The Catholic World, Vol. 01, April to September, 1865
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Title: The Catholic World, Vol. 01, April to September, 1865
Author: Various
Release date: April 4, 2012 [eBook #39367]
Language: English
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Credits: Produced by Don Kostuch
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CATHOLIC WORLD, VOL. 01, APRIL TO SEPTEMBER, 1865 ***
Produced by Don Kostuch
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This text includes Volume I;
Number 1--April 1865
Number 2--May 1865
Number 3--June 1865
Number 4--July 1865
Number 5--August 1865
Number 6--September 1865
[End Transcriber's notes]
_Fine Binding_
THE CARSWELL COMPANY LIMITED
THE CATHOLIC WORLD.
_A Monthly Eclectic Magazine_
of
GENERAL LITERATURE AND SCIENCE.
VOL. I.
APRIL TO SEPTEMBER, 1865.
NEW YORK:
LAWRENCE KEHOE, PUBLISHER,
7 BEEKMAN STREET.
1865.
CONTENTS.
Ancient Saints of God, The, 19.
Ars, A Pilgrimage to, 24.
Alexandria, The Christian Schools of, 33, 721.
Animal Kingdom, Unity of Type in the, 71.
Art, 136, 286, 420.
Art, Christian, 246.
Authors, Royal and Imperial, 323.
All-Hallow Eve, or the Test of Futurity, 500, 657, 785.
Arks, Noah's, 513.
Babou, Monsieur, 106.
Blind Deaf Mute, History of a, 826.
Church in the United States, Progress of the, 1.
Constance Sherwood, 78, 163, 349, 482, 600, 748.
Catholicism, The Two Sides of, 96, 669, 741.
Cardinal Wiseman in Rome, 117
Catacombs, Recent Discoveries in the, 129.
Chastellux, The Marquis de, 181.
Church of England, Workings of the Holy Spirit in the, 289.
Cochin China, French, 369.
Consalvi's Memoirs, 377.
Church History, A Lost Chapter Recovered, 414.
Canova, Antonio, 598.
Cathedral Library, The, 679.
Catholic Philosophy in the Thirteenth Century, 685.
De Guerin, Eugenie and Maurice, 214.
Divina Commedia, Dante's, 268.
Dinner by Mistake, A, 535.
Dramatic Mysteries of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, 577.
Dublin May Morning, A, 825.
Extinct Species, 526.
Experience, Wisdom by, 851.
Falconry, Modern, 493.
Fifth Century, Civilization in the, 775.
Guerin, Eugenie and Maurice de, 214.
Glacier, A Night in a, 345.
Grand Chartreuse, A Visit to the, 830.
Hedwige, Queen of Poland, 145.
Heart and the Brain, 623.
Irish Poetry, Recent, 466.
Jem McGowan's Wish, 56.
Legends and Fables, The Truth of, 433.
London, Catholic Progress in, 703.
London, 836.
Laborers Gone to their Reward, 855.
Mont Cenis Tunnel, The, 60.
Mongols, Monks among the, 158.
Mourne, The Building of, 225.
Memoirs, Consalvi's, 377.
Maintenon, Madame de, 799.
Miscellany, 134, 280, 420, 567, 712, 858.
Nick of Time, The, 124.
Perilous Journey, A, 198.
Poucette, 260.
Prayer, What came of a, 697.
Russian Religious, A, 306.
Saints of God, The Ancient, 19.
Science, 134, 280, 712.
Streams, The Modern Genius of, 233.
Stolen Sketch, The, 314.
Swetchine, Madame, and her Salon, 456.
Shakespeare, William, 548.
St. Sophia, The Church and Mosque of, 641.
Species, The Origin and Mutability of, 845.
Three Wishes, The, 31.
Terrene Phosphorescence, 770.
Upfield, Many Years Ago at, 393.
Vanishing Race, A, 708.
Wiseman, Cardinal in Rome, 117.
Winds, The, 207.
Women, A City of, 514.
Wisdom by Experience, 851.
Young's Narcissa, 797.
POETRY
A Lie, 245.
Avignon, The Bells of, 783.
Domine Quo Vadis? 76.
Dream of Gerontius, The, 517, 630.
Dorothea, Saint, 666.
Ex Humo, 33.
Gerontius, The Dream of, 517, 630.
Hans Euler, 237.
Limerick Bells, Legend of, 195.
Mary, Queen of Scots, Hymn by, 337.
Martin's Puzzle, 739.
Saint Dorothea, 666.
Speech, 829.
Twilight in the North, 344.
Unspiritual Civilization, 747.
{iv}
_Contents._
NEW PUBLICATIONS.
Archbishop Spalding's Pastoral, 144.
At Anchor, 287.
American Annual Cyclopaedia, US.
A Man without a Country, 720.
Banim's Boyne Water, 286.
Beatrice, Miss Kavanagh's, 574.
Cardinal Wiseman's Sermons, 139.
Cummings' Spiritual Progress, 140.
Christian Examiner, Reply to the, 144.
Correlation and Conservation of Forces, The, 288, 425.
Confessors of Connaught, 574.
Cure of Ars, Life of the, 575.
Ceremonial of the Church, 720.
Darras' History of the Church, 141, 575, 860.
England, Froude's History of, 715.
Faith, the Victory, Bishop McGill's, 428.
Grace Morton, 574.
Heylen's Progress of the Age, etc., 142.
Household Poems, Longfellow's, 719.
Irvington Stories, 143.
Irish Street Ballads, 720.
John Mary Decalogne, Life of, 576.
Lamotte Fouque's Undine, etc 142.
La Mere de Dieu, 432.
Life of Cicero, 573.
Moral Subjects, Card. Wiseman's Sermons on 287.
Mystical Rose, The, 288.
Mater Admirabilis. 429.
Month of Mary, 720.
Martyr's Monument, The, 860.
New Path, The, 288, 576.
Our Farm of Four Acres, 143.
Protestant Reformation, Abp. Spalding's History of the, 719.
Real and Ideal, 427.
Religious Perfection, Bayma's, 431.
Russo-Greek Church, The, 576.
Retreat, Meditations and Considerations for a, 720.
Songs for all Seasons, Tennyson's, 719.
Sybil, A Tragedy, 860.
Translation of the Iliad, Lord Derby's, 570.
Truebner's American and Oriental Literature, 576.
William Shakespeare, 860.
Whittier's Poems; 860.
Young Catholic's Library, 432.
Year of Mary, 719.
----
THE CATHOLIC WORLD.
VOL. I., NO. 1.--APRIL, 1865.
From Le Correspondant.
THE PROGRESS OF THE CHURCH IN THE UNITED STATES.
BY E. RAMEUR.
[The following article will no doubt be interesting to our readers,
not only for its intrinsic merit and its store of valuable
information, but also as a record of the impressions made upon an
intelligent foreign Catholic, during a visit to this country. As might
have been expected, the author has not escaped some errors in his
historical and statistical statements--most of which we have noted in
their appropriate places. It will also be observed that while
exaggerating the importance of the early French settlements in the
development of Catholicism in the United States, he has not given the
Irish immigrants as much credit as they deserve. But despite these
faults, which are such as a Frenchman might readily commit, the
article will amply repay reading.--ED. CATHOLIC WORLD.]
After the Spaniards had discovered the New World, and while they were
fighting against the Pagan civilization of the southern portions of
the continent, the French made the first [permanent] European
settlement on the shores of America. They founded Port Royal, in
Acaclia, in 1604, and from that time their missionaries began to go
forth among the savages of the North. It was not until 1620 that the
first colony of English Puritans landed in Massachusetts, and it then
seemed not improbable that Catholicism was destined to be the dominant
religion of the New World; but subsequent Anglo-Saxon immigration and
political vicissitudes so changed matters, that by the end of the last
century one might well have believed that Protestantism was finally
and completely established throughout North America. God, however,
prepares his ways according to his own good pleasure; and he knows how
to bring about secret and unforeseen changes, which set at naught all
the calculations of man. The weakness and internal disorders of the
Catholic nations, in the eighteenth century, retarded only for a
moment the progress of the Catholic Church; and Providence, combining
the despised efforts of those who seemed weak with the faults of those
who seemed strong, confounded the superficial judgments of
philosophers, and prepared the way for a speedy religious
transformation of America.
This transformation is going on in our own times with a vigor which
seems to increase every year. The {2} causes which have led to it
were, at the outset, so trivial that no writer of the last century
would have dreamed of making account of them. Yet, already at that
time, Canada, where Catholicism is now more firmly established than in
any other part of America, possessed that faithful and energetic
population which has increased so wonderfully during the last half
century; and even in the United States might have been found many an
obscure, but a patient and stout-hearted little congregation--a relic
of the old English Church, which after three centuries of oppression
was to arise and spread itself with a new life. But no one set store
by the poor French colonists; England and Protestantism, together, it
was thought, would soon absorb them; and as for the _Papists_ of the
United States, the wise heads did not even suspect their existence.
The writer who should have spoken of their future would only have been
laughed at.
The English Catholics, like the Puritans, early learned to look toward
America as a refuge from persecution, and in 1634, under the direction
of Lord Baltimore, they founded the colony of Maryland. Despite
persecution from Protestants whom they had freely admitted into their
community, they prospered, increased, and became the germ of the
Church of the United States, now so large and flourishing.
In the colonial archives of the Ministry of the Navy we have found a
curious manuscript memoir upon Acadia, by Lamothe Cadillac, in which
it is stated that in 1686 there were Catholic inhabitants in New York,
and especially in Maryland, where they had seven or eight priests.
Another paper preserved in the same archives mentions a Catholic
priest residing in New York; and William Penn, who had established
absolute toleration in the colony adjoining that of Maryland, speaks
of an old Catholic priest who exercised the ministry in Pennsylvania.
The Catholics at this time are said to have composed a thirtieth part
of the whole population of Maryland. This estimate seems to us too
low. At all events, the increase of our unfortunate brethren in the
faith was retarded by persecution and difficulties of all kinds which
surrounded them. In the Puritan colonies of the North, they were
absolutely proscribed. In the Southern colonies, of Virginia, Georgia,
and Carolina, their condition was but little better; in New York they
enjoyed a precarious toleration in the teeth of penal laws. In
Maryland and Pennsylvania alone they were granted freedom of worship,
and a legal status; though even in those colonies they were exposed to
a thousand wrongs and vexations. Maryland persecuted them from time to
time and banished their priests; and William Penn, in his tolerant
conduct toward them, was bitterly opposed by his own people.
Nevertheless, despite difficulties and violence, the Anglo-American
Catholics increased by little and little, wherever they got a
foothold; the descendants of the old settlers multiplied; new ones
came from England and Ireland; and a German immigration set in,
especially in Pennsylvania, where several congregations of German
Catholics were formed at a very early period. In the archives of this
province we have found several valuable indications of the state of
the Church in 1760. There were then two priests, one a Frenchman or an
Englishman, named Robert Harding, the other a German of the name of
Schneider. It seems probable that they were both Jesuits. [Footnote
1] In a letter to Governor Loudon, in 1757, Father Harding estimates
the number of Catholics in Philadelphia and its immediate neighborhood
at two thousand--English, Irish, and German; but in the absence of
Father Schneider he could not be positive as to these figures. A
letter from Gouverneur Morris in 1756 {3} speaks of the Catholics of
Maryland and Pennsylvania as being very numerous and enjoying freedom
of worship, and adds, that in Philadelphia there is a Jesuit who is a
very able and talented man. The Abbe Robin, a chaplain in Rochambeau's
army in 1781, informs us in his narrative that there were several
Catholic churches at Fredericksburg, Va., and even a Catholic
congregation at Charleston, S.C.
[Footnote 1: In De Courcy and Shea's "Catholic Church in the United
States" pp. 211, 212, an account will be found of both these
missionaries. The first mentioned was an Englishman. Both were--
Jesuits. ED. C. W.]
The toleration accorded to the Jesuits in the United States was
precarious, but it amounted in time to a pretty complete freedom; and
as they were not disturbed when the order was suppressed in Europe,
some of their brethren from abroad took refuge with them; so that in
1784, we find, according to Mr. C. Moreau, in his excellent work on
the French emigrant priests in America, [Footnote 2] nineteen priests
in Maryland, and five in Pennsylvania. To these we must add the
priests of Detroit, Mich., Vincennes, Ind., and Kaskaskia and Cahokia,
Ill., all four originally French-Canadian settlements which were ceded
to England along with Canada, and after the American Revolution became
parts of the United States. Counting, moreover, the missionaries
scattered among the Indian tribes, we may safely say that the American
Republic contained at the period of which we are speaking not fewer
than thirty or forty ecclesiastics. The number of the faithful may be
set down as 16,000 in Maryland, 7,000 or 8,000 in Pennsylvania, 3,000
at Detroit and Vincennes, and about 2,500 in southern Illinois; in all
the other states together they hardly amounted to 1,500. In a total
population therefore of 3,000,000 they numbered about 30,000, and of
these 5,500 were of French origin. Such was the condition of the
Church in the United States when it was regularly established in 1789
by the erection of an episcopal see at Baltimore, and the appointment,
as bishop, of Mr. Carroll, an American priest, born of one of the
oldest Catholic families of Maryland. The dispersion of the clergy of
France, in 1790, soon afterward supplied America with numerous
evangelical laborers, who gave a new impulse to the development which
was just becoming apparent in the infant Church.
[Footnote 2: One vol. 12mo. Paris: Douniol.]
A few years before the French Revolution, Mr. Emery, superior of Saint
Sulpice, guided by what we must term an extraordinary inspiration,
came to the assistance of the American Church, and with the help of
his brother Sulpitians and at the cost of the society, founded a
theological seminary at Baltimore. His plans were already well matured
when Bishop Carroll, soon after his appointment, entering heartily
into the project, promised him a house and all the assistance he could
give. Four Sulpitians accordingly set out from Paris in 1790, taking
with them five Seminarians. They were supplied with 30,000 francs to
defray the cost of their establishment, and to this modest sum the
crisis which soon overtook the parent establishment allowed them to
add but little; but this mite, bestowed by the Church of France in the
last days of her wealth, was destined to become, like the widow's
mite, the price of innumerable blessings.
Between 1791 and 1799 the storm of revolution drove twenty-three
French priests to the United States. As the first apostles, when they
set out from Rome, portioned out Germany and Gaul among themselves, so
they divided this country, and most of them organized new communities
of Christians, or by their zeal awakened communities that slept. Six
of them, Flaget, Cheverus, Dubourg, Marechal, Dubois, and David,
became bishops.
The base of operations from which these peaceful but victorious
invaders went forth was Baltimore, the episcopal see around which were
gathered the old American clergy and the greater part of the Catholic
population. It was here that the Sulpitians {4} had their seminary,
and this establishment became a centre of attraction for a great many
of these exiled priests who belonged to the Society of Saint Sulpice.
Some (as MM. Ciquard, Matignon, and Cheverus) bent their steps from
Baltimore toward the laborious missions among the intolerant and often
fanatical Puritans of the North, where the Catholics--a mere
handful--were found scattered far and wide; isolated in the midst of a
Protestant population; deprived of priests and religious services, and
in danger of totally forgetting the faith in which they had been
baptized. Nothing discouraged these apostolic men. Aided by divine
grace, they awakened the indifferent, converted heretics, gathered
about them the few Catholics who immigrated from Europe, attracted all
men by their affable and conciliating manners, their intelligence and
education, and the disinterestedness of their lives. Soon on this
apparently sterile soil Catholic parishes grew up and flourished in
the midst of people who had never before seen a priest. Thus were
founded the churches of Massachusetts, Maine, and Connecticut--so
quickly that, in 1810 (that is to say, only eighteen years after the
beginning of the missions), it was deemed advisable to erect for them
another bishopric. Congregations had sprung up on every side as if by
enchantment, and the venerable Abbe Cheverus was appointed their first
bishop.
Others went westward. The Abbes Flaget, Badin, Barriere, Fournier, and
Salmon carried the faith into Kentucky. There they found a few
Catholic families who had emigrated from Maryland. With them they
organized churches, which increased with prodigious rapidity, and were
the origin of the present dioceses of Louisville, Covington,
Nashville, and Alton.
The Abbes Richard, Levadour, Dilhiet, and several others, passed
through the forest and the wilderness, and joined the old French
colonies which still survived around the ruins of the French military
posts in the Northwest and in the valley of the Mississippi. They
found there a few missionaries, whom the Canadian Church still
maintained in those distant countries; but their ranks were thin, and
they were old and feeble. This precious reinforcement enabled them to
give a fresh impetus to the French Catholic congregations over whom
they kept watch in the forest. Detroit, Vincennes, Cahokia, Kaskaskia,
and afterward St. Genevieve and St. Louis in Missouri, ceded to the
United States in 1803, received the visits of these new apostles, and
experienced the benefits of their intelligence and zeal. Nearly all
the places where they fixed themselves have since given their names to
large and flourishing bishoprics.
Several of the emigrant priests remained in Maryland and Virginia, and
enabled the Sulpitians to complete the organization of their seminary,
while at the same time they assisted Bishop Carroll in providing more
perfectly and regularly for the wants of those central provinces which
might be called the first home of American Catholicism. The number of
the faithful everywhere increased remarkably. We can hardly estimate
the extraordinary influence which these French missionaries exercised
by their exemplary lives, their learning, their great qualities as
men, and their virtues as saints; and the Anglo-Saxon inhabitants (who
are thoroughly Protestant if you will, but for all that religious at
bottom) were struck by their character all the more forcibly because
it was so totally different from what their prejudices had led them to
expect of the Catholic clergy.
There is something patriarchal and Homeric in the lives of these men,
which read like the poetic legends in which nations have commemorated
the history of their first establishment. We have seen the journal of
one of these missionaries--the Abbe Bourg, {5} who labored further
North, in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. His life was one long,
perpetual Odyssey. In the spring he used to start from the Bay of
Chaleur, traverse the northern coasts of New Brunswick, pass down the
Bay of Fundy, make the entire circuit of the peninsula of Nova Scotia,
and after a journey of five hundred leagues, performed in nine or ten
months, visit the islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and so come
back to his point of departure. From place to place, the news of his
approach was sent forward by the settlers, so that whenever he stopped
he found the faithful waiting for him, and whole families came fifteen
or twenty leagues to meet him. Hardly had he arrived before he began
the round of priestly labor, of confession and baptism, of burial and
marriage. He was the arbiter of private quarrels, and often of public
disputes. He found time withal to look after the education of the
children--at least to make sure that they were well taught at home.
Thus he would stay fifteen days perhaps in one place, a month in
another, according to the number of the inhabitants. The first
communion of the children crowned his visit. Then the man of God, with
a last blessing on his weeping flock, disappeared for a whole year;
and when the apparition so long desired, but so transitory, had
passed, it left behind a halo of superhuman glory, which seemed to
these pious people the glory rather of a prophet than of an ordinary
man.
In such ways the marks of a messenger from God seemed more and more
clearly and unmistakably stamped upon the Catholic missionary, and
Protestants themselves began to yield to the subtle influence of so
much real virtue and self-devotion. Conversions were frequent even
among the descendants of the stern Puritans. Many of the most fervent
Catholic families in the United States date from this period. A rich
Presbyterian minister of Boston (Mr. John Thayer) was converted, and
became a priest and an apostle. So God scattered the seed of grace
behind the footsteps of his poor, persecuted children, who, despite
their apparent misery, bore continually with them the wealth of the
soul, the power of the Word, and the marvellous attraction of their
sacrifices and virtues.
Providence, however, had not deployed so strong a force for no purpose
beyond the capture of these converts. A very few missionaries might
have sufficed for that; but it was now time to prepare the land for
the great European immigration which was to cause the astonishing
growth of the United States. Spreading themselves over the vast area
of the Union, the emigrants found everywhere these veteran soldiers
whom the French Revolution had sent forth into the New World as
pioneers, tried both by the pains of persecution and the labors of
apostleship. Before this great human tide the old emigrant priests
were like the primitive rocks which arrest and fix geological
deposits, The Catholic part of the tossing flood invariably settled
around them and their disciples. All over the West the churches
founded by the old French settlers increased, and new ones sprang up
wherever a Catholic priest established himself. From that moment the
grand progressive movement has never ceased. The blood of the martyrs
of France, the spirit of her banished apostles, became fruitful of
blessings, of which the American churches are daily sensible.
The first bishop in the United States had been appointed in 1789. Four
years afterward another see was erected at New Orleans, La., which,
ten years later, became a part of the United States; and in 1808, so
rapid had been the Catholic development, that three new bishops were
consecrated--one for Louisville, Ky., another for New York, and the
third for Boston, Mass. Two of these sees were occupied by the French
missionaries who had founded them--Bishop {6} Flaget at Louisville,
and Bishop Cheverus at Boston. That of New York was entrusted to a
venerable priest of English [Irish] origin--the Rev. Luke Concanen. In
the whole United States there were then sixty-eight priests and about
100,000 Catholics. Lei us now glance at the rapid increase of the
American Church up to our own day.
I.
From the States of Maryland and Pennsylvania the Church was not long
in spreading into Virginia, New York, Kentucky, and Ohio. The
establishment of sees at Louisville and New York was followed by the
erection of others at Philadelphia in 1809, and Richmond and
Cincinnati in 1821. The two Carolinas, in which the Catholics had
hitherto been an obscure and rigorously proscribed class, received a
bishop at Charleston in 1820. New Orleans, a diocese of French
creation, was divided in 1824 by the erection of the bishopric of
Mobile. The old French colonies in the far West were the nucleus
around which were formed other churches. The dioceses of St. Louis,
Mo. (organized in 1826), Detroit, Mich. (1832), and Vincennes, Ind.
(1834), all took their names from ancient French settlements, and were
peopled almost exclusively by descendants of the French Canadians who
were their first inhabitants.
Thus, in the course of twenty-six years, we see eight new sees
erected, making the number of bishops in the United States thirteen.
The number of the clergy amounted in 1830 to 232, and in 1834 probably
exceeded 300. At the date of the next official returns (1840) there
were 482 priests and three more bishoprics--those of Natchez, Miss.,
and Nashville, Tenn., both established in 1837, and that of Monterey
in California, a country of Spanish settlement which had recently been
annexed to the United States. [Footnote 3]
[Footnote 3: Monterey was not a part of the United States until
1848, nor a bishop's see until 1850. In place of it we should
substitute Dubuque, made a see in 1837.--ED. C. W.]
But this increase was not comparable to that which followed between
1840 and 1850. In ten years the number of bishops was doubled by the
erection of fifteen [seventeen] new sees. In 1840 there were sixteen;
in 1850 thirty-one [thirty-three]. The growth during this period was
most perceptible in the North and West. Among the new sees were
Hartford, Conn., Albany and Buffalo, N. Y., Pittsburg, Penn.,
Cleveland, O., Chicago, Ill., Milwaukee, Wis., St. Paul, Minn., Oregon
City and Nesqualy, Oregon, and Wheeling in Northern Virginia. The
others were Little Rock, Ark., Savannah, Ga., Galveston, Texas, and
Santa Fe, New Mexico. [Footnote 4] The clergy in 1850 numbered
1,800, having considerably more than doubled [nearly quadrupled] their
number in ten years.
[Footnote 4: And San Francisco and Monterey--ED C. W.]
Thus we see that the Church was pressing hard and fast upon the old
New England Puritans. They soon began to feel uneasy, and to oppose
sometimes a violent resistance to her progress. In some of the States,
especially Connecticut and New Hampshire, there were laws against the
Catholics yet unrepealed; so that the dominant party had more ways of
showing their hatred of the Church than by mere petty vexations. In
Boston things went so far that a nunnery was pillaged and burned by a
mob. It is from this time that we must date the origin of the
Know-Nothing movement, directed ostensibly against foreigners, but
undoubtedly animated in the main by hatred of Catholicism and alarm at
its progress. The fretting and fuming of this political party was the
last effort of Puritan antipathy. The Church prospered in spite of it;
so the Puritans resigned themselves to witness her gradual aggressions
with the best grace they could assume.
{7}
Ten new sees were established between 1850 and 1860, and eight of
these were in the North or West--viz., Erie, Newark, Burlington,
Portland, Fort Wayne, Sault St. Marie, Alton, and Brooklyn. Two were
in the South--Covington and Natchitoches. There were thus in the
United States, in 1860, forty-three bishoprics, with 2,235 priests.
Let us now see how many Catholics were embraced in these dioceses, and
what proportion they bore to the total population.
The number of the faithful it is not easy to determine accurately; for
a false delicacy prevents the Americans from including the statistics
of religious belief in their census-tables. Estimates are very
variable. A work printed at Philadelphia in 1858 by a Protestant
author sets down the number of Catholics as 3,177,140. Dr. Baird, a
Protestant minister, published at Paris in 1857 an essay on religion
in the United States--an essay, be it remarked, which showed the
Catholics no favor--in which he estimated their number at 3,500,000.
But neither of these estimates rests upon trustworthy data. They were
certainly below the truth when they were made, and are therefore far
from large enough now, for the yearly increase is very great.
Our own calculations are drawn partly from our personal observation,
and partly from official documents published by various ecclesiastical
authorities. The best criterion is undoubtedly the rate of increase of
the clergy.
It must be evident that in America, more than in any other country,
there is a logical relation between the number of the faithful and the
number of the priests. As the clergy depend entirely upon the
voluntary contributions of their people, there must be a fixed ratio
between the growth of the flocks and the multiplication of pastors. If
the clergy increase too fast, they endanger their means of support.
Now, if priests cannot live in America without a certain number of
parishioners to support them, we may take this number as a basis for
calculating the minimum of the Catholic population; and we may safely
say that the population will be in reality much greater than this
minimum; because, as we can testify from experience, the churches
never lack congregations, and in most places the number of the clergy
is insufficient to supply even the most pressing religious wants of
the people. One never sees a priest in the United States seeking for
employment. On the contrary, the cry of spiritual destitution daily
goes up from parishes and communities which have no pastors.
Calculations founded upon the statistics of "church accommodations"
given in the United States census--that is, of the number of persons
the churches are capable of holding--are not applicable to our case;
because the Catholic churches, especially in the large cities, are
thronged two or three times every Sunday by as many distinct
congregations, while the Protestant churches have only one service for
all. The capacity of the churches therefore gives us neither the
actual number of worshippers nor the proportion between our own people
and those of other denominations. We have taken, then, as the basis of
our estimate, the ratio between the number of priests and the number
of the faithful, correcting the result according to the circumstances
of particular places. The first point is to establish this ratio, and
we are led by the concurrent results of careful estimates made in some
of the States, and special or general calculations which we have had
opportunity of making in person, to fix it at the average of one
priest for every 2,000 Catholics. But we have a very trustworthy
method of verifying this estimate, and that is by comparison between
the United States and the contiguous British Provinces, in which the
statistics of religious belief are included in the general census.
Setting aside Lower Canada, where the Catholic population is as
compact as it is in France, we find that in Upper {8} Canada, a
country which resembles the Western United States, the ratio in 1860
was one priest for every 1,850 Catholics, and in New Brunswick, a
territory very like New England, one for every 2,400. Our average
ratio of one for every 2,000 cannot, therefore, be far from the truth.
We have made due account of all data by which this ratio could be
either raised or lowered in particular times and places. We have
ourselves made investigations in certain districts, and persons well
qualified to speak on the subject have given us information about
others. The result of our corrected calculation gives us 4,400,000 as
the Catholic population of the United States in 1860, the date of the
last general census. We shall give presently the distribution of this
total among the several states; but we wish first to call attention to
another fact of great importance which appears from our figures. In
1808 the Catholics were 100,000 in a total population of 6,500,000, or
1/65th of the whole; in 1830 they were 450,000 in 13,000,000, or
1/29th of the whole; in 1840, 960,000 in 17,070,000, or 1/18th; in
1850, 2,150,000 in 23,191,000, or 1/11th; and finally, in 1860 they
were over 4,400,000 in 31,000,000, or 1/7th of the total population.
It thus appears that for fifty years the Catholics have increased much
faster than the rest of the inhabitants, and especially during the
last two decades. Between 1840 and 1850 their ratio of increase was
125 per cent., while that of the whole population was only 36; and
from 1850 to 1860 their ratio of increase was 109 per cent., while
that of the whole people was 35.59. These figures, to be sure, are not
mathematically certain, for they are deduced partly from estimates;
but we are confident that, considering the imperfect materials at our
disposal, we have come as near the exact truth as possible, both in
the ratio of increase and in the total population. Official returns in
the British Provinces confirm our calculations in a most remarkable
manner; and we believe that, estimating the future growth on the most
moderate scale, the Catholics will number in 1870 one-fifth of the
whole population, and in 1900 not far from one-third.
II.
Having traced the progress of the Church step by step in the United
States, it will now be equally interesting and instructive to see how
this progress has been made in different places. The Catholics are by
no means uniformly dispersed over the country, and their increase has
not been equally rapid in all the states. It will be worth our while
to see in which quarters they are settled with the most compactness
and in which they are widely dispersed; and thus we may predict
without great risk which regions are destined to be the Catholic
strongholds in the New World. We have already said that the proportion
of the Catholics to the whole people in 1860 was as one to seven; but
if we divide the country into two parts we shall find that in the
Southern states there are only 1,200,000 Catholics in a population of
12,000,000--that is, they are 1/10th of the whole; while in the North
they number 3,200,000 in 19,000,000, or more than 1/6th. Even these
figures give but a very general idea of the distribution of the
faithful. If we take the whole country, state by state, we shall find
the proportions still more variable. In some places the Catholic
element is already so strong that its ultimate preponderance can
hardly be doubted, while its slow development in other quarters
promises little for the future. The following tables will enable our
readers to comprehend at once the distribution of the Catholics among
the various states:
{9}
NORTHERN STATES.
SOUTHERN STATES.
[Illustration]
{10}
These tables show at a glance the disproportion between the Catholics
of the North and those of the South. In only one Northern state (that
of Maine) is the proportion of Catholics as small as 5.45 per cent, of
the whole population; while there are no fewer than five Southern
states in which it is less than three per cent. If we leave out New
Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Missouri, and Maryland, where the
preponderance of the faithful is due to special causes, we find that
in the other Southern states the average proportion is not above four
per cent. In other words, in these regions the Church has little
better than a nominal existence. This is partly because the stream of
European immigration has always flowed in other directions, and partly
because the negroes generally adhere to the Baptist or Methodist sects
in preference to the Church.
But when we examine the tables more in detail, we see that in both
sections the ratio of Catholics varies greatly in different states. It
is easy to account for this difference in the South. Six states only
have any considerable number of Catholic inhabitants. Louisiana and
Missouri owe them to the old French colonies around which the Catholic
settlers clustered. In New Mexico, more than three-fourths of the
people are of Spanish-Mexican origin. Texas derives a great number of
her inhabitants from Mexico, and has received a large Catholic
emigration both from Europe and from the United States. Maryland, the
germ of the American Church, owes her religious prosperity to the
first English Catholic settlers; and the Church in Kentucky is an
offshoot of that in Maryland. Such are the special causes of the great
differences between the churches of the various Southern states. In
the North there is less disparity. European immigration has produced a
much more decided effect in this section than in the preceding. From
this source come most of the faithful of New York, Oregon, California,
Ohio, and New Jersey. In Ohio the Germans have done the principal
part, and they have done much also in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The
effect of conversions is more perceptible in Connecticut, Rhode
Island, Massachusetts, and New York than elsewhere. In many of the
states, however, and especially in Pennsylvania, we find numerous
descendants of English Catholic settlers, while the old French
colonies of the West have had their influence upon the population of
Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Illinois, and also of the northern
part of New York, where the French Canadians are daily spreading their
ramifications across the frontier. If we look now at the localities in
which the proportion of Catholics is greatest, we shall notice several
interesting points touching the laws which have determined the
direction of the principal development of the Church, and which will
probably promote it in the future. In the South there are what we may
call three groups of states in which the Catholic element is notably
stronger than in the others. One belongs exclusively to the Southern
section, and consists of Louisiana, Texas, and New Mexico, having an
aggregate Catholic population of 380,000 in 1,363,800, or 28 per
cent. The other groups (Missouri, that is to say, and Maryland and
Kentucky) form parts of much larger groups belonging to the Northern
states. The first of these latter, and that to which Maryland and
Kentucky are attached, consists of Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey,
and Ohio. Its aggregate population is 11,647,477, of whom the
Catholics are 2,240,000, or nineteen per cent. This group contains the
ancient establishments of Maryland and Pennsylvania--good old Catholic
communities, in which the zeal and piety of the faithful possess that
firm and decided character which comes of long practice and
time-honored traditions. It contains, too, the magnificent seminary of
Baltimore, founded and still directed by the Sulpitians. This is the
largest and most complete {11} establishment of the kind in the United
States, and derives from its connection with the Sulpitian house in
Paris special advantages for superintending the education of young
ecclesiastics, and training accomplished ministers for the sanctuary.
Kentucky, likewise, has some important and noteworthy institutions,
such as the seminary of St. Thomas and the college of St. Mary, both
of which are in high repute at the West, and the magnificent Abbey of
Our Lady of La Trappe at New Haven, with sixty-four religious,
eighteen of whom are choir-monks. The Kentucky Catholics deserve a few
words of special mention. The descendants, for the most part, of the
first settlers of Maryland, who scattered, about a century ago, in
order to people new countries, they partake in an eminent degree of
the peculiar characteristics which have given to Kentuckians a
reputation as the flower of the American people. They are more
decidedly American than the Catholics of any other district, and they
are remarkable for their homogeneousness, their education, and their
attachment to the faith and traditions of the Church.
The most important and numerous Catholic population is found in the
state of New York, where the faithful amount to no fewer than 800,000.
They have here religious establishments of every kind. This condition
of things is the result, in great measure, of the well-known ability
of Archbishop Hughes, whose death has left a void which the American
clergy will find it hard to fill. His reputation was not confined to
the Empire City. He was as well known all over the Union as at his own
see, and was everywhere regarded as one of the great men of the
country. Although the progress of the faith in New York has been owing
in a very great degree to immigration, it is in this city and in
Boston that conversions have been most numerous; and in effecting
these, Archbishop Hughes had a most important share. It is not
surprising, then, that his death should have caused a profound
sensation in the city, and that all religious denominations should
have united in testifying respect for his memory.
It is difficult to apply a statistical table to the study of the
question of conversions. These are mental operations of infinite
variety, both in their origin and in their ways; for the methods of
Providence are as many and as diverse as the shades of human thought
upon which they act. It may be remarked, however, that the different
Protestant sects furnish very unequal contingents to the little army
of souls daily returning to the true faith; and it is a curious fact
that the two sects which furnish the most are the Episcopalians, who,
in their forms and traditions, approach nearest to the Catholic
Church, and the Unitarians, who go to the very opposite extreme, and
appear to push their philosophical and rationalistic principles almost
beyond the pale of Christianity. These two sects generally comprise
the most enlightened and intellectual people of North America. On the
other hand, the denominations which embrace the more ignorant portions
of the population (such as the Baptists, the Wesleyan Methodists,
etc., etc.) furnish, in proportion to their numbers, but few converts.
The principal Catholic review in the United States (_Brownson's
Review_, published in New York) is edited by a well-known convert,
whose name it bears, and who was formerly a Unitarian minister.
Further North--in New England--there is another Catholic group, of
recent origin, formed of the Puritan states of Connecticut,
Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. The first see here was established by
Bishop Cheverus only sixty years ago. These bishoprics, however, have
already acquired importance; for in the diocese of Hartford the
Catholics are now sixteen per cent, of the whole population, and the
rapidity of their increase and the completeness of their church
organization give us ground for bright hopes of their future progress.
Immigration {12} here does much to promote conversions, and it will
not be extravagant to anticipate that in the course of a few years the
number of the faithful will be doubled. _The Pilot_, the most
important Catholic journal in the country, is published in Boston.
The far West, only a few years ago, was a great wilderness, with only
a few French posts scattered here and there in the Indian forest, like
little islands in the midst of a great ocean. Now it is divided into
several states, and counts millions of inhabitants. In this rapid
transformation, Catholicism has not remained behind. Many dioceses
have been established, and the quickness of their growth has already
placed this group in the second rank so far as regards numerical
importance, while all goes to show that Catholicism is destined here
to preponderate greatly over all other denominations. The states of
Missouri, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota contained, in
1860, 4,575,000 souls, of whom 890,000, or 19 per cent., were
Catholics. This is as large a proportion as we find in the central
group. It is, moreover, rapidly rising, and only one thing is
necessary to make these states before long the principal seats of
Catholicism in the Union--that is, an adequate supply of priests. It
is of the utmost importance that the demand for missionaries in these
diocese be supplied at whatever cost.
The principal causes of this remarkable increase are, first, the
crowds of immigrants attracted by the great extent of fertile land
thrown open to settlers; and, secondly, the fact that the Catholic
immigrants on their arrival clustered, so to speak, around the old
French settlements, where the missionaries still maintained the
discipline and worship of the Church. At first, therefore, it was easy
to direct this great influx of people, since they naturally tended
toward the pre-existing centres of faith. The consequence was that the
Church lost by apostacies fewer members than one might have supposed,
and fewer than were lost in other places. But now the daily augmenting
crowds of immigrants are dispersing themselves through less solitary
regions. They are coming under more direct and various influences; and
hence the necessity for increasing the number of churches and parish
priests becomes daily more and more urgent. At the same time, the
means at the disposal of the bishops become daily less and less
adequate for supplying this want, especially since the people of the
country, new and unsettled as they are, and absorbed in material
cares, furnish but few candidates for the priesthood. Here we see a
glorious field for the far-reaching benevolence of the Society for the
Propagation of the Faith. Nowhere, we believe, will the sending forth
of pious and devoted priests produce fruits comparable to those of
which the past gives promise to the future in this part of the United
States. We spoke just now of the old French colonies, and our readers
will perhaps be surprised that we should have made so much account of
those poor little villages, which numbered hardly more than from 500
to 1,500 souls each when the Yankees began to come into the country.
Nevertheless, we have not exaggerated their importance. It is not only
that they served as centres and rallying-points; but so rapid is the
multiplication of families in America that this French population
which, if brought together in one mass in 1800, would have counted at
most 14,000 souls, now numbers, including both the original
settlements and the swarms of emigrants who have gone from them to the
West, not fewer than 80,000. Their descendants are always easily
recognized. Detroit, and its neighborhood in Michigan, Vincennes
(Ind.), Cahokia and Kaskaskia (Ill.), St. Louis, St. Genevieve,
Carondelet, etc. (Mo.), Green Bay and Prairie du Chien (Wis.), St.
Paul (Minn.)--all these old settlements have preserved the deep imprint
of our race. Even in the new colonies which were afterward drawn from
them, the French population have uniformly kept up the practice of
their religion, {13} the use of their mother tongue, and a lively
recollection of their origin. Of this fact we have obtained proof in
several instances from careful personal observation. Small and poor,
therefore, as these settlements were, they had a powerful moral
influence upon the great immigration of the nineteenth century. The
Catholic immigrants felt drawn toward them by the attraction of a
community of thought and customs; and God, whose Providence rules our
lives, directed the movement by his own inscrutable methods.
III.
While the Catholic element was increasing at the rate of 80, 125, and
109 per cent, every ten years, other religious denominations showed an
increase of only twenty or twenty-five per cent. Some remained
stationary, and a few even lost ground. Whence comes this continued
and increasing disparity in the development of different portions of
the same people? The principal reason assigned for it is the immense
emigration from Ireland to America. As the number of Catholics in the
United States when the emigration began was very small, every swarm of
fresh settlers added much more to their ratio of increase than to that
of other denominations. Ten added to ten gives an increase of 100 per
cent.; but the same number added to 100 gives only ten per cent. At
first sight, this seems a sufficient explanation; but we shall find,
when we come to examine it, that it does not really account for our
increase. If the growth of the American Catholic Church were the
result wholly of immigration, we should find that as the number of
Catholic inhabitants increased, the apparent effect of this
immigration would be diminished. In other words, the _ratio_ of increase
would gradually fall to an equality with that of other denominations.
But, so far from this being the case, the difference between our ratio
of increase and that of the Protestant sects is as great as ever--is
even growing greater. The ratio which was ten per cent. a year between
1830 and 1840, rose to 12.50 per cent, a year between 1840 and 1850,
and was 10.09 per cent, between 1850 and 1860. There are other causes,
therefore, beside European emigration to which we must look for an
explanation of Catholic progress in America. If we study with a little
attention the extent to which immigration has influenced the
development of the whole population of the country, and the exact
proportion of the Catholic part of this immigration, we shall find
confirmation of the conclusions to which we have been led by the
simple testimony of figures. Immigration has never furnished more than
six or seven per cent. of the decennial increase of the population of
the United States, the growth of which has been at the rate of
thirty-five per cent, during the same period. Immigration, therefore,
contributed to it only one-fifth. Again, of these immigrants,
including both Irish and Germans, not more than one-third have been
Catholics. Moreover, we must take account of the considerable number
of members that the Church has lost in the course of their dispersion
all over the country.
Clearly, then, the influence of immigration is not enough to account
for the rapid progress of the faith. A careful analysis of the
Catholic population at different tunes, and in different places,
enables us to specify two other causes.
1. The Catholics are principally distributed at the North among the
free states, where the population increases much faster than it does
at the South; and the Catholic families, it has been observed,
multiply much faster than the others, in consequence, no doubt, of
their more active and regular habits of life, sustained morality,
respect for the marriage tie, and regard for domestic obligations.
This difference in fecundity is quite perceptible wherever the
Catholic element {14} is strong--as in Canada, and the states of New
York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, etc., and,
among the Southern states, in Louisiana, Maryland, and Missouri.
2. Another cause of increase is the conversion of Protestants--a cause
which operates slowly, quietly, and, at first, imperceptibly, but with
that constant and uniform power--reminding us of the great operations
of nature--which is almost always the sign of a Providential agency.
Eloquent theorists and brilliant writers on statistics, preferring
salient facts and striking phenomena--what they call the great
principles of science--too often overlook or despise those obscure
movements which act quietly upon the human conscience. Yet how much
more powerful is this mysterious action--like the continual dropping of
water--than the showy effects which captivate so many thinkers, whose
organs of perception seem dazzled by the glow of their imagination!
Such was the nature of the invisible operation which was inaugurated
by the preaching of the martyrs of the faith whom the French
Revolution cast forth like seed all over the world. The rules of
political economy had nothing to do with it. It acted in the secret
chambers of men's hearts and the retirement of their meditative
moments, and it has gone on without interruption to the present
moment, increasing year by year. The Church seizes upon the
convictions of grown men; reaches the young by her admirable systems
of education; impresses all by her living, persuasive propagandism,
made beautiful by the zeal and devotion and holiness of her
missionaries. Simple and dignified, without the affectation of dignity--
austere, without fanaticism--their presence alone roots up old
prejudices, while their preaching and example fill the soul with new
lights and with anxieties which nothing but their instructions can set
at rest. Thus, wherever they go, the thoughts and comparisons which
they suggest multiply conversions all around them. You have only to
question a few Catholic families in the older states about their early
religious history, and you will see how important an element in the
prosperity of the Church is this force of attraction--so important,
that the following statement may almost be taken as a general law:
Wherever a Catholic priest establishes himself, though there be not a
Catholic family in the place, it is almost certain that by the end of
a time which varies from five to ten years, he will be surrounded by a
Catholic community large enough to form a parish and support a
clergyman. This rule seems to us to have no exception except in some
of the southern states. We have no hesitation in stating it broadly of
even those parts of New England in which the anti-Catholic feeling is
now strongest.
We shall presently have occasion to show that the only thing which
prevents the American Church from increasing, perhaps doubling, the
rapidity of its progress, is the scarcity of ecclesiastics and
missionaries, from which all the dioceses are suffering.
We have explained the important part which converts have played in
this progress. The inquiry naturally arises: Whence come so many
conversions? What are the causes which generally lead to them? These
are delicate and difficult questions. We have no wish to speak ill of
the Protestant clergy. Most of them are certainly honorable men,
estimable husbands and good fathers; but we cannot help observing that
they lack the sacerdotal character so conspicuous in the Catholic
priest. Their ministry and their teaching cannot fully satisfy the
soul; and whenever a calm and unprejudiced comparison is drawn between
them and the Catholic clergy, it is strange if the former do not
suffer by the contrast, and behold their flocks, little by little,
passing over to the side of the Church. This comparison is one motive
which often leads Protestants, not precisely into {15} the bosom of
the faith, but to the study of Catholic doctrine; and this is a step
by no means easy to persuade them to take; for, of every ten
Protestants who honestly study the faith, seven or eight end by
becoming Catholics. The Americans are a people of a strong religious
bent. Nothing which concerns the great question of religion is
indifferent to them. They study and reflect upon such matters much
more than we skeptical and critical Frenchmen. The conversions
resulting from such frequent consideration of religious matters ought,
therefore, to be far more numerous in America, and even in England,
than in other countries.
There are doubtless many other causes which contribute to the same
result. Among them are mixed marriages, which generally turn out to
the advantage of the Church, especially in the case of educated people
in the upper ranks in society. Not only are the children of these
marriages brought up Catholics, but almost always, as experience has
shown us, the Protestant parent becomes a Catholic too.
The excellent houses of education directed by religious orders are
another active cause of conversions. If elementary education is almost
universal in the United States, it is nevertheless true that the
higher institutions of learning are exceedingly defective. The
colleges and boarding-schools founded under the direction of the
Catholic clergy, though inferior to those of France in the
thoroughness of the education they impart and the amount of study
required of their pupils, are yet vastly superior to all other
American establishments in their method, their discipline, and the
attainments of their professors. The consequence is that they are
resorted to by numbers of Protestant youth of both sexes. No
compulsion is used to make them Catholics; no undue influence is
exerted; the press, free as it is, rarely finds excuse for complaint
on this score; but facts and doctrines speak for themselves. The good
examples and affectionate solicitude which surround these young
people, and the friendships they contract, leave a deep impression on
their minds, and plant the seed of serious thought, which sooner or
later bears fruit. Various circumstances may lead to the final
development of this seed. Now perhaps a first great sorrow wakens it
into life; now it is quickened by new ideas born of study and
experience; in one case the determining influence may be a marriage;
in another, intercourse with Catholic society; and not a few may be
moved by the falsity of the notions of Catholicism which they find
current among Protestants, and which their own experience enables them
to detect. This motive operates oftener than people suppose, and
generally with those who at school or college seemed most bitterly
hostile to the faith. In tine, those who have been educated at
Catholic institutions are less prejudiced and better prepared for the
action of divine grace, which Providence may send through any one of a
thousand channels.
And lastly, Catholicism acts upon the Americans through the medium of
the habits and customs to which it gradually attaches them, the result
of which is that in the growth of the population the Church makes a
constant, an insensible, and what we might call a spontaneous
increase. It is a well-known fact that the Catholic families of North
America, as a general rule, are distinguished by a character of
stability, good order, and moderation which is often wanting in the
Yankee race. Now this turns to the advantage of the Church; for it is
evident that a people which fixes itself permanently where it has once
settled, which concentrates itself, so to speak, has a better chance
of acquiring a predominance in the long run than one of migratory
habits, always in pursuit of some better state which always eludes it.
This truth is nowhere more apparent than in a county of Upper Canada
where we spent nearly three years. The county of Glengarry was settled
{16} in 1815 by Scotchmen, some of whom were Catholics. The colony
increased partly by the natural multiplication of the settlers, partly
by immigration, until about 1840, when immigration almost totally
ceased, all the lands being occupied. The population was then left to
grow by natural increase alone. The Protestants at that time were
considerably in the majority; but by 1850 the proportions began to
change, and out of 17,576 inhabitants 8,870 were Catholics. In 1860
the majority was completely reversed, and in a population of 21,187
there were 10,919 Catholics; in other words, the latter, by the
regular operation of natural causes, had gained every year from one to
two per cent, upon the whole. It would not be easy to give a detailed
explanation of this fact; we are only conscious that some mysterious
and irresistible agency is gradually augmenting the proportion of the
Catholic element in American society and weakening the Protestant.
American society might be compared to a troubled expanse of water
holding various substances in solution. The solid bottom upon which
the waters rest is formed by the deposit of these substances, and day
after day, during the moments of rest which follow every agitation of
the waves, more and more of the Catholic element is precipitated which
the waters bring with them at each successive influx, but fail to
carry off again. It is by this human alluvium that our religion grows
and extends itself; and if this growth is wonderful, it may be that
the effect of the infusion of so much sound doctrine into American
society will prove equally astonishing and precious.
Great stress has often been laid upon the good qualities of the
American people, but comparatively few have spoken of their faults;
not because they had none, but because their faults were lost sight of
in the brilliancy of their material prosperity. But recent events have
led to more reflection upon this point; so it will not astonish our
readers if we point oat one or two, such as the decay of thoughtful,
systematic, methodical intelligence among them, in comparison with
Europeans; their narrowness of mind; their inaptitude for general
ideas; and their sensibly diminishing delicacy of mind. These defects
show an unsuspected but serious and rapid degeneracy of the
Anglo-American race, and the decline has already perhaps gone further
than one would readily believe. If Catholicism, which tends eminently
to develop a spirit of method and order, broadness of view and
delicacy of sentiment, should combat successfully these failings, it
would render a signal service to the United States in return for the
liberty which they have granted it.
But Catholics, we should add, are indebted to the United States for
something more than simple liberty. They have there learned to
appreciate their real power. They have learned by experience how
little they have to fear from pure universal liberty, how much
strength and influence they can acquire in such a state of society.
There is this good and this evil in liberty--that it always proves to
the advantage of the strong; so that when there is question of the
relations between man and man, it must be a well-regulated liberty, or
it will result in the oppression of the weak. But the case is
different when it comes to a question of discordant doctrines: man has
everything to gain by the triumph of sound, strong principles and the
destruction of false and specious theories. In such a contest, let but
each side appear in its true colors, and we have nothing to fear for
the cause of truth. The United States will at least have had the merit
of affording an opportunity for a powerful demonstration of the truth;
and great as are the advantages which the Catholic Church can confer
upon the country, she herself will reap still greater advantages by
conferring them; for it will turn to her benefit in her action upon
the world at large.
In fact, the experience of the Church {17} in America has doubtless
gone for something in the familiarity which religious minds are
gradually acquiring with the principles of political liberty; and thus
the growth of American Catholicism is allied to the world-wide
reaction which is now taking place after the religious eclipse of the
last century. This transformation of the United States, in truth, is
only one marked incident in the intellectual revolution which is
drawing the whole world toward the Catholic Church--England as well
as America, Germany as well as England, even Bulgaria in the far East.
The foreign press brings us daily the signs of this progress; and
nothing can be easier than to point them out in France under our own
eyes. But unfortunately we have been too much in the habit, for the
last century, of leading a life of continual mortification, too
conscious that we were laughed at by the leaders of public opinion. We
crawled along in fear and trembling, creeping close to the walls,
dreading at every step to give offence, or to cause scandal, or to
lose some of our brethren. Accustomed to see our ranks thinned and
whole files carried off in the flower of their youth, we stood in too
great fear of the deceitful power of doctrines which seemed to promise
everything to man and ask nothing from him in return. And therefore
many of us still find it hard to understand the new state of things in
which we are making progress without external help. This progress,
however, inaugurated by the energy of a few, the perseverance of all,
and the overruling hand of divine Providence, is unquestionably going
on, and may easily be proved. We have only to visit our churches,
attend some of the special retreats for men, or look at the Easter
communions, to see what long steps faith and religious practice have
taken within the last forty years. The change is most perceptible
among the educated classes and in the learned professions. We have
heard old professors express their astonishment in comparing the
schools of the present time with those of their youth. It was then
almost impossible to find a young man at the _Ecole Polytechnique_, at
St. Cyr, or at the _Ecole Centrale_, with enough faith and enough
courage openly to profess his religion; now it may be said that a
fifth or perhaps a fourth part of the students openly and
unhesitatingly perform their Easter duty. We ourselves remember that
no longer ago than 1830 it required a degree of courage of which few
were found capable to manifest any religious sentiment in the public
lyceums. Voltairianism--or to speak better, an intolerant
fanaticism--delighted to cover these faithful few with public
ridicule; while now, if we may believe the best authorized accounts,
it is only a small minority who openly profess infidelity. We can
affirm that in the School of Law the change is quite as great, and it
has begun to operate even in that time-honored stronghold of
materialism, the School of Medicine.
But what must strike us most forcibly in the examination of these
questions is the fact, already pointed out by the Abbe Meignan, that
the progress of religion has kept even pace with the extension of free
institutions. Wherever the liberal _regime_ has been established, the
reaction in favor of religion has become stronger, no doubt because
liberty places man face to face with the consequences of his own acts
and the necessities of his feeble nature. Man is never so powerfully
impelled to draw near to God as when he becomes conscious of his own
weakness; never so deeply impressed with the emptiness of false
doctrines as when he has experienced their nothingness in the
practical affairs of life. The violence of external disorder soon
leads him to, reflect upon the necessity of solid, methodical, moral
education, such as regulates one's life, and such as the Church alone
can impart. And therefore the great change of sentiment of which we
have spoken is perceptible chiefly among the educated and liberal
classes, while with the ignorant and {18} vulgar infidelity holds its
own and is even gaining. The educated classes, more thoughtful,
knowing the world and having experience of men, see further and
calculate more calmly the tendency of events; with the common people
reason and plain sense are often overpowered by the violence of their
temperament and the impetuosity of their passions. Ignorance and
inordinate desires do the rest, and they imagine that man will know
how to conduct without knowing how to govern himself.
Whatever demagogues may say, history proves that the head always rules
the body. The period of discouragement and apprehension is past. We
shall yet, no doubt, have to go through trials, and violent crises,
and perhaps cruel persecutions; but we may hope everything from the
future. And why not? If we study the history of the Jewish people, we
shall see how God chastises his people in order to rouse them from
their moral torpor, and raise them up from apparent ruin by unforeseen
means. Weakness, in his hand, at once becomes strength; he asks of us
nothing but faith and courage. We have traced his Providence in the
methods by which he has stimulated the growth of the American
Church--methods all the more effectual because, unlike our own vain
enterprises, they worked for a long time in silence and obscurity.
These Western bishoprics remained almost unknown up to the day when,
the light bursting forth all at once, the world beheld a Church
already organized, already strong, where it had not suspected even her
existence.
There is a magnificent and instructive scene in _Athalie_, where the
veil of the temple is rent, and discloses to the eyes of the terrified
queen, Joas, whom she had believed dead, standing in his glory
surrounded by an army. Even so, it seems to us, was the American
Church suddenly revealed in all her vigor to the astonished world,
when her bishops came two years ago to take their place in the council
at Rome. And the same progress is making all over the globe. Noiseless
and unobtrusive, it attracts no attention from the world; it is
overlooked by Utopian theorists; it goes on quietly in the domain of
conscience; but the day will come when its light will break forth and
astonish mankind by its brightness. Such are the ways of God!
NOTE.--The greater part of the materials for the preceding article
were written or collected during the course of a journey which we made
in the United States in 1860. Since then the progress of Catholicism
has necessarily been somewhat checked by the events of the lamentable
civil war which is desolating the country; but the check has been far
less serious than might have reasonably been apprehended. Religion has
been kept apart from political dissensions and public disorders; it
has only had to suffer the common evils which war, mortality, and
general impoverishment have inflicted upon the whole people. If all
these things are to have any bad effect upon the progress of the
Church, it will be in future years, not now. In fact, all the
documents which we have been able to collect show that the numbers of
both the faithful and the clergy, instead of falling off, have gone on
increasing. In thirty-eight dioceses there are now 275 more priests
than there were in 1860; from the five other sees, namely, those of
New Orleans, Galveston, Mobile, Natchitoches, and Charleston, we have
no returns. This increase is confined almost entirely to the regions
in which the Church was already strongest; elsewhere matters have
remained about stationary.
Of this number of 275 priests added to the Church in the course of
three years, 251 belong to the following fourteen dioceses, namely:
Baltimore, Pittsburg, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Brooklyn, Albany, Alton,
Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul, Detroit, Fort Wayne, Vincennes, and
Hartford. The last-named belongs to the {19} Northeastern or New
England group, all the others to the Central and Western. Thus
fourteen dioceses alone show nine-tenths of the total increase, and
the others divide the remaining tenth among them in very minute
fractions. From some states, it is true, the returns are very meagre,
and from others they are altogether wanting; but the disproportion is
so strong as to leave no doubt that the future conquests of the Church
in the United States will be gained, as we have already said,
principally in the Middle and Western States.
E. R.
----
_From The Month._
THE ANCIENT SAINTS OF GOD.
A FRENCH OFFICER'S STORY.
BY THE LATE CARDINAL WISEMAN.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTION.
We often practically divide the saints into three classes. The ancient
saints, those of the primitive age of Christianity, we consider as the
patrons of the universal Church, watching over its well-being and
progress, but, excepting Rome, having only a general connection with
the interests of particular countries, still less of individuals.
The great saints of the middle age, belonging to different races and
countries, have naturally become their patrons, being more especially
reverenced and invoked in the places of their births, their lives, and
still more their deaths; whence, St. Willibrord, St. Boniface, and St.
Walburga are more honored in Germany, where they died, than in
England, where they were born.
The third class includes the more modern saints, who spoke our yet
living languages, printed their books, followed the same sort of life,
wore the same dress as we do, lived in houses yet standing, founded
institutions still flourishing, rode in carriages, and in another
generation would have traveled by railway. Such are St. Charles, St.
Ignatius, St. Philip, St. Teresa, St. Vincent, B. Benedict Joseph, and
many others. Toward these we feel a personal devotion independent of
country; nearness of time compensating for distance of place. There is
indeed one class of saints who belong to every age and every country;
devotion toward whom, far from diminishing, increases the further we
recede from their time and even their land. For we are convinced that
a Chinese convert has a more sensitive and glowing devotion toward our
Blessed Lady, than a Jewish neophyte had in the first century. When I
hear this growth of piety denounced or reproached by Protestants, I
own I exult in it.
For the only question, and there is none in a Catholic mind, is
whether such a feeling is good in itself; if so, growth in it, age by
age, is an immense blessing and proof of the divine presence. It is as
if one told me that there is more humility now in the Church than
there was in the first century, more zeal than in the third, more
faith than in the eighth, more charity than in the twelfth. And so, if
there is more devotion now than there was 1,800 years ago toward the
Immaculate Mother of God, toward {20} her saintly spouse, toward St.
John, St. Peter, and the other Apostles, I rejoice; knowing that
devotion toward our divine Lord, his infancy, his passion, his sacred
heart, his adorable eucharist, has not suffered loss or diminution,
but has much increased. It need not be, and it is not, as John the
Baptist said, "He must increase, and I diminish." Both here increase
together; the Lord, and those who best loved him.
But this is more than a subject of joy: it is one of admiration and
consolation. For it is the natural course of things that sympathies
and affections should grow less by time. We care and feel much less
about the conquests of William I., or the prowess of the Black Prince,
than we do about the victories of Nelson or Wellington; even Alfred is
a mythical person, and Boadicea fabulous; and so it is with all
nations. A steadily increasing affection and intensifying devotion (as
in this case we call it) for those remote from us, in proportion as we
recede from them, is as marvellous--nay, as miraculous--as would be the
flowing of a stream from its source up a steep hill, deepening and
widening as it rose. And such I consider this growth, through
succeeding ages, of devout feeling toward those who were the root, and
seem to become the crown, or flower, of the Church. It is as if a beam
from the sun, or a ray from a lamp, grew brighter and warmer in
proportion as it darted further from its source.
I cannot but see in this supernatural disposition evidence of a power
ruling from a higher sphere than that of ordinary _providence_, the laws
of which, uniform elsewhere, are modified or even reversed when the
dispensations of the gospel require it; or rather, these have their
own proper and ordinary providence, the laws of which are uniform
within its system. And this is one illustration, that what by every
ordinary and natural course should go on diminishing, goes on
increasing. But I read in this fact an evidence also of the stability
and perpetuity of our faith; for a line that is ever growing thinner
and thinner tends, through its extenuation, to inanition and total
evanescence; whereas one that widens and extends as it advances and
becomes more solid, thereby gives earnest and proof of increasing
duration.
When we are attacked about practices, devotions, or corollaries of
faith--"developments," in other words--do we not sometimes labor
needlessly to prove that we go no further than the Fathers did, and
that what we do may be justified from ancient authorities? Should we
not confine ourselves to showing, even with the help of antiquity,
that what is attacked is good, is sound, and is holy; and then thank
God that we have so much more of it than others formerly possessed? If
it was right to say "Ora pro nobis" once in the day, is it not better
to say it seven times a day; and if so, why not seventy times seven?
The rule of forgiveness may well be the rule of seeking intercession
for it. But whither am I leading you, gentle reader? I promised you a
story, and I am giving you a lecture, and I fear a dry one. I must
retrace my steps. I wished, therefore, merely to say that, while the
saints of the Church are very naturally divided by us into three
classes--holy patrons of the Church, of particular portions of it, and
of its individual members--there is one raised above all others, which
passes through all, composed of protectors, patrons, and nomenclators,
of saints themselves. For how many Marys, how many Josephs, Peters,
Johns, and Pauls, are there not in the calendar of the saints, called
by those names without law of country or age!
But beyond this general recognition of the claims of our greatest
saints, one cannot but sometimes feel that the classification which I
have described is carried by us too far; that a certain human dross
enters into the composition of our devotion; we perhaps nationalize,
or even individualize, {21} the sympathies of those whose love is
universal, like God's own, in which alone they love. We seem to fancy
that St. Edward and St. Frideswida are still English; and some persons
appear to have as strong an objection to one of their children bearing
any but a Saxon saint's name as they have to Italian architecture. We
may be quite sure that the power and interest in the whole Church have
not been curtailed by the admission of others like themselves, first
Christians on earth, then saints in heaven, into their blessed
society; but that the friends of God belong to us all, and can and
will help us, if we invoke them, with loving impartiality. The little
history which I am going to relate serves to illustrate this view of
saintly intercession; it was told me by the learned and distinguished
prelate whom I shall call Monsig. B. He has, I have heard, since
published the narrative; but I will give it as I heard it from his
lips.
CHAPTER II.
THE FRENCH OFFICER'S FIRST APPEARANCE.
On the 30th of last month--I am writing early in August--we all
commemorated the holy martyrs, Sts. Abdon and Sennen. This in itself
is worthy of notice. Why should we in England, why should they in
America, be singing the praises of two Persians who lived more than
fifteen hundred years ago? Plainly because we are Catholics, and as
such in communion with the saints of Persia and the martyrs of Decius.
Yet it may be assumed that the particular devotion to these two
Eastern martyrs is owing to their having suffered in Rome, and so
found a place in the calendar of the catacombs, the basis of later
martyrologies. Probably after having been concealed in the house of
Quirinus the deacon, their bodies were buried in the cemetery or
catacomb of Pontianus, outside the present Porta Portese, on the
northern bank of the Tiber. In that catacomb, remarkable for
containing the primitive baptistery of the Church, there yet remains a
monument of these saints, marking their place of sepulture. [Footnote
5] Painted on the wall is a "floriated" and jewelled cross; not a
conventional one such as mediaeval art introduced, but a plain cross,
on the surface of which the painter imitated natural jewels, and from
the foot of which grow flowers of natural forms and hues; on each side
stands a figure in Persian dress and Phrygian cap, with the names
respectively running down in letters one below the other:
SANCTVS ABDON: SANCTVS SENNEN.
The bodies are no longer there. They were no doubt removed, as most
were, in the eighth century, to save them from Saracenic profanation,
and translated to the basilica of St. Mark in Rome. There they repose,
with many other martyrs no longer distinguishable; since the ancient
usage was literally to bury the bodies of martyrs in a spacious crypt
or chamber under the altar, so as to verify the apocalyptic
description, "From under the altar of God all the saints cry aloud."
This practice has been admirably illustrated by the prelate to whom I
have referred, in a work on this very crypt, or, in ecclesiastical
language, _Confession_ of St. Mark's.
[Footnote 5: See _Fabiola_, pp. 362, 363.]
One 30th of July, soon after the siege of Rome in 1848, the chapter of
St. Mark's were singing the office and mass of these Persian martyrs,
as saints of their church. Most people on week-days content themselves
with hearing early a low mass, so that the longer offices of the
basilica, especially the secondary ones, are not much frequented. On
this occasion, however, a young French officer was noticed by {22} the
canons as assisting alone with great recollection.
At the close of the function, my informant went up to the young man,
and entered into conversation with him.
"What feast are you celebrating today?" asked the officer.
"That of Sts. Abdon and Sennen," answered Monsignor B.
"Indeed! how singular!"
"Why? Have you any particular devotion to those saints?"
"Oh, yes; they are my patron saints. The cathedral of my native town
is dedicated to them, and possesses their bodies."
"You must be mistaken there: their holy relics repose beneath our
altar; and we have to-day kept their feast solemnly on that account."
On this explanation of the prelate the young officer seemed a little
disconcerted, and remarked that at P-- everybody believed that the
saints' relics were in the cathedral.
The canon, as he then was, of St. Mark's, though now promoted to the
"patriarchal" basilica of St. John, explained to him how this might
be, inasmuch as any church possessing considerable portions of larger
relics belonging to a saint was entitled to the privilege of one
holding the entire body, and was familiarly spoken of as actually
having it; and this no doubt was the case at P--.
"But, beside general grounds for devotion to these patrons of my
native city, I have a more particular and personal one; for to their
interposition I believe I owe my life."
The group of listeners who had gathered round the officer was deeply
interested in this statement, and requested him to relate the incident
to which he alluded. He readily complied with their request, and with
the utmost simplicity made the following brief recital.
CHAPTER III.
THE OFFICER'S NARRATIVE.
"During the late siege of Rome I happened to be placed in an advanced
post, with a small body of soldiers, among the hillocks between our
headquarters in the villa Pamphily-Doria and the gate of St.
Pancratius. The post was one of some danger, as it was exposed to the
sudden and unsparing sallies made by the revolutionary garrison on
that side. The broken ground helped to conceal us from the marksmen
and the artillery on the walls. However, that day proved to be one of
particular danger. Without warning, a _sortie_ was made in force, either
merely in defiance or to gain possession of some advantageous post;
for you know how the church and convent of St. Pancratius was assailed
by the enemy, and taken and retaken by us several times in one day.
The same happened to the villas near the walls. There was no time
given us for speculation or reflection. We found ourselves at once in
presence of a very superior force, or rather in the middle of it; for
we were completely surrounded. We fought our best; but escape seemed
impossible. My poor little picket was soon cut to pieces, and I found
myself standing alone in the midst of our assailants, defending myself
as well as I could against such fearful odds. At length I felt I was
come to the last extremity, and that in a few moments I should be
lying with my brave companions. Earnestly desiring to have the
suffrages of my holy patrons in that my last hour, I instinctively
exclaimed, 'Sts. Abdon and Sennen, pray for me!' What then happened I
cannot tell. Whether a sudden panic struck my enemies, or something
more important called off their attention, or what else to me
inexplicable--occurred, I cannot say; all that I know is, that somehow
or other I found myself alone, unwounded {23} and unhurt, with my poor
fellows lying about, and no enemy near.
"Do you not think that I have a right to attribute this most wonderful
and otherwise unaccountable escape to the intercession and protection
of Sts. Abdon and Sennen?"
I need scarcely say that this simple narrative touched and moved
deeply all its hearers. No one was disposed to dissent from the young
Christian officer's conclusion.
CHAPTER IV.
THE EXPLANATION.
It was natural that those good ecclesiastics who composed the chapter
of St. Mark's should feel an interest in their youthful acquaintance.
His having accidentally, as it seemed, but really providentially,
strolled into their church at such a time, with so singular a bond of
sympathy with its sacred offices that day, necessarily drew them in
kindness toward him. His ingenuous piety and vivid faith gained their
hearts.
In the conversation which followed, it was discovered that all his
tastes and feelings led him to love and visit the religious monuments
of Rome; but that he had no guide or companion to make his wanderings
among them as useful and agreeable as they might be made. It was
good-naturedly and kindly suggested to him to come from time to time
to the church, when some one of the canons would take him with him on
his _ventidue ore_ walk after vespers, and act the _cicerone_ to him,
if they should visit some interesting religious object. This offer he
readily accepted, and the intelligent youth and his reverend guides
enjoyed pleasant afternoons together. At last one pleasanter than all
occurred, when in company with Monsignor B.
Their ramble that evening led them out of the Porta Portuensis, among
the hills of Monte Verde, between it and the gate of St. Pancratius--
perhaps for the purpose of visiting that interesting basilica. Be it
as it may, suddenly, while traversing a vineyard, the young man
stopped.
"Here," he exclaimed, "on this very spot, I was standing when my
miraculous deliverance took place."
"Are you sure?"
"Quite. If I lived a hundred years, I could never forget it. It is the
very spot."
"Then stand still a moment," rejoined the prelate; "we are very near
the entrance to the cemetery of Pontianus. I wish to measure the
distance."
He did so by pacing it.
"Now," he said, "come down into the catacomb, and observe the
direction from where you stand to the door." The key was soon
procured.
They accordingly went down, proceeded as near as they could judge
toward the point marked over-head, measured the distance paced above,
and found themselves standing before the memorial of Sts. Abdon and
Sennen.
"There," said the canon to his young friend; "you did not know that,
when you were invoking your holy patrons, you were standing
immediately over their tomb."
The young officer's emotion may be better conceived than described on
discovering this new and unexpected coincidence in the history of his
successful application to the intercession of ancient saints.
SANCTI ABDON ET SENNEN, ORATE PRO NOBIS.
------
{24}
From The Lamp.
A PILGRIMAGE TO ARS.
I went to Lyons for the express purpose of visiting the tomb of the
Cure of Ars; for I knew the village of Ars was not very far from that
city, though I had but a vague idea as to where it was situated or how
it was to be reached. I trusted, however, to obtaining all needful
information from the people at the hotel where I was to pass the
night; and I was not mistaken in my expectations; but I must confess,
to my sorrow, that I felt for a moment a very English sort of
shamefacedness about making the inquiry. Put to the waiter of an
English hotel, such a question would simply have produced a stare of
astonishment or a smile of pity. A visit to the tomb of the Duke of
Wellington at St. Paul's, or a descent into kingly vaults for the wise
purpose of beholding Prince Albert's coffin, with its wreaths of
flowers laid there by royal and loving hands these things he would
have sympathized with and understood. But a pilgrimage to the last
resting-place of a man who, even admitting he were at that moment a
saint in heaven, had been but a simple parish-priest upon earth, would
have been a proceeding utterly beyond his capacity to comprehend, and
he would undoubtedly have pronounced it either an act of insanity or
one of superstition, or something partaking of the nature of the two.
I forgot, for a moment, that I was in a Catholic country, and inquired
my way to Ars with an uncomfortable expectation of a sneering answer
in return. Once, however, that the question was fairly put, there was
nothing left for me but to be ashamed of my own misgivings.
"Madame wished to visit the tomb of the sainted Cure?--_mais oui_. It
was the easiest thing in the world. Only an hour's railway from Lyons
to Villefranche; and an omnibus at the latter station, which had been
established for the express purpose of accommodating the pilgrims, who
still flocked to Ars from every quarter of the Catholic world."
I listened, and my way seemed suddenly to become smooth before me.
Later on in the evening, I found that the housemaid of the hotel had
been there often; and two or three times at least during the lifetime
of the Cure. I asked her for what purpose she had gone there; whether
to be cured of bodily ailments or to consult him on spiritual matters?
"For neither one nor the other," she answered, with great simplicity;
"but she had had a great grief, and her mother had taken her to him to
be comforted." There was something to me singularly lovely in this
answer, and in the insight which it gave me into the nature of that
mission, so human, and yet so divine, which the Cure had accomplished
in his lifetime. God had placed him there, like another John the
Baptist, to announce penance to the world. He preached to thousands--he
converted thousands--he penetrated into the hidden consciences of
thousands, and laid his finger, as if by intuition, upon the hidden
sore that kept the soul from God. Men, great by wealth and station,
came to him and laid their burden of sin and misery at his feet. Men,
greater still by intellect, and prouder and more difficult of
conversion (as sins of the intellect ever make men), left his presence
simple, loving, and believing as little children. For these he had
lightning glances and words of fire; these by turns he reprimanded,
exhorted, and encouraged; but when the weak and sorrowful of God's
flock came to him, he paused in his apostolic task to weep over them
and console them. And so it was with {25} Jesus. The great and wealthy
of the earth came to him for relief, and he never refused their
prayers; but how many instances do we find in the gospel of the gift
of health bestowed, unasked and unexpected, upon some poor wanderer by
the wayside, or the yet greater boon of comfort given to some poor
suffering heart, for no other reason that we know of than that it
suffered and had need of comfort! The cripple by the pool of Bethsaida
received his cure at the very moment when he was heartsick with hope
deferred at finding no man to carry him down to the waters; and the
widow of Nain found her son suddenly restored to life because, as the
gospel expressly tells us, he was "the only son of his mother, and she
was a widow."
The heart of the Cure of Ars seems to have been only less tender than
that of his divine Master; and in the midst of the sublime occupation
of converting souls to God, he never disdained the humble task of
healing the stricken spirit, and leading it to peace and joy.
"My husband died suddenly," the young woman went on to say, in answer
to my further questions; "and from affluence I found myself at once
reduced to poverty. I was stunned by the blow; but my mother took me
to the cure; and almost before he had said a word, I felt not only
consoled, but satisfied with the lot which God had assigned me." And
so indeed she must have been. When I saw her, she was still poor, and
earning her bread by the worst of all servitude, the daily and nightly
servitude of a crowded inn; but gentle, placid, and smiling, as became
one who had seen and been comforted by a saint. She evidently felt
that she had been permitted to approach very near to God in the person
of God's servant, and every word she uttered was so full of love and
confidence in the sainted cure that it increased (if that were
possible) my desire to kneel at his tomb, since the happiness of
approaching his living person had been denied me.
The next morning I set off for Villefranche. It is on the direct line
to Paris, and at about an hour's railroad journey from Lyons. When I
reached it, I found three omnibuses waiting at the station, and I
believe they were all there for the sole purpose of conveying pilgrims
to Ars. One of the conductors tried every mode of persuasion--and there
are not a few in the vocabulary of a Frenchman--to inveigle me into his
omnibus. "I should be at Ars in half an hour, and could return at two,
three, four o'clock--in short, at any hour of the night or day that
might please me best." It was with some difficulty I resisted the
torrent of eloquence he poured out upon me; but, in the first place, I
felt that he was promising what he himself would have called "the
impossible," since a public conveyance must necessarily regulate its
movements by the wishes of the majority of its passengers; and in the
next, I had a very strong desire to be alone in body as well as in
mind during the few hours that I was to spend at Ars.
At last I found an omnibus destined solely for visitors to
Villefranche itself, and the conductor promised that he would provide
me a private carriage to Ars if I would consent to drive first to his
hotel. Cabaret he might have called it with perfect truth, for cabaret
it was, and nothing more--a regular French specimen of the article,
with a great public kitchen, where half the workmen of the town
assembled for their meals, and a small cupboard sort of closet opening
into it for the accommodation of more aristocratic guests. Into this,
_bon gre, mal gre_, they wished to thrust me, but I violently repelled
the threatened honor, and with some difficulty carrying my point,
succeeded in being permitted to remain in the larger and cooler space
of the open kitchen until my promised vehicle should appear. It came
at last, a sort of half-cab, half-gig, without a hood, but with a
curiously contrived harness of loose ropes, and looking altogether
{26} dangerously likely to come to pieces on the road. Luckily, I am
not naturally nervous in such matters, and, consoling myself with the
thought that if we did get into grief the "_bon cure_" was bound to
come to my assistance, seeing I had incurred it solely for the sake of
visiting his tomb, I was soon settled as comfortably as circumstances
would permit, and we set off at a brisk pace.
The country around Villefranche is truly neither pretty nor
picturesque; and though we were not really an hour on the road, the
drive seemed tedious. Our Jehu also, as it turned out, had never been
at Ars before; so that he had not only to stop more than once to
inquire the way, but actually contrived at the very last to miss it.
He soon discovered the mistake, however, and retracing his steps, a
very few minutes brought us to the spot where the saint had lived
forty years, and where he now sleeps in death. His house stands beside
the church, but a little in the rear, so it does not immediately catch
the eye; and the church, where his real life was spent, is separated
from the road by a small enclosure, railed off, and approached by a
few steps. We looked around for some person to conduct us, but there
was no one to be seen; so, after a moment's hesitation, we ascended
the steps and entered the church. If you wish to know what kind of
church it is, I cannot tell you. I do not know, in fact, whether it is
Greek or Gothic, or of no particular architecture at all; I do not
know even if it is in good taste or in bad taste. The soul was so
filled with a sense of the presence of the dead saint that it left no
room for the outer sense to take note of the accidents amid which he
had lived. There are two or three small chapels--a Lady chapel, one
dedicated to the Sacred Heart, and another to St. John the Baptist.
There is also the chapel of St. Philomena, with a large lifelike image
of the "_bonne petite sainte_" to whom he loved to attribute every
miracle charity compelled him to perform; and there is the
confessional, where for forty years he worked far greater wonders on
the soul than any of the more obvious ones he accomplished on the
body. All, or most of all, this I saw in a vague sort of way, as one
who saw not; but the whole church was filled with such an aroma of
holiness, there was such a sense of the actual presence of the man who
had converted it into a very tabernacle in the wilderness--a true Holy
of Holies, where, in the midst of infidel France, God had descended
and conversed almost visibly with his people--that I had neither the
will nor the power to condescend to particulars, and examine it in
detail.
My one thought as I entered the church was, to go and pray upon his
tomb; but in the first moment of doubt and confusion I could not
remember, if indeed I had been told, the exact spot where he was
buried. The chapel of St. Philomena was the first to attract my
notice, and feeling that I could not be far wrong while keeping close
to his dear little patroness, I knelt down there to collect my ideas.
The stillness of the church made itself felt. There were indeed many
persons praying in it, but they prayed in that profound silence which
spoke to the heart, and penetrated it in a way no words could have
ever done.
I was thirsting, however, to approach the tomb of the saint, and at
last ventured to whisper the question to a person near me. She pointed
to a large black slab nearly in the centre of the church, and told me
that he lay beneath it. Yes, he was there, in the very midst of his
people, not far from the chapel of St. Philomena, and opposite to the
altar whence he had so many thousands of times distributed the bread
of life to the famishing souls who, like the multitude of old, had
come into the desert, and needed to be fed ere they departed to their
homes. Yes, he was there; and with a strange mingling of joy and
sorrow in the thought I went and knelt down beside him.
{27}
Had I gone to Ars but a few years before, I might have found him in
his living person; might have thrown myself at his feet, and poured
out my whole soul before him. Now I knelt indeed beside him, but
beside his body only, and the soul that would have addressed itself to
mine was far away in the bosom of its God. Humanly speaking, the
difference seemed against me, and yet, in a more spiritual point of
view, it might perhaps be said to be in my favor.
The graces which he obtained for mortals here he obtained by more than
mortal suffering and endurance--by tears, by fastings, and nightly
and daily impetrations;--now, with his head resting, like another St.
John, on the bosom of his divine Lord, surely he has but to wish in
order to draw down whole fountains of love and tenderness on his
weeping flock below. And certainly it would seem so; for however
numerous the miracles accomplished in his lifetime, they have been
multiplied beyond all power of calculation since his death.
Later on in the day, when the present cure showed me a room nearly
half full of crutches and other mementos of cures wrought--"These are
only the ones left there during his lifetime," he observed, in a tone
which told at once how much more numerous were those which cure had
made useless to their owners since his death.
I had not been many minutes kneeling before his tomb, when the lady
who had pointed it out to me asked if I would like to see the house
which he had inhabited in his lifetime. On my answering gladly in the
affirmative, she made me follow her through a side-door and across a
sort of court to the house inhabited by the present cure. This house
had never been the abode of M. Vianney, but had been allotted to the
priests who assisted him in his missions. The one which he actually
inhabited is now a sort of sanctuary, where every relic and
recollection of him is carefully preserved for the veneration of the
faithful. We were shown into a sort of _salle a manger_, sufficiently
poor to make us feel we were in the habitation of men brought up in
the school of a saint, and almost immediately afterward the present
cure entered. He had been for many years the zealous assistant of the
late cure; and, in trying to give me an idea of the influx of
strangers into Ars, he told me that, while M. Vianney spent habitually
from fifteen to seventeen hours in the confessional, he and his
brother priest were usually occupied at least twelve hours out of the
twenty-four in a similar manner. Even this was probably barely
sufficient for the wants of the mission, for the number of strangers
who came annually to Ars during the latter years of the cure's life
was reckoned at about 80,000, and few, if any, of these went away
without having made a general confession, either to M. Vianney
himself, or, if that were not possible, to one or other of the
assisting clergy.
It was pleasant to talk with one who had been living in constant
communication with a saint; and I felt as if something of the spirit
of M. Vianney himself had taken possession of the good and gentle man
with whom I was conversing. Among other things, he told me that the
devout wish of the saint had of late years been the erection of a new
church to St. Philomena; and he gave me a fac-simile of his
handwriting in which he had promised to pray especially for any one
aiding him in the work. The surest way, therefore, I should imagine,
to interest him in our necessities--now that he is in heaven--would be
to aid in the undertaking which he had in mind and heart while yet
dwelling on earth. Even in his lifetime there had been a lottery got
up for raising funds; and as money is still coming in from all
quarters, his wish will doubtless soon be accomplished. I saw a very
handsome altar which has been already presented, and which has been
put aside in one of the rooms of the cure until the church, for which
it is {28} intended, shall have been completed. M. le cure showed me
one or two small photographs, which had been taken without his
knowledge during the lifetime of the saint; and also a little carved
image, which he said was a wonderful likeness, and far better than any
of the portraits. Afterward he pointed out another photograph, as
large as life, and suspended against the wall, which had been procured
after death. It was calm and holy, as the face of a saint in death
should be, and I liked it still better in its placid peace than the
smile of the living photograph. Even the smile seemed to tell of
tears. You know that he who smiles is still doing battle--cheerfully
and successfully indeed, but still doing battle with the enemies of
his soul; while the grave calmness of the dead face tells you at once
that all is over--the fight is fought, the crown is won; eternity has
set its seal on the good works of time, and all is safe for ever.
I could have looked at that photograph a long time, and said my
prayers before it--it seemed to repose in such an atmosphere of
sanctity and peace--but the hours were passing quickly, and there was
still much to see and hear concerning the dead saint. I took leave,
therefore, of the good priest who had been my cicerone so far, and
sought the old housekeeper, who was in readiness to show me the house
where M. Vianney had lived. We crossed a sort of court, which led us
to a door opposite the church. When this was opened, I found myself in
a sort of half-garden, half-yard, in the centre of which the old house
was standing.
It is hard to put upon paper the feelings with which a spot the
habitation of a saint just dead is visited. The spirit of love and
charity and peace which animated the living man still seems brooding
over the spot where his life was passed, and you feel intensely that
the true beauty of the Lord's house was here, and that this has been
the place where his glory hath delighted to dwell. The first room I
entered was one in which the crutches left there by invalids had been
deposited. It was a sight to see. The crutches were piled as close as
they could be against the wall, and yet the room was almost half full.
The persons who used those crutches must have been carried hither,
lame and suffering, and helpless as young children; and they walked
away strong men and cured. Truly "the lame walk and the blind see;"
and the Lord hath visited his people in the person of his servant.
My next visit was made to the _salle a manger_, where M. Vianney had
always taken the one scanty meal which was his sole support during his
twenty-four hours of almost unbroken labor. It was poverty in very
deed--poverty plain, unvarnished, and unadorned--such poverty as an
Irish cabin might have rivalled, but could scarcely have surpassed.
The walls were bare and whitewashed; the roof was merely raftered; and
the floor, which had once been paved with large round stones, such as
are used for the pavement of a street, was broken here and there into
deep holes by the removal of the stones. During his forty years'
residence at Ars, M. Vianney had probably never spent a single sou
upon any article which could contribute to his own comfort or
convenience; and this room bore witness to the fact. How, indeed,
should he buy anything for himself, who gave even that which was given
to him away, until his best friends grew well-nigh weary of bestowing
presents, which they felt would pass almost at the same instant out of
his own possession into the hands of any one whom he fancied to be in
greater want of them than he was? I stood in that bare and desolate
apartment, and felt as if earth and heaven in their widest extremes,
their most startling contrasts, were there in type and reality before
me. All that earth has of poor and miserable and unsightly was present
to the eyes of the body; all that heaven has of bright {29} and
beautiful and glorious was just as present, just as visible, to the
vision of the soul. It was the very reverse of the fable of the fairy
treasures, which vanish into dust when tested by reality. All that you
saw was dust and ashes, but dust and ashes which, tried by the
touchstone of eternity, would, you knew, prove brighter than the
brightest gold, fairer than the fairest silver that earth ever yielded
to set in the diadem of her kings! My reflections were cut short by
the entrance of one of the priests, who invited us to come up stairs
and inspect the vestments which had belonged to the late cure, and
which were kept, I think, apart from those in ordinary use in the
church. There was a great quantity of them, and they were all in
curious contrast with everything else we had seen belonging to M.
Vianney. Nothing too good for God; nothing too mean and miserable for
himself--that had been the motto of his life; and the worm-eaten
furniture of the dining-room, the gold and velvet of the embroidered
vestments, alike bore witness to the fidelity with which he had acted
on it. The vestments were more than handsome--some of them were
magnificent. One set I remember in particular which was very
beautiful. It had been given, with canopy for the blessed sacrament
and banners for processions, by the present Marquis D'Ars, the chief
of that beloved family, who, after the death of Mdlle. D'Ars, became
M. Vianney's most efficient aid in all his works of charity. The
priest who showed them to us, and who had also been one of the late
cure's missionaries, told us that M. Vianney was absolutely enchanted
with joy when the vestments arrived, and that he instantly organized
an expedition to Lyons in order to express his gratitude at the altar
of Notre Dame de Fourriere. The whole parish attended on this
occasion. They went down the river in boats provided for the purpose,
and with banners flying and music playing, marched in solemn
procession through the streets of Lyons, and up the steep sides of
Fourriere, until they reached the church of Notre Dame. There the
whole multitude fell on their knees, and M. Vianney himself prayed, no
doubt long and earnestly, before the miraculous image of Our Lady,
seeking through her intercession to obtain some especial favor for the
man who, out of his own abundance, had brought gifts of gold and
silver to the altar of his God.
I asked the priest for some information about the granary which was
said to have been miraculously filled with corn. He told me he had
been at Ars at the time, and that there could be no doubt that the
granary had been quite empty the night before. It was, I think, a time
of scarcity, and the grain had been set aside for the use of the poor.
M. Vianney went to bed miserable at the failure of his supplies; but
when he visited the granary again early the next morning, he found it
full. It was at the top of his own house, I believe, and was kept, of
course, carefully locked. Nobody knew how it had been filled, or by
whom. In fact, it seemed absolutely impossible that any one could have
carted the quantity of grain needed for the purpose and carried it up
stairs without being detected in the act. The priest made no comment
on the matter; indeed, he seemed anything but inclined to enlarge upon
it, though he made no secret of his own opinion as to the miraculous
nature of the occurrence. As soon as he had answered my inquiries, he
led us to the room which had been the holy cure's own personal
apartment. It was, as well as I can remember, the one over the
dining-room. No apostle ever lived and died in an abode more entirely
destitute of all human riches. It was kept exactly in the same state
in which it had been during his lifetime--a few poor-looking books
still on the small book-shelf, a wooden table and a chair, and the
little bed in the corner, smoothed and laid down, as if only waiting
his return from the confessional for the {30} few short hours he gave
to slumber--if, indeed, he did give them; for no one ever penetrated
into the mystery of those hours, or knew how much of the time set
apart apparently for his own repose was dedicated to God, or employed
in supplicating God's mercies on his creatures.
The history of that room was the history of the saint. A book-shelf
filled with works of piety and devotion; a stove, left doubtless
because it had been originally built into the room, but left without
use or purpose (for who ever heard of his indulging in a fire?); a
table and a chair--that was all; but it was enough, and more than
enough, to fill the mind with thought, and to crowd all the memories
of that holy life into the few short moments that I knelt there. How
often had he come back to that poor apartment, his body exhausted by
fasting, and cramped by long confinement in the confessional, and his
heart steeped (nay, drowned, as he himself most eloquently expressed
it) in bitterness and sorrow by the long histories of sins to which he
had been compelled to listen--sins committed against that God whom he
loved far more tenderly than he loved himself! How often, in the
silence and darkness of the night, has he poured forth his soul, now
in tender commiseration over Jesus crucified by shiners, now over the
sinners by whom Jesus had been crucified! How often has he (perhaps)
called on God to remove him from a world where God was so offended;
and yet, moved by the charity of his tender human heart, has besought,
almost in the same breath, for the conversion of those sinners whose
deeds he was deploring--the cure of their diseases and the removal or
consolation of their sorrows! Like a mother who, finding her children
at discord, now prays to one to pardon, now to another to submit and
be reconciled, so was that loving, pitying heart ever as it were in
contradiction with itself--weeping still with Jesus, and yet still
pleading for his foes.
The mere action of such thoughts upon the human frame would make
continued life a marvel; but when to this long history of mental woe
we add the hardships of his material life--the fifteen or seventeen
hours passed in the confessional, in heat and cold, in winter as in
summer; the one scanty meal taken at mid-day; the four hours of sleep,
robbed often and often of half their number for the sake of quiet
prayer--when we think of these things, there is surely more of miracle
in this life of forty years' duration than in the mere fact that it
won miracles at last from heaven, and that God, seeing how faithfully
this his servant did his will here on earth, complied in turn with
his, and granted his desires.
No one, I think, can visit that spot, or hear the history of that
life, as it is told by those who knew him as it were but yesterday,
without an increase of love, an accession of faith, a more vivid sense
of the presence of God in the midst of his creatures, and a more real
comprehension of the extent and meaning of those words, "the communion
of saints," which every one repeats in the creed, and yet which few
take sufficiently to their heart of hearts to make it really a portion
of their spiritual being--a means of working out their own salvation
by constant and loving communication with those who have attained to
it already. Thousands will seek the living saint for the eloquence of
his words, the sublimity, of his counsels, the unction of his
consolations; but, once departed out of this life, who visits him in
his tomb? who turns to him for aid? who lift their eyes to heaven, to
ask for his assistance thence, with the same undoubting confidence
with which they would have sought it had he been still in the flesh
beside them? In one sense of the word, many; and yet few indeed
compared to the number of those to whom "the communion of saints" is
an article of faith, or ought at least to be so, in something more
than the mere service of the lip. It was amid some such {31} thoughts
as these that I left the town of Ars, grieved indeed that I had not
seen the holy cure in his lifetime, and yet feeling that, if I had but
faith enough, I was in reality rather a gainer than a loser by his
death. He who would have prayed for me on earth would now pray for me
in heaven. He who would have dived into my conscience and brought its
hidden sins to light, would obtain wisdom and grace for another to put
his finger on the sore spot and give it healing. He who would perhaps
have cured me of my bodily infirmities, could do so (if it were for
the good of my soul) not less efficiently now that he was resting on
the heart of his divine Lord. God had granted his prayers while he was
yet upon earth--a saint indeed, and yet liable at any moment to fall
into sin--would he refuse to hear him now that he had received him
into his kingdom, and so rendered him for ever incapable of offending?
I hoped not, I felt not; and in this certainty I went on my way
rejoicing, feeling that it was well for this sinful world that it had
yet one more advocate at the throne of its future Judge, and well
especially for France that, in this our nineteenth century, she had
given a saint to God who would have been the glory of the first. For
truly the arm of the Lord is not shortened. What he has done before,
he can do again; and, therefore, we need not wonder if the miracles of
the Apostles are still renewed at the tomb of this simple and
unlettered, priest, who taught their doctrines for forty years in the
unknown and far-off village of which Providence had made him pastor.
------
From Once A Week.
THE THREE WISHES.
The Eastern origin of this tale seems evident; had it been originally
composed in a Northern land, it is probable that the king would have
been represented as dethroned by means of bribes obtained from his own
treasury. In an Eastern country the story-teller who invented such a
just termination of his narrative would, most likely, have experienced
the fate intended for his hero, as a warning to others how they
suggested such treasonable ideas. Herr Simrock, however, says it is a
German tale; but it may have had its origin in the East for all that.
Nothing is more difficult, indeed, than to trace a popular tale to its
source. Cinderella, for example, belongs to nearly all nations; even
among the Chinese, a people so different to all European nations,
there is a popular story which reads almost exactly like it. Here is
the tale of the Three Wishes.
There was once a wise emperor who made a law that to every stranger
who came to his court a fried fish should be served. The servants were
directed to take notice if, when the stranger had eaten the fish to
the bone on one side, he turned it over and began on the other side.
If he did, he was to be immediately seized, and on the third day
thereafter he was to be put to death. But, by a great stretch of
imperial clemency, the culprit was permitted to utter one wish each
day, which the emperor pledged himself to grant, provided it was not
to spare his life. Many had already perished in consequence of this
edict, when, one day, a count and his young son presented themselves
at court. The fish was served as usual, and when the {32} count had
removed all the fish from one side, he turned it over, and was about
to commence on the other, when he was suddenly seized and thrown into
prison, and was told of his approaching doom. Sorrow-stricken, the
count's young son besought the emperor to allow him to die in the room
of his father; a favor which the monarch was pleased to accord him.
The count was accordingly released from prison, and his son was thrown
into his cell in his stead. As soon as this had been done, the young
man said to his gaolers--"You know I have the right to make three
demands before I die; go and tell the emperor to send me his daughter,
and a priest to marry us." This first demand was not much to the
emperor's taste, nevertheless he felt bound to keep his word, and he
therefore complied with the request, to which the princess had no kind
of objection. This occurred in the times when kings kept their
treasures in a cave, or in a tower set apart for the purpose, like the
Emperor of Morocco in these days; and on the second day of his
imprisonment the young man demanded the king's treasures. If his first
demand was a bold one, the second was not less so; still, an emperor's
word is sacred, and having made the promise, he was forced to keep it;
and the treasures of gold and silver and jewels were placed at the
prisoner's disposal. On getting possession of them, he distributed
them profusely among the courtiers, and soon he had made a host of
friends by his liberality.
The emperor began now to feel exceedingly uncomfortable. Unable to
sleep, he rose early on the third morning and went, with fear in his
heart, to the prison to hear what the third wish was to be.
"Now," said he to his prisoner, "tell me what your third demand is,
that it may be granted at once, and you may be hung out of hand, for I
am tired of your demands."
"Sire," answered his prisoner, "I have but one more favor to request
of your majesty, which, when you have granted, I shall die content. It
is merely that you will cause the eyes of those who saw my father turn
the fish over to be put out."
"Very good," replied the emperor, "your demand is but natural, and
springs from a good heart. Let the chamberlain be seized," he
continued, turning to his guards.
"I, sire!" cried the chamberlain; "I did not see anything--it was the
steward."
"Let the steward be seized, then," said the king.
But the steward protested with tears in his eyes that he had not
witnessed anything of what had been reported, and said it was the
butler. The butler declared that he had seen nothing of the matter,
and that it must have been one of the valets. But they protested that
they were utterly ignorant of what had been charged against the count;
in short, it turned out that nobody could be found who had seen the
count commit the offence, upon which the princess said:
"I appeal to you, my father, as to another Solomon. If nobody saw the
offence committed, the count cannot be guilty, and my husband is
innocent."
The emperor frowned, and forthwith the courtiers began to murmur; then
he smiled, and immediately their visages became radiant.
"Let it be so," said his majesty; "let him live, though I have put
many a man to death for a lighter offence than his. But if he is not
hung, he is married. Justice has been done."
{33}
------
From The Month.
EX HUMO.
BY BARRY CORNWALL.
Should you dream ever of the days departed--
Of youth and morning, no more to return--
Forget not me, so fond and passionate-hearted;
Quiet at last, reposing
Under the moss and fern.
There, where the fretful lake in stormy weather
Comes circling round the reddening churchyard pines,
Rest, and call back the hours we lost together,
Talking of hope, and soaring
Beyond poor earth's confines.
If, for those heavenly dreams too dimly sighted,
You became false--why, 'tis a story old:
_I_, overcome by pain, and unrequited,
Faded at last, and slumber
Under the autumn mould.
Farewell, farewell! No longer plighted lovers,
Doomed for a day to sigh for sweet return:
One lives, indeed; one heart the green earth covers--
Quiet at last, reposing
Under the moss and fern.
------
From The Dublin Review.
THE CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS OF ALEXANDRIA.
_S. Clementis Alexandrini Opera Omnia_. Lutetiae. 1629.
_Geschichte der Christlicher Philosophie, von_ Dr. Heinrich Ritter.
Hamburg: Perthes. 1841.
If any country under the sun bears the spell of fascination in its
very name, that country is Egypt. The land of the Nile and the
pyramids, of the Pharaohs and the Ptolemies--the land where art and
science had mysterious beginnings before the dawn of history, where
powerful dynasties held sway for long generations over the fertile
river-valley, and built for themselves mighty cities--Thebes, the
hundred-gated, Memphis, with its palaces, Heliopolis, with its temples--
and left memorials of themselves that are attracting men at this very
day to Luxor and Carnak, to the avenue of sphynxes and the pyramids--
Egypt, where learning
Uttered its oracles sublime
Before the Olympiads, in the dew
And dusk of early time--
the land where,
{34}
Northward from its Nubian springs,
The Nile, for ever new and old,
Among the living and the dead
Its mighty, mystic stream has rolled--
Egypt seems destined to be associated with all the signal events of
every age of the world. Israel's going into and going out of Egypt is
one of the epic pages of Holy Scripture; Sesostris, King of Egypt,
left his name written over half of Asia; Alexander, the greatest of
the Greeks, laid in Egypt the foundation of a new empire; Cleopatra,
the captive and the captor of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, killed
herself as the old land passed away for ever from the race of Ptolemy;
Clement and Origen, Porphyry and Plotinus, have left Egypt the classic
land of the Church's battle against the purest form of heathen
philosophy; St. Louis of France has made Egypt the scene of a glorious
drama of heroism and devotion; the pyramids have lent their name to
swell the list of Napoleon's triumphs; and the Nile is linked for ever
with the deathless fame of Nelson.
In the last decade of the second century, about the time when the
pagan virtues of Marcus Aurelius had left the Roman empire to the
worse than pagan vices of his son Commodus, Egypt, to the learned and
wealthy, meant Alexandria. What Tyre had been in the time of Solomon,
what Sidon was in the days of which Homer wrote, that was Alexandria
from the reign of Ptolemy Soter to the days of Mahomet. In external
aspect it was in every way worthy to bear the name of him who drew its
plans with his own hands. Its magnificent double harbor, of which the
Great Port had a quay-side six miles in length, was the common
rendezvous for merchant ships from every part of Syria, Greece, Italy,
and Spain; and its communications with the Red Sea and the Nile
brought to the warehouses that overlooked its quay the riches of
Arabia and India, and the corn and flax of the country of which it was
the capital. The modern traveller, who finds Alexandria a prosperous
commercial town, with an appearance half European, half Turkish,
learns with wonder that its 60,000 inhabitants find room on what was
little more than the mole that divided the Great Port from the
Eunostos. But it should be borne in mind that old Alexandria numbered
300,000 free citizens. The mosques, the warehouses, and the private
dwellings of the present town are built of the fragments of the grand
city of Alexander. The great conqueror designed to make Alexandria the
capital of the world. He chose a situation the advantages of which a
glance at the map will show; and if any other proof were needed, it
may be found in the fact that, since 1801, the population of the
modern town has increased at the rate of one thousand a year. He
planned his city on such vast proportions as might be looked for from
the conqueror of Darius. Parallel streets crossed other streets, and
divided the city into square blocks. Right through its whole length,
from East to West--that is, parallel with the sea-front--one magnificent
street, two hundred feet wide and four miles in length, ran from the
Canopic gate to the Necropolis. A similar street, shorter, but of
equal breadth, crossed this at right angles, and came out upon the
great quay directly opposite the mole that joined the city with the
island of Pharos. This was the famous Heptastadion, or Street of the
Seven Stadia, and at its South end was the Sun-gate; at its North,
where it opened on the harbor, the gate of the Moon. To the right, as
you passed through the Moon-gate on to the broad quay, was the
exchange, where merchants from all lands met each other, in sight of
the white Pharos and the crowded shipping of the Great Port. A little
back from the gate, in the Heptastadion, was the Caesareum, or temple
of the deified Caesars, afterward a Christian church. Near it was the
Museum, the university of Alexandria. Long marble colonnades connected
the {35} university with the palace and gardens of the Ptolemies. On
the opposite side of the great street was the Serapeion, the
magnificent temple of Serapis, with its four hundred columns, of which
Pompey's Pillar is, perhaps, all that is left. And then there was the
mausoleum of Alexander, there were the courts of justice, the
theatres, the baths, the temples, the lines of shops and houses--all on
a scale of grandeur and completeness which has never been surpassed by
any city of the world. Such a city necessarily attracted men.
Alexandria was fitly called the "many-peopled," whether the epithet
referred to the actual number of citizens or to the varieties of
tongue, complexion, and costume that thronged its streets. The Greeks,
the Egyptians, and the Jews, each had their separate quarter; but
there were constant streams of foreigners from the remote India, from
the lands beyond the black rocks that bound the Nile-valley, and from
the Ethiopic races to which St. Matthew preached, where the Red Sea
becomes the Indian Ocean. At the time we speak of, these discordant
elements were held in subjection by the Roman conquerors, whose
legionaries trod the streets of the voluptuous city with stern and
resolute step, and were not without occasion, oftentimes, for a
display of all the sternness and resolution which their bearing
augured.
Alexandria, however, in addition to the busy life of commerce and
pleasure that went on among Greeks, Egyptians, Jews, and Africans, was
the home of another kind of life, still more interesting to us.
Ptolemy Soter, who carried out Alexander's plans, was a man of no
common foresight and strength of character. He was not content with
building a city. He performed, in addition, two exploits, either of
which, from modern experience, we should be inclined to consider a
title to immortality. He invented a new god, and established a
university. The god was Serapis, whom he imported from Pergamus, and
who soon became popular. The university was the Museum, in which lived
and taught Demetrius of Phalerus, Euclid, Stilpo of Megara, Philetas
of Cos, Apelles the painter, Callimachus, Theocritus, Eratosthenes,
Apollonius Rhodius, and a host of others in philosophy, poetry,
geometry, astronomy, and the arts. Here, under successive Ptolemies,
professors lectured in splendid halls, amid honored affluence. All
that we have of the Greek classics we owe to the learned men of the
Museum. Poetry bloomed sweetly and luxuriantly in the gardens of the
Ptolemies; though, it must be confessed, not vigorously, not as on
Ionic coast-lands, nor as in the earnest life of Athenian freedom--save
when some Theocritus appeared, with his broad Doric, fresh from the
sheep-covered downs of Sicily. The name of Euclid suggests that
geometry was cared for at the Museum; Eratosthenes, with his
voluminous writings, all of which have perished, and his one or two
discoveries, which will never die, may stand for the type of
geography, the science for which he lived; and Hipparchus, astronomer
and inventor of trigonometry, may remind us how they taught at the
Museum that the earth was the centre of the universe, and yet,
notwithstanding, could foretell an eclipse almost as well as the
astronomer royal. In philosophy, the university of Alexandria has
played a peculiar part. As long as the Ptolemies reigned in Egypt, the
Museum could boast of no philosophy save commentaries on Aristotle and
Plato, consisting, in great measure, of subtle obscurities to which
the darkest quiddities of the deepest scholastic would appear to have
been light reading. But when the Roman came in, there sprang up a
school of thought that has done more than any other thing to hand down
the fame of Ptolemy's university to succeeding ages. Alexandria was
the birthplace of Neo-Platonism, and, whatever we may think of the
philosophy itself, we must allow it has bestowed fame on its alma {36}
mater. At the dawn of the Christian era, Philon the Jew was already
ransacking the great library to collect matter that should enable him
to prove a common origin for the books of Plato and of Moses. Two
hundred years afterward--that is, just at the time of which we speak--
Plotinus was listening to Ammonius Saccas in the lecture-hall of the
Museum, and thinking out the system of emanations, abysms, and depths
of which he is the first and most famous expounder. Porphyry, the
biographer and enthusiastic follower of Plotinus, was probably never
at Alexandria in person; but his voluminous writings did much to make
the Neo-Platonist system known to Athens and to the cities of Italy.
In his youth he had listened to the lectures of Origen, and thus was
in possession of the traditions both of the Christian and the heathen
philosophy of Alexandria. But his Christian studies did not prevent
him from being the author of that famous book, "Against the
Christians," which drew upon him the denunciations of thirty-five
Christian apologists, including such champions as St. Jerome and St.
Augustine. The Neo-Platonist school culminated and expired in Proclus,
the young prodigy of Alexandria, the ascetic teacher of Athens, the
"inspired dogmatizer," the "heir of Plato." Proclus died in 485, and
his chair at Athens was filled by his foolish biographer Marinus,
after which Neo-Platonism never lifted up its head.
Between the time when Philon astonished the orthodox money-getting
Hebrews of the Jews' quarter by his daring adoption of Plato's Logos,
and the day when poor old Proclus--his once handsome and strong frame
wasted by fasting and Pythagorean austerities--died, a drivelling old
man, in sight of the groves of the Academe and the tomb of Plato, not
far from whom he himself was to lie, many a busy generation had
trodden the halls of the Museum of Alexandria. All that time the
strife of words had never ceased, in the lecture-hall, in the gardens
of the departed Ptolemies, round the banquet-table where the
professors were feasted at the state's expense. All that time the fame
of Alexandria had gathered to her Museum the young generations that
succeeded each other in the patrician homes and wealthy burghs of
Syria, Greece, and Italy. They came in crowds, with their fathers'
money in their purses, to be made learned by those of whose exploits
report had told so much. Some came with an earnest purpose. To the
young medical student, the Alexandrian school of anatomy and the
Alexandrian diploma (in whatever shape it was given)--not to mention
the opportunity of perusing the works of the immortal Hippocrates in
forty substantial rolls of papyrus--were worth all the expense of a
journey from Rome or Edessa. To the lawyer, the splendid collections
of laws, from those of the Pentateuch to those of Zamolxis the
Scythian, were treasures only to be found in the library where the
zeal of Demetrius Phalerius and the munificence of Ptolemy
Philadelphus had placed them. But the vast majority of the youth who
flocked to the Museum came with no other purpose than the very general
one of finishing their education and fitting themselves for the world.
With these, the agreeable arts of poetry and polite literature were in
far greater request than law, medicine, astronomy, or geography. If
they could get a sight of the popular poet of the hour in his morning
meditation under the plane-trees of the gardens, or could crush into a
place in the theatre when he recited his new "Ode to the Empress's
Hair;" or if they attended the lecture of the most fashionable
exponent of the myths of the Iliad, and clapped him whenever he
introduced an allusion to the divine Plato, it was considered a very
fair morning's work, and might be fitly rewarded by a boating party to
Canopus in the afternoon, or a revel far into the night in any of
those thousand palaces of vice {37} with which luxurious Alexandria
was so well provided. And yet there is no doubt that the young men
carried away from their university a certain education and a certain
refinement--an education which, though it taught them to relish the
pleasures of intellect, in no wise disposed them to forego the
enjoyments of sense; and a refinement which, while imparting a
graceful polish to the mind, was quite compatible with the deepest
moral depravity. Pagans as they were, they were the fairest portion of
the whole world, for intellect, for manliness, for generosity, for
wit, for beauty and strength of mind and body--natural gifts that, like
the sun and the rain, are bestowed upon just and unjust. Their own
intercourse with each other taught them far more than the speculations
of any of the myth-hunting professors of the Museum. They crowded in
to hear them, they cheered them, they would dispute and even fight for
a favorite theory that no one understood, with the doubtful exception
of its inventor. But it was not to be supposed that they really cared
for abysms or mystical mathematics, or that they were not a great deal
more zealous for suppers, and drinking bouts, and boating parties.
These latter employments, indeed, may be said to have formed their
real education. Greek intellect, Greek taste, wit, and beauty, in the
sunniest hour of its bloom, mingled with its like in the grandest city
that, perhaps, the earth has ever seen. The very harbors, and temples,
and palaces were an education. The first rounding of the Pharos--when
the six-mile semicircle of granite quay and marble emporia burst on
the view, with the Egyptian sun flashing from white wall and blue sea,
and glancing and sparkling amidst the dense picturesque multitude that
roared and surged on the esplanade--disclosed a sight to make the soul
grow larger. The wonderful city itself was a teaching: the assemblage
of all that was best and rarest in old Egyptian art, and all that was
freshest and most lovely in the art of Greece, left no corner of a
street without its lesson to the eye. Indoors, there was the Museum,
with its miles of corridors and galleries, filled with paintings and
sculptures; outside, the Serapeion, the Caesareum, the exchange, the
palace, the university itself, each a more effective instructor than a
year's course in the schools. And after all this came the library,
with its 700,000 volumes!
In the year of our Lord 181, ships filled the Great Port, merchants
congregated in the exchange, sailors and porters thronged the quays;
crowds of rich and poor, high and low, flocked through the streets;
youths poured in to listen to Ammonius Saccas, and poured out again to
riot and sin; philosophers talked, Jews made money, fashionable men
took their pleasure, slaves toiled, citizens bought and sold and made
marriages; all the forms of busy life that had their existence within
the circuit of the many-peopled city were noisily working themselves
out. In the same year, Pantaenus became the head of the catechetical
school of the patriarchal Church of Alexandria.
It was the time when those who had lived and walked with the Apostles
had passed away, and when the third generation of the Church's rulers
was already growing old. St. Irenaeus was near his glorious end; St.
Eleutherius, of memory dear to Britain, had just closed his
pontificate by martyrdom, and St. Victor sat in his place. The echoes
of the voice of Peter had hardly died out in Rome and Antioch; the
traditions of Paul's bodily presence were yet living in Asia, in
Greece, and the Islands; and the sweet odor of John's life still hung
about the places where his sojourning had been: many a church of
Greece and Egypt and of the far East had the sepulchre of its founder,
an Apostle or an apostolic man, round which to pray. It was the age of
the persecutions, and the age of the apologies. In every {38} city
that was coming about which from the first had been inevitable. The
Church was laying hold of human learning, and setting it to do her own
work. In fixing upon Alexandria as the spot where, at this period, the
contest between Christian science and Gentile learning, Gentile
ignorance and Gentile brute force, was most interesting and most
developed, we must pass by many other Churches, not in forgetfulness,
though in silence. We must pass by Rome, the capital of the world, not
because there were not learned men there whom Jesus Christ had raised
up to battle with heathen philosophy; for it was but a few years since
Justin Martyr had shed his blood for the faith, and Apollonius from
his place in the senate had spoken his "apology" for his fellow
Christians. But the enemies which the Gospel had to meet at Rome were
not so much the learning and science of the heathen as his evil
passions and vicious life; and the sword of persecution, at Rome
hardly ever sheathed, kept down all attempts at regularity or
organization in public teaching. We must pass by Athens, still the
intellectual capital of the world, not because there were not at
Athens also worthy doctors of the wisdom of the cross--witness, to the
contrary, Athenagoras, the Christian philosopher, who presented his
apology to Marcus Aurelius. But Athens, though at the end of the
second century and long afterward she was the mother of orators,
poets, and philosophers, seems to have been too thoroughly steeped in
the sensuous idolatry of Greece to have harbored a school of
Christianity by the side of the Porch and the Lyceum. If the same was
true of Athens then as a century afterward, her smooth-tongued,
"babbling" sophists, and her pagan charms, must have had to answer for
the soul of many a poor Christian youth that went to seek learning and
found perdition. We pass by Carthage, in spite of Tertullian's great
name; Antioch, notwithstanding Theophilus, whose labors against the
heathen still bore fruit; Sardis, in spite of Melito, then just dead,
but living still in men's mouths by the fame of his learning,
eloquence, and miracles; and Hierapolis, in spite of Apollinaris, who,
like so many others, approached the emperor himself with an apology.
All over the Church there were men raised up by God, and fitted with
learning to confront learning, patience to instruct ignorance, and
unflinching fortitude to endure persecution--men in every way worthy
to be the instruments of that great change which was being wrought out
through the wide world of the Roman empire.
But at Alexandria, the school of Christianity existed under
interesting and peculiar conditions. St. Mark had landed on the
granite quay of the Great Port with Peter's commission; he had been
martyred, and his successors had been martyred after him; and for a
long time Christianity here, as everywhere else, had been
contemptuously ignored. It spread, however, as we know. In time, more
than one student, before he attended his lecture in the splendid halls
of the Museum, had given ear to a far different lesson in a different
school. The Christian catechetical school of Alexandria is said to
have been founded by St. Mark himself. If so, it is only what we might
naturally expect; for wherever heathens were being converted, there a
school of teachers had to be provided for their instruction; and we
read of similar institutions at Jerusalem, at Antioch, and at Rome.
But the catechetical school of Alexandria soon assumed an importance
that no other school of those times ever attained. Whether it was that
the influence of the university gave an impetus to regular and
methodical teaching, or that the converts in Alexandria were in great
measure from a cultivated and intellectual class, it appears to have
been found necessary from the earliest times to have an efficient
school, with a man of vigor and intellect at its head, capable of
maintaining his position even when compared {39} with the professors
of the university. The first of the heads or doctors of the school of
whom history has left any account, is Pantaenus. Pantaenus is not so
well known as his place in Church history and his influence on his age
would seem to warrant. He was appointed to his important post at a
time when Christians all over the world must have been rejoicing. The
fourth persecution was just dying out. For twenty years, with the
exception of the short interval immediately after the miracle of the
Thundering Legion, had Marcus Aurelius, imperial philosopher of the
Stoic sort, continued to command or connive at the butchery of his
Christian subjects. What were the motives that led this paragon of
virtuous pagans to lower himself to the commonplace practices of
racking, scourging, and burning, is a question that depends for its
answer upon who the answerer is. Philosophers of a certain class, from
Gibbon to Mr. Mill, are disposed to take a lenient, if not a
laudatory, estimate of his conduct in this matter, and think that the
emperor could not have acted otherwise consistently with his
principles and convictions, as handed down to us in his "Meditations."
Doubtless he had strong convictions on the subject of Christianity,
though it might be questioned whether he came honestly by them. But
his convictions, whatever they were, would probably have ended in the
harmless shape of philosophic contempt, had it not been for the men by
whom he was surrounded. They were Stoics, of course, like their
master, but their stoicism was far from confining itself to
convictions and meditations. They were practical Stoics, of the
severest type which that old-world Puritanism admitted. As good
Stoics, they were of all philosophers the most conceited, and took it
especially ill that any sect should presume to rival them in their
private virtues of obstinacy and endurance. It is extremely probable
that the fourth persecution, both in its commencement and its revival,
was owing to the good offices of Marcus Aurelius's solemn-faced
favorites. But, whatever be the blame that attaches to him, he has
answered for it at the same dread tribunal at which he has answered
for the deification of Faustina and the education of Commodus.
However, about the year 180, persecution ceased at Alexandria, and the
Christians held up their heads and revived again, after the bitter
winter through which they had just passed. Their first thoughts and
efforts appear to have been directed to their school. The name of
Pantaenus was already celebrated. He was a convert from paganism, born
probably in Sicily, but certainly brought up in Alexandria. Curiously
enough, he had been a zealous Stoic, and remained so, in the Christian
sense, after his conversion. There is no doubt that he was well known
among the Gentile philosophers of Alexandria. Perhaps he had lectured
in the Museum and dined in the Hall. Probably he had spent many a day
buried in the recesses of the great libraries, and could give a good
account of not a few of their thousands of volumes. He must have known
Justin Martyr--perhaps had something to say to the conversion of that
brilliant genius, not as a teacher, but as a friend and
fellow-student. He may have come across Galen, when that lively
medical man was pursuing his researches on the immortal Hippocrates,
or entertaining a select circle, in the calm of the evening, under one
of the porticos of the Heptastadion. No sooner was he placed at the
head of the Christian school than he inaugurated a great change, or
rather a great development. Formerly the instruction had been intended
solely for converts, that is, catechumens, and the matter of the
teaching had corresponded with this object. Pantaenus changed all
this. The cessation of the persecution had, perhaps, encouraged bolder
measures; men would think there was no prospect of another, as men
generally think when a long and difficult trial is over; so the
Christian schools were to be opened {40} to all the world. If
Aristotle and Plato, Epicurus and Zeno, had their lecturers, should
not Jesus Christ have schools and teachers too? And what matter if the
Christian doctrine were somewhat novel and hard--was not Ammonius the
Porter, at that very time, turning the heads of half the students in
the city, and filling his lecture-room to suffocation, by expounding
transcendental theories about Plato's Logos, and actually teaching the
doctrine of a Trinity? Shame upon the Christian name, then, if they
who bear it do not open their doors, now that danger is past, and
break the true bread to the hungry souls that eagerly snatch at the
stones and dry sticks that others give! So thought Pantaenus. Of his
teachings and writings hardly a trace or a record has reached us. We
know that he wrote valued commentaries on Holy Scripture, but no
fragment of them remains. His teaching, however, as might have been
expected, was chiefly oral. He met the philosophers of Alexandria on
their own ground. He showed that the fame of learning, the earnestness
of character, the vivid personal influence that were so powerful in
the cause of heathen philosophy, could be as serviceable to the
philosophy of Christ. The plan was novel in the Christian world--at
least, in its systematic thoroughness. That Pantaenus had great
influence and many worthy disciples is evident from the fact that St.
Clement of Alexandria, his successor, was formed in his school, and
that St. Alexander of Jerusalem, the celebrated founder of the library
which Eusebius consulted at Jerusalem, writing half a century
afterward to Alexandria, speaks with nothing less than enthusiasm of
the "happy memory" of his old master. If we could pierce the secrets
of those long-past times, what a stirring scene of reverend wisdom and
youthful enthusiasm would the forgotten school of the Sicilian convert
unfold to our sight! Doubtless, from amidst the confused jargon of all
manner of philosophies, the voice of the Christian teacher arose with
a clear and distinct utterance; and the fame of Pantaenus was carried
to far countries by many a noble Roman and many an accomplished Greek,
zealous, like all true academic sons, for the glory of their favorite
master.
After ten years of such work as this, Pantaenus vacated his chair, and
went forth as a missionary bishop to convert the Indians. Before
passing on to his successor, a few words on this Indian mission,
apparently so inopportune for such a man at such a time, will be
interesting, and not unconnected with the history of the Christian
schools.
In the "many-peopled" city there were men from all lands and of all
shades of complexion. It was nothing strange, then, that an embassy of
swarthy Indians should have one day waited on the patriarch and begged
for an apostle to take home with them to their countrymen. No wonder,
either, that they specified the celebrated master of the catechisms as
their _dignissimus_. The only wonder is that he was allowed to go. Yet
he went; he set out with them, sailed to Canopus, the Alexandrian
Richmond, where the canal joined the Nile; sailed up the ancient
stream to Koptos, where the overland route began; joined the caravan
that travelled thence, from well to well, to Berenice, Philadelphus's
harbor on the Red Sea; embarked, and, after sailing before the monsoon
for seventy days, arrived at the first Indian port, probably that
which is now Mangalore, in the presidency of Bombay. This, in all
likelihood, was the route and the destination of Pantaenus. Now those
among whom his missionary labors appear to have lain were Brahmins,
and Brahmins of great learning and extraordinary strictness of life.
Moreover, there appears to be no reason to doubt that the Church
founded by St. Thomas still existed, and even flourished, in these
very parts, though its apostolic founder had been martyred a hundred
years before. It was not so unreasonable, then, that {41} a bishop
like Pantaenus should have been selected for such a Church and such a
people. Let the reader turn to the story of Robert de' Nobili, and of
John de Britto, whose field of labor extended to within a hundred
miles of master in human learning when the the very spot where
Pantaenus probably landed. St. Francis Xavier had already found
Christians in that region who bore distinct traces of a former
connection with Alexandria, in the very points in which they deviated
from orthodoxy. De' Nobili's transformation of himself into a Brahmin
of the strictest and most learned caste is well known. He dressed and
lived as a Brahmin, roused the curiosity of his adopted brethren,
opened school, and taught philosophy, inculcating such practical
conclusions as it is unnecessary to specify. De Britto did the very
same things. If any one will compare the Brahmins of De Britto and De'
Nobili with those earlier Brahmins of Pantaenus, as described, for
instance, by Cave from Palladius, he will not fail to be struck with
the similarity of accounts; and if we might be permitted to fill up
the picture upon these conjectural hints, we should say that it seems
to us very likely that Pantaenus, during the years that he was lost to
Alexandria, was expounding and enforcing, in the flowing cotton robes
of a venerable Saniastes, the same deep philosophy to Indian audiences
as he had taught to admiring Greeks in the modest pallium of a Stoic.
Recent missionary experience has uniformly gone to prove that deep
learning and asceticism are, humanly speaking, absolutely necessary in
order to attempt the conversion of Brahmins with any prospect of
success: and the mission of Pantaenus seems at once to furnish an
illustration of this fact, and to afford an interesting glimpse of
"Christian Missions" in the second century. But we must return to
Alexandria.
The name that succeeds Pantaenus on the rolls of the School of the
Catechisms is Titus Flavius Clemens, immortalized in history as
Clement of Alexandria. He had sat under Pantaemus, but he was no
ordinary scholar. Like his instructor, he was a convert from paganism.
He was already master in human learning when the grace came. He had
sought far and wide for the truth, and had found it in the Catholic
Church, and into the lap of his new mother he had poured all the
treasures of Egyptian wisdom which he had gathered in his quest.
Athens, Southern Italy, Assyria, and Palestine had each been visited
by the eager searcher; and, last of all, Egypt, and Alexandria, and
Pantaenus had been the term of his travels, and had given to his lofty
soul the "admirable light" of Jesus Christ. When Pantaenus went out as
a missioner to India, Clement, who had already assisted his beloved
master in the work of the schools, succeeded him as their director and
head. It was to be Clement's task to carry on and to develop the work
that Pantaenus had inaugurated--to make Christianity not only
understood by the catechumens and loved by the faithful, but
recognized and respected by the pagan philosophers. Unless we can
clearly see the necessity, or, at least, the reality of the
philosophical side of his character, and the influences that were at
work to make him hold fast to Aristotle and Plato, even after he had
got far beyond them, we shall infallibly set him down, like his modern
biographers, as a half-converted heathen, with the shell of Platonism
still adhering to him.
It cannot be doubted that in a society like that of Alexandria in its
palmy days there were many earnest seekers of the truth, even as
Clement himself had sought it. One might even lay it down as a normal
fact, that it was the character of an Alexandrian, as distinguished
from an Athenian, to speculate for the sake of practising, and not to
spend his time in "either telling or hearing some new thing." If an
Alexandrian was a Stoic, never was Stoic more demure or more intent on
warring against his body, after Stoic {42} fashion; if a geometrican,
no disciple of Bacon was ever more assiduous in experimentalizing,
measuring, comparing, and deducing laws; if a Platonist, then
geometry, ethics, poetry, and everything else, were enthusiastically
pressed into the one great occupation of life--the realizing the ideal
and the getting face to face with the unseen. That all this
earnestness did not uniformly result in success was only too true.
Much speculation, great earnestness, and no grand objective truth at
the end of it--this was often the lot of the philosophic inquirer of
Alexandria. The consequence was that not unfrequently, disgusted by
failure, he ended by rushing headlong into the most vicious excesses,
or, becoming a victim to despair, perished by his own hand. So
familiar, indeed, had this resource of disappointment become to the
philosophic mind, that Hegesias, a professor in the Museum, a little
before the Christian era, wrote a book counselling self-murder; and so
many people actually followed his advice as to oblige the reigning
Ptolemy to turn Grand Inquisitor even in free-thinking Egypt, and
forbid the circulation of the book. Yet all this, while it revealed a
depth of moral wretchedness which it is frightful to contemplate,
showed also a certain desperate earnestness; and doubtless there were,
even among those who took refuge in one or other of these dreadful
alternatives, men who, in their beginnings, had genuine aspirations
after truth, mingled with the pride of knowledge and a mere
intellectual curiosity. Doubtless, too, there was many a sincere and
guileless soul among the philosophic herd, to whom, humanly speaking,
nothing more was wanting than the preaching of the faith. Their eyes
were open, as far as they could be without the light of revelation:
let the light shine, and, by the help of divine grace, they would
admit its beams into their souls.
There are many such, in every form of error. In Clement's days,
especially, there were many whom Neo-Platonism, the Puseyism of
paganism, cast up from the ocean of unclean error upon the shores of
the Church. Take the case of Justin Martyr: he was a young Oriental of
noble birth and considerable wealth. In the early part of the second
century, we find him trying first one school of philosophers and then
another, and abandoning each in disgust. The Stoics would talk to him
of nothing but virtues and vices, of regulating the diet and curbing
the passions, and keeping the intellect as quiet as possible--a
convenient way, as experience taught them, of avoiding trouble;
whereas Justin wanted to hear something of the Absolute Being, and of
that Being's dealings with his own soul--a kind of inquiry which the
Stoics considered altogether useless and ridiculous, if not
reprehensible. Leaving the Stoics, he devoted himself heart and soul
to a sharp Peripatetic, but quarrelled with him shortly and left him
in disgust; the cause of disagreement being, apparently, a practical
theory entertained by his preceptor on the subject of fees. He next
took to the disciples of Pythagoras. But with these he succeeded no
better than with the others; for the Pythagoreans reminded him that no
one ignorant of mathematics could be admitted into their select
society. Mathematics, in a Pythagorean point of view, included
geometry, astronomy, and music--all those sciences, in fact, in which
there was any scope for those extraordinary freaks of numbers which
delighted the followers of the old vegetarian. Justin, having no
inclination to undergo a novitiate in mathematics, abandoned the
Pythagoreans and went elsewhere. The Platonists were the next who
attracted him. He found no lack of employment for the highest
qualities of his really noble soul in the lofty visions of Plato and
the sublimated theories of his disciples and commentators; though it
appears a little singular that, with his propensities toward the ideal
and abstract, he should have tried so many masters before he {43} sat
down under Plato. However, be that as it may, Plato seems to have
satisfied him for a while, and he began to think he was growing a very
wise man, when these illusions were rudely dispelled. One day he had
walked down to a lonely spot by the sea-shore, meditating, probably,
some deep idea, and perhaps declaiming occasionally some passage of
Plato's Olympian Greek. In his solitary walk he met an old man, and
entered into conversation with him. The event of this conversation was
that Justin went home with a wonderfully reduced estimate of his own
wisdom, and a determination to get to know a few things about which
Plato, on the old man's showing, had been woefully in the dark. Justin
became a convert to Christianity. Now, Justin had been at Alexandria,
and, whether the conversation he relates ever really took place, or is
merely an oratorical fiction, the story is one that represents
substantially what must have happened over and over again to those who
thronged the university of Alexandria, wearing the black cloak of the
philosopher.
Justin lived and was martyred some half a century before Clement sat
in the chair of the catechisms. But it is quite plain that, in such a
state of society, there would not be wanting many of his class and
temperament who, in Clement's time, as well as fifty years before,
were in search of the true philosophy. And we must not forget that in
Alexandria there were actually thousands of well-born, intellectual
young men from every part of the Roman empire. To the earnest among
these Clement was, indeed, no ordinary master. In the first place, he
was their equal by birth and education, with all the intellectual
keenness of his native Athens, and all the ripeness and versatility of
one who had "seen many cities of men and their manners." Next, he had
himself been a Gentile, and had gone through all those phases of the
soul that precede and accompany the process of conversion. If any one
knew their difficulties and their sore places, it was he, the
converted philosopher. If any one was capable of satisfying a generous
mind as to which was the true philosophy, it was he who had travelled
the world over in search of it. He could tell the swarthy Syrian that
it was of no use to seek the classic regions of Ionia, for he had
tried them, and the truth was not there; he could assure him it was
waste of time to go to Athens, for the Porch and the Garden were
babbling of vain questions--he had listened in them all. He could calm
the ardor of the young Athenian, his countryman, eager to try the
banks of the Orontes, and to interrogate the sages of Syria; for he
could tell him beforehand what they would say. He could shake his head
when the young Egyptian, fresh from the provincial luxury of Antinoe,
mentioned Magna Graecia as a mysterious land where the secret of
knowledge was perhaps in the hands of the descendants of the Pelasgi.
_He_ had tried Tarentum, he had tried Neapolis; they were worse than
the Serapeion in unnameable licentiousness--less in earnest than the
votaries that crowded the pleasure-barges of the Nile at a festival of
the Moon. He had asked, he had tried, he had tasted. The truth, he
could tell them, was at their doors. It was elsewhere, too. It was in
Neapolis, in Antioch, in Athens, in Rome; but they would not find it
taught in the chairs of the schools, nor discussed by noble
frequenters of the baths and the theatres. He knew it, and he could
tell it to them. And as he added many a tale of his wanderings and
searchings--many an instance of genius falling short, of good-will
laboring in the dark, of earnestness painfully at fault--many of those
who heard him would yield themselves up to the vigorous thinker whose
brow showed both the capacity and the unwearied activity of the soul
within. He was the very man to be made a hero of. Whatever there was
in the circle of Gentile philosophy he knew. St. Jerome calls {44} him
the "most learned of the writers of the Church," and St. Jerome must
have spoken with the sons of those who had heard him lecture--noble
Christian patricians, perchance, whose fathers had often told them
how, in fervent boyhood, they had been spell-bound by his words in the
Christian school of Alexandria, or learned bishops of Palestine, who
had heard of him from Origen at Caesarea or St. Alexander at
Jerusalem. From the same St. Alexander, who had listened to Pantaenus
by his side, we learn that he was as holy as he was learned; and
Theodoret, whose school did not dispose him to admire what came from
the catechetical doctors of Alexandria, is our authority for saying
that his "eloquence was unsurpassed." In the fourth edition of Cave's
"Apostolici," there is a portrait that we would fain vouch to be
genuine. The massive, earnest face, of the Aristotelian type, the
narrow, perpendicular Grecian brow, with its corrugations of thought
and care, the venerable flowing beard, dignifying, but not concealing,
the homely and fatherly mouth, seem to suggest a man who had made all
science his own, yet who now valued a little one of Jesus Christ above
all human wisdom and learning. But we have no record of those features
that were once the cynosure of many eyes in the "many-peopled" city;
we have no memorial of the figure that spoke the truths of the Gospel
in the words of Plato. We know not how he looked, nor how he sat, when
he began with his favorite master, and showed, with inexhaustible
learning, where he had caught sight of the truth, and, again, where
his mighty but finite intellect had failed for want of a more
"admirable light;" nor how he kindled when he had led his hearers
through the vestibule of the old philosophy, and stood ready to lift
the curtain of that which was at once its consummation and its
annihilation.
But the philosophers of Alexandria, so-called, were by no means,
without exception, earnest, high-minded, and well-meaning. Leaving out
of the question the mob of students who came ostensibly for wisdom,
but got only a very doubtful substitute, and were quite content with
it, we know that the Museum was the headquarters of an anti-Christian
philosophy which, in Clement's time, was in the very spring of its
vigorous development. Exactly contemporary with him was the celebrated
Ammonius the Porter, the teacher of Plotinus, and therefore the parent
of Neo-Platonism. Ammonius had a very great name and a very numerous
school. That he was a Christian by birth, there is no doubt; and he
was probably a Christian still when he landed at the Great Port and
found employment as a ship-porter. History is divided as to his
behavior after his wonderful elevation from the warehouses to the
halls of the Museum. St. Jerome and Eusebius deny that he apostatized,
while the very questionable authority of the unscrupulous Porphyry is
the only testimony that can be adduced on the other side; but, even if
he continued to be a Christian, his orthodoxy is rather damaged when
we find him praised by such men as Plotinus, Longinus, and Hierocles.
Some would cut the knot by asserting the existence of two Ammoniuses,
one a pagan apostate, the other a Christian bishop--a solution equally
contradicted by the witnesses on both sides. But, whatever Saccas was,
there is no doubt as to what was the effect of his teaching on, at
least, half of his hearers. If we might hazard a conjecture, we should
say that he appears to have been a man of great cleverness, and even
genius, but too much in love with his own brilliancy and his own
speculations not to come across the ecclesiastical authority in a more
or less direct way. He supplied many imposing premises which Origen,
representing the sound half of his audience, used for Christian
purposes, whilst Plotinus employed them for revivifying the dead body
of paganism. The brilliant sack-bearer seems to have been, at the very
least, a liberal {45} Christian, who was too gentlemanly to mention so
very vulgar a thing as the Christian "superstition" in the classic
gardens of the palace, or at the serene banquets of sages in the
Symposium.
The question, then, is, How did Christianity, as a philosophy, stand
in relation to the affluent professors of Ptolemy's university? That
they had been forced to see there was such a thing as Christianity,
before the time of which we speak (A.D. 200), it is impossible to
doubt. It must have dawned upon the comprehension of the most
imperturbable grammarian and the most materialist surgeon of the
Museum that a new teaching of some kind was slowly but surely striking
root in the many forms of life that surrounded them. Rumors must long
before have been heard in the common hall that executions had taken
place of several members of a new sect or society, said to be impious
in its tenets and disloyal in its practice. No doubt the assembled
sages had expended at the time much intricate quibble and pun, after
heavy Alexandrian fashion, on the subject of those wretched men; more
especially when it was put beyond doubt that no promises of reward or
threats of punishment had availed to make them compromise their
"opinions" in the slightest tittle. Then the matter would die out, to
be revived several times in the same way; until at last some one would
make inquiries, and would find that the new sect was not only
spreading, but, though composed apparently of the poor and the humble,
was clearly something very different from the fantastic religions or
brutal no-religions of the Alexandrian mob. It would be gradually
found out, moreover, that men of name and of parts were in its ranks;
nay, some day of days, that learned company in the Hall would miss one
of its own number, after the most reverend the curator had asked a
blessing--if ever he did--and it would come out that Professor
So-and-so, learned and austere as he was, had become a Christian! And
some would merely wonder, but, that past, would ask their neighbor, in
the equivalent Attic, if there were to be no more cakes and ale,
because _he_ had proved himself a fool; others would wonder, and feel
disturbed, and think about asking a question or two, though not to the
extent of abandoning their seats at that comfortable board.
The majority, doubtless, at Alexandria as elsewhere, set down
Christianity as some new superstition, freshly imported from the home
of all superstitions, the East. There were some who hated it, and
pursued it with a vehemence of malignant lying that can suggest only
one source of inspiration, that is to say, the father of all lies
himself. Of this class were Crescens the Cynic, the prime favorite of
Marcus Aurelius, and Celsus, called the Epicurean, but who, in his
celebrated book, written at this very time, appears as veritable a
Platonist as Plotinus himself. Then, again, there were others who
found no difficulty in recognizing Christianity as a sister
philosophy--who, in fact, rather welcomed it as affording fresh
material for dialectics--good, easy men of routine, blind enough to
the vital questions which the devil's advocates clearly saw to be at
stake. Galen is pre-eminently a writer who has reflected the current
gossip of the day. He was a hard student in his youth, and a learned
and even high-minded man in his maturity, but he frequently shows
himself in his writings as the "fashionable physician," with one or
two of the weaknesses of that well-known character. He spent a long
time at Alexandria, just before Clement became famous, studying under
Heraclian, consulting the immortal Hippocrates, and profiting by the
celebrated dissecting-rooms of the Museum, in which, unless they are
belied, the interests of science were so paramount that they used to
dissect--not live horses; but living slaves. He could not, therefore,
fail to have known how Christianity was regarded at the Museum.
Speaking of Christians, then, in his works, he of course retails a
good deal of {46} nonsense about them, such as we can imagine him to
have exchanged with the rich gluttons and swollen philosophers whom he
had to attend professionally in Roman society; but when he speaks
seriously, and of what he had himself observed, he says, frankly and
honestly, that the Christians deserved very great praise for sobriety
of life, and for their love of virtue, in which they equalled or
surpassed the greatest philosophers of the age. So thought, in all
probability, many of the learned men of Alexandria.
The Church, on her side, was not averse to appearing before the
Gentiles in the garb of philosophy, and it was very natural that the
Christian teachers should encourage this idea, with the aim and hope
of gaining admittance for themselves and their good tidings into the
very heart of pagan learning. And was not Christianity a philosophy?
In the truest sense of the word--and, what is more to the purpose, in
the sense of the philosophers of Alexandria--it was a philosophy. The
narrowed meaning that in our days is assigned to philosophy, as
distinguished from religion, had no existence in the days of Clement.
Wisdom was the wisdom by excellence, the highest, _the_ ultimate
wisdom. What the Hebrew preacher meant when he said, "Wisdom is better
than all the most precious things," the same was intended by the
Alexandrian lecturer when he offered to show his hearers where wisdom
was to be found. It meant the fruit of the highest speculation, and at
the same time the necessary ground of all-important practice. In our
days the child learns at the altar-rails that its end is to love God,
and serve him, and be happy with him; and after many years have
passed, the child, now a man, studies and speculates on the reasons
and the bearings of that short, momentous sentence. In the old Greek
world the intellectual search came first, and the practical sentence
was the wished-for result. A system of philosophy was, therefore, in
Clement's time, tantamount to a religion. It was the case especially
with the learned. Serapis and Isis were all very well for the "old
women and the sailors," but the laureate and the astronomer royal of
the Ptolemies, and the professors, many and diverse, of arts and
ethics, in the Museum, scarcely took pains to conceal their utter
contempt for the worship of the vulgar. Their idols were something
more spiritual, their incense was of a more ethereal kind. Could they
not dispute about the Absolute Being? and had they not glimpses of
something indefinitely above and yet indefinably related to their own
souls, in the Logos of the divine Plato? So the Stoic mortified his
flesh for the sake of some ulterior perfectibility of which he could
give no clear account to himself; the Epicurean contrived to take his
fill of pleasure, on the maxim that enjoyment was the end of our
being, "and tomorrow we die;" the Platonist speculated and pursued his
"air-travelling and cloud-questioning," like Socrates in the basket,
in a vain but tempting endeavor to see what God was to man and man to
God; the Peripatetic, the Eclectic, and all the rest, disputed,
scoffed, or dogmatized about many things, certainly, but, mainly and
finally, on those questions that will never lie still:--Who are we?
and, Who placed us here? Philosophy included religion, and therefore
Christianity was a philosophy.
When Clement, then, told the philosophers of Alexandria that he could
teach them the true philosophy, he was saying not only what was
perfectly true, but what was perfectly understood by them. The
catechetical school was, and appeared to them, as truly a
philosophical lecture-room as the halls of the Museum. Clement himself
had been an ardent philosopher, and he reverently loved his masters,
Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, whilst he had the feelings of a
brother toward the philosophers of his own day. He became a Christian,
and his dearest object was to win his brethren to a participation in
his own good fortune. {47} He did not burn his philosophical books and
anathematize his masters; like St. Paul, he availed himself of the
good that was in them and commended it, and then proclaimed that he
had the key of the treasure which they had labored to find and had not
found. This explains how it is that, in Clement of Alexandria, the
philosopher's mantle seems almost to hide the simple garb of the
Christian. This also explains why he is called, and indeed calls
himself, an Eclectic in his system; and this marks out the drift and
the aim of the many allusions to philosophy that we find in his extant
works, and in the traditions of his teaching that have come down to
us. If Christianity was truly called a philosophy, what should we
expect in its champion but that he should be a philosopher? Men in
these days read the _Stromata_, and find that it is, on the outside,
more like Plato than like Jesus Christ; and thus they make small
account of it, because they cannot understand its style, or the reason
for its adoption. The grounds of questions and the forms of thought
have shifted since the days of the catechetical school. But Clement's
fellow-citizens understood him. The thrifty young Byzantine, for
instance, understood him, who had been half-inclined to join the
Stoics, but had come, in his threadbare pallium, to hear the Christian
teacher, and who was told that asceticism was very good and
commendable, but that the end of it all was God and the love of God,
and that this end could only be attained by a Christian. The languid
but intellectual man of fashion understood him, who had grown sick of
the jargon of his Platonist professors about the perfect man and the
archetypal humanity, and who now felt his inmost nature stirred to its
depths by the announcement and description of the Word made flesh. The
learned stranger from Antioch or Athens, seeking for the truth,
understood him, when he said that the Christian dogma alone could
create and perfect the true Gnostic or Knower; he understood perfectly
the importance of the object, provided the assertion were true, as it
might turn out to be. Unless Clement had spoken of asceticism, of the
perfect man, and of the true Gnostic, his teaching would not have come
home to the self-denying student, to the thoughtful sage, to the
brilliant youth, to all that was great and generous and amiable in the
huge heathen society of the crowded city. As it was, he gained a
hearing, and, having done so, he said to the Alexandrians, "Your
masters in philosophy are great and noble: I honor them, I admire and
accept them; but they did not go far enough, as you all acknowledge.
Come to us, then, and we will show what is wanting in them. Listen to
these old Hebrew writers whom I will quote to you. You see that they
treated of all your problems, and had solved the deepest of them,
whilst your forefathers were groping in darkness. All their light, and
much more, is our inheritance. The truth, which you seek, we possess.
'What you worship, without knowing it, that I preach to you.' God's
Word has been made flesh--has lived on this earth, the model man, the
absolute man. Come to us, and we will show you how you may know God
through him, and how through him God communicates himself to you." But
here he stopped. The "discipline of the secret" allowed him to go no
further in public. The listening Christians knew well what he meant;
his pagan hearers only surmised that there was more behind. And was it
not much that Christianity should thus measure strength and challenge
a contest with the old Greek civilization on equal terms, and about
those very matters of intellect and high ethics in which it especially
prided itself?
But the contest, never a friendly one, save with the dullest and
easiest of the pagan philosophers, very soon grew to be war to the
knife. We have said that the quiet lovers of literature among the
heathen men of science were perfectly ready to admit the Christian
philosophy to a fair share {48} in the arena of disputation and
discussion, looking upon it as being, at worst, only a foolish system
of obtrusive novelties, which might safely be left to their own
insignificancy. But, quite unexpectedly and startlingly for easy-going
philosophers, Christianity was found, not merely to claim the
possession of truth, but to claim it wholly and solely. And, what was
still more intolerable, its doctors maintained that its adoption or
rejection was no open speculative question, but a tremendous practical
matter, involving nothing less than all morality here and all
happiness hereafter; and that the unfortunate philosopher, who, in his
lofty serenity, approved it as right, and yet followed the wrong,
would have to undergo certain horrors after death, the bare suggestion
of which seemed an outrage on the dignity of the philosophical
character. This was quite enough for hatred; and the philosophers, as
their eyes began to open, saw that Crescens and Celsus were right, and
accorded their hatred most freely and heartily.
But Christianity did not stop here. With the old original schools and
their offshoots it was a recognized principle that philosophy was only
for philosophers; and this was especially true of Clement's most
influential contemporaries, the Neo-Platonists. The vulgar had no part
in it, in fact could not come within the sphere of its influence; how
could they? How could the sailors, who, after a voyage, went to pay
their vows in the temple of Neptune on the quay, or the porters who
dragged the grain sacks and the hemp bundles from the tall warehouses
to the holds of Syrian and Greek merchantmen, or the negro slaves who
fanned the brows of the foreign prince, or the armorers of the Jews'
quarter, or the dark-skinned, bright-eyed Egyptian women of the
Rhacotis suspected of all evil from thieving to sorcery, or, more than
all, the drunken revellers and poor harlots who made night hideous
when the Egyptian moon looked down on the palaces of the
Brucheion--how could any of these find access to the sublime secrets
of Plato or the profound commentaries of his disciples? Even if they
had come in crowds to the lecture-halls--which no one wanted them to
do, or supposed they would do--they could not have been admitted nor
entertained; for even the honest occupations of life, the daily labors
necessary in a city of 300,000 freemen, were incompatible with
imbibing the divine spirit of philosophy. So the philosophers had
nothing to say to all these. If they had been asked what would become
of such poor workers and sinners, they would probably have avoided an
answer as best they could. There were the temples and Serapis and Isis
and the priests--they might go to them. It was certain that
philosophy was not meant for the vulgar. In fact, philosophy would be
unworthy of a habitation like the Museum--would deserve to have its
pensions stopped, its common hall abolished, and its lecture-rooms
shut up--if ever it should condescend to step into the streets and
speak to the herd. It was, therefore, with a disgust unspeakable, and
a swiftly-ripening hatred, that the philosophers saw Christianity
openly proclaiming and practising the very opposite of all this. True,
it had learned men and respected men in its ranks, but it loudly
declared that its mission was to the lowly, and the mean, and the
degraded, quite as much as to the noble, and the rich, and the
virtuous. It maintained that the true divine philosophy, the source of
joy for the present and hope for the future, was as much in the power
of the despised bondsman, trembling under the lash, as of the
prince-governor, or the Caesar himself, haughtily wielding the
insignia of sovereignty. _We_ know what its pretensions and tenets
were, but it is difficult to realize how they must have clashed with
the notions of intellectual paganism in the city of Plotinus--how the
hands that would have been gladly held out in friendship, had it come
in respectable {49} and conventional guise, were shut and clenched,
when they saw in its train the rough mechanic, the poor maid-servant,
the negro, and the harlot. There could be no compromise between two
systems such as these. For a time it might have seemed as if they
could decide their quarrel in the schools, but the old Serpent and his
chief agents knew better: and so did Clement and the Christian
doctors, at the very time that they were taking advantage of fair
weather to occupy every really strong position which the enemy held.
The struggle soon grew into the deadly hand-to-hand grapple that ended
in leaving the corpse of paganism on the ground, dead but not buried,
to be gradually trodden out of sight by a new order of things.
It must not, however, be supposed that the Christian school of
Alexandria was wholly, or even chiefly, employed in controversy with
the schools of the heathen. The first care of the Church was, as at
all times, the household of the faith: a care, however, in the
fulfilment of which there is less that strikes as novel or interesting
at first sight than in that remarkable aggressive movement of which it
has been our object to give some idea. But even in the Church's
household working there is much that is both instructive and
interesting, as we get a glimpse of it in Clement of Alexandria. The
Church in Alexandria, as elsewhere, was made up of men from every lot
and condition of life. There were officials, civil and military,
merchants, shop-keepers, work-people--plain, hard-striving men,
husbands, and fathers of families. In the wake of the upper thousands
followed a long and wide train--the multitude who compose the middle
classes of a great city; and it was from their ranks that the Church
was mainly recruited. They might not feel much interest in the
university, beyond the fact that its numerous and wealthy students
were a welcome stimulus to trade; but still they had moral and
intellectual natures. They must have craved for some kind of food for
their minds and hearts, and cannot have been satisfied with the dry,
unnourishing scraps that were flung to them by the supercilious
philosophers. They must have felt no small content--those among them
who had the grace to hearken to the teachings of Clement--when he told
them that the philosophy _he_ taught was as much for them as for their
masters and their betters. They listened to him, weighed his words,
and accepted them; and then a great question arose. It was a question
that was being debated and settled at Antioch, at Rome, and at Athens,
no less than at Alexandria; but at Alexandria it was Clement who
answered it. "We believe your good tidings," they said; "but tell us,
must we change our lives wholly and entirely? Is everything that we
have been doing so far, and our fathers have been doing before us,
miserably and radically wrong?" They had bought and sold; they had
married and given in marriage; they had filled their warehouses and
freighted their ships; they had planted and builded, and brought up
their sons and daughters. They had loved money, and the praise of
their fellow-men; they had their fashions and their customs, old and
time-honored, and so interwoven with their very life as to be almost
identified with it. Some of their notions and practices the bare
announcement of the Gospel sufficiently condemned; and these must go
at once. But where was the line to be drawn? Did the Gospel aim at
regenerating the world by forbidding marriage and laying a ban on
human labor; by making life intolerable with asceticism; by emptying
the streets and the market-places, and driving men to Nitria and the
frightful rocks of the Upper Nile? And what made the question doubly
exciting was the two-fold fact, first, that in those very days men and
women were continually fleeing from home and family, and hiding, in
the desert; and secondly, that there were in that very city
congregations of {50} men calling themselves Christians, who
proclaimed that it was wrong to marry, and that flesh-meat and wine
were sinful indulgences.
The answer that Clement gave to these questionings is found mainly in
that work of his which is called _Paedagogus_, or "The Teacher." The
answer needed was a sharp, a short, and a decisive one. It needed to
be like a surgical operation--rapidly performed, completed, with
nothing further to be done but to fasten the bandages, and leave the
patient to the consequences, whatever they might be. Society had to be
_reset_. We need not repeat for the thousandth time the fact of the
unutterable corruptness and rottenness of the whole pagan world. It
was not that there were wanting certain true ideas of duty toward the
state, the family, the fellow-citizen: the evil lay far deeper. It was
not good sense that was wanting; it was the sense of the supernatural.
"Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die," was the formula that
expressed the code of popular morality; and because men could not "eat
and drink" comfortably and luxuriously without some sort of law,
order, and mutual compact, it followed as a necessary consequence that
there must be law, order, and compact. It was not, therefore, that
Clement had merely to hold up the Gospel and show them its meaning
here and its application there. He had to shift the very groundwork of
morality, to take up the very foundations of the moral acts that go to
make up life as viewed in the light of right and wrong. He had to
substitute heaven for earth, hereafter for here, God for self. And he
did so--in a fashion not unknown in the Catholic Church since, as
indeed it had been not unknown to St. Paul long before. He simply held
up to them the crucifix. Let any one turn to the commencement of the
_Paedagogus_, and he will find a description of what a teacher ought
to be. At the beginning of the second chapter he will read these
words: "My children, our teacher is like the Father, whose Son he is;
in whom there is no sin, great or small, nor any temptation to sin;
God in the figure of a man, stainless, obedient to his Father's will;
the Word, true God, who is in the Father, who is at the Father's right
hand, true God in the form of a man; to whom we must strive with all
our might _to make ourselves like_." It sounds like the commencement
of a children's retreat in one of our modern cities to hear Clement
proclaim so anxiously that the teacher and model of men is no other
than Jesus, and that we must all become children, and go and listen to
him and study him; yet it is a sentence that must have spoken to the
very inmost hearts of all who had a thought or care for their souls in
Alexandria; and one can perceive, in the terms used in the original
Greek, a conscious adaptation of epithets to meet more than one
Platonic difficulty. It was the reconciliation of the true with the
beautiful. The Alexandrians, Greek and Egyptian, with their Greek
longings for the beautiful, and their Egyptian tendings to the
sensible, were not put off by Clement with a cold abstraction. A
mathematical deity, formed out of lines, relations, and analogies,
such as Neo-Platonism offered, was well enough for the lecture-room,
but had small hold upon the heart. Christianity restored the thrilling
sense of a personal God, which Neo-Platonism destroyed, but for which
men still sighed, though they knew not what they were sighing for; and
Christianity, by Clement's mouth, taught that the living and lovely
life of Jesus was to be the end and the measure of the life of all.
They were to follow him: "My angel shall walk before you," is
Clement's own quotation. And having thus laid down the regenerating
principle--God through Jesus Christ--he descends safely and fearlessly
into details. Minutely and carefully he handles the problems of life,
and sets them straight by the light of the life of Jesus.
These details and these directions, {51} as left to us by Clement in
the _Paedagogus_, are only what we might anticipate from a Christian
teacher to his flock; and yet they are very interesting, and disclose
many facts that are full of suggestion to one who reads by the light
of the Catholic faith. Who would not like to hear what Clement said to
the Church of Alexandria about dress, beauty, feasting, drinking,
furniture, conversation, money, theatres, sleep, labor, and
housekeeping? We know well that there must have been ample scope for
discourse on all these topics. The rich Alexandrians, like the rich
Romans, and the rich Corinthians, and the rich everywhere, were
fearfully addicted to luxury, and their poorer neighbors followed
their example as well as they could. But there were circumstances
peculiar to Alexandria that enabled it to outdo the rest of the world
in this matter; putting Rome, of course, out of the question. It was
the market for India; and seeing that almost everything in the way of
apparel came from India, Alexandria had the pick of the best that the
world could afford, and seems not to have been behindhand in taking
advantage of its privilege. Nobody enjoyed more than the Alexandrian--
whether he were a descendant of the Macedonian who came in with the
Conqueror, or a _parvenu_ of yesterday grown great by his wheat-ships
or his silk-bales--to sweep the Heptastadion, or promenade the Great
Quay, or lounge in the gardens of the Museum, in what ancient tailors
and milliners would call a synthesis of garments, as ample, and stiff,
and brilliant as Indian looms could make them. Then, again, Alexandria
was a university town. Two hundred years of effeminate Ptolemies and
four hundred of wealthy students had been more than enough to create a
tradition of high, luxurious living. The conjunction of all that was
to be got for money, with any amount of money to get it with, had made
Alexandria a model city for carrying out the only maxim which the
greater number even of the philosophers themselves really understood
and practically followed: "Let us eat and drink!" Again, a navigable
river, a rainless sky, and a climate perhaps the finest in the world,
offered both inducements and facilities for parties of pleasure and
conviviality in general. It is true the river was only a canal: one
thing was wanting to the perfection of Alexandria as a site for an
empire city, viz., the Nile; but that the canal was a moderate success
in the eyes of the Alexandrians may be inferred from the fact that
Canopus, where it finished its short course of thirteen or fourteen
miles, and joined the Nile, was a perfect city of river-side hotels,
to which the boats brought every day crowds of pleasure-seekers. Very
gay were the silken and gilded boats, with their pleasant canopies and
soothing music; and very gay and brilliant, but not very reputable,
were the groups that filled them, with their crowns of flowers, their
Grecian attitudinizing, and their ingenious arrangements of
fan-working slaves. This was the population which it was Clement's
work to convert to purity and moderation.
It is very common with Clement's modern critics, when making what our
French allies would call "an appreciation" him, to set him down as a
solemn trifler. They complain that they cannot get any "system of
theology" out of his writings; indeed, they doubt whether he so much
as had one. They find him use the term "faith" first in one sense and
then in another, and they are especially offended by his minute
instructions on certain matters pertaining to meat, drink, and dress.
To any one who considers what Clement intended to do in his writings,
and especially in the _Paedagogus_, there is no difficulty in seeing an
answer to a difficulty like this. He did not _mean_ to construct a
"system of theology," and therefore it is no wonder if his critics
cannot find one. He did not even mean to state the broad, general
principles of the Gospel: his hearers knew these well enough. What he
did mean to do was, {52} to apply these general rules and principles
to a variety of cases occurring in everyday life. And yet, as a matter
of fact, it is to be observed that he always does lay down broad
principles before entering into details. In the matter of eating, for
instance, regarding which he is very severe in his denunciations, and
not without reason, he takes care to state distinctly the great
Catholic canon of mortification: "Though all things were made for man,
yet it is not good to use all, nor at all times." Again, in the midst
of his contemptuous enumeration of ancient wines, he does not forget
to say, "You are not robbed of your drink: it is given to you, and
awaits your hand;" that which is blamed is excess. He sums up what he
has been saying against the voluptuous entertainments then so
universal by the following sentence--a novelty, surely, to both
extremes of pagan society in Alexandria--"In one word, whatever is
natural to man must not be taken from him; but, instead thereof, must
be regulated according to fitting measure and time."
In deciding whether Clement was a "solemn trifler," or not, there is
another consideration which must not be omitted, and that is his sense
of the humorous. It may sound incongruous when speaking of a Father of
the Church, and much more of a reputed mystical Father like Clement,
but we think no one can deny that he often supplements a serious
argument by a little stroke of pleasantry. As many of his sentences
stand, a look or a smile would lighten them up and make them sparkle
into humor. Paper and ink cannot carry the tone of the voice or the
glance of the eye, and Clement's voice has been silent and his eye
dimmed for many a century; but may we not imagine that at times
something of archness in the teacher's manner would impart to his
weighty words a touch of quaintness, and the habitually thoughtful eye
twinkle with a gleam of pleasantry? He would be no true follower of
Plato if it were not so. Who shall say he was not smiling when he gave
out that formal list of wines, of eatables, and of scents most
affected by the fashionables of those days? He concludes an invective
against scandalous feats by condemning the universal crown of roses as
a "nuisance:" it was damp, it was cold; it hindered one from using
either his eyes or his ears properly. He advises his audience to avoid
much curious carving and ornamenting of bed-posts; for creeping
things, he says, have a habit of making themselves at home in the
mouldings. He asks if one's hands cannot be as well washed in a clay
basin as in a silver one. He wonders how one can dare to put a plain
little loaf on a grand "wing-footed" table. He cannot see why a lamp
of earthenware will not give as good a light as one of silver. He
alludes with disgust to "hissing frying-pans," to "spoon and pestle,"
and even to the "packed stomachs" of their proprietors; to Sicilian
lampreys, and Attican eels; shell-fish from Capo di Faro, and Ascrean
beet from the foot of Helicon; mullet from the Gulf of Thermae, and
pheasants from the Crimea. We hear him contemptuously repeat the
phrases of connoisseurs about their wines, the startling variety of
which we know from other sources besides his writings: he speaks of
the "scented Thasian," the aromatic "Lesbian," the "sweet wine of
Crete," the "pleasant Syracusan." The articles of plate which he
enumerates to condemn would be more than sufficient to furnish out a
modern wedding breakfast. To scents he gives no quarter. We have heard
a distinguished professor of chemistry assert, in a lecture, that
wherever there is scent on the surface there is sure to be dirt
beneath; and, from the well-known fact that in Capua there was one
whole street occupied by perfumers, he could draw no other inference
than that Capua must have been "a very dirty city." It would appear
that Clement of Alexandria was much of this opinion. He gives a
picture of a pompous {53} personage in a procession, "going along
marvellously scented, for the purpose of producing a sensation, and
yet underneath as foul as he could be." He enumerates the absurd
varieties of ointments in fashion, and orders them to be thrown away.
He is indignant at the saffron-colored scented robe that the gentlemen
wore. He will have no flowing or trailing vestments; no "Attic
buskins," no "Persian sandals." He complains that the ladies go and
spend the whole day at the perfumer's, the goldsmith's, and the
milliner's, just as if he were speaking of "shopping" in the
nineteenth century, instead of A.D. 200. He blames the men for
frequenting the barbers' shops, the taverns, and the dicing-houses. It
is amusing in these days to read of his denunciations of shaving. He
has no patience with "hair-haters:" a man without the hair that God
gave him is a "base sight." "God attached such importance to hair," he
says, "that he makes a man come to hair and sense at the same time."
But, in reality, this vehement attack on the "smooth men," as he calls
them, points to one of the most flagrant of heathen immoralities, and
reveals in the context a state of things to which we may not do more
than allude. He condemns luxury in furniture, from "beds with silver
feet, made of ivory and adorned with gold and tortoise-shell," down to
"little table-daggers," that ancient ladies and gentlemen used
indifferently to their food and to their slaves. All this is not very
deep, but it is just what Clement wanted to say, and a great deal more
useful in its place and connection than a "system of theology." We may
add that it is a great deal more interesting to us, who know pretty
well what Clement's "system of theology" was, but not so well what
were the faults and failings of his Christian men and women in those
far-off Alexandrian times.
There is anothe
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