheless it is not a pleasant task to board a train at 2.15 A. M. and ride as far as seventy-two miles and then only take breakfast at 11 or 12.30."
" I showed one of the articles on the mitigation of the Eucharistic fast to a priest who was simply horrified. But when I made him understand that 'breakfast' was far less opposed to the reception of the Holy Eucharist than any amount of deliberate venial sin, he opened great eyes and seemed to wake up from a dream."
" My sentiment in favor of this mitigation is of a number of years' standing, as I became interested in this view not from read- ing but from experience in mission work . . . My experience in this line is so urgent that I would consider it a sin to neglect doing my part to help the cause along . . . The longer I see this pitiful state of affairs, the more it hurts me to think that there has been so far no hope of relief in sight ... I have talked the matter over with a number of friends, but got little or no satisfaction, several of them not having had any of my sort of experience on the missions."
" I have spoken to my neighbor priests, and they suggest that if a petition were sent through the diocese, it would be signed by all . . . People here have to drive sixteen or more miles to church. . . . If Mass could be said as late as one P. M., the places could be more often attended, to the great advantage of the people."
" Many people, especially sick people and workingmen, are prac- tically barred from daily Communion .... Daily Communion works miracles."
" I suggest that the Holy See be petitioned to the effect: First, that priests for their celebration and others for their Holy Com- munion may have the choice of a fast from midnight or of five hours, no matter how substantial the previous meal may have been ; second, that all confessors be empowered to let their penitents go to Holy Communion after having taken not more than two deciliters of any kind of non-alcoholic liquor."
" I willingly subscribe to any petition to the Archbishops of the country or to the Holy See for a modification of the law of fasting with a view to promote frequent and daily Communion. A good number of my poor mountaineers can receive only every two weeks, because they must take turns to come to the High Mass at ten o'clock. I w^ould never approve of the use of intoxicants before
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Communion ... If one of the Archbishops would take up our petition and urge a request to the Holy See at the next meeting of the Archbishops, great good might be done."
A very interesting letter came from a doctor in theology. It is to be hoped that he will communicate the benefit of his experi- ences in an article written for publication. Another priest offers to help the movement along not only by financial support, but also by the work of the commercial department of his school, in sending circulars and the like.
The Right Rev. Albert Pascal, Bishop of Prince Albert, Canada, writes : " Les raisons que vous donnez au sujet du jeune eucharis- tique sont bien convaincantes. Je m'y associe pleinement. II ap- partient au S. Siege de voir si les raisons apportees en faveur de la mitigation du jeune eucharistique sont suffisantes pour nous accorder cette faveur." ^
A. Van Sever.
Route 2, Grand Rapids, Wisconsin.
IS OLD AGE SUPFIOIENT KEASON POR BREAKING THE EUOHA-
EISTIO PAST?
Qu. Three years ago I received into the Church a man 7 1 years old. This person came to me of his own free will to seek entrance into the true Church ; that is the way he stated his case.
His sincerity is proved to this day by his very devout manner of life.
But now he earnestly asks to be allowed to receive Holy Com- munion daily. Of course I gladly gave the permission.
Yesterday he came to the sacristy and told me he suffered great thirst during the night, his tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth, so that he had to get up after midnight to take a drink of water. He knows, he told me, the law of the Church in regard to fasting. But his grief is that in view of this law he will be unable to receive Holy Communion frequently. It has made him very downhearted, for the reception of Holy Communion is his one great consolation in his old age. He came to me for advice to find out if it was per- mitted to him to take only a few drops of water to loosen hib tongue. I advised him that he should try to wet his tongue with- out swallowing the water, and not to receive on those days when he felt especially thirsty. He is a strict temperance man.
1 The reasons which you give concerning the Eucharistic fast are quite convincing. I approve of them fully. It belongs to the Holy See to decide whether the reasons brought forth in favor of the mitigation of the Eucharistic fast be sufficient to grant us this favor.
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May I ask you for enlightment on this point of fasting in the case of a man of such advanced years? e. f. s.
Resp. Under the existing legislation the aged convert will have to abstain from Holy Communion whenever he finds it necessary to break his fast. There is a concession that allows habitual invalids who are unable to fast, although they may not be confined to bed, the reception of Holy Communion twice a month, even after they have taken some light food. Likewise, the administration of Extreme Unction in some dangerous spell of sickness may be made the occasion for ad- ministering Holy Communion without fasting to those with whom old age is a continuous sickness and implies danger of death.
THE JUDICIAL COMMITTEE OF THE PRIVY OOUUOIL AND THE OANADIAK BILL AGAINST THE "NE TEMERE."
In The Ecclesiastical Review for April, 191 2 (pp. 422 ff.) we discussed the course of Mr. Lancaster's proposed bill in the Dominion Parliament. This Bill to amend the Marriage Act provided as follows : '' Every ceremony or form of ceremony heretofore or hereafter performed by any per- son authorized to perform any ceremony of marriage by the laws of the place where it is performed, and duly performed according to such laws, shall everywhere within Canada be deemed to be a valid marriage, notwithstanding any differ- ences in the religious faith of the persons so married and with- out regard to the religion of the person performing the cere- mony.
" (2) The rights and duties, as married people, of the re- spective persons married as aforesaid, and of the children of such marriage, shall be absolute and complete, and no law or canonical decree or custom of or in any province of Canada shall have any force or effect to invalidate or qualify any such marriage or any of the rights of the said persons or their chil- dren in any manner whatsoever."
In answering questions submitted to it by the Dominion Government of Canada, the Canadian Supreme Court had held it to be beyond the power of the Dominion Parliament to enact the proposed legislation. The Government there-
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upon was given special leave to appeal to the Judicial Com- mittee of the Privy Council, and Viscount Haldane, the newly-appointed Lord Chancellor, together with the Earl of Halsbury, Lord Macnaghten, Lord Atkinson, Lord Shaw, and Chief Baron Palles, heard the argument/
It was agreed between counsel during the course of the oral argument that this Bill was intended to enable any person who was licensed to perform the ceremony to perform it validly, no matter what might be the religious faith of those married by him.
The argument in favor of the validity of the proposed Act was that the Dominion Parliament had the sole power of deal- ing with what should form the essential thing to a contract of marriage. The word " marriage " could not be taken as necessarily including any ceremonial as part of its validity.
Lord Shaw argued that there must be something attaching to the ceremony of marriage which must be performed by solemn words. He said, however, that a public ceremony was not necessary. But Lord Halsbury maintained that it was im- portant for society that there should be some public record of what had taken place, namely, the agreement between the parties.
It was urged, in favor of upholding the decision of the Su- preme Court of the Dominion, that all that the Federal Gov- ernment was competent to legislate for was marriage minus solemnization. This Bill purported to say that an officer who was given by Quebec law a limited authority to perform the marriage ceremony should have a universal authority to do so.
The Judicial Committee finally held (29 July last) that the Bill was ultra vires of the Canadian Parliament. In one of the first opinions delivered by the Lord Chancellor since he ascended the wool-sack he said : ^ '* The decision of these ques- tions turns on the construction to be placed on sections 91 and 92 of the British North America Act, 1867. Sec. 91 enacts that the Parliament of the Dominion may make laws for the
1 The decision is reported under " In the Matter of a Reference by H. R. H. the Governor-General of Canada in Council to the Supreme Court of Canada of Certain Questions Concerning Marriage," 28, The Times Law Reports 580 (No. 35, 9 August, 1912),
2 P. 582, above.
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609
peace, order and government of Canada in relation to all matters not coming within the classes of subjects by the Act assigned exclusively to the legislatures of the Provinces, and, for greater certainty^ but not so as to restrict the generality of the foregoing terms of the section, it declares that, notwith- standing anything in the act, the exclusive legislative au- thority of the Parliament of the Dominion extends to all matters coming within the classes of the subjects enumerated. One of these is marriage and divorce. The section concludes with a declaration that any matter coming within any of the enumerated classes shall not be deemed to come within the class of matters of a local or private nature comprised in the enumeration of the classes of subjects by the Act assigned ex- clusively to the Legislatures of the Provinces.
"Section 92 enacts that in each Province the Legislature may exclusively make laws in relation to matters coming within the classes of subjects enumerated in this section. Among these is the solemnization of marriage in the Province. . . .
" Their Lordships consider that the provision in section 92 conferring on the Provincial Legislature the exclusive powei to make laws relating to the solemnization of marriage in the Province, operates by way of exception to the powers con- ferred as regards marriage by section 91, and enables the Provincial Legislature to enact conditions as to solemnization which may affect the validity of the contract. There have doubtless been periods, as there have been and are countries, where the validity of the marriage depends on the bare con- tract of the parties without reference to any solemnity. But there are at least as many instances where the contrary doc- trine has prevailed. The common law of England and the law of Quebec before confederation are conspicuous examples which would naturally have been in the minds of those who inserted the words about solemnization into the statute. Prima facie these words appear to their Lordships to import that the whole system of what solemnity ordinarily meant in the systems of law of the Provinces of Canada at the time of Confederation is intended to come within them, including conditions which affect validity."
The decision had been foreshadowed in the debates in Par- liament. The temper of the advocates of the Bill may be
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judged from the peroration of counsel. He said, in closing for the appellants, that the question was a vital one, which many persons were keenly watching, anxious to know whether the design of the Federation of one great growing nation should be set aside and a question affecting the whole basis of society should be governed by merely local, isolated, and factional differences. It is to be noted that this advocate comes from Protestant Ontario, which was trying to force its local view on Catholic Quebec, and that Ontario, unaffected though it is by Quebec's local laws, wants to say that Quebec shall not pass such local laws respecting the solemnization of marriage, for instance, as are not pleasing to Protestant Con- servatives. It is expected that this authoritative pronounce- ment of the highest court of the British Empire, appealed to especially by the Conservatives, will prevent the introduction, at least in the Dominion Parliament, of the vicious bills con- cerning all the phases of the marriage question now so com- mon in many legislatures.
Immediately after the official pronouncement of the above, decision some extremists talked of amending the British North America Act. But no general power is expressly con- ferred upon the Dominion Parliament to alter the Federal Constitution.^ j^j^^s M. Dohan.
PROFESSIONAL SEOEEOT IN HOSPITALS.
Qu. Allow me to submit the following difficulties, which are actual.
1. The superintendent (Religious) of a Catholic hospital knows officially or professionally that a youth who had been in the hospital is gravely afflicted with a contagious disease. He is engaged to a young woman whom the superintendent befriends. May the latter warn the young girl of the danger, knowing that the young man is not likely to reveal his infirmity, because he is very eager to marry the girl.
2. The same superintendent is repeatedly requested by the chief physician of the hospital to prevent the local chaplain from visits to certain of his patients, intimating an accusation which is plainly detrimental to the priest's reputation. The superintendent has no authority over the chaplain. Is she obliged to inform the bishop of the situation?
8 Sec Clement's Canadian Constitution, Second Edition (1904), p. 250.
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Resp. I. It would be an act of charity to warn the young girl of her danger, since the youth is disposed to inflict an in- jury upon her against which she has a just right to be pro- tected by those who are interested in her welfare.
But in order to justify such an act of friendship or charity it is required that —
(a) there be no doubt about the fact of the youth being presently afflicted with the supposed disease;
(b) the assumed marriage to be a definitely known contin- gency ;
(c) there be no other way of preventing the prospective marriage under existing conditions.
A mere professional rumor about a former patient's condi- tion of health, or a mere conjecture about a probable marriage (with such "engagements" as are customary in America), would not justify a warning that would injure the otherwise legitimate prospects of the youth, all the more since the evil that afflicts him may not be attributable to his own fault. The same charity that is invoked in favor of the young girl, is due also to the youth, unless he himself interposes an ob- stacle to its exercise. In like manner the reason for manifest- ing the defect would cease if there be at command other legiti- mate means of preventing the proposed marriage.
2. As for the second case, the superior of the hospital may justly avail herself of the counsel of her ecclesiastical superior, the bishop, or any other prudent priest to direct her action in such a matter. Hence she violates no confidence if she speaks to the bishop. But she is not obliged to assume the odium of either correcting the action of the chaplain or of letting him know that she communicated the matter to the bishop. If the doctor has charges to make against the chaplain, it is his place to make them to the latter's superior, who is the Ordinary who appointed him to the position. The priest might justly resent any attempt to discipline him if it came from one under his own charge, though in a different sphere of action, unless it were a case of plain interference on his part with the established order of the hospital over which the superin- tendent has immediate charge. Any other action which con- cerns the private conduct of the chaplain is no more her re- sponsibility than would be the private conduct of the doctor himself, if it does not openly reflect on his practice.
6l2 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
PBIVATE BENEDICTION OF THE BLESSED SAOEAMENT.
Qu. In the last issue of the Review you mention " Private Benediction " of the Blessed Sacrament. This, I understand, was recommended by the late Pope for the month of October. Though the Review may have given the method of this religious exercise, I cannot find it mentioned anywhere. Would you for the good of others as ignorant as myself give the process to be observed in such cases?
Resp. Private Benediction with the ciborium or pyx is given as follows :
1. Six candles are lighted on the altar.
2. The priest, vested in surplice and stole (white), and ac- companied by two servers bearing candles, goes to the altar, prays a short while kneeling on the lowest step ; then ascends to the predella and opening the tabernacle door draws the ciborium covered with its veil to the front, without taking it out of the tabernacle.
3. Having genuflected on one knee, he descends to the low- est step; (where he is free to incense the Blessed Sacrament, although this is not necessary). He then recites such prayers as may be deemed appropriate, and ends with the Tantum ergo (which may be either recited or chanted), followed by the V. " Panem de coelo " and the prayer " Deus qui nobis," etc.
4. He then ascends to the top step, genuflects on one knee, and closes the tabernacle.
It will be observed from the foregoing form that the priest does not take the ciborium from the tabernacle to give Bene- diction.
In the Encyclical on the Rosary in which Leo XIII recom- mends the October devotions with Private Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, in churches which cannot have the more solemn Exposition with chant, etc., as prescribed by the ordi- nary rubrics, the special faculty of giving Benediction with the ciborium is included. In this case the priest, after reciting the prayer " Deus qui nobis ", receives the humeral veil, goes up to the tabernacle, genuflects, takes out the ciborium and, having covered it with the extremities of the veil, turns to bless the people with the usual form of the cross. He then replaces the ciborium. in the tabernacle.
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This latter Benediction is not always a part of the Private Benediction and, outside the month of October, it supposes a custom or the special approval of the Ordinary.
Incense may likewise be used before giving the actual bless- ing with the pyx.
BULWER'S "PEUR JOSEPH" IN THE LIGHT OF HISTORY.
Qu. I have read " Father Joseph " by O'Connor and was glad to see the Bulwer Lytton caricature of Cardinal Richelieu's intimate friend and adviser set in its proper light. But as Mr. O'Connor does not cite any documents for his version of the life of Joseph Francis le Clerc du Tremblay, a literary critic of my acquaintance refuses to accept it as true. What can I say in refutation?
Resp. If Mr. O'Connor does not give the documents on which his biography of Monsignor Fran9ois le Clerc du Trem- blay rests, it is because that personage is as well known a fig- ure in the contemporary history of Richelieu as is that of Louis XIII or the Queen Mother, who are interwoven in the drama of the Cardinal's career. The general outline of that life, as our author gives it, requires no documentary evidence. Any good biographical dictionary, such as the Biographie Universelle (Vol. XXI), will vouch for the facts. There was indeed some controversy about the quality of influence which the Cardinal's confidant, commonly known as Pere Joseph, exercised in shaping the political issues of France; and Lord Lytton, we have no doubt, got from this the suggestion which made him caricature Monsignor du Tremblay in order that he might bring the character into harmony with his dramatic purpose, which happened to meet also the anti-Catholic pre- judice of the time. But Lytton must have known that he was falsifying history, though improving the dramatic effect of his play.
Hyppolite de la Porte mentions the controversy in referring to the Histoire de la vie du Rev. Pere Joseph le Clerc du Tremblay, Capucin, instituteur des filles du Calvaire (by I'abbe Richard). That life was published in two volumes in 1702. St. Jean de Maurienne and other critics attacked the accuracy of the Abbe Richard in regard to certain statements, which appeared to be rather the exaggerations of a panegyrist than the sober conclusions of an historian. But these differ-
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ences do not affect the chief facts as they stand in Mr. O'Con- nor's narrative, the object of which is to inform the popular mind that takes its knowledge of history from certain stand- ard novels and dramas, and to warn the reader of Richelieu that Lytton's " Father Joseph " is not the Pere Joseph of fact, as associated with the great Cardinal.
For the rest, Mr. O'Connor does give, in footnotes through- out his volume, such references to the biographical sources of Pere Joseph as should enable any unprejudiced critic to verify the facts and to prove that Richelieu's associate as pictured by Lytton is the very opposite of the true Pere Joseph of history.
THE BEIDE AND GEOOM KNEELING IN THE SANOTUAEY.
Qu. Will you kindly let me know through the Ecclesiastical Review whether there is any authority for the bride and groom kneeling within the sanctuary at the Nuptial Mass?
Resp. The question has been discussed frequently in these pages. We repeat: Custom, sanctioned by the practice of Rome and Catholic countries generally, has extended to the entire ceremony of the Mass the rubric that after the Pater noster of the Nuptial Mass the marriage parties are to stand or kneel " ante altare " ; for, although the phrase " versus sponsum et sponsam ante altare genuflexos " may be inter- preted to mean that the couple to be married stand " at the communion-rail outside the sanctuary ", it may also mean " at the foot of the altar within the sanctuary ". Indeed the latter would under the circumstances seem to be the more ordinary interpretation, since the priest is not supposed to leave the altar when he gives the wedding ring to the bride, etc. But if the bridegroom and bride may enter the sanctuary to re- ceive the ring and blessing, there appears to be no reason why they should not remain there during the Mass. Since the " witnesses " are directed to stand " near " the bride and groom during the ceremony, the presence of the former in the sanctuary may likewise be deemed permissible. It would seem to be part of the wisdom of the Church that she allows pastors a certain amount of freedom in this matter of inter- preting the rubric; for there are occasions when he may deem it advisable to vary the degree of solemnity in imparting the blessing of the Church. Thus, pastors who would ordinarily
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have the marriages in their fold celebrated with a Nuptial Mass, giving the newly-married Holy Communion and the marriage blessing within the sanctuary, may nevertheless be called on for some legitimate reason to celebrate the marriage without Mass or in the evening, and in that case to perform the ceremony at the communion-rail. Such a distinction need have nothing odious about it; for just as we admit some friends to the inner family circle, which we deny to others, so also may a closer approach to the altar of God be allowed to those who deal more reverently with the graces received in His sanctuary.
THE OLD INDULT OP EEQUIEM MASSES AND THE NEW EUBEIOS.
Qu. At our last Clerical Conference the following question came under discussion : By a special indult we have had the privilege since 1880 of celebrating each week two Requiem Masses on Doubles which are not of a first or second class nor fall during privileged Octaves. Does the Divino afflatu affect this indult; and if so, how far?
Resp. It would seem from the new Rubrics on the cele- bration of Mass that, while the reform is not final, it is in- tended to do away with the existing privileges, in so far at least as these are contrary to the new provisions. Of these provisions the Constitution Divino afflatu says : " Jam in praesenti instauranda censuimus . . . ut in sacra liturgia Missae antiquissimae de . . . Feriis, praesertim quadrage- simalibus locum suum recuperarent " (n. 6).
This aim to restore the celebration of ferial Masses causes of course the elimination of votive and private requiem Masses. An exception is made with regard to private Masses for the dead during Lent, when it is permissible to say such Mass on the first free day of each week (according to the calendar of the church in which the Mass is said).
There are moreover several decrees of the S. Congregation of Rites, issued since the publication of the Constitution Di- vino afflatu and intended to interpret it, which indicate that private Masses for the dead, hitherto allowed by special indult to different dioceses or churches, would cease with the intro- duction of the new rubrics in 191 3. Thus a declaration of 22 March, 191 2, states : " Particular offices that have been granted
(5 1 6 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
by indult of the Holy See to certain dioceses, orders or re- ligious congregations . . . are declared by the new rubrics to be suppressed." And under decree of 19 April, 191 2, it is stated : " The provision of the new Rubrics with regard to requiem Masses is general and . . . includes not only private Masses, but those," etc.
According to the above, existing privileges that are in the way of the general purpose of the reform are to be considered as abrogated. The privilege of celebrating a low Mass in- stead of a Missa cantata when, for lack of chanters, etc., it is impossible to celebrate solemnly, would not seem to be touched by the new regulations, inasmuch as the purpose of the latter is in no wise interfered with thereby.
IMAGES OP THE SAORED HEART ON THE ALTAR.
Qu. Is there any decree forbidding the placing on the altar of images of the Sacred Heart, or of the two Hearts of Jesus and Mary — I mean the hearts separate from the figures — to serve as a suitable background for the baldachin or throne on which the Blessed Sacrament is usually exposed? I am told there is. If so, would it be forbidden to have such emblems painted in the panels of the sanctuary, back of the altar?
Resp. The use of pictures or carvings of the Sacred Heart is contrary to liturgical regulation if the emblem is placed on the altar as if it were meant to represent the figure of Christ. As a symbol it is out of place on the altar, in the centre be- hind the throne, or directly over the tabernacle. The pro- hibition (31 March, 1887, n. 3673) is manifestly designed to preclude misapprehension, as though any mere symbol could claim the prominent attention of the worshipper where the reality of the Blessed Sacrament is to be the centre of all devotion. The crucifix indeed is not only permitted, but is prescribed to be there; for it marks the spot as the sacrificial altar and as such has a distinct and supplementary purpose, although even the crucifix is removed whenever the Real Pres- ence is actually exposed for the veneration of the faithful. Other pictures or statues, directly behind the altar, of figures of saints or representations of the mysteries of religion are understood likewise to be supplementary, as indicating the titular or patron of the altar or church.
STUDIES AND CONFERENCES. 617
But the prohibition to place on the altar designs of the Sacred Heart as a symbol of the Divine Love extends only to the altar proper, and not to the decorations on the wall, nor to the ornamental antependium, nor the secondar}^ furnishings of the sanctuary, because here there can be no misapprehension about the decorative purpose of the emblem.
THE ASSISTANT PRIEST AT A PIEST MASS.
Qu. It is customary to have an assistant priest vested in cope on occasion of the newly-ordained priest's first Mass, when the Mass is celebrated solemnly. I presume this is in harmony with the rubrics, or at least not contrary to them. But is it proper to have such an assistant priest when the Mass is only a low Mass?
Resp. The practice of having an assistant priest to attend the celebrant of a first Mass has the explicit sanction of the Sacred Congregation of Rites, for both solemn and private Masses. The only distinction is that at solemn Mass the as- sistant wears stole and cope, whereas at private Mass he wears only the stole over the surplice. (Cf. Deer. S. R. C, I Dec, 1882, n. 3564; and 11 June, 1888, n. 3515.)
LA PRISE DU BON DIEU.
UEucharistie, a monthly of a half -hundred pages (pub- lished at Paris, 5 Rue Bayard, 4 fr. 50, for the United States), is an admirably conducted periodical which discusses the doc- trinal, liturgical, historical, biographical, and practical phases of the worship of the Blessed Sacrament. There is a depart- ment of " Chronicles " and another of " Customs ". From a late issue (16 July, 1912, p. 230) we take the following item:
Among the old customs which we should like to see pre- served is one which greatly puzzles visitors to the parish church of Lucs-sur-Boulogne (Vendee), at the high Mass on Sundays. They are not a little surprised when, after the Gospel, they see approach the portly figure of the beadle ("un grave marguillier ") who in his right-hand holds a plate ("sebille") and with his left holds wide open a gigantic and well-filled snuff-box. Every one of the faithful who gives a sou has the right to take a pinch of snuff.
The writer says that he has not been able to trace the origin of the custom of " cette prise du bon Dieu ", but avers " qu'il existe depuis un temps immemorial dans la paroisse des Lues, ainsi que dans presque toutes les paroisses du voisinage."
Critfcfsms anb flotes^
OOLLEOTANEA BIBLIOA LATINA Oura et Studio Monacliorum S. Benedicti. Vol. I. Liber Psalmorum juxta Antiquissimam Latinam Versionem nunc primum ex Oasinensi Kod. 557, curante D. Ambrosio M. Amelli, O.S.B., Abbate S. M. Plorentinae, in lucem profertur. Eomae, Eatisbonae, Neo-Eboraci, Oincinnati: Pridericus Pustet Biblio- pola. 1912. Pp. xxxiv— 175.
In their labors to restore the original reading of the Latin Vulgate, as it was given to the Church by St. Jerome, the Benedictine Fathers intrusted with the revision have had to examine numerous codices and MS. ' recensions containing the changes gradually made during fourteen centuries by the copyists of the earlier texts. The result of this examination led in the first instance to the setting apart of a number of critical versions and commentaries to aid them in making the proper selection of the text containing the best reading. What Paul de Lagarde attempted to do in order to secure a critical edition of the Septuagint, is now being done with much better success, owing to modem facilities of investigation, by the monks of St. Benedict under the leadership of PP. Gasquet, Amelli, Manser, Quentin, de Bru5me, Comey, Cottineau, Belasis, and other scholars of the same Order. The publication of these " adjuncts ", which furnish a standing testimony to the care and intelligence with which the re- search in the restoration of the Hieronymian text is being pursued, constitutes the chief purpose of the Collectanea Bihlica. Abbot Amelli's edition of the Book of Psalms in a reading contained in the so-called Codex Casinensis, is the first instalment of this col- lection to come from the press. In immediate preparation there are also a subsidiary edition of the Psalter, and the Gospel Codex of Sarezzano, to be edited also by Amelli ; a glossary of the Vercelli Gospels, by the Abbot Gasquet ; the Vatican edition of the Codices Claramontanus and Palatinus, by De Bruyne; and the Psalteriurn Sanger manense^ by Quentin; besides these there are in preparation a number of MS. " Fragmenta " of interest to Bible students.
The above-mentioned Codex Casinensis is a MS. of 650 pages bound together in 42 fasciculi (quaterniones). The greater part of it is written in double column in Longobard and Gothic script, with ornamental initials. The first 573 pages contain the proto- canonical books of the Old Testament and the New Testament, to- gether with a Latin version of the Book of Esther according to the Septuagint. The Codex contains also four separate versions of the Psalter. The remaining 74 pages are devoted to a transcription of
CRITICISMS AND NOTES.
619
St. Jerome's De Interpretatione Nominum Hebraicorum, and of the Prologus et Liber Hebraicarum Quaestionum tarn in V. quam in N. Testamento; likewise the Liber Locorum in Latin after the Greek copy of Eusebius. Thereupon follows an anonymous treatise De decern Temptationibus, together with several tracts already known to scholars through the Bibliotheca Casinensis.
The Codex dates back to the twelfth century, and comes from the hands of two amanuenses. One of these was a certain monk named Ferro, as is proved by a comparison with other MSS. from the same hand preserved at Monte Casino, and dedicated to Abbot Theodinus, who presided over the monastery in 1166.
Of the four copies of the Psalter contained in the Codex the first is St. Jerome's translation from the Hebrew, made by him after he had prepared two separate revisions of the old Latin version of his day. These two revisions, known as the Gallic and the Roman Psalters respectively, occupy the second and fourth places in the Monte Casino Codex.
The third place is occupied by a version hitherto quite un- known. Dom Amelli attributes the same conjecturally to Rufinus of Aquileja, the contemporary of St. Jerome. The reasons which he brings forward to support his conjecture are creditable to his critical judgment and merit the impartial consideration of all scholars. Indeed his conclusions are much more logical and scien- tific than most of the hypothetical assumptions which the Higher Criticism as a rule is accustomed to assign to its sources. That the MS. antedates the sixth century is apparent not only from the vocabulary and literary style of the version, which indicate the use of an early African translation, but likewise from the corrections, which show that the reviser made his emendation after the Hebrew and the Hexaplar; and these have no parallel in any other known version to which they might be referred. The translator's aim was apparently much more conservative than that of either St. Jerome or those who followed him. The reviser's efforts to preserve the African text in its primitive form, so far as agreement with the pre-Masoretic text and with Origen's Hexaplar permitted it, are quite marked. This fact separates the present version from all other known Latin translations.
In assigning the probable authorship of the translation to Rufinus, Dom Amelli is not unmindful of the objections that may be drawn from the assertions of Isidore, Bede, and Rhabanus Maurus, who state that Jerome's translation was the first recognized attempt at a Latin Bible, a statement which might easily be understood to mean that they knew of no other version or that St. Jerome's version was the only one recognized in their time. Dom Amelli rests his
620 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
conjecture on more positive reasons. Among these must in the first place be reckoned the striking similarity in the use of words peculiar to the present version and used also by Rufinus. These are not merely what may be called the hapaxlcgomena in the writings of Rufinus, such as profectio for profectus and deliciare for delectare, but also the almost constant preference of words like sentire and sensus for intelligere and intellectus, copiosus esse for abundare, and such words as commanere, maliloquium, spretio, interanea, etc.
Moreover St. Jerome himself appears to bear witness to the oddi- ties of his quondam friend Rufinus as an interpreter of the Sacred Text when he writes (Epist. 106, n. 57) "nisi forte k^ovthvucaq non putatis transferendum despexisti, sed secundum dissertissimum istius temporis interpretem, annichilasti vel annuUasti, vel nulli- ficasti, et si qua alia possunt inveniri apud imperitos portenta ver- borum ". This fits in well with the peculiarities in the present Codex of the Psalter and the literary habits of Rufinus. The charge that according to St. Jerome himself Rufinus was ignorant of Hebrew, rests on too vague an expression of the saint, and Rufinus was not necessarily hindered from using the assistance of an interpreter in correcting the African version. At all events P. Amelli supports his theory not only with good reasons but with the modesty becoming the seasoned critic.
Students, alike of the Sacred Scriptures and of philology, will find abundant material to interest them in this hitherto unfamiliar version, and we may congratulate the Fathers of Monte Casino in having found such excellent interpreters as the editors of the Collectanea Biblica to give us the first fruits of the new revision of the Hieronymian Vulgate. The Appendix adds some notable criti- cal apparatus to the interpretation of the new text, such as specimens of the Psalterium Casinense critice juxta fontes examinatum, and of the other versions represented in the Hebrew and in the Hexaplar ; also the testimony of Tertullian, Cyprian, Arnobius the African, Augustine, Ambrose, and Jerome. There are several exquisite pho- totype reproductions of specimen pages from the Codex. We under- stand that the edition is restricted to five hundred copies, which, it would seem, will hardly suffice to fill the demand, considering the character of the volume. H. H.
EUOHARISTIOA. Verse and Prose in Honor of the Hidden God. By the Rev. H. T. Henry, Litt.D. Philadelphia: The Dolphin Press. 1912. Pp. x-252.
The desire has often been expressed that Dr. Henry would put together in book form the many poems which he has contributed to
CRITICISMS AND NOTES. 531
various periodicals and especially to the present Review. The volume at hand contains the answer, at least in part, to this request — in part, for, as the title indicates, the collection is limited to poems pertaining explicitly or implicitly to the Blessed Sacrament: they are all " in honor of the Hidden God ". The author's " occasional poems " that relate to other themes will, it may be hoped, be given a place in a future volume.
The book comprises seventeen original poems and one hundred translations (the original text is printed parallel with the English), including herein antiphons and psalms of Corpus Christi, hymns in honor of the Sacred Heart and the Holy Name. There are also translations in prose of the " Oratio Sti. Augustini ", found in the Missal post Missam, and of the Blessing of the Vestments, from the Ritual. A scholarly as well as a highly interesting commentary supplements the collection.
So much for the gross anatomy of the volume. The reader will want to be told rather of its life, of the soul which the poet, its maker, has given to his work. If beauty is the splendor formae as well as the splendor vert, then are these poems a most vivid ex- pression of the beautiful. The essential, ** the substantial ", form, which is their theme, gives them of course the objective unity which is the first constituent of beauty; but it is that "form" as caught by the poet's mind and moulded into manifold " accidental forms " which constitutes the variety that is the other no less essential element of beauty. Father Faber somewhere observes that to the non-musical the musician is a never-ceasing wonder. The same is true of the poet in the eyes of the unpoetical. That the intellect should seize the various forms and relations of a single thought is not the wonder; but that the imagination should create both the sensible symbols and the apt expression and at the same time catch the multiform varieties of the metrical movement that are best adapted to all the elements as well as most pleasing to the rhythmical feeling — herein lies the marvel.
Let us dwell for a moment on just this latter element, the metre, as furnishing some of that variety to which the charm of these poems is due. That the translations should be rich in this respect is less remarkable, when it is remembered that the originals have emanated from many singers. But take the author's own produc- tions. There are in all seventeen original poems and barely two move to the same measure. By way of illustration, two stanzas from "A Christmas Carol " may be quoted here as exemplifying at once the variant movements and their adaptation to the thought and feeling. Notice how the opening lines of each stanza reflect the sense of joy and exaltation, while the following verses drop the
522 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
soul quietly into the restfulness of the twofold mystery of Bethlehem :
Nowel ! Nowel ! Angels bring Tidings of the wondrous thing — Whom the heavens and earth obey, Christ is born for us to-day ! Angel forms and music fill All the spaces of the sky : " Glory be to God on high, Peace to men of perfect will !"
Nowel ! Nowel ! Come and see.
While your hearts make melody.
Where the Holy Infant lies :
Feast your hearts and feast your eyes.
For the King is come again
To the longing sons of men.
But behold, the altar-stone
Is His manger, is His throne !
But beauty is not simply the splendor of form — inward and out- ward form, unity in variety — it is likewise the splendor of truth — truth, the harmony between mind and thing; between thing and mind — truth made resplendent by the colors and expression with which the poet's imagination and literary skill clothe his true ideals. That there should be exact conformity between the thoughts and the truths — whether of faith or of reason — embodied in these poems goes of course without saying. We refer here rather to the resplendence of that truth as increasing by its delicate conformance to its own ideal standard, that very substantial truth which it is meant to pro- mote by rendering it beautiful. Take as an illustration ** Love's Folly," and notice how " the fact truth " is uplifted to the ideal — the foolishness of God is shown to be wiser than men — while the symbolism employed, the allusions, the language, the movement add their own resplendence to both.
I.
The Light of Light, the King of kings, His message of Salvation brings ; But in His Manhood none may trace The hidden glory of His Face.
So, in the Fool's robe of white. Doth Herod clothe the Light of Light : In answering jest, the soldiers fling A robe of red about their King.
Such is the fact truth, though idealized. See it now made resplen- dent through the symbol created by imagination :
CRITICISMS AND NOTES. 623
II.
Behold, the God-Man comes again Each day to be the food of men : Love's folly stands again revealed, For lo, His Manhood is concealed!
But now He clothes Himself instead 'Neath the white robe of wheaten bread ; And of His Precious Blood the sign Is the red robe of chaliced wine.
The reviewer is sorely tempted to illustrate more fully this re- splendency of truth by further quotations; but his space forbids. Besides, it is not fitting to anticipate the reader's own pleasure in this connexion. Rarely does one meet with a collection of poems each of which is so uniformly pleasing. There is none over which one does not want to linger, finding therein food alike for the intellect, the imagination, and the feelings. In this do these poems prove themselves works of genuine art that they meet with just pro- portion the demands of all the higher faculties. Head and heart, both are contented in them.
The foregoing remarks concern Dr. Henry's original poems. When we pass to his translations, almost all of which are of litur- gical hymns and psalms, we are struck at once by the skill that has been able to bring out the thought and imagery of the original while retaining the metrical movement unchanged. Rightly the Angelic Doctor's majestic Lauda Sion is given the place of honor ; and from it we take a parallel illustration:
Lauda, Sion, Salvatorem, Praise, O Sion, praise thy Saviour,
Lauda ducem et pastorem Shepherd, Prince, with glad behaviour,
In hymnis et canticis. Praise in hymn and canticle :
Quantum potes, tantum aude : Sing His glory without measure.
Quia major omni laude. For the merit of your Treasure
Nee laudare sufficis. Never shall your praises fill.
And so on throughout, — idea, sentiment, and measure move onward identically parallel. Or to borrow another example, from the trans- lations of the Corpus Christi psalms, notice how perfectly the English measure reflects the symbolism of the " panting hart " in the " Quemadmodum desiderat cervus " (Ps. 41) :
Quemadmodum desiderat cervus ad As a thirsty hart pants for the waters fontes aquarum : ita desiderat anima That leap from the sod,
mea ad te Deus. So is my spirit athirst
Unto Thee, O my God !
Sitivit anima mea ad Deum fortem My soul is anhungered for God, vivum : quando veniam, et apparebo The Living and Strong :
ante faciem Dei? O when shall I see Him, girt round
With His heavenly throng?
624 ^^^ ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
But this must suffice ; though we must not omit to express our grati- fication at the fair setting which the bookmaker's art has given to the volume. The casket befits the gems ; and one may feel that in pre- senting such a book to a friend the giver is equally honored with the recipient. F. P. S.
DE EOOLESIA OHRISTL Antonins Straub, S.J., Theologiae in 0. E. Universit. Oenipontana Professor. Duo volumina. — Oeniponte: Felicianus Eauoh. (L. Pustet.) 1912. Pp. xcli— 500 et 916.
There has been no dearth within recent times of scholastic treatises on the subject " De Ecclesia " ; we need mention only Franzelin, Mazella, and Wilmers, all three, like our present author, members of the Society of Jesus. If there be a new call for the publication, at this time, of such ponderous treatments, it must be on the score of some new development of doctrine, or some novel exposition of the traditional teaching by the older theologians, who occasionally drew their conclusions from limited scientific material, apparently assuming that science had been exhausted by reason of revelation. Apart from the subject's intrinsic importance, which demands that the student of theology obtain a clear and full view of the great institution which is man's chief exponent and medium toward his final end, P. Straub believes that there are not a few matters which might receive additional clearness from scholastic treatment — " non solimi ab adversariis impugnatae, sed maxime in ecclesia addubi- tatae, sive documentis hactenus parum observatis sive usu rationis theologicae opportuno luce nova illustrantur ". Among the topics thus enhanced by fresh illustration and further documentary evidence are: the question of infallibility of the Apostles, independently of their call to the episcopate, and without prejudice to the primacy of jurisdiction of St. Peter (pp. 136, thes. VII) ; the subject of the St. Peter's Roman episcopate, which is to be considered as of a monarchical character excluding the jurisdictional power of St. Paul as Apostle of the gentiles. Our author holds strenuously to the proposition that " Sedi Romanae unitus est primatus ita, ut hinc avelli et alio transferri nunquam valeat " (vol. I, p. 447). In the matter of corporal punishment for the extermination of heresies the author vindicates the right of the Church to avail herself of the civil power ; that is to say, he interprets the " potestas ligandi universalis " as comprehending the right to administer temporal and corporal punishment (vol. II, p. 9). In this connexion we may mention that he defends the Leonine genuineness of the famous " Epistula ad Turribium ", which some writers have denied. In the chapter " De Magisterio infallibili Ecclesiae ", when discussing the
CRITICISMS AND NOTES. 625
infallibility of the Pope apart from an ecumenical council, the au- thor vindicates as " ex cathedra " pronouncements the Syllabus of Pius IX, the Encyclicals of Leo XIII on the invalidity of Anglican Orders, and the recent " Motu Proprio " on Modernism by Pius X (vol. II, pp. 396-402). The writer's uncompromising attitude regarding the doctrine of the " temporal power " is in accord with his general views on the subject of the authority of the Pope. He maintains the necessity of the " temporal power " to the extent that it could not be relinquished by the Sovereign Pontiffs without violat- ing the prerogatives of Papal Infallibility as defined by the Vatican Council : " ideoque nee licite nee valide dimittendus ". This seems to us to state the case in a somewhat extreme form as a theological proposition. Allowing that the " temporal power " of the Popes is not only an expedient for the safeguarding of their spiritual in- dependence, but even a necessity under given circumstances, would not the Pope, as interpreter of the Catholic mind at large, be at liberty, without violating any right, to relinquish the patrimony of St. Peter? For, just as the Popes received that patrimony origin- ally, for the conservation of the interests of Christ's Church, for reasons either of expediency or necessity, might they not relinquish it, since the " temporal power " is not essential to the existence of the Church, but only necessary for the perfect fulfilment of her functions as mistress of the Catholic body?
There are other important and interesting questions in the field of theological discussion in which our author takes a decided position as compared with the attitude of others, who ar«e accustomed to put their propositions in less absolute terms. There are also some exegetical difficulties, such as the interpretation of I Cor. 15: 51, in connexion with the question of the authenticity of the Vulgate, which the author solves in a way that appears to him more or less final. But the points we have singled out will suffice to indicate the trend of the work and those in which it, we would not say takes issue with other scholastic theologians, because that would not be quite true, but in which the author seeks to establish a definite line of orthodox reasoning for theological schools of to-day. To many of our theological teachers such a course may seem necessary as the only method to counteract effectually the tendency to minimize Catholic doctrine and conciliate the spirit of Modernism. On the other hand it seems to us that, whilst we should be very positive in regard to what is undoubtedly revealed and infallible doctrine, and whilst we should likewise lay great stress on that " pietas fidei " which accepts with reverence and an open mind whatever is implied as closely interwoven with the deposit of faith, it is not v^ise to strain, by converting into dogmatic statements, all that commends itself d^
626 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
a corollary of a dogmatic proposition. Father Straub's method leaves the student in a quandary when he is confronted with the alternative of pronouncing a person a heretic or admitting him to the Sacraments, because of his opinions on topics on which a large number of theologians, including bishops and popes, might be found to differ from him, or would at all events allow a certain latitude to others, whatever opinion they might think the more safe. Whilst we might differ in our judgment from that of Father Straub as to what is expedient for the teacher of Dogma, no one will be inclined to question the erudition of our author. Every page bears witness to his wide reading and indefatigable industry in recording the dicta of the learned, where he wishes to enforce the logic of his theses. As a text-book for theological schools the work is somewhat lacking in that didactic division which would enable the student to survey his matter at short notice and relieve him of the necessity of analyzing the lengthy pages which confront him without a break in his reading of a naturally trying Latin text. But few teachers will want to be without such a work as a reference book on the tract " De Ecclesia," though it be a type that defends orthodoxy in rather rigorous fashion. There is an excellent topical index covering eighty pages, at the beginning of the first volume, which will allow the student to refer to the author's views. One likes to fathom the limitations of orthodox teaching, especially in these days of uncertain and shifting pronouncements, when a new type of liberalism has invaded the field of theological teaching. The letterpress and general make-up of the two volumes are ex- cellent.
THE TEAOHEE'S PEAOTIOAL PHILOSOPHY. By George Tmmbull Ladd, D.D., LL.D. New York: Punk & Wagnalls. Pp. 339.
A book by ex- Professor Ladd on the application of philosophical principles to professional teaching can hardly fail to be both in- structive and interesting. The author is a veteran in the field of philosophy. For many years he taught philosophy at Yale, and has enriched our language with a goodly number of works on that sub- ject as well as on psychology as such. The fact that his studies carried him into the domain of experimental and physiological psy- chology (upon which branch indeed he was the first to produce a noteworthy treatise in English) added an empiric note to his specu- lation which kept it from any excessive tendency to apriorism and subjective metaphysics. Although by no means " scholastic ", his philosophy is on the whole sane, in close contact with common sense, and contains much which a Catholic philosopher can both endorse
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62^
and utilize, as one may see in Father Maher's Psychology (Stony- hurst Series).
The book before us embodies lectures which the author delivered in Japan, Korea, and Hawaii during the year 1906-1907, modified, of course, and adapted to meet educational conditions in this coun- try. A passage from the preface will serve to indicate the mental attitude that motivizes and characterizes the work. "In this coun- try there has been slowly gathering the conviction that our system of education, from the public schools of primary grade to the Grad- uate and Professional Schools connected with our Universities, has not been productive, as it should be, of the right sort of men and women to conduct safely and wisely and righteously the aifairs of Church and State. And there has been of late, and there still is, much discussion — some of it faultfinding and criminating — over questions of causes and remedies, and over the general problem of whether our recent movements have been progressive or retrograde." Dr. Ladd declines to discuss this question, declaring it to be his purpose rather to emphasize " the personal and moral elements " as indispensable requirements for any lasting success or progress, and ex- pressing his belief " that the lack of discipline, through moral and religious motives and in accordance with moral and religious ideals, in the home-life,' in school and in college, and in society at large, is the prime source of all our national evils as far as they are con- nected with the educative processes as now in vogue. He also be- lieves that these evils are very deep and large at the present time and will be most difficult to cure or even greatly to abate under ex- isting conditions such as those with which the individual teacher cannot readily cope." This is surely an obviously sane profession of faith and it, together with its implications, dominates the author's thought throughout. While the moral and religious elements of education are but lightly touched upon, where they do come to the front they are soundly if not thoroughly exhibited. The function, the equipment, the chief ideals of the teacher, and his relation to society and the State, these are the leading subjects developed; and into them the author has woven a large amount of solid truth and practical suggestion.
From what has been already quoted the reader may surmise that Dr. Ladd is no adulator of the " new pedagogy ". As an illustration of independent judgment the following passage may be worth not- ing : " We have upset, or thrown into the melting-pot, many, many old things: we are discoverers and doers of a few things. But we have not really settled many important problems; much of our so-called pedagogy is painfully poor stuff, and is coming to be so regarded by the most sensible part of the public interested in edu-
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cation. And just now one of the most hopeful tendencies in edu- cational circles is to go backward, at least by a process of reflective examination, and consider anew in what respects we have been wise, and in what respects we have been foolish, in departing so far and so rapidly from the old-time system of education" (p. 271).
Thoughts equally sensible as this abound everywhere. In this lie the force and value of the book, — its sane estimate of actual condi- tions, and, within the limits of its scope, its practical suggestions. What especially is insisted upon is that the cure for the ills that afflict society — educational, political, what not — lies in the individual first curing himself. Mediae cura teipsum, may apply equally to the teacher and the taught, as certainly does the attende tibi et doctrinae.
GESOHIOHTE DER ALTKIEOHLIOHEN LITEEATUE. Von Otto Bardenhewer, Doct. Theol., Prof. TJnivers. Muenclien. Drei Baendes I nnd II — Vom Ausgange des ersten bis zum Beginne des vierten Jahrhunderts ; III — Von Beginn des vierten bis gegen Ende des fuenften Jahrhunderts. Preiburg, Brisg. ; St. Louis, Mo.s B. Herder. 1912.
The first two volumes of this monumental work by the veteran scholar and editor of Biblical and old Christian literature, Dr. Bardenhewer, were published in 1902 and 1903, and in recalling the item here we want to indicate that the work has lost nothing of its worth from the fact that the present volume is issued after a lapse of ten years. The student of Patrology will remember that a took on the subject was published by the same author in 1894, and trans- lated into English by Monsignor Shahan, of the Catholic University. The latter volumey whilst giving the student a full survey of the field of old Christian literature, with the modern critical apparatus needed for present-day apologetics, does not include many inter- esting details helpful to a proper estimate of those early eventful periods when Christian doctrine and discipline developed into the lasting forms on which Catholic theology bases its precepts and teaching. Fessler and Nirschl had done excellent work in this field of Church history, but they have proved insufficient, in view of, during the last decade, the criticisms of rationalistic Protestant- ism by scholars of the type of Harnack, Krueger, and Loisy, not to speak of their nimierous followers in England and America who, with perhaps less erudition but also less reverence for antiquity, have succeeded in forcing their opinions upon the present gener- ation of religious-minded readers.
The scope of Monsignor Bardenhewer's work is of course readily understood. It differs from the author's Patrologie only inasmuch
CRITICISMS AND NOTES.
629
as it enters on questions of greater detail. Considering the im- portance which the study of early Christianity plays in the apolo- getics of to-day, such a treatment of the Church's beginnings is of immense value to the theologians. Beginning with Jerome, who, in his De viris illustribus, lays as it were the foundation of patristic history, the author gives in the first place a full repertory of the literary sources and commentaries on the subject. This intro- ductory portion, intended merely for orientation, is followed by an examination of the ecclesiastical literature itself, from the Apos- tolic writings down to the end of the fifth century, including both Eastern and Western authors, with the exception of the Syrian Church, to which Dr. Bardenhewer expects to devote special atten- tion in the next volume.
The earlier part of the history of Christian literature, from about A. D. 120, is divided into groups dealing with apologetic, polemic, and domestic Church literature respectively. The third century opens with what is styled the theological science period of the patristic age, in which the schools of Alexandria, of Syro- Palestine, and of Asia Minor, exercise their distinct and mutual influence on the formulating of doctrinal discipline. These are followed by the so-called Africans of the West, Tertullian, Cyprian, Arnobius, and Lactantius. Next come the Roman and other Western writings, among which are included the acts of the martyrs from the middle of the second to the opening of the fourth century ; likewise the Jewish writings which were subsequently incorpor- ated in the distinctly Christian literature.
The third volume, with which we are at present more especially concerned, opens with a period when the external relations of the Church began to admit of a new development of ecclesiastical and theological science. The East had, indeed, hitherto been in ad- vance of the West. A close study of the Alexandrine and Egyptian writers reveals an independence of all Latin influence, whilst the apologists of Rome and those of Spain and Gaul constantly avail themselves of Greek sources. The same is true of Asiatic writers, such as Basil, and the two Gregorys, Nazianzen and Nyssa, and Amphilichius of Iconium. It is also true of the schools of Antioch and Syria. Whilst the Greek writers of this period were nearly all translated into Latin, none of the Latin authors, with the exception of Jerome and Rufinus, was turned into Greek. But if Eusebius of Vercelli, Paulinus, Hilary, Ambrose, and Prudentius were zealous in interpreting the fruits of Oriental Christian genius to the Latin scholars that flocked to the academies of Christian teach- ers, after the edict of Constantine and Licinius had. opened a way to the new culture, they also added valuable treasures of distinctly
630 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
Christian genius to the inheritance bequeathed them from the East. This is particularly noticeable in poetry. Herein the Latin far surpass the Greek writers of the fourth century. From Spain and Gaul the fairest fruits of Christian letters are furnished by Juvencus, Ausonius, and Prudentius, names with which those of Pope Damasus, Paulinus of Nola, and the Illyrian Niceta of Re- misiana, readily associate themselves in the mind of the student of Christian hymnody. The volume ends with St. John Chrysostom in the Oriental Church and with St. Jerome in the West. It leaves the great figures of Cyril of Alexandria, Theodoret, Augustine, Leo the Great, John Damascene, and the two Gregorys of Tours and Rome, as well as the Syrian writers above referred to, for the fourth and last volume. We trust the venerable author will be enabled to complete the work at an early date, thus filling a gap not other- wise supplied in Herder's admirable Theologische Bibliothek.
H. H.
THE NEW PSALTEE AND ITS USE. By the Kev. Edwin Burton, D.D.. and the Eev. Edward Myers, M.A., of St. Edmund's College, Old Hall. Longmans, Green, and Company: New York, London, Bombay and Calcutta. 1912. Pp. 259.
A book on the new Psalter comes opportunely in the series of manuals comprising the " Westminster Library " for priests. In it we find not only a terse and satisfactory explanation of the rubrics which accompany the recent Apostolic Constitution " Divino af- flatu " and which change the old form of reciting the Breviary, but likewise a practical exposition of how the new legislation adapts itself to the traditional rubrics. This latter feature has the ad- vantage of showing both the method of priestly prayer in the Church, and also the rationale thereof.
The chief purpose of the volume is of course, as is pointed out in the preface, to set forth the manner of following the new rubrics. Although these are very explicit and in themselves " a good specimen of careful legal draughtsmanship, terse, yet clear, and with not a word to spare ", these very qualities, whilst recommending them from the technical point of view, are apt to render the due apprecia- tion of their contents somewhat difficult to those whose active duties make a careful study of their technicalities impossible. At the same time the young cleric who takes up the Breviary for the first time finds here the necessary indications how to go about reciting the Divine Office. In short we have here a brief history of the Breviary, of its gradual development as a canonical prayer, of the methods adopted from time to time to keep it within the lines of its original
CRITICISMS AND NOTES. 631
purpose as a rule of worship and spiritual discipline, and finally a succinct interpretation of the rubrics which direct the manner of its recital in private and in public.
The arrangement of the contents follows the logical order, giving first the text of the Constitution " Divino afflatu ", with a brief analytical introduction; next, a short history of the chief reforms that have been undertaken since the formation of the Breviary down to the latest ordering of the Plan Psalter of 1911. A separate chapter deals with the distribution of the Psalms and the order of the various parts of the Canonical Office. The latter half of the first section explains the peculiarities of the calendar and the in- cidental variations in the hymns, lessons, and prayers. Part two teaches the use of the Roman Breviary, giving first the framework of the Office and then a detailed series of directions for each of the Hours. The volimie has a good alphabetical index for practical reference.
A PEAOTIOAL GUIDE TO THE DIVINE OPPIOE. By Andrew B. Mee- haii, St. Bernard's Seminary, Eochester, N. Y. John P. Smith Printing Company: Kochester, N. Y. 1912. Pp. 182 with Supplement.
NOTES ON THE NEW KUBKIOS AND THE USE OF THE NEW PSALTEE. By the Eev. Arthnr J. Hetherington. Bums & Oates: London. 1912. Pp. 56.
These two manuals are much alike in purpose, scope, and structure. They explain the new Office in a clear and concise manner. They are printed in good readable type. The American version has the advantage of entering more fully into certain details that are likely to help those who say the Office for the first time. In addition it has a helpful index, which is an aid to the priest in case of practical doubts as to the bearing of certain rubrics. Even those who are quite familiar with the Breviary will derive much profit from the historical and liturgical indications touching certain portions of the canonical prayer which are to be found in both of these books.
DE PEOOESSU OEIMINALI EOOLESIASTIOO. Usui scholarum et jndi- cum in cnriis ecclesiasticis acoommodavit Dr. Franciscus Heiner, auditor S. E. Eotae. Latins vertit ac denuo edidit Dr. Arthurus Wynen saoerd. Inst, a Van. Vine. Pallotti fundati. — Fridericns Pustet, Pont. Bibliop. : Eomae, Eatisbonae, Oinoinnati, Neo-Eboraci. 1912. Pp. 227.
A work of this kind from the hands of a member of the Rota gives assurance of being not only accurate in its statements, but also prac-
632
THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW,
tical in its application of the rules laid down for ecclesiastical trials, so as to avoid those interminable digressions that are commonly found in books of legal interpretation. Accordingly we have here a succinct exposition of the functions of the various officers employed to test the merits of charges brought against a priest on criminal or on administrative grounds; the methods to be observed in trials of this kind; the rights of appeal; and the process of executing the sentence. There is of course an introductory chapter which briefly outlines the scope and effect of legal or criminal procedure against clerics, indicates the necessary qualifications of the personnel, and the value of documentary evidence in such cases. The third part of the book treats of extraordinary procedures in cases of heresy, solici- tation, suspicion, and dismissal from religious institutes. The sub- ject of Amotio administrativa, though hardly implied in the title of the book, is nevertheless dealt with together with the exposition of the Decree Maxima cura. An appendix gives the required for- mulas for instituting a trial and there is a good alphabetical index.
Since the present work is not merely an addition to Droste's Canonical Procedure edited in English by the present Archbishop of Milwaukee while professor of Canon Law, in 1887, but in large measure supplants the legislation of the Instructio S. E. et Reg. of 1880, on which Dr. Droste commented, it would be desirable to have an English translation of the present volume.
OOUES PKATIQUE DE PSALYODIE VATIOANE d'apres les donnees du Oantorinus Eomain. Semiographie S 4 6 * 4X2, complete et unique pour toutes les formulas. Par I'Abbe Jos. Ant. Pierard. Eome, Tonmai: Desclee & Oie. 1912. Pp. 68.
The author, who is Cure de Sommerain (Houffalize-Belgique), signalized his long and deep study of the art of chanting the Psalms by issuing, four years ago, a Psautier-Vesperal, with a new and in- genious method of indicating the places of the mediation and clos- ing cadences, etc., of the Psalms in the various tones and endings in which they are to be sung. This work he is developing into a complete " Psautier Paroissial," but finds it desirable, because of a recently published imitation of his system of signs, to precede the publication of the larger work by the present practical course in psalmody. The semeiography (S46*4X2) looks cabalistic, but is a simple series of signs constituting a unique and sufficient formula for the desirable indications, in chanting, of the notes of preparation of cadences, and of the cadences themselves, for all the tones and for the different ways in which the tones are to be sung (solemn, ferial, paschal, etc.). A very interesting part of the pamphlet is
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the historical review of the systems adopted to popularize, by facili- tating the method of singing aright, the psalmody of the Church, and the genesis of the author's own system (pp. 49-67).
H. T. Henry.
Xiterar^ Cbat
The Pustets are announcing the new Missal, in various sizes, to harmonize with the recent decrees reforming the canonical Offices. It contains, of course, all the proper feasts.
The Church and Social Problems by Father Joseph Husslein, S.J. deserves more than a passing recommendation to priests. No pastor in any of our " laborers' districts " can, without gross neglect of his duty to instruct and warn his people, pass over the exposition of the insidious doctrines which go under the name of Socialism, and which foster discontent in the home and disruption in society.
The learned Franciscan, Augustinus Gemelli, has published a fourth and newly revised edition of Non Moechaberis, reviewed by us last year. It is the first volume of his projected work " Quaestiones Medico-pastorales." The author, who has the gift of treating a delicate subject with the skill of an experienced physician, and with the discretion of a devout priest, announces the solution of some intricate moral problems in his forthcoming volume, De psycho-pathologia pastorali. (Florentiae: Libreria Editrice Fiorentina — Fr. Pustet.)
The Rev. Joseph McSorley, of the Paulist Fathers in New York, who has been much interested in the Italian mission of that city, is about to publish an Italian Grammar and Exercise Book, especially designed for the use of priests in their care of souls. The purpose is to condense the needed informa- tion for a priest who wishes to hear confessions, instruct in their religious duties, and console in sickness the Italian immigrants who have no priests of their own nationality to attend them or supply their spiritual needs.
Some years ago, in discussing in The Ecclesiastical Review the question of the proper pronunciation of Latin, we pointed out that Latin is for Catholics not only a scholastic and liturgical tongue, but also a living language uni- versally used as the recognized medium of current legislation and of com- munication between the official heads of the Church and their subjects. Hence the usage of the Roman See should be the determining factor in Latin pronunciation, just as much as the French Academy or the standard usage of literary centres in England, Germany, and Italy, determines the pronunciation of their respective tongues. Now the Holy Father in a Letter addressed to the Archbishop of Bourges in France emphasizes the same fact and expresses the desire that the present Roman pronunciation be adopted throughout France. The reasons given apply equally to other countries.
Helene Stummel, whose successful efforts in bringing about a widespread reform in church vestments are recognized throughout Germany, has edited a much improved form of Toennissen's Fingerzeige fur Paramenten-V ereine. The manual of sixty pages treats briefly of the altar furnishings and the making of altar linens and vestments for the use of the ministers of the sanc- tuary. There is also a section on the method of preserving the sacred vest- ments and vessels. The book has numerous illustrations for the correction of the unecclesiastical and in many respects tasteless forms- of our sacred vesture. (Fredebeul und Koenen : Essen-Ruhr, Germany.)
634 ^^^ ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
In connexion with the subject of Christian art in Germany we would direct the attention of students in that field to the publication of a new version of Albrecht Duerer's Writings under the title of Duerer's Schriftlicher Nachlass, edited by G. A. Weber, the author of a Life of the artist. The book contains chronicles, letters, verses, diary notes of Duerer's journeys, and his observations on religion and art. (Fr. Pustet and Co.)
Father Reginald Buckler's Studies in Religious Life, which have been pub- lished within the last few years, show that the author's aim is to popularize the scholastic teaching of the Angel of the Schools. Although he takes his illustrations from the wide range of Patristic as well as Scriptural lore, everywhere he emphasizes the principles that underlie the aim at perfection. In charity we get the motive principle which rules all the powers of the soul and thus shapes all the other virtues. Spiritual Perfection through Charity, the latest of Father Buckler's books, offers an antidote as well as a contrast study to the spirit of mere philanthropy or altruism, which absorbs the qualities of the spiritual life that should make for the love of God as the first and last end of man (Benziger Bros.).
The Rev. G. C. H. Pollen, S.J., who translated Mgr. Batiffol's Credibility of the Gospels (see EccL. Review, August, 1912), has published an Appendix to the volume, in view of the recent decisions of the Biblical Commission with reference to the authorship and authenticity of the Synoptic Gospels. Father Pollen explains the author's attitude, which was to vindicate the his- toricity and authority of the Gospels, without deciding the question of priority or of sources (Longmans, Green, & Co.).
An interesting study of the relation of Tatian's Diatessaron to the Western text of the Gospels, which Von Soden and Vogels have attempted to connect, thereby hoping to solve definitely the " complex phenomenon which remains the only true riddle in the history of the text ", is "published in the July number of the Revue Benedictine. The writer, Dom Chapman, O.S.B., shows conclusively that the labored demonstration of the German scholars rests on the assumption of the existence of an early Greek version of the Diatessaron, for which there is not the slightest proof. The first suggestion of the existence of such a version was given by Victor of Capua (540-546), who appears to have used some such codex when writing his Codex Fuldensis, although it is by no means certain that his copy was not a Latin version. It is quite in- credible that for 350 years nothing should have been heard of such a version, especially when it is claimed that it exercised an extraordinary influence upon the actual correction of the Gospels. In truth Dom Chapman shows from the harmonistic reading of Marcion, who antedates Tatian, that the Western text of the Gospels was in existence before either Marcion or Tatian. The learned Benedictine's own conclusion regarding the Western text is that it does not actually present a harmonious reading and that the attempts to harmonize it have simply failed.
A work of much value in connexion with a subject which fortunately, though not without occasional abuses of course, is enlisting more and more the attention of legislators, philanthropists, and charity-workers, has recently been published under the title of Progress and Uniformity in Child-Labor Legislation by William F. Ogburn, Ph. D. It is a remarkably thorough statis- tical study of legislation enacted by the various States of the Union, covering a period of about thirty-one years ; and shows by exact measurement what ap- proach is being effected toward uniformity. It brings together data drawn from some 800 to 1000 volumes of statistics, each volume containing an average of 500 to 600 pages. The data thus gathered represent about 500 enactments. The monograph contains information of moment for the clergy, who are often obliged to know just what statute law has to say about the limitations of child labor. The volume is No. 121 of the Columbia University Studies (Longmans, Green, & Co., New York).
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635
Although the coal bins of Mother Earth are still well stored with the precious fuel (Europe alone possessing some 700 billion tons and America about as much, to say nothing of other parts of the globe), the supply is not inexhaustible, seeing indeed that not far from a billion tons are being annually consumed and with the growing consumption the extraction becomes more difficult and consequently more expensive. None of us need feel chilled at the prospect of the coal scuttle being forever unfillable. All the same the problem does confront the mind of man, what he is going to do, not so much to keep warm, as to keep his machinery, his wheels and things, a- spinning. To the newish science of photo-chemistry the problem appears to admit of a fairly easy solution. Get your heat out of plants where the sun's rays are being stored up all the time, just as they were ages ago in the carboniferous days when the coal measures were forming. The possi- bilities of this process and somewhat of its methods are developed in a highly interesting way by Prof. Giacomo Ciamican of Bologna in a lecture delivered before the International Congress of Applied Chemistry, held in New York, II September. The paper may be found in the issue of Science for 27 Sep- tember. The matter is too technical to be discussed here ; but it is extremely alluring to the imagination. Even the sober scientist indulges his readers with a glimpse of the possible future. The tropics will then be the favored places where cunning human devices will draw from the luxuriant vegetation a vast supply of solar energy. But even " on the arid lands there will spring up industrial colonies without smoke and without smoke stacks ; forests of glass tubes will extend over the plains and glass buildings will rise every- where ; inside of these will take place the photochemical processes that hither- to have been the guarded secret of the plants, but that will have been mas- tered by human industry, which will know how to make them bear even more abundant fruit than nature, for nature is not in a hurry and mankind is. And if in a distant future the supply of coal becomes completely exhausted, civilization will not be checked by that, for life and civilization will continue as long as the sun shines! If our black and nervous civilization, based on coal, shall be followed by a quieter civilization based on the utilization of solar energy, that will not be harmful to progress and to human happiness." The prospect will encourage those who shiver for their shivering posterity.
The Hibbert Journal is always full of suggestions — good sometimes, often- times otherwise. It rarely contains such definite statements of truths favor- able to the Catholic Church as it does in the article in its current issue, on French Catholics and Social Work. The writer, Mr. Henry V. Arkell, *' who has passed the last twenty years in Paris as a newspaper correspondent," and may therefore be presumed to speak from personal experience, states some facts that are both interesting and hope-inspiring. He describes im- partially the governmental persecution that left the French Church in 1906 " absolutely denuded of everything. No congregations, no schools, no funds, no salaries, no church buildings, no church treasuries, no seminaries, no residences for the clergy, no rank, no position. In exchange, however, there was the gift of Liberty."
What efficient use French Catholics have made of this "gift" he shows by means of eloquent figures. For instance, he says that about 400,000 French fathers belong to the associations of Peres de Families, organized to protect the faith of their children frequenting the State schools. Again, "in the past few years 450,000 Parisians have been won over to the Church, who before lived without any kind of religion."
Once more, " it was confidently anticipated by the adversaries of the Roman Catholic Church that few young men would be found disposed to become candidates for Orders once the Separation was a fait accompli. Undoubtedly there was reason for this conjecture, for vocations had fallen to a very low ebb in the two or three years that preceded the abolition of the Concordat.
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But here again there was a great surprise. Last year, for example, the candidates for the priesthood seeking admission into the Paris Grand Seminary more than doubled the contingents of previous years. Strange to say, these vocations are not confined to youths, but include those of already- formed men, men of culture, who, whether from disappointments or from disgust of the world ( !) prefer to devote themselves to the ecclesiastical career. As far as may be judged, there is no longer any real disquietude in episcopal minds on the point of priestly recruits" (p. 89). Mr. Arkell notes many other signs of vigorous activity in France.
How well that activity is being organized is indicated by the multiform movements of the Action Populaire, of whose social and literary energy some mention was made in our last issue. The September number of Le Mouve- ment Social, an international Catholic review, reflects the highest order of thought and sense (Reims, Action Populaire; Paris, Lecoffre).
But while the literature on topics social grows apace, that on theology shows no signs of falling off. New works are constantly dropping from the press and the older are being reedited. Thus we have quite recently Le Mystere de la Tr^s Ste. Trinite by the well-known theological and philosophical Domi- nican, Pere Hugon — a solid, but a characteristically luminous treatment of the theology of the Church's doctrine on the Blessed Trinity. It follows the same method as the author's previous work on the Redemption.
Au dela du Tombeau is a very clear treatise on Heaven by a French- Canadian priest, Pere Hamon, S.J. " The book is addressed especially to working people, to the poor, to all those who have but a very modest share in the joys and pleasures of earth." It has just appeared in a third edition.
The Chevalier de Beauterne's well-known monograph on Napoleon's re- ligious beliefs {Sentiment de Napoleon 7^^ sur le Christianisme) has recently been revised for the second time and is now reedited by M. Ph. Laborie. The fact that this is the fourteenth edition argues well for the merits of the work.
Jeunesse et I'Ideal by the Abbe Henri Morice is an inspiriting book for youth. Le Salut assurS par la Devotion a Marie is a small booklet that will help to piety; and Les Apprets du Beau Jour de la Vie by the Abbe Fliche consists of " conversations ", which contain instructions and exhortations, illustrated by stories, for first Holy Communion. All the foregoing books in French are published by Pierre Tequi, Paris (Benziger Bros.: N. Y.).
Father Kress knows what is needed by the people in the line of practical literature and he knows how to produce it. Amongst our continually multi- plying books on Socialism his Questions of Socialists still holds its place of distinction. The Red Peril is another more recent booklet of his, and con- tains five lectures on the economic and moral aspects of Socialism. Thy Kingdom Come is another pamphlet, the aim of which is " to demonstrate the Catholic rule of faith and at the same time to remove the objections that hinder most Protestants from accepting the faith". Both are useful little brochures, time-savers alike for. priest and people. (Each sells at $5-00 per hundred copies at the Ohio Apostolate, Cleveland.)
Amongst other brief practical books of instruction mention should be made of Father Frasinetti's Short Treatise on Confession and Communion, prepared especially for the Laity — a clear, solid little treatment of an ever important subject, published by the Sentinel Press, New York. From the same Press we have The Eucharistic Way of the Cross; also Special Devotions for the Pupils of Catholic Schools, a neat little manual of sensible prayer for every- day use.
LITERARY CHAT. 537
Little Mass Book by the Right Rev. Mgr. J. S. Lynch, D.D., will be found to help children to assist devoutly at the Holy Sacrifice. It is published by Benziger Brothers, who also reprint the well-known brief The Way of the Cross by a Jesuit Father.
Dogmatic Canons and Decrees (Devin-Adair Co., New York) is a collection of the principal Decrees of the Council of Trent bearing on the subject of faith, the Scriptures, sin and justification, the Sacraments, Purgatory, the invocation of Saints, and Indulgences. To these are added the Definition of the Immaculate Conception, the Syllabus of Pius IX, and the two dogmatic Constitutions of the Vatican Council on the Catholic Faith and the Church of Christ. The English translations of these documents are those of Canon Waterworth (Trent), Cardinal Manning (Vatican), and Cardinal McCabe (Syllabus). The print is large and clear and there is an index to the contents of the volume.
On Union with God is the title of a handsome little volume of the Angelus Series. (Benziger Brothers.) It is a translation of a treatise by the great Dominican teacher of the Angel of the Schools, Blessed Albert the Great; with notes by Fr. Berthier, of the same Order. The excellent translation is made by a Benedictine of Princethorpe Priory.
Reference has repeatedly been made in these pages to the Rivista di Filo- sofia Neo-Scolastica, a splendid quarterly review in Italian answering to the Revue Neo-Scolastique of Louvain. Following the example of its French com- panion it likewise is publishing an extension " library " (Piccola biblioteca scientifica delta Rivista di Filosofia Neo-Scolastica), three recent numbers of which are before us : i. " Recenti scoperte e recente teorie nello studio dell'ori- gine dell'uomo " ; 2. " Le Leggi dell'Eredita " ; 3. " II Psicomonismo ". They are brief studies, neatly made and well printed, and sell at 0.75 lire (fifteen cents). When we say that they are written or edited by P. Agostino Gemelli, O.F.M., the indefatigable and up-to-date scientist, apologist, and philosopher, ample assurance is given of the solidity and timeliness of these little volumes (Florence, Libreria Edit. Fiorentina).
The current issue of the bi-monthly La Ciencia Tomista, edited by the Spanish Dominicans, contains the concluding article of a series on the cele- brated Salamantican theologian, Victoria. The article is devoted to the bibliography of his works, printed and manuscript, and will be useful for stu- dents of Thomistic theology (Madrid, Santo Domingo et Real).
Progress — What it means, by Mrs. Randolph Mordecai, is a remarkable book in this that it condenses the gatherings from a wide field of reading and observation into something like epigrammatical lessons for the purpose of cor- recting current but false views on the subject of religion, education, and social activity. Practically the author demonstrates the truth of the paradox that success is not the gauge of progress. Her defence of the principle that Chris- tian culture is a process of evolution toward true freedom, and her apology for the emancipation of womanhood, are full of suggestive thought. Here and there we find statements which, if they are to be taken literally, would need modification, if not correction. Thus, it is hardly historically true that " virginity and celibacy was the ruling practice of the early Christians to such an extent that it had almost threatened their extinction." If some writers have used phrases that give this impression, it was an exaggeration intended to em- phasize the appreciation of celibacy as a fruit of Christian asceticism. No doubt the evidences of virginal sacrifice in the days of Christian martyrdom account for, without however justifying, the impression. In like manner ■expressions like " woman was the first creature in all the creation to fall " would lose nothing of their force by being more accurately stated, since the fall of the angelic creation prior to man's fall is a doctrine of Christianity.
638 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
But withal, this is a volume to supply food for thought and material for in- struction (B. Herder).
Of Eucharistic publications we commend from amid a large number of recent books the new edition in two volumes of Father Dalgaim's The Holy Communion, edited by the Oratorian Father Allan Ross. He writes a very instructive preface to the new edition, in which he explains the position of the author toward frequent Communion in the light of the recent Decree on the subject. Another excellent book on the subject is Im Zeichen der Zeit, written as a festal offering on occasion of the Vienna Eucharistic Congress, by the Jesuit Father Alois Schweykart (Pustet, Innsbruck). It consists of thirty- two Conferences dealing with the devotional, educational, and social aspects of the Blessed Eucharist and devotion to the Sacred Heart.
The American Catholic Historical Society (Philadelphia) has combined with its quarterly Records the publication of the "American Catholic Historical Researches," which the late Mr. Martin I. J. Griffin conducted with remark- able editorial skill and industry for many years. Dr. William L. Griffin, like his father, is a devoted member of the American Catholic Historical Society and one of its Board of Managers. This, as well as the fact that Mr. Oliver Hough, of the Committee on Historical Research, and the Rev. Edward J. Curran, a member of the same Committee, are actively responsible for the publication, give prospect of the Records becoming in its new series one of the most valued publications for priests and the educated laity.
Pastor Bonus, a monthly publication for the clergy of Germany, ably edited by Dr. C. Willems, Professor of Theology in the Ecclesiastical Seminary of Treves, has just entered upon its twenty-fifth year of useful propaganda in pastoral and ecclesiastical science. Founded by the late Prof. Einig, whose theological writings bear witness to his wide erudition and stainless orthodoxy, the magazine has maintained its high reputation up to the present under the management of Dr. Willems, to whom as a brother laborer in the field of ecclesiastical letters " ut ecclesia aedificationem accipiat " we extend our hearty congratulations.
The Librairie S. Francois (Rue Cassette, 4, Paris) is making commendable efforts through its publication of the Bibliotheque de Propagande Franciscaine to extend the spirit of Franciscan devotion, and enlarge the activity of the Tertians in every sphere of religious and domestic life. We have before us half-a-dozen Manuels by P. Eugene d'Oisy, all serving in different ways as incentives to devotion and as attraction to the Order. Translations of these booklets would no doubt disseminate the virtues for which the Seraphic Founder laid very deep foundations in his Rule, virtues never needed more than now.
Boohs 1Receiveb»
THEOLOGICAL AND DEVOTIONAL.
EucHARiSTiCA. Verse and Prose in Honour of the Hidden God. By the Rev. H. T. Henry, Litt.D., Overbrook Seminary. Philadelphia: The Dolphin Press. 1912. Pp. x-252. Price, $1.25, net.
Jesus Christus. Sein Leben, sein Leiden, seine Verherrlichung. Von R. P. Berthe, C.SS.R. Uebersetzt von Dr. Wilhelm Scherer. Regensburg, Rom, New York und Cincinnati. Fr. Pustet & Co. 1912. Pp. 558. Price, $1.75.
BOOKS RECEIVED.
639
The Eucharistic Way of the Cross. By the Venerable Pierre J. Eymard, Founder of the Congregation of the Most Blessed Sacrament. From the sev- enth French edition. New York : Fathers of the Blessed Sacrament, 184 E. 76th St. Pp. 24. Price, $0.05; $3.00 per hundred.
Special Devotions. Compiled for the Pupils of Catholic Schools. New York: The Sentinel Press. 1912. Pp. 180. Price, $0.15; $10.00 per hundred.
Short Treatise on Confession and Communion. Prepared especially for the Laity by Joseph Frassinetti, Prior of St. Sabine, Genoa. New York : The Sentinel Press. Pp. 77. Price, $0.05 ; $4.00 per hundred.
Le Mystere de la Tres Sainte Trinite. Par le R. P. :i£douard Hugon, des Freres Precheurs, Maitre en Theologie, Professor de Dogme, au College Pontifical " Angelique " de Rome. New York, Cincinnati, Chicago : Benziger Bros. ; Paris : Pierre Tequi. 19 12. Pp. viii-374. Prix, 3 /r. 50.
The Catholic Faith. A Compendium authorized by His Holiness Pope Pius X. Translated by permission of the Holy See. New York, Cincinnati, Chicago: Benziger Bros. 1912. Pp. 128. Price, $0.40 net.
Looking on Jesus, the Lamb of God. By Madame Cecilia, Religious of St. Andrew's Convent, Streatham, London, S. W. New York, Cincinnati, Chi- cago: Benziger Bros. 1912. Pp. xiii-431. Price, $1.75 «^''
Love, Peace, and Joy. A Month of the Sacred Heart according to St. Gertrude. From the French of the Very Rev. Andre Prevot, of the Society of the Priests of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, by a Benedictine of Princethorpe Priory. New York, Cincinnati, Chicago: Benziger Brothers. 1912. Pp. viii- 203. Price, $0.75 net.
Dogmatic Canons and Decrees. Authorized translations of the Dogmatic Decrees of the Council of Trent, the Decree on the Immaculate Conception, the Syllabus of Pope Pius IX, and the Decrees of the Vatican Council. New York: The Devin-Adair Co. 1912. Pp. 261.
Thy Kingdom Come. By William Stephens Kress, Priest of the Ohio Apostolate. Twentieth thousand. Cleveland : The Ohio Apostolate. 1912. Pp. 64. Price, $5.00 per hundred copies.
Le Salut assure par la Devotion a Marie. Temoignages et Exemples. Troisieme edition. New York, Cincinnati, Chicago : Benziger Bros. ; Paris : Pierre Tequi. 191 2. Pp. xi-187.
Au dela du Tombeau. Par le R. P. Ad. Hamon, S.J. Troisieme edition. New York, Cincinnati, Chicago: Benziger Bros.; Paris: Pierre Tequi. 1912. Pp. viii-335. Prix, 3 fr.
Cardinal Mercier's Retreat to his Priests. Translated by J. M. O'Kav- anagh. With a Foreword by His Eminence Cardinal Gibbons, Archbishop of Baltimore. St. Louis, Mo. : B. Herder. Pp. 365 and Ixvi. Price, $1.50.
Le Tiers-Ordre Franciscain — Qu'est-ce que le Tiers-Ordre Franciscain? Par le P. Eugene d'Oisy. ( Bibliotheque de Propagande Franciscaine. II.) Pp. 32. Prix, O fr., 05. Pourquoi entrer dans le Tiers-Ordre? Par le P. Eugene d'Oisy. (Bibliotheque de Propagande Franciscaine. III.) Pp. 32. Prix, o fr., 05. Gloires et Bienfaits du Tiers-Ordre. Par le P. Eugene d'Oisy. (Bibliotheque de Propagande Franciscaine. IV.) Pp. 32. Prix, o fr., 05. Catechisme ou Petit Manuel a I' Usage des Novices Tertiaires de Saint-Fran- fois. Par le P. Eugene d'Oisy. (Nouvelle Bibliotheque Franciscaine. 3® Serie, I.) Pp. 256. Prix: broche, o fr., 60; relie, o fr., 80, post en plus. La Vie Chretienne par le Tiers-Ordre Franciscain. Collection de Propagande. No. I.) Pp. 48. Prix: L'unite, o fr., 15; la douzaine, i fr., 40; le cent, 10 fr. Paris: Librairie Saint- Francois ; Couvin, Belgique : Maison Saint- Roch. 1912.
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THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
The " SuMMA Theologica " of St. Thomas Aquinas. Part I. Literally- translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Second Number (QQ. XXVII-LXXIV). New York, Cincinnati, Chicago: Benziger Bros. 1912. Pp. x-554. Price, $2.00, net.
Little Mass Book. By the Right Rev. Mgr. J. S. M. Lynch, D.D. New York, Cincinati, Chicago: Benziger Bros. 1912. Pp. 58. Price, $0.10 net; $6.00 per hundred.
The Way of the Cross. Adapted by a Jesuit Father. Second edition, re- vised. New York, Cincinnati, Chicago : Benziger Bros. 1912. Pp. 62. Price, $0.10, net; $6.00 per hundred.
Marriage, Divorce, and Morality. By Henry C. Day, S.J. New York, Cincinnati, Chicago: Benziger Bros.; London: Burns & Gates. 1912. Pp. XV-7S. Price, $0.50, net.
Les Apprets du Beau Jour de la Vie ou Suite d'Entretiens. Entremeles de Comparaisons et d'Histoires interessantes pour les Enfants de la Premiere Communion. Par I'Abbe Fliche, Chanoine honoraire d' Amiens, Cure-Doyen de Bernaville. Trente-quatrieme edition. New York, Cincinnati, Chicago : Benziger Bros.; Paris: Pierre Tequi. 1912. Pp. 477. Prix, i jr., 50.
La Bonte et les Affections Naturelles chez les Saints. Par Marquis de Segur. Tritisieme serie. Quatrieme edition. New York, Cincinnati, Chi- cago: Benziger Bros.; Paris: Pierre Tequi. 1912. Pp. vi-273. Prix, 3 jr.
LITURGICAL.
Notes on the New Rubric and the Use of the New Psalter. By the Rev. Arthur J. Hetherington. New York, Cincinnati, Chicago : Benziger Bros.; London: Burns & Gates. 1912. Pp. vi-56. Price, $0.60, net.
Fingerzeige fur Paramenten-Vereine. Von Helene StummeK Nach kirchlich gut geheissenen Bestimmungen vollig neu bearbeitet und mit Ab- bildungen versehen. Auf Grund der von W. Tonnissen, ' Priester der Erz- diozese Koln, 1879 herausgegeben gleichnamigen Schrift. Mit 36 Illustra- tionen. Essen-Ruhr: Fredebeul & Koenen. 1912. Pp. 60. Preis, kartoniert, I M.
A Practical Guide for Servers at Low Mass and Benediction. Com- piled by Bernard F. Page, S.J. New York, Cincinnati, Chicago : Benziger Bros. 1912. Pp. 42. Price, $0.35, net.
PHILGSOPHICAL.
Christian Social Reform. Program outlined by its Pioneer, William Emmanuel Baron Von Ketteler, Bishop of Mainz. By George Metlake. Pref- ace by His Eminence Cardinal O'Connell, Archbishop of Boston. Philadel- phia: The Dolphin Press. 1912. Pp 246. Price, $1.50, postpaid.
Il Psicomonismo 0 MoNiSMO PsicoBiOLOGico. Bohdan Rutkiewicz. (Pic- cola Biblioteca Scientifica della " Rivista di Filosofia Neo-Scolastica ". Num. 3.) Firenze, Italy: Libreria Editrice Fiorentina. 1912. Pp. 97. Prezzo, o /. 75 c.
Le Falsificazioni di Ernesto Haeckel. Dott. A. Brass — Dott. A. Gemelli. 2^ edizione riveduta ed aumentata. (Biblioteca dell "Rivista di Filosofia Neo- Scolastica". Serie C — Num. i.) Firenze, Italia: Libreria Ediitrice Fiorentina. 1912. Pp. 198. Prezzo, 2 /. 50 c.
The Teacher's Practical Philosophy. A Treatise of Education as a Species of Conduct (Fifteen Lectures). By George Trumbull Ladd, LL.D., author of Elements oj Physiological Psychology, Psychology Descriptive and Explanatory , Philosophy oj Conduct, etc. New York and London : Funk & Wagnalls Co. 1911. Pp. viii-331. Price, $1.25, net.
THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW
Fifth Series. — Vol. VII.— (XLVII). — December, 1912.— No. 6.
THE GEOWTH OF OHRISTIAN ART IN GERMANY.
THE history of Christian art in Germany begins practically with Charlemagne. Some churches were erected be- fore his time, but they were small and unimportant. The buildings left by the Romans sufficed for the early wants of the people. Some of these, like the churches of Treves and Cologne, were built for Christian purposes; others were chris- tianized pagan temples and basilicas. In the smaller towns the churches were probably of wood, and every trace of them has perished.
The most important ecclesiastical structure erected by Charlemagne is the Palace Church at Aix-la-Chapelle (796- '804), which is strongly colored by Byzantine elements, the in- fluence of St. Vitale of Ravenna being unmistakable. But much as the great emperor's court church was admired at the time, it did not serve as the basis for the development of Germanic architecture; the early Christian basilica was found to be far better adapted than the circular and domical struc- ture of the East to Catholic ritual, giving as it does greater prominence to the altar and the clergy. The real progress made during the Carlovingian period consisted essentially in the further development of the basilica style, with the aid of Oriental technical skill and artistic forms.
A fresh impulse was given to ecclesiastical art under the Othos (936-1002); and under the Hohenstaufen (1138- 1268) the old round-arched style reached its highest point of perfection. " If any style deserves the name of German," says
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Fergusson, "it is this, as it was elaborated in the valley of the Rhine, with very little assistance from any other nation beyond the hints obtained from the close connexion that then existed between the Germans and the inhabitants of the valley of the Po." Unfortunately this real German, or, as it is usually called (since Arcisse de Caumont misnamed it in 1838), Romanesque style was never fully developed, and never reached the perfection of finish and completeness of the Gothic. Notwithstanding this, says a competent English critic, it contained as noble elements as the other, and was capable of as successful cultivation, and, had its simpler forms and grander dimensions been elaborated with the same care and taste, Europe might have possessed a higher style of medieval architecture than she has yet seen.
The leading characteristics of the German style are the double apsidal arrangement of the plan, the heaping of small circular or octangular towers, combined with polygonal domes, at the intersections of the transepts with the nave, and the extended use of galleries under the eaves of the roofs both of the apses and of the straight sides. The most ornamented parts are the doorways and the capitals of the columns. " The latter," says Fergusson, " surpass in beauty and richness any- thing of their kind executed during the Middle Ages, and though sometimes rude in execution, they equal in design any capitals ever invented. These only required the experience and the refinement of another century of labor to qualify them to compete successfully with any part of the pointed style of architecture which succeeded their own."
The oldest specimen of German Romanesque is the mon- astery church at Gernrode at the foot of the Harz Mountains, erected in 958; but the real home and nursery of the round- arched style is the valley of the Rhine, where those majestic " Kaiserdome " of Speyer, Mainz, and Worms arose which are to this day the admiration of the tourist and the delight of the lover of art.
Much later than England, Germany took over the French pointed-arch, called by the Italians, who had the classic models daily before their eyes, the Gothic or barbarian style. The German master-builders — Gerhard von Rile, Erwin, Ulrich von Enzingen, Hiiltz, Prachatitz — simplified the
THE GROWTH OF CHRISTIAN ART IN GERMANY.
^43
French cathedral style, laying less stress on picturesqueness of effect than on mathematical exactness of design and execution. The square and triangle reign supreme, as Boisseree observes ; every part of the Cologne cathedral, for example, is designed with a mathematical precision perfectly astonishing. The re- sult is that the French and English cathedrals are more ele- gant, fanciful, poetical, and the German domes and minsters more subdued, solemn, awe-inspiring. The noblest features of the latter are the giant steeples; with their open-work spires and their organic development out of the square into the octagon and out of the octagon into the spire.
The first important Gothic structures in Germany are the church of Our Lady in Treves (122 7- 1245) and of St. Eli- zabeth in Marburg (1235-1283). Before long the whole country was dotted with them. In the cities stately parish churches were built by the rich burghers, all in the prevailing style, but with endless variations. The Friars, too, had their churches and chapels, contrasting strongly in their simplicity with their more pretentious sisters. In the forefront of the Gothic monuments of Germany and of the world stand the five largest cathedrals, three (Cologne, Strassburg and Freiburg) on the Rhine, and two (Ulm and Vienna) on the Danube. Though some excellent churches were designed after 1300, they show in many of their parts only too clearly the signs of " decline and fall ", especially a pronounced fondness for technical tricks and tours de force and an excessive use of merely decorative elements.
The Gothic structures of the thirteenth and fourteenth cen- turies afforded but very indifferent surfaces for painting; glass-painting made up for this to a certain extent. Perhaps it was better so ; for, if mural painting had been more gener- ally practised, the art of glass-painting might never have reached the degree of perfection that it did, and few I presume would care to exchange " the brilliant effect and parti-colored glories of the windows of a perfect Gothic cathedral, where the whole history of the Bible is written in the hues of the rainbow by the earnest hand of faith ", for the painted slabs of the Assyrian palaces, the painted temples of the Greeks, or the mosaics and frescoes of the Italian churches. The best examples of German glass-painting are found in the Church
544, ^^-^ ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
of St. Victor at Xanten on the lower Rhine and in the Cathedrals of Cologne, Strassburg, Freiburg, and Ratisbon.
The fifteenth century marks a turning point in the history of German art. A new spirit is abroad, not indeed as yet the free spirit of the Italian Renaissance, for Gothic ideals and Gothic forms are still dominant; but everywhere a more real- istic conception of art is observable. About the same time that Masaccio was creating his glorious frescoes in Italy, the altar painting of the brothers Hubert and Jan Van Eyck at Ghent revolutionized the art of the North. More than the great masters themselves, the works of their pupils, Roger von der Weyden and Hans Memling, influenced the German painters of the fifteenth century. In Cologne Stephen Lochner and Meister Wilhelm produced madonnas of trans- cendent loveliness, and in Colmar Martin Schongauer, the first great painter on German soil, painted altar-pieces and made copper-engravings that enjoyed a world-wide reputation. In Augsburg and Niirnberg Hans Holbein the Elder and Michael Wohlgemut were busy imparting the rudiments of their art to Hans Holbein the Younger and Albrecht Diirer. In Bavaria Mathias Griinewald was earning the reputation, which he still enjoys, of being Germany's greatest colorist. The plastic arts could boast of such masters as Adam Krafft, Riemenschneider, and Peter Vischer, the last named of whom, in his Tomb of St. Sebaldus, had so felicitously wedded the old order with the new. Into architecture, too, though the beginnings of German Renaissance may be justly said to lack system and logic, new life and vigor were being infused that promised a glorious development when the restless, eager striving after new forms, new means of expression should have taken definite shape.
Looking back at the art movement that began in Germany during the latter half of the fifteenth, and its magnificent development at the beginning of the sixteenth century, we must admit that all the signs pointed to a German Cinque- cento. But no summer was to follow on this hopeful spring, no fulfilment on all this promise.
During the second decade of the sixteenth century an event occurred that drew all minds and hearts away from art and its pursuit and directed them into other channels. This event,
THE GROWTH OF CHRISTIAN ART IN GERMANY.
645
or rather catastrophe, was the so-called Reformation. " Diirer writes his dark forebodings on the back of his last work, the wonderful panels of the four Apostles, and gives it away, because he cannot find a purchaser. Holbein leaves his native land, because it gives him nothing to do, and gains a livelihood in foreign parts by portrait-painting." ^
Although Luther himself was not an enemy of art, it is an historical fact that " the Reformation darkened the morning of the German Renaissance," as Kuhn so aptly remarks, or, as Erasmus expresses it: "The arts began to freeze." Prot- estantism as a form of religious belief has produced no art; for its place of worship it requires nothing but a spacious room, bare and cold, with a table and a pulpit, but no altar, no tabernacle, no sacred vessels, no statues, nor paintings. Most of the Reformers waged relentless war on all forms of sacred art: the much-maligned Vandals were connoisseurs compared with Calvin, Zwingli, and their followers. Many a Maecenas of yesterday was overnight transformed into a rabid iconoclast by the nrew doctrines. After having sworn alle- giance to the gospel according to Bugenhagen, the citizens of Brunswick refused to finish the steeple of their beautiful St. Andrew's Church.
The devastations of the iconoclasts were followed by the terrible Peasants' War and the long and bloody conflicts be- tween the Catholic and Protestant princes and cities. When peace was at last restored, the Catholics began to turn their thoughts to art once more. The Jesuits, encouraged by the Catholic Electors, began the erection of their superb churches in Cologne, Munich, Salzburg, and other cities of Southern Germany. Everywhere unfinished works were taken up again. It is idle to speculate what might have come of this new movement, for it was crushed in its infancy by a second catastrophe, the result of the first, viz. the Thirty Years' War. When it was over, Germany had lost her wealth, her national well-being, her power, her independence, her honor, and more than half of her population. Art could not thrive in such an atmosphere.
Austria and Southern Germany were the first to recover
1 Kuhn, Baukunst, p. 724.
^46 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
to a certain degree from the all but deadly blow. But as all art traditions had been completely broken with, new con- necting links had to be sought. The Catholic South found these in Italy. From Lombardy Italian artists — architects, stuccoers, decorators, painters, sculptors — found their way in great numbers into the Austrian Crownlands, Switzerland, Bavaria, to the courts of the princes, to the episcopal resi- dences, and the great monasteries. They brought with them the bright, fantastic, color-sparkling Baroco. Exiled Hugue- nots introduced a cold imitation of French Baroco into North- ern Germany. The Italian masters and their German pupils have left us some very noteworthy monuments of their skill, among others the Theatine church in Munich, the Karlskirche in Vienna, the cathedral of Salzburg, and the Hofkirche in Dresden.
The reign of Baroco and Rococo came to an end about the year 1 750. They had run wild and a reaction was inevitable. In their epoch-making works Winckelmann and Lessing con- trasted the eccentricities of the prevailing style with the simple elegance of the classical antique. " Back to Hellas !" became the watchword of the new school, and before long there arose on all sides theatres, museums, academies, churches, in the various styles of ancient Greece. It was evident that no works with the true spirit of Christianity in them could be born of this movement, and it was just as well that the pseudo-classi- cists treated religious art in a rather stepmotherly fashion. One creation, however, of this period gained the glory of a kind of omnipresence such as the madonnas of Raphael and Leonardo's Last Supper had alone enjoyed till then : Thor- waldsen's statue of Christ.
With the fall of Napoleon Romanticism began its triumphal march through Europe. The Catholic reaction against the rationalism and religious indifference of the eighteenth cen- tury turned men's thoughts back to the ages of faith. The artists took the lead in the movement, which may be said to have begun with Overbeck's pilgrimage to Rome in 1810. Romanticism means in the last analysis Catholicism. Over- beck and his friends — the Nazarenes, as they were called be- cause they cut themselves off from the world of art around them, from the academies and professors of art — recognized
THE GROWTH OF CHRISTIAN ART IN GERMANY.
647
this and returned to the bosom of the old Mother Church. Their works, noble, dignified, pure in conception as suited their subjects, soon gained an almost unexampled popularity. To the Nazarenes, with all their faults, belongs the imperish- able honor of having laid the foundation for the splendid development of modern German painting. They brought German painting back to life again after it had been dead for well-nigh three hundred years. Historians of art try to forget this. The greatest of the Romantic painters, Peter Cornelius, the creator of the Last Judgment in the Ludwigs- kirche of Munich, is only now beginning to receive the re- cognition which his genius deserves.
In many respects the architects of Romanticism were not so fortunate as the painters. The Western world had ceased to have a style of its own. Eclecticism is perhaps the word that best characterizes the architecture of this period. Artists as well as patrons of art contented themselves with making a selection from the styles of the past according to their per- sonal tastes. Louis I of Bavaria, the great Maecenas of the nineteenth century, made a veritable architectural chart of his capital. At his bidding Ziebland built the Basilica of St. Boniface, a vast pile with five naves and sixty-six marble columns. Klenze had to furnish a Byzantine Romanesque design for the church of All Saints. Ohlmiiller was told to try early Gothic for Our Lady Help of Christians; and Gartner, Italian Romanesque for the Ludwigskirche.
The completion of the Cologne cathedral under the direc- tion of Frederick Zwirner gave a mighty impulse to the study of Gothic, which resulted in the erection of a number of very correct medieval churches in various parts of Germany. But neither the new buildings nor the numerous restorations in the medieval styles were really medieval churches : they were merely structures which showed how the nineteenth century interpreted and imitated the art-language of the ages of Faith. In a few cases rare architectural geniuses like Hein- rich von Ferstel and Friedrich von Schmidt succeeded in giving to their works something of the picturesqueness and charm that distinguish the monuments of the thirteenth century. The Votivkirche at Vienna, Ferstel's masterpiece {erected 185 6- 18 79), is undoubtedly the most satisf actor)',
648 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
and pleasing of all the works attempted by the modern Goths of Germany. It is far more than an imitation : there is char- acter, individuality about it. The same can be said of Schmidt's Vienna churches. These masters felt that mere copying was deadening work, satisfying neither the people nor the artist; so they boldly introduced new elements into the old styles, retaining, for example, the Gothic or Roman- esque architectural forms, but mixing the construction with Renaissance ideas. Other architects went a step farther and took up the long tabooed Renaissance and Baroque styles once more.
Though Gothic and Romanesque, especially Romanesque, churches are still being everywhere erected, the tendency of religious architecture in recent times is to create large, un- broken spaces, which afford all present a full view of the altar and the pulpit. No style, it is claimed, is better calculated to create such spaces than what is known as the new renais- sance, a harmonious combination of Renaissance and Baroco.
Just a word about the very latest tendency in architecture, the " Modern " — die Moderne, as the Germans call it. Its distinguishing characteristic is its aversion to all historical styles, or at any rate to all unity of style. Simplicity, in- dividuality, picturesqueness, and above all serviceableness are the watchwords of its votaries; whatever is thought suitable for the attainment of these ends is welcomed, no matter how " uncorrect " it may be. All the modern means of construc- tion and vaulting, such as steel and reinforced concrete, are freely used, as are also the modern decorative ideas. The moderns flatter themselves that a new style will be evolved in this way. " Modern " Protestant churches can be seen in most of the larger cities of Germany : the Catholics have as a rule clung to the medieval styles, though the younger Catholic architects are by no means averse to trying their hand at modern building, and have done so with considerable success.
The sculptors have followed in the footsteps of the archi- tects. Some work to this day in the spirit and manner of the Renaissance ; others keep as closely as possible to Romanesque and Gothic models ; others again have been swept along by the current of the Modern. The tendency of the moderns may be summed up, according to Kuhn, in these three phrases — real- Asm, truth instead of beauty, artistic form.
St. Boniface's CiruRcii, Karlsruhe A good example of (German Romanesque. Stone trimmings, with plaster on brick-woi
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THE GROWTH OF CHRISTIAN ART IN GERMANY. g^g.
Civilized men have always believed that the proper object, the highest aim of art, is the production of the beautiful, and artists have al>vays tried to realize in their works the Good, the True, and — the Beautiful. The " modern " artist is not of this opinion: he claims that art is not concerned with the production of the beautiful, but of the true; and by the true he means the true to nature, the realistic, not the true in the proper sense of the word, not the truth. Old-fashioned esthetics never separates truth from beauty, but demands that in art the true and the good become the beautiful. Esthetics is an abomination to our Moderns, who sneer at the poor mis- guided artist who still strives after the beautiful in his works and lacks the courage to sacrifice beauty to reality. They themselves have no scruple whatever about making the physi- cally and morally ugly the subject of their representations. The form is all in the eyes of such artists; the idea, the thought is nothing. They do not want " the beautiful iorvci with the beautiful soul ", but merely the form. And they want the whole form. Not even a vestige of drapery is al- lowed to cover their representation of the human body. " L'Art pour I' Art/" is the cry which went up in Paris some thirty years ago and which found a mighty echo in the whole civilized world. "Art is its own law. Art and artists are free, free from every moral consideration, free from all reli- gious reverence. Everything is permitted to art and the- artist !'*
The result is that countless so-called works of art are any- thing but art: they are satires on religion and good morals. They do not represent nude forms (the subject often calls for these), but undressed, disrobed forms, contrary to all good taste and moral sense, to all truth and probability. Not even the churches — I mean Protestant churches — are safe fromr- the invasion of this flood of indecency, of this " emancipated " art.
The generation of Christian sculptors has, however, by no^ means died out. In Munich, Miinster, Ravensburg, Cologne, excellent talent is to be found, but first-class or even second- class productions are not at all too numerous. The artists themselves are not alone to blame for this. A good piece of sculpture is the result of long, painstaking labor, and com-
<550 T^HE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
mands a respectable price. The orders for such works should naturally come from the ecclesiastical authorities, from the secular and religious clergy. But the churches are for the most part poor and the old endowed monasteries have dis- appeared. Yet every church, no matter how small or poor, wants statuary, wants carved altar-pieces, holy water stoups, etc. To meet the demand so-called Christian Art Companies sprang up on all sides like mushrooms, offering cheap works of art for sale. No real artist condescends to work for such a concern; or, if he does, his originality, his enthusiasm, is soon stamped out by commercialism. This is one reason for the scarcity of good Catholic art. Another is the intolerable dictatorship only too often exercised by those who give orders. They dictate the " style," the cut of the features, the expres- sion of the eyes, the length of the hair. It is impossible to say how many hopeful young artists have turned their backs on religious art altogether on account of unreasonable med- dling of this kind. We shall see hereafter what is being done to encourage the men who, in the face of derision from the " Moderns ", ingratitude and indifference from those of the fold, and, worst of all, heartless commercial competition, have ventured on the thorny road of religious art.
What has been said of sculpture applies also to painting. About the middle of last century the influence of the Munich and Diisseldorf Nazarenes began to decline. Men like Fiihrich, Steinle, Schwind, Deger, Ittenbach — the last of the Nazarenes — could not indeed complain of lack of work, but they had no successors, and it was not till toward the end of the century that new life began to pulsate in religious paint- ing, though the number of really talented artists in the reli- gious field is by no means too great even now. The Kultur- kampf, the materialistic Zeitgeist, and the rapid rise of com- mercialism are the chief factors that conspired to bring re- ligious art to the verge of extinction.
" Inter arma silent Musae." After the Franco- German War the German Catholics were forced to bring all their strength, all their enthusiasm, and all their material resources to bear on the struggle for liberty of conscience and the rights of the Church. The Muse of Christian art, seeing herself forsaken, fled away. The Kulturkampf, however, was more
THE GROWTH OF CHRISTIAN ART IN GERMANY. 651
than a vehement outburst of the furor Protestanticus against Rome: it was at the same time the first great onslaught of modern science and philosophy on Christianity. Bismarck was unconsciously playing into the hands of the evolutionists, materialists, pessimists, and socialists.
The political, social, philosophical, and religious ideas and aspirations of a given epoch are invariably reflected in its art productions. The Nazarenes had gone to Rome for inspira- tion : the young painters of the 'seventies and 'eighties went to Paris, and so Zolaism and Renanism made their entry into German art together with Pleinairism, Impressionism, and Pointillism. If the new generation had let sacred subjects alone, it would not have added blasphemy to its immorality. But just here we see one of the most deplorable signs of the times : for the first time in the history of the world art was used to combat religion. The modern artists choose sacred, religious subjects, but divest them of their higher, supernatural consecration, of their superhuman, supernatural relations, and drag them down into the sphere of the merely natural, the purely human. The Apostles assembled around the Master at the Last Supper are made to look like hotel-porters put into hair-shirts for the occasion; Christ Himself is not the Christ of Revelation, of Christian tradition, but the Christ of Renan or Strauss, a Christ who has passed through the •ordeal of modern scientific ostracism. A " modern " Annun- ciation reminds one for all the world of an illustration in a love-story; a Birth of Christ looks like a scene in an emi- grant camp, and a Flight into Egypt like a gipsy idyll. So- cialism has not only invaded our schools and parliaments, but possessed itself of our art too.
When the storm of the religious conflict began to abate, the German Catholics were confronted by new tasks of the great- est moment. The Catholic working classes had to be organ- ized to stem the tide of Socialism; Catholic scientific so- cieties had to be founded to parry the blows of an infidel and blasphemous science ; vast sums of money had to be raised for the rapid recruiting of the depleted ranks of the clergy; the increase, by leaps and bounds, of the population called for the erection of hundreds of new churches, and German mission- aries from all parts of the world were stretching out their
652 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
hands for assistance. No wonder that bitter complaints were repeatedly heard at the Catholic Congresses to the effect that next to nothing was being done to counteract the pernicious influence of immoral, anti-Christian productions of art spread broadcast over the land by the aid of the most modern means of reproduction; that churches were too hurriedly built to be really worthy of their builders and of the religion to which they were dedicated; that the works of Catholic artists were seldom, if at all, to be seen at the public art exhibitions ; that there were no first-class Catholic art reviews to awaken and foster interest in Christian art and to bring the artists and the public in touch with each other; that Catholic homes were sup- plied wih prints and chromos — mostly importations — whose sweetishness was only surpassed by their want of character. In this case also, as in so many others, salvation was to come from the Catholic Congresses themselves.
From the very first the Catholics had given their attention to the question of Christian art at their annual meetings. Authorities on art such as August Reichensperger, P. Ilde- phons Lehner, and Professor Kreuser, had developed the prin- ciples of genuine Christian art and pointed to the supreme necessity of encouraging Christian artists. Creditable Chris- tian art exhibits became features of the Katholikentage. Be- sides a number of diocesan art societies, a " Christian Art Society " for Germany, with an organ of its own, was founded at Cologne in 1852. But all these laudable efi'orts were doomed to bear but little practical fruit.
In 1892 the Congress of Mainz, on the motion of Prof. SchniJrer, of Freiburg, recommended the founding of a Ger- man Society of Christian Art, and commissioned the Rev. F. Festing, the sculptor George Busch and the painter Gebhard Fugel to take the necessary steps to this end. These men went at their task with a will, and on 4 January, 1893, the Deutsche Gesellschaft fiir Christliche Kunst was organized, with Freiherr von Hertling as first President and Canon Staudhamer as first Secretary. The membership list, which included eleven bishops and archbishops, hundreds of priests and prominent laymen, and all the well-known Catholic artists of the day, was headed by His Royal Highness, the Prince- Regent Luitpold of Bavaria. Before the end of August the
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Shrine and Altar of St. Barbara Church of the Sacred Heart, Graz.
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Scholastica's Body Being Brought to St, Benedict's Monastery A good example of the Beuron School of Decoration.
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THE GROWTH OF CHRISTIAN ART IN GERMANY. 653
new society issued its first Kunstmappe (annual art-portfolio) and held its first convention during the session of the Catholic Congress at Wurzburg. A few extracts from the Statutes ap- proved by the convention will give a clear idea of the aims and organization of the Society:
The Deutsche Gesellschaft fiir christliche Kunst aims to be a rallying-point for all artists and patrons of art who are prepared to foster creative Christian art and to awaken intelligent interest in it among all classes of the people.
Any person can become a member of the Society * who identifies himself with its aims and pays the annual dues of 10 marks ($2.50). Payment of 250 marks in cash entitles to life-membership.
Whoever abuses his privilege of membership for commercial or advertising purposes can be excluded from the Society by the Board of Directors.
Every year a general meeting of the Society is held at which all the members are entitled to a vote, in addition to this the Board of Directors can call an extraordinary meeting at any time. The general meeting alone has the right to alter the Statutes of the Society.
The affairs of the Society are managed by a Board of Directors composed of eighteen members elected by the general assembly. One-third of the Board consists of artists, two-thirds of patrons, three of whom at least should be priests. . . . The members of the Board are elected for a term of three years; each year six members — four patrons and six artists — retire from the Board. . . . The two Presidents (only the second can be an artist) are elected for a term of three years by the Board of Directors from among their own members. The two secretaries and treasurers are elected in the same way.
The duties of the Board of Directors are: 1. to promote the aims of the Society by sedulously consulting its interests; 2. to carry on the current business of the Society; 3. to arrange art exhibitions; 4. to administer the property of the Society.
Each year the Society issues an art-portfolio {Kunstmappe) con- taining on an average 35 reproductions of original works by the members of the Society with a brief explanatory text. The Kunst- mappe is sent gratis to the members.
A Jury of 8 members is annually elected, six by the artists (2 architects, 2 sculptors, 2 painters) and two by the other members 'Of the Society.
2 The Headquarters of the G. f. c. K. are located at Munich, Karlstrasse 6.
654 ^^^ ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
The Jury decides on the works to be admitted into the Jahres- mappe and for exhibitions held under the auspices of the Society. Its decisions are final in all purely artistic questions touching the Society. If the President objects to the admission of a work of art into the Jahresmappe on other than artistic grounds, he can enter a provisional veto and refer the matter to the Board of Directors.
Artists in the sense of § § 1, 6 and 12 are such as have given proof of their ability by the production of original works of art. After presentation by one of its artist members, the Jury decides whether a candidate is to be admitted into the Society as an artist or not.
The property of the Society is used: 1. to meet current expenses; 2. to publish the art-portfolio ; 3. to promote monumental works of Christian art; 4. for exhibitions.
Thanks to the whole-souled cooperation of prominent ec- clesiastics and laymen, thanks especially to constant encour- agement in high places, the Christian Art Society has suc- ceeded in bringing together an unexpectedly large number of talented artists who are ready to place their best efforts in the service of Christian art. The results thus far achieved bear out the claim made at the last Catholic Congress, that a glori- ous revival of religious art is in progress. At the end of 1 910 the Society counted 5950 members recruited mainly from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, — the other coun- tries of Europe and the Americas having but few representa- tives. Of the artists of the Society Kuhn says in his monu- mental Allgemeine Kunstgeschichte:^ "The ablest of the religious painters [elsewhere he says the same of the architects and sculptors] are in every way the equals of the secular artists, but strange to say their names are seldom found in the popular art dictionaries." It is also strange that reproduc- tions of religious paintings by German Protestant artists, such as Hofmann and Plockhorst, are met with in hundreds of our American Catholic educational institutions, but seldom, if ever, the far superior works of Catholic painters; such as Feuerstein, Schiestl, Kunz, Fugel, Seitz, Wante, or Schleibner.
In 1900 the Board of Directors of the Gesellschaft fiir christliche Kunst took a step which, though it led to serious misunderstandings, has resulted in much good to the cause of
^ Die Malerei, II, p. 1351.
THE GROWTH OF CHRISTIAN ART IN GERMANY. 655
Christian art. On the motion of Prof. Busch i't advised the- founding of a " Christian Art Company, Ltd." ( Gesellschaft fiir christliche Kunst, G. m. b. H.). This company, which is closely allied to, though quite distinct from the German Society of Christian Art, has for its object the bringing of works of Christian art before the buying public. All its stock- holders are members of the Society, and the Society as such holds stock to the amount of 8000 marks. The net profits are not divided among the stockholders (these merely draw 4% interest on their investment), but are used exclusively for the promotion of Christian art.
In 1904 the Art Company began the publication of the il- lustrated monthly magazine, Die christliche Kunst. Toward its support the Art Society pays a yearly subvention of two- marks for each of its members, who in return receive the magazine for the nominal yearly subscription price of M.4.80 ($1.20). During the seven years of its existence it has steadily improved and ranks to-day with the best art periodi- cals of the world. By the variety of the subjects treated (it covers the whole field of genuine art, both sacred and pro- fane), the good repute of the contributors, and the number and beauty of its illustrations, it has won the praises even of the most critical and exacting of its readers.
Since 1908 the Art Company has been publishing an il- lustrated supplement to Die christliche Kunst under the title Der Pionier.'^ The " Pioneer ", as its name implies, aims to prepare the way for Christian art, to remove obstacles, bridge over difficulties, give advice and encouragement; it appeals especially to the priest, the teacher and the student, treating as it does in a most lucid manner all the practical questions touching Christian art in the church, the school, and the home. It fully deserves all the patronage, and more than, it has thus far received.
Die christliche Kunst is not the official organ of the Deutsche Gesellschaft fiir christliche Kunst, though four-fifths of its members subscribe for it. The only official organ of the So- ciety is the Jahresmappe. Every member of the society, how- ever, has the right to enter protest with the Board of Direc-
* Price, 3M. — 75 cents per year.
^56 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
tors or at the annual convention, if he thinks that the review ^r the Pionier is not true to the principles and interests of the Society.
The Jahresmappe, for the contents of which the Society is responsible, is an admirable means of making known the works of Christian artists and of enabling the members to form their own opinion of the religious art-life of our day and of serving them as reliable guides in the selection of artists for any orders they may have to place. The high artistic character of the Jahresmappe has been repeatedly ac- knowledged both by the public press and the organs of the various non-Catholic art societies. Even a casual study of the eighteen portfolios thus far issued will elicit the con- fession that here is the story of German Christian art en- deavor during the past twenty years. The fruits displayed are not all of equal beauty and delight, but for this very reason they present a truer picture of the searching and wrestling of individual talents for the same ideals.
By means of its annual raffles, which are arranged in such a way that each member of the Society, without any addi- tional pecuniary obligation, must win at least once in five years, valuable productions of sacred art are introduced into the Christian home. Only original works of art and ex- ceptionally good reproductions of famous works by old and new masters are raffled.
One of the most important duties of the Society is the ar- ranging of Christian Art Exhibitions. In spite of many and great difficulties very satisfactory results have been achieved in this line. The first exhibition was held in Munich in the summer of 1895 at the same time as the Forty-Second Catholic Congress. Another could be arranged for the following year in Dortmund. In 1899 the Christian artists took part as a separate group in the Munich Artists' Exhibition, which at- tracted so much attention at the time. In 1905 they exhibited in Vienna and in 1907 at Aix-la-Chapelle. The Munich Ex- position of 1908 had a special department for Christian Art, consisting of a church and a number of adjoining chapels for applied religious art. By far the greater number of the ex- hibitors in this department belonged to the Society of Chris- tian Art and represented its ideas in a most creditable man-
Carved Tympanum Over Doorway, St. Paul's Church, Munich,
St. John Chrysostom
St. Athanasius
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THE GROWTH OF CHRISTIAN ART IN GERMANY. 657
ner. From 15 May to 30 September, 1909, an International Christian Art Exposition was held in Dusseldorf. Three halls had been placed at the disposal of the Society, which was represented by no less than sixty artists. A number of its non- Bavarian artists affiliated themselves with local groups of exhibitors. Twenty years ago the Dusseldorf Exposition would have been an impossibility.
Two new features have been recently introduced into the exhibition work of the Society : the Exhibitions for Students and the Wanderausstellungeny or Travelling- Exhibitions. The former are arranged in various parts of the country for the Christmas or summer holidays, and are left as far as possible to the management of the students themselves. The first exhibition of this kind was held in Kevelaer in Septem- ber last under the auspices of Fritz Stummel's Lower Rhenish Art School. The Wanderausstellungen are an excellent means for educating the people up to an intelligent apprecia- tion of true religious art. During the past two years such unpretentious and inexpensive exhibitions have made the rounds of Bavaria, everywhere enthusiastically welcomed by the clergy, the press and, above all, by the people themselves. If these exhibitions are supplemented by a popular lecture on art, illustrated if possible, they are always sure to be a success. Perhaps it will interest the tourist to know that the Society maintains, at its headquarters in Munich, a permanent Chris- tian art exhibit which is well worth a visit. The writer has spent some pleasant and instructive hours there himself. The space available is, however, too limited, and steps are being taken to provide for better accommodations. The advisability of establishing a school of Christian art in connexion with an exposition hall was seriously discussed at the last annual con- vention.
The advertising of competitions for monumental works of art, though it has its drawbacks, is a most effective means of stimulating interest both among the artists and the public Since it took up this kind of work some ten years ago, the Society of Christian Art has conducted sixteen successful com- petitions, including plans for churches, monuments, stained- glass windows, altars, frescoes, and cover-designs for books and magazines. All competitions are advertised' and the re-
658
THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
suits published in Die christliche Kunst and the Yearly Report- issued by the Society.
At the Fifteenth General Meeting of the Society of Chris- tian Art, which was held in Munich, 4 July, 191 2, a number of amendments to the original statutes were unanimously adopted. The most important ones may be summed up under the following heads: i. membership; 2. organs of the society,*: 3. the formation of groups within the Society.
1. Membership. All persons professing the Christian re- ligion can become ordinary members of the Society. Corpor- ations, associations, foundations and institutions whose aims are not incompatible with those of the Society can be admitted into the Society as extraordinary members. Extraordinary members have the right to be represented at the General Meetings of the Society. University students can be admitted into the Society as participants. Participants are entitled to the annual art gift of the society : other rights they have none. Their yearly contribution is six marks.
2. Organs of the Society. To the already existing organs — the Board of Directors, the Jury, and the General Meeting of the Members — a fourth, an Honorary Board of Directors, has been added. It consists of the bishops who are members of the Society. The members of the Honorary Board have, the right to assist at all the meetings of the Board of Direc- tors, either in person or by their representatives. The de- cisions of the Board of Directors are null and void if the Honorary Board declares them to be opposed to Catholic prin- ciples. Writings and works of art intended for general dis- tribution among the people must be submitted to the Honorary Board before they are published.
At least one-third of the members of the Board of Direc- tors must be ecclesiastics.
3. The formation of groups within the Society. In larger districts local groups, or branches, of the Society of Christian Art can be organized. Each group must be composed of at least twenty members. No district can have more than one group.
The district groups must pursue the same ends as the So- ciety of Christian Art. The decisions of the Board of Direc- tors of the Society are binding on all the groups. The
THE GROWTH OF CHRISTIAN ART IN GERMANY. ^cg
statutes of the district groups must be approved by the Board of Directors of the Society. No district group can acquire the rights of a body corporate. Properly constituted district groups have the right to representation at the General Meet- ings of the Society. Each group is entitled to one vote for every twenty of its members not present at the General Meet- ing, but in no case to more than ten votes.
Such is a brief sketch of the work being done by the German Society of Christian Art. In other parts of the world similar societies are doing similar work, and, though their methods of doing it may be different, all are spurred on by the same noble enthusiasm for the ultimate triumph of Christian ideas and ideals over the idols of materialism on the modern battlefield of art.
Some months ago, from his bed of sickness, the aged Car- dinal Capecelatro wrote to the organizers of an Italian So- ciety of Christian Art : " My heart is sorely distressed when I contemplate the sad state into which Christian art has been allowed to fall. It has long been my ardent wish that a so- ciety for the promotion of modern Christian art should be founded, because I know how powerful the warm light of sacred art is to enlighten the mind and to inflame the heart with faith and love. O ! if Christian art could but flourish again as it did of old in the ages of faith, how much good might not be done? And if we all strove to convince our Catholic people that the light of celestial beauty streaming forth from the master-works of Christian art ennobles and sanctifies our religious feelings, how great would be the gain for the salvation of souls! With mind and heart we should draw nearer to the Eternal Beauty."
George Metlake.
Cologne, Germany.
66o
THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
THE SMALL HOST "EXTRA OOEPOKALE"— A BIT OP OASUISTEY.
The following list (including only commonly accessible authors) will enable the reader to control the references found in the present article. The tract referred to under an author's name is taken from his Moral Theology, unless explicit mention is made of another work. It will readily appear that the writer finds himself in full accord with the opinion represented by Father Columba in the present discussion.
St. Alphonsus, (a) De Euchar., No. 217.
(b) Homo Apostolicus, Examen Ordinandorimi, No. 99.
Ballerini, De Euchar.,- Nos. 59, 60, 61, 62.
Bouquillon, Theol. Mor. Fund., Nos. 65-71. (Authojity of St. Alphonsus.)
The Casuist, Case LXVI, p. 279 (taken verbatim, without ac- knowledgment, from Dr. Koeberl in the Theologisch- praktische Quart ah chrift, 1906, pp. 576-583).
Genicot, De Euchar., No. 174, 4°.
Goepfert, Das allerh. Sak., § 126, 2.
Gury, De Euchar., No. 94,' 1°.
Konings, De Euchar., No. 1283.
Lambertini (Benedict XIV), De Sacrificio Missae, III, 18, 4° and 6°.
Lehmkuhl, Cath. Encyc, XIV, 601-611. De Euchar., No. 125. Casus (37), No. 128 etc.
Marc, De Euchar., No. 1527, 1°.
Sabetti, De Euchar., No. 682, 1°.
Slater, The Holy Eucharist, C. XIX, 3.
Noldin, De Euchar., Nos. 113, 114, 4.
Tanquerey, De Euchar., No. 135.
I. The Case. ^ ^ T T wasn't consecrated at all. You should have taken it
1 yourself after the purification." — " No, it was probably consecrated, — so you should have taken it just after the Precious Blood, before the ablutions." — " No, it was more probably not consecrated, — so you should have taken it after the first, and before the second, ablution."
Sympathize with me, dear fellow-sufferer. My server wished to communicate during my Mass. I placed a small host on the paten. On rising from the genuflection after
THE SMALL HOST ''EXTRA CORPORALE." 561
elevating the Sacred Host I caught sight of the small host lying outside the corporal, touching, or all but touching, the right edge of the purificator. It had evidently fallen there when I uncovered the chalice at the Offertory. What was to be done? Instinctively I placed the small host on the cor- poral at the foot of the chalice and went on with the Mass. A solution flashed upon me, as I thought, unbidden. " In the sacristy I had the intention to consecrate that host in this Mass. I haven't revoked that intention, and the host was cons ec ratable. Therefore it is certainly consecrated, and I shall give it to the server." So I did. It is true, I felt some trepidation. I listened for objections, but none seemed to obscure that first clear impression. About the intention I had no doubt at all. The physical presence troubled me most. The host was three inches outside the corporal. But I could find no solid reason to doubt my logic, and hence I gave the server Communion as usual.
For the general edification I narrated the incident to my confreres at the general recreation of our community. Quite generally my solution was condemned. And when I inquired what then I should have done, I received the mutually con- tradictory answers that stand at the opening of this article. It was some consolation to find my adversaries divided among themselves. So I felt emboldened to say that I still held that I had acted correctly, and would not feel myself justified in doing otherwise if the accident should happen again.
"What's that? Father Columba, you're a heretic!" — " No, a schismatic !" — " Verging on Modernism !" — "All au- thors agree that you simply cannot treat the host under such circumstances as consecrated!"
"Why not?" said I. " No one has any doubt about the matter or the form. And I'm sure I had the intention, and did not revoke it. 'Atqui,' says the Ritual, ' his tribus exis- tentibus Veritas adest Sacramenti '."
"There! I thought so." The patriarch among the fath- ers was speaking. " That is the result of reading novels, and neglecting theology. Come, confess — you are simply stand- ing in the shoes of Father Irwin, the flippant young priest in Chapter XXIII of Father Sheehan's My New Curater
(" Oh, ho !"— "Ah, ha !"— " So, so !")
^52 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
" Call him flippant if you will : I have yet to meet an ef- fective answer to his argument. Here is the book. I brought it along purposely. Will you allow me to read the passage?"
" Just a moment," said Father Prior. " Two of the younger fathers will please bring authorities from the library, that we may have wherewith to make straight the crooked ways in good Father Irwin's theological garden."
" Bring Sabetti ! Gury ! Ballerini ! Noldin ! Konings ! Marc ! Tanquerey !" — such are the cries that pursue the mes- sengers.
II. A Theological Battle.^
*' Now, Father Irwin," said the chairman, addressing a smart, keen-looking young priest who sat at the end of the table, ''you have just come back to us from Australia; of course, everything is perfect there. What do you think — Are the particles in a ciborium, left by inadvertence outside the corporal during consecration, consecrated? Now, just reflect for a moment, for it is an important matter."
" Unquestionably they are," said the young priest con- fidently.
" They are not," replied the chairman. " The whole con- sensus of theologians is against you."
" For example?" said Father Irwin coolly.
" Wha-at?" said the chairman, taken quite aback.
" I doubt if all theologians are on your side," said Father Irwin. " Would you be pleased to name a few?"
" Certainly," said the chairman, with a pitying smile at this young man's presumption. " What do you think of Benedict XIV, Suarez, and St. Alphonsus?"
The young man didn't seem to be much crushed under the avalanche.
" They held that there should be reconsecration ?"
" Certainly."
" Let me see. Do I understand you aright? The celebrant intends from the beginning to consecrate those particles ?"
" Yes."
" The intention perseveres to the moment of consecration?'*
" Yes." * Cf. Ecclesiastical Review, 1899, Vol. 20, pp. 477 S.
THE SMALL HOST "EXTRA CORPORALE."
663
"And the materia being quite right, he intends to conse- crate that objective, that just lies inadvertently outside the corporal ?"
" Quite so."
"And you say that Benedict XIV, Suarez, and St. Alphonsus maintain the necessity of reconsecration ?"
" Yes."
" Then I pity Benedict XIV, Suarez, and St. Alphonsus."
There was consternation. The bishop looked grave. The •old man gaped in surprise and horror. The young men held down their heads and smiled.
" I consider that a highly improper remark, as applied to the very leading lights of theological science," said the chair- man, with a frown. And when the chairman frowned it was not pleasant. The bishop's face, too, was growing tight and •stern.
" Perhaps I should modify it," said the young priest airily. " Perhaps I should have rather said that modern theologians and right reason are dead against such an opinion."
" Quote one modern theologian that is opposed to the com- mon and universal teaching of theologians on the matter!"
" Well, Ballerini, for example, and the Salmanticenses — "
" Pshaw ! Ballerini. Ballerini is to upset everything, I rsuppose?"
" Ballerini has the Missal and common sense on his side."
"The Missal?"
"Yes. Read this — or shall I read it? — ' Quidquid horum deficit, scilicet materia debita, forma cum intentione, et ordo sacerdotalis, non conficitur Sacramentum ; et his existentibus, quibuscunque aliis deficientibus, Veritas adest Sacramenti '."
" Quite so. The whole point turns on the words ' cum in- tentione '. The Church forbids, under pain of mortal sin, to consecrate outside the corporal. Now the priest cannot be presumed to have the intention of committing a peccatum grave just at the moment of consecration; and, therefore, he cannot be supposed to have the intention of consecrating."
" Pardon me if I say, sir," replied the young priest, " that that is the weakest and most fallacious argument I ever heard advanced. That reasoning supposes the totally inadmissible principle that there never is a valid consecration when, in-
664
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advertently, the priest forgets some Rubric that is binding under pain of mortal sin. If, for example, the priest used fermented bread, if the corporal weren't blessed, in which case the chalice and paten would be outside the corporal, as well as the ciborium ; if the chalice itself weren't consecrated, — there would be no sacrifice and no consecration. Besides. if you once commence interpreting intention in this manner, you should hold that if the ciborium were covered on the corporal, there would be no consecration — "
*' That's only a venial sin," said the chairman.
"A priest, when celebrating," said Father Irwin, sweetly^ " is no more supposed to commit a venial than a mortal sin. Besides — "
" I'm afraid our time is running short," said the bishop \ " I'll remember your arguments, which are very ingenious, Father Irwin. But as the chairman says, the consensus is aga-inst you. Now, for the main Conference, de textibus Sacrae Scripturae."
III. The Intention to consecrate Illicit Matter as- sumed BY THE Church.
" Father Irwin is right."—'' No, the bishop is right."—" It's a different case from the one under discussion." — " Granted that Fr. Irwin's reasoning is evident, you cannot follow it in praxi." — " St. Alphonsus is against it, and that settles the case."
This volley of comment was interrupted by Father Prior: " To avoid confusion let one at a time attack Father Columba» who has intrenched himself behind Father Irwin. Let Father Dunstan begin."
Fr. D. — " No priest can treat a host which during conse- cration lies outside the corporal as certainly consecrated, un- less he has the intention to consecrate it, even though it should, at the moment of consecration, lie outside the corporal. But such an intention is a mortal sin. Therefore no conscientious priest can ever treat such a host as certainly consecrated."
C. — "O Shade of Socrates, be near me now! Fr. D., I understand you to affirm that the intention must reach the matter just as the matter will be at the moment of consecra- tion. As, then, a host outside the corporal is illicit matter, it cannot be reached by a licit intention."
THE SMALL HOST ''EXTRA CORPORALE." 55 1
Fr. D. — " That's my position — better worded I must say,, than I left myself."
C. — " Grammercy. Wine with which not even a drop of water has been mingled (by error of a weak-sighted priest,, for instance) is illicit matter?"
D.— " Yes."
C. — " The intention to consecrate that illicit matter is like- wise illicit?"
D.— "Y-yes. No!"
C— "Why not?"
D. — " I see your trap. The rubric says that such wine is- to be considered certainly consecrated. The rubric therefore presupposes that the priest had a valid intention. It is the duty of the priest to have a valid intention. It is monstrous to hold that the Church makes it a duty for the priest to have- an illicit intention. Therefore though the matter is illicit, the intention is licit. The intention would be illicit only when- accompanied by advertence to the fact that the matter is- illicit."
C. — " So an intention to be valid does not need to be ac- companied by the condition : provided that the matter at the moment of consecration will be licit."
D. — " It need not be, and should not be. Such a condition would render invalid the consecration of the wine without the water. Now the Church requires you to have a valid inten- tion in such cases. You are not then allowed to make your intention dependent on a condition that will not be realized."
C. — " So the intention need not include that condition. Further, it should not. What do you say of the man who> affirms that the intention must include that condition, and that the consecration in such a case is uncertain, because the priest cannot be presupposed to have included in his intention a con- dition that would make it illicit?"
D. — " Such a man does not think with the Church, on that point. Rather, the practice of the Church in the case of the unmixed wine, in those cases mentioned by Father Irwin (or rather Ballerini), shows that the priest is required by the Church to have, at least implicitly, just the contrary condition, viz, I intend to consecrate that chalice, even if, inadvertently, I shall fail to put into it the drop of water demanded by the-
:^^^ THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
Church under pain of mortal sin. Without this condition, made at least implicitly, the wine without water could not be reached by the intention at all, and thus could not be consecrated at all."
C. — " So the Church requires me to have an intention to •consecrate validly matter forbidden by her rubrics?"
D.— " Yes."
C. — "And the Church cannot require me to commit sin?"
D.—" God forbid!"
C— " My intention then to consecrate the small host, though :it will be outside the corporal, is not thereby a sin."
D. — " I am forced to say it is not. And that admission of ^course destroys the argument with which I began. The in- tention to consecrate a host outside the corporal cannot be more sinful than the intention to consecrate wine without water admixed. Nor can I plead that the Church requires the intention to cover illicit matter only when the essential matter of the sacrifice is in question. For a ciborium which 'Contains no essential matter would be validly consecrated though the priest should find out that the hosts it contains, while valid, are yet illicit. So, Father Prior, I strike my flag. I know no reason for doubting the validity of this morn- ing's consecration, or that would hinder Father Columba from acting again as he did this morning." — ( " Oh, ho!" — " Fes- tina lente!" — " You're too easy. Father Dunstan.")
IV. Must the Intention be made (or renewed) during
Mass?
" Father Mark is anxious to continue the battle," — thus Father Prior.
Fr. M. — " With Father Lehmkuhl I urge that secondary matter can never be held to be certainly consecrated when the priest has merely had the intention in the sacristy and has not renewed that intention during Mass itself. By his in- tention in the sacristy he wills, not to consecrate, but to add, during Mass itself, secondary matter to the essential matter."
C. — " So, if the sacristan during the Gospel puts on the corporal a ciborium which the priest before Mass had ordered him to prepare, such a ciborium is not certainly consecrated, if the priest, excited by his sermon, does not think of that
THE SMALL HOST ''EXTRA CORPORALE/
667
<:iborium from the moment he gave the order till after the Elevation ?"
M. — " On the contrary, it is most certainly consecrated."
C. — " But the priest has not renewed the intention."
M. — " Yes, he has. He cannot go on with Mass, turn the last fold of the corporal, etc. without adverting, if not re- ilexly at least directly, to the ciborium."
C. — " So, although the priest is not aware of attention in either case, the ciborium upon the corporal will certainly draw his attention sufficiently to be surely consecrated; while if it is just outside, it will never do so?"
M.— " So I hold."
C. — " Surely that is a very precarious position in dealing -with the validity of a sacrament. To be sure of a valid con- secration we must be certain, you say, that the intention was renewed during Mass. If now the ciborium stand outside the <:orporal there are many cases where, though the ciborium be ever so near the corporal, we cannot be certain the in- tention was renewed. How can it be so absolutely certain that a ciborium on the corporal must have drawn the priest's attention, while we can never be sure that the ciborium just outside the corporal has done so? Is it not probable that a ciborium on the corporal may sometimes not draw the priest's attention more than it would were it lying outside the cor- poral? If so, your principle that the secondary matter of the sacrifice cannot be held to be certainly consecrated unless the intention to consecrate it be made, or at least renewed, during Mass itself, — that principle is at least dubious, that means, unallowed in dealing with the Sacraments.
" But the position is not only dubious, it is clearly false. A priest can be reflexly sure he did not notice the ciborium at all until after consecration. In that case the only re- newal of the intention conceivable is that included in the fact that he has been saying Mass in virtue of an intention made before Mass to consecrate that ciborium during Mass. And thus the intention had in the sacristy reaches forward to the consecration of the secondary matter itself, and not merely to the addition during Mass of matter to be consecrated. If the virtual intention made in the sacristy does not guarantee the consecration of secondary matter during Mass, the ciborium
668 TH^ ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
ought to be reconsecrated, at least conditionally, whether it stand on the corporal or off. If it does guarantee the ciborium on the corporal, it guarantees equally the ciborium outside the corporal — unless you make the intention never to consecrate outside the corporal, and that intention you are not allowed to make."
V. May the Priest positively exclude Validity ?
Father Bruno. — "Not allowed? I've made that intention; once for all, and I renew it often. In this fierce controversy it is the only safe passage between Scylla and Charybdis. That intention made, I know that the ciborium outside is certainly not consecrated."
C. — " Even when, just before consecration, you had un- covered the ciborium and drawn it nearer, but still failed to get it on the corporal, or perhaps pushed its base under the corporal ?"
B. — " Even then it would not be consecrated."
C. — " I am glad you are consequent. I know a priest who had your practice and still said he would consider the con- secration in the above case valid. But see. There is a con- sensus theologorum modernorum that such a consecration is valid. I think I may safely defy you to bring me a single recent author to the ' contrary . Now that consensus presup- poses that it is the practice of the Church to treat such a con- secration as valid. Where does the Church authorize you to- depart from this practice? Certainly her general principle is against you. In doubtful cases she never makes the valid- ity depend on the observance of the rubrics; she simply asks, were the elements essential to validity present? She pre- supposes that her rubrics are not essential to validity. How dare you destroy that presupposition? You would not dare- to do it in Baptism, — ' provided e. g. this water is really baptismal water '. A conscientious bishop would not dare to^ ordain under this condition — ' provided those to be ordained are not irregular '. To avoid venial sin you would not say — ' provided the ciborium shall be uncovered at the moment of consecration,' etc. Why, then, do you make an exception' with the ciborium outside the corporal ?"
THE SMALL HOST "EXTRA CORPORALE/
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B. — '* Just because so many theologians hold that the in- tention in the sacristy would be illicit, and the consecration therefore doubtful."
C. — '* But please be consequent. The consecration, they say, would be doubtful. It is not sure the intention was there : it is not sure the intention was not there. Thus you con- tradict the theologians whom you have invoked. With your practice the consecration can never be doubtful. You are sure the intention was not there."
B. — " But surely it is a torture not to be able, in a fre- quently returning case, to make an intention that will be either certainly valid or certainly invalid."
C. — " I agree with you. Therefore I make the intention in this case that I do everywhere else in the sacraments : It shall be valid even though, inadvertently, I shall violate the Rubrics by leaving the ciborium outside the corporal.'*
VI. The Intention should be absolute.
B. — " There you fall from Scylla into Charybdis. The theologians say it is doubtful. You contradict them as I did, by making it sure."
C. — " Will you kindly mention just one modern theologian ^ho sticks to the principle that consecration outside the cor- poral is always doubtful?"
B. — " One! Here's Sabetti and Marc, and Lehmkuhl, and Konings and Slater, and the Casuist, and — "
C. — " One word, please, before I disappear beneath your avalanche. Is there one amongst these mighty names who says that the consecration is doubtful when the priest adverted to the ciborium just before consecration and renewed his in- tention to consecrate, but failed to notice that it stood outside the corporal?"
B. — " N-no. Not all of them treat the case expressly. But all who do, agree that the ciborium is consecrated beyond doubt."
C. — "And yet it stands outside the corporal! So all who admit validity in this case do not stick to the principle that consecration outside the corporal is always doubtful. And a principle that fails even once is no principle at all. Now listen. In this case the priest's intention, made' just before
670 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
consecration, included implicitly the condition : even though the cihorium is lying, inadvertently, outside the ciborium. That condition, therefore, is not sinful, just before conse- cration. Is it, then, sinful three minutes before? Or seven?' Or ten? Or fifteen? Or before Mass altogether? Further, why, in any case, would the absolute intention to consecrate- be sinful when made in the sacristy? Because the ciborium, which is the object of that intention, will as a matter of fact be lying outside the corporal at the moment of consecration. Not so? Well, in the name of goodness, isn't the ciborium, as a matter of fact, outside the corporal when the priest makes the intention during Mass just before the consecration? Sa if you say that the intention just before consecration is sub- jectively lawful, because the priest does not notice that the ciborium is objectively forbidden and is disposed to put it on the corporal if he did notice it, then I can assure you that every conscientious priest who makes in the sacristy an in- tention to consecrate a ciborium which will be objectively un- lawful during consecration is likewise disposed to put it on the corporal if he were to notice it, and that he will not do so in fact only because he will not notice that it is objectively for- bidden. And thus I still maintain that my intention, made in the sacristy and not revoked, was lawful, and that therefore there can be no reasonable doubt about this morning's consecration."
VII. Does St. Alphonsus leave the Consecration doubt- ful IN PRAXI ?
Father Bruno. — " But granting that the validity of the- consecration is certain, speculatively, it still remains true that,, practically, it is uncertain. In dealing with the sacraments, every real reason to doubt validity must be excluded. Now St. Alphonsus holds it more probable that the ciborium outside the corporal is not consecrated. And this express opinion of St. Alphonsus to the contrary is a real reason to doubt, in praxi, the validity of your consecration."
C. — " You do not act on that last statement yourself."
B. — " How so, please?"
C. — " Recall the case discussed above. At some time dur- ing Mass, perhaps even just before consecration, you catch.
THE SMALL HOST "EXTRA CORPORALE." ^ji
sight of the ciborium, and, not noticing that it is outside the- corporal, renew your intention made in the sacristy to conse- crate it. Presupposed that you have not laid down for your- self the absolute rule on no condition to consecrate outside the- corporal, have you any real reason to doubt the validity ?"
B. — " None. Father Marc, whose title-page restricts him to the teachings of St. Alphonsus, says it is surely conse- crated. Ballerini, notably opposed on many points to St. Alphonsus, says the same. Lehmkuhl is agreed. Slater also.. Elbel, contemporary of St. Alphonsus, and referred to ap- provingly by Marc, is another. Noldin and Tanquerey con- sent. I believe there is no theologian of approved standing; who thinks there is real reason to doubt."
C. — " Yes, there is at least one — St. Alphonsus."
B. — " Impossible ! St. Alphonsus doubts the validity only when the intention made in the sacristy was not renewed during Mass."
C. — " That impression you would be warranted in gather- ing from some of our modern theologians. They refer to^ St. Alphonsus when they condemn this last case (the sacristy intention unrenewed), and keep silent about him when they defend the former (the intention renewed during Mass). Yet, in fact, what St. Alphonsus expressly doubts is the valid- ity even when the priest has the intention during Mass. The. ciborium to be consecrated is placed on the corporal by a cleric. You notice it and intend to consecrate. Though you do not again advert to it, the consecration is certain. But suppose it is placed outside the corporal. You notice it and' intend to consecrate. You have not noticed that it is outside,, and do not notice that circumstance till after consecration. The consecration is doubtful. That is clearly the situation- supposed by St. Alphonsus in the famous No. 217. If you have any doubt, go to Homo Apostolicus. There he says^ generally : ' If however the ciborium at the time of consecra- tion has remained outside the altar (i. e. corporal), there is doubt whether consecration has taken place '."
So my contention stands. St. Alphonsus condemns your renewed-before-consecration case. He is consequent. His; principle is not justifiable; but he sticks to it He does not
<>']2
THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
tell me that my sacristy intention would be illicit because its object, fifteen minutes from now, will be illicit, while four- teen and one-half minutes from now, my intention will be licit in spite of the fact that its object, one-half minute later, will be illicit. He does not allow me at the consecration an intention that is mortally sinful and forbid me the same in- tention in the sacristy. St. Alphonsus, of course, implies that he is against my practice. Further, he refers to Pope Benedict XIV, who treats expressly only the unrenewed sacristy intention. But the point is this. If the express opinion of St. Alphonsus does not hinder you and your sup- porters from treating the renewed-during-Mass-intention as valid, how is his, not express but merely implied, opinion about the sacristy intention to be a real reason for always doubting its validity? For myself I can find no standing :ground between Ballerini and Noldin on the one hand and St. Alphonsus on the other. The position of St. Alphonsus leads to consequences that are inadmissible. So I put myself un- der the wings of the Sacred Penitentiary, which while re- plying (5 July, 183 1 ) that a professor of theology may safely follow and teach the opinions laid down by St. Alphonsus in his Moral Theology, nevertheless goes on to say that this per- mission is not to be construed into a reason for censuring those who follow opinions upheld by other reliable {probatis) authors. This approval of St. Alphonsus on the part of the Sacred Penitentiary cannot be taken as guarantee that his teachings are unquestionably correct. The Church cannot guarantee an author's work to be unquestionably correct and •simultaneously forbid me to construe such guarantee into a reason for condemning those who contradict the author in question. And if, notwithstanding this warning, I were to put that construction on her approval of St. Alphonsus, what will I do when I find myself in consequence at war with the ^opinions on the efficacy of grace laid down by St. Thomas? The approval given by the Church to the entire theological teaching of St. Thomas, moral as well as dogmatic, is just as emphatic as that bestowed on the moral doctrines of St. Alphonsus. When I consider, finally, that two of the keen- est moral theologians in modern times, Ballerini and Palmieri, maintained in Rome itself that St. Alphonsus's argument on
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this point is a sophism ; when I reflect that Noldin, also used as text-book in Rome, at least on the Aventine, is likewise point-blank opposed to St. Alphonsus; when I find Marc, Lehmkuhl, and Slater upholding the renewed-during-Mass case which the Saint expressly condemns as doubtful; when I think of hundreds of priests who depend on these great names for guidance; when I see the Church keep silence in the face of all this, — it seems to me impossible to maintain that she agrees with you when you say that the authority of St. Alphonsus renders unsafe in praxi any opinion that he considers doubtful.
Do not fear, however, that I am going to the opposite ex- treme of condemning the Saint's advice as unsafe in praxi. A confessor who reads St. Alphonsus to learn his opinions only, not to weigh his reasons; who follows the Saint's de- cisions unswervingly, is but doing what is permissible.^ And just the thorny question now torturing us has been for me at times a temptation to make personal use of this privilege. I can well conceive circumstances where I would recommend its adoption by others. But if adopted it must be abided by consistently, even if it forces you to deprive an entire congre- gation of its Easter Communion ; as in the case of Fr. Matthew, who in saying Mass on Trinity Sunday for a Texas congre- gation which he visited once a year, put the ciborium on the altar before Mass only to find it outside the corporal after consecration. As, then, that privilege would lead me, in my present state of mind, to condemn cases where validity could be rendered doubtful only by an express and special decision of the Church herself, I feel sure the Saint himself, if placed in this condition, would desert his own authority. I am con- firmed in this feeling when I find him recommending (in a Note to the Reader) his Moral Theology on the ground that, in choosing opinions he had been immensely careful (in gens €ura) to make reason supersede authority. Do we honor the Saint by reversing his practice? Is not imitation the highest form of reverence?
Let me conclude. Only if the intention made in the sacristy to consecrate absolutely were sinful, or if it were necessary to renew the intention during Mass, or if the authority of St.
2 Sacred Penitentiary, 5 July, 183 1.
674 '^HE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
Alphonsus rendered the validity doubtful in practice, only then would there be real reason for doubting this morning's consecration, or for adopting a different method of procedure in future. But I think it is clear, first, that the Church has given no such absolute authority to St. Alphonsus; secondly, that very few theologians follow the Saint unswervingly; thirdly, that the insistence upon renewal begs the question,, since the final condition of renewal or non- renewal is the physical presence, respectively non-presence, of the ciborium upon the corporal; fourthly, that the virtual intention made in the sacristy cannot be more sinful than the actual intention just before consecration, i. e. is valid and licit because the host lies outside the corporal only by inadvertence. As long then as this conviction stands firm beneath the searching shafts of its rival, so long shall stand my resolution to render again un- der similar circumstances the same decision I rendered this morning.
Patrick Cummins, O.S.B. Conception Abbey , Mo.
SERMONS— TASTE AND TOLEEANOE.
IS not the simple truth this — that there may profitably be as many different sorts of sermons as there are different sorts of people? And is not the frank recognition of this very simple truth a legitimate encouragement to different sorts of preachers? Some who are bound to preach are thoroughly aware that they are not what is called good preachers; for the sake of those who are their listeners they wish they were; and for their own sake too, since it is human nature to desire that any work we have to do should not be of an inferior quality. Nevertheless it does not follow that the defect of preaching power they admit in themselves, and regret, even when others would agree with their self-criticism, is in actual reality so serious a drawback as it would superficially appear. A priest may be, as he humbly conceives, a " bad preacher '\ and it is likely enough that there will be critics to remark it: but there is more in a man than anything he says, and that superiority of the man himself to his words is not lost in the pulpit. Indeed, it is often to the man we listen rather than
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to any special things he may enunciate in speech. His con- gregation knows him for a good man, and it matters more to them than his phrases or epithets. The phrases may lack much; they may be somewhat flat, somewhat outworn; they may be very inadequate to the nobility of his theme, poorly inexpressive of sublime ideas, miserably weak for the weight of the message intended : his use of epithets may be even tedious; he chooses them awkwardly, and they may be, and often are, calculated rather to dull the force of what he means than to sharpen and illustrate it. But none of this matters so much as he, meekly aware of it all, though helpless to better it, imagines : because the force is in himself that he, and others too, miss in his words.
He may dutifully spend all the hours available in prepara- tion, and the result almost disheartens him : but the real pre- paration has been in his life, and the result does not depend on his present, conscious eff"ort.
Of course a congregation likes ** good sermons " : enjoys them, and perhaps may remember them better than " bad sermons " ; it may grumble at the " bad " sermons : neverthe- less it profits by them, by reason of the man himself. For the only really bad sermons would be such as were insincere. A platitude in the pulpit is not a stale saying, but a saying which is only words and has no conviction at the back of it.
Say a sermon was " stupid ". It does not follow it is bad. It may be thoroughly earnest, but the thoughts are, perhaps, dull and pedestrian. A congregation is, as our old grammars would say, a noun of multitude, and in a multitude there are many people : some are neither dull, nor stupid, their thoughts are not precisely pedestrian : well, they are bored. They are disposed to think the sermon beneath them. Let them practise patience and humility. But in the congregation are some dull folk too, honest creatures, and the honest stupid sermon suits them. It is their turn to be satisfied. The finer discourses, though just as honest and sincere, are over their heads, and they would be bored too if they dared.
A sermon which is insincere expresses nothing, however big the words : it is the only bad sort, and is worst of all for the preacher.
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The fact, not a recondite one, of there being so many dif- ferent kinds of people in even an average congregation of no uncommon size, makes part of the preacher's difficulty. He would wish to be of use to all, but he cannot even know what all need, even if, knowing, he were able to give each what was specially useful to each. But some difficulties are so great that they answer themselves : God asks none of us to do impossibilities, and He asks no one to do two things at once. It is we ourselves, who try, if we be over-solicitous, and unconsciously fussed by expecting too much of ourselves. It is very right we should do our best, and not let ourselves off with less: but our best is not always equally good, and if somebody else's worst is better than our best it is not his fault, and need not be our misfortune. It is a lucky stone that kills two birds at one throw; we need not worry ourselves if in one sermon we cannot take direct aim at two or three hundred birds at once. After all, the plain truth, if we stick to it, hits everybody, and if it hits many who have been hit before, it is all right: the truest truths are not the newest.
Though nine-tenths of a congregation should go away and think we had made no great figure, they do not know all about it, God does, and He does not specially care for ma- jorities. Even if only one person has got any good of us^ and we cannot know of even that one, God is not necessarily dissatisfied. We do not read of flocks of converts after the Sermon on the Mount, and it was the Sermon on the Mount, and God preached it. After the Crucifixion itself, after the Resurrection, the number of those He had converted, in three and thirty years, appears to have been about a hundred and twenty. What do we expect?
To return to the variousness of hearers : surely it leaves us ground for hoping that all sorts of sermons may appeal to some.
It may well be that a greater number will prefer the style that is called popular. It may well be admitted, too, that there is more than mere preference : that the " popular " ser- snon not only pleases, but profits them best. They cannot attend without interest, and only this sort awakes their inter- est. Their emotions want stirring: without emotion they are dead, and nothing arouses their emotion but the downright
SERMONS— TASTE AND TOLERANCE. 677
*' popular" sermon. It would be affectation to ignore that emotion is a large part of us, and it is utterly unfair to pre- tend that there is anything inferior in appeal to emotion in preaching. No other road is open to the interior of immense numbers of people : why should we leave the devil the key of the gate? If we occupy the path there is the less room for the three concupiscences to lodge in it.
Let us be plain-spoken : there are huge numbers who can hardly be awaked from spiritual somnolence and lethargy ex- cept by a method of preaching that is, not to put too fine a point upon it, ranting. Then let those who can rant. It is not the highest style of preaching? Never mind, if it catches lower-class souls. A silken net never caught a whale — his blubber weighs too much. To tell the truth it is not a net that does catch him, but harpoons, and there is blood about while the harpooning is going forward.
St. Paul, we may be reminded, never ranted. For my part I do not know, for I never heard. But of one thing we may feel quite sure, he would have used any sort of sermon that his unfailing spiritual instinct showed him was called for by the quality of his audience. If there be listeners who in spiritual matters are semi-deaf, and you can shout, then shout. If others can hear only partly with their ears, and have to listen with their eyes as well; then jump about. Only shout the truth : no yelling will make two and two more than four : and do not lash yourself into an excitement that you do not feel; if a genuine fervor jumps you, never mind how high; but, for shame's sake, do not try and skip yourself above yourself or your sincere emotion. Even that might bring you popularity, but there is One among your audience who will not away with it. Anything else He will suffer; slips of grammar, faults of " taste ", indifferent arguments, two-legged syllogisms, lapses of memory, historical blunders, controversial insecurity, argumenta ad homines etiam iinbecilles, but not that : nor stage violence ; the stage-hero, denouncing the stage- villain does not, for all his rage, think a penny the worse of him : they are the best of friends and will sup together pres- ently. Though he foam with rage at the mouth, no one sup- poses him to be in the* least angry ; no one wants him to be. His voice may crack with the fury of his tirade against the
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monster opposite, but it would not scandalize us to hear of his borrowing ten shillings from the monster before they part for the night. On the stage neither hero nor villain speaks his own feelings, for himself, but the feelings of his part : the villain may be the hero in to-morrow's play : and no one will think he has morally degenerated : the villain takes the char- acter of persecuted merit and he is not pretending to be a jot better than he was yesterday. He is deceiving nobody, and trying to deceive nobody. Stage acting is not pretence. But I should be pretending were I in the pulpit to assume a fire that had not set me alight, in hopes that it might enkindle me. The actor is guilty of no insincerity : he is only trying to ex- press another man's sentiment with all the force he can sum- mon : I should be guilty of the worst sort of insincerity trying to deceive myself first that others might be deceived the more defencelessly. Non sic ad astra.
This is not saying that a preacher is not to be warmed by his theme : the more it heats him the more likelihood that others will be set on fire. By all means let his theme warm him: only let it be that: let the theme do it, not himself. It can only be from sincere enthusiasm that a man is genuinely carried away. But there may be a pulpit excitement which is not the irresistible effect of genuine enthusiasm. It may be " effective ", but it effects nothing for God. Not by making folk stare can we force the Spirit of God to come down into them. I dare say there were many on Carmel who thought it a fine thing when Baal's priests cried out and cut themselves with knives after their manner, but it brought no fire down from heaven.
It is supercilious and pharisaic to decry preaching because it is emotional. Is it pretended that our emotions were all given us by Satan? He certainly aims at getting hold of them : why should not we pre-occupy them for God ? Only let the emotion be honest, and genuine; nothing real is use- less. It is not to the point to urge that emotion is transient. Life itself is transient. Any emotion we feel may be our last; it must be better that it should be an emotion on God's side. The chances are, as we say in common speech, it will not be our last. Admit it dies down : still it has grooved a mark on our soul, and a good one. Say it is a fire gone out : it may
SERMONS— TASTE AND TOLERANCE. f^jg
well leave a smouldering spark capable of re-kindling : when a fire is gone out, all is not instantly cold. Put it at its worst . the flame is extinguished, the heat is chilled: still there was fire and good fire. It is better to have been hot on God's side for a time than to have been cold throughout. A thing which is not the very best must be far better than the worst ■of all : and the worst thing of all is complacent, unmoved spiritual lethargy : it is the beginning of a habit and tends to be a fixed one : once fixed, not sermons but miracles are needed to break up that ever-thickening ice.
If I labor this it is lest any reader should think me against preaching of the popular, vehement kind : there are many who need it: let us confess it again, many who need downright " ranting ", in which there may be more sentiment than thought, for many have much less capacity for thinking than they have for feeling : and no preaching can confer a capacity that is wanting: a preacher, indeed, may be capable of edu- cating dormant capacity, but hardly in one sermon, and he may have only the opportunity of one: he does what he can with the material on which he has to work that once.
An audience may be thoroughly unintellectual and not in the least vulgar. But it may even be vulgar. Yet vulgar men and women have souls, and they are not a bit more easy to save on that account. They also need preaching, and if any will sink himself to them it is a great work. It may be to the preacher a great mortification too : one from which some- thing within him shrinks as something in a saint shrank when he put his lips to a sore. Not all of us could do what St. Catherine did at Siena, what St. Ignatius did : we are not saints. But if a man will do even that for Christ, it 7nust bear fruit: it was only when Catherine drank her awful cup that the nearly lost soul of Andrea was won. And our Lord made the ghastly drink sweet.
If a preacher should bend his head to catch souls even through the vulgarity of their ears, let us be content to con- fess that we could not do it ourselves, and stand aside for him. God knows : and He does not ask us to do what we cannot do. When we know He asks us to do something, then we know that we can do it, though we have thought it a moral impossi- bility, or a physical : it is a physical impossibility for a man
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with a withered hand to stretch it out; but He bade the man> stretch it out and he did, else would he have carried it with- ered to the grave.
What we cannot do ourselves let us not refuse leave to others to do, in preaching also. There is room for all sorts.
But just as in a congregation there may be some whom, humanly speaking, a preacher can reach only by rhetoric, fine rhetoric; or by a rhetoric less fine, if more fiery; or by vehemence; or even by a rough wit, and banter (as one ma)- often hear in a Catholic country) ; so there are others to whom even fine rhetoric in a pulpit is almost repugnant; to whom a rhetoric that fails of being fine, and is only fierce, is utterly repugnant; to whom any extreme vehemence is repellent and physically disagreeable, and well-nigh intolerable; whom the heat of some preachers does not warm but chill, with a quite involuntary sense of shrinking, almost of aversion, almost of protest. They are as unafifected in disliking violent action, noisy declamation, passionate appeal to emotion, as those wha like it are sincere in admiration. It does not carry them off their legs, but stiflFens their backs. It does not engage their sympathy, but arouses a perfectly genuine remonstrance, and goes far to awaken an antipathy that they can no more help than they can help preferring argument to assertion, and proof to argument. It is no more conceited in them to have one sort of taste than it is beggarly and mean in others to have a dif- ferent taste, or no taste at all. In the one case the popular preacher appeals to a natural quality of mind ; in the other the natural quality of mind is all against such an appeal as his. They are not to condemn him; but neither are they bound in sincerity to condemn themselves. If they should belittle him, and deny him sincerity, they misbehave: but it is not mis- behavior in them not to like what the tone of their mind dis- likes. If they are wishing it was a different sort of preacher's turn to hold the pulpit, they are only yielding to the same spontaneous feeling as the man in the next pew who is re- joicing that he came to-night instead of to-morrow — to- morrow when the vault will resound with no loud echoes^ and a very quiet voice will lay down, in measured cadence, positions from which there is no logical escape : when un- faith will be beaten with a cold rod of iron, and unbelief be
SERMONS— TASTE AND TOLERANCE. ggF
made to show itself as not only cruel and unhappy but silly too: when humanistic excuses for lax morals will be forced to appear no better than vapid sentimentality, scrambling on one knock-kneed leg. The man who loves the popular preacher, and is only capable of him, is hardly to be accused of resisting the Holy Ghost because he merely suffers from distraction while those calm, though really irresistible, things, are being said. It is not malice, but incapacity, that makes him think the theologian dull. If he finds the preacher's huge nose queer, he does not mean to be flippant : he is only what he is, and he cannot help it. But neither is the other man resisting the Holy Ghost because he cannot, for the life of him, understand why rivers of sweat should accompany allusion to the river of life and grace. He does not want to be bored : he is not assuring himself that it is superior to remain quite cool while the preacher is so frightfully hot. Never- theless his mind wanders : the preacher sets it off : the preacher starts down an alley and the listener goes down to the end of it, while the preacher has dashed eagerly off into another. The preacher gives a smack at one objection to faith, but by no means knocks it down ; another has leapt into his mind and he must punch at it; the listener lingers to consider how the first ought to have been flattened ; before he had made up his mind, he sees the preacher sparring with indomitable pluck at a third objection, with glorious pluck, but with lamentable want of science. Such agility makes the hearer blink, but it is quite as fatiguing to try and follow as it is dazzling. " Come along," cries the preacher, with amazing spirit. "Any amount of you. The more the merrier. I've a black eye in^ my fist for each of you." The courage, the activity, the readiness to duck, and hit, and lunge out in another direction, are all marvellous : but a black eye blinds no one permanently : science will give it against the hitter for all his popularity: and this unfortunate spectator is on the side of science, he- cares more for victory than for a fine show.
Well, well ! What metaphors have we been slipping into !' Misfortune brings us strange bedfellows, says the proverb, and metaphor leads us into odd company. I apologize, and resume.
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Talking of metaphor; there may be hundreds of profiting listeners to a rough-and-ready preacher who have no objection in life to a mixed metaphor. But it tries the other sort of listener. He has nothing to urge against the metaphor of shipwreck: like the young lady in Pride and Prejudice who said, " The idea of the olive-branch perhaps is not wholly new ", he confesses to himself that the shipwreck simile is rather venerable than original ; but it is none the less true for being time-worn. He listens with respect; but when the preacher, hastily remembering what is the symbol of Hope, •adjures his hearers to cling to the sheet anchor of Hope, when all is storm and darkness, and all seem sinking, he cannot help considering the buoyancy of anchors. He recognizes that the tangled mazes of a forest brake, with thorny undergrowth, and light obscured overhead, not inaptly illustrate muddled doubt; and faith is doubt's contrary and cure; but is " faith's golden key" suggested? Are keys, even of gold, of much •service to lost and benighted wayfarers?
There are, we have said, many in a given audience who can 1)6 reached by the way of feeling, and very little by appeal to thought: the avenue to their spiritual sense is the heart, and not the head. Why should we not own it, and act upon it?
But it is mainly by way of the head others are taken. Must we not acknowledge that also? No one wants to compare them or weigh their values. But facts are facts : and one of these facts is as real and legitimate as the other. Some ser- mons are little theological treatises, and some hearers find them heavy of digestion : not every one can assimilate the solid- est food. But to some they are the most welcome kind of sermon, and not to priests only. They would as lief have their bread without sweetening or plums in it.
I heard a couple of country folk discuss a sermon once.
" 'Twere fine!" declared one. "As full of flav'rin' and fruit as a Simnel cake."
" Eh, but I've no stomach for cake," confessed the other. " I like them bready." Much more accomplished judges like them bready too.
It is objected to some preachers that they can only preach essays, and yet some people like essays, and can remember what is in them better than a more " appealing " sermon. I
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cannot help suspecting that some of the finest sermons we have are liable to this reproach: St. Gregory's, for example; though Cardinal Newman's are more undeniable instances. They are better printed than spoken, it may be urged. We, who only read them, and could not have heard them, cannot disprove the assertion. But it is certain that they were heard eagerly, that they drew willing throngs, and were powerfully effective: they could not have been condemned as ineffective though they had not survived their original utterance and come to be printed. Nor it is fair to urge that they were essays by essayists of extraordinary power, and therefore cannot be in- stanced to make a rule, as preachers of extraordinary power can never be of ordinary occurrence. Preachers of exceptional force in the other class, the class most unlike essay preachers, are of exceptional occurrence too. We do not daily fall in with the best of any sort.
What is pleaded here is that there should be no attempt to form a rule at all. That we should recognize the enormous variety of hearers, the huge divergence of taste: and frankly confess that every kind of preaching is legitimate because every kind will find some to whom it appeals — even essay preachers.
The answer is not that a preacher must try so to modify himself as to appeal to all : he never can. He can only be himself, and the effort to be several people will not give him three heads : it was only Cerberus who, as Mrs. Malaprop said, was " three gentlemen at once ".
Every preacher may not exactly suit every congregation: but it does not follow that it is the preacher's fault, any more than it is the fault of the congregation : it is nobody's fault. But I suspect that every genuine preacher, and we have con- cern with no other, suits some part of his congregation — even the essay preacher. If the part of the congregation that does not like essays is the larger part, it is certainly their misfor- tune; but, majorities do so well for themselves in most ways, that, if the minority has the best of it in this instance, no frightful injustice is done. Even majorities may learn pa- tience and be none the worse for it. If they also learned humility it would be a valuable illustration of the truth that ".the age of miracles is not past.
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In England the finest preacher we have reads his sermons from a manuscript, and I dare say many would say they were homilies or essays. It is possible that many preachers are preferred to him by many hearers. No one wants to compel these many to hear him instead of those they prefer. But those who prefer to hear him never forget what they have heard: may they also not have their taste? It is certainly a strong measure to read a sermon from writing : it is not sug- gested that every preacher, or many preachers, should do it But it might be suggested that if some preachers were to com- mit their sermons to writing they would never be preached — and that would be a pity, for they are excellent in their sort: only there are other sorts.
A certain Scotch minister, departing from this life, be- queathed his sermons, the sermons of forty years, to his parisli. After the funeral it was debated in full sederunt what should be done with them. Some Elders proposed printing, othero concurred, but advised selection. Finally one Elder arose and pawkily suggested that the Kirk Session should " reeverently burn them ". I know one preacher, at all events, who if he should be forced to write his sermons (and read them after- ward) would undoubtedly burn them — but I am not sure about " reeverently ".
It is urged against the essay preachers that they are think- ing of how the sermons would print. The force of the in- sinuation, and a real force too where the insinuation is justi- fied, is that they are thinking not of their congregation but of the public. " Every woman writer," said Heine, " writes with one eye on herself, and one eye on some man, except Countess Hahn-Hahn, who has only one eye." If an essay preacher composes his sermons with one eye on the public and one eye on himself, he degrades the office of preaching: but he may, as well as the " popular " preacher, have both eyes on God. And truth, logic, and dogma will always *' print ".
Francis Bickerstaffe-Drew.
Salisbury Plains, England.
I
CARDINAL NEWMAN AS HYMN-WRITER, 685
OAEDIU AL NEWMAN AS EYMN-WKITER AND HIMN-COMPOSEK.
IT was the present writer's good fortune to spend a very pleasant afternoon with Cardinal Newman in 1880, and to have had the privilege of playing over some sacred music for the great Oratorian. In the course of a delightful con- versation I became acquainted with the hitherto unsuspected gift of the author of The Dream of Gerontius as a highly skilled musician. And yet, with the exception of an interest- ing article by the Rev. Edward Bellasis in The Month (Sep- tember, 1891 ), very little attention has been paid to the powers of Newman both as a hymn-writer and a hymn-composer. It is universally admitted that the author of " Lead Kindly Light '• deserves a niche among the brilliant hymn-writers of the nineteenth century. But it is not so generally known that Newman also composed several hymn tunes and thereby en- riched the hymnals of all Christian denominations. On this account it may be well to exhibit in a short sketch the genius of the great English Cardinal in both directions. It will be more convenient to treat of these phases of his genius separ- ately. And first as to his powers as a hymn- writer.
As early as 1829 Newman wrote verses, as he tells us in his Apologia : " Never man had kinder or more indulgent friends than I have had : but I expressed my own feeling as to the mode in which I gained them in this very year 1829, in the course of a copy of verses. Speaking of my blessings, I said. ' Blessings of friends, which to my door, unasked, unhoped» have come'". Between the years 1832-4 Newman contri- buted many beautiful hymns to the British Magasijte, under the title of Lyra Apostolica, and these, together with other lyrical productions by Keble and other writers, were published under the same title in 1836. A clue to Newman's poetical pieces is furnished by the Greek letter ^. Among these charm- ing lyrics are " Lead Kindly Light " and " Two Brothers Freely Cast Their Lot ". The former hymn, which has had a world-wide circulation, was written 16 June, 1833, while Newman was becalmed in an orange boat in the Straits of Bonifacio, and was published in the British Magazine for March, 1834. It was at the very time that the future Prince of the Church was revolving those thoughts that, as he him- self writes in his Apologia, subsequently " led him on his
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journey to where his mind felt its ultimate rest ". Origin- ally it was prefixed by a motto : " Faith — Heavenly Lead- ings " ; on its publication in Lyra Apostolica the motto was changed to : " Unto the godly there ariseth up light in the darkness"; and finally, in the Occasional Verses (1868) an- other change was made to : " The Pillar of the Cloud ". New- man's lyric consists of three verses, but, in 1876, a Protestant Bishop, Dr. Bickersteth had the hardihood to add a fourth stanza, which however did not obtain much favor. Other persons have presumed to tinker the verses, but the correct version will be found in most modern Catholic and Anglican hymnals.
" Two Brothers Freely Cast Their Lot " is No. 28 of Lyra. Apostolica commencing:
Two brothers freely cast their lot
With David's Royal Son; The cost of conquest counting not,
They deem the battle won.
In Tract for the Times No. y^, " On the Roman Breviary '\ there are translations of fourteen Latin hymns, the best known of which is " Come Holy Ghost, Who Ever One" (St. Am- brose's "Nunc Sancte nobis Spiritus"), the first verse of which is :
Come Holy Ghost, who ever One And with the Father and the Son, Come, Holy Ghost, our souls possess With Thy full flood of holiness.
In the year 1838 Newman published Hymni Ecclesiae and these were reissued in 1865, being translations from the Breviary. As is generally known, the sometime Fellow of Oriel, and select University Preacher at Oxford, was received into the Catholic Church 8 October, 1845, and was subse- quently appointed first Rector of the Catholic University, Dublin. Meantime, " The Angel Lights of Christmas Morn " was written in 1 849, and was published in the Rambler, in the year 1850, as was also " In the Far North Our Lot is Cast ", the title of which was changed in 1857, to " On Northern Coasts Our Lot is Cast ". The former hymn is headed " Candlemas " and commences thus:
CARDINAL NEWMAN AS HYMN-WRITER. 687
The Angel lights of Christmas morn,
Which shot across the sky, Away they pass at Candlemas,
They sparkle and they die.
The latter hymn was written for the feast of the Oratorians^ and is designated " St. Philip Neri, in His Mission ", com- mencing :
In the far North our lot is cast.
Where faithful hearts are few : Still are we Philip's children dear,
And Peter's soldiers true.
A third lyrical contribution to the Rambler of 1850 is a. hymn to the Blessed Virgin Mary, " There Sat a Lady All on the Ground ".
In 1853 was published Verses on Religious Subjects, which contained a number of original hymns, as well as ten trans- lations from the Breviary hymns. " Green are the Leaves and Sweet the Flowers " achieved a great popularity for the devotions of the month of May, and is included in the recent Westminster Hymnal (No. 118). Equally popular is "My Oldest Friend, Mine from the Hour " headed " Guardian Angels ", also to be found in the Arundel Hymns (No. 242),. and in the Westminster Hymnal (No. 165). "The Holy Monks concealed from Men " (headed " St. Philip in Him- self ") was written in 1850, and published in 1853. It is in- cluded in Arundel Hymns (No. 228), edited by the Duke of Norfolk and Mr. C. T. Gatty, in 1902. "All is Divine which the Highest has made" was also written in 1850, and was followed by "The One True Faith the Ancient Creed", headed, " St. Philip Neri ", which, in its revised form, as " This is the Saint of Gentleness and Kindness " (as written for the Birmingham Oratory Hymn Book, in 1857), is in- cluded in the Arundel Hymns (No. 226). The metre is based on that of the Latin hymn " Iste Confessor ", as will be seen from the first verse :
This is the saint of gentleness and kindness, Cheerful in penance and in precept winning :
Patiently healing of their pride and blindness, Souls that are sinning.
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It was quite in the fitness of things that the Binningham Oratory Hymn Book of 1857 and 1862 should contain a num- ber of Newman's hymns. The most popular of these were: " Help, Lord, the Souls which Thou hast made ", " I ask not for Fortune ", and " Thou Champion High ". The first of these, " Help, Lord, the Souls ", was headed " The Faithful Departed '*, and it is to be met with in almost all Catholic hymn books, including Arundel Hynuis and the Westminster Hymnal. " I ask not for Fortune, for Silken Attire " was written for the feast of St. Philip Neri, and was for years a favorite at Birmingham. " Thou Champion High " was written for the feast of St. Michael, and is included in Arundel Hymns (No. 209). Its rhythm is peculiar, as will be seen from the opening verse :
Thou champion high Of Heaven's imperial bride,
For ever waiting on his eye. Before her onward path, and at her side, In war her guard secure, by night her ready guide.
As for the Dream of Gerontius, numerous essays have been -devoted to its exposition, and therefore it concerns us only to note that it has supplied two popular hymns, namely, " Firmly I Believe and Truly ", and " Praise to the Holiest in the Height ". Both of these hymns have found their way into most hymn-books, including the Westminster Hymnal.
It may however be added that the Dream of Gerontius first appeared in the pages of The Month for May and June, 1865, and was published in separate form in 1866, the separate edition being now extremely scarce.
Other popular hymns of Newman's are: "Light of the Anxious Heart" (Lux alme, Jesus, mentium), "Oh! Say Thou Art not Left of God ", " Unveil, O Lord, and on Us Shine ", and ** When I Sink Down to Gloom or Fear ".
And now as to Newman as a hymn-composer. It will prob- ably come as a surprise to those who associate the name of the illustrious Cardinal with magnificent prose writings and deep theological views, to learn that his first attempt as an author was the writing of a comic opera ! This astonishing fact is authenticated duly in a letter of the year 181 5, at which date
CARDINAL NEWMAN AS HYMN-WRITER. 689
the future Cardinal was in his sixteenth year. Even at that early period he was an accomplished violinist, and — what was very unusual in those days — took to the study of chamber music. He graduated at Trinity College, Oxford, in 1820, and in the February of the same year he writes : " Our Music Club has been offered and has accepted the Music Room for our weekly private concert." Incidentally I may observe that the Oxford Music Room is the oldest in Europe, and a mono- graph dealing with its attractive history from 1748- 1840, from the pen of the Rev. Dn J. H. Mee, was issued in 191 1. From Neivman's Correspondence (edited by Mrs. Mozley) we learn how untiring he was in regard to the success of the ** private concert" from 1820 to 1823, especially reveling in the works of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven. His violin masters were Joseph Reinagle and his son A. R. Reinagle, the latter of whom is known as the composer of the hymn tune " St. Peter's ". He frequently played trios with the un- fortunate Blanco White, and Reinagle.
In 1833-4, as has been seen, Newman wrote a number of hymns, and to some of these he composed original tunes, but the others he set to existing airs, notably, " The Angel Lights of Christmas Morn ", for the feast of Candlemas, which he adapted to a tune by Reinagle.
In 1849 Newman composed the "Pilgrim Queen" to his own words: and in 1850 his musical gifts were seen in two charming hymns to the Blessed Virgin : " Month of Mary " and " Queen of Seasons " both entitled " Rosa Mystica ". To Father Faber's beautiful hymn " Eternity " — also known as " Eternal Years " — he adapted an air from Beethoven's 6th Trio for flute, voice, and violincello. In fact, so ravished was Newman with Beethoven's lovely melody that he ex- pressed the wish that he would like to have it sung to him when he came to die. The words of the first verse may be •quoted :
How shalt thou bear the Cross, that now
So dread a weight appears? Keep quietly to God, and think Upon the Eternal Years.
Other hymns composed by Newman are ".Watchman ", ^'The Two Worlds", "Regulars and St. Philip", and
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" Night ". He adapted " Death " to a theme from one of Beethoven's quartets. However, one of his most popular melodies is the hearty, vigorous tune he composed to " I was Wandering and Weary ", which was published in Oratory Hymns in 1854 under the title of "The True Shepherd" — set to Father Faber's words.
Many incorrect versions are current as to Newman's reply to the polemical challenge of Canon McNeill, a noted Liver- pool bigot. It is not true, as frequently stated, that Newman offered to play in a fiddle competition against McNeill for £500. The real fact is that Newman in his dignified reply suggested that after the Liverpool divine had unburthened himself of his harangue, he (Newman) would play the violin, and " left it to the public to judge which was the better man ".
Newman's musical tastes were inherited from his father who occasionally attended Warwick Street Chapel (the Bavarian Embassy Chapel), London, opened 12 March, 1790. In his Apologia he tells of a visit to this chapel with his father,. " who, I believe, wanted to hear some piece of music ". As before stated, he reveled in the old classical masters, but his delight was in Beethoven, " the master of them all ". He was a familiar figure at the periodical Birmingham Festival, but was not in love with the Wagner school. Although admiring Plain Chant he preferred figured music, and was much at- tracted by the luscious strains of Gounod's Masses and Motets, but more particularly by Cherubini's Masses, especially the 1st Requiem in C minor. He could find no real beauty in the " modern " masters, such as Schubert, Schumann, Wagner, or Brahms, or even Mendelssohn. Beethoven's Mass in C was one of his favorites, much to the dismay of the younger Oratorians.
To the last Cardinal Newman cultivated his love for music, and when no longer able to play the violin he delighted to have someone come to his room and discourse sweet sounds on a harmonium. I cannot more fittingly end this paper than by quoting the following sentence from Newman's Idea of a University : " Music is the expression of ideas greater and more profound than any in the visible world, ideas which centre, indeed, in Him whom Catholicism manifests, who is the seat of all beauty, order, and perfection whatever ".
W. H. Grattan Flood.
Enniscorthy, Ireland.
THE CURE OF INTEMPERANCE. 6gi
THE CURE or INTEMPERANCE. II. The Alcoholic Insanities.
THE mental deteriorations, which are unmistakably such, brought about by alcoholism, are classified thus: I. ordi- nary drunkenness; 2. acute alcoholic insanity or delirium tre- mens; 3. chronic alcoholic insanity.
The subdivisions of chronic alcoholic insanity are: I. melan- cholia; 2. mania; 3. persecutory delirium; 4. amnesic forms; 5. alcoholic mental confusion; 6. pseudoparanoiac forms; 7. alcoholic pseudoparalysis; 8. alcoholic progressive paralysis; 9. alcoholic epileptic insanity.
Seneca said, " Ebrietas est voluntaria insania ". But while technically ordinary drunkenness is not classed as insanity, chronic alcoholism leads to true dementia. The mental changes in alcoholism are usually gradual. The intellect is blunted; the judgment becomes imprudent; the moral con- science is dulled, before real insanity is apparent. A chronic drunkard has a foolish laugh, even when he is sober; he is addicted to thin childish humor and faint puns. A neuro- pathic diathesis tends toward alcoholism, and conversely alco- holism begets a neuropathic disposition. He is therefore irri- table. Unreasonable irritability, storms of rage without suf- ficient provocation, are characteristics of the condition. Wife- beating, cruelty to children, to inferior animals, attacks upon associates, are of frequent occurrence.
A brutal selfishness is a chief symptom of advanced chronic alcoholism. When the chronic alcoholic spends money on anything but his own decaying carcass he is gratifying vanity, avoiding a scolding, or he is already demented. A chronic alcoholic almost as a rule will not pay his bills, even when he has a plenty of money, through a sense of justice or honesty. He is like a confirmed neurasthenic in this respect: that a neurasthenic pays all bills promptly is a good prognostic sign. This concentration on self makes the alcoholic stubborn, im- polite, shameless, regardless of his appearance in public, in- solent, a carping critic of political and ecclesiastical authority. There are exceptions, but this is the rule.
One of the frequent mental derangements incurred by the married alcoholic is a vicious jealousy of a wife or husband,
692
THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
which gives rise to groundless suspicion of marital infidelity. When the condition becomes fixed it commonly remains per- manent, and it may lead to homicide. The cause of this pecu- liar mental obliquity is that alcohol irritates and excites the genital centres, but decreases the power of sexual satisfaction ; there is a constant irritation of the genital tract, which the weakened mind elaborates into delusions. A drunkard will swear in court positively that he has caught his wife in adul- tery, mentioning all the circumstances, and the whole story is the outcome of a delusion. It should be a rule of legal evi- dence that a drunkard's testimony in trials of this nature is not to be admitted. The groundless suspicion of marital infi- delity is a symptom also of chronic cocaine intoxication.
Acute alcoholic insanity is called delirium tremens. There is also an abortive form of this psychosis, which is less severe than the typical delirium. Delirium tremens, the trembling delirium, is often incorrectly called mania a potu. Delirium tremens is not a mania, but an acute hallucinatory confusion, in which consciousness is more impaired than in a typical mania. Mania a potu is a genuine mania, and it will be de- scribed with the chronic alcoholic insanities.
Delirium tremens is the commonest of the alcoholic insani- ties, and not many persistent drunkards escape it. It may come after a few debauches, when the quantity of alcohol in- gested is large, and the time for its excretion is insufficient. It requires about two days to get even a moderate dose of alcohol out of the body, and accumulation of the poison over- powers the nervous system. This system yields more rapidly to the intoxications than the other less finely-organized tissues of the body. It also responds to stimulation more promptly than the other somatic organs. When alcohol is suddenly withdrawn from the chronic drunkard, there is a neurotic lowering of blood-tension and collapse, as if a large dose of a poison had been administered.
Before the onset of delirium tremens the patient has usually morning nausea, and he is unable to take nourishment; he sus- tains himself by alcoholic stimulation, and this ends in col- lapse. There is a period of unquiet sleep, restlessness with precordial anxiety, fright at sudden noises and lights. There is a roaring in the head, fiery stars appear, the patient grows
THE CURE OF INTEMPERANCE,
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more and more anxious and irritable, until finally, within from three or four to about twenty-four hours, the delirium sets in, with muscular tremor.
The hallucinations take the forms of animals usually, and the phantasms are always in motion. Snakes, rats, beetles, crawl over the bed or upon his body. Dogs jump at him; bats flap about his head; gargoyle-like tigers, elephants, lions, circle around him. In some cases the hallucinations take the shapes of men, devils, or witches; or bestial orgies are enacted before the diseased imagination. Auditory hallucinations are frequent, but not so common as the visual; hallucinations of smell and taste are met with, but they are less frequent. Cries for help, clangor of bells, shrilling of steam whistles, threat- ening voices, fill the air about tliose that have auditory hallu- cinations. Erotic erethism and pain referred to the geni- talia may be mixed with the phantasms. Some patients feel ants or worms crawling under their skin. Regular patterns on the room furniture turn into lines or piles of coins. Actual sights or sounds are distorted into hallucinations.
The disturbance of consciousness is sufficient usually to prevent the patient from recognizing his surroundings. He mistakes hospital attendants for friends or enemies; he takes journeys; repeats old quarrels. Sometimes he is joyous for a few moments, then suddenly in terror for his life; he alter- nates between foolish laughter and the agony of death. Most delirium tremens patients despite all these mental disturbances can give direct and intelligent answers to questions, describe their present sensations, and the like; but the narration is in- terrupted by sudden passing accesses of the hallucination; and although the answers are congruous and true, the sufferer ap- parently is answering absentmindedly ; he does not clearly understand what he is saying.
In delirium tremens the hallucinations at times pass over into delusions which are more or less fixed. This happens especially after repeated attacks of the delirium. Usually there is intelligence enough left to recognize for a short time that an hallucination is such, but this degree of control may be lost. The delusions are morally painful : the drunkard sup- poses that his friends are treacherous, his wife unfaithful, his children are dead (he sees them dead), he is to be hung for
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THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW,
his own crimes, and so on. The intense selfishness of alcohol- ism in general is carried over into its insane moods. Per- sistent delusions make the prognosis bad for recovery of mental health : it supposes serious nervous lesions. Delusions that begin in the final stage of an attack of delirium tremens may disappear after some weeks.
The patient is always restless and anxious; he cannot keep still for more than a few seconds. He wanders about, picking up imaginary objects, driving away insects, answering fancied calls to him, seeking protection from those near him. Such patients rarely commit suicide, but that is a possible outcome. Murder in delirium tremens is rare, but always possible, and such a patient must be regarded as extremely dangerous if he has hallucinations of impending death or injury.
There is insomnia in the early stages of the attack, and after exhaustion a stuporous condition, and finally true sleep. The tremor is a fine muscular trembling, most marked in the mus- cles of the face and hands, but present also in all the voluntary muscles. The tremor stops for a moment under mental ex- citement. It obliges the patient to do any action precipi- tately, if he will do it at all : he must lift a drink to his lips quickly or he will spill the liquid. Where there is muscular spasm the attack is severe, and such spasms occur often est in the muscles about the eyes and on the forehead.
At times a rise in temperature is observed ; and in groups of delirium tremens patients albumen in the urine during the early stage of the attack is found in from 40 to 80 per cent of the cases. When the delirium is marked the albumen disap- pears, and it reappears as the delirium lessens.
The average duration of an attack of delirium tremens is from a week to ten days; some cases recover consciousness in four days, others not for eighteen days. When there is star- vation, owing to gastritis, death may result. The mortality depends largely on the medical treatment: some physicians save nearly every case, others lose as many as 20 per cent by death. Where oedema of the brain, called also " wet brain " or serous meningitis, appears in delirium tremens (and it happens in about 15 per cent of the cases), the mortality is very high under ordinary treatment — nearly 65 per cent. Here again skill in the physician is very important. If
THE CURE OF INTEMPERANCE.
695
pneumonia complicates delirium tremens, apart from wet brain, the mortality is close to 48 per cent.
The abortive form of delirium tremens is like the typical disease in the course of the attack, except that it stops short of hallucinations during the waking state. There is, after an alcoholic debauch, the same atonic dyspepsia, tremor, mental anxiety, precordial distress, insomnia, sweating, and hideous dreams; but the disease does not reach the stage of halluci- nation.
The prognosis of recovery in delirium tremens is affected by the presence or absence of wounds and infectious diseases. Bonhoeffer ^ found a mortality of ii per cent in 1,077 cases, and of these 57 per cent were caused by pulmonary diseases. In uncomplicated cases he had a mortality of less than one per cent. Lambert in 709 cases at Bellevue Hospital, New York, found a mortality of about 20 per cent; the pneumonia cases in Bellevue had a mortality of 48.8 per cent. In cases where the delirium and the motor symptoms are severe, the prog- nosis is grave. When delirium tremens comes on in conse- quence of wounds, about 50 per cent of the cases die. The medical treatment of delirium tremens will be given below.
Alcoholic melancholia differs from melancholia arising from other causes by its sudden onset. There may be only head- ache and insomnia as prodromal symptoms; then suddenly the patient is overwhelmed with dreadful hallucinations of death, torture, murder, threatening voices, as in delirium tremens. More rarely there are hallucinations of animals, as in the acute delirium. In the alcoholic melancholia very in- tense neuralgic pain occurs in the peripheral nerves. Albu- minuria is often present. The attack seldom lasts beyond ten days. Often there are permanent delusions as a consequence of the disease, and these tend to develop into a permanent de- lirium of persecution.
Alcoholic mania is as unexpected in its outbreak as the mel- ancholia just described. It often comes on at night after a desperate oppression of fear. At this period an alcoholic maniac is very dangerous : he is likely to brain anyone in his neighborhood, and he does this in absolute unconsciousness. As almost any chronic alcoholic with a neuropathic inheri-
^ Osier, loc. cit, p. 187.
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THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
tance is liable to an outbreak of this kind, such persons are a constant menace to society.
The premonitory symptoms of this mania are increasing ir- ritability, sexual excitement, general change in the facial expression and the manners of the patient, and an enormous desire for spirits. There is tremor, sometimes facial paraly- sis, contracted or unequal pupils, thick or hesitating speech,. and exaggerated m.uscle- reflexes.
The blind, reckless fury of the maniacal outburst itself re- sembles that of the paretic; but in the alcoholic mania there is no temporary remission. The alcoholic mania resembles paresis somewhat in the delusions of self-importance. The maniac says he is God, a king, or the like; and if his claims are questioned he breaks out into a screaming frenzy in which he tears clothing and destroys furniture. The angels of heaven crowd about him in untold multitudes to do him honor. He is sleepless. He must be kept in a padded room or he is likely to dash his brains out, or break his bones. There are abortive remissions, and renewed outbursts, until the patient is exhausted. At the end sleep comes, but on awakening the sufferer almost always shows permanent mental deterioration.
Many cases go on from violence to a muttering delirium ; then there is collapse, and death. Some take on a chronic course. Dementia follows the mania ; the delusions grow con- fused ; the nutrition sinks ; the pulse is weak ; the temperature subnormal. This dementia grows worse, and after some months death results from pneumonia, diarrhoea, or progres- sive decline. Not more than 40 per cent of alcoholic maniacs recover as far as partial sanity.
In cases that have been sectioned post mortem there was intense congestion of the membranes and substance of the brain, general oedema, atrophy of the convolutions, and es- pecially widespread damage of the blood-vessels.
Alcoholic persecutory insanity is a suspicious or perse- cutory delirium, the onset of which may be rapid or gradual. A rapid development is the more common form. The symp- toms resemble true paranoia so closely that the disease is often called alcoholic pseudoparanoia.
After the usual abuse of alcoholic liquor, insomnia and ir- regularity of the blood-circulation show. Then hallucina-
THE CURE OF INTEMPERANCE,
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tions, especially auditory, are complained of. Voices mock or threaten the patient, and these voices speak especially of his reproductive organs. They tell him he is a sexual per- vert, and so on. The voices speak obscenely; they tell him he is hypnotized, destroyed by electric currents. He has enemies that are trying to poison him. Sometimes there are hallucinations of smell and taste, and delusions. Tubes are run into his room to send in poisonous gases, and the like.
The common delusions are sexual. After these come de- lusions in which life is supposed to be endangered. The ene- mies are usually invisible; they act from a distance by elec- tricity or other machinery. The sufferer is in great fear, and. he seeks protection from the police or in asylums. At times there are notions of grandeur mixed with the persecutory symptoms. The patient thinks he is president of the United States, a king, or is in some high position, and that secret enemies are trying to destroy him.
When the onset of the disease is rapid, in a few cases there may be recovery of mental health. Other cases go on into^ progressive dementia. Some recover partly after several years of insanity. When the disease comes on gradually, every hope of cure is lost, as a rule. All the symptoms of persecution already mentioned occur, but the patient is very dangerous. In fact there is no insane person more dangerous than one laboring under chronic alcoholic persecutory insan- ity. He is irritable, furious, and murderous, and he should always be kept in an asylum. The memory finally fails, and dementia ends the state.
Alcoholic amnesia (forgetfulness) is an insanity in which derangement of the memory is especially conspicuous. All alcoholics are forgetful; but the loss of memory can be so marked as to make it the chief symptom of the disease. Am- nesic alcoholics commonly drink in the morning; they have the morning nausea, tremor, spots of anesthesia ; but they sel- dom show the extreme irritability of the alcoholic, probably because the neurons are more deeply injured than in other conditions. Hallucinations and delusions are not pronounced in this form of disease, and they may be entirely absent. Fere produced monsters in chickens by exposing eggs to the fumes of alcohol, and I have seen one case where a man that
'698
THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
never drank alcohol, but who worked constantly in its fumes, lost his memory while in the fumes, and recovered it after he had kept out of these for a few days.
The typical symptom of alcoholic amnesia is instantaneous forgetfulness of what happens or is said in the presence of the -patient. If one with a severe form of amnesia is told a man's •name he loses all memory of it within a few seconds, and no 'effort will bring it back. He cannot repeat a simple sentence after a dictation. Lighter conditions of amnesia can remem- ber part of a conversation for a little while. In fully devel- 'Oped amnesia the patient cannot recall names; he loses the ■"Order of his work; he may be hungry at meal times, but he forgets to eat. If he is sent across a room to bring an object, he will forget what he is sent for before he reaches the object. This process may be repeated for an hour if the experimenter so wishes, and the patient will not even notice the repetition. Knowledge gained in childhood often remains, hence the pos- sibility of speech. He may tell correctly of a fact that hap- pened thirty years ago, but he cannot tell you anything of a fact that happened thirty minutes since. The patient usually recognizes that he has lost his memory. Recovery is pos- sible in many of these cases by withdrawing all alcohol, building up the patient's health, then gradually teaching him over again all that he has forgotten. The older the patient the more difficult the cure.
There is a form of alcoholic amnesia in which the patient is in a condition of waking trance or automatism. He may carry out complicated professional actions, transfer property, commit crime, take long journeys, and so act that no one notices any disorders in his mental faculties. Then he sud- denly grows conscious, and has slight or no recollection what- ever of what he did during the trance. There is no question of the total lack of memory in many of these cases. Transient alcoholic automatism is related to alcoholic epilepsy. In- stances of this trance lasting for days and weeks are very rare; but Professor Henry J. Berkley,^ of Johns Hopkins University, has seen it last for five months.
Epilepsy is made worse by alcoholism, and it can be caused 'by alcoholism. The children of alcoholics who take to drink-
^ A Treatise on Mental Disease. New York. 1900.
THE CURE OF INTEMPERANCE.
699
ing frequently became epileptics. Eight or ten per cent of ^11 alcoholics have epileptic seizures, ordinarily after a severe debauch. In some cases the attacks are incomplete; there may be spasms of single muscles, or of half the body, and the consciousness may not be totally lost, but there is severe cerebral congestion. Other patients have complete epileptic convulsions. Epilepsy, instead of delirium tremens, may be the result of an alcoholic debauch ; or an epileptic convulsion may precede the delirium tremens. The prognosis of alco- holic epilepsy is bad even if alcohol is withheld. Repeated seizures commonly cause death in a short time by cerebral congestion and oedema.
Periodic alcoholic insanity, strictly so called, is relatively rare. In a patient that has an hereditary disposition to in- sanity repeated attacks of delirium tremens may bring about a periodically recurring insanity instead of persecutory in- sanity or dementia. These periodic attacks are like delirium tremens, except that the tremor is absent. They recur at in- tervals of a few weeks or months, with prodromal irritability, long after all alcohol has been withheld. As the attacks are repeated, the lucid intervals lessen. The final dementia is of slow approach. Some patients have stages of persecutory mania before dementia sets in.
It must be remembered that some periodic alcoholic de- bauches are a symptom of recurrent mania from other causes : the patient is primarily a maniac, and symptomatically only an alcoholic. Many insane persons called dypsomaniacs are not such at all.
Dypsomania is a form of insanity, and it is a very rare dis- ease. The dypsomaniac is usually the child of alcoholics, and is at intervals overwhelmed by an irresistible desire for alco- hol to quiet his distress. There is a prodromal period of in- tense irritability, with insomnia, headache, and great mental anguish. These symptoms are somewhat relieved by alcohol, and when the patient once starts to drink, he will take any form of the drug he can get. When whiskey is out of reach, he will swallow Cologne water, bay rum, the alcohol in lamps, sometimes even the preserving alcohol on pathological speci- mens in a medical museum. The condition may persist for days, until the patient falls into a deep sleep, from which he
^OO T^H^ ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
awakens weak but quiet; and with no inclination for alcohol until the next attack comes on. The debauch may end in de- lirium tremens, and then the recovery is slower.
It is very difficult, practically impossible, to prove that such a patient is morally responsible for what he does in one of these attacks. All neurologists hold that genuine dypsomania is insanity while the attack is present. As a matter of fact, physical restraint is usually the only means of averting an outbreak. A person that tipples steadily, and has occasional outbreaks into a spree, is not a dypsomaniac; the spree is an effect of the cumulation of toxine, and the patient is an ordi- nary drunkard.
Cyclothymia is another periodic emotional disorder in some drunkards, in which they are alternately depressed (dys- thymic), and then excited (hyperthymic). Sometimes this cyclothymia is apparently independent of the alcoholism, and the alcoholism is a consequence of the cyclic psychosis.
Dementia is a terminal stage in all forms of chronic alco- holism ; but if the patient starts out with a feeble nervous or- ganism the dementia is likely to begin early and to be pro- gressive. Not infrequently in persons between i8 and 25 years of age that are the children of alcoholics, alcoholic de- mentia sets in and soon becomes absolute. The patient is ever afterward like a mere brute; he has nothing left but the ani- mal instincts, and the bodily functions.
Some chronic alcoholics fall into a pseudoparesis, which can resemble true paresis very closely. In one form are observed mental debility and dullness, with tremor, hallucinations, and delusions, especially of marital infidelity and neuromuscular weakness; but to these symptoms are added the slapping, staggering gait of the paralytic, defects in speech, headache, and apoplectic or epileptic convulsions. Partial recovery is possible in such cases.
A second form resembles true paresis so closely that it is difficult to make a clear differential diagnosis. To the symp- toms already described are added an expansive delirium, de- lusions of grandeur, of great wealth, and the like. Sexual delusions also occur. This expansive mania Is followed in a few weeks by dementia, which goes down to total mental an- nihilation. Neuritis is common in pseudoparesis.
THE CURE OF INTEMPERANCE. 70 1
Korsakow's psychosis is a condition of delirium in chronic alcoholism combined with a polyneuritis, that is, an inflamma- tion of the nerves with the effects of such an inflammation. There is a loss of one's orientation and appreciation of time, also loss of memory, especially memory of recent events. A tendency to garrulousness and to hallucinations is noticeable. The disease occurs in middle life or earlier, and is about as frequent in women as in men. At first it sometimes is con- fused with delirium tremens, but the critical sleep with which •delirium tremens characteristically ends is lacking, and the delirium continues.
After a while the hallucinations become less prominent, but the lack of memory, the foolish babbling, and the defective orientation become more evident. Sometimes the first stages are made up of memory lapses with a tendency to fabricate stories to fill the gaps.
The patient does not recognize friends and his attention wanders. In the early stages hallucinations of sight occur at night; but these may extend in intensity, and be present also in the day. Optic and tactile hallucinations are the common- est, and they may be like those of delirium tremens. Some patients are excited, others melancholic; they are frequently anxious and irritable; some are merely silly, others childish. They retain considerable power of reasoning.
The polyneuritis shows the various anesthesias and hyper- esthesias of other polyneuritides. An ataxic gait is the rule; the pains, sensitiveness to touch, and the muscular weakness of polyneuritis are present. The neuritis is more marked in the legs; and when it is established, atrophy follows. There may be contractions and permanent deformity. In very se- vere cases the arms are involved, and even several head mus- <:les may be implicated.
The course of the disease is long, and months or years may pass before recovery of health. It is doubtful that complete recovery ever takes place in grave cases, especially as regards the mind. A marked tendency to die of intercurrent diseases
is noticeable.
[to bb continued.]
Austin O'Malley.
Philadelphia, Penna.
702 7-^^ ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
EEAOTIONS AND BY-PEODUOTS OF THE DEOEEE ON FKEQUENT'
COMMUNION.
IT is not always easy to determine definitely influences in morals. They are subtle and elusive and may be the re- sult of so many causes other than the assigned that certainty is not to be looked for. But, fortunately, we can trace clearly the reactions on clerical life of the recent papal decisions on Frequent and Daily Communion and can indicate what may fairly be styled some of the by-products in clerical procedure of those decrees, as a consequence of the practice of the faith- ful. The inquiry is not without interest, nor is it devoid of profit, at least in suggestion.
The Daily Mass.
And, first, the preaching of these decrees and the observed result now evident in the increased Communions among the laity have necessarily reacted on the attitude of numerous^ priests toward daily Mass. At the outset let us admit that as a rule the English-speaking priest is not as keen in the matter of saying Mass daily as is his Latin or Teutonic brother. It may be well to reflect on the fact. For purposes of clearness and completeness let us take the priest at work, as it were, and the priest at play, that is, the priest in his ordinary life at home in his parish, and the priest en vacanceSy whether travel- ing about or resting at some resort. Those who have had the- opportunity of observing during travel the ecclesiastical life not only in well-known European cities and towns, but in small and obscure out-of-the-way places, will have noticed rare, if any, instances in which a parish church is left without the daily Mass. In the United States it is not at all uncommon to find parish churches in which Mass is omitted from Sunday to Sunday unless there is some special occasion which induces; the pastor to celebrate. In large city parishes there is a curious custom by which assistants are left " free " for Mass on certain days; and frequently such freedom results in failure to celebrate at all on these days. Nor is such failure unknown in Ireland or in England, although perhaps not as frequent as here.
Again, one cannot but note the general eagerness which priests of the continental countries show .to say Mass daily ;
BY-PRODUCTS OF DECREE ON DAILY COMMUNION. 703:
whereas there are always to be seen a goodly number of priests, from America, garbed in civilian's dress (and sometimes how extraordinary that dress is when the sacerdotal character of the wearer is considered!) who appear quite satisfied, even on Sundays, to hear Mass rather than celebrate it in a near-by church. But one need not cross the ocean to observe the fact. The hotels of any of our great American cities on any day of the year would furnish a considerable number of priests who-^ leave the impression that they are anxious to remove every external evidence of the charisma that, in spite of them, fre- quently betrays itself in countenances and manner. What is. most to be regretted is the fact that many priests of irreproach- able character and undoubted piety succumb to the habit of omitting the daily celebration of Mass on the ground that they do not want to give their parochial brethren trouble;: do not want to burthen sacristans with extra work; they feel that they will upset arrangements, etc. There may, indeed,, at times be among the parochial clergy those who seem to re- gard the request of a stranger to celebrate Mass in their church as an intrusion. Even the sacristan may at times, by vigor- ous or exaggerated laying out of vestments, and scowling; looks, indicate that the visitor is not welcome. In other places there is perhaps a lack of proper equipment needed for several Masses celebrated simultaneously ; or a Mass out of the regu- lar time may interfere with the results of the collection at the parochial Mass, which the pastor regards chiefly as a revenue- producer, its spiritual aspect being utterly lost sight of. These are doubtless difficulties, and doubtless, too, the considerate- ness of a timid priest under such circumstances is in itself something to be admired. But when the people learn, as- they are fast learning, that the standard to be reached by the ordinary Christian is nothing short of daily Communion, what will be their opinion of the priest who evidently has not reached that standard? When the people grasp, as they are doing, the plain fact that practically the sole obex to daily Communion for the laity is mortal sin, what will they think of the priest who does not celebrate daily? The adrniratio populi with regard to the non-celebration of priests hitherta has to a great extent been restrained by confused and confus- ing notions of obligation and of needed perfection. But the
704 ^^^ ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
ruthless bluntness of these papal decrees, putting an end to all subtle distinctions, leaves the faithful in no doubt as to what is expected of them, and surely they can no longer be doubtful of what is expected of their spiritual guides. When therefore from parish after parish throughout the country the consoling and encouraging reports come in of marvelous in- creases in attendance at daily Mass and reception of daily Communion, such glorious news is bound to react upon clerical life where there has been any sluggishness. And since no priest can long afford to offend public opinion, we may look for the practical elimination of any neglect to celebrate dail) Mass.
Punctuality in Celebrating at a Fixed Hour.
The same causes will lead to other reforms. For example, it is likely to eliminate the lack of punctuality in saying Mass at the hours announced, for any disregard of such punctuality may easily become a source of public disedification. Punc- tuality is the courtesy of kings, and priests may be nothing less among men. Every director of souls experiences the diffi- culty arising, especially for the laboring classes, from a disre- gard of punctuality. It causes not only inconvenience, but also lessens the fervor of devotion. Though often only a question of five, ten, or fifteen minutes, it is time wasted in weary waiting for the sluggard who ignores the eager desire of many panting for daily Communion as the hart for the water brooks. What a mockery becomes the stately pile reared for the worship of God when the lowly who come seek- ing their daily supersubstantial bread have to depart hungry- and sorrowful to their toil, because of the thoughtless want of punctuality on the part of a self-indulgent priest who ought to remember that he derives his support mostly by the alms of -such poor. The increased number of daily Communions brings with it likewise an increase in the number of parochial Masses to be said at hours suitable for the people. It were strange perversity in our parochial clergy if they sought to suit their own convenience rather than that of their people in fixing the hours for daily Mass. We need to remember that sacerdos pro populo, not populus pro sacerdote. The l)eneficent effects to which I have alluded are already notice-
BY-PRODUCTS OF DECREE ON DAILY COMMUNION. 705
able in many parishes, and are bound to become more so. Some churches during Lent, for example, have a Mass at one o'clock on weekdays, and wherever people are likely to heed the invitation efforts are thus being made to provide for their devotion. In many parishes daily Mass is said as early as five and as late as nine o'clock; and at some of these daily Masses two priests and more are required to give Communion, so that the congregation may not be unduly delayed.
Incidentally another excrescence may be done away with by the growing assistance of the faithful at daily Mass and the anticipated prolonging of the hours during which for their ac- commodation Masses may be said. Where an ordinary daily Mass is said at nine and at noon or at one o'clock, those pastors who have devised a carefully graduated scale of honoraria for requiem Masses according to the hour at which they are cele- brated, a scale based presumably upon the damage done to the sacerdotal stomach's integument by prolonged fasting, will see a light and remove a secret but growing source of com- plaint.
Daily Communion at Clerical Retreats.
Curiously enough (from the same reaction) a change may be anticipated in the procedure at clerical retreats. It was significant that no sooner had the decrees been promulgated than in the ecclesiastical journals of France discussion at once arose as to how priests on retreat would conform to their spirit, whether by celebrating or by simply communicating. As in our conditions it would be obviously impracticable for the retreatants to celebrate, doubtless even in our larger clergy retreats the example already set in the retreats of many smaller dioceses will be followed and all will be invited to communicate. The satire afforded by a preacher thundering out the duty of the clergy to enforce ad unguem these decrees, while during four or five days they themselves are led by tra- ditional usage to violate them, will surely appeal to the epis- copal sense of humor. As to the practical difficulties it will be felt that the bishops will be as quick to overcome them in time of retreat as the priests concerned are alert in meeting similar practical obstacles in their own charges.
7o6
THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
Churches at the Health-resorts.
Similarly on the principle qui vult finem vult media, we look for increased opportunities of celebrating to be given to priests on vacation or traveling. It is somewhat of a shock to find so many churches in this country possessing minor altars that are evidently intended for ornament only or to fill up architectural vacant spaces, as they are not equipped for saying Mass, either being unconsecrated or without altar-stone. Chalices are fre- quently wanting, as well as duplicate sets of vestments. These deficiencies are sometimes, but not frequently, met with in city churches, but they become particularly irritating in churches at popular resorts. If three or five priests could celebrate simultaneously it would be possible to have a large number of Masses every morning within a reasonable period ; but where they have to celebrate one after another, the delay necessarily becomes an insuperable obstacle, taking into consideration the curious customs governing breakfasting at American hotels.
Priests and bishops celebrating at such resorts since the pro- mulgation of these decrees have observed a remarkable in- crease not only in the assistance at Mass but also in the re- ception of Holy Communion ; and wise pastors in such places will find it to their advantage to foster the devotional desires both of visiting priests and people. The difficulties created by overtaxed sacristans can easily be overcome; and the visit- ing clergy, who are usually open-handed as well as pious, will observe this particular difficulty solve itself.
Open Churches. Through the increased devotion toward the Blessed Sacra- ment churches which were hitherto kept closed from Sunday to Sunday, have thus been opened during the entire day and quite far into the evening for private devotions. Frequently pastors have thus been induced, when opportunities offer, to give Benediction. The numbers that avail themselves of such privileges are considerable and ever increasing; and the re- sults as far as the parish is concerned are not confined to .spiritual benefits alone.
The " Celebret." A further by-product of the practice of frequent Communion in this country will be a definite regulation of the celebret.
BY-PRODUCTS OF DECREE ON DAILY COMMUNION. jqj
Until quite recently American priests traveling in their own country affected to ignore such a document. The underlying reasons were greatly to our credit and spoke much for our simplicity. But the multiplication of impostors, undesirables and unfit, has caused bishops in several of the larger dioceses at least to issue stringent regulations in this respect. These regulations are much like those that are in force in foreign countries, without however providing the same formal admin- istrative organization to cope with the necessary ensuing for- malities. Unpleasant consequences often arise from this lack, which can be avoided only if the priests whose business it is to enforce these diocesan regulations would remember that Epieikeia is an important factor in dealing with visiting priests, especially when it is remembered that in dioceses not a few in this broad land of liberty the request for a celebret by a priest intending to take a trip would be fruitless, possibly because such documents were unknown at the chancery or would be considered a reflection upon our native honesty. No doubt we shall come eventually to some system such as obtains abroad ; but the point is that it must be uniform and general. At present the visiting card is sufficient in most cases; yet many a high-minded priest has been mortified to find himself without papers in the presence of some clerical autocrat who insists upon the letter of his particular diocesan law. It ought to be widely recognized that churches are meant for use and that the greater number of Masses said in them, the greater the happiness of priest and people; that sacristans are paid employes, and their convenience must not stand in the way of a priest desirous of celebrating; that reasonable provision must be made in every church for the adventitious stranger; that such hospitality is a blessed thing and can even be ex- tended advantageously in the sense of the axiom Ubi missa ibi mensa; that consequently it is desirable that some uniform and general regulation be made by which priests traveling in this country will be able to celebrate without unnecessary for- malities and restrictions.
Joseph H. McMahon. New York City.
I (i t'i i lij'i 1-
' >iij ill U,c\\ b^i
AOTA PII PP. X.
I.
fCoNstiTUTio Apostolic A de sanctissima Eucharistia
orlw ii.v..vUf£ J^ -i,Riyjvrtscuo Ritu sumenda.
in£-3rrt r I*i^s Episcopns.
Servus Servo rum Dei.
Ad perpetuam rei meinoridm.
Tradita ab antlquis, haec diu in Ecclesia consuetudo tenuit, mt ad varies, pro diversis locis, mores ritusque sacrorum, «nodo superstitionis et idololatriae suspicio omnis eis abesset, iideles peregrini nullo negotio sese accommodarent. Quod ^quidem usu veniebat, pads et coniunctionis gratia, inter multi- plicia unius Ecclesiae Catholicae membra, seu particulares ^cclesias, confovendae, secundum illud sancti Leonis IX, *' nihil obsunt saluti credentium diversae pro loco et tempore coftsuetudines, quando una fides per dilectionem operans bona quae potest, uni Deo commendat omnes "/
•* Epist ad Michaelem Constantinopolitanum Patriarcham.
ANALECTA. 709
Hue accedebat necessitatis causa, cum, qui in exteras regiorf nes advenissent, iis plerumque nee sacrae ibi aedes, nee sacer- dotes ritus proprii suppeterent. Id autem cum in ceteris rebus- fiebat, quae ad divinum cultum pertinent, turn in ministrandist suscipiendisque sacramentis maximeque Sanctissima Euchari- stia. Itaque clericis et laicis, qui formatas, quae dicebantur, litteras peregre afferrent, patens erat aditus ad eucharisticun^ ministerium aut epulum in templis alieni ritus; et Episcopi, presbyteri ac diaconi latini cum graecis hie Romae, graeci cum latinis in Oriente divina concelebrabant mysteria : quod usque adeo evasit sollemne, ut si secus factum esset, res posset argumento esse discissae vel unitatis fidei vel concordiae ani- morum.
At vero, postquam magnam Orientis christiani partem a centro catholicae unitatis lamentabile schisma divellerat, con- suetudinem tam laudabilem retinere iam diutius non licuitw Quum enim Michael Caerularius non solum mores caerimoni- asque latinorum maledico dente carperet, verum etiam edi- ceret aperte consecrationem panis azymi illicitam irritamque esse, Romahi Pontifices, Apostolici officii memores, latinis qui- dem, ad avertendum ab eis periculum erroris, interdixerunt,, ne in pane fermentato sacramentum conficerent neu sumerent; graecis vero, ad catholicam fidem unitatemque redeuntibus, veniam fecerunt communicandi in azymo apud latinos: id quod pro iis temporibus et locis opportunum sane erat, imo necessarium. Quum enim nee saepe graeci tunc invenirentur episcopi huic beati Petri cathedrae coniuncti, nee ubique ad- essent catholica orientalium templa, timendum valde erat, ne orientales catholici ad schismaticorum ecclesias ac pastores cum certo fidei periculo accederent, nisi apud latinos commu- nicare ipsis licuisset.
lamvero felix quaedam rerum commutatio, quae postea visa est fieri, cum in Coneilio Florentino pax Ecclesiae graecae cum latina convenit, veterem disciplinam paulisper revocavit. — Nam statuerunt quidem eius Concilii Patres : " in azymo sive fermentato pane triticeo Corpus Christi veraciter confici,. sacerdotesque in alterutro ipsum Domini Corpus conficere de- bere, unumquemque scilicet iuxta suae Ecclesiae sive occiden^ talis sive orientalis consuetudinem ",^ sed hoc decreto vo-
* Ex Bulla Eugenii IV, Laetentur Coeli.
jlQ THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
luerunt sane catholicam veritatem de valida utriusque panis consecratione in tuto collocare, minime vero promiscuam com- munionem interdicere fidelibus; quibus contra, quin earn con- firmandae pads causa concesserint, non est dubium. Exstat Isidori, metropolitae Kloviensis et totius Russiae, luculentis- sima epistola, quam, absoluta Florentina Synodo, cuius pars magna fuerat et in qua Dorothei patriarchae Antiocheni per- sonam gesserat, Legatus a Latere in Lithuania, Livonia et universa Russia dedit anno mccccxl Budae ad omnes qui sub ditione essent Ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae : qua in epistola, de reconciliata feliciter graecorum cum latinis concordia prae- fatus, haec habet : " Adiuro vos in D. N. L C. ne qua divisio vos inter et latinos amplius subsistat, cum omnes sitis D. N. L C. servi, in nomine eius baptizati. . . . Itaque graeci qui in latinorum regione degant aut in sua regione habeant latinam ecclesiam, omnes divinam liturgiam adeant et corpus D. N. L C. adorent, ac corde contrito venerentur, non secus ac id in propria ecclesia quisque faceret, nee non et confitendi gratia latinos sacerdotes adeant, et corpus Domini Nostri ab eisdem accipiant. Similiter et latini debent ecclesias graecorum adire et divinam liturgiam auscultare, fide firma corpus lesu Christi ibidem adorare. Utpote quod sit verum L C. corpus, sive illud a graeco sacerdote in fermentato, sive a latino sacerdote in azymo consecratum fuerit; utcumque enim aequa veneratione dignum est, sive azymum, sive fermentatum. Latini quoque confiteantur apud sacerdotes graecos et divinam commu- nionem ab eisdem accipiant, cum idem sit utrumque. Ita nempe statuit Cone. Florentinum in publica Sessione die vi lunii a. MCCCCXXXix ".
Etsi autem Isidori testimonio evincitur factam esse a Flo- rentina Synodo facultatem fidelibus promiscuo ritu communi- candi, tamen facultas huiusmodi subsecutis temporibus nee ubique nee semper f uit in usu ; ideo praesertim quia, cum male sartam unitatem mature Graeci rescidissent, iam non crat, cur Pontifices Romani quod Isidorus a Florentina Synodo in- dultum refert, curarent observandum. Pluribus nihilominus in locis promiscuae Communionis consuetudo mansit usque ad Benedicti XIV Decessoris aetatem, qui primus Constitu- tione Etsi pastoralis pro Italo-Graecis die XXVI maii anni MDCCXLii graves ob causas vetuit, ne laici latini Communi-
ANALECTA. 7II
onem a graecis presbyteris sub fermentati specie acciperent; graecis autem propria paroecia destitutis facultatem reliquit, ut in azymo apud latinos communicarent. Ubi vero, graecis et latinis una simul commorantibus suasque habentibus eccle- sias, usus invaluisset Communionis promiscuae, commisit Or- dinariis, ut, si huiusmodi consuetude removeri sine populi offensione animorumve commotione non posset, omni cum lenitate curam operamque in id impenderent, ut semper latini in azymo communicarent, graeci in fermentato. Quae autem pro Italo- Graecis Decessor Noster statuit, eadem ipse postea ad Melchitas quoque et ad Coptos pertinere iussit: eaque paullatim ad omnes transierunt Orientales, consuetudine po- tius quam legis alicuius praescripto ; non ita tamen, ut quando- ^que Apostolica Sedes idem non indulserit latinis, quae etiam orientales non destituti ecclesia propria, neque uUa urgente necessitate, ut communicarent in azymo, pluries passa est, immo permisit.
Quod praecipue factum est, posteaquam, animarum studio flagrantes, nonnullae religiosae Familiae tum virorum turn mulierum ex variis Europae regionibus ad Orientis oras ad- vectae, auxilium catholicis diversorum rituum, multiplicatis apud ipsos christianae caritatis operibus collegiisque ad in- stitutionem iuventutis ubique apertis, praebuerunt. Cum autem hae Familiae ob frequentem Eucharistiae usum quie- tam et tranquillam inter difficultates et aerumnas vitam age- rent, ex orientalibus, quod genus valde ad pietatem proclivi est, facile ad imitationem sui multos excitarunt : qui cum aegre apud suos vel ob distantiam locorum vel ob penuriam sacer- dotum et templorum, vel etiam ob diversas rituum rationes huic desiderio possent satisfacere, ab Apostolica Sede instan- ter gratiam postularunt accipiendae Eucharistiae, more lati- norum. Hisce postulationibus Apostolica Sedes aliquando concessit: atque ephebis, qui in latinorum collegiis educa- rentur, item ceteris fidelibus, qui eorum templa celebrarent ac piis consociationibus essent adscripti, permisit, salvis quidem iuribus parochorum, potissime quoad paschalem Communi- onem et Viaticum, ut pietatis causa intra annum in templis latinorum eucharistico pane a latinis presbyteris consecrato reficerentur. Quin etiam in ipso Concilio Vaticano Cofumissio peculiaris negotiis Rituum Orientalium praeposita hoc inter
712 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
alia sibi proposuit dubium, an expediret relaxare aliquantu- lum legum ecclesiasticarum severitatem de non permiscendis ritibus maxime in Communione Eucharistica, veniamque tri- buere fidelibus communicandi utrovis ritu : cumque eius Com- missionis Patres adnuendum censuissent, decretum confece- runt in earn sententiam; quod tamen, abrupto temporum ini- quitate Concilio, Patribus universis probandum subiicere non licuit. — Post id temporis S. Congregatio Fidei Propagandae pro negotiis Rituum Orientalium, ut solatio consuleret eorum, qui ob inopiam ecclesiarum vel sacerdotum proprii ritus a Communione saepius abstinere cogebantur, decretum die xviil augusti anni MDCCCXCIII edidit, quo, ad promovendam Sacra- mentorum frequentiam, omnibus fidelibus ritus sive latini sive orientalis, habitantibus ubi ecclesia aut sacerdos proprii ritus non adsit, facultas in posterum tribuitur communicandi, non modo in articulo mortis et in Paschate ad observandum prae- ceptum, sed quovis tempore, suadente pietate, iuxta ritum ec- clesiae loci, dummodo sit catholica.
Decessor autem Noster, Leo XIII fel. rec. in Constitutione Orientalium dignitas Ecclesiarum, eiusdem gratiae participes fecit, quicumque propter longinquitatem ecclesiae suae, nisi gravi cum incommodo, eam adire non possent. Simul vero prohibuit, ne in collegiis latinis, in quibus plures alumni ori- ental es numerarentur, latino more hi communicarent; prae- cepitque ut accirentur eiusdem ritus sacerdotes qui sacrum facerent et sacratissimam Eucharistiam illis distribuerent, saltem diebus dominicis ceterisque de praecepto occurrentibus festis, quovis sublato privilegio. Sed tamen experiendo est cognitum, non ubique facile inveniri sacerdotes orientales, qui, cum alibi occupati sint in ministerio animarum, diebus dominicis et festis, atque adeo ipsis profestis diebus queant collegia adire latinorum, ut pueris puellisque esurientibus panem angelicum ministrent.
Quamobrem non raro supplicatum est huic Apostolicae Sedi, ut disciplinam Ecclesiae tanta in re indulgentius tempe- raret. Quae preces supplices, post editum die xx Decembris MCMV per S. Congregationem Concilii decretum Nostrum Sacra Tridentina Synodus de quotidiana Communione Eu- charistica, multo frequentiores fuerunt ab orientalibus, qui veniam pejtebant transeundi ad ritum latinum, quo facilius
ANALECTA. 71^
possent caelesti dape recreari; in eisque non pauci numera- bantur pueri ac puellae, qui hoc ipsum beneficium participare percuperent.
Itaque, considerantibus Nobis fidem catholicam de valida consecratione utriusque panis, az3^mi et fermentati, tutam esse apud omnes; insuper compertum habentibus complures esse, turn latinos turn orientales, quibus ilia promiscui ritus inter- dictio et fastidio et offensioni sit, exquisita sententia sacri Consilii christiano nomini propagando pro negotiis Orienta- Hum Rituum, re mature perpensa, visum est omnia ilia anti- quare decreta, quae ritum promiscuum in usu Sanctissimae Eucharistiae prohibent vel coangustant; atque omnibus et latinis et orientalibus facultatem facere sive in azymo sive in fermentato apud sacerdotes catholicos, in ecclesiis cuiusvis ritus catholicis, secundum pristinam Ecclesiae consuetudinem, augusto Corporis Domini Sacramento sese reficiendi, ut " omnes et singuli qui christiano nomine censentur, in hoc concordiae symbolo iam tandem aliquando conveniant et con- cordent *'.*
Equidem confidimus, quae hie praescribuntur a Nobis, ea dilectis filiis, quot habemus in Oriente, ex quovis ritu, ad- modum fore utilia non solum ad inflammandum in eis pietatis ardorem, sed etiam ad mutuam eorum concordiam confirman- dam. — Etenim quod ad pietatem attinet, nemo non videt divi- nam Eucharistiam, a Patribus Ecclesiae latinis graecisque quotidianum christiani hominis panem solitam appellari, ut- pote qua sustentetur et alatur tamquam valetudo animae, multo magis frequentandam eis esse, quorum caritas vel fides, seu ipsa supernaturalis vitae principia, maiore in discrimine^ versentur. Quare catholici orientales, quibus est in media multitudine schismaticorum habitandum, non ex periculoso eorum convictu aliquod fidei caritatisque detrimentum capi- ent, si hoc se cibo caelesti roborare consueverint, sed magnum- et perpetuum in se vitae spiritualis sentient incrementum. — Quod spectat alterum, patet proclive factu usque adhuc fuisse, ut inter homines unius fidei sed diversorum rituum, ex eo- quod alii aliis facilius possent Corporis Christi esse participes, causae aemulationum et discordiarum exsisterent. Nunc
3 Cone. Trident. Sess. XIII.
-ri4 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
autem, cum huius mensae, quae symbolum, radix atque prin- eipium est catholicae unitatis, promiscuam esse omnibus fide- libus communicationem volumus, pronum est debere inter ipsos increscere animorum concordiam, " quoniam unus panis, •ait Apostolus, unum corpus multi sumus, omnes qui de uno pane participamus ".*
Haec I^os igitur de Apostolicae potestatis plenitudine sta- tuimus et sancimus :
I. Sacris promiscuo ritu operari sacerdotibus ne liceat: pro- pterea suae quisque Ecclesiae ritu Sacramentum Corporis Domini conficiant et ministrent.
II. Ubi necessitas urgeat, nee sacerdos diversi ritus adsit, licebit sacerdoti orientali, qui fermentato utitur, ministrare Eucharistiam consecratam in azymo, vicissim latino aut ori- entali qui utitur azymo, ministrare in fermentato; at suum •quisque ritum ministrandi servabit.
III. Omnibus fidelibus cuiusvis ritus datur facultas, ut, pie- tatis causa, Sacramentum Eucharisticum quolibet ritu con- fectum suscipiant.
IV. Quisque fidelium praecepto Communionis paschalis ita satisfaciet, si eam suo ritu accipiat et quidem a parocho suo : cui sane in ceteris obeundis religionis officiis addictus mane- bit.
V. Sanctum Viaticum moribundis ritu proprio de manibus proprii parochi accipiendum est: sed, urgente necessitate, fas esto a sacerdote quolibet illud accipere; qui tamen ritu suo ^ministrabit.
VI. Unusquisque in nativo ritu permanebit, etiamsi con- suetudinem diu tenuerit communicandi ritu alieno; neque ulli detur facultas mutandi ritus, nisi cui iustae et legitimae suf- fragentur causae, de quibus Sacrum Consilium Fidei Propa- gandae pro negotiis Orientalium iudicabit. In his vero causis numeranda non erit consuetudo quamvis diuturna ritu alieno communicandi.
Quaecumque autem his litteris decernimus, constituimus, declaramus, ab omnibus ad quos pertinet inviolabiliter servari volumus et mandamus, nee ea notari, in controversiam vo- cari, infringi posse, ex quavis, licet privilegiata causa, colore
** I Corinth. lo: 17.
ANALECTA. 715
et nomine; sed plenarios et integros effectus suos habere, non ■obstantibus Apostolicis, etiam in generalibus ac provincialibus conciliis editis, constitutionibus, nee non quibusvis etiam con- firmatione Apostolica vel quavis alia firmitate roboratis, sta- tutis consuetudinibus ac praescriptionibus; quibus omnibus, perinde ac si de verbo ad verbum hisce litteris inserta essent, ad praemissorum effectum, specialiter et expresse derogamus et derogatum esse volumus, ceterisque in contrarium facienti- bus quibuslibet. — Volumus autem ut harum litterarum ex- emplis etiam impressis, manuque Notarii subscriptis et per constitutum in ecclesiastica dignitate virum suo sigillo muni- tis, eadem habeatur fides, quae praesentibus hisce litteris os- tensis haberetur.
Datum Romae apud S. Petrum, anno Incarnationis Domi- nicae millesimo nongentesimo duodecimo, in festo Exalta- tionis S. Crucis, xviii Kalendas octobres, Pontificatus Nostri ;anno decimo.
Fr, H. M. Cardinalis GOTTL S. C. de Propaganda Fide Praefectus. A. Cardinalis AGLIARDI. 5. R. E. Cancellarius.
VISA M. RiGGi, C. A. Not
II.
-Ad R. p. D. Ioannem Cuthbertum Hedley, Neoporten- siUM Episcopum, quinquagesimo Sacerdotii eius anno feliciter recurrente, gratulationis ergo.
Venerabilis frater, salutem et apostolicam benedictionem. — Te propediem celebraturum annum sacerdotii quinquagesi- mum et sanctae laetitiae socios non Benedictinos tantum habi- turum sodales, sed et omnes Angliae Antistites ac prope uni- versos Angliae catholicos, iucunde Nos scito accepisse. Tanta enim voluntatum significatio baud dubie ostendit in excelso loco sitam esse laudem tuam, eamque ita omnes percellere, ut omnium egregium sit de te, de tua vita, virtute indicium. Rectum quidem indicium; cum, et rebus et perpolitae orati- onis elegantia praeclara, edita a te scripta recte noverimus^ 'Cumque probe compertum habeamus quo monasticae perfectly
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THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
onis studio, qua consilii gravitate, qua pastorali florueris ac floreas sollicitudine. Quare non absimili Nos opinione pa- ternaque affecti caritate, tuum, venerabilis frater, omniumque tecum laetantium gaudium libenter communicamus ac de mu- tuo studio gratulamur utrisque. Benevolae caritatis Nostrae testimonium addat, volumus etiam calix sacrificalis, quern libet ad te dono mittere una cum apostolica benedictione, quam caelestium auspicem donorum tibi, venerabilis frater,. dioecesis tuae clero populoque peramanter in Domino imper- timus.
Datum Romae apud S. Petrum, die xii septembris MCMXII,, Pontificatus Nostri anno decimo.
PIUS PP. X.
S. OONGREGATIO S. OFFIOII. (Sectio de Indulgentiis.) I.
CONCEDITUR INDULGENTIA PlENARIA IN HONOREM BeATAE
Mariae Virginis Immaculatae, primo sabbato cuius - libet mensis lucranda.
i^Ex audientia Sanctissimi, die ij iunii ipi2.) Sanctissimus D. N. D. Pius div. Prov. Pp. X, ad augendam fidelium devotionem erga gloriosissimam Dei Matrem Imma- culatam, et ad fovendum pium reparationis desiderium, quo fideles ipsi cupiunt quandam exhibere satisfactionem pro exe- crabilibus blasphemiis quibus Nomen augustissimum et ex- celsae praerogativae eiusdem beatae Virginis a scelestis ho- minibus impetuntur, ultro concedere dignatus est, ut universi qui primo quolibet sabbato cuiusvis mensis, confessi ac sacra Synaxi refecti, peculiaria devotionis exercitia in honorem beatae Virginis Immaculatae in spiritu reparationis ut supra, peregerint, et ad mentem summi Pontificis oraverint, Indul- gentiam plenariam, defunctis quoque applicabilem, lucrari valeant Praesenti in perpetuum valituro absque ulla Brevis expeditione. Contrariis quibuscumque non obstantibus.
M. Card. Rampolla. L. * S.
•i* D. Archiep. Seleucien., Ads. S. O^
ANALECTA. 717
II.
Decretum circa Indulgentias Festis Beatorum Adnexas.
Supremae sacrae Congregationi S. Officii sequentia pro- posita sunt dubia, quae versantur circa indulgentias in festis Beatorum concessas, quando haec transferuntur, nimirum:
I. An, translate in perpetuum festo alicuius Beati quod externa solemnitate non gaudet, transferatur quoque indul- gentia concessa ecclesiis Ordinis regularis in casu tantum quo huiusmodi indulgentia concessa sit intuitu Beati eiusque ex- presso nomine, an ctiam in casu quo non fuerit concessa in- tuitu Beati, id est eius expresso nomine, sed tantum affixa diei qua eius festum celebratur?
II. Et quatenus affirmative ad primam partem: Num translatio locum habere debeat, tam si festum pro universo Ordine, quam si pro aliqua tantum regulari provincia vel singulari conventu peragatur?
III. Num translatio indulgentiae locum habeat, si reposito in aliam diem fixe festo Beatorum, eorum solemnitas externa in antiquo die, ut ante officii repositionem perpetuam, affixa perseveret in populo?
IV. An quando festum Beatorum ordinis S. Francisci cele- bratur a variis familiis franciscalibus, non tamen eodem die sed diverso, Tertiarii saeculares lucrari valeant indulgentiam eidem festo adnexam, die quo festum illud celebratur ab ea familia cui ipsi subsunt, etiam si in proprio indulgentiarum summario alio die adquirenda design etur?
V. An Tertiarii, si eorum sodalitas erecta est in ecclesiis franciscanis quae festa Beatorum impedita in aliam perpetuo die translatam celebrant, in die tantum translationis indul- gentiam plenariam consequi valeant?
VI. An Tertiarii, qui ecclesiam ubi sodalitas erecta sit non habere possunt, ideoque valent indulgentiam eiusmodi in qua- libet ecclesia franciscali promereri, possint pluries eandem in- dulgentiam adquirere, si festa in diversis ecclesiis diverso die fixe recolantur?
Quibus dubiis mature perpensis, Emi Patres una mecum general es Inquisitores, feria IV, die 12 iunii 191 2, dixerunt:
Ad I. Affirmative ad primam partem; negative ad secun- dam.
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THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
Ad II. Servetur Decretum S. C. Indulgentiarum, lanuen.y 12 ianuarii 1878.
Ad III. Negative, iuxta Decretum S. C. Indulgentiarum,, Urbis et Orbis, 9 augusti 1852.
Ad IV. Poterunt Tertiarii, pro lubito, eam lucrari die in summario designate, vel die quo festum recolitur ab ea familia. cui ipsi subsunt : ita tamen, ut semel tantum a singulis indul- gentia adquiri possit.
Ad V. Provisum in praecedenti.
Ad VI. Negative.
Et feria V, die 13 iisdem mense et anno, Ssmus D. N. D.. Pius divina providentia Pp. X, in solita audientia R. P. D. Adsessori S. Officii impertita, supra relatas resolutiones Emo- rum Patrum benigne approbare dignatus est.
M. Card. Rampolla.
L. * S.
■^^ D. Archiep. Seleucien., Ads. S. O.
S. OONGEEGATIO DE EELIGIOSIS.
I.
Quoad Communionem Infirmarum in Monasteriis Clau-
SURAE PaPALIS.
Edito a S. C. Concilii, die 20 decembris 1905, Decreto- Sacra Tridentina Synodus, quo inter alia praescribitur ut Communio frequens et quotidiaita praesertim in religiosis In- stitutis cuiusvis generis promoveatur, earum consulendum quoque erat sorti infirmarum quae intra septa monasteriorum clausurae Papalis decumbunt; quum ipsa clausura, prout de- terminatur in iure canonico vigenti, aliquod in praxi videretur parere incommodum ad frequentiorem earum aegrotantium Communionem, praesertim ex eo quod regulariter nonnisi confessarius et in eius defectu capellanus, et, si sacerdos sit regularis, a socio comitatus, monasterii claustra ingredi valeat ad Sacramenta infirmis ministranda.
Ouare Emi ac Rmi Patres Cardinales S. C. de Religiosis,, occasione arrepta quorumdam dubiorum quae ad rem propo- sita fuerant, die 30 augusti 191 2, in plenario coetu ad Vati- canum habito, quoad Communionem infirmis deferendam in
ANALECTA. 7IQ,
monasteriis clausurae Papalis, sequentia decernere existima- runt, nempe: In defectu confessarii vel capellani tertius sa- cerdos, etiam regularis, licet sine socio, legitime vocatus de licentia episcopi, qui pro hac licentia nomine ipsius episcopi concedenda etiam abbatissam seu superiorissam habitualiter designare poterit, sacram Communionem infirmis valeat de- ferre Religiosis, quae ad ecclesiae crates descendere nequeunt. Oportet autem ut quatuor religiosae maturae aetatis, si fieri possit, ab ingressu in clausuram usque ad egressum, sacerdo- tem comitentur, qui sacram pyxidem aliquas consecratas par- ticulas continentem deferre, sacram Communionem adminis- trare, reverti ad ecclesiam, eamdemque sacram pyxidem re- ponere debet, servatis rubricis a Rituali Romano pro Com- munione infirmorum statutis.
Et hanc Emorum Patrum sententiam et resolutionem Ssmus Dominus noster Pius Papa Decimus, ad relationem subscripti Secretarii, die I septembris 191 2 ratam habere "et confirmare dignatus est. Contrariis non obstantibus quibuscumque.
Datum Romae ex Secretaria sacrae Congregationis de Re- ligiosis, die I septembris 191 2.
Fr. I. C. Card. Vives, Praefectus.
L. * S.
*i' Donatus, Archiep. Ephesinus, Secretarius.
II.
DUBIUM QUOAD InDULTA AbSTINENTIAE ET IeIUNII RELATE AD ReLIGIOSOS.
Rmus D. Antonius Fiat, Superior generalis Congregationis Missionis et Filiarum a Caritate, a S. C. de Religiosis sequen- tis dubii solutionem expostulavit, nimirum :
Utrum in indultis apostolicis, quibus mitigationes vel dis- pensationes conceduntur ab abstinentia et ieiunio in regioni- bus intra et extra Europam, praesertim in America Latina,, comprehendantur Familiae religiosae ibi degentes.
Emi autem ac Rmi Patres Cardinales sacrae eiusdem Con- gregationis, in aedibus Vaticanis adunati die 30 augusti 1912^ re maturo examine perpensa, responderunt :
I. Affirmative quoad abstinentiam et ieiunium a lege Eccle- siae generali praescripta, nisi ab indulto exclud'antur religiosis
^20 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
II. Negative quoad abstinentiam et ieiunium a propriis Re- gulis et Constitutionibus statuta, nisi in indulto expresse de hac dispensatione mentio habeatur. Non servantes igitur huiusmodi abstinentiam et ieiunium, transgrediuntur quidem Regulam et Constitutionem, non autem legem Ecclesiae; ideo- que culpam tantum et poenam incurrunt a Constitutionibus vel Regulis statutam.
III. Quoad vero Religiosos in America Latina degentes, standum novissimo Indulto per Secretariam Status concesso, die I ianuarii an. 1910.
Quas Emorum DD. Cardinalium responsiones Ssmus Do- minus noster Pius Papa X, ad relationem infrascripti Secre- tarii, die I septembris 1 91 2 adprobare et confirmare dignatus
€St.
Contrariis non obstantibus quibuscumque. Datum Romae ex Secretaria sacrae Congregationis de Re- ligiosis, die i septembris 191 2.
Fr. I. C. Card. Vives, Praefectus.
L. * S.
■i* Donatus, Archiep. Ephesinus, Secretarius.
III.
T)UBiUM QUOAD Religiosos Votorum Solemnium degentes
AD TEMPUS EXTRA ClAUSTRA.
Quaesitum est ab hac sacra Congregatione negotiis religi- osorum Sodalium praeposita, utrum Religiosus, habitu regu- lari dimisso, extra claustra ad tempus degens indulto aposto- lico, cum facultate ab episcopo obtenta celebrandi Missam et alia opera sacerdotis propria peragendi, subsit eidem Ordi- nario, ita ut episcopus habeat in eum iurisdictionem et auctori- tativam et dominativam potestatem, quamvis in Rescripto de- sit consueta formula: Ordinario loci subsit in vim quoque solemnis obedientiae voti.
Emi autem ac Rmi Patres Cardinales sacrae eiusdem Con- :gregationis, in plenariis Comitiis ad Vaticanum adunatis die 30 augusti 1 91 2, praehabito duorum ex officio Consultorum ^voto, et re mature perpensa, responderunt :
Affirmative, facto verbo cum Sanctissimo.
ANALECTA. ^21
Sanctitas porro Sua, ad relationem infrascripti Secretarii, die I septembris 191 2 responsionem Emorum Patrum adpro- bare et confirmare dignata est. Contrariis non obstantibus quibuscumque.
Datum Romae ex Secretaria sacrae Congregationis de Re- ligiosis, die I septembris 191 2.
Fr. I. C. Card. Vives, Praefectus.
L. * S.
+ Donatus, Archiep. Ephesinus, Secretarius.
EOMAN OUEIA.
PONTIFICAL APPOINTMENTS.
10 April, igi2: The Most Rev. Neil McNeil, Archbishop of Vancouver, appointed to the Archiepiscopal See of To- ronto.
75 May, igi2: The Very Rev. James Morrison, of the par- ish of Vernon River in the Diocese of Charlottetown, ap- pointed to the Episcopal See of Antigonish.
J/ July, igi2: The Right Rev. Timothy Casey, Bishop of St. John, appointed to the Archiepiscopal See of Vancouver.
2 August, igi2: The Rev. Edward Le Blanc, of the parish of St. Bernard in the Diocese of Halifax, appointed to the Episcopal See of St. John.
2 August, ipi2: The Rev. John Pereira Barros, of the Archdiocese of San Pablo in Brazil, made Private Chamber- lain supernumerary.
7/ Atigust, igi2: The Rev. Anselm Poock, of the Diocese of Salford (England), made Private Chamberlain super- numerary.
ig August, igi2: The Very Rev. Joseph Shiel appointed Bishop of Rockhampton in Australia.
18 September, igi2: Mr. Joseph Prey, of New York, made Knight of the Order of St. Gregory the Great (civil rank).
28 September, igi2: The Rev. John J. Tierney, of the Dio- cese of Wilmington, made Domestic Prelate.
2 October, igi2: Mr. James Dunn, of Jamaica, made Knight of the Order of St. Gregory the Great (civil rank).
Stubfes anb Conferences.
OUE ANALEOTA.
The Roman documents for the month are:
1. Apostolic Constitution, ordaining that hereafter the, faithful of the various rites (Latin and Greek Uniates) may receive Communion in either leavened or unleavened bread,, according as they have opportunity, in churches (or from the hands of priests) of different rite.
Priests of either rite are authorized to administer Com- munion in leavened or unleavened bread, as necessity may dictate. These priests are nevertheless obliged to celebrate Mass and consecrate according to their own rite; they are likewise to administer Communion, whether it be under the species of leavened or unleavened bread, as necessity dictates, in the form prescribed by their own rite.
The faithful, in whatsoever form they receive Communion, are not thereby authorized to relinquish their allegiance to their own rite (Latin or Greek). Such change can be made only by permission of the Sacred Congregation of Propa- ganda (for Oriental Affairs).
2. Pontifical Letter addressed to the Right Rev. John Cuthbert Hedley, O.S.B., Bishop of Newport, congratulating the latter on the occasion of the golden jubilee of his priest- hood.
Congregation of the Holy Office (Section of Indul- gences) : I. Grants a plenary indulgence (applicable to the souls of the departed) in honor of Our Blessed Lady on the first Saturday of each month to all those who, after having confessed and received Holy Communion, spend some time in devotion in honor of the Immaculate Virgin, in the spirit of reparation; the usual prayer according to the intentions of the Sovereign Pontiff is also prescribed.
2. Decides that the transfer of the feast of a " Beatus " carries with it also the transfer of the indulgences attached to the same — to be gained however but once.
S. Congregation of Religious: i. Grants that, in the ab- sence of the confessor or chaplain of a cloistered community,.
STUDIES AND CONFERENCES. 723
any other priest, secular or regular, who has the approval of the bishop (which approval may be regularly given to him, with the bishop's consent, by the superioress of the commu- nity), may distribute Holy Communion to the sick members unable to come to the crates. The priest who administers Holy Communion is to be accompanied, if possible, by four religious, from and back to the altar, in the manner prescribed by the Roman Ritual.
2. Answers affirmatively the doubt whether the Sisters of Charity (Vincentian) are at liberty to avail themselves of the Apostolic indults regarding fast and abstinence granted to different countries, especially Latin America, so far as these indults dispense from the general law, but do not affect the special laws of fast and abstinence prescribed by the Rules and Constitutions of this Order. These the members are obliged to observe, unless there is special exemption given.
3. Decides that priests of solemn religious vows who by Apostolic indult are permitted to serve on the secular mission and to doff for the time being their religious habit, are under the jurisdiction (" auctoritative et dominative") of the local bishop, as though they had pledged their obedience to him absolutely.
Roman Curia gives the list of recent pontifical appoint- ments.
METEIOAL TEANSLATION OP PSALMS. Psalm I.
Blessed the man who hath not walked the way Of wicked counselors with willing feet ; Nor stood in sinners' paths : nor gone astray To sit him in the scoffer's scornful seat.
His joy is in the Lord's most holy Law : And in His word divine, his true delight; He shall consider it with love and awe, Shall meditate upon it day and night.
And he shall flourish as a fecund tree The brooks and running waters planted near, That yields its grateful fruit abundantly, And in its season glorifies the year.
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THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW,
Its leaf shall fall not ; even so, the days Of God's elect shall fadeless, changeless be; And whatSG he shall do, in all his ways He shall be gladdened by prosperity.
Not thus shall fare the wicked. No, ah! no, (Unlike the happy portion of the just), They shall be driven by the blasts of woe As from the earth is swept the wind-blown dust.
Therefore, they shall not in the judgment stand, Nor rise to meet the righteous, face to face ; In councils where the just and wise command, Sinners, alas ! shall have no part or place.
For lo! our God looks with approving eyes Upon the way wherein His faithful tread ; He shall the wicked in their sins surprise : Shall make their course to perish with the dead.
E. C. D.
Psalm VIII. O Lord, our Lord, in all this earth we tread How glorious is Thy majestic Name! Thou o'er the heavens hast Thy glory spread. And Thy magnificence above the same.
Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings weak Hast Thou perfected praise before Thy foes, That Thou Thine enemies might'st hold in check, •And vengeful adversaries all depose.
Considering Thy heav'ns — Thy handiwork, — When I therein the moon and stars behold, (Which in their sparkling splendor Thou hast set And firm established in the skies of old) —
Oh ! what is man that Thouy Almighty Lord, Art mindful of him? What, the son of man That Thou the Eternal, in Thy mercy broad, Should'st visit him whose life is but a span ?
A little less than angels Thou hast made And fashioned him — hast formed him to abound In gifts scarce lower than the heavenly hosts' ; With glory and with honor hast him crown'd.
STUDIES AND CONFERENCES. 72 S
Thou makest him a ruler o'er the works Of Thy blest hands : hast put all things revealed Under his feet; hast sheep and oxen made His subjects — with the cattle of the field.
Thou givest him a power, a control Over the birds, creatures of sky and air; The fishes of the sea, all things that pass Thro' ocean's paths are given to his care.
O Lord, our Lord! forevermore the same, In all the earth how wondrous is Thy Name.
E. C. D,
Psalm XVIIL
The heavens, abroad.
Tell the glory of God : The brilliant expanse where His living lights shine.
With tongues as of flame,
Doth, ceaseless, proclaim The work of His hands — His creation divine.
The day and the night,
The darkness, the light. Like the flow of a stream, gushing forth without cease.
Discover always
His knowledge and praise. The glory of God which shall never decrease.
Their language is heard
To earth's ends — in each word Of creation's grand chorus. Their speech manifold
Is well understood
By the wise and the good Who in all His fair works their Creator behold.
The sun is His tent
In the broad firmament, And He, like a bridegroom, in beauty and force,
From His bridechamber goes,
From His sacred repose. As a giant rejoicing to run His brave course.
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Rising up, all alight,
In the orient bright, He circles the heavens from end unto end ;
From the furthermost parts.
Through His circuit He darts, His heat none may hide from, — His fires naught fend.
The law of the Lord
Is in perfect accord With man's glorious destiny. Spotless, sublime,
It giveth relief
To the children of grief: Consoling, in sorrow, the creatures of Time.
The word of the Lord,
(Be it ever adored!) Is constant and sure — making little ones wise;
His precepts are right.
His commands clear and bright. Refreshing the soul, and enlight'ning the eyes.
Eternal, all clean,
Is His worship serene: (The heathen's foul rites are of blood and of lust,)
God's judgments are true —
Ever old, ever new — They are strictly, divinely, eternally just.
More should these be desired
Than treasures admired Of gold or of jewels. His statutes, decrees.
More than honey are sweet.
More with dulcor replete, Than droppings of honeycombs, fresh from the bees.
Thy servant with care,
With praise and with prayer, Observeth Thy laws and Thy precepts, O Lord !
For,' in keeping them fast.
From the first to the last. Is fullness of recompense, plenteous reward.
Oh ! who can discern How oft in his turn, He hath thoughtless, transgressed — wander'd heedless, astray?
STUDIES AND CONFERENCES. 727
From each hidden offence • My secret soul cleanse, And purge all unrecognized failings away.
Thy servant, Lord, spare
From the stranger's false snare: From the sway of idolaters, godless and proud,
For, free from their stain,
I shall blameless remain, No grievous transgression my spirit shall cloud.
Even thus, shall each word
Of my mouth, gracious Lord, And my heart's meditation before Thee appear
Ever pleasing and meet.
Everlastingly sweet To Thee, my Redeemer, my Helper most dear !
E. C. D.
Psalm XXIL
The Lord God is my Shepherd, With gentle rule He leads To pastures naught can jeopard,' Where me He guards and feeds. Supplying all my needs.
'Mid green and tender grasses He wills me to abide ; In restful, watered places, He nurtures me beside The pure refreshing tide.
He hath, restoring, fed me, Revived my soul's dull flame ; In righteous ways hath led me With high and holy aim. For sake of His blest Name.
Yea, tho', 'mid gloom constraining, I walk Death's valley drear, If Thou my steps sustaining, Beside me dost appear — No evils will I fear.
728
THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
With Thee, my Shepherd, near me To nerve my trembling feet, Thy rod, Thy staff shall cheer me With comfort sure and sweet. Until the shades retreat.
Thou hast for me appointed A feast my foes may see ; My head Thou hast anointed: My cup, o'erflowing free. How goodly 'tis to me !
Thy mercies ever yearning Shall follow me always; And to Thy house returning, I there shall dwell with praise — Dwell there for endless days.
E. C. D.
THE PRESENT STATUS OF OALENDAE EEIORM.
The Fifth International Congress of Chambers of Com- merce held its sessions this year in Boston, Mass., 24-28 Sep- tember. First amongst its agenda was a Communication by the President of the Congress, M. Louis Canon-Legrand, on " Fixing the date of Easter, and the Reform of the Calendar". As the chambers of commerce have formally taken hold of the subject (at Prague in 1908) and seem determined not to let go of it, the action of the latest Congress is of interest. The President distributed his detailed communication in the form of a pamphlet. It appears in an English translation, however, in the Boston Chamber of Commerce News (Spec- ial Edition, 25 September). From it we quote:
In 1907, the German delegates on the permanent committee at- tending the meeting at Ostend proposed to enter on the order of the day of our Congress the question of the reduction of the varia- bility of Easter. . . .
The question was raised at the Prague Congress in 1908. . . The two years which elapsed between 1908 (Prague) and 1910 (Lon- don) allowed all our associations to study this question, and at the London Congress we had a number of papers. . . .
STUDIES AND CONFERENCES. 729
The original question, as proposed at Ostend, to reduce the varia- bility of the date of Easter, became transformed into that of fixing the date of Easter, and to this was added the reform of the cal- endar. ...
The President sketches various suggested reforms, and re- marks : " We welcome all these suggestions without favoring any one to the detriment of the others." He then notes the resolutions of the London Congress (1910) favoring (a) the establishment of a fixed international calendar and (b) an in- ternational agreement establishing a fixed date for Easter.. That London Congress further instructed its Permanent Com- mittee " to obtain an initiative on the part of some govern- ment to convoke for this twofold purpose an official diplo- matic conference ". The Swiss government undertook this in- itiative, which contemplated inviting the various govern- ments of Europe to send representatives to an international conference, so that expressions of opinion and discussions thereon might be had, without any binding result. The Amer- ican governments have not as yet been sounded upon this question of an international conference.
At this point the matter becomes of great interest to Cath- olics— the President remarking:
It is necessary to say a few words regarding the Holy See. The Swiss government, having no official representation at the Vatican,, was unable to act directly, but is of the opinion, with the majority of those interested in this question, that the reform of the calendar is not practically realizable except with the assent of the Holy See, since the question was largely that of fixing the dates of religious^ holidays.
We have therefore sounded officially the attitude of the Holy See.
We know, from a reliable source, that the Holy See has submitted the question of the reform of the calendar for the consideration of the Congregation of Rites. It is stated further that this considera- tion would probably be quite lengthy, since it would give rise to an investigation throughout all Christian countries. We have, of course, never expected that so large a question could be solved quickly. Wfr can utilize most advantageously the considerable time which will still be occupied with diplomatic delays; we must arouse public opinion. No innovation can be imposed on the public if the public does not accept it. We must prepare the public for the problem;.
.^^O ^^^ ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
we must arouse and create public opinion. For this reason the Bureau has suggested to the delegates to the Permanent Committee to work in their respective countries in support of the principle of •calendar reform, either by petitions of considerable magnitude, or by means of replies to interpretations on the subject.
The propaganda is a slow one, but appears to be a steady ■one. The brief historical review given above shows the gene- sis and spread of the idea; but the most significant recent illus- tration of the result of the propaganda is the action of the Seventh Congress of Chambers of Congress of the British Empire (ii June, 1912), which '' passed unanimously a favor- able resolve ". The President attaches great importance to this action, " because it emanates from countries spread over the entire globe and representing a great variety of peoples, habits and customs ".
The President's communication would fill four pages, but enough has been extracted to show the status of the move- ment when the Boston Congress opened its sessions, 24 vSep- tember. Among the speeches made there, was one by the chairman of the London Chamber of Congress, wholly in ap- proval ; another by the representative of the Vienna Chamber of Commerce, who declared that " all important factors in Germany have agreed that the Easter holidays should be set for a definite date and that a uniform calendar should be in- troduced for the entire world ", etc. A letter from the Chinese delegates was read, approving the reform.
From the remarks of the President at this session, it would appear that Switzerland had not made much progress in its proposed calling of an international conference — for the President uses the future tense (the Swiss government " will call for an international political conference").
So far there is nothing said or done which should make a Catholic feel uneasy. Indeed, the Swiss government appears to be properly careful of all the proprieties in respect of con- sulting the Holy See, without whose concurrence the scheme is, it considers, hopeless and impracticable.
The President, who had noted this fact in his communica- tion to the Congress, has meanwhile heard something which lieads him to say :
STUDIES AND CONFERENCES. 73 1
Now, as regards the religious question I have a few words to say. It is obvious that what we are doing does not go against any re- ligious conviction; we respect all convictions; but we hold that all religions are interested to have a uniform calendar and can so ar- range it. This is what we think, we merchants and business men, while respecting at the same time all religions.
Furthermore I have just received from one of my German col- leagues a notice which is supposed to have come from the German Embassy at Rome to the Chancellory at Berlin, saying that it would appear that the Roman Curia, as well as the Greek Orthodox Church, would not be disposed to consider the question.
It would seem then — we simply have a notification coming from Germany — that at Rome, as in Greece, there is not a present dispo- sition to consider the matter. That does not prevent us, however, from confirming it with our vote. We do not wish to be disagree- able to anyone, we respect all convictions, bu* we insist on saying, between business men and merchants, that it is desirable to have a fixed Easter and a uniform calendar.
He then requested the delegates who were favorable to this view to raise their hands. The Report says : " General rais- ing of hands ", and the President thinks that " in these condi- tions we may consider that the Fifth Congress held in Boston unanimously confirms what has been decided at the London Congress ".
The last paragraph quoted from the address of the Presi- dent is the first " disagreeable " note we have heard in respect of the religious side of the question of calendar reform. Is M. Louis Canon- Legrand a mere doctrinaire, or is he really one of those " merchants and business men " he several times refers to? Besides being president of the International Con- gress, he is president of its Permanent Committee; he is also president of the Federation of the Commercial and Industrial Associations of Belgium; he is president of the Chamber of Commerce of Mons ; and, lastly, be is president of the Provin- cial Council of Hainaut. Apparently, he is intensely inter- ested in the question of calendar reform because of his com- mercial relationships, and not because of any religious, or anti-religious, bias. If the attitude of the Holy See be that which the German Embassy is credited with publishing, those who are interested in sustaining the negative position of the Holy See might champion appropriately the non-religious
y^2 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
calendar suggested by Professor Alexander Philip, which in no wise affects the question of Easter, but confines itself merely to a civil regulation of the lengths of the months. If the agitation or propaganda of the Chambers of Commerce should gain great headway, so as to menace the status desired by the Holy Father, possibly the month-reform of the pro- posed civil calendar might offer a satisfactory compromise. This, at all events, is the thought of Mr. Philip, in a letter (dated 7 August, 191 2) to the present writer:
The President of the Swiss Confederation has intimated that his government will not proceed with the proposed Convention un- less it is to be attended by representatives of the Pope and the Rus- sian government. I attach little seriousness to the latter because Russia has not our calendar at present, but obviously a Conference affecting the Gregorian calendar wanting some representative from the successor of Gregory XIII would be incomplete. That cuts both ways. I hope nothing will be proposed [in the Boston Congress] which would incur the censure of the Pope. On the other hand, I trust the Holy Father will not unnecessarily stand aside. . . .
Now, the reorganization of the monthly calendar is the first and necessary step. It would not require to be retraced, whichever of the various suggestions were adopted for further advance later. It is complete in itself and it, by itself, would enable many simplifica- tions not only in the departments indicated by me, of Accountancy, Banking, etc., but in all departments of human activity where future and recurring arrangements require to be pre-arranged. Hence I think the clergy have a real and genuine interest in promoting this reform, quite apart from the consideration that if this change ( which is embodied in the Harcourt Bill) were carried, the risk of any further step involving an attack on the Church would be removed. Let the Churches help in the realization of a normal secular cal- endar. Then the remainder will be so clearly within their domain that none will venture to act against or without them. Such, I am certain, is the wise course, and as no unfriend of Ecclesiastical rights, I hope the Church will realize the position in good time. For the Church, the Calendar has always, even in pre-Christian times, been a vital matter. ...
Altogether, the agitation does appear to be one made, not against any religious traditions or convictions, but in favor of a civil or commercial reform of the calendar. Throughout the discussions of the subject, the commercial and civil better-
STUDIES AND CONFERENCES. jxx
ments sought have been exclusively emphasized; and the re- ligious side of the question — one which could not be ignored —came into the discussion, not as its prime motive, but rather as a circumstance demanding most careful consideration. Into the hidden motives of men it is not easy, at all times, to pierce. But the outward, superficial activities appear to be, in this matter of calendar reform, sufficiently innocent of malicious purpose.
H. T. Henry.
THE PEOPER ABBKEVIATION OP THE WOED " MONSIGNOE,"
To the Editor, The Ecclesiastical Review.
Every now and then we are called to account for the abbreviation of the word " Monsignor ". Sometimes the contraction " Mgr." is complained of as stupid or silly. Other times we are advised that " Msgr." is incorrect and ought not to appear in a book called offi- cial. Several times during the past few months it has been sug- gested that we place the matter before the Reverend Editor of the Ecclesiastical Review and ask him to give his opinion on the subject. To the Editor of the Directory the abbreviation " Mgr." has always seemed somewhat odd, standing as it does for manager. We can not however take it upon ourselves to alter the abbreviation. If some light were thrown on the subject by an authority, it might lead the Right Reverend Bishops and Chancellors, who surely read the Review, to agree on some suggestions and changes.
In the Anmiario Pontificio for 1912 or the Gerarchia Cattolica the abbreviation for Monsignor is " Monsig.", whilst in other Roman publications it is sometimes " Mons." Which, in your opinion, is the correct abbreviation, and which ought to be used in this country?
Jos. H. Meier, Editor, Kenedy's Catholic Directory.
Resp. Recognized English custom uses the abbreviation Mgr, for Monsignor. There is nothing incongruous in this custom. The fact that " Mgr." stands likewise for " man- ager " in our system of literal abbreviation, makes it no more objectionable than the use of " A. M." for Master of Arts (artium magister) because "A. M." also stands for forenoon (ante meridiem). We can not imagine the reader of the abbreviation " Rt. Rev. Mgr." mistaking it for any thing else
734 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
than what it is intended for, since such a phrase as Right Rev- erend Manager is hardly conventional.
The Italian form of abbreviation is no criterion for Eng- lish readers, since we do not ordinarily use the Italian form of the word " Monsignore " (with the final e). Moreover, in Italian brachygraphy the form " Mgr." stands for " Ma- gister", and its use for " monsignore " might therefore easily mislead, since both ecclesiastical titles are applicable to- priests in Latin countries. Italian writers use three forms of abbreviation in documents for " Monsignore ", viz. MonS,. Mos, and M — S.^
For English-speaking countries " Mgr." is the most ap- approved form, and the one adopted in the English and Irish Ecclesiastical Directories, in Sir Francis Burnand's Catholic- Who's Who, and in such authorities as the Century Diction- ary, Standard Dictionary, A uthor and Printer, etc.
DAILY COMMUNION AND PKIESTS' BETEEATS.
To the Editor, The Ecclesiastical Review.
The yearly retreat of priests, made by order of the Ordi- naries in many dioceses, is for the purpose of renewing and strengthening the priest's spirit. He is, according to the Apostle, " the dispenser of the mysteries of God ". If our Catholic people knew that the priests during their retreats not only abstain from saying Mass, but through a firmly es- tablished custom of Jansenistic origin also refrain from going to Holy Communion, they would be greatly surprised and puzzled.
But such are the facts. The priests, who are commanded by Mother Church to exhort the faithful " often and with great zeal " to daily Communion, are compelled to go through a week of spiritual starvation, the personal and universal harm of which can not be offset by any series of sublime lec- tures and meditations. Any gentleman will offer his visitor, especially when he has called him from a long distance, some kind of food. The priest is called to the retreat, but his daily spiritual food is not even offered to him. Such is the case in most, if not all, retreats of priests in this country. Mgr. A. de
^ See Dizionario di Abbreviature latine ed italiane, Cappelli.
STUDIES AND CONFERENCES. n^e
Waal of Rome wrote me some time ago: " The Sisters to^ whom I give retreats go to Holy Communion every morning, and our priests say Mass every day during their retreats."
The Action Eticharistique (October, 191 2) speaking of this matter says: " I regret that during our ecclesiasticar retreatsr the priests are expected to abstain from Holy Communion. At no time is the need of graces greater, nor the disposition- better in those who are of good will. Is it not in place here to- remind the director of such retreats, who practically forbids Holy Communion to all, that he oversteps his rights? He arrogates to himself an advice which only the confessor has a right to give to his individual penitent. He sins in a double way against article 5 of the Decree of 1905 : confessors, how- ever, are to be careful not to dissuade anyone from frequent and daily Communion, provided that he is in the state of grace and approaches with a right intention. In a good num- ber of dioceses in France — in Belgium in all dioceses — the- priests communicate freely.
Would it be out of place or asking the impossible, if our bishops were asked to provide that Holy Communion be dis- tributed at the community Mass every morning during the- priests' retreats, so that all who are willing may feel that they are welcome at the railing? Let us also hope that the time- may not be far off, when ways and means may be found, so- that priests may say Mass every morning during their re- treats. Where there is a will, surely there will be found a way.
L. F. SCHLATHOELTER. Troy, Missouri.
EFnOIENOY OP MODEEN SEMINAEY EDUOATION.
To the Editor, The Ecclesiastical Review.
What seems to me an important question, suggested by some re- cent articles in the Review^ is this: Is the American young priest,, the product of the latest improvement in seminary education, equal' or in any respect superior to his brother in the sacred ministry of fifteen or of twenty years ago? We hear the assertion on every side- that he is not so well equipped in the essentials of his work, that his. zeal is of the superficial kind or of that quality which looks to pro- motion chiefly, whilst he is much more exacting in his demands for- material comforts and rights than were his predecessors. If this be-
736
THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
true it is a serious matter, the cause of which ought to be inquired into not only by the directors of our seminaries but by the pastors who are expected to support ecclesiastical institutions at considerable sacrifice and expense. Would it not be advisable to invite discus- sion of the question in order to see what truth there is in the vaunted progress in methods of ecclesiastical education on the one hand, and in the common report on the other, that our young clergy are lacking considerably in the missionary and apostolic spirit, from which neither the regular nor secular priest can dispense himself justly? I do not sign my name to this communication, for the reason that, if it were known to my neighbors, I might seem to criti- cize local conditions.
CONNATUS.
THE ESSENTIAL PEESENOE OF THE MATTER TOE OONSEOEATION.
The discussion in this number of the Review regarding the valid consecration of a host that is placed outside the corporal is typically suggestive of the cavilling scrupulosity to which an exaggerated importance given to theological pronounce- ments at times leads, where common sense or reason should be the guide. We have no hesitation in the present case in ex- pressing our sympathy with the view taken by Father Patrick Cummins. Setting aside for the moment the otherwise useful refinements of scientific or systematic theology, and taking the stand of the Patristic teachers who had neither St. Ray- mund nor St. Alphonsus, nor Lehmkuhl nor Marc, to formu- late their scruples, we would say that the essential require- ment in the case of consecration, namely that of the materia certa, praesens, prope posita, is verified whenever the host is on the altar within sight and knowledge of the celebrant. The latter intends to consecrate the host which he assumes to be on the corporal. Whether it lies on the corporal (as normally it should) or within ten (or, as D'Annibale thinks, even within twenty) feet, matters little if these conditions are verified.
OHOIOE OP A DIOOESAN PATEON.
Qu. Is the Ordinary at liberty to select as " Patronus Dioecesis " or " loci " a saint distinct from the titular of his cathedral? In the case about which I am inquiring the latter is an Irish saint whose feast-day does not particularly appeal to the German, Slav, and
STUDIES AND CONFERENCES.
m
•^^other nationalities which are represented in large proportion in these parts. My idea would be to designate as a separate " Patronus loci " or " dioecesis " an American saint, since we have a number of ;such in our Office recited by all the clergy. Would it be allowable to choose the Venerable John Nepomucene Neumann,' whose claim to heroic sanctity appears to have been well established, although the process of his canonization has not yet been completed? His having been a bishop in the United States, and his being both an American citizen and an immigrant from the Austrian country whence come so many of our Catholic people at the present time, would have a good effect in unifying the different nationalities with which a bishop in this country has to deal. After all, religion and the worship of the Church to which all these people belong is the best way to bring about that unity which we all desire.
Resp. The election of a " Patronus loci " or " dioecesis ", to be liturgically recognized, is not within the power or facul- ties of a bishop, but requires the ratification of the entire dio- "cese in a synod.^ The choice must moreover be reported to the Sacred Congregation and be approved by the same.
A similar decree forbids the choice of any but canonized saints as " Patroni ", save for localities in which for special reasons the Church permits a limited cultus of certain " beati- fied " saints closely connected with the localities. The reason for this restriction is that the Church exercises a final or de- finitive judgment of her '* magisterium infallibile " only in the last act of canonization.^
THE OONPITEOK IN THE OASE OF THE "BENEDIOTIO APOSTOLIOA" AFTER EXTEEME UNOTION.
Qu. Must the Confiteor always be repeated before giving the final indulgence after Extreme Unction? I was taught so; but it is very awkward in case the priest has to administer the last Sacra- ments to a number of patients in a hospital ward. I should think the rubrics do not oblige under such circumstances, especially when time urges.
Resp. In the first place the Confiteor and Prayers pre- scribed for the administration of Extreme Unction need be
1 See Decretum pro Patronis in posterum eligendis, S. R. C, 23 March, 1630.
2 Conf. Deer, super Cultu Beatis praestando, S. R. C, 27 Sept., 1659.
73^
THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
said but once for a number of patients in the same room. Only the formula of anointing is repeated for each individu- ally. Then, " si immineat necessitas conferendi unum post aliud immediate, licere semel in casu." Hence in the above case the " Absolutio Apostolica " may be given without re- peating the Confiteor (S. C. O., in Quebec, i September, 1851).
ANOINTING or THE PEET.
Qu, In anointing the feet at Extreme Unction, a priest of a Re- ligious Order, whom I saw administering the Sacrament lately, anointed the sole of the foot first and then the upper part near the instep. I had never seen this before, as the custom with us as incul- cated in the seminary has been to anoint merely the upper side of each foot. Is there any warrant in the rubrics for the double anoint- ing?
Resp. The common rule taught by Baruffaldi, Billuart and others, and approved by general practice, is to anoint the upper part of the instep, " ad pedes, in parte superiore ". St. Alphonsus, following the prescription of St. Charles laid down in the Acts of the Church of Milan, would have the unction applied to the soles of the feet, in plantis. Many priests, in order to reconcile both views, anoint the sole and then the instep. The Sacred Congregation, when asked which was the proper way, answered Nihil innovandum (S. R. C, 27 August, 1836). This means that where there is a defi- nite custom it is to be observed ; otherwise one is free to choose without scruple.
]6ccle8fa8tical Xfbrar^ XTable*
EEOENT BIBLE STUDY.
1. The Sixto- Clementine Vulgate. Was the Sixtine Vulgate really intended and issued as an authentic or authoritative edition of Sacred Scripture? The errors of this edition were many. Did Sixtus V promulgate the Bull whereby such an edition, despite its mistakes, should become the authentic Bible of the Latin rite? In 1907, Monsignor Baumgarten ^ insisted that the fact of the promulgation was beyond the shadow of a doubt. Sixtus V had not only published the Sixtine Bible, but had authoritatively imposed it upon the faithful as a final and authentic edition of the Vulgate. There had been no idea of a later and more accurate edition. The errors of the 1590 edition were not avowed, as Cardinal Bellarmin, in his famous preface to the Clementine Vulgate, would lead us to suppose. And how did Monsignor Baum- garten make good his opinion? He had actually found the identical Bull of promulgation "Eternus ille". It was stowed away in the Vatican archives of Sant Angelo. The very text of this original Bull of Sixtus V on his edition of the Vulgate was now printed in Biblische Zeitschrift.'^ The evi- dence seemed overwhelming. On the reverse side of the last page of the Bull was the written testimony of the Magister Cursorum, Pompeius Euerra, to the fact that, on 10 April, the Bull had been posted upon the doors of the Lateran basilica. Such posting was then the form of promulgation. If this written testimony were true, the denial of the promul- gation would be gratuitous and useless.
The worth of the witness of Euerra does not seem to be such as Monsignor Baumgarten deems it to be. Fr. Xavier Marie Le Bachelet, Professor of Theology in the Jesuit Scho- lasticate of the Provinces of France and Lyons at Ore Place in England, unhesitatingly threw that witness out of court. ^ As
1 " Die VerofTentlichung der Bulle * Eternus ille coelestium ' vom i Marz, 1590," in Biblische Zeitschrift, v. 189-191.
2 " Das Original der Konstitution * Eternus ille coelestium ' vom i Marz, 1590," Bibl. Zeit., v. 337-351-
3 Bellarmin et la Bible Sixto-CUmentine, etude et documents inedits. Beau- chesne, Paris, 1911; and Etudes, 20 March, 1911.
y^o 1'HE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
the most thorough and intensive student of Bellarmin now living/ Le Bachelet deserves a hearing. Of course, he is bent on freeing the great cardinal from the charge of false- hood. This charge is commonplace in Protestant writings on the Vulgate, was made by those opposed to the beatification of the Venerable Servant of God, and is now and again put forth by Catholics. Recently the Abbe Turmel ^ scored Bel- larmin as at any rate insincere when he wrote, in the preface to the now extant Clementine Vulgate: " Quod cum jam csset excusum, et ut in lucem emitteretur idem Pontifex [Six- tus V] operam daret, animadvertens non pauca in sacra biblia praeli vitio irrepsisse, quae iterata diligentia indigere vide- rentur, totum opus sub incudem revocandum censuit atque decrevit." These statements Le Bachelet defends as sincere and truthful. The single witness of Euerra does not decide the dispute against Bellarmin.
Monsignor Baumgarten again took issue with the defenders of the Cardinal.^ He traced forty copies now known of the Sixtine Vulgate — eight in Rome, seven elsewhere in Italy, rseven in Germany, four in Austria, eight in England, three in Paris, one in St. Petersburg, one in Madrid, one in New Tork. Le Bachelet admits that the Sixtine Vulgate was pub- lished. The issue is not over the publication of the book, but the promulgation of the Bull whereby that book was authori- tatively decreed to be the authentic edition of the Latin Vul- gate. Monsignor Baumgarten cites the periodical Avvisi di Roma for 1590, as it follows the current history of the Bull and the Bible of Sixtus. The data are most interesting. On 2 May are announced the publication of the Sixtine Vulgate and its distribution to the Cardinals and chief members of the Pontifical Court. On 3 June we learn that twenty-five briefs and Bibles were sent to the princes and sovereigns of Catholic countries the 29th of May ; and that, in the brief to tthe emperor, Sixtus spoke of his constitution as already issued
* See his Votum Bellarmini de Immaculata B. V. M. Conceptione, Paris, 'igoS; Bellarmin avant son Cardinhlat, Paris, 1911; the article on Bellarmin 'in Dictionnaire de Theologie Catholique, Paris, 1903 ; together with many ;^articles in Etudes.
^ Revue du Clerge Fran^ais, I Dec, 1904, 15 Jan., 1907.
^ Die Vulgata Sixtina von isgo und ihre Einfilhrungsbulle. Aktenstiicke cind Untersuchungen, Miinchen, 191 1. 1
ECCLESIASTICAL LIBRARY TABLE. 74 r
{iam edita not promulgata) whereby the Sixtine edition? was made authoritative. On 22 August the Bull " Eternus- ille coelestium " is announced as published ; a resume of its contents is given. On 27 August the death of Sixtus is re- corded and the sale of the Bible and of the Bull is suspended- This is all most useful in our study ; but it is not the last word- There can be no doubt but the Bible was printed and dis- tributed and sold. It is just as clear that the Bull " Eternus- ille coelestium" was actually printed. Was it promulgated? Before 25 August, the day on which Sixtus died, was the Bull affixed to the doors of the Lateran or did the Pope withhold: the promulgation because he intended a later and more cor- rect edition? We have a witness for each side — Euerra for promulgation, Bellarmin for non-promulgation of the Bull.
Other witnesses to the promulgation there are not. As to- the two copies of the Bull that are in Rome, they only prove the admitted fact of the printing and sale of the Bull. One of these copies, that in the Vatican archives, has the signature of the prodatary and of the secretary. This formality would be important were both signatures authentic ; but Le Bachelet shows that the Cardinal Prodatary has not signed, the sec- retary, M. Vestrius Barbianus, has written both signatures.'' The absence of an authentic signature of the Cardinal Pro- datary is significant. More significant still is the absence of the usual formalities from this Bull as it stands in the collec- tion of the Vatican archives entitled Lettere ai Principi, t. xxii. The two documents that precede and the two that fol- low are all signed by more witnesses than the secretary, and all contain testimony of registration " apud Marcellum Secre- tarium " and of promulgation. Why are these usual formali- ties absent only from the Bull " Eternus ille " ? No other reason can be supposed save that of Bellarmin — the Bull wa;? never promulgated.
The data provided by the A vvisi throw no new light upon our question. Le Bachelet had already ^ published the despatches; of Olivares to Philip II, which contained all that the Avvisi announce and more, to wit, the intention of Sixtus V, before
■^ J^tudes, 5 Oct., 1912, page 71.
8 Bellarmin et la Bible Sixio-Clementine, pp. 79 ff-. 188 ff.
742 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
the 28 May, to make the Sixtine Bible the authoritative and final edition of the Vulgate. For Olivares writes: " Que no avia de aver otra biblia de aqui adelante " (p. 194). Indeed, in the process of beatification of the Venerable Servant of God {Positio, 1 712), everything was admitted which Mon- signor Baumgarten has so assiduously striven to make good : *' Licet daremus permissum fuisse a Sixto, ut sua editio pub- lice prostaret ac venderetur, non ex hoc sequitur quod Bulla Sixti praefixa solemniter sit publicata, quia solemnitas quae de more adhibetur, in publicatione Bullarum, non consistit in solo permissu superiorum, ut illae jam impressae vendantur, vel seorsim, vel simul cum opere ad quod referuntur et cum quo conjunctae sunt." Moreover, in examining the witness of the A wist, Le Bachelet scores a good point. Monsignor Baumgarten had cited the periodical as saying on the 22 and 25 August, 1590, " finalmente h uscita la BoUa," " at last the Bull has appeared ". There might be reference to promulga- tion, did not the Avvisi in each number add two very im- portant words omitted by Monsignor Baumgarten, " final- mente e uscita la BoUa in istampa,*' " at last the Bull has ap- peared in print ".
When all the evidence in favor of promulgation has been sifted there remains only the witness of Euerra, the Magister Cursorum. Against this sole witness, Fr. Le Bachelet sets: I. the authority of Bellarmin in the preface to the Clementine Vulgate; 2. the authority of the cardinals who agreed to his explanation of the intention of Sixtus; 3. a letter of Fr. Alber, Assistant of Germany, who in 1610, stated that the Bull had never been promulgated because it had never been registered in chancery; 4. the word of many cardinals given to Bellar- min in 1591 ; 5- the witness of Fr. Azor, who was of the time of Sixtus V and, in a public disputation in the Roman Col- lege, denied the value of Euerra's certificate of promulga- tion, explaining that this certification was done in anticipa- tion so as to expedite the printing of the Bull ; 6. the anony- mous " Particula praefationi Sacrorum Bibliorum inserenda." Herein we read of Sixtus V : " Biblicos ipse libros quasi pri- vatim excudendos curavit . . . ut postea maturius de toto ne- gotio deliberare, atque Vulgatam editionem prout debebat publicare possit." Monsignor Baumgarten deems this state-
ECCLESIASTICAL LIBRARY TABLE. 743
ment of Fr. Azor to be mere gossip ; and throws out the wit- ness of the anonymous " Particula " as the work of Toledo and consequently prejudiced. This is a gratuitous assump- tion. Fr. Le Bachelet shows that the witness is that of An- gelo Rocca, the chief collaborator of Sixtus V in the publica- tion of his Bible. This opinion had already been expressed by Prat ^ and Nisius.^^ The reasoning of Le Bachelet does not convince the author of the Bulletin in Rivue Biblique, April, 1912; and may be equally ineffective with others; it will, at any rate, show that the charge of insincerity in his preface to the Clementine Vulgate has not been clearly made good against Bellarmin.
2. Archeology, a. New Hittite Inscriptions. The Cornell Expedition to Asia Minor has published the second part of the first volume of its Travels and Studies in the Nearer East (Ithaca, 191 1 ). Among the Hittite inscriptions which it contains are two that Dr. Sayce, Professor of Assyriology in the University of Oxford, considers to be most important. These are Gurun inscriptions which show that Khattu-kanis, King of Carchemish, extended his power so far North as Gurun. The Cornell photograph of the Beacon Stone, Nishan Tash, at Boghaz-Keui, convinces Dr. Sayce ^^ that it was once covered with Hittite inscriptions. These cannot be deciphered now, because of the weathered condition of the monument.
b. Excavations at 'Ain Shems. The Palestine Exploration Fund, after its most successful excavations at Gezer, has been at work, since April last, at 'Ain Shems, the almost certain 5ite of the Biblical Beth Shemesh. Mr. Macalister has ac- cepted the chair of archeology in Trinity College, Dublin; his leadership will be missed by the Fund. Dr. Duncan Mac- kenzie, co-worker with Sir Arthur Evans in the excavations of Knossos in Crete, will conduct the new campaign. The outlook is encouraging. No nearby villages nor insurmount- able cemeteries will obstruct the pick and shovel ; nor will the inevitable wely, a sanctuary in honor of the dead, cry out harivi, " Keep off ", as the most interesting finds come within
» " La Bible de Sixte Quint," ttudes, Sept., 1890.
10 " Zur Geschichte der Vulgata," Zeitschrift fur katholische Theologie, 191a.
^1 Expository Times, Nov., 19 12.
744 THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
reach. The excavations at Lachis, Tell es-Safy and Gezer brought to light much that had to do with other than Israel- itish antiquities. These strongholds were ever able to with- stand the onslaught of Israel, and probably held out against: her domination until the era of the Macchabees. Not so Beth Shemesh. Here was a frontier outpost of Israel from earliest times, a protection against Philistine intrusion. In place of the quarterly statement which had hitherto been published, merely a current account of the work appeared last year in the Palestine Exploration Fund's Quarterly Statement. The policy will hereafter be to issue an annual statement of the results of the excavations at 'Ain Shems. In this wise will there be less danger of hurry and hazard in the conjectures of the explorers. Thus far the fortified town has been pretty ac- curately located and limited, a general idea has been formed as to the chronological layers to be looked for in the ruins,, and considerable booty has been got out of the nearby ne- cropolis. In its most ancient portion, the town's walls are- now seen to have been massive and megalithic; they belongs Mr. Mackenzie thinks, to the age of bronze. The tombs af- ford evidence of ante-Semitic life as early as the troglodytes. These cave-dwellers can be traced in the neolithic and earliest bronze implements found in situ — records, the excavators say,.. of the third millenium before Christ. A hypogeum, or under- ground tomb, of the neolithic period shows such signs of funeral sacrifices as does the Crematorium of Gezer; it was later used in the days of Egyptian rule, as is clear from the scarabs and statues picked up therein ; and yet shows no sign either of Babylonian or of Aegean influence.
c. Writing in the time of Moses. They that defend the tra- ditional position of Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch- sometimes go into the side-question of the script employed" by the scribes of the great lawgiver. Was it alphabetic or ideogrammatic ? Phenician, Assyrian or Egyptian? Pro- fessor A. S. Zerbe ^^ attempts to prove that the Phenician alphabet was known as early as the time of Moses and was used in the composition of the Pentateuch. The last redac- tion of the five books he assigns to an age not much later than-
^2 The Antiquity of Hebrew Writing and Literature, or Problems in Penia- teuchal Criticism. Cleveland, igil.
ECCLESIASTICAL LIBRARY TABLE. 745;
that of Josue. Dr. Sayce holds that all archeological evidence is against the use of Phenician script in Palestine before the- time of David. If this be true, then cuneiform writing was most likely employed by the scribes of Moses. At times we might clear up difficulties of our Massoretic text by this work- ing hypothesis of the use of an ideogrammatic or a syllabic: script. Take for instance the names of the kings whom Abra- ham defeated about 2100 B. C, as they are preserved to us in the fourteenth chapter of Genesis. These names may have been preserved in a cuneiform clay cylinder. Later on the Jew- ish scribe, who transliterated the chapter in Phenician script,, may have handed down to us mutilated forms of the names. In this way, Ellasar was written for al Larsa. Ammu-rapi, the Amorite name of the Babylonian Khammu-rabi, was mis- written Amraphel. How this? Because we know that the same cuneiform sign stood for both pil and pi. The scribe may have read Am-rapll for Am-rapi or Ammu-rapi.
d. The Sinking of Philae. By next January the work of the great dam at the first cataract of the Nile will be completed. The enlargement of this Assuan dam will hold back such an amount of water as to submerge almost all of the splendid temple of Isis upon the lovely island of Philae. We shall regret the loss of the Hall of Columns, the ruin of its massive shafts and their beautiful painted capitals, and the ultimate tumbling down of the restored temple. The Egyptian gov- ernment has underpinned and braced the buildings, but they are set up with very porous stone. The water will gradually soak in and crumble the lower portions of the stone-work; it will soak up above the surface-level and bring down the huge- blocks that make the roof. The need of the people is imper- ative; the interests of archeology must yield to that need. Fortunately the buildings on Philae are of a later period and can be duplicated elsewhere in Egypt. They contain a relief of Cleopatra and her son Caesarion by Julius Caesar.
3. Interpretation. Fr. Juan G. Arintero, O.P., has issued his second volume of " Desenvolvimiento y vitalidad de la Iglesia"." A preliminary sketch of the book had appeared in La Ciencia Tomista, July and August, 191 1, and was taken to^
"^^ Evolucion Doctrinal, Salamanca, 1911.
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THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
task by L. Murillo, SJ/'^ An objective evolution of the de- posit of faith had been defended, like to that of the develop- ment of the acorn into the oak tree. " At first many truths, and these the most important, were not recognized nor ex- plicitly believed. ... To prove this fact, it were enough to recall all that it cost, even after the Council of Nicea, fittingly to formulate the fundamental dogmas of the Trinity and the Incarnation." ^^ The mistake here made is a dangerous one. We cannot admit that before the fitting definition of the [great dogmas, there was no faith in such dogmas. Such an admission would be tantamount to the admission that during the first few centuries the Incarnation was not in the con- sciousness of the Church. The consciousness of the Church was always clear in the matter of the divinity ol Christ; the consciousness of theologians was not always so clear. The definitions of Nicea, Ephesus and Chalcedon were not to clear up the consciousness of the Church — quite the reverse, these definitions would never have been, had not the consciousness 'of the Church been clear upon the dogma defined and cleared up. The definitions of the great councils in this matter of the Incarnation purposed merely to share with theologians some of the Church's clearness about the divinity of the Saviour. This clearing up of the theologians about a dogma is not an ^objective evolution of that dogma. All such evolution is sub- jective; it is as the clearing away of a mist which has pre- vented the theologians from seeing clearly. The dogma re- mains in the consciousness of the Church just what it was before the mist was cleared away, just what it was when Christ or His Holy Spirit entrusted it to the Church to have and to hold and to hand down from generation unto genera- tion. In view of the points scored by Fr. Murillo, Fr. Arin- tero has very much modified his opinion in the volume that has just appeared. However, he still holds that all the preach- ing of the New Testament preachers no more than laid the "Seed in the consciousness of the Church; and that that seed and its consequent seedling are ever evolving and evolving in the consciousness of the Church by means of religious ex-
'^* Razon y Fe, vol. 31, pp. 141, 277. ^^ Ciencia Tomista, 191 1, p. 380.
ECCLESIASTICAL LIBRARY TABLE. 'ja'j
perience. It is a dangerous theory, even though the learned Dominican protest that he is far from denying the existence of any dogma in the consciousness of the Church from its infancy/®
4. Text. The J. P. Morgan collection of Coptic Manuscripts has been listed by Dr. H. Hyvernat/^ There are fifty vol- umes chiefly in Sahidic, the Coptic of Upper Egypt, a dia- lect in which our Coptic manuscripts were singularly scarce; the collection contains also Bohairic or Lower Egypt and Fayumic or Middle Egypt MSS. Of the Old Testament books, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, i and 2 Samuel ^nd Isaiah, are represented by complete MSS.; of the New Testament books, Matthew, Mark, John, the 14 letters of Paul, I and 2 Peter, 1-3 John, are complete and Luke h in- complete. Despite the fact that these MSS. are not later than the ninth or tenth century, they will be of service in the reconstruction of the sacred text — especially so will the Sahidic MSS. be. Hitherto we have had only the Apocalypse of the books of the New Testament represented by a complete Sahidic MS. The Bohairic finds may help to solve the question of the age of the Bohairic text. Guidi and Leipoldt and others will not allow that this North Egyptian Coptic version was made earlier than the seventh century. H. C. Hoskier ^^ tries to make good the existence of the Bohairic version in the third century, its use by some of the fourth- century Egyptian writers, and the influence exercised upon Codex Sinaiticus (fourth century) by the Bohairic, Old Latin and Old Syriac versions. The kinship of Codex Sinai- ticus with the Bohairic version is commonly enough held. Hoskier's theory of polyglot exemplars is peculiar to him- self. He deems that the scribes copied from polyglots, either trilingual (Greek-Latin-Syriac) or quadrilingual (Greek- Latin-Syriac-Coptic) ; in fact, he would have it that by the close of the first century " they were using Greek and Syriac together ". An interesting, though rather peculiar text-study
i« Cf. Murillo, in Razon y Fe, Oct., 1912.
^■^ Journal of Biblical Literature, xxxi, 54-67.
'^^ Concerning the Date of the Bohairic Version: Covering a detailed exami- fiation of the text of the Apocalypse and a review of some of the writings of the Egyptian Monks. London, Quaritch, 1911, pp. viii-203.
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is that of John S. Mcintosh, A Study of Augustine's Versions- of Genesis}^ Its use will be that of a contribution to the study of St. Augustine's witness to the text of the Old Latin version of the Bible; and of an offset to the recklessness of Zycha's edition of Augustine in the Vienna Corpus Script- orum Ecclesiastic or um Latinorum. This latter editor starts out with the wrong idea, namely that Augustine used one- recension of the Old Latin version and no other version nor any text of the Bible. The result is that we are often given an edited text and not St. Augustine's original. We say that the starting-point of Zycha is wrong, because St. Augustine himself implicitly tells us that he did not keep to one recen- sion of the Old Latin ; he refers to variant versions, good and bad readings in Greek codices, and even Hebrew readings.
Walter Drum, S.J. Woodstock Collage, Maryland.
i^"A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Art and Literature in candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, De- partment of Latin." University of Chicago Press, 191 2, pp. x-130.
Criticisms anb Botes.
THE SUMMA THEOLOGIOA OP ST. THOMAS AQUINAS. Part I. Literally translated by Pathers of the English Dominican Province Vol. II. New York, Cincinnati, Chicago: Benziger Bros. 1912. Pp. 564.
THE CATHOLIC PAITH. A Compendium authorized by His Holiness Pius X. Translated by permission of the Holy See. New York, Cincinnati, Chicago: Benziger Bros. 1912. Pp. 128.
To connect in one review the Summa Theologica with an almost elementary Catechism may seem like paralleling the well-worn story •of the sermon on confession preached on St. Joseph's day because the Saint, being a carpenter, would have built confessionals were he still working at his trade. And yet not so. The Summa is the logical outcome of the Catechism and St. Thomas had novices in view when he constructed his wonderful synthesis : " consideravimus hujus doctrinae novitios," as he says. Perhaps, too, the priest at the present day could not do very much better than to take the above com- pendium of Faith and develop it for his people in the light of the truths found in parallel parts of the Summa. To the receptive 3nind there are few, if any, more suggestive sermon books than the Summa, and the preacher of the Word who will make it his con- stant companion need never be lacking in solid, nutritious food for his flock. Of course, to preach the abstract truths as they are found in St. Thomas would be worse than pedantic. They must be assimi- lated to the preacher's individuality and illustrated by story and ex- ample. Nevertheless they are truths that are readily assimilatable because they reach the depths of the spirit through the avenue of ** common sense ", — the universal possession of sound minds.
It will be noticed that the volume above is the second in course to appear. The first volume, which was published a year or more ago, and which was reviewed at the time in these pages, embodied a trans- lation of the Quaestiones de Deo Uno (I-XXVI inclusive). The volume at hand contains those de Deo Trino, de Creatione, de An- gelis, and de Operihus sex Dierum (XXVII-LXXIV). The trans- lators here, as in the preceding volume, have performed their very difficult task with uniform success. They aimed primarily at fidelity to the text and this they have on the whole attained. Here and there indeed the critical eye might look for even greater exactness: for instance, in Q. XXVII, Art. 5, in c. a., it is doubtful whether
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St. Thomas meant by " sentire " the act of " feeling ". He prob- ably means, as he usually (always?) does by "sentire", the act of sense perception; again, in the next Question, Art. 1, in the closing sentence of the corpus articuli: " in the identity of the same nature " seems to be a redundancy, which is not in the original. These blem- ishes, however, and other such, resulting from an excess of the virtue of fidelity, are of secondary, if of any, importance.
The translators have resolutely set their face against adding a. single annotation. From their own point of view they have of course in this acted wisely, though the reader, at least if unfamiliar with scholasticism, may think otherwise.
The compendium of Catholic Faith in title above is a translation, " made by special permission of the Holy See, of the Catechistno Maggiore which Pius X has prescribed for use in all the higher classes of schools in the Province of Rome." The doctrine there- fore which that catechism contains " is published with the highest authority any compendium of Catholic teaching can possess ". The translator has departed from the catechetical form, partly because the original in that form has previously been rendered into English, and partly because the positive form is more acceptable to adults. Besides, there is already an abundance of Catechisms in English. Although the same may no doubt be said of doctrinal manuals, the present compendium (which is also so worthily executed) will like- wise be welcome not only to Catholics, but, it is to be hoped, to non- Catholics, who may wish to have in a succinct form the belief and practice of the Church.
THE SODALITY OP OUR LADY STUDIED IN THE DOCUMENTS. By Father Elder Mnllan, S.J. Third edition (first in English) revised and enlarged by the author. New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons. 1912. Pp. X2V.-180 and 328.
STOEY OP THE SODALITY OP OUR LADY (PRIMA PBIMARIA). By the Rev. Edmund Lester, S.J. New York, Cincinnati, Chicago: Benziger Bros. 1912. Pp. 74.
The Sodality of Our Lady has, during its existence of over three hundred years, proved itself one of the most effective means of har- nessing to the serv'ice of God the youth who are passing from the age of childhood to that period of maturity when the sense of respon- sibility and independence begins to assert itself as part of our social existence. To-day it flourishes best among young women. Origi- nally it was designed for boys at that critical age when character
CRITICISMS AND NOTES. 751
is beginning to develop, and when conscience is awakening to the sense of duty. It was on the eve of the Annunciation, 1563, that the young Belgian Jesuit John Leunis, in the class-room of the Roman College, conceived the idea of drawing into a circle of specially devoted clients of the Immaculate Virgin Mother of Christ the young students of his class. They were to be " Knights of Our Lady ", whose duty it would be to carry out, first, in their own daily conduct, the sublime virtues of purity, of honor, and of chivalrous charity. Next they were to defend and propagate the honor of Our Lady as pattern of every noble virtue, and as Queen and Protectress of the student body. The fire enkindled in the hearts of the young boys quickly spread. Soon every Jesuit college throughout Chris- tendom had its battalion of " Knights of Our Lady ". In time the ranks of the Sodality were opened to youths and men not under Jesuit direction. Not until two hundred years later, in 1751, were affiliated branches of the Sodality for girls and women recognized by the Society. Under Leo XII in 1825 a great impetus was given to women's Sodalities of Children of Mary affiliated to the Prima Primaria of Rome.
The further development of the Sodality, its wonderful fruits shown in the long array of illustrious saints that have come from its ranks, the methods which were evolved gradually for preserving its spirit, and the favorite devotions adopted by the Children of Mary and enriched with spiritual graces from the treasury of the Church, are the subject of Father Lester's brief comment in the little Story of the Sodality of Our Lady.
Much broader in scope and with a distinctly scientific purpose is Father Elder Mullan's volume of over five hundred pages. It is of course a historical record, but one that deals with sources. In thfr first place we have a detailed Introduction containing the acts of the Holy See regarding the establishment of the Sodality, its spe- cific purpose, the means adopted for its propagation, its statutes and rules, conditions of aggregation, government, obligations of mem- bership, etc. Apart from these features and of distinctly valuable consideration is the study of the workings of the Sodality as an in- strument of education, social uplift, and moral reform. Whilst the author does not enter upon these topics in the fashion of an essayist, his volume contains all the elements for a minute study of the ques- tions connected with efforts at social reformation.
The second part of the work is purely documentary. It contains the texts of Pontifical Bulls and Briefs, Rescripts of the Sacred Con- gregations, Rules and Regulations contained in letters of the super- iors of the Jesuit Order, in the Ratio Studiorum, Among the in- structions given to the Society on the subject of Sodalities is one by
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Father General Aquaviva in which he declares that women are not to be admitted to the Sodalities, and another in which he urges that priests be encouraged to form Sodalities among themselves. Both measures were wisely suggested by the conditions of the times, that is at the end of the sixteenth century, when the Church looked to the clergy and to educated laymen for counteracting by a healthy spirit of renewed devotion to the Mother of Christ the false maxims •of the so-called reformers. The work leads up to the present day, including the pertinent documents for the year 1910. The latter are printed in the original form and language, but they are accom- panied by explanatory headings and rubrics in the vernacular. They are separately catalogued, and there is a very full index at the end of the volume.
THE OHUROH AND SOCIAL PEOBLEMS. By the Eev. Joseph Huss- lein, SJ. New York: The America Press. 1912. Pp. 211.
OATHOLIO STUDIES IN SOCIAL EEPOEM: III. The Housing Problem. Edited by Leslie A. St. L. Toke, B.A. Pp. 67. IV. The Church and Eugenics. By the Rev. Thomas Gerrard. Pp. 60. St. Louis, Mo.: B. Herder. 1912.
One can hardly escape the suggestion — is it a temptation — that we are being somewhat surfeited with discussions on Socialism. Socialism is undoubtedly growing and Socialists are untiring in their work of disseminating their theories and proposals. The antidote 'Should no doubt be furnished proportionately to the far-spreading evil. If the protagonists of error multiply their books and pamph- lets and papers by the million, the disciples of truth should mani- fest no less energy in spreading the light. Surely, surely; and so let us all join in scattering broadcast the half -million sixteen-page pamphlets that Mr. Goldstein has published, and then let us read and hand around the other brochures and more stately volumes which have been recently provided for us. Nothing better, too, than that alert little weekly sheet The Live Issue can be recom- mended for universal dissemination among the masses; and be sure to get into the hands of every thoughtful reader that up-to-date wideawake sentinel. The Common Cause. It is the very best thing for the classes. And so on.
Of course, gentle reader, if you are perfectly familiar with all this prolific book-world and you recognize that just a few ideas are forever recurring in it, the circle widening but little, bear it in mind that most people are not so well informed, and forget it not that repetita juvant.
CRITICISMS AND NOTES. jr-.
However all this may be, what is certainly calculated to do good is, in the first place, a clear statement both of the Church's attitude toward Socialism and of Catholic social ideals — generally. Next to this, and no less important, comes the presentation of practical methods of social reform. A book in which the former of these two desiderata is provided is the first of the works listed above. The author is well and favorably known to the clergy, not only through his contributions to America but also through his inspiring little pamphlet The Pastor and Socialism, which has been so widely cir- culated. The book before us embodies and develops the ideas briefly outlined in that pamphlet. It contains therefore not only a study of Socialism (including herein especially so-called " Christian Socialism") but also an outline, though brief, of Catholic social ideals. Under the title Socialism and the Church many aspects of Socialist theory and practice are weighed in the balance of Catholic principles. To say that all these topics " are fully dealt with ", as has been claimed for the book, is overstating the truth very much. Economic determinism, for instance, a universally recognized foun- -dation of Marxian or so-called scientific Socialism, is by no means " fully dealt with ". Nevertheless, for the forming of a proper estimate of the general teachings and methods of Socialists, as gath- -ered from their more authoritative writers, the summary and criti- cism are adequate. In the chapter on Christian Socialism a very good exposition of this hybrid kind of movement is given. Occa- sion is there taken to set forth the New Testament and the Patristic teachings on social life, and to show how far removed were the doc- trines and social ideals of the early Church from those advocated by Socialists at the present time. The concluding chapter, on Cath- olic Social Ideals, presents the attitude of the Church toward labor and labor organization; the Christian social system called Solidar- ism — wherein the elements of truth contained in Individualism as well as Socialism are harmoniously correlated, while their falsities and excesses are avoided — is succinctly set forth. The layman is shown his ideal in the life of Windthorst, and the priest his ideal in the life of Von Ketteler. The social mission of Catholic women is also well described. " The divine remedy " for the ills afflicting the body social and politic is seen to lie primarily in the moral order, and that in the Catholic Church. Specifically it is the Blessed Sacrament which is the soul that binds the individual human units into one living organism wherein each is for all and all is for each.
Taking the book as a whole, it is solid and relatively thorough. It is throughout stimulating both to thought and to action. While rscholarly in matter, it is pleasing and popular, in the best sense, in
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Style — a book that will be relished more by readers within the fold than by those without. In view of a second edition, it may be noted that " attention " at page 33, line 6, should read " attend- ance ", and that the rhetorical figure at the head of page 8 might be slightly altered. The dome of St. Peter's may soar : it can hardly be said to " sweep ".
Books like the foregoing are necessary to establish the true prin- ciples upon which alone the social question can be solved. Books,, however, that show how such principles should be applied, books that deal with methods of social reform in regard to special sub- jects, are no less demanded. Such are the Catholic Studies, the series of manuals edited by the Catholic Social Guild in England. Some notice of the first two numbers of the series, those namely^ treating of destitution and sweated labor respectively, has pre- viously appeared in these pages. Of the two recent numbers at hand one deals with the housing problem, the other with eugenics. The housing problem in large cities as well as in small towns and rural districts is of course discussed mainly in view of conditions prevailing in England. The opening chapter, however, on guiding principles is a small treasury of practical wisdom and experience- from which all who are interested in this at present very insistent problem, whether in England or America or elsewhere, can draw useful ideas and suggestions. The pamphlet contains likewise an interesting paper by Mgr. Benson entitled A Catholic Colony, re- printed from the Dublin Review (April, 1910). There is also a- good bibliography.
Father Gerrard's pamphlet on The Church and Eugenics is a sound, scholarly and highly interesting discussion of a subject that is to-day engrossing the minds of multitudes of thoughtful men and women outside the Church. It is quite the easiest thing in the world to pass the movement by unheeded; or next to this to deride it as a fad. There is of course not a little in the movement that is opposed to Catholic principles. But at the same time, as Father Gerrard ob- serves, there is much in it that is in harmony with Catholic prin- ciples and indeed highly conducive to the end for which the Church exists; and the object of the present manual is to sift the true from the false elements in the movement by the light of Catholic truth. So far as we know this is the first attempt by a Catholic writer to undertake this not inconsiderable task. The work has been accom- plished thoroughly and interestingly. The subject is treated from- every side, historically, scientifically, philosophically, socially, mor- ally. It is not necessary to enter into any details here. The small
CRITICISMS AND NOTES. ycc
price for which the pamphlet can be had places it within reach of all, and no priest who wishes to form a judicious, all-around esti- mate of the recent schemes for racial betterment can afford to leave this monograph unread.
KIROHLIOHES HANDLEXIKON. Ein ITaclisclilagebiicli ueber das Gesamtgebiet der Theologie und ibrer Hilfswisseaschaften. Unter Mitwirkung zablreicber Facbgelebrten, in VerbinduDg mit dem Professoren Karl Higenreiner, Jobann Bapt. Nisius, S.J., Joseph Scblecbt und Andreas Seider, berausgegeben von Prof. Miobael Bucb- berger. Zwei Baende. Muencben: AUgemeine Verlagsgesellscbaft. 1907-1912. Pp. xvi— 2072-2831.
Those who are familiar with Wetzer und Welte's Kirchenlexikon, particularly in its second edition by Cardinal Hergenroether and Dr. Kaulen, and likewise with Herder's unsurpassed Konversations- lexikon, both of which works are written by Catholic scholars and cover respectively the entire field of ecclesiastical and general knowl- edge, will no doubt ask at once what can be the purpose of a new ecclesiastical dictionary for German Catholics. The answer is that the present work fills a gap between the two great encyclopedias mentioned.
The Kirchenlexikon gives us a more or less exhaustive account of subjects that come under the rubrics of Church history, apologetics, dogmatic and moral theology, Scripture, canon law, Catholic biog- raphy, and Christian art. The Konversationslexikon on the other hand goes out of the domain of church topics and theology, and treats of all sorts of subjects, but from the Catholic viewpoint, thus counteracting the influence of reference books which misrepre- sent or neglect principles and facts in history or in science that are favorable to the Catholic Church. It covers indeed nearly all the subjects treated in Wetzer and Welte, but in more didactic and suc- cinct fashion, leaving the student to enlarge his information on such topics by reference to the larger source.
Professor Buchberger's Kirchliches Handlexikon confines itself to matters of ecclesiastical and theological science, and in this respect covers the same ground as the Kirchenlexikon, but it does so in the brief and didactic manner of the Konversationslexikon. Being a specialist reference book it devotes much more attention to subdivisions of theological science and to details in the choice of ecclesiastical matter than the more discursive theological encyclo- pedia on the one hand and the lay encyclopedia on the other. The scholarship of the compilers is guarantee for the -accuracy of the
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statements made in the Handlexikon; and whilst the circle of col- laborators is of a very wide range, the doctrinal topics indicate rigorous orthodoxy and a tone of conservative moderation in matters of philosophical and theological speculation. The clergy, for whom the work has chiefly been written, will find it a thoroughly service- able book of reference, and both a complement and a corrective of much that is to be found in our secular encyclopedias. The more than twenty-five thousand articles are all signed and indicate the breadth of specialist scholarship engaging some three hundred or more prominent writers in the theological and other schools of Ger- many. Type and bookmaking of the two volumes are excellent.
THE POET'S OHANTKY. By Katherine Bregy. B. Herder: St. Louis, Mo. Herbert and Daniel: London. 1912. Pp. 181.
There is much to recommend to the clerical reader this exquisitely ordered symposium of biographical sketches. It is a singularly truthful delineator whose hand guides the delicate pencilings which characterize for us the group of highminded souls to whom we are introduced through this handsome volume. If all of the nine poets whose miniatures we have here, were not actually ordained priests, they all possessed, without exception, a special priestly grace. Two of them — Robert Southwell and Gerard Hopkins — ^belonged to the Society of Jesus. Richard Crashaw, of whom Cowley wrote :
Poet and Saint ! to thee alone are given
The two most sacred names of earth and heaven,
and to whom we owe that perfect compendium in rhythmic language of the miracle of Cana, sometimes attributed to Dryden :
Nympha pudica Deum vidit et erubuit,
after his renunciation of Anglican orders, led the life of an eccle- siastic in the service of Cardinal Palotta and later in the solitude of the Loreto sanctuary. William Habington, the author of Castara, " seemed at one time claimed for the priesthood ", and the chaste grace of his heavenward inspirations attests that he never wholly lost the sense of association with the sanctuary. Indeed Miss Bregy seems to touch the true note of interpretation when she as- signs as the motif of his later verses " dreams of a lost vocation haunting the soul of the poet ". Of Lionel Johnson, Miss Bregy speaks in the poet's own words of Walter Pater, as one
. . . who toHed so well
Secrets of grace to tell Graciously. . . .
CRITICISMS AND NOTES. yn
and therein gives us a perfect image of the "mystical apostle of the inward life " who died all too early and sadly. Although Coventry Patmore and Francis Thompson have been more popular in the lit- erary sense of the word than any of the foregoing poets, their dis- tinctly spiritual nature, such as colors the missionary zeal of the true priest, is no less marked in them. We need only to refer to Patmore's Wedding Sermon in his Angel of the House, his Religio Poetae, and his preference of St. Bernard's " Amor Dei ". About Francis Thompson we know that " he was early sent to the vener- able Ushaw school, in half-anticipation of a priestly career ", though he lost the trail, and the sad echoes of that loss seem to come back in his wonderful The Hound of Heaven. Can we at- tribute any such or kindred qualities to the soul of Alice Meynell? " More than one meditation of her final volume (of poems)," says Miss Bregy, " suggests the influence of that immemorial treasure house of poetry and vision, the Roman Breviary."
The Poet's Chantry, for these and other reasons that counsel the cultivation of heart and mind, claims a place in the priest's library.
BETEOTHMENT AND MARRIAGE. A Canonical and Theological Treatise, with Notes on History and Civil Law. By Canon de Smet, S.T.L., Professor of Theology in the Grand SIniinaire de Binges. Eevised and greatly enlarged by the anthor. Vol. I. Translated from the French edition of 1912 by the Rev. W. Dobell. St. Louis, Mo.: B. Herder; Bruges: Charles Beyaert. 1912,
In the September number of last year we gave an exhaustive re- view of Canon de Smet's De Sponsalibus et Matrimonio. Since then the work has been translated into French, and in publishing the French edition the author claimed that it was more than a mere translation. The work was thoroughly revised and amended. The same process of improving the original has been applied to the Eng- lish translation, which thus becomes the author's latest word on the subject. It embodies the more recent decisions of the S. Con- gregation regarding the validity of the marriage contract, and also the conclusions of canonists on topics of recent discussion, such as the right of the State to sterilize its subjects, civil divorce in its relation to the Sacraments, legitimizing of offspring from natural marriages, etc. The author writes in the first place for Belgian students; hence the predominant references are to European con- ditions. The English and American legislation it to be treated separ- ately, in an Appendix to the second volume. Since the work addresses itself specially to the clergy of America and England, the English
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reader will wish that the conditions of these two countries had been considered in the body of the work, so as to take the place of the discussion of the marriage laws of Belgium. That would have in- volved new labor, of course, but it seemed to be called for, consid- ering the particular purpose of the English version, which is not monumental but practical. The value of the book as a reference work remains, however. The present first volume covers the sub- ject of Betrothment, the Nature of the Marriage Contract, its effects, properties, and conditions or regulations.
The second volume, which may be expected at an early date, will deal chiefly with the subject of matrimonial impediments and dis- pensations.
GOD: THE AUTHOR OF NATUEE AND THE SUPERNATURAL (DE DEO OREANTE ET ELEVANTE). A Dogmatic Treatise by the Rev. Joseph Pohle, Ph.D., D.D., Professor at the University of Breslau. Authorized English version based on the fifth German edition, with some abridgment and many additional references, by Arthur Preuss. B. Herder: St. Louis, Mo.: London, England, and Freiburg. 1912. Pp. 365.
This, the third volume of Dr. Pohle's Dogmatic Theology in the English version, deals with God as Creator. In the first two vol- umes the author considered God as He is in Himself. We have here the proof and explanation of the dogma of creation out of nothing; the act in its relation to the Divine Trinity; in its nature as a free act ; and the inconmiunicability of the creative power. This includes the idea of preservation as a continuous act of crea- tion, and leads to the consideration of Divine Providence. The second part of the volume treats of creation in its passive sense, dogmatic cosmology, the hexsemeron in its relation to science and exegesis, the Mosaic account of creation and physical science; an- thropology and the supernatural order through original sin. The third and last section is devoted to Angeology, the nature and en- dowments of the angelic world, the demons, and the relation of both to the human race. Dr. Preuss supplies excellent references and a good index to his translation.
APOLOGIE DU OATHOLIOISME PAR LES INOREDULES. Expose du Dogme de la Morale et du Oulte Oatholiques. Par 1' Abbe E. Angler. Paris: P. Lethielleux. 1912. Pp.317.
The French, with their subtle intuitions quickened by love that is being tried in the furnace of persecution, find reasons for faith and
CRITICISMS AND NOTES. 7 eg
'hope in the most unlooked-for places. Therefore are we getting from them apologies drawn from all sorts of sources: history, the arts, the sciences, philosophy. The volume before us adds another, based on infidelity. Unbelief is made to testify against itself. Others indeed have attempted similar feats, and in our own language we have some bouquets of fair Catholic flowers culled from Protes- tant gardens. But the book at hand is, we believe, the first en- •deavor to summon testimonies from the non-Catholic world in favor of not only the Catholic system as a whole but of every department thereof. Beginning with fundamental religion, and passing onward through theism; embracing the soul, the Bible, our Lord, the Church, worship in all its objects and instruments; our duties toward God, neighbor, and self; and including each of the seven Sacraments ; terminating with the four Novissima — to each and all these truths of faith and spiritual life witnesses from outside the pale are summoned in testimony. The witnesses number about 350 and, though not all are of equal merit, most of them are valuable and their aggregate force is striking. As someone has said of the author, he not only mounts the pulpit himself but he forces the most inveterate enemies of religion to ascend with him and give glory to God, His Christ, and His Church. The volume is unusually well indexed, and the general sources whence the individual testimonies are drawn are given as footnotes. The latter is a good feature, but it would have been still better had chapter and verse been cited. The omission of the precise sources detracts somewhat from a work that is invaluable, especially for speakers and writers.
ANK"US LITUEG-IOUS cum Introdnctione in disciplinam liturgioam. Anctore Michaele Gatterer, S.J. Editio tertia juxta novissimas rubricas emendata. Oeniponte: Pelicianus Eanch (L. Pustet). 1912. Pp. 424.
If we comment on this new edition of a volume noticed in these pages only a short time ago, it is because there is no better manual, to our knowledge, to introduce the student of liturgy in the seminary to a proper appreciation of the most practical discipline of his entire •course. It is not a book of reference so much as a text-book, and in this respect satisfies the chief demands of brevity, conciseness of ter- minology and definition, analytical grouping, and survey of the whole field of Catholic worship. Beginning with the Notiones litur- gicae, in which the principles of liturgical study are laid down, the author proceeds to give a brief history of the development of litur- gical rule, the sources of it, and the value of its obligation. Next
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we have the divisions of the ecclesiastical year, with its feasts, its calendar regulations, its separate offices and rites. The new ar- rangement «f the Breviary receives due consideration.
EXPOSITION DE LA MOKALE OATHOLIQUE SPEOIALE. Conferences de Notre-Dame de Paris. Par le E. P. M. Janvier, 0. P. Vol. I: LaPoi. Oareme 1911. Vol. II, Oareme 1912. Paris: P. LetMel- leux. 1912.
GLOIRES ET BIEUFAITS DE L'EUOHARISTIE. Par I'Abbe 8. Oonb6. Paris! P. Lethielleux. Pp. 402. 1911.
We have here two collections embodying two types of sermons both of which have their place and importance beyond the country and the language in which they were preached and are now printed. Pere Janvier's Exposition of Catholic Morals began with the Lenten conferences of Notre Dame, Paris, as far back as 1903. The emi- nent orator, aiming at doing for moral truths what his illustrious predecessor Monsabre in his Exposition of Catholic Dogma had done for dogmatic truth, laid down a deep and broad foundation embracing the whole moral constitution of man. The ultimate end, liberty, the passions, vice and virtue, law, grace — each of these sub- jects has formed the theme of successive Lents at the great Parisian Cathedral. Faith was the theme for 1911 and 1912. Accordingly we have in these two volumes a thorough exposition of the theology of Faith — the object, acts and habit, as well as the vices opposed to faith. These conferences are not of course ordinary sermons. They are rather theological treatises, wherein ideas of the great masters are elaborated and presented in that luminous and eloquent style for which the orators of Notre Dame are justly famed. Such con- ferences are seldom heard, and doubtless rightly, from our pulpits. Nevertheless they have a place even with us, at least as occasional discourses or lectures. In this connexion the prospective preacher will find them store-houses of available material. Thoroughly anal- yzed as they are, they can easily be divided up each into two or more average instructions. Each volume contains six conferences and six instructions for retreats; also an excellent analytical index of each discourse which enables the eye to take in an easy survey of the matter.
The Glories and Benefits of the Blessed Sacrament comprises a series of instructions on the Blessed Sacrament originally given at various places on various occasions. They differ therefore somewhat in length and style. They are all, however, clear-cut, thoughtful,
LITERARY CHAT. ^gj
and practical. Suggestive for one who has to preach without much preparation they will be found particularly useful as furnishin<r thoughts applicable to the devotion of the Holy Hour. **
A PEAOTIOAL GUIDE FOR SERVERS AT LOW MASS A19D BENE- DIOTION. ' Oompiled by Bernard F. Page, S.J. New York, Cin- cinnati, Chicago: Benziger Bros. 1912. Pp. 42.
Father Page's manual is in truth a "practical guide" for servers at Mass; and whilst there are quite a number of similar books, it is evident that this one has been prepared with a distinct regard for the actual need and benefit of little boys who are called to minister at the altar. Not only are the instructions explicit and clear, but they are set forth in such typographical form as to appeal simul- taneously to the intelligence and eye. Besides this the intervals in which the server is not actually engaged in ministering to the priest are filled out with suggestive little prayers concentrating and direct- ing the attention of the seiver to a proper aim during the sacred worship at Mass or Benediction. The book is handsomely made and will prove a suitable gift for school boys aspiring to serve in the sanctuary.
Xfterane Cbat
One need not be a single-taxer in order to recognize the strength of the arguments put forward by its advocates in favor of their theory. Nor need one assent to all the statements made by Mr. Fillebrown in his well-known defence of the theory in The A B C of Taxation (Doubleday, Page & Co., New York). Those who have not read this book, but who may desire to have the theory in a nutshell, can get what they want from the same author's Single Tax Catechism (C. B. Fillebrown, 77 Summer St., Boston, Mass.). The wee little brochure (just ten pages, and only five cents for them all) appears in its tenth edition to anticipate 19 13. Of course all its meat is very much boiled down, but if you desire an ampler supply you can find it in the ABC.
Those who used to think that the Single Tax meant the nationalization of land will be told by the Catechism: "No; it means, rather ( !) the socializa- tion of economic rent." Then, " does it not mean the abolition of private prop- erty in land? No; it simply proposes to divert an increasing share of ground rent into the public treasury " — a procedure that does " not in the least involve common ownership of land."
Mgr. Benson has made many people his debtors by his numerous books. Grown-up folk will never be able to meet the obligation, and now the tiny tots are running up an account. The Alphabet of the Saints, previously on their list, has just been followed by A Child's Rule of Life:
" A Rule for big children and small "
he arranges in " rhymes ", that though " rather feeble sometimes,
Are better than no rhymes at all."
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THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
■ The " Rule " is designed te guide the child through the day, from rising in the morning to retiring at night, and thus includes prayer and play and meals; Mass, Confession, and Holy Communion. It is printed in large black letters, -€ach page capped by an appropriate illustration and framed in a quaint and decidedly funny fringe of pink picturettes that include quite a menagerie and a curiosity-shop which will delight any one with a sense of drollery. The *' subjects " of the rule chosen as types are two " mildly medieval " tots, with whom should a critic find fault he would probably have missed the clever idealism of the artist. The book in quarto format, red paper or cloth binding, makes an appropriate Christmas gift for a small child (Longmans, Green & Co.).
Communion Verses for Little Children, by a Sister of Notre Dame, can hardly fail to help little ones who like to speak to our Lord in the language of rhyme, which after all seems most natural to the child. There are four- teen short rhythmical prayers, two for each day, before and after Communion. The sentiments are varied to suit the varying disposings of grace and moods of nature (Benziger Bros.).
The latest issue of the Classified Catalogue of the Carnegie Library in Pitts- burgh contains the accessions from 1907-1911 relating to General Works, Philosophy, and Religion. It is a pity that the two preceding sections of the complete catalogue devoted to the same subjects are out of print ; so that one cannot, save through the card catalogue, know the institution's full treasures relating to these fundamental topics. However, judging from what is before us, Catholics have no cause for complaint as regards the additions represent- ing their faith. These cover some seven pages of the catalogue and amongst them we find the Catholic Encyclopedia, Allies's Formation of Christendom, Pastor's History of the Popes, McCaffrey's History of the Catholic Church in the Nineteenth Century, Wolferstan's Catholic Church in China, Bardenhewer- Shahan's Patrology, and a goodly number of volumes of lesser importance, together with Joseph McCabe's Decay of Rome, and George Tyrrell's Medi- evalism. That the list is not even longer, especially that it is not fuller in our Philosophy, is not improbably due to the apathy of Catholics themselves. The Catalogue is thoroughly indexed (pp. 368).
Faith and Reason in Relation to Conversion is a very thoughtful treatment of a difficult subject. It is a pamphlet of forty-five pages embodying two articles from the Irish Ecclesiastical Record (March and April, 1912; Dublin, Browne & Nolan).
The Romance of a Jesuit (translated from the French of G. de Beugny d'Haguerne by Francesca Glazier) is the story of a miseducated young man who, under the stress of poverty occasioned by his spendthrift and suicide father, accepts a position with the French government to spy upon the domestic life of the Jesuits. The youth enters a Jesuit novitiate whence he writes to his employers letters that contain, however, nothing but vague suspicions of no use to the government. The strain of his double life becomes unbearable after a time and his conscience forces him to reveal his whole career of du- plicity to the novice master. The latter treats him with Christlike kindness and compassion and assists him to obtain a situation in the world whereby lie is enabled to help support his younger sister, solicitude for whose care had led him to his career of hypocrisy. The story is well told and well translated. The interest is heightened by some incidents of love and a duel (Benziger Bros.).
To those who have at heart the cause of Catholic education — and what priest lias not? — the history of The Growth and Development of the Catholic School System in the United States must be full of interest. And when the story <bearing the title just quoted) is told with the fullness of exact informa-tion
LITERARY CHAT. 75^
-and the smooth flow of narrative which characterize Father Burns's prior study of the beginnings of that system, the interest will be assured. We must ^efer to our next issue a fuller account of this volume in which the splendid story of educational growth is narrated. In the meanwhile we recommend it most warmly, to the clergy especially and religious teachers. Its record of heroic struggle should be to them an inspiration and a support (Benziger
In a recently published volume (Sands-Herder) on Retreats for the People by Father Charles Plater, S.J., there is a chapter on the literature of retreats, in which attention is directed to the admirable work of the Spiritual Exercises by St. Ignatius. The author also adverts to a series of books entitled Collec- tion des Retraites Spirituelles, which deals with the practice of Retreats (Lethielleux). We have some excellent helps in this direction in English, such as Bishop Ullathome's, Father Buckler's, and Bishop Hedley's books, and others, which, whilst they do not speak of the organizing of retreats for the laity, are in their very material suggestive of what our laity need in the way of spiritual renewal.
Speaking of literature for retreats for the laity, it may be said that there is no class of books so effective as an incentive to the exercise of virtue in the world, as the reading of biographies of eminent Catholic laymen. One of the latest publications of this kind, although it appeals chiefly to the educated laity, is the Life of John Hunger ford Pollen, by his daughter Anne Pollen (Murray — Herder). An Oxford graduate, a convert, a man of the world, an -artist, a lover of poetry and of music, he also represents the militant, the social, and the spiritual-minded Catholic in an eminent degree.
The. spirit of the centenary festivities in honor of St. Clare of Assisi (1212- igi2), recently celebrated in the Umbrian cradle of the Franciscan virtues, is gracefully embodied in a beautiful Ricordo published from S. Damiano, The dedication itself is characteristic of the peculiar charm that attaches to the annals of the Institute of the Poverello : "A Chiara di Assisi, discepola fervente del Poverello Umbro, queste pagine storico-letterarie in ricordo del Settimo Centenario dalla Fondazione dell' Ordine delle Povere Dame I Minori <Ji S. Damiano con animo riverente e devoto umilmente consecrano." The nuns of Santa Chiara are very poor, but they wish to see the hallowed church and the spot in which the Saint prayed, and in which she is laid to await the Resurrection, restored to something of its ancient beauty; and for this the alms of the lovers of the poor and of the glory of God's House are humbly -solicited.
Students who are endeavoring to keep informed about the philosophical movements of the present day will be helped by Professor Saulze's Le Monisme Materialiste en France. Materialistic monism, together with a par- allel monism of a more or less spiritual character, comprises practically what- ever philosophy exists outside the Church. M. SauIze confines himself in the volume just mentioned to a few typical writers, principally MM. le Dantec, B. Conta, and Mile. C. L. Royer. These he studies analytically and critically. What is especially useful in his work is the very full bibliography (comprising some five hundred authors). The volume forms part of a larger whole, in preparation, on Materialistic Monism in general ; the other part, which will deal with the movement in Germany, is in press. When the second part, which is really logically first, modern Materialistic Monism being of German par- entage, is received, we shall give a fuller estimate of the entire work (Paris, Beauchesne et Cie).
Notwithstanding the copious literature that has grown up, especially during the past century, around the Pastor of Hermas, the ethical teachings oi the famous work have never been excised, critically examined* and systematically
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THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
exposed for the modern student of the early Christian literature. The work that has been done hitherto has centred mainly in the historico-dogmatic aspects or the general moral teachings of the Pastor, An attempt has been made (and a very successful attempt it seems to be) to educe from the book and systematically construct a unified body of Hermasian ethics by Dr. Ansgar Baumeister. The Christian Ideal of Life and Faith, with the other precepts, forms the groundplan of the work. Under the former heading the aim and end of Christian life and the conditions of its attainment, under the second the ethical doctrines regarding faith, and the relation of faith to the other commandments, are considered. It is a brochure of i6o pages and is the ninth in the well-known Freiburger Theologische Studien. The title is DU Ethik des Pastor Hermae. (Herder, St. Louis, Mo.)
Books TReceiveb.
BIBLICAL.
Searching the Scriptures. By the Rev. T. P. F. Gallagher, S.T.L., B.C.L. New York, Cincinnati, Chicago: Benziger Bros.; Dublin: M. H. Gill & Son, 19 1 2. Pp. XX-431. Price, $1.75 net.
COMMENTARII IN S. PAULI EpISTOLAS AD EPHESIOS, PhILIPPENSES ET CoLO-
SENSES. Auctore losepho Knabenbauer, S.I. (Cursus Scrip turae Sacrae. Auc- toribus R. Comely, I. Knabenbauer, Fr. de Hummelauer aliisque Soc. lesu presbyteris. S. P. Pius X, ut Sanctitati Suae Opus Hoc dedicaretur, benigne concessit.) Parisiis : Sumptibus P. Lethielleux. Pp. xi-368. Prix, 7 fr.
The Deciding Voice of the Monuments in Biblical Criticism. By Melvin Grove Kyle, D.D., LL.D., Lecturer on Biblical Archaeology, Xenia Theologi- cal Seminary. Oberlin, Ohio: Bibliotheca Sacra Co. 1912. Pp. xvii-320.
The First Twelve Chapters of Isaiah. A New Translation and Commen- tary. By the Rev. George S. Hitchcock, D.D., Doctor of Sacred Scripture,. Rome. New York, Cincinnati, Chicago : Benziger Bros. ; London : Burns & Gates. 1912. Pp. ix-2io. $1.25 net.
The Holy Bible. Translated from the Latin Vulgate. Diligently com- pared with the Hebrew, Greek, and Other Editions in Divers Languages.. The Old Testament was first published by the English College at Douay, A. D. 1609; and the New Testament was first published by the English College at Rheims, A. D. 1582. This edition contains Annotations, References, an His- torical and Chronological Index, many maps and illustrations. Published with the Imprimatur and Approbation of His Eminence John Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York. New York: The C. Wildermann Co. 1912. Pp. 1066 and 310-17 maps.
Pentateuchal Studies. By Harold M. Wiener, M.A., LL.B., of Lincoln Inn, Barrister-at-Law, author of The Origin of the Pentateuch, Essays in Pentateuchal Criticism, etc. Oberlin, Ohio: Bibliotheca Sacra Co.; London: Elliot Stock. 1912. Pp. xvi-353. Price, $2.15 postpaid.
Ueber das Gleichnis vom ungerechten Verwalter (Lk. 16:1-13). Von Dr. Adolf Riicker, Privatdozent an der Universitat Breslau. {Biblische Stu- dien, XVII. Band, 5. Heft.) St. Louis, Mo. und Freiburg, Brisg. : B. Herder. Pp. vi-66. Price, $0.55.
THEOLOGICAL AND DEVOTIONAL.
Theologiae Dogmaticae Elementa ex Probatis Auctoribus collegit P. B. Prevel, SS.CC, S. Theol. Licent. et in Sem. Rothom. Theol. Dogm. Professor. Edit:o tertia, aucta et recognita secundum documenta ab Apost. Sede novi- ter promulgata opera et studio P. M. J. Miquel, SS.CC, S. Theol. Doct. et
BOOKS RECEIVED.
765
Theol. Dogmaticae Prof. Tomus I: Tractatus de Vera Religione, de Eccle- sia, de Traditione et Scriptura, de Fide, de Deo Uno et Trino, de Deo Crea- tore. Pp. 712. Tomus II: Tractatus de Incarnatione, de Beata Virgine Maria, de Gratia, de Sacramentis in Genere, de Sacramentis in Specie. Pp. 696. Parisiis: Sumptibus P. Lethielleux. 1912. Prix, 3 vols., 16 fr.
The Holy Hour. By the Rev. T. W. Drum, of the Dubuque Apostolate, Dubuque, Iowa. 1912. Pp. 26.
L'Heure des Ames. Par le P^re Mainage, Dominicain. Premiere sirie. Albert de Ruville. Miss Baker. Johannes Joergensen. Paris : P. Lethielleux. 19 12. Pp. 199. Prix, 2 fr.
Gloires et Bienfaits de l'Eucharistie. Par I'Abb^ Stephen Coub^, Cha- noine Honoraire d'Orleans et de Cambrai. Troisi^me edition. (CEuvres Ora- toires.) Paris: P. Lethielleux. 191 1. Pp. 402. Prix, 3 fr. 50.
The Living Flame of Love. By St. John of the Cross. With His Letters, Poems, and Minor Writings. Translated by David Lewis. With an Essay by Cardinal Wiseman and additions and an Introduction by Benedict Zim- merman, O.C.D., Prior of St. Luke's, Wincanton. New York, Cincinnati, Chicago: Benziger Bros. 1912. Pp. lv-317. Price, $1.95, net.
Predigten und Ansprachen zunachst fur die Jugend gebildeter Stande. Von Mgr. Dr. Paul Baron de Mathies (Ansgar Albing). Vierter Band: Ad- vents- und Fastenpredigten, akademische Ansprachen und Gelegenheitsraden. St. Louis, Mo. und Freiburg, Brisg. : B. Herder. Pp. x-478. Prels, geb. in Leinwand, $1.65.
L'aimable petite Sainte Agnes. Par Florian Jubaru, S.J. Paris: P. Le- theilleux. 19 12. Pp. 160. Prix, i fr. 50.
Our Reasonable Service. An Essay in the Understanding of the Deep Things of God. By Vincent J. McNabb, O.P. New York, Cincinnati, Chi- cago: Benziger Bros.; London: Burns & Gates. 1912. Pp. viii-138. Price, 1$i.io net.
Hospital Addresses. By Henry Sebastian Bowden, of the Oratory. {Sa- tiety for Visiting Hospitals.) New York, Cincinnati, Chicago: Benziger Bros.; London: Burns & Gates. 1912. Pp. xi-197. Price, $0.70 net.
The Ways of Mental Prayer. By the Right Rev. Dom Vitalis Lehodey, Abbot of Briquebec, O.C.R. Translated from the French by a Monk of Mount Melleray. New York, Cincinnati, Chicago : Benziger Bros. ; Dublin : M. H. Gill & Son. 19 1 2. Pp. xx.xii-408. Price, $1.75 net.
A Child's Rule of Life. By Robert Hugh Benson. Drawn by Gabriel Pippet. New York, London, Bombay, Calcutta: Longmans, Green & Co. 1912. Pp. 25. Price, paper cover, $0.40 net; cloth, $0.75 net.
Vida de la Beata Margarita Maria Alacoque de la Orden de la Visi- TACION DE Santa Maria. Publicata en su monasterio de Paray-le-Monial. Traducida en Madrid por una Religiosa de la misma Orden. Con licencia de la autoridad eclesiastica. St. Louis, Mo.: Friburgo de Brisgovia, Alemania: B. Herder. 1912. Pp. 265. Price, $0.80.
Das Himmelbrot. Ermahnungen zum oefteren Empfang der heiligen Kon»- munion. Von Walter Dwight, S.J. Autorisierte Uebersetzung von P. Bern- hard von HI. Sakramente, aus der Karmeliten Orden. Mit Titelbild von Fueh- rich. St. Louis, Mo. und Freiburg, Brisg. : B. Herder. 1912. Pp. 182. Price. $0.80.
Les Quinze Stapes ou Pas spirituels dans la voie des Exercices de Saint Ignace d'apres le Pere Louis de la Palma. Par le P^re Emile Becker, S.J., Missionaire au Tchely, S.E. {Collection des Retraites Spirituelles.) Deux- ieme edition. Paris: P. Lethielleux. 1911. Pp. xix-214. Prix, 2 fr.
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THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW.
PHILOSOPHICAL.
The Housing Problem. Edited by Leslie A. St. L. Toke, B.A. (No. Ill of Catholic Studies in Social Reform. The Catholic Social Guild.) St. Louis,. Mo.: B. Herder. 1912. Pp. 60. Price, $0.20.
The Church and Eugenics. By the Rev. Thomas J. Gerrard, author of Marriage and Parenthood, etc. (No. IV of Catholic Studies in Social Reform. The Catholic Social Guild.) St. Louis, Mo. : B. Herder. 1912. Pp.60. Price,. $0.20.
Faith and Reason in Reijition to Conversion to the Church. By T. Frederic Willis, B. A. Oxon. Dublin : Browne & Nolan. Pp. 45. Price, — /6.
Die Ethik des Pastor Hermae. Von Dr. phil. et theol. Ansgar Bau- meister, Repetitor am Priesterseminar in St. Peter. (Freiburger theologische Studien, herausgegeben von Dr. G. Hoberg und Dr. G. Pfeilschifter, 9, Heft.) Freiburg, Brisg. und St. Louis, Mo.: B. Herder. 1912. Pp. xiv-146. Price, $0.85.
Exposition de la Morale Catholique. Morale Speciale. II. La Foi. II. La Vertu de Foi et les Vices qui lui sont opposes. Careme 1912. Par le R. P. M.-A. Janvier des Fr^res Precheurs. {Conferences de Notre-Dame de Paris.) Paris: P. Lethielleux. 1912. Pp. 378. Prix, 4 fr.
Apologie du Catholicisme par les Incredules. Expose du Dogme de la Morale et du Culte Catholiques. Par I'Abbe Ernest Augier, Chanoine Honor- aire, Cur^ Arckipetre. Paris: P. Letheilleux. 1912. Pp. viii-309. Prix,. 2 fr. 50.
Dictionnaire Apologi^.tique de la Foi Catholique contenant les Preuves de la V^rit^ de la Religion et les Reponses aux Objections tirees des Sciences humaines. Quatrieme Edition entierement refondue sous la direction de A. d'Ales, Professeur a I'lnstitut Catholique de Paris. Avec la collaboration d'un- grand nombre de Savants Catholiques. Fascicule VIII: Gouvernement eccle- siastique — Incineration. Paris: Gabriel Beauchesne. 1912. Coll. 321 to 639. Prix, 5 frs.
Elements of Logic by His Eminence Cardinal Mercier. Translated by Ewan MacPherson. Third Edition. New York : The Manhattanville Press. 1912. Pp. 77. Price, $0.60 postpaid ; ten copies, $0.45 each.
Jeunesse et Ideal. Par I'Abbe Henri Morice. New York, Cincinnati, Chicago: Benziger Bros.; Paris: Pierre Tequi. 1912. Pp. x-201. Prix, 2 fr.
Progress and Uniformity in Child-Labor Legislation. A Study in Sta- tistical Measurement. By William F. Ogbum, Ph.D., Instructor in History, Politics, and Economics, Princeton University. {Studies in History, Eco- nomics, and Public Law. Edited by the Faculty of Political Science of Colum- bia University. Vol. XLVIII, No. 2.) New York: Columbia University; Longmans, Green & Co.; London: P. S. King & Son. 1912. Pp. 219. Price, $1.75.
Recenti Scoperte e Recenti Teorie nello studio dell^Origine dell'Uomo.. Agostino Gemelli, O.F.M., Dottore in medicina e chirurgia, Professore agg. on. di istologia. (Piccola biblioteca scientifica della " Ri vista de Filosofia Neo-Scolastica ". Num. i.) Firenze, Italia: Libreria Editrice Fiorentina. 1912. Pp. 109. Prezzo, o /. 75 c.
Le Leggi dell'Eredita. A. G. Elrington, Professore di biologia al Collegio Angelico in Roma. (Piccola biblioteca scientifica della " Ri vista di Filosofia Neo-Scolastica". Num. 2.) Firenze, Italia: Libreria Editrice Fiorentina. 19 1 2. Pp. 49. Prezzo, o /. 75 c.
Il Concetto della Natura e il Principio del Diritto. Giorgio del Vec- chio, Professore nella R. Universitk de Sassari. Milano, Torino, Roma: Fra- telli Bocca Editori. 1908. Pp. 174. Prezzo, 5 lire.
BOOKS RECEIVED.
j6t
Sull'Idea di una Scienza del Diritto Universale Comparato. Comu- nicazione letta al Congresso filosofico di Heidelberg il 4 Settembre 1908 da. Giorgio del Vecchio, Professore nella R. Universita di Sassari. Seconda edi- zione, con aggiunte. Torino, Roma, Milano, Firenze : Fratelli Bocca Editori. 1909. Pp. 34. Prezzo, 2 lire.
Sulla Positivita come Carattere del Diritto. Giorgio del Vecchio. Pro- lusione al corso di Filosofia del diritto letta I'li febbraio 1911 nella R. Univer- sita di Bologna. (Opuscoli de Filosofia e di Pedagogia, N. 8.) A. F. For- miggini, Editore in Modena. 1911. Pp. 25. Prezzo, i lire.
Il Fenomeno della Guerra e l'Idea della Pace. Giorgio del Vecchio,. Professore nella R. Universita di Messina. Seconda edizione riveduta e ac- cresciuta. Torino, Roma, Milano, Firenze: Fratelli Bocca Editori. 1911. Pp. 99. Prezzo, 3 lire.
HISTORICAL.
KiRCHLiCHEs Handlexikon. Ein Nachschlagebuch ueber des Gesamtgebiet der Theologie und ihrer Hiltswissenschaften. Unter Mitwirkung zahlreicher Fachgelehrten in Verbindung mit den Professoren Karl Hilgenreiner, Johan Bapt. Nisius, S.J., Joseph Schlecht und Andreas Seider, herausgegeben voo* Prof. Michael Buchberger.— Zwei Bande : A— H und I— Z. Muenchen : AU- gemeine Verlagsgesellschaft 1907-1912. Pp. xvi, 2071 und 2831. Price, VoL I, $7.00; Vol. II, $9.50,
The Guardians of Liberty and Roman Catholics. A few facts for Bigots. By Rev. Thomas F. Coakley, D.D., Pittsburgh, Pa. Pp. 15. Price,
5 cts.
Report of the Proceedings and Addresses of the Ninth Annual Meet- ing OF the Catholic Educational Association at Pittsburgh, Penna., on^ 24, 25, 26, and 27 June, 1912. {Catholic Educational Association Bulletin— November, 1912— Vol. IX, No. i.) Columbus, Ohio: Office of Secretary Gen- eral, 165 1 E. Main St. Pp. viii-538.
John Hungerford Pollen (1820-1902). By Anne Pollen. With portrait and illustrations. London: John Murray; St. Louis, Mo.: B. Herder. 1912. Pp. 396. Price, $4.25.
The Three Sisters of Lord Russell of Killowen and their Convent Life. By the Rev. Matthew Russell, S.J., author oi At Home with God,. Among the Blessed, etc. With five illustrations. New York, London, Bom- bay, Calcutta: Longmans, Green & Co. 1912. Pp. x-311. Price, $2.00 net.
Life of St. Francis of Assist. By Father Cuthbert, O.S.F.C. With thir- teen illustrations. New York, London, Bombay, Calcutta: Longmans, Green
6 Co. 1912. Pp. viii-453. Price, $2.50 net.
His Grey Eminence. The True " Friar Joseph " of Bulwer Lytton's " Richelieu ". A Historical Study of the Capuchin, Pere Joseph Fran9ois le Clerc du Tremblay. By R. F. O'Connor. Philadelphia: The Dolphin Press. 1912. Pp. 112. Price, $1.00, postpaid.
The Growth and Development of the Catholic School System in the United States. By the Rev. J. A. Burns, C.S.C, Ph.D., President of Holy Cross College, Washington, D. C, author of The Catholic School System in the United States; its Principles, Origin, and Establishment. New York, Cin- cinnati, Chicago: Benziger Bros. 1912. Pp. 421. Price, $1.75. net.
Studien zu Hilarius von Potiers. II. Bischofsnamen und Bischofssitze bei Hilarius. Kritische Untersuchungen zur kirchlichen Prosopographie und Topographic des 4 Jahrhunderts. Von Alfred Leonhard Feder, S.J. Vorgelegt in der Sitzung am 12 Oktober 1910. (Sitzungsberichte der Kais. Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien. Philosophisch-Historische 'Klasse. 166. Band, §;
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THE ECCLESIASTICAL REVIEW,
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Sentiment de Napoleon I^b sur le Christianisme recuelli par Bathild BouNiOL. Par Chevalier de Beauterne. Quatorzieme edition revue par Ph.-G. Laborie, Membre Titulaire de Societes Savantes (Histoire, archeologie, phil- sophie). New York, Cincinnati, Chicago: Benziger Bros.; Paris: Pierre Tequi. 1912. Pp. 216.
Dominican Martyrs of Great Britain. By Fr, Raymund Devas, O.P. New York, Cincinnati, Chicago : Benziger Bros. ; London : Burns & Gates. 1912. Pp. 77. Price, $0.75, net.
Le Reverend Pere A. de Poni.evoy de la Compagnie de Jesus. Sa Vie. Par le P. Alexandre de Gabriac de la Meme Compagnie. Avec un choix d'Opuscules et de Lettres. I. — Vie du R. P. A. de Ponlevoy. Nouvelle edi- tion. New York, Cincinnati, Chicago : Benziger Bros. ; Paris : Pierre Tequi. 19 1 2. Pp. xviii-482. Prix, 4 jr.
The Eve of Catholic Emancipation. Being the History of the English CathoUcs during the First Thirty Years of the Nineteenth Century. By the Right Rev. Mgr. Bernard Ward, F.R.Hist.S., President of St. Edmund's Col- lege, author of Dawn of the Catholic Revival in England (i 781-1803). In three volumes. Vol. Ill: 1820-1829. With illustrations. New York, London, Bombay, Calcutta: Longmans, Green & Co. 1912. Pp. viii-390. Price, $3.75, net.
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Mother. A Story. By Kathleen Norris. With illustrations by F. C. Yohn. New York, London, Toronto: The Macmillan Co. 1912. Pp. 172. Price, $1.25 net.
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Conversation : What to Say and How to Say it. By Mary Greer Conklin. New York: Funk & Wagnalls Co. 1912. Pp. 186. Price, $0.75.
Madrigali. By T. A. Daly, author of Canzoni and Carmina. Illustrated by John Sloan. Philadelphia: David McKay. 1912. Pp. xiii-169. Price, $1.00 net.
The Woman Hater. By John Alexander Hugh Cameron, author of A Colonel from Wyoming. New York: Christian Press Association. 1912. Pp. 297. Price, $1.25.
INDEX TO VOLUME XLVII.
PAGE
Abstinence on Feast Days. Faculty to dispense from Fast and — 78
Adoration. Private Exposition of Blessed Sacrament at Hour of — . . 362, 612
Adultery with Attempted Marriage. Impediment arising from — 219
Advertisements in The Ecclesiastical Review. The Character of the — . 365
Agassiz, Determined Opponent of Evolution 277
Ageing Clergy. A Plea for our — 488
Alcohol and Their Effects. Different Kinds of — 536
Alcoholic Insanities. An Account of the — 691
Alcoholism. The Physiology and Pathology of — 535, 693
Altar. Images of the Sacred Heart on the — 616
American College, Rome. Student Life in the — 403
American Philosophy. Studies in — 185, 257
Apologetic Works. Some Recent — 229
Art in Germany. Growth of Christian — 641
Arts and Science. Attitude of Church toward the — 137
Assouan and the Pentateuch. The Temple in — 291
Australia. The Maxima Cura applies in — 464
Ave Maria or Angelus Bell. The Ringing of the — ill
Ayrinhac, S.S., D.D., LL.D. The Very Rev. H. A.— 303
Babylonian Legislation 4500 Years Ago l6l
" Beatus ". Indulgences in Case of Transfer of Feast of — 716
Belford. The Rev. John L.— 591
Bell. The De Profundis— iii
Bells. About the Ecclesiastical Uses of — 172
" Benedictio Apostolica ". Repeating the Confiteor in Case of — 737
Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. Private — 362, 600, 612
Biblical Commission and the Synoptic Gospels 523
Biblical Institute in Rome. Diploma of — 583
Bickerstaffe Drew. The Right Rev. Mgr. Francis D. — 674
Bishop's Jurisdiction over Religious who serve on Secular Mission 720
Bourdoise and the Foundation of Seminaries. Adrian — 426
Breviary. The Changes in the Missal and — 79
Bride and Groom Kneeling in the Sanctuary 614
Brook Farm, a Transcendentalist Movement 196
Brothers of the Common Life. Thomas a Kempis and the — 603
Brownsville Vicariate made Diocese of Corpus Christi 77
" Caeremoniale Episcoporum " and American Custom 224, 360
Calendar of the Church. Special and General — 471
Calendar Reform. The Latest Proposal in — 141
Calendar Reform. The Present Status of— 728
Camerata System in Roman Seminary Life 4^3
Canada. A Bishop for the Ruthenians in — 582
Canadian Bill against the Ne temere. The — 607
Catholic Directory for 1913. The Official — 49^
" Cautiones ". Dispensation in Mixed Marriages without the — . . 330, 364, 477
" Celebret ". Uniform Practice of issuing the — 706
Ceulemans. The Rev. J. B.— 185. 257
Chanting Monosyllable or Hebrew Word. Manner of — 471
Chaplain of Hospital. Jurisdiction over — 610
Chaplain. Pastoral Rights of a Convent— 600
Children to hear Mass. Value of Method in Teaching— 591
China. Our Catholic Soldiers in — "O
Christian Art in Germany. Growth of— 641
Church open all Day, The Custom of keeping the— 700
Churches at Health-Resorts. Daily Masses in— 700
Civil Courts. The Motu Proprio on Clerics and the — 303. 357
Clerical Portrait. Flavian : A — ^
Clerics before the Secular Courts. The Motu Proprio on— .... 303. 357
Cloistered Community. Faculty to distribute Communion to Sick Mem- bers in— 718
Coakley, D.D. The Rev. Thomas F.— 403
Collection Tours. Rules for Orientals making— 471
Communion. Some Reactions of the Decree on Daily— 702
Communion and Indulgence at Forty Hours' Devotion 225
770 Index to Volume XLVII.
PAGE
Communion and Priests' Retreats. Daily — 734
Communion in either Leavened or Unleavened Bread. Permission to ad- minister— 708
Communion last ? Does the Virtue of — 100
Communion outside Mass. Prayer after distributing — 363, 495
Communion to Sick Members of Cloistered Community. Faculty to dis- tribute— 718
Concord School of Philosophy, 1878. Beginning of the — 197
" Confiteor " after Extreme Unction. Repeating the — 737
Consecration of Small Host outside the Corporal 660, 736
Constantine's Proclamation of Religious Liberty. Celebration of — . . 385, 472
Convent of St. Catharine, Sinai 19
Coptic Manuscripts. The J. P. Morgan Collection of — 747
Corporal. The Small Host outside the — 660
Corpus Christi. Erection of Diocese of — 77
Country School. Helping the — 494
Crutch at Mass. A Priest using a — 494
Cummins, O.S.B. The Rev. Patrick— 660
Cure of Intemperance. The — 535, 6gi
Custom in America. The " Caeremoniale Episcoporum " and — 224, 360
Dease. A. — 69
Defending the Policy of the Popes 492
Degrees of the Propaganda, Rome. Academic — 415
Delirium Tremens an Acute Alcoholic Insanity 692
De Prof undis Bell. The— ill
Desert to Convent St. Catharine. Over the — 19
De Smet, S.T.L. The Very Rev. A.— 341
Diocesan Patron. Choice of a — 736
Diploma of Pontifical Biblical Institute, Rome. Form of — 583
Discipline in Theological Seminaries. Studies and — 395, 455
Dispensation " Disparitatis Cultus " if the Guarantees are refused. 330, 364, 477
Dispensation from Fast and Abstinence on Feast Days 78
Divino afflatu on the Rubrics. The Text of the — 79
Dobree. L. E. — 42, 1 72
Donnelly. Eleanor C. — 723
Donnelly, S.J. The Rev. Francis P. — 53
Doxology on Feasts of the Blessed Virgin 97
Drum, S.J. The Rev. Walter — 105, 601, 739
Drunkenness. The Reform of — 533, 691
Dubillard recommends League for Priests. Cardinal — 589
Easter. Fixing the Date of — 141, 728
Ecclesiastical Dress and Vestments 283
Eloquence and the Supernatural. Pulpit — 129
Emerson and the Evolution Theory 261
Emerson, the Leader of the Transcendental School 189
Emigration of Catholics. Pope Pius X on — 451
Emotional in Sermons. Place for the — 677
" En Dies est Dominica " 156
Essay Style for Sermons. The Value of 57, 674
Eucharistic Fast. The Question of mitigating the — 226, 604
Eudes and the Reformation of the Clergy. Blessed John — 426
Eusebius. Constantine's Miraculous Vision as related by — 388
Evolutionism in American Philosophy 257
Examinations in the Roman Seminaries 414
Exposition of Blessed Sacrament. Private — 362, 612
Extreme Unction. Anointing the Feet in — 738
Extreme Unction. Repeating the Confiteor after — 737
Fast? Does Old Age dispense from Eucharistic — 606
Fast. Question of mitigating the Eucharistic — 226, 604
Fast and Abstinence in Latin America. Exemption of Sisters of Charity
from — 719
Fast and Abstinence on Feast Days. Faculty to dispense from — 78
Father Carlton's Oflferings : A Story 42
Feast Days. Letter of S. Congregation of Council on — 77
Index to Volume XLVII. 771
PAGE
Feet at Extreme Unction. Anointing the — 738
Figures and Comparisons by St. Francis de Sales. The Use of — 434
Figures of Speech in Sermons. The Use of — 58
Fiske, the Greatest American Expounder of Evolution 265
Flavian : A Clerical Portrait i
Flavin's Vespers and Complin. Father — 69
Flood. W. H. Grattan— 155
Folghera, O.P. The Rev. J. D.— ! ! . ! ! 446
Fort Wayne. Boundaries of Diocese of — 77
Forty Hours' Devotion. Indulgences and Communion at — 225
Franciscans and Indulgences of the Stations of the Cross 471
Fryar. John R. — 283
Germany. Growth of Christian Art in — 641
Gospels. The Biblical Commission and the Synoptic — 523
Gospels. The Mutual Relations of the First Three — 341
Gospels of SS. Mark and Luke. Biblical Commission and the — 341
Gothic Structures in Germany. Leading — 643
Greek Monks at Mount Sinai 32'
Greek Uniates. Rite of Administering Communion to Latins or — 708
Grobel, C.F. The Rev. P.— no
Gaild of Our Lady of Ransom, England 212
Hammurabi, 4500 Years Ago. The Laws of — 161
Harris on the Church. William Torrey — 198
Hedley, O.S.B. Letter of Holy Father to the Right Rev. J. C— 715
Henry, Litt.D. The Rev. H. T.— 141, 557, 728
Historical Lessons in the Office. Revision of — 216
Hittite Inscriptions. Two Important — 743
Holy Week. Matins and Lauds in — 453
Hospitals. Professional Secrecy in — 610
Hour of Adoration. Private Exposition of Blessed Sacrament at — . . 362, 612
Hymn-Writer and Hymn-Composer. Cardinal Newman as — 685
Hymn-Writer. Thomas a Kempis as a — I55
Hyvernat and the Morgan Coptic MSS. Dr. H. — 747
Images of the Sacred Heart on the Altar 616
Imagination in St. Francis de Sales 434
Immaculate Conception. Indulgence on First Saturday in Honor of — . . 716
Impediment arising from Adultery with attempted Marriage 219
Indians in South America. Encyclical on the Condition of — 447
Indulgence on First Saturday in Honor of Immaculate Conception 716
Indulgences and Communion at Forty Hours' Devotion 225
Indulgences in Case of Transfer of Feast of " Beatus " 716
Indulgences of the Stations of the Cross. Franciscans and the — 471
"In hoc signo vinces " in the Light of History 3^7
Insanities induced by Alcoholism. Account of the — 6gi
Intemperance. The Reform of — 533. 6qi
Intention to consecrate be made during Mass? Must — 666
Intention to consecrate Illicit Matter. The — 664
Italy on their Seminaries. Letter to Bishops of — 395. 455
Jam Toto subitus Vesper eat Polo 557
Kane, S.J. The Rev. William T.— 385
Kantism in American Philosophy '85
Kearney, Nebraska. Erection of New Diocese of — 7"
Kempen ? Where is the Diocese of — 226
Ketteler. A Glimpse into the Pastoral Life of Bishop Von— 552
Labarum : " In hoc signo vinces ". Constantine's-— 39^
Lagrange, O.P., and the Sacred Congregation. Pere— 597
Labitton's Books on Sacerdotal Vocat-'on. Canon— 5^3. 5^4
Latin. The Proper Pronunciation of — 633
Latin Language in Classes in Seminary. Use of— 409
League for Priests, " Pro Pontifice et Ecclesia " ' 589
Lecture System in the Classes in Seminaries 407
Lessons in the Office. Revision of H'storical — 216
Litany of Loreto. The Oration after the— 359
Loughran. The Rev. J. J.— 221
772 Index to Volume XLVII.
PAGE
Lytton's Portrayal of " Friar Joseph " 613
Maas, SJ. The Very Rev. A. J.— 523
Mahony. Father Prout : Frank — 8
Maltese for " Quid mihi et tibi est ? " 601
Marriage. Impediment arising from Adultery with attempted — 219
Marriage without the required " Cautiones ". Dispensation in Mixed —
330, 364. 477
Martin, S.J. The Rev. M.— 477
Mass. The Assistant Priest at a First — 617
Mass. The Celebration of Daily — 702
Mass. Prayer after distributing Communion outside — 363, 495
Mass. A Priest using a Crutch or Chair at — 494
Mass. Value of Method in Teaching Children to hear — 591
Mass at a fixed Hour. Punctuality in Celebrating — 704
Mass at Health-Resorts. Provision for Daily — 706
Masses and the New Rubrics. The Old Indult of Requiem — 615
Matins and Lauds in Holy Week 453
Matrimonial Impediment arising from Adultery 219
Maynooth. Reminiscences of — 62, 316
McClorey, S.J. The Rev. John A. — 129
McHale, CM. The Very Rev. Patrick— 424
McMahon, Ph.D. The Rev. Joseph H.— 702
Metlake. George — 641
Metrical Translations of Psalms i, 8, 18, 22 723
Miller's Account of Kantian Philosophy. Samuel — 187
Milvian Bridge. The Miraculous Sign at the Battle of — 387
Missal and Breviary. The Changes in the — 79
Mixed Marriages without the Guarantees. Dispensations in — .. 330,364,477
Monosyllable or Hebrew Word. Manner of Chanting — 471
Monotony of Style in Tiresome Sermons 53
" Monsignor ". The Proper Abbreviation of the Word — 733
Moore's " Irish Melodies ". Father Prout and — 13
Moses. Writing in the Time of — 744
" Nee quisquam oculis vidit " 159
Ne temere. The Canadian Bill against the — 607
Newman as Hymn-Writer and Hymn-Composer 685
Nihil obstat of his own Ordinary. Priest Author should have — 218
Noll and the Country School. The Rev. J. F.— 494
Normal Schools for Catholic Teachers 494
" Now Let the Darkling Eve " 562
Nuptial Mass. Place of Bride and Groom at — 614
" O Amor quam Ecstaticus " 157
O'Connor, Esq. R. F.— 8
Octaves. Feasts of Double Major Rite that have — 97
Office of Dead. Matins and Lauds in — 453
Old Age dispense from Eucharistic Fast? Does — 606
Old Pr'est's Vespers — and Complin : A Story. The — 69
Olier and the Foundation of S. Sulpice. Venerable J. J. — 431
O'Malley, M.D. Austin — 533, 691
Oration after the Litany of Loreto. The — 359
Oratory to Grace. The Relationship of — 136
Ordinary. Priest Author should have Nihil obstat of his own — 218
Ordinary's Jurisdiction over Religious who serve on Secular Mission 720
O'Reilly, O.P. The Rev. Thomas a Kempis— 105
Orientals making Collection Tours. Rules for — 471
Parker, O S.B. The Rev. S. A.— 564
Pastoral Rights of a Convent Chaplain 600
Pastor's Permission. Private Exposition of Blessed Sacrament needs — . . 362, 612
Patron. Choice of a Diocesan — 736
Pentateuchal Criticism. The Temple of Jahu and — 291
Philip and Calendar Reform. Professor Alexander — 141
Philosophy. Studies in American — 185, 257
Plea for our Ageing Clergy. A — 488
Index to Volume XLVII. 773
Policy of the Popes. Defending the — ^ga
Pontifical Mass and Vespers. The Prescribed Reverence in— ...... 224.' ^60
Pope, O.P., S.S.D. The Rev. Hugh— ,291
Pope. Defending the Policy of the — ..*.!!'..!..'.*..'..... . . 493
Popular Sermons. Essay Sermons and so-called — 676
Postulants in Monasteries of Simple Vows 585
Prayer after distributing Communion outside Mass 363* 495
Preacher. Personal Sanctity and Natural Abilities of the— . ..'.*. .' 134
Preachers. An Apology for Sundry — 674
Preachers. The Difference between Catholic and non-Catholic — 129
Priests during Retreats. Daily Communion of— [ 705
Priests' League " Pro Pontifice et Ecclesia " ,,, 589
Priests serving as Seminary Prefects. Newly-ordained — 399
Prise du Bon Dieu. La — 517
Private Benediction in Convents. The Right to permit — 600
Private Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament 612
Private Exposition of Blessed Sacrament 362* 612
Privilegium Fori. The Respect shown to the — 304, 357
Professional Secrecy in Hospitals 610
Promises. The New Decree on ante-nuptial — 330, 364, 477
Pronunciation of Latin. The Proper — 633
Propaganda, Rome. Theological Studies at the — 415
Prout : Frank Mahony. Father — 8
Psalms I, 8, 18, 22. Metrical Translation of — 723
Psaltery. Permission to print the New — 98
Pulpit Eloquence and the Supernatural 129
Punctuality in celebrating Mass at fixed Hours 704
Quantavis diligentia and the Privilege of the Court 303, 357
" Quid mihi et tibi ? " again 105, 221, 601
" Quisquis valet numerare ? " 158
Reactions of the Decree on Daily Communion. Some — 702
Realism in America. The Influence of Scotch — 185
Recreation in the Seminary. The Regulation of — 400
Reformation on Art in Germany. Effect of the — 645
Religious Liberty. Constantine's Proclamation of — 385, 472
Religious who serve on the Secular Mission. Jurisdiction of Ordinary
over — 720
Requiem Mass under the New Rubrics. The Old Indult of — 615
Retreats. Daily Communion at Clerical — 705, 734
Reverence in Pontifical Mass and Vespers. The Prescribed — 224, 360
Revision of the Vulgate. The Work of the— 618
Richelieu. The Relationship of Pere Joseph to — 613
Roman Seminary Life. An Account of — 403
Romanesque Architecture in Germany 643
Romanticism in Art. The Reign of — 646
Ruthenians in Canada. A Bishop for the — 582
Sacraments. Value of Method in Teaching Children to receive the — .... 591
Sacred Heart. So-called " Miraculous Portrait " of — 587
Sacred Heart on the Altar. Images of the — 616
St. Alphonsus on Vocation to Priesthood. St. Thomas and — 514
St. Catherine at Mount Sinai. The Convent of — 19
St. Cecilia and its Value. The Story of— 564
St. Francis de Sales. The Imagination in the Writings of — 434
St. Paul's Sermons. Use of Figures of Speech in — 59
St. Sulpice. Venerable J. J. Olier and the Foundation of — 431
St. Thomas and St. Alphonsus on Vocation to Priesthood 514
St. Vincent de Paul and the Foundation of Seminaries 424
Sanctuary. Bride and Groom kneeling in the — 614
Saturday Devotions in honor of the Immaculate Conception. First — . . 716
Schlathoelter. The Rev. L. F.— : 735
Schurman, a Relentless Critic of Evolution 278
Scully, C.R.L. The Rev. Vincent— 603
Secrecy in Hospitals. Professional — 610
Seminary Education. Efficiency of Modern — 735
774 Index to Volume XLVII.
PAGE
Seminary Life in Rome. An Account of — 403
Seminary Prefects. Newly-ordained Priests serving as — 399
Seminary to be separate. The Preparatory and the Theological — 396
Seminaries. The Course of Studies and Discipline in — 395, 455
Seminaries. St. Vincent de Paul and the Foundation of — 424
Senfelder, M.D. Leopold — 19
Sermon. Something more about the Tiresome — 53
Sermons by Catholic and non-Catholic Preachers. Difference between — . . 129
Sermons — Taste and Tolerance 674
Sheridan, C.C. The Rev. P.— 62, 316
Sinaitic Tourists. Practical Hints to — 19
Sisters of Charity from Fast and Abstinence in Latin America. Exemp- tion of — 719
Sixtus V promulgate the " Eternus ille " ? Did — 739
Small Host outside the Corporal. Consecration of — 660
Smoking in the Seminary 406
SnufT-Box at the Offertory. Passing of — 617
South America. Encyclical on the Condition of Indians in — 447
Spencer and the Theory of Evolution 259
Spiritual Direction in Roman Seminaries 421
Stations of the Cross. Franciscans and Indulgences of the — 471
Story of St. Cecilia and its Value. The — 564
Strappini, S.J. The Rev. W. D.— l6i
Studies and Discipline in Theological Seminaries. Course of — .... 395, 455
Supernatural. Pulpit Eloquence and the — 129
Synoptic Gospels. The Biblical Commission and the — 523
Syene and Pentateuchal Criticism. The Temple in — 291
Taste and Tolerance in Sermons C74
Temple of Jahu and Pentateuchal Criticism. The — 291
Theology in Seminaries. The Course for Students of — 402
Thomas a Kempis and Brothers of the Common Life 603
Thomas a Kempis as a Hymn-Writer 155
Transcendentalism or Kantism in America 189
Transfer of Feast of *' Beatus ". Indulgences in Case of — 716
Travel during Vacations. Roman Students and — 419
Trent and the Foundation of Seminaries. The Council of — 425
Trent on Vocation to Priesthood. Teaching of Council of — 518
Vacations. Continuous Residence in the Seminary and — 397
Valerian and St. Cecilia. The Story of — 564
Van Sever. The Rev. A. — 228, 604
Vasectomy. A Survey of the Controversy on — 341
" Veni, Veni, Rex Gloriae " 157
Vestments. Ecclesiastical Dress and — 283
Vestments of the Jewish Priests and of Catholic Clergy. Similarity be- tween— 283
Vincentians in French Seminaries. The Work of the— 431
Vocation. The Traditional Idea of Sacerdotal — 513, 584
Vocations to the Priesthood. Lack of — 395, 455
Vulgate. The Sixto-Clementine — 739 '
Vulgate. The Work of the Revision of the— 618
Wirth, D.D. The Rev. Edmund J.— 513
Zulueta, S.J. The Rev. F. M. de— loi
BOOK REVIEWS
Aertnys : Compendium Liturgiae Sacrae 252
Amelli : Collectanea Biblica Latina 618
Annus Liturgicus. Gatterer : — 759
Augier : Apologie du Catholicisme par les Incredules 758
Authority. Huizinga : — 121
Bardenhewer : Geschichte der Altkirchlichen Literatur 628
Bazin : Davidee Birot 231
Benson : Friendship of Christ 113
Benson : The Coward .....]................ 241
Index to Volume XLVII. 775
PAGE
Betrothment and Marriage. De Smet : — 757
Biblica Latina. Collectanea — Araelli : — 618
Bon vin : Cantemus Domino 115
Bouddhisnie Primitif. Roussel : — 118
Boyle : What is Socialism ? 239
Bregy : Poet's Chantry 755
Breviarium Romanum 251
Brossart-Meyenberg: Homiletic and Catechetic Studies 503
Cantemus Domino. Bonvin : — ne
Catechetic Studies. Homiletic and — Meyenberg-Brossart : — 503
Catholic Encyclopedia. Vols. Xlll and XIV 505
Catholic Faith. The — 749
Cauvons : Histoire de I'Inquisition en France 253
Cecilia: Girls' Clubs and Mothers' Meetings 123
Charruau : Vendeenne 232
Chesterton : Manalive 233
Christ is God. Drum : — 230
Christus. Huby:- — n8
Chronicle of the Popes. McKilliam : — 232
Church and Eugenics. Gerrard : — 752
Church and Social Problems. Husslein : — 633, 752
ColTey : The Science of Logic 254, 369, 496
Collectio Rerum Liturgicarum. Wuest : — 507
Colvin : The Learning Process 496
Compendium Liturgiae Sacrae. Aertnys : — 252
Coube : Gloires et Bienfaits de I'Eucharistie 760
Coward. The — Benson : — 241
Davidee Birot. Bazin : — 231
Dawson. The Mirror of Oxford 249
De Curia Romana. Monin : — 367
De Processu Criminali Ecclesiastico. Heiner-Wynen : — 631
De Smet: Betrothment and Marriage 757
Drum : Christ is God 230
Dubray : Introductory Philosophy 369
Ecclesia Christi. De — Straub: — 624
Epicurus to Christ. Hyde : — 254
Eucharistica. Henry : — 620
Exposition de la Morale Catholique Speciale. Janvier : — 760
Finlay : Plandbook of the History of Philosophy 374
Five Great Philosophies of Life. Hyde : — 374
Friendship of Christ. Benson : — 1 13
Gatterer : Annus Liturgicus 759
Gerrard : The Church and Eugenics 752
Geschichte der Altkirchlichen Literatur. Bardenhewer : — 628
Girls' Clubs and Mothers' Meetings. Cecilia: — 123
Gloires et Bienfaits de I'Eucharistie. Coube : — 760
God : The Author of Nature and the Supernatural. Pohle : — 758
Heiner-Wynen : De Processu Crimnali Ecclesiastico 631
Henry : Eucharistica 620
Hetherington : Notes on the Rubrics and the Use of New Psalter. 631
His Grey Eminence. O'Connor : — 5°!
Homiletic and Catechetic Studies. Meyenberg-Brossart : — 503
Housing Problem. The— Toke :-— 752
Huby: Christus Ii8
Huizinga : Authority ' I2i
Husslein : The Church and Social Problems 633, 752
Hyde : The Five Great Philosophies of Life 374
Idee de Dieu. Murat : — 120
Inquisition en France. Histoire de 1' — Cauzons : — 253
Janvier : Exposition de la Morale Catholique Speciale 760
Jesu bei Matt. 10:27. Selbstoffenbarung — Schumacher? — 230
Jorgensen : St. Francis of Assisi 236
kirchliches Handlexicon. Herder : — 755
•^^e Index to Volume XLVII.
PAGE
Koo : The Status of Aliens in China 504
Ladd : Teacher's Practical Philosophy 626
Learning Process. The — Colvin : — 496
Lester : The Story of the Sodality of Our Lady 750
Life and Times of the Patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Thompson : — . 253
Living Wage. A — Ryan : — 379
Liturgicarum. Collectio Rerum — Wuest : — 507
Liturgy. Catechism of the — Singenberger : — 253
Logic, The Science of — Coffey : — 254, 369, 496
Los Gremios. Segarra : — 376
Lourdes. The Unbeliever : A Romance of — 379
Manalive. Chesterton : — 233
Marriage. Betrothment and — De Smet : — 757
Mathias : Organum comitans ad Propriura de Tempore 118
McKilliam : Chronicle of the Popes 232
Meehan : Practical Guide to the Divine Office 631
Mirror of Oxford. Dawson : — 249
Monin : De Curia Romana 367
Mullan : Sodality of Our Lady Studied in the Documents 750
Murat : L'Idee de Dieu 120
Myers : The New Psalter and its Use 630
Non-Catholic Friends. For our — Noll : — 366
O'Connor : His Grey Eminence 501
Organum comitans ad Proprium de Tempore. Mathias : — 118
Otten : The Reason Why 115
Parochial School. Why ? — Noll : — 507
Philosophical Tendencies. Present — Perry : — 254, 369
Philosophie. Histoire de la — Sortais : — 374
Philosophies of Life. Five Great — Hyde : — 374
Philosophy. Handbook of the History of — Finlay: — 254, 374
Philosophy. Introductory — Dubray : — 254, 369
Philosophy. Teacher's Practical — 626
Pierard : Cours Pratique de Psalmodie Vaticane 632
Poet's Chantry. Bregy : — 756
Pohle : God : the Author of Nature and the Supernatural 758
Practical Guide to the Divine Office. Meehan : — 631
Practical Guide for Servers at Low Mass and Benediction. Page : — 761
Psalter and its Use. The New — Myers : — 630
Reason Why. The — Otten : — 115
Rosmini : Theodicy 254, 373
Roussel : Bouddhisme Primitif 1 18
Rubrics and the Use of the New Psalter. Notes on the — Hetherington : — 631
Ryan : A Living Wage 379
St. Francis of Assisi. Jorgensen : — 236
Schumacher : Selbstoffenbarung Jesu bei Matt. 10 : 27 230
Science of Logic. The — Coffey : — 254, 369, 496
Segarra : Los Gremios 376
Socialism as it is. Walling : — 123, 239
Socialism ? What is — Boyle : — 239
Social Problems. The Church and — Husslein : — 752
Social Reform. Studies in — 379, 752
Sodality of Our Lady Studied in the Documents. Mullan : — 750
Sodality of Our Lady. The Story of the — Lester : — 750
Sortais : Histoire de la Philosophie 374
Status of Aliens in China. Koo : — 504
Straub : De Ecclesia Christi 624
Summa Theologica of St. Thomas 749
Teacher's Practical Philosophy. Ladd : — 626
Theodicy. Rosmini : — 254, 373
Thompson : Life and Times of the Patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. 252 . .>
Toke : The Housing Problem 752 / ^
Vendeenne. Charruau : — 232
Walling : Socialism as it is 123, 239
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