YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY THE LIBRARY OF THE DIVINITY SCHOOL MEDLEVAL AND MODERN SAINTS AND MIEACLES. NOT AB UNO E SOGIETATE JESU. NEW YORK: HAEPEK & BEOTHEKS, PUBLISHEES, FEAWKI.IN BQUAIiE. 18V 6. Yale Divinity Library New Hauen. Conn. K721 M4fc2 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1876, by HAEPEE & BEOTHEES, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. P E E F A C E. Many American Protestants are inclined to look with favor, or at least with indulgence, on the pre tensions of Catholicism ; and not- a few have been persuaded to exchange the Scriptural faith and the simple ritual of their fathers for the traditions, the dogmas, and the gaudy material worship of the Rom ish Church. The writer believes that such persons, and indeed the general American public, are very imperfectly informed respecting the actual teachings of modern Eomanism, the intellectual, moral, social, and political tendencies of those teachings, and the real aims of the leaders of the party which inspires and controls the policy of the Vatican. Romish proselytism is dexterous in adapting itself to the va ried mental and spiritual conditions of its pupils. Its pulpit and its printed manuals are not its only, or even its most efficient, instruments. Its individ ual private appeals, whether from lay or ecclesiastical agents, and especially its schools, are most powerful in misleading the weak, the wavering, and the young ; and the secret lessons of the confessional are an ir- 4 Preface. resistible means of confirming and strengthening the but half-converted neophyte. It distorts the truth by silent suppression, by artful equivocation, and not rarely by unscrupulous denial of damaging fact, which its ministers know the objector has not at hand the means of establishing. The evidence re specting the real doctrines and history of the Romish Church is often to be found only in voluminous col lections rare in Protestant countries, or in works ex isting only in foreign languages, and hence altogeth er inaccessible to the general reader; and the in quirer is constantly baffled by the want of sufficient evidence to meet the bold denial or affirmation of the propagandist on his own ground. The writer thinks he will render a service to the cause of truth by laying before the public, in a popu lar form, facts not familiarly known to American and English readers, but which have an important bear ing on the claims to universal spiritual and temporal dominion expressly or virtually advanced by Rome. He has been careful to draw his statements and illus trations fronr sources undeniably trustworthy, and, in nearly all cases, recognized by the Church itself as authoritative. The Latin documents in the Appen dix are for the use of ecclesiastical students. CONTENTS. fact I. From the Patristic to the Jesuit Age 11 II. From the Founding of the Society of Jesus to the Reign of Pius IX 65 III. Romish Hagiology under Pope Pius IX 107 IV. Mariolatry in France. — Conclusion 152 APPENDIX : I. Ecclesiastical Forgeries 207 II. Opinion in Catholic Countries on Relations be tween Church and State 213 III. The Brothers of Common Life 216 IV. The Inquisition at Rome 218 V. Papal Approval of Condemnation of Huss 226 VI. Papal Remonstrances against the Abolition of the Forum Ecclesiasticum 227 VII. Romish Opposition to the Translation of the Scriptures into Modern Languages 229 VIII. The Edict of Nantes, and its Revocation 230 IX. The "Monita Secreta" Societatis Jesu , 240 X Suppression of Books by the Priests 241 Contents. I'AQB XI. Letter from the Saviour to a Girl of St. Mar cel, in France 244 XII. The Romish Church under the Reign of Pius IX 245 BOOKS REFERRED TO IN THE FOLLOW ING PAGES. PART I. Maury, Alfred, Essai sur les Legendes Pieuses du Moyen-Age. Paris, 1843, 8vo. Newman, J. H., The Miracles of Scripture compared with those reported Elsewhere. London, 1873. The Miracles of Early Ecclesiastical History compared with those of Scripture. London, 1873. Benedicti XIV., Pont. Opt. Max., Opus de Servorum Dei Beati- ficatione et Beatornm Canonizatione. Prati, mdcccxxxiv., 7 vols. 4to. RiBADiNEnLE, R. P. Petri, Societatis Jesu : Flos Sanctorum, 6 Libro de las Vidas de los Santos. Madrid, 1599-1601, 2 vols, folio. Flos Sanctorum, seu Vitas et Res Gestse Sanctorum, Latine traductse, additis utilissimis Annotationibus et Sanctorum Vitis recerjtioribus, a R. P. Jacobo Canisio, Soc. Jesu. Presb. Colonise Agrippinse, mdccxli., 3 vols, folio. Vita del Venerabile Servo di Dio, P. Giuseppe Anchieta, della Compagnia di Gesu, detto l'Apostolo del Brasile, curata da' Processi autentici formati per la sua Beatificazione. Roma, mdccxxxviii., 8vo. Rev. D. Francesco di Lucia, Relazione Istoriea della Trasla- zione del Sagro Corpo, e Miracoli di Santa Filomena. Be- nevento, 1834, 3 vols. 8vo. 8 Books referred to in the following Pages. Goodwin, Thom(as, D.D., Christ Set Forth, together with a Treatise discovering the Affectionate Tenderness of Christ's Heart in Heaven unto Sinners on Earth. London, 1643, 12mo. Languet, Jos., La Vie de la venerable Mere Marguerite Marie, Religieuse de La Visitation, nominee dans le Monde Marie Alacoque. Paris, 1729, 4to. Asseline, Louis, Marie Alacoque et le Sacre" Cceur. Paris, 1873, 12mo. PART II. S. Alfonso De' Liguori, Le Glorie di Maria. Bassano, 1852, 2 vols. 12mo. Confessore Diretto per le Confessioni della Gente di Cam- pagna. Monza, 1825, 1 vol. 8vo. F. Agostinho de Santa Maria, Santuario Mariano e Historia das Imagens Milagrosas de Nossa Senhora. Lisboa, 1707, 10 vols. 4to. R. P. M. F. Ambrogio Landucci, Origine del Tempio dedicato in Roma alia Vergiue Madre di Dio presso alia Porta del Popolo. Roma, 1646, 4to. Narrazione del Prodigio avveuuto nella Santa Imagine di Maria Vergine di Rimini, estratta dall' autentico Proeesso compi- lato dall' Ecclesiastica Curia della detta Citta. Rimini, 1851, 8vo. PART III. Berthier, le Pere, Notre Dame de La Salette, Pelerinage de 1872. Paris, 1872, 12mo. Nau, I'Abbe", L'Apparition de La Salette, envisage dans ses Consequences. Paris, 1861, 12mo. Books referred to in the following Pages. 9 Hendrick Lasserre, Onze Lieve Vrouw van Lourdes. Gent, 1873, 8vo. Keller, Emile, L'Encyclique du 8 De'cembre 1864 et les Prin- cipes de 1789. PART IV. Vitae Patrum. — De Vita et Verbis Seniorum, sive Historise Ere- miticEB Libri X. Antverpise, 1628, folio. Rosweydi, Heriberti, e Societate Jesu, De Fide Haereticis ser vanda. Antverpise, 1610, 8vo. Ribadineira, P. Pedro, Flos Sanctorum, 6 Libro de las Vidas de los Santos. Madrid, 1599-1601, 2 vols, folio. Generelle Legende der Heylighen, door H. Rosweyde. Ant- verpiae, 1686, 2 vols, folio. Flos Sanctorum, sen Vitae et Res Gestae Sanctorum, primum Hispanice conscriptae, nunc vero Latine traduct®, additis utilissimis Annotatiouibus et Sanctorum Vitis recentiori- bus, a R. P. Jacobo Canisio, Soc. Jes. Presb. Coloniae Agrippinse, mdcclxi., 3 vols, folio. Reverendi Fratris Jacobi de Voragine, de Sanctorum Legen- dis. Opus perutile. Venetiis, mcccclxxxiii., 1 vol. folio. Acta Sanctorum, quotquot toto orbe coluntur. 1663-1867, 60 vols, folio. D. Giuseppe Cozza, Della Vita, Miracoli e Culto del Martire Pietro de Arbues. Roma, 1867, 1 vol. 8vo. 1* MEDLEVAL AND MODERN SAINTS AND MIRACLES. I. FEOM THE PATRISTIC TO THE JESUIT AGE. The ancient book of legends entitled " Yitse Pa- trum, sive Historise Eremeticse," is characterized by Mr. Lecky, in a note to the fourth chapter of his " His tory of European Morals," as an " invaluable collec tion," and as "one of the most fascinating volumes in the whole range of literature." The " Yitse Patrum " is the most ancient, the most attractive, and the most important, though not the most voluminous, work of Christian legendary lore. It has probably had a wider circulation than any oth er monument of saintly history ; and during the ages which elapsed from the period when its materials were first gathered until near the close of the thir teenth century — when the " Legenda Aurea," a very inferior compilation, at least partially superseded it — 12 Mediaeval and Modern Saints and Miracles. the " Yitse Patrum " was the chief source of informa tion, in all European countries, respecting the mythic and heroic ages of the Christian Church. We say the mythic and heroic ages of the Church, because the genuine hagiological annals of the early post-apostolic centuries are plainly distinguishable, in literary and critical character, both from the accounts of the origin and founding of Christianity contained in the Gospels and the Acts, and from the fabulous lives of hermits, martyrs, saints, and religious wonder workers fabricated or remodeled at later dates, and especially since the invention of printing and the con sequent birth and diffusion of — what had not previ ously existed in Europe — a truly popular written lit erature. The Gospels and the Acts, whether rightly ascribed to the apostles and the primitive disciples or not, and whatever opinion may be adopted as to the truth of their details and the critical ability of their writers, are, both in conception and in execution, in a strict sense documents of historical literature. The lives and acts of the Christian thaumaturgists of the five or six succeeding centuries were often simply dreams of crazy enthusiasm and wild superstition; but when composed with a conscious purpose, they were designed, not, like the Gospels, for general cir culation or for the conversion of the people, but for From the Patristic to the Jesuit Age. 13 the instruction and edification of the professional priesthood. They were, in short, what were technic ally called " legends," that is, writings intended and appointed to be read publicly and privately by the regular clergy. The term " legend " — the Latin ge- rundial legendum, — or lectio, originally embraced a considerable part of the ordinary church service, but in common use it was afterward restricted to narra tives of the lives and miracles of saints and martyrs, which, as well as ascetic treatises, were read aloud to monks and nuns when assembled for instruction, more especially during the hour of refection; and they were also much used in private study in the monastic cells. The earliest of these biographies of holy men are, in general, narratives of events reported to the writ ers on testimony which they accepted as credible, and there is seldom much room for doubting the good faith and sincerity of the authors. In very many instances, too, there are no good grounds for questioning the truth of the leading biographical data ; and the legends often incidentally furnish val uable hints in regard to the times of the writers, if not of the heroes, of the tale, and, therefore, cautious ly used, are a not unimportant source of historical il lustration. Christianity was first received by a large 14 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. proportion of its votaries, not simply because it ap proved itself to the conscience, the heart, and the in tellect of man, but " for the very works' sake ;" and this was more emphatically the case in the ages of inferior culture which followed the decay and down fall of the Roman empire. Hence, as would natu rally be supposed, the legends of this latter period, even when founded on a basis of fact, scarcely ad dress any faculty but the imagination ; they almost universally exhibit a craving appetite for the marvel ous and the supernatural, and a devout, unhesitating, and uncritical credulity, which clothe with a mythic coloring the scenery of the events described, and give to all but the frame of the picture — to all, in fact, which the writers and their contemporaries regarded as the real substance and marrow of the work — the character of a purely imaginative creation. The stock of ancient traditions, and of other sources of information regarded as authoritative, was not in exhaustible ; and when the material at hand had been worked up, and grown trite and familiar, the monks began to borrow and remold themes from pagan my thologies, and to compose imaginary Christian histo ries of like character, at first, probably, not with in tent to deceive, but simply as literary exercitations, and as an employment for the vacant hours of claus- From the Patristic to the Jesuit Age. 15 tral life.* These narratives embody the monkish ideal of the religious, as distinguished from the secu lar, virtues. The types of their heroes and heroines seem to have been suggested by the personal experi ences and aspirations of the writers, and the princi pal personages of the drama almost uniformly begin or end by martyrdom or monastic profession. The mediseval legends, at whatever period the supposed scene may have been laid, were all more or less stamped with the character and costume of their own age and with the couleur locale of the country of their composition, a circumstance which rendered them especially acceptable as well as credible to the contemporary world, and secured to them both a wide circulation and afterward a gradual recognition by the faithful, and often by the dignitaries of the Church, as authentic records. But the spirit of criticism born with the revival of learning soon detected the unhis- torical character of these compositions, exposed their anachronisms, their inconsistencies, and their improb- * In speaking of the early fabulous legends of the Romish Church as often not intended to deceive, we refer to those composed before the forging of papal decrees and of grants of lands and wills in favor of the Church became a regular branch of monastic industry. When counterfeiting such documents had grown into an art, the invention of false miracles and biographies would naturally be practiced without scruple. See Appendix I. 16 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. abilities, and the term " legend " became at last al most synonymous with " fable."* The modern legends of Catholicism, or those com posed or recast from old material after the joint in fluence of the invention of printing and of the Ref- * For a highly instructive critical examination of the origin and composition of the mediaeval legends, see Alfred Maury, "Les Le- gendes Pieuses du Moyen-Age." We can not indeed adopt all the opinions of the learned author, but we know not where to look for a sounder and more philosophical view of the subject than this essay presents. It is eminently calculated to produce conviction in the minds of cultivated and candid Catholics, and is therefore regarded by the Church as a very dangerous book. Judicious measures have been taken for its suppression, and, though.published so lately as 1843, it is now a very rare volume. Residents in Northern New York will remember the burning of a large number of Protestant French Bibles by Canadian priests some years ago. The London Times of December 9th, 1875, contains the following account of the destruction of some of Gasparin's works by a zealous Catholic librarian in France : " Ultramontanes seem to have still a hankering for the auto-da-fe. Madame Gasparin, the well-known Protestant writer, having presented a copy of her late husband's work, " Les Eeoles du Doute et les lilcoles de la Foi," to the popular library of Boussenois, in the C6te d'Or, has received the following extraordinary letter from its director, M. de Geroal : '"We can not thank you too much on this occasion. M. de Gas parin's works and those of the Franklin Press are most useful to us. This very morning we made the finest fire ever seen with all these works. How pleasant, now the mornings are chilly, to warm one's fingers with M. de Gasparin's books ! They burn splendidly. Once more thanks, madame. Geneva paper, especially M. de Gasparin's, has done us a great service, and we hope to warm ourselves again with his books. Meanwhile, pray accept our warmest compliments.' " From the Patristic to the Jesuit Age. 11 ormation had created a reading public, have been framed, not for the general purpose of spiritual in struction, but in a spirit of distinct and conscious re ligious partisanship, with the special object of serving as instruments of Romish propagandism, and their tone has been accommodated to the low moral and intellectual level of the classes for which they are in tended. The " Yitse Patrum " is not now a common book ; and probably no inconsiderable proportion of the reading public in England and in the United States owes its first and only knowledge of the volume so highly commended by Mr. Lecky to the use which that very able writer has made of it in the admirable history above quoted. The Jesuit Rosweyde, to whom we owe the editio optima of the "Yitse Patrum," was the most efficient instrument of his order in the revival of hagiological literature, and some of his writings are still cited as authoritative on matters connected with the studies to which he devoted him self. Hence we presume that a brief account of his life and labors, as well as of the volume just men tioned and of others similar in character, will be not without interest in connection with some observations suggested by the efforts now making by the Society of Jesuits in many parts of Christendom, not only to 18 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. restore the miracles, the martyrs, and the saints of the early and mediaeval Church to their old position as objects of faith and veneration, but to propagate the belief in new saints and contemporary miracles, and especially to give to the worship of the creature a still higher expression in what it is not extravagant or unjust to call the deification of the Yirgin Mary. We think it right to premise, in this place, that we have no intention of running a tilt against Catholi cism as the religion of morally and intellectually en lightened men and women in the countries where it prevails. Our quarrel is with Romanism, as another name for Jesuitism, which is not a religion, in any good sense of the word, but a polity. We will not even go so far as, with most of our co-religionists, to claim for Protestants a moral superiority over Catho lics of the same degree of intellect and culture. Long residence in Catholic countries, under circumstances which have brought us daily, hourly, into free com munication with Catholics of all ranks, has taught us that the common Protestant estimate of such Cathol icism as we speak of is unjust ; and we have no hes itation in saying that we find among zealous Catho lics, and in every social condition, not excluding even the priesthood, examples of piety, truth, honor, chari ty, benevolence, every moral virtue, in short, as brill- From the Patristic to the Jesuit Age. 19 iant as any which experience has made known to us in Protestant lands. Nor do we limit this remark to the scholastically instructed classes. The children of the poor, under favorable circumstances, often receive a domestic training which supplies the place of the moral lessons elsewhere imparted in connection with more formal teaching; and candid foreigners who have resided in the continental countries of Europe generally admit that their Catholic household serv ants, and the mechanics and shop-keepers they deal with, are as faithful and as honest as the same class of persons in England and in the United States. At the same time, we are very far from believing that any form of Catholicism is as favorable as Protest antism to the development of the best qualities of the head and the heart. Catholicism as it is, and, so long as the fundamental organization of the Church of Rome continues to exist, will be actually administered, is hostile to the moral and the intellectual culture, and of course to the social progress, of man. Hence, though many Catholics emancipate themselves from ecclesiastical shackles, and rise to as high excellence as is anywhere attainable by humanity, yet the pro portion of such is smaller than in Protestant peoples ; and, taking the whole population together, the average moral standard, like the average standard of knowl- 20 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. edge, is much lower in France, Spain, Italy, than among the Protestants of Germany, England, and the United States. The fact that the truly virtuous and enlightened form a relatively less numerous body in Catholic than in Protestant countries, acts unfavora bly on the character of the individual members of that body, because there is not among them the esprit de corps of a consciously strong society, and public opinion is far less severe and efficacious in the con demnation and repression of departures from the strict rules of morality. Hence they want the whole some restraints which a larger proportion of men of sound principles and exemplary lives would impose upon them, and consequently the dissuasives from the indulgence of vicious propensities are less powerful. This state of things has given rise to what to unprej udiced foreigners is one of the most painful features of the society we refer to. We mean the want of mutual trust and confidence among even men and women of good reputation, which betrays itself ev ery hour to the stranger who has become sufficiently familiar with social life to be a competent observer. There is one phase of social life in which the Cath olic nations, at least those of Southern Europe, are greatly superior to us of the Germanic and Anglo- Norman races, and which has a much higher ethical From the Patristic to the Jesuit Age. 21 importance than we usually ascribe to it. We mean what have been happily called "the minor morals," the urbanities and amenities of mutual intercourse, which powerfully tend not only to bring out kindly feeling in response, but really to promote it in those who habitually practice the civilities, the courteous regard for the sensibilities and the self-respect of oth ers, so characteristic of the Latin nations, and which contrast so strongly with the bluff, if not brutal, ad dress of the Englishman, the offensive self-sufficiency of the German, and the rude self-assertion of the American. Whether freethinkers, or those who reject alto gether what is called, with a wide latitude of mean ing, revealed religion, are proportionally more numer ous in Catholic than in Protestant countries, it is hard to say. We incline to the affirmative of the proposi tion ; but in any case it is certain that the number of professedly adhering and believing Catholics who ut terly reject the exclusive pretensions of Rome, and in fact every thing specially characteristic of the Rome of Pius IX., is very large. In general, Protestantism is grossly misunderstood in Catholic countries, both as to what it affirms and what it denies; and many a soi-disant Catholic is as essentially a Protestant as was Luther himself, without ever suspecting it. The 22 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. name of Protestant is a bugbear, and, besides, howev er strong may be the antipathies of a Catholic to the present government and principles of the Romish Church, there are, as will be readily obvious to every thinking man, many considerations which operate with great force to deter serious-minded persons from openly separating from the communion to which they and their fathers have immemorially belonged, and which is connected by a vast multitude of ties with all their social, all their political, institutions.* Add to this a want of moral courage, a defect which we believe to be more common among Catholics than among Protestants, and it is not strange that Old Catholics and other open seceders from Rome are few in France, in Italy, and in Spain, though there is a large, and, we hope, constantly increasing number of really "reformed" members of the Church of Rome who detest her intolerance, who have no re spect for the dogma of papal infallibility, who do not worship the Yirgin Mary as one of the persons of the Godhead, who do not govern their lives by the ethical principles of De' Liguori, nor choose spiritu al counselors for their wives and daughters among priests who follow the detestable rules laid down for : See Appendix II. From the Patristic to the Jesuit Age. 23 their governance by that newly promoted Doctor of the Universal Church, in his " Manual for Confessors." But to return to Rosweyde. Heribert Rosweyde was born at Utrecht in 1569, and grew up under the influence of the violent passions excited by the relig ious and political contest of that age between the Netherlands and Spain. He became in early youth a member of the society of Loyola, and was permit ted and encouraged to devote his life to the study of ecclesiastical literature, and to the propagation of Jesuit views of the facts and principles which consti tuted the history and inspired the government of the Church in the centuries immediately following its general recognition as the organized and visible rep resentative of Christianity. On the acceptance and dissemination of these views the Jesuits rested their anticipations of a restoration of the political and re ligious power of the mediseval priesthood, then rude ly shaken by the assaults of the Reformers, and espe cially their ambitious hopes of the virtual supremacy of their own fraternity as at once the guiding influ ence and the most efficient organ, the brain and the hand, of the papacy. If, after many rebuffs and many crushing defeats, they have at length, under the pontificate of the weak and willful Pius IX., well- nigh realized their most daring aspirations, their tri- 24 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. umph is, in no small degree, due to a class of labor ers of whom Rosweyde is a favorable type. Rosweyde published at Antwerp, where his life was chiefly spent, numerous laboriously edited works by other writers, in Latin and in Flemish, besides va rious critical and controversial treatises of his own, which display no inconsiderable amount of learning and ability. It must be added, to his credit as a probably sincere and honest, if often mistaken, man, that, with a few exceptions of a certain importance, his writings exhibit at least a semblance of candor and fairness too often wanting in the literature of religious narrative, dogma, and discussion. Among the works of older authors published by Rosweyde, the most conspicuous are two editions of the "Yitse Patrum" in Latin, and several in Flemish; a Flem ish translation of the "Flos Sanctorum" of the Spanish Jesuit Ribadineira ; the " Silva Eremitarum iEgypti et Palestinse;" and the "Yitse Sanctarum Yirginum." All these, as would be inferred from their titles, cover to some extent the same ground, and they may be regarded as essays toward the exe cution of a plan projected by Rosweyde, and after ward carried out on a stupendous scale by the Bol- landists ; for a general collection of the "Acta Sanc torum," or biographies of the holy men and women From the Patristic to the Jesuit Age. 25 recognized by the Romish Church as endowed with special sanctity, and entitled to the veneration of the faithful. Of greater general interest, though of much more limited circulation than the works we have already mentioned, is John Busch's " Chronicle of the Augus- tinian Monastery," or rather " Coenobium " of Winde- sheim — so important from its relations with the "Fra- tres Communis Yitse" organized by Groote* — the only known manuscript of which chronicle was res cued from destruction and published by Rosweyde ; and the excellent service he thereby rendered to the history of mediseval culture ought not to be passed over in silence. Most of Rosweyde's original works have been su perseded by later productions, or are devoted to the discussion of questions which in our day have com paratively little actual living interest, and are there fore forgotten. His "Yindicise Kempenses," how ever, is still quoted as an able argument in support of the claims of Thomas a Kempis to be regarded as the author of the " Imitatio Christi ;" and his " De * We are not able to refer to any tolerably full account in English of the Brothers of Common Life. Delprat's " Verhandeling over de Broederschap, van G. Groote," second edition, Arnhem, 1856, is the most satisfactory general history of these important communities known to us. See Appendix III. 2 26 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. Fide Hsereticis servanda," an argument in defense of the burning of John Huss, by sentence of the Council of Constance, notwithstanding the safe-con duct given him by the Emperor Sigismund, deserves special notice, both as an example of dexterous though shallow special pleading, well adapted to the mind and heart of the Catholic world at the period of its publication, and as having a significant bearing on questions of the profoundest importance, both then and now, to the moral, intellectual, and political in terests of society. We do not propose to discuss the history of this cause celebre further than is necessary to make the po sition of Rosweyde, of the council, of the papacy, and of the Romish Church in regard to it clearly intelli gible ; but the real knot of the question is involved in his argument on the subject, though Romish soph istry has obscured it by embarrassing it with much irrelevant matter. The true point, then, at issue, and now of extreme interest to us, was not whether the Emperor Sigismund was base enough to betray his plighted faith, not whether a conventicle of ferocious bigots were consigning an innocent man to the flames, but whether the Romish ecclesiastical tribunals have universal jurisdiction to judge, universal power to punish, the crime of heresy, without the consent and From the Patristic to the Jesuit Age. 21 against the will of the civil power, however and wher ever constituted. This jurisdiction, this power, as we shall see, the council claimed and the papacy af firmed, and (at least virtually) still affirms, in behalf of the Church of Rome. Daniel Plancius, rector of the High School at Delft, had accused the Romish Church of teaching practi cally, if not formally, that Catholics are not bound to keep faith with heretics, and had cited as an au thoritative declaration to that effect the decree of the Council of Constance condemning John Huss to death, in violation of the* Emperor Sigismund's guar antee of his safety.* The " De Fide Hsereticis ser vanda " is a reply to this charge. It denies that the Church ever sanctioned the proposition that faith is not to be kept with heretics, and attempts, with much parade of citation, to prove that it both taught and followed the opposite doctrine ; diverts the attention of the reader from the real merits of the question as to the breach of faith implied in the action of the council, by what, under the circumstances, must be * Singularly enough, Plancius, so far as can be judged from Ros- weyde's reply, does not appear to have referred to the famous letters of Pope Innocent III. , in which the king and generals of France are instructed that in their warfare against the Albigenses "faith is not to be kept with those who do not keep faith with God." See Gas- parin, "Innocent III.,'' p. 320. 28 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. regarded as idle and hardly even specious quibbling about the period of Huss's departure from Prague for Constance, and the date, terms, and effect of the safe-conduct, which, though previously promised, was not actually delivered to Huss until he was on his way to the council; tries, not without success, to show that Huss was rash, intemperate, and inconsist ent in his language, and gave unnecessary and indis creet provocation to the council; and finally tran- quilizes the consciences of the faithful, to whom the case of Huss always has been, and still is, a very sore subject ;* by showing that the council was duly con voked and organized as ecumenical ; that its decrees, having all been sanctioned by the pontifical approval, were, for both these reasons, of divine authority ; and, therefore, that its decision on the point at issue deter mining that heretics (Huss of course included) were amenable to its criminal jurisdiction, salvo conductu non obstante, is to be received with implicit submis sion as a conclusive answer to all objections. It must here be observed that the decision of the council did not in the least turn on the legal con- * For a curious and instructive account of the suppression, perver sion, and falsification of the truth respecting Huss by the Austrian censorship of the press, in comparatively recent times, see an article in Fraser's Magazine for October, 1875, entitled "How History is sometimes Written. " From the Patristic to the Jesuit Age. 29 struction and force of the safe-conduct, which Ros weyde, writing two hundred years later, impeaches as not broad enough in its guarantees to cover the case. But this point was not taken by the council, nor does it appear to have been even raised in the discussions. It was assumed on all hands, as was undoubtedly the fact, that the safe-conduct was meant to secure Huss from all molestation by any authority whatever, lay or ecclesiastical, eundo, morando et redeundo, and the council based its jurisdiction on the ground that the emperor or other civil authorities could not ex empt heretics from ecclesiastical cognizance, because the ecclesiastical was in all things supreme over the lay power. The safe -conduct was rejected, not as limited in intent and legal construction, or as inap plicable to the case, but as proceeding from an infe rior and incompetent authority, having no jurisdic tion of the matter, as derogatory to the higher digni ty and prerogatives of a judicature which represented God on earth, and as therefore null and void from the beginning. The terms of the judgment, as ex pressed in the nineteenth canon of the council, are thus given by Rosweyde, " De Fide Hsereticis servan da," p. 3 : " Prsesens sancta Synodus ex quovis salvo conductu per Imperatorem, et alios sseculi Principes, hsereticis vel de hseresi diffamatis, putantes eosdem 30 Mediaeval and Modern Saints and Miracles. sic a suis erroribus revocare, guocumque vinculo se adstrinxerint, concesso, nullum fidei Catholicse, vel jurisdictioni Ecclesiasticse prsejudicium generari, vel impedimentum prsestari, posse seu debere, declarat ; quo minus, dicto salvo conductu non obstante ; liceat judici competenti et Ecclesiastico, de hujusmodi per- sonarum erroribus inquirere et alias contra eos debite procedere eosdemque punire, quantum justitia suade- bit, si suos errores revocare pertinaciter recusaverint : etiamsi de salvo conductu confisi ad locum venerint judicii, aluis non venturi: nee sic promittentem, cum ali&s fecerit quod in ipso est, ex hoc in aliqua reman- sisse obligatum."* * "The present holy council declares that no prejudice to the Cath olic faith, no impediment to the ecclesiastical jurisdiction, can or ought to be created by any safe-conduct granted by the emperor or other secular princes, under whatever pledges, to heretics or persons charged with heresy, in the hope of reclaiming them from their errors, so that it should not be lawful for the competent ecclesias tical judge, notwithstanding such safe-conduct, to inquire into the errors of such persons, and otherwise duly proceed against them, and punish them, as justice shall require, provided they pertinaciously refuse to retract their errors, even though they may have come to the place of trial upon the faith of such safe - conduct, when they would not have come otherwise ; nor is the grantor [of such safe- conduct], when in other respects he has done what in him lay, in any manner bound thereby." From the tenor of this canon, it is evident that the terms and con ditions of the safe-conduct were regarded by the council as wholly immaterial, and that no additional pledges by the emperor could have given it greater force or extension, the emperor having no au- From the Patristic to the Jesuit Age. 31 It is evident that this canon, which does not men tion Huss by name, or refer in terms to the safe-con duct granted him by Sigismund, was intended as a general declaration of principle applicable to all like cases. It -claims for the Church universal cognizance of questions of heresy and supreme authority to in quire into and punish that crime, and it treats as nul lities all acts and ordinances of the civil power in any way conflicting with the exercise of this its exclu sive jurisdiction. Sigismund, in a speech addressed to Huss at a session of the council, in which he pro- thority whatever in the case. It is important to notice that the coun cil claims power not only to try, but to punish, heretics, and there fore the pretense that it is not the Church, but the "secular arm,'' which sheds their blood is a mere subterfuge. The Church employs lay hangmen and stokers, indeed, but it is her decree which author izes them to take the life of the victim. And, besides, the tortures of the Inquisition were inflicted in her dungeons and by her " fa miliars," not in the prisons or by the jailers of the State. Protest ant writers, in a weak spirit of indulgent candor, have gone much beyond the truth in treating the Inquisition as often a political, rather than an ecclesiastical, engine. Doubtless, in some cases, the Church lent or sold her thunders, her racks, and her fagots to political persecutors ; but the most that can be said in her defense is, that in such cases she was the accessory, not the principal, in the crime. There is no serious pretense that lay sovereigns ever compelled the Church to aid in the execution of their vengeances, though no doubt they may have found her a willing instrument of their own wickedness. The Church delivers the condemned heretic to the "secular arm" for execution by fire and fagot just as "the chief priests and elders of the people " delivered Jesus to Pontius Pilate, and he to the soldiers, " to be crucified." See Appendix IV. 32 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. fessed himself ready to kindle the avenging fire with his own hand if the reformer refused to retract his errors, had insisted that the safe-conduct -was functus officio when Huss had once been allowed to make his defense before that tribunal ; but the council de scended to no such pettifogging shifts. It founded its decision on its own sovereignty and the conse quent invalidity of all guarantees guocumque vin culo, under whatever pledges, from lay, and therefore necessarily both inferior and incompetent, authorities. This and most, if not all, of the other decrees of the council were formally sanctioned by Popes Mar tin Y.* and Eugenius, both of whom, as members of the council before their elevation to the pontificate, had voted for the condemnation of Huss. It has never been revoked or disapproved by the Church, but is virtually recognized and confirmed by the papal Encyclica and Syllabus of 1864 ; and it is therefore a doctrine that all Romanizing Catholics are bound to accept and maintain. The effrontery with which Rosweyde cites this damning piece of evidence as furnishing, in its last clause, conclusive proof of the good faith of the council and the Church is a curiously characteristic specimen of Jesuitical logic. * See Appendix V. From the Patristic to the Jesuit Age. 33 The peculiar circumstances under which the Coun cil of Constance was convoked gave to its proceed ings a unique importance. There were then living three pretenders — Gregory XII., Benedict XIIL, and John XIIL — all claiming to have been canonically elected to the papal throne, and all sustained by more or less numerous and influential adherents. It was to decide between the rival claims of these soi-disant pontiffs, and thus to heal a schism that had divided the Church for forty years, and, further, to crush the heresy of Huss and his followers, that the council was summoned ; and though John, the feeblest and least powerfully supported of the three, assented to the convocation of this body, it really assembled in obedience to the mandate, of a lay sovereign, the Emperor Sigismund. With much difficulty, Gregory and John were induced, after the council had been three years in session, to lay down their insignia and resign their pretensions into the hands of the council, and Benedict was formally deposed and excommuni cated by it. Pope and antipopes being thus happi ly disposed of, a conclave, composed of twenty car dinals and thirty bishops, on the 11th of November, 1417, conferred the triple crown on Otto Colonna, a member of their own body, who was then not an or dained priest, but only a sub-deacon. The new and 2* 34 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. soon universally recognized pontiff took the name of Martin Y. It is worth noting that, though Martin owed his elevation to the assertion of the ecclesias tical supremacy of the council over the papacy in the deposition of Benedict XIIL, he thought it pru dent to check any further assumption of power on the part of this and future assemblies of the like character; and at the forty-fifth session of that of Constance he promulgated a constitution forbidding appeals from popes to councils, except in cases of schism, this being precisely the question in which he was now interested. Rosweyde, though in other parts of his argument often citing the decrees of popes as conclusively binding on the faithful, and even some times treating councils as deriving their powers from the sanction of the pope, appears, nevertheless, to have really held that the supreme authority of the Church is vested in ecumenical councils ; for his gen eral conclusion is: "Fixum igitur firmumque esto, quod Clerus legitime congregatus in QScumenico Consilio statuit, id totius nominis Christiani, id totius Orbis, id totius Christianitatis, id Ecclesise universse, id Dei demum esse judicium" (p. 19).* * "Let it therefore be accepted as definitively settled, that whatever the clergy, lawfully assembled in ecumenical council, decides, that is the judgment of the entire Christian name, the judgment of the whole world, the judgment of all Christendom, the judgment of the Univer sal Church — in fine, the judgment of God himself." From the Patristic to the Jesuit Age. 35 This declaration, with which the opinions of a large proportion of the Catholic clergy undoubtedly then coincided, is, in the present position of that Church, one of the most important propositions in Rosweyde's work; though his discussions of other points — such, for example, as whether, according to Catholic opinion, the pope can annul all contracts and all oaths, as well his own as those of other per sons (" Utrum Pontifex, ex Catholicorum sentential, pacta omnia et juramenta, cum aliorum turn sua, pos- sit rescindere ") * — involve principles fraught with the most momentous consequences. On this particu lar question the judgment of Rosweyde is, of course, in the affirmative, with the qualification, " Si ita caussse sequitas flagitet" ("If the justice of the case so re quires ").f Rosweyde limits the exercise of this pow- * "Whether the pope, according to Catholic opinion, can annul all contracts and all oaths, whether his own or those of others." t The papacy maintains, as recently exemplified in Spain, that con cordats between the Romish See and political states for the suppres sion of religious liberty and other purposes are perpetually binding on the lay power, but that the Church may at any time rescind and re voke all stipulations and concessions on its own part. Thus the Uni- vers of July 23d and September 25th, 1871, declares that concordats between Rome and civil states are not contracts, but temporary privi leges, which the pope deigns to grant according to circumstances, mere concessions of which he always remains the master and sole judge, and which he can consequently revoke at his pleasure. See Michaud, "De I'Etat present de I'Eglise Catholique Romaine en France, " p. 74 ; Paris, 1875. 36 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. er, indeed, by what, if the competency of the pope to determine all questions of conscience be admitted, would be, from the Catholic point of view, reasona ble restrictions; but his argument is a vicious petitio principii, because it assumes the very point in dis pute, namely, the jurisdiction of the dicastery, the di vine right of the head of the Church to substitute his judgment for the conscience of the party and the decision of ordinary civil tribunals, and to pronounce, as a sovereign magistrate, what the demands of jus tice are. In fact, according to Rosweyde, and most defenders of the pretensions of Rome at the present time, the papacy is a jurisdiction vested with supreme authority to determine its own limits, and of course having practically no limit at all.* The mere asser- * In a letter to the London Times, dated January 18th, 1875, too long to be given at length in this place, Monsignor Capel quotes, from his own reply to Mr. Gladstone, the following statement : " The Church, as the representative of the spiritual power, and as the guardian of the divine law, " a. Can define the limits of her own powers, and consequently, ipso facto, those of the other powers " [the paternal and the civil]. Like expressions are now constantly employed by the ultramontane press, and especially by the Civilta Cattolica, the direction of which has been created a corporation by Pope Pius IX., committed to the Jesuits, and virtually recognized as the official organ of the papacy. Thus the Civilta of March 18th, 1871, p. 664, says : " The pope is a sovereign judge over all civil laws. In him the two authorities, the temporal authority and the spiritual authority, are united, for he is the vicar of Jesus Christ, who was not only the eternal priest, but the From the Patristic to the Jesuit Age. 31 tion of a claim of competency by the papacy, in any supposable case whatever, is of itself a universally binding decision in favor of the validity of such claim. This all-embracing supremacy of the Church is impliedly claimed by the Encyclica and Syllabus of 1864, as well as by numerous bulls and decrees of earlier pontiffs, and it is precisely this that is meant by the phrase " liberty of the Church," in the lan guage of the Roman Curia. It is distinctly main tained that the liberty of the Catholic religion im plies the authority of the Church to decide for itself what attributes, what organization, what legislation, what civil and criminal as well as moral and spirit ual jurisdiction, and what disciplinary, judicial, ad ministrative, and executive instrumentalities, are nec essary or convenient for the exercise of its divine functions. Not only are all human laws or institu tions in any way conflicting with this " liberty " in valid and null ab initio, but criminal and impious ; and, further, it is the duty of the State to lend its arm, when needful, to execute and enforce the decision's of the Church. It is upon such grounds that Rome claims the right to establish tribunals having exclu sive jurisdiction of all matters, civil or criminal, in King of kings and Lord of lords The pope, by virtue of his ex alted dignity, is at the summit of the two powers. " 38 Mediaeval and Modern Saints and Miracles. which the Church or any of its ministers are con cerned,* and to create monastic and other religious bodies and give them legal corporate existence. * There is probably no one among the legislative and judicial re forms of modern civilization which has been so strenuously resisted and condemned by the Romish Church as the abolition of the "Fora Ecclesiastica," or ecclesiastical courts, in the European states, and the consequent subjection of the Catholic clergy to the general, civil, and criminal law of the land. These tribunals formerly existed in every Catholic country, and in some European states they have been abolished only within the present generation. The judges, and all the principal officers of the ecclesiastical courts were taken from the clergy, and the rules of procedure and of evidence were totally diverse from those observed in the secular courts. Thus, laymen were not competent witnesses against churchmen in criminal causes: "Lai- cus," says Marcardus, "contra clericum in causa criminali testimo nium dicere prohibetur " (" Laymen are not permitted to testify against a priest in a criminal case ") ; and this protection was extended to all tonsured, even if not yet ordained, persons. As Eomagnosi observes, this is not merely the opinion of a canonist, but it is founded on an express provision of the canonical law. According to the same au thority, a witness legally infamous, and consequently incompetent to testify in a civil court, might be received to testify in "Fora Ecclesi astica,'' sub torturd (under torture), in support of wills in favor of pious objects. See Marcardus " De Probatione." The abuses inevitable under such a system of jurisprudence are too obvious to need to be dwelt upon. And yet, it should be universal ly known, the power to create such tribunals, with such jurisdiction and so administered, is one of the " liberties " most tenaciously insist ed on by the papacy at the present day. The Syllabus of 1864, v., xxxi., enumerates, among the damnable errors condemned by the papacy, the proposition : " Ecclesiasticum forum pro temporalibus clericorum causis sive civilibus sive criminalibus omnino de medio tollendum esse, etiam inconsuM et reclamanti Apostalica Sede," and refers to two allocutions of Pius IX., the Acerbissimum of the 27th of From the Patristic to the Jesuit Age. 39 The sophism which consists in employing words in one sense in the premises, and in another in the conclusion, is dexterously and constantly used by Romish controversialists, and opponents are too often confounded by arguments in which a recognition of the liberty of the Church is converted into an admis sion of its authority, and the concession of a priv ilege to be enjoyed into the acknowledgment of a right to be exercised. In these days of governmental resistance to eccle siastical aggression, and of repression of ecclesiastical abuses, no complaint is more frequently and boldly urged than that of an infringement of the liberty of the Church. Equal religious freedom, in its true sense, is admitted as a political right by every really civilized people ; but papal Rome claims that the lib erties of the Church are as wide as her cupidity and her ambition, and it rejects the principle sic utere tuo ut alienum non laedas, or rather insists that there is no jus alienum as against the Church, and that no September, 1852, and the Nunquam fore of the 15th of December, 1856, both of which contain violent protestations against the abolition of these justly detested tribunals in Hispano - American republics. Of course, if these courts had continued to exist in the Sardinian states, the shocking crimes which led to the suppression of the schools of the Ignorantelli at Turin and elsewhere, ten years ago, would have gone unpunished, and Father Theoger and his accomplices would still be engaged in their accursed work of corruption. See Appendix VI. 40 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. supposed right or liberty which conflicts with her pretensions can have a lawful or valid foundation. But to return to Rosweyde's principal labors. " Yitse Patrum " is a title first used generically, and applied indiscriminately to all collections of lives of saints, the particular work intended being indicated by reference to the name of the supposed author. But a narrative of a visit or visits to the monks and hermits of Egypt and the adjacent desert, believed to have been drawn up, or, perhaps, compiled or trans lated from Greek into Latin, by Rufinus, a presbyter of Aquileia, in the latter half of the fourth century, appears to be the work usually meant by early medi aeval writers when they cite the " Yitse Patrum," or, as by an easily explicable grammatical error it was popularly called, the "Yitas Patrum." Lives of saints and hermits, attributed to St. Jerome and oth er writers, were subsequently added to this work of Rufinus, and the whole collection took the name of « Yitse [or Yitas] Patrum." Before the year 1471, three editions, or rather three issues of one edition, of the " Yitse Patrum " appeared, comprising in five books a large proportion of the matter contained in Rosweyde's redaction. These three issues are all without title-page, date, or place of publication or name of printer. In the following years of the same From the Patristic to the Jesuit Age. 41 century, at least five other editions, with more or less new matter and many changes of arrangement, were published in different countries. Rosweyde's second edition, Antwerp, 1628, contains a carefully revised text of all the contents of previous issues, with im portant additional biographical, historical, and critic al treatises, with valuable prolegomena, notes, glossa ry, and indexes, and it has not yet been superseded. Migne, indeed, has reprinted it, without addition or improvements, in volumes lxxiii. and lxxiv. of his " Patrologise Cursus Completus," Paris, 1860 ; but the mechanical execution of this edition is in the same very inferior style as the other volumes of his collection, and, like them, it has nothing but its cheapness to recommend it. The editions of the " Yitse Patrum " thus far enu merated are all in Latin ; but several translations into different modern languages appeared in the course of the fifteenth century. Of these, the most interesting to English and American students is that of Caxton, printed by Wynkyn de Worde after Cax- ton's death, at Westminster, in 1495, under the title, "Yitas Patrum, or the Lyves of the olde anneyent Holy Faders Hermytes," and it is justly celebrated as one of the finest productions of De Worde's press. This translation does not appear to have ever been 42 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. reprinted, and it is much to be wished that some of the English publishing societies would prepare a new edition of a work which, on philological as well as literary and historical grounds, has so strong claims to our attention. In the form in which Rosweyde has given us this volume, it is a stout folio of about one thousand pages, exclusive of prolegomena and indexes. Its contents are divided into ten books, three of which were added by Rosweyde, and an appendix contain ing the "Paradisus" of Heraclides and the "Lau- siaca " of Palladius. The first book is a compilation of narratives ascribed to different authors, among whom St. Jerome is the most conspicuous ; the sec ond and third pass under the name of Rufinus ; and the remaining books are of various and for the most part uncertain authorship. These lives were mostly written in Greek, but some of the Latin translations were probably nearly contemporaneous with the orig inals. In general, the Latinity is very far from classic, but in the main the simplicity of the thought renders the construction clear enough, and, at all events, those who are shocked by its barbarisms may read with pleasure the quaint old translations into modern languages, and especially the Flemish, which is apparently by Rosweyde himself, and is undoubt- From the Patristic to the Jesuit Age. 43 edly the best of them all. The Continental transla tions of the " Yitse Patrum " had great success, and the editions of them are numerous. On the other hand, as we have said, Caxton's translation of this work never had a second edition, though his ver sion of the much inferior " Legenda Lombardica " of Peter de Yoragine, commonly called the " Legenda Aurea," was twice reprinted by himself, thrice by De Worde, and several times by other printers. As a matter of pure literary history, perhaps the most noticeable feature of the first book, if not of the whole volume, is the incorporation into it of the Oriental myth or religious romance of Barlaam and Josaphat, the truth of which is vouched for by the Greek translator, long supposed to have been Joannes Damascenus, an ecclesiastical writer of the eighth century, who treats the narrative as his own, and de clares that he derived his facts from trustworthy sources. The authenticity of this legend was doubted at an early period, and mediaeval criticism was acute enough to detect in the tale itself internal evidence of the purely imaginative and even heathen charac ter of the narrative. But this question was soon dis posed of, so far as respects the true believer, by the decision of an infallible Church, which recognized the validity of the pretensions of these saints, en- 44 Mediaeval and Modern Saints and Miracles. rolled them in her martyrologies, and appointed the 27th of November for their veneration. Profane learning has now traced the lives of Barlaam and Josaphat to a Sanskrit original, and identified the holy men with Sakya-Mouni, the divine founder of Buddhism, and one of his apostles.* Perhaps no single legend has obtained a more extensive Continental popularity than this. Not to speak of numerous versions in all the principal Euro pean tongues, we have before us a Flemish transla tion of the sixteenth century, and an Icelandic, or Old Northern, of the beginning of the thirteenth ; it still continues to be separately reprinted for popular circulation, and one may find it in many a humble cottage in Italy on the same shelf with the "Lottery Dream-book," De' Liguori's " Glorie di Maria," and the exploits of the doughty paladins of chivalry, " Guerino detto il Meschino " and " I Reali di Fran- cia." It was certainly not a new thing for a mediaeval hagiologist to adopt a heathen tale as the ground work of a Christian legend, or even for the authori- * See Max Miiller in Contemporary ^Review for July, 1870, p. 588 ; and Colonel Yule's " Marco Polo," second edition, vol. ii., pp. 304-308. This couple of heathen saints still retains its place in the Romish cal endar, and is found in the official Diario Romano for November 27th, 1874 (issued con privilegio Pontificio), p. 87. From the Patristic to the Jesuit Age. 45 ties of the Romish Church to introduce unbaptized and unbelieving pagans into the bead-roll of her demi-gods ; but, like the close conformity between the ritual and vestments of the Buddhist lamas and those of the Catholic priesthood, the fact that a Sanskrit narrative should have found its way to the shores of the Mediterranean, in that dark period, is of" great interest as an illustration both of the wide range of Oriental influence on Western culture and Western religious ideas, and of the totally unhistorical charac ter of the legendary lore of Rome. Independently of this fact, the story of Barlaam and Josaphat is the least attractive narrative in the " Yitae Patrum," be cause it has little of the simple, true-hearted, and inartificial character which distinguishes so many of the legends embraced in that volume. In fact, that which gives the " Yitae Patrum " its value and inter est above later collections of the same general nat ure is, that the narratives are partly derived from personal observation and experience, and from inter course with the monks and hermits they describe, and partly from the reports of other devotees believed to have been spectators of the events to which they bore witness. They are generally the productions of men not only fair-minded and honest in purpose, but, tried by the standard of their age, intelligent and ju- 46 Mediaeval and Modern Saints and Miracles. dicious. In general, their evidence as to what they saw, due allowance being made for enthusiasm and self-delusion, may be received as true ; while at the same time sound principles of historical criticism re quire us to reject as pure fiction a large proportion of the facts which they narrate on hearsay evidence and tradition. The writers were inspired by no pur pose but to promote the glory of God. The public they addressed was not the world, but the cloister. So far as their works had a consciously didactic char acter, they were designed to stimulate the zeal and fire the devotion of the professed ; and the conver sion of the wicked was but an incidental result to be accomplished, not by the popular circulation of these writings, but by the preaching of the ordained min istry, whose character they were striving to form by exhibiting for their imitation examples of the passive and ascetic virtues, abstinence, self-denial, voluntary poverty, rigorous discipline, courage in encountering and fortitude in enduring the tortures and death of the martyr. Though the general tone of the earlier Christian legends is such as we have described, there are in the mythic lore of mediaeval Catholicism isolated in stances of miracles of a different character, which, if not in their, original conception, at least in the con- From the Patristic to the Jesuit Age. 47 struction given to them and the application made of them, apparently stand out from the general mass of contemporaneous thaumaturgy, and seem to antici pate the spirit of a later age. Some of them we shall notice incidentally hereafter ; but as a character istic example of the class we are speaking of, and for the sake of pointing out that even these miracles had originally a purely ecclesiastical significance, we will here refer to the miracle of Bolsena, to which the Romish Church has attached such vast importance. Centuries before the time of Luther, skepticism had made its way among the Catholic clergy, who at that time were almost the exclusive possessors of theo logical learning, and who alone occupied themselves with religious controversy. The doctrine of the real presence, transubstantiation, or the conversion of the bread and wine consecrated in the sacrament of the eucharist into the actual flesh and blood of Christ, being unsupported by the evidence of the senses, was accepted with extreme difficulty even by the priest hood; and there was always a strong party in the Church itself which doubted, if it did not positively deny, the fact of the miraculous transformation. Ac cording to the authoritative doctrine, this miracle of transubstantiation was performed, not by an immedi ate and special exercise of divine power alone, but 48 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. through the concurring instrumentality of the priest. It was not the appropriation of the elements to the religious purpose of the sacrament, or their actual reception by the communicant, which operated the change, but it was the solemn pronouncing of a cer tain formula by an ordained priest that metamor phosed the substance, while it retained the color, con sistence, and all material accidents of ordinary bread and wine, into the real flesh and blood of Christ. Every priest could administer the sacrament, every priest could at pleasure make himself a co-worker with God in this great miracle.* The performance of this act by him was a necessary condition preced ent to the reception of the sacrament by the penitent and the pronouncing of absolution; and hence the possession of this tremendous power by the clergy, and especially the belief of the priests themselves that they did actually exercise it, were matters of ex- * "Their [the priesthood's] incommunicable and highest preroga tive is not in governing ; it is in the power of making the Son of God the slave of their voice, in offering the Son to the Father in unbloody sacrifice for the sins of the world, in being the channels through which grace is communicated, and in the supreme and incommunicable pow er of remitting and retaining sin." — Donoso Coktes, Essays on Ca tholicism, etc., p. 49, Dublin, 1874. Not having at hand the original of this absurd book, now in high favor with the ultramontane party, we quote from M 'Donald's translation published as above. The ital icizing is our own. From the Patristic to the Jesuit Age. 49 treme importance as tending to confirm the influence of the clergy on the people, and to strengthen in the clergy itself the esprit de corps, the feeling of a com mon superiority of function by the possession of an exclusive prerogative denied to the laity ; for while the layman could, in case of necessity, perform the ceremony of baptism, which was the sacrament next in importance to that of the eucharist, the priest alone could administer the Lord's -supper, the nec essary accompaniment of absolution.* According to the Church, the miracle of Bolsena was performed to convince a skeptical priest, and through him his doubting brethren, of the reality of the transforma tion of the sacred elements. When he cut the conse crated wafer, blood flowed from the bread and stained the napkin on which it lay. The napkin, or corpo rate, with its yet visible stains of the divine blood, is alleged to be still preserved in the Cathedral of Or- vieto, in which diocese Bolsena lies. For the reasons we have stated, the miracle of Bol- * "A priest who kept a concubine, and who was covered with lep rosy, found that the leprosy disappeared at the moment of consecra tion in the celebration of the mass, but returned again after the com munion. Do we not here clearly see the image of sin, the moral lep rosy to which the guilty priest was a prey, and which left him only at the moment when, clothed with the divine character, the human nat ure departed from him and there remained only the minister of the Divinity ?" — Mauky's Legendes Pieuses du Moyen-Age, p. 65. 3 50 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. sena was considered a matter of cardinal importance to the clergy at the time it is alleged to have hap pened ; and when, two centuries later, the great strug gle of the Reformation gave prominence to two lead ing questions, the doctrines of transubstantiation and justification by faith, the miracle of Bolsena acquired a new importance as a piece of evidence addressed to the world as well as to the clergy. So long as that controversy raged, this miracle was constantly ap pealed to as a conclusive proof of the apostolic char acter of the Catholic priesthood, and the anniversary of its occurrence, the feast of the Corpus Domini, was celebrated with the greatest pomp and splendor. In later days, in spite of the efforts of Newman and other Catholic writers to divert public attention from the real issues of the present day by reviving the dis cussion of forgotten controversies, the great theolog ical questions which divided religious opinion in the sixteenth century have fallen into the background, and the real presence and justification by faith are no longer points which much occupy men's minds. The agitating problem now is, not the relative supe riority of Catholicism and Protestantism as schemes of religious belief or even of practice, not what are the spiritual functions and prerogatives of the clergy, but whether the papacy shall absorb all civil and all From the Patristic to the Jesuit Age. 51 temporal power, and whether Rome, or rather the Jesuits in the name of Rome, shall again rule the world. Hence the miracle of Bolsena has sunk into comparative insignificance ; and it is not very improb able that the famous shrine, wrought in the fourteenth century with such exquisite skill to contain the cor porate, may, not long hence, find a place, as so many similar works have already done, in a profane muse um of mediaeval art. As has been observed, the " Yitse Patrum " has be come an obsolete book. It has been completely su perseded by a branch of legendary literature in tended for more general circulation and for more purely popular effect. The Jesuits have never for gotten the old adage: Power must be maintained by the same means by which it was acquired. They know that Christianity was received by a large pro portion of its primitive converts on the testimony of miracles. It is to signs and wonders that they now appeal in proof of the divine authority of their mis sion ; and from the miracles of St. Francis Xavier to those of Our Lady of Lourdes, there is scarcely one which has not owed its acceptance by the faithful and the authorities of the Church to the ministry of a Jesuit apostolate. The Reformers of the sixteenth century, as well as 52 Mediaeval and Modern Saints and Miracles. many of their followers in recent times, often failed to see clearly whither their own fundamental princi ples were leading them, and consequently they some times preached doctrines the full development of which involved the subsequent adoption of opinions which they did not perceive to be necessary conse quences or corollaries of the great truths they were proclaiming. Hence they were unconsciously under mining many beliefs — such, for instance, as that in post- apostolic miracles — which they themselves, to some extent, entertained. The real import and ul timate result of their teachings was, that inspiration ceased with the apostles ; that the power of working miracles was confined to them and other primitive disciples ; and that the incarnation of Christ, as set forth and expounded in the records and doctrinal teachings of those holy men, constituted a complete and perfect dispensation, capable indeed of expan sion and development in the way of interpretation and application, but neither requiring nor admitting addition or augmentation in -dogma or in external supernatural proof.* * The general doctrine among Protestants who claim a special di vine origin for the Christian Scriptures may be thus stated : Chris tianity, as an intellectual religion, doubtless teaches more to a pure and cultivated mind than to a debased and ignorant one ; but any system of religious doctrine which inculcates upon the latter what it allows to From the Patristic to the Jesuit Age. 53 The influence of the preaching of the Reformers was, in many respects, wider than the reception of their doctrines. Its leaven even penetrated within the pale of the Catholic Church, and produced a fermentation which threatened the decomposition of the whole mass. The mediaeval legends were fall ing into discredit not only where the Reformation prevailed, but, for a time, even in strictly Catholic countries. But there had been reformers before the Reformation, and the opinions of Luther were fruits of a past as well as seeds of a future agitation. Anxious questionings concerning the soundness of the foundations of Romish supremacy had been rife, be regarded as false by the former is itself false. There are, even in mathematics, gradations, approximations, or at least accommodations, of truth in the practical application of strictly scientific principles. To the common wheelwright, the relation of the circumference of a circle is as 22 to 7, or, in case greater exactness is required, as 355 to 113, and neither the reason nor the experience of the uninstrncted me chanic contradicts this rule. To the mathematician the relation is a circulating decimal, and wholly incapable of exact numerical expres sion. The imperfection of language and the utter inadequateness of human conceptions of spiritual things may oblige religious teachers to employ terms which fall short of the truth, not terms in one case con tradictory to terms employed in another. The Scriptures, say the Protestants, contain all spiritual truth necessary to the believer, and in matters of doctrine are their own witness. With increased knowl edge and intellectual power among men, they.are better and better un derstood, and this enlarged comprehension constantly keeps pace with the advance of intellect, supplies its needs, and renders further proofs or revelations superfluous. 54 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. and the necessity of counteracting these dangerous tendencies had long been felt by the Catholic hie rarchy. Hence, for generations and even centuries before the reformatory movements of Luther, his as sociates and followers, there had been a persistent and successful effort on the part of the Romish Church to supersede the canonical Scriptures as an authoritative and sufficient guide to a knowledge of the facts, the faith, and the moral system of the Christian religion, and to substitute pontifical bulls, definitions, and ordinances as the sole rules of Chris tian doctrine and practice.* The old legendary nar ratives, originally composed, as we have seen, for the use and edification of the monastic clergy, and espe cially the later and more imaginative works of relig ious fiction, were observed to have the effect of weak- * We have here an explanation of the remarkable fact that, while the translation and circulation of not only morally unexceptionable, but of absurd and demoralizing, legends have been, from a remote pe riod, not only permitted, but promoted, by the Church of Rome, the translation of the Scriptures, and even private reading of the Vulgate, without special permission, has been sometimes absolutely forbidden, and under all circumstances discouraged by that Church. So reluc tant were the ecclesiastical authorities to allow the study of the Bible to be in any way facilitated, that an English priest was burned alive, not two centuries before the Reformation, for preparing a concordance to that volume. On the other hand, dictionaries or general indexes to the body of legends are allowed ; and there are even geographical dic tionaries, or gazetteers, of the legends of the Catholic Church. From the Patristic to the Jesuit Age. 55 ening the hold of the Scriptures on the hearts of the people, of strengthening ecclesiastical influence among them, and of constantly presenting the Church of Rome, embodied in the clergy and especially in the regular orders, as enlightened and sanctified from above, and clothed with spiritual supremacy by di vine appointment; in fine, as the recipient and min ister of a continuous perpetual inspiration, witnessed from time to time, as was the mission of the apos tles, by signs and miracles, and therefore as the equal and ever-living successor of Christ. The title God on Earth {Deus in Terris), was very commonly ap plied to the pope by ecclesiastical and at last by pro fane writers ; and, in fact, ^hough the phrase is now not much used, the same attribute is even more vo ciferously claimed for the head of the Romish Church at the present day. The Founder of the Christian religion disclaimed all political authority, discouraged all worldly ambi tion in his disciples, and even asserted no direct su premacy over the moral and intellectual man. On the contrary, he appealed to the testimony of the individual conscience and reason in support of his right to be heard as an expounder of spiritual and ethical truth. The Romish Church makes no such appeal, arrogates to itself despotic authority, de- 56 Mediaeval aind Modem Saints and Miracles. mands unreasoning, unquestioning submission, and claims assent to its dogmas upon its own ipse dixit, unsupported by external argument or internal evi dence.* * "It follows from this that the Church alone has the right to af firm and deny, and that there is no right outside her to affirm what . she denies, or to deny what she affirms. The day when Society, for getting her doctrinal decisions, has asked the press and the tribune, newswriters and assemblies, what is truth and what is error, in that day error and truth are confounded in all intellects, Society enters into the regions of shadows, and falls under the empire of fictions " The doctrinal intolerance of the Church has saved the world from chaos. Her doctrinal intolerance has placed beyond question polit ical, domestic, social, and religious truths — primitive and holy truths, which are not subject to discussion because they are the foundations of all discussions. ."..... This serves to explain why the Church, and the Church alone, has had the holy privilege of fruitful and prolific discussion." — Donoso Coktes, "Essays, pp. 42, 43. Of all the means of moral and intellectual culture, there is probably none more efficient than the study of ethical and religious doctrine, in cluding the investigation of the principles on which it rests. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, theological learning occupied in the general education of Protestant countries the place now assigned to politics and public economy. The great statesmen, philosophers, and even poets of those periods had received almost a, professional clerical training, and herein lies one of the secrets of their strength. The Church claims this vast field as her exclusive province, and in denying to laymen the right to the free exercise of their reason on the questions most important to their well-being here and hereafter, Do noso Cortes and other defenders of Rome deprive them of the most po tent methods of the highest mental discipline. They contend that the doctrines of the Church are to be received as axioms, propositions of necessary and absolute truth ; and that no question of right and wrong, of duty to God or man, can be discussed on any other basis. It is not surprising that writers starting with such preposterous assump- From the Patristic to the Jesuit Age. 57 Rome assumes to personate the Redeemer in an organized corporate form ; to be not only the per petual depository of the spiritual functions of Christ, but also to exercise what he repudiated — a general sovereignty over all the temporal powers of the earth. Pretensions so extravagant, however boldly and per sistently urged, require some other support than bare assertion, and hence the necessity of a succession of new supernatural evidences more or less akin to the material proofs which accompanied the earthly life of Christ. These, it is declared, are found in fre quent new revelations and displays of miraculous power, and hence, as might naturally be supposed, the signs and wonders of the apostolic age have been left far behind, in number and in variety, by those of the mediseval and modern Romish Church. There were, undoubtedly, very many in the early ages of Christianity who adopted the new faith, not upon the testimony of its miracles, but from a sense of its adaptedness to the moral needs of the human spirit. There are happily, in our days, a large number of enlightened men in Catholic countries who accept tions should arrive at preposterous conclusions. Donoso Cortes him self is a striking example of the chaotic confusion of ideas in a mind which believes because Rome declares, and not because reason and conscience approve. 3* 58 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. the Christian religion in the form in which alone birth and education have made it known to them, but who have as little respect for miracle-mongers as the most skeptical Protestant. But these are the few est. It is not to such that the authorities of the Rom ish Church now address themselves, but to the multi tude whose faith is founded in the grossest materialism, and who can apprehend no spiritual, no abstract truth, except when clothed in the coarsest sensuous form. As soon as the Society of Jesuits had become well organized, and its aims and policy clearly defined in the minds of its leaders, it was apparent that its real scope was not the revival of apostolic Christianity, but the resuscitation of mediseval ecclesiasticism as a means of universal and supreme power to be used for purely worldly purposes. The promotion of a religious reaction became its peculiar function, and the rehabilitation of the more recent fabulous litera ture of the Church played an important part in the work of reconstruction. From the literary character and critical ability of Rosweyde, it would hardly have been expected that he would engage very zealously in the dissemination of a mythology so different in tone and object from the older legendary narratives which he had done so much to make accessible and intelligible. But the From the Patristic to the Jesuit Age. 59 discipline of the order of Loyola permits and encour ages strange and sudden changes of apparent pur pose in its adepts, and accordingly we find the hand of Rosweyde as active in this new field as it had been in the illustration of more primitive hagiology. His most important labor in the branch of religious fic tion, which we are now about to introduce to the reader, is his Flemish translation of the " Flos Sanc torum " of Ribadineira, with numerous additions, in two large folios, which, as appears by a copy before us, had so rapid a sale in the small public for which it was designed that it had reached a sixth edition as early as the year 1686. He gave to the book the ti tle " General Legend of the Saints," and this and oth er versions of the collection of Ribadineira are usual ly cited by this name. The " Flos Sanctorum " has been translated into most European languages ; it has been published under the highest ecclesiastical sanc tions, in hundreds of editions, some dating within the last two or three years; and it is to be regarded as the most authoritative repository of Romish ecclesi astical tradition which is accessible to the general public in the Catholic countries of the European con tinent.* The principal rivals to this work in England * Several collections of legends bearing the title of "Flos Sancto- 60 Mediaeval anal Modern Saints and Miracles. and France, so far as we remember, are Alban But ler's "Lives of the Saints" and Baillet's " Yies des Saints." But these are by no means stimulating enough to satisfy the appetites of Catholic lovers of sensational religious narrative. Butler's work is fee ble, flat, and washy, seldom rising even to the ridicu lous ; and Baillet's four heavy folios, though learned, are scarcely less insipid. The most extensive collec tion of the Lives of the Saints is the "Acta Sancto rum " of the Bollandists, which when completed will be among the most voluminous works ever publish ed in Europe.* The biographies of the saints follow mm " appeared in the sixteenth century, and one of them, printed in the year 1556, was inserted in the "Index Librorum Prohibitorum," donee corrigatur. This is not the "Flos Sanctorum " of Ribadineira referred to in the text, which was first printed near the close of the sixteenth century, at Madrid, in Spanish. None of the very numer ous editions and translations of this work appear to have met with any ecclesiastical censure. * We barely notice this collection because, like the "Annals" of Baronius, and the most ancient legends we have spoken of, it is a purely professional work, printed in Latin, and designed solely for the use of the clergy, not for the lay population. The " Flos Sanctorum " of Ribadineira, on the other hand, though with a Latin title, was first written and published in Spanish, and intended for the edification of the Spanish people, upon the religious character of which nation it has had a very powerful influence. It has been translated into most modern European languages, as well as into Latin, and is still very widely circulated. Besides the regular canonical legendaries, there exists in manuscript, or in rare literary collections, a vast mass of old religious fable which, though once very popular, is not known to have From the Patristic to the Jesuit Age. 61 the calendar, the name and life of each being placed under the day of his martyrdom. The sixtieth folio comes down to the 29th of October, and the lives of the two or three thousand saints remaining to be catalogued will; it is thought, fill forty or fifty more additional volumes. The plan of the "Acta Sanc torum" and of the " Flos Sanctorum," which is the same in this respect, leads to some jostling among the aspirants for human veneration and some jeal ousy among their devotees, because it happens, not unfrequently, that the anniversaries of several mar tyrs occur on the same day. This is naturally a growing evil, for all the saints must be accommo dated within the three hundred and sixty-five days of the year, and the number is constantly growing.* In 1862, Pope Pius IX. canonized twenty-seven Jap- been formally approved by Rome. To this mythology we can only ' allude in passing, and we confine ourselves to legends which are at this day circulated under the sanction of the competent authorities of the Romish Church. See D'Ancona, " I Precursori di Dante," Fi- renze, 1873, and authorities there cited. See also Appendix VII. * Rome has now a considerable number of candidates for canoniza tion on the lists. Not to mention humbler individuals, we may spe cially refer to Joan of Arc and Louis XVI., the claims of both of whom are strenuously urged by French ultramontanists, obviously for political reasons. Our old friend Columbus, too, whose jealous spirit the honors paid to the American Cardinal M'Closkey will not allow to sleep, is an aspirant for the same elevation. What will Mr. Aaron Goodrich and Professor Anderson say to this ? 62 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. anese martyrs in a batch, and a volume at least will be required for a fair narrative of the heroic deeds of Pedro de Arbues, a holy man, selected as chief as sociate by Torquemada, the famous Grand Inquisitor of the fifteenth century, and whose apotheosis was well justified by his exploits during the few years in which he brandished the torch and plied the rack.* * For the use of the word apotheosis in this sense we have the au thority of Cozza, who, in his life of De Arbues published at Rome in 1867, applies this term even to the beatification which precedes the final decree of canonization. In ecclesiastical Latin, the saints of the Church are commonly called Divus, the appellation bestowed by the Romans on the deified emperors after their death. According to his biographer, the distinguishing quality which recommended De Arbues to the gentle Torquemada, and of course, we must suppose, to Pius IX. who canonized him, was his tender and sympathetic nature, which told so powerfully on the Jews and Moslems of his province that these miscreants embraced Christianity by thousands as soon as it was known what means of "moral suasion" the dread tribunal had in trusted to him. Cozza does not descend to particulars, but he per haps refers to an amiable practice, in which De Arbues indulged, of roasting his victims by a slow fire, thus humanely sparing them the keen pangs of a sudden death by exposure to a fiercer heat, affording them an easy and gradual introduction to the more agonizing tor ments they were about to enter upon in the infernal regions — under the sharp ministrations of an Inquisitor of whom even De Arbues and Torquemada were but feeble though ambitious imitators — and, at the same time, securing to them an hour or two of leisure for repentance. De Arbues is reported to have been eminently successful in inventing methods of torture which inflicted the keenest agony on the victim without a wound or even breaking the skin. What valuable services for a Church which "never sheds blood!" When Rome condescends to answer the charge of persecution, she From the Patristic to the Jesuit Age. 63 The Bollandist Lives of the Saints have, in gener al, no literary merit, or, as Froude expresses it, " no form or beauty to give them attraction in them selves;" and we can conscientiously indorse his judi cious recommendation, that " whoever is curious to study the lives of the saints in their originals should rather go elsewhere than to the Bollandists, and, uni- retorts by reproaching Protestants with an intolerance as uncharitable and even as ferocious as her own. There is certainly color of truth in this accusation. The Reformation was not at once and completely our everriculmn fermenti veteris. The old leaven long infected the new religion. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Protestants not only repaid persecution by persecution, but even volunteered it ; and there have been cases where this treatment of " heretics " was al most as unchristian, as inhuman, as criminal, as the inquisitorial acts of the Romish Church herself. But there is this difference. As soon as that free discussion which Rome interdicts to her flock had shown the Reformed Churches that religious persecution was contrary to their own principles and to those of the Gospel, they ceased to practice it ; and there is no Protestant who does not now deplore and condemn this error, this crime, of his forefathers. Rome, on the other hand, has never disapproved any of the bloody suppressions of heresy, any of the atrocities of her instruments, from the crusade against the Albi- geois to the dragonnades of Louis XIV. and the recent murders of Protestant clergymen by Catholic mobs, headed by priests, at Barletta and Mexico. Even now she canonizes the most fiendish of Inquisi tors, and claims the right to put down heresy by force. Rome cries to us, as she did to the immortal pilgrim, Christian, "You will never mend till more of you be burned." Bunyan's picture of the "Old Man that sat in the mouth of the cave " is as true to the life at the present day as it was when that wonderful genius lay languishing twelve years in Bedford jail, a victim to the intolerance of a Protest ant State Church. See "Pilgrim's Progress," Part I. 64 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. versally, never read a late life when he can command an early one." Our limits of space will not permit us to give ex tracts from the older lives of saints. We must refer our readers to the various legendary collections, to Mr. Lecky's valuable work, and to Milman's " Latin Christianity," for notices of them. We now proceed to give some account of what, in the present phase of modern religious life, is of greater practical im portance, though of far less intrinsic interest — the leg endary literature of the Church of Rome since the Reformation and the foundation of the order of Jes uits. From the Founding of the Jesuits to Pius IX. 65 II. FROM THE FOUNDING OF THE SOCIETY OF JESUITS TO THE BEIGN OF PIUS IX. We now proceed to give, from sources the authen ticity and even authoritative character of which Car dinal Manning himself would scarcely have the hard ihood to deny, some specimens of the moral and in tellectual nutriment which the Romish Church has supplied to its votaries for more than three centuries. When we speak of the authoritative character of these legends, we mean that they have been pub lished, and are constantly republished, as well as orally promulgated, under the express sanction and with the approval of the proper ecclesiastical licens ing officers, and very often also of other high digni taries of the Church, including the pontiffs them selves. On this point we desire to make ourselves well understood, and we think it important to draw the attention of our readers to the position of emi nent Catholic ecclesiastics, and especially of Dr. Newman, in relation to it. In 1873, Dr. Newman 66 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. republished an essay on the " Miracles of Scripture," written by him for the " Encyclopaedia Metropolitana " in 1825-26, when he was still a Protestant ; and an other, on the miracles of the first age of Christianity, written in 1842-'43 as a preface to a translation of a part of Fleury's " Ecclesiastical History." In the for mer of these essays, page 77 of the new edition, he speaks with some severity of the " notorious insinceri ty and frauds of the Church of Rome ;" in the latter, at page 236, he quotes Melchior Canus, a Dominican and a divine of Trent, as saying of the " Legenda Aurea " that it is the production of " an iron mouth, a leaden heart, and an intellect without exactness or discretion;" and, on page 237, he refers to similar avowals respecting other legendaries " from the first century to the sixteenth, from inspired writers to the schools of St. Dominic and the Oratory." In a note on page 77 he qualifies the passage above quoted re specting the " notorious insincerity and frauds of the Church of Rome," by admitting that " there have been frauds among Catholics, and for gain, as among Prot estants, whether churchmen or dissenters, or among antiquarians, or transcribers. of MSS.,or picture-deal ers, or horse-dealers," etc., " but that does not prove the Church to be fraudulent," etc., etc. Dr. New man does not here assert, in direct terms, that the From the Founding of the Jesuits to Pius IJC. 61 Church of Rome has never practiced "insincerity and fraud" by circulating fabulous legends and sanctioning counterfeit miracles, but he unquestion ably means to be understood as altogether denying the complicity of that Church in any such impos ture, and her responsibility for the circulation of such books as the " Legenda Aurea " and other lying " leg endaries " and tales of fictitious miracles. It is a fashionable affectation among English Prot estants, and by some of them it has been carried to an offensive obsequiousness, to treat Dr. Newman as a thoroughly fair, open, and candid writer on con troverted questions in theology and ecclesiastical his tory, polity, and discipline. We freely admit that Dr. Newman has not the unblushing and unscrupu lous recklessness of assertion and denial which characterizes some of the more conspicuous of his countrymen, who have preceded or followed him in transferring their religious allegiance to an alien enemy, and who habitually use fact, as geologists use time, ad libitum; but we should be glad to see some proof that he does not hold the suppressio veri to be lawful when the truth would be damaging to his cause. It is observable that, in the note from which we have quoted, Dr. Newman, though citing some private expressions of disapproval of absurd legends, 68 Mediaeval anal Modem Saints and Miracles. does not produce a single authoritative or official dec laration of any period later than the " sixteenth cent ury," the date of the foundation of the order of Jes uits, as condemning any ecclesiastical fable or fraud whatsoever; and he most assuredly knows that the monstrous fictions we have above referred to, many of which are in a high degree ridiculous, profane, and demoralizing, as will appear from the extracts we shall give from them, are printed and reprinted under the imprimatur of the constituted authorities of the Church, and assiduously circulated at this day by the parochial and monastic clergy among their penitents, without a word of reproof from their su periors. In short, he is fully aware that this foolish and corrupting mythology is propagated with every sanction the Church can give it, short of a formal dogmatic ex-cathedrd affirmation of its truth. And Dr. Newman can hardly be ignorant of the fact, that even such affirmation has been made, at least impliedly, in regard to some such fables, in pontific al acts of canonization declared on the face of them to be pronounced ex cathedra by divine inspiration. On this point a word of explanation will not be amiss. The performance of miracles by the candi date, or by his relics after his death, is not only a necessary condition of canonization, or even of the From the Founding of the Jesuits to Pius IX. 69 ascription of that lower degree of holiness implied in beatification, but is, in fact, the sole base and ground upon which either of these proceedings is founded. When the canonization or beatification of a supposed saint is proposed, and the large funds necessary to cover the expenses are raised or secured by the dev otees of the candidate, or the sovereigns, who ask this honor for him — for Rome does nothing, not even canonize a saint or crown an image of the Yir- gin, gratis — the evidence of the performance of mir acles by the aspirant, his bones, or some fragment of his person or his raiment, is referred to an ecclesias tical tribunal, which submits a report upon it in the nature of what lawyers call a "special verdict," de tailing the facts established by the testimony. Upon this report the pope pronounces judgment, and, if favorable to the pretensions of the claimant, decrees his canonization or beatification according to the de gree in which his "heroic" virtues have been exer cised. The decree, which is promulgated ex cathedra by the pope in person, with the same formalities as in the case of a definition of a new dogma, is expressly grounded on the miracles, which it usually recites, and often at great length, and concludes with a declaration, that if any shall disregard the decree or dare to dispute it, he will " incur the wrath of Al- 10 Mediaeval and Modern Saints and Miracles. mighty God, and of the blessed apostles Peter and Paul." It is noticeable that in most cases the decree does not refer to the proof of the miracles, or the report of the ecclesiastical board on that subject, but treats them as if directly known to the pontiff. The records of the proceedings, which in many cases are curiously minute aud circumstantial, do not general ly employ the word cathedra in referring to the seat of the pontiff, but more commonly use solium, al ways, however, stating that he was crowned with the mitre when pronouncing the decree. In some rec ords Sedes eminentior, id est, Solium Pontificium, is used; but, in point of fact, this Sedes ox Solium is the technical, official Cathedra, all decrees pro nounced from which are infallible, and, as appears from the work of Pope Benedict XIY, "De Ser- vorum Dei Beatificatione et Beatorum Canoniza- tione," lib. xlv., cap. 4, this point is insisted upon by those who hold the infallibility of the judgment of canonization. But, as we have stated, there are in stances in which the decree, in express terms claims the divine sanction. Thus the sentence of Clement YIIL, in the canonization of Saint Raymond, asserts itself to be pronounced auctoritate Dei omnip'otentis, Patris et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti, Beatorum Apos- tolorum Petri et Pauli, et Nostra. See Benedict From the Founding of the Jesuits to Pius IX. 11 XIY., " De Canonizatione," etc., lib. i., app. xi. Still stronger is the language employed in the decree of the canonization of the saints Isidore Agricola, Ig natius Loyola, Francis Xavier, Filippo Neri, and Te resa de Jesu, promulgated by Pope Gregory XY., on the 12th of March, 1622, and printed in Benedict XIY., " De Canonizatione," etc., lib. i., app. xi., edi tion ofPrato, 1839, pp. 538-541. The extract from the report of the case given in the volume cited is confined to the final proceedings, and does not, like many others, embrace the history of the miracles of the candidates, though it dwells largely on their merits. The final decree read by the secretary, no mine suae Beatitudinis and in the presence of the pope, the cardinals, and all the principal officers of the Curia, is as follows : " Audite, Coeli, quae loquor ; audiat Terra verba oris mei ! " Cum e re Christiani Nominis esse sibi pie persua- dent Sanctissimus Dominus Noster, ccelestes hono- res quinque his Beatis tribui, divino Numine in- stinctus ex altissima hac Christianse Sapientise Cathe dra" quam Divinae Yeritatis Oracnlum Deus ipse con- stituit in terris, Isidorum Agricolam, Ignatium Loyo- lam, Franciscum Xaverium, Hispanos; Philippum Nerium, Florentinum, in Sanctorum Confessornm 12 Mediaeval and Modern Saints and Miracles. Catalogum, Teresiarn de Jesu, Hispanam, in Sancto rum Yirginum Numerum referendos esse, decernit." Or, in English, thus : "Hear, ye heavens, what I speak; let the earth hear the words of my mouth ! "Forasmuch as our most Holy Lord [a common Latin designation of the Pope] is piously persuaded that it is for the interest of the Christian name that celestial honors be ascribed to these five Blessed, be ing impelled by divine inspiration, he decrees, from this most exalted chair of Christian wisdom, which God himself has established as the oracle of Divine Truth on earth, that Isidore Agricola, Ignatius Loy ola, Francis Xavier, all of Spain, and Philip Neri, of Florence, be inscribed on the roll of Holy Confessors, and that Teresa de Jesu, of Spain, be counted in the number of Holy Yirgins." The pope, then, upon the supplication of Cardinal Ludovisi, confirmed the sentence read in his name by blessing the assemblage, making the sign of the cross, and solemnly pronouncing the sanction, De- cernimus. In claiming inspiration and infallibility, language can go no further. What the particular miracles were upon the strength of which the canonization of these saints was decreed does not appear from this record, and From the Founding of the Jesuits to Pius IX. 13 the faithful are, of course, authorized to infer that they are those narrated in the " Flos Sanctorum," or General Legend, and other collections published un der the sanction of the ecclesiastical authorities, the only sources, in fact, from which they can obtain in formation on the subject. The decree of canonization, being founded on the alleged miracles, of course implies the affirmation of the actual performance and genuine supernatural character of those miracles ; and if, in pronouncing it, the pope is to be considered as speaking official ly ex cathedra, as is most expressly insisted by the terms of the decree, all Catholics are bound by his judgment as to the reality of the miracles asserted. The absurdity and evident falsity of many of them have led numbers of Catholics to attempt to evade this conclusion by denying that, in this case, the sentence is of a dogmatic and binding character. The question is discussed at great length, and numerous authorities on both sides are cited, in Ben edict XIY., " De Canonizatione," lib. i. Pope Bene dict leaves the precise point undecided, but his per sonal opinion is evidently in favor of the infallibil ity of these decrees, and he sums up his argument in these words : " Itaque, ut tantae qusestioni finem denique imponamus: Si non hsereticum, temerari- 4 74 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. um quidem, scandalum toti Ecclesise afferentem, in Sanctos injuriosum, faventem hsereticis negantibus auctoritatem Ecclesise in canonizatione Sanctorum, sapientem hasresim, utpote viam sternentem infide- libus ad irridendum fideles, assertorem erroneae pro- positionis et gravissimis pcenis obnoxium dicemus eum, qui auderet asserere, Pontificem in hac aut ilia canonizatione errasse (" De Canonizatione," etc., lib. i., cap. xlv., 28), which we thus translate : " To con clude the discussion, then, we declare that whoever shall dare to assert that the pope has erred in this or that canonization, is, if not heretical, rash; that he brings a scandal upon the whole Church ; disparages the saints, and countenances heretics who deny the authority of the Church in the canonization of saints ; savors of heresy, as opening the way to infidels for ridiculing the faithful ; is a maintainer of an errone ous proposition, and deserving of the severest pun ishment." The pope adds, that this is the universal judgment of all authorities on either side of the main question.* * Dr. Newman accordingly exposes himself to the gravest ecclesi astical censure if he hesitates to believe that angels, in the shape of two yoke of white oxen, assisted St. Isidore Agricola, then a farm- servant, in plowing » field: "Flos Sanctorum," hi., p. 213 a; that St. Teresa & Jesu was ad divinos amplexus familiariter admissa ; that God once snatched (ereptam) a cross from her hands, and restored it From the Founding of the Jesuits to Pius IX. 15 Hence it is clear that, as to all miracles adduced as proof of the sanctity of the canonized, the Church teaches that, if not positive heresy, it is a great sin to disbelieve them; and, consequently, the Church makes herself responsible for the truth of them, as well as for that of other fictitious wonders promul gated by the priesthood in her name, and the circu lation of which a single word of condemnation from Rome would at once end forever. If Rome does not approve and sanction this use of her name by her official ministers, why is not that word spoken ? In view of such facts, where was Dr. Newman's "candor" when he penned the note in question as a salvo to the condemnation he had pronounced in the essay? Is it "for gain" that the Church makes herself a party to impostures and falsehood, or will Dr. Newman save himself by avowing that he, as set with four large jewels ; that Christ presented to her his right hand, and said : " Behold this nail, whereby it is attested that henceforth thou art my spouse, which dignity thou hadst not hitherto attained. Hereafter, therefore, thou shalt honor me not only because I am thy God and Creator, but thy spouse, as thou art my true spouse ;" that, on another occasion, Christ said to her, "If I had not already cre ated heaven, I would create it for thy sake alone ;" that, notwithstand ing these exalted favors, this saint was so humble that she habitually performed menial services in the convent, sometimes running about on all fours and carrying a pannier of stones on her back, ritu quadru- pedis, and with a halter around her neck. — Flos Sanctorum, i., 519 a, 521 b., 526 b. 76 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. a son of the Church, accepts the legend of St. Ur sula and her eleven thousand virgins, whose festival is celebrated at Rome, on the 21st of October, at the churches of the Ursulines, who venerate St. Ursula as their patron, Torre de' Specchi, Sta. Maria del Po- polo, and St. Ignatius, where the head of one of the virgins is exhibited; the legend of Barlaam and Josaphat, who are venerated on the 27th of Novem ber ; the ridiculous tales of Ribadineira and his con- tinuators, or those of St. Alfonso de' Liguori in his " Glorie di Maria?" Will he stultify himself by de claring that he believes in the signs and wonders of the winking Yirgin at Rimini, of the madonnas of La Salette and of Lourdes, and of the crazy nun of Paray-le-Monial ? If not, does he acquit the Church of "insincerity and fraud" in sustaining them; or are these cases where the Church affirms to the mul titude what it admits to Dr. Newman to be mere falsehood and delusion ? It is pure disingenuousness and sophistry in Dr. Newman to talk of such cheats and impostures as the work of " Catholics," and not of the " Church," unless he means to assimilate Pius IX. and the whole hierarchy of Rome to "picture- dealers" and horse -jockeys, and to include them among the "Catholics" who commit these "frauds for gain." From the Founding of the Jesuits to Pius IX. 11 If we are asked whether the superstitious beliefs and observances which we have noticed constitute the general faith and religious practice of intellect ual lay men and women in Catholic countries, we reply, most emphatically, they do not. They are as decisively rejected by such persons as they are in Protestant lands, and those only are responsible for the existence of such doctrines and such delusions who actively or tacitly encourage their acceptance or diffusion. We know, too, that many Catholic eccle siastics sincerely deplore the prevalence of these de grading superstitions, though we must add that few, if any, openly protest against them — for what Rom ish ecclesiastic would dare to denounce the fables, the follies, and the filth of De' Liguori ? When in telligent Catholics are remonstrated with on the ab surdity and even criminality of circulating these triv ial and often immoral fables, and when you point to a papal brief recognizing them, and encouraging by indulgences and pardons the adoration of the image or relic by or through which the miracle is alleged to have been wrought, the stereotyped answer — es pecially from " perverts," who, as a general rule, are very ignorant as to the real teachings of the Church to which they have seceded — is that these tales are not matters of dogmatic definition ; and therefore a 78 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. belief in them, even if sanctioned by a pontifical brief, is optional, not obligatory. We have already disposed of this point so far as the miracles of canon ized saints are concerned ; but even if there were any foundation for the opinion that canonization is not an authoritative, dogmatic affirmation of the reality of the miracles, the distinction between what we are invited and what we are obliged to believe is alto gether too subtle for the mass of Catholic worshipers, who, in general, are not taught to attach vital impor tance to the question what sort of a chair the pope sat in when he pronounced a particular decree or is sued a particular brief, or to discriminate between the solemnly formulated pontifical dogma and the preachings and teachings of the monastic and the parochial clergy, and who consequently suppose all that the Church, embodied in the pope, officially or unofficially proclaims, and all that the curate or con fessor, the official representative of the Church, de clares, to be equally binding. Every Catholic cler gyman knows that the " Glories of Mary," and oth er equally fabulous and demoralizing collections, are constantly printed under ecclesiastical sanctions which command the respect of the vulgar, and that these books are in general circulation among his parish ioners. Every priest knows that the masses, to whom From the Founding of the Jesuits to Pius IX. 79 this profane mythology is addressed, do not distin guish between what the pope, divino Numine in- stinctus, pronounces to bind the reason and the con science of the penitent, and what the higher or even the lower orders of the regular and parochial clergy supply to them in their regular church -services, in printed books and in festival sermons, as true repre sentations of Christian faith, practice, and history. The devout Calabrian and Sicilian assassins and rob bers, and even the honest peasantry and artisans who flock around the shrine of an imaginary saint, still more implicitly accept the doctrine and the fables which popular religious literature and the priesthood diffuse in narratives and harangues about their idols than they do the facts and teachings of the Gospel. The Church, then (that is, the priesthood), from the pope to the lowest country curate — for in the ultra montane slang of the present day the Church means the clergy only, and does not include the laity — is responsible for the degrading and demoralizing influ ence exerted on the people by the only literature it encourages and circulates. The very breviary, or manual of church-service, prepared under a decree of the Council of Trent and sanctioned by numerous papal ordinances, contains a number of legends, sel dom, indeed, so offensive to good taste, good morals, 80 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. and good sense as many of the tales of Ribadineira and the visions of Mary Alacoque, but, nevertheless, often utterly undeserving of credit, and in a religious sense as unprofitable as the "Arabian Nights " tales.* We have spoken of the class of legends we are now about to introduce to our readers as belonging to the last three centuries. Many of them, indeed, are of more ancient origin, but they had fallen into comparative oblivion, and had ceased to exercise any practical influence until Jesuit industry hunted them up, rechristened them, transformed them, clothed them in new habiliments suited to new special pur- * What edification can a serious-minded worshiper find in the le gend of St. Hilarion, contained in the breviary under October 21st, which happens to lie open before us ? This saint, converted from pa ganism to Christianity when a school-boy, retired to anchorite life in the Egyptian desert at the age of fifteen, and died at eighty. He al ways wore a garment of sackcloth, and this, once put on, was never washed or changed : nee vero saccum quo semel amictus est unquam aut lavit aut mutavit. — Breviarium Romanum, October 21st, approved by Pope Clement VIII. and Urban VIII., and published at Paris and Lyons in 1851. The pious Isabella, daughter of his Most Catholic Majesty Philip II., fell far short of this, for she wore her linen un changed only three years, the capture of Ostend, then in infidel hands, having released her from her solemn vow at the end of the siege. Is any spiritual Christian the wiser for listening to the legend of Paul the Hermit ? This saint lived in the desert to the age of one hundred and ten years, receiving every day, from a. crow, half a loaf, and a whole one when he had a visitor. When St. Anthony found him dead in his cave, two lions appeared, bewailed his death, and dug his grave with their claws. — Breviarium Romanum, January 15th. From the Founding of the Jesuits to Pius IX. 81 poses, and then sent them forth to the world, claim ing for them the prestige of antiquity as a guaran tee of their truth. We have already observed that the chief evidence relied upon by the Jesuits for the claims of that Church is, not holiness of life in its professors, but the performance of miracles by Catholic saints and martyrs. Most modern miracles of an earlier date than the restoration of the order of Jesuits by Pius YII. in 1814 — after forty years of suspended anima tion in Russia* — had been performed through the intercession of living saints, and occasionally, though perhaps more rarely, by relics, sacred images, or some other visible material agency, acting as a conductor of the divine energy. Apparitions and revelations of the Yirgin, the creation of wonder-working springs by her, and the like, though certainly far from new, are more especially characteristic of the thaumatur- gy of the present day. The miracles of the " Flos Sanctorum " are chiefly of the former class, and the * When the society of Jesuits was suppressed in 1773, many of the order took refuge in Russia, where they were allowed by the Govern ment to exist in a partially organized and unostentatious form, until their restoration in 1814. So long as they were persecuted by the papacy they were protected by Russia, and, doubtless, in some way made useful to her tortuous policy ; but as soon as they were restored by the pope, they were expelled from the Russian territories. 4* 82 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. Yirgin is far from playing an important part in the mythology of that collection. But we shall return to this point hereafter. The supernatural interventions most in vogue in Catholic countries are, naturally enough, miracles of healing, as is abundantly testified by the multitudes of crutches, waxen limbs, pictures of remarkable de liverances, and other ex-votos suspended at the most frequented shrines of popular superstition. The saints of Catholicism would furnish a very complete materia medica thaumaturgica. Many saints have been, and are, general practitioners in medicine ; oth ers, what are now called specialists; and there is hardly a human malady which has not its particular combatant and conqueror in the ranks of the apoth eosized. Thus St.Yitus, who is simply the heathen Slavic god Swantowit, under a Romanized name, cures the spasmodic convulsions known as StYitus's dance; Santa Lucia has a double vocation, healing the diseased eyes of her votaries, and protecting them against fire ;* St. Liborius is so efficacious in stone and gravel, that the mere translation of his relics to Amelia — the inhabitants of which were almost uni versally, fere omnes, afflicted with that evil — banish- * " Flos Sanctorum," vol. i., p. 460. From the Founding of the Jesuits to Pius IX. 83 ed the disease from the city so completely that a case was never afterward heard of within its precincts;* St. Simon Stylita is sovereign in imposthumes ; San ta Barbara, whose persecutors, including her own fa ther, were killed by a thunder-bolt, is a sure refuge against lightning, and it is her consequent partiality for explosions which has caused her to be chosen as the patroness of artillerists, and to be complimented by the bestowal of her name on naval powder-mag azines, which the French call " Sainte Barbe ;" An drea Avellino has, at Messina, a temple dedicated to him as contra apoplexin opifero Sospitatori, and his life is so remarkable that the editor of the Latin edition of the " Flos Sanctorum " of 1721 thought it worth while to devote no fewer than twenty-three fo lio pages to an account of it. This saint excited the wrath of the great enemy by crossing himself, when a puling infant in the cradle, and was ever after a marked object of Satanic hatred and persecution. Not only was he daily and hourly beset with tempta tions during his whole life, but the adversary, in the shape of an ugly, ragged vagabond, virum abomina- bili vultu, fcede dilaceratis indutum vestibus, fol lowed him to his final agony, and tried to intercept * "Flos Sanctorum,'' vol. iii., p. 414. 84 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. his fleeting spirit in his latest breath. His judicious biographer thinks that Satan would probably have fetched his soul at last, but for the intervention of a handsome young gentleman, elegantissimd forma ju- venis — of course an angel in disguise — who came to the rescue at the critical moment, threw a halter set with sharp spikes over the head of the foul fiend, and dragged him out through the solid wall of the dying man's cell, belaboring him lustily the while with a stout shillalah, multis et gravibus verberibus* Still more precocious than St. Andrea Avellino was St. Yincenzo Ferrer, who yelped like a puppy in his mother's womb, to the great consternation of that ex cellent matron, who was comforted only by the as surance of the Archbishop of Yalencia that this quasi catuli latratus indicated that the unborn babe would, in time, defend the flock of the Lord, and drive away the wolves by his energetic barking. St. Yincenzo Ferrer performed above eight hundred and sixty miracles, chiefly in the way of healing, all duly at tested and recorded. Among his other graces he possessed the gift of tongues, for, though preaching only in his native Yalencian, every foreigner heard him in his own language.^ * "Flos Sanctorum," vol. ii., pp. 139-148. t Id., vol. iii., p. 642. Carlos Ros justly attaches much importance From the Founding of the Jesuits to Pius IX. 85 The supernatural gifts of the saints have been by no means confined to the remedy of disease. The recovery of stolen goods by holy men was formerly very common, and King Ferdinand of Spain not only excelled in general detective police, but he was particularly, praesertim, resorted to in cases of dra- petomania, being, by special grace, very successful in catching runaway slaves, a virtue formerly much in request in certain quarters, but now fallen some what into discredit. The kindness of this saint to an imals was such, that, when he had arrested heretics and caused them to be condemned to the flames, he was used to spare the oxen the labor of drawing fuel for the pile by carrying the wood on his own blessed shoulders.* These examples are all taken from the authorized Latin edition of the " Flos Sanctorum " above refer- to this fact as proving that the dialect of Valencia is truly " apostol ic." Indeed, the Holy Virgin herself employed Valencian, at the time of her visit to Elx, in giving instructions respecting the observ ance of her festival at that city. The original document, together with a picture of the Assumption, is still, we believe, preserved at Elx in a casket, provided by the Virgin to contain it. The use of Valencian by the Virgin is not surprising, for we have the testimony of the learned theologian, Vicente Marco, to the fact that it was one of the seventy-two languages spoken at Babel before the confusion of tongues, which it happily survived. * "Flos Sanctorum," vol. iii., pp. 293, 300, 308. 86 Mediaeval and Modern Saints and Miracles. red to ; but though it would seem that human folly can go no further, they may at least be paralleled, if not surpassed, in absurdity by thousands of other cases recorded in writings published, and industrious ly circulated at this day, under the direct personal sanction of the highest authorities of the Romish Church, including, in many cases, the popes them selves. Take, for example, the history of the Holy House of Loreto, a legend dating, indeed, as early as the fourteenth century, but to which little importance was attached before the pontificate of Sixtus Y. This structure, though not in any of its features re sembling the ancient architecture of the East, is af firmed to be the original mansion of Joseph and Mary, and, consequently, the home in which the in fancy and youth of the Saviour were spent. For three centuries it has been visited annually by many thousands of pilgrims ; and before the invasion of It aly by the French, near the close of the last century, it had accumulated from their offerings a treasure of precious objects supposed to be unsurpassed by any collection of valuables in the world. According to the legend, the house was transported by angels from Nazareth to the east coast of the Adriatic in the twelfth century, removed twice or thrice afterward From the Founding of the Jesuits to Pius IX. 87 in the same miraculous manner, and at last definitive ly settled at Loreto, not far from the port of Ancona. After Loreto fell into the hands of the infidel Pied- montese in 1860, and especially after the negotiation of the convention of September 15th, 1864, which was interpreted as a final surrender of the claims of Italy to the national capital, there was a wide-spread expectation among the ignorant that the sacred house would flit to Rome, where, under the protection of the pontiff and the pious Napoleon III., the some what irregular but accepted eldest Son of the Church, it would be safe from Sub-alpine aggression. The miracle not being performed as was hoped, it was proposed that, since the mountain would not come to Mohammed, Mohammed should go to the mountain, and accordingly that the Casa Santa should be taken down and carried piecemeal by human agency to the Yatican gardens. The occupation of Rome by the Italian troops in 1870 naturally defeated this project. Few relics are more highly venerated than the Holy Coat of Treves, alleged to be one of the gar ments of Christ for which the soldiers cast lots at the crucifixion, and to have been discovered at Jerusa lem by St. Helena. There are various traditional ac counts of the finding of this garment and its removal to Europe, the oldest of which occurs in the works 88 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. of Gregory of Tours, under the date of a.d. 596. The reconciling of the conflicting statements in re gard to the place of deposit of this relic has cost Catholic investigators much trouble, there being no fewer than ten " holy coats " at different shrines, each asserted to be the only genuine garment, and all in vested with about equal miraculous powers. Leo X., in 1514, decided in favor of the coat of Treves as the veritable relic, and, of course, gave it great promi nence ; but in 1843 Pope Gregory XYI. declared the coat at Argenteuil to be the authentic piece of rai ment. The difficulty is easily solved by the supposi tion of a miraculous multiplication of the garment ; and, indeed, we do not see why there might not be ten holy coats as easily as two heads of John the Bap tist. The coat at Treves disappeared soon after the time of Gregory of Tours, and did not come to light again until the year 1196, when it is alleged to have been found in a vault discovered in the course of re pairs of the cathedral. It is now believed by pro fane archaeologists to be the mantle of a priest of Baal, or, perhaps, more probably of the Druse relig ion. Some of the pilgrimages to this shrine have numbered hundreds of thousands of votaries, and that of 1844 is particularly memorable as the occasion of the German Catholic movement initiated by Rouge. From the Founding of the Jesuits to Pius IX. 89 This agitation threatened even more serious danger to Rome than the Old Catholic reform of the pres ent day, until it was put down by the Protestant gov ernments of Germany, whose policy it then was to sustain the papacy as a political ally.* Before entering upon two important phases of modern superstition to which we shall soon refer, we will premise an account of some other remarkable recent legends; and we ask particular attention to the life of the Jesuit Anchieta, as an example of the puerile and irreverent character of modern hagiolo- gy, and to the veneration paid to the relics of St. Philomena, as an instance of the facility with which, even in the nineteenth century, the recognition of purely imaginary personages, as saints, martyrs, and miracle-workers, can be secured under the auspices of the Church of Rome. The blessed Father Anchieta, a native of Teneriffe, was one of the early adepts of the Society of Jesuits, and became celebrated as the " Apostle of Brazil," where most of his life was spent in missionary labors. * It is only since the declaration of papal infallibility that the pla- tonic billing and cooing between Rome and Prussia has ceased. When the assembling of the Ecumenical Council of 1869 was an nounced, the King of Prussia (now Emperor of Germany) sent to His Holiness Pius IX. a magnificent carpet, to be spread under the pon tifical throne in the council hall. 90 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. He was beatified by a decree of Pope Clement XII. in 1736, and the testimony on which the decree was founded, as existing in the records of the process for that purpose in the Yatican, is contained in his life, published at Rome in 1738, with all the regular li censes and sanctions. As the author of the life boasts with reason, no saint has ever appeared on the stage of the world attended by a more "splendid retinue of miracles," and hence Anchieta is natural ly considered as emphatically the " thaumaturgist of his age." Healing the sick and raising the dead were matters of such familiar, every -day practice with Anchieta that they soon ceased to attract notice among his contemporaries. Their jaded palates con stantly required new stimulus to keep their appetite for the marvelous at the proper pitch. Hence, our saint was constrained to resort to grotesque and fan tastic miracles, occasionally much resembling the ex ploits of modern spiritistic mediums, and often per formed, not for any purpose of edification, but in mere wantonness of spirit. Thus, at the game of the goose — which consists in giving the neck of the poor bird a twist as the contestants run by it, the one who bestows the fatal wrench being the victor — a quarrel having arisen as to the person entitled to the prize, a deaf-and-dumb boy spoke, at the command of Father From the Founding of the Jesuits to Pius IX. 91 Anchieta, and claimed the goose as his own. This "miracle" says our author, "diverted" the assembled crowd more .than any other sport of the day. His biographer cites the following wonder as particularly " funny," lepido. While ascending a river, his com panions shot several monkeys from the boat. An chieta ordered them not to kill any more of the ani mals, but to amuse themselves with the mourning of the survivors. He then summoned the rest of the troop to bewail the dead, which they did in chorus, with such awkward tumbles, such uncouth cries and contortions, and such " most ridiculous gestures and grimaces," as hugely to delight the humane specta tors, and the monkeys continued the exhibition till Anchieta dismissed them with his blessing. When walking in the sun, he would summon flocks of birds to hover over his head and keep pace with him, per forming the part of a parasol. When preaching at the city of Espirito Santo, he was always attended by a couple of large tamed birds, whose office it was to perch on the belfry of the church, and warn him by loud cries when he was in danger of wearying the patience of his audience by spinning his spiritual yarn to too great a length. He would travel for miles at the height of several palms above the ground, and he often thus performed journeys of 92 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. many hours in a few minutes ; he was present at dif ferent places, leagues apart, at the same instant ; was occasionally crowned with a halo of light; produced fine musical concerts on invisible instruments played by unseen hands ; could read the thoughts of others, describe events happening at the moment in distant continents, and was endowed with the gift of proph esy. The proof of these " heroic " virtues was satis factory to the sovereign pontiff, and Anchieta was beatified accordingly. 1 Among the late accessions to the saintly circle, the martyr Philomena is, perhaps, the favorite, and her praises have been sung even by Protestant poets. The story is so generally known that we shall proba bly surprise few of our readers by saying that there is no historical proof, nor even a tradition, of the ex istence of such a person. Still the history is curious, and deserves something more than a passing mention. We shall therefore give a few details from the most authentic possible source, the " Historical Relation of the Translation of the Sacred Body of St. Philomena, Yirgin and Martyr," by Dr. Francesco di Lucia, the first private possessor of the relics, published at Ben- evento, in three volumes, octavo, in 1834, and vise by authority of the Archbishop, and the Apostolic Delegate of Benevento. The work is written, as the From the Founding of the Jesuits to Pius IX. 93 author justly boasts, with such "simplicity as to be intelligible to the commonest capacity, even of a silly woman," ad ogni triviale ingegno, anche d' unafem- minella. In the year 1805, this reverend gentleman, while at Rome on a professional "commission for procuring relics, especially of martyrs," con impegno di sagre reliquie, specialmente di martiri, received an offer of a very desirable subject, being no less than the entire skeleton of a female martyr, but was obliged to decline the proposal at first for want of sufficient funds.* Afterward encouragement from friends, and the force of a " clear inspiration," chiara ispirazione, moved him to accept the offer with the single stipulation that the relic should be a warrant ed " body of a holy [female] martyr, with a proper name," and " so," continues he, " my mind was re lieved of all perplexity." He proceeds to inform his readers that when the bones of unknown martyrs are discovered, it is usual to bestow names upon them * Rome drives a thriving trade in relics, and makes as good mer chandise of the bones of Christian martyrs as the Egyptians do of the mummies of heathen Pharaohs and Potiphars. During the year 1874, straws from the dungeon mattress of the " Prisoner of the Vati can," Pius IX., lately visited in his darksome cell by a body of Ameri can pilgrims, all, we believe, of the Irish "persuasion,'' were much in request for exportation to France, where they compete in the mar ket with a native product, the holy water of Lourdes, to an extent alarming to the patriotism of French commercial religion. 94 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. under a pontifical license; but in the case of St. Philomena, the real name was made out satisfacto rily to the faithful, as we shall see hereafter. The reverend customer was taken to one of the public treasuries of relics in the custody of Monsignor Pon- zetti, where, among many boxes of bones, he found three with names of reputed martyrs, one of these being that of St. Philomena. The " sweetness and suavity of the name" struck him powerfully. He was at once filled with an irresistible longing for these remains, and was indiscreet enough to betray his anxiety by the expression of his countenance, which, as he naively says, was observed by the guard ian of the relics. He had little hope of accomplish ing his wishes, because, on account of the occupancy of the city by the " enemy," the then infidel French, there was just at that time a great dearth, scarsezza, of relics with names at Rome, and good merchant able articles of this description were quoted at high prices accordingly. But the person who had intro duced him to the monsignore promised him the body, and our hero committed the negotiation for it to this disinterested friend as a mezzano, or broker, which was, probably enough, his regular profession. The wily monsignore soon sent Dr. Di Lucia a mes sage through the broker, informing him that he had From the Founding of the Jesuits to Pius IX. 95 discerned visible tokens that the saint herself wished to accompany him to his province, and advising him by all means to secure the prize. He was naturally overjoyed at this, intelligence, and at once closed the bargain for the remains, the delivery of which was promised for the next Saturday. But when " Cool reflection at length came along," Monsignor Ponzetti felt that he had committed a commercial indiscretion in agreeing to part with so valuable a treasure to an eager customer on such easy conditions, and, by the advice of "crafty coun selors " of his bureau, as Dr. Di Lucia shrewdly sus pects, he flatly refused to fulfill his promise, and aft er much haggling and many shifts, to the bitter dis gust, amaro disgusto, of our simple friend, he tanta lized him by fobbing off upon him the body of a sup posed martyr of an unmelodious name, and of com paratively small account, Santa Ferma. But this was a mere fetch, for as the Rev. Dr. Di Lucia, seeing, as he thought, that things would be no better, was be ginning to reconcile himself to the acceptance of the substitute, and to make the most of a bad bargain, he learned that certain " most honored persons," includ ing the broker, had succeeded in securing St. Philo mena, not indeed for him, but for a friend of his, a 96 Mediaeval and Modern Saints and Miracles. Neapolitan bishop, then, by the merest chance, lodg ing in the same house with him, and the sacred rel ics were actually brought to the bishop's apartment. This, of course, rekindled our hero's passionate de sires, and after much tribulation an exchange of rel ics was effected on "terms not made public," but probably on the payment of a handsome considera tion by way of boot, and the bishop and the doctor prepared to start for Naples together, in the same post-coach with their treasures. In stowing the lug gage the postman had placed the case of St. Philome- na's bones under the seat of the bishop, that of St. Ferma under Dr. Di Lucia's. The bishop, who was of " majestic " and voluminous obesity, was hoisted into the coach with difficulty, and had hardly taken his seat when he received several hard thumps — probably " spirit-knocks " — on his gouty legs. Wheth er the saint resented the trick that had been played on her votary, and did not like the proximity of one of the parties to the imposition, does not appear ; but the knocks were several times sharply repeated, and his reverence, sore in the shins and a little conscience- stricken perhaps, was convinced that they came from the case of bones, though assured that it was so firm ly chocked that any movement of it was impossible. He insisted on the removal of this troublesome neigh- From the Founding of the Jesuits to Pius IX. 97 bor, and the case was transferred to a more satisfac tory position, and, being tightly lashed with cords, remained quiet till it reached Naples. The name of the martyr was discovered by an in scription painted on three fragmentary slabs of baked clay found near the relics, and containing the words or syllables "Lumena,fi,pax, te, cum" with represen tations of several arrows, an object called a scourge, and other symbols. Incredulous persons suggested that all this was hardly sufficient to prove that the bones were those of St. Philomena, a Christian mar tyr never before heard of; but the solid argument that the testimony was quite as clear and conclusive as in most other cases of the invention of relics was held to be a satisfactory reply to these captious ob jections. But the relics, though thus proved to be genuine, still lacked a history, without which their acquisition might turn out but an indifferent specu lation to the purchaser. This embarrassment was happily removed by the saint herself, who complai- santly appeared to a " most zealous ecclesiastic," ze- lantissimo sacerdote, and recited the story of her life, the most important fact of which was, that she was put to death for refusing the hand of a heathen emperor. This devout and favored priest communi cated the revelation to our author, both orally and in 5 98 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. writing, so that the chain of evidence is complete and irrefragable. After this it is perhaps superfluous to add that the martyr has furnished abundant addition al evidence of her sanctity by an almost unbroken succession of miracles from the translation of her relics to the present day.* In fact, the saint appears to have given her votaries rather too much of a good thing, and Dr. Di Lucia evidently thinks that Ne quid nimis is a rule she would do well to follow. " I am obliged to confess," says he — vol. ii., p. 91 — " that her miracles have lost something of their prestige, am- mirabilitd, from their very frequency." The most conspicuous, as well as the grossest, case of pure material worship in modern times is that of the Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. This cultus was organized and zealously propagated by the Jesuits, and, though lately hard pushed by the rival pretensions of the Yirgin of La Salette, and now * St. Philomena, who, as well as Anchieta, is complimented with the appellation of "the thaumaturgist of her age," appears to have recently transferred the sphere of her operations to the congenial soil of France, and to have formed a working partnership with the Rev. Mr. Vianney, who died in 1859 as curate of Ars, a small town in the French Department of Ain, and who has acquired an immense local reputation by the miracles he is performing in anticipation of canoni zation. The devotees who make the pilgrimage to La Salette often visit the tomb of the curate, and offer up their prayers to him in con junction with St. Philomena, as a preparation for the higher exercises of La Salette. From the Founding of the Jesuits to Pius IX. 99 more especially by those of Our Lady of Lourdes, it has long formed a leading feature in the machinery, the deus ex machina, of the scenic manifestations of the Society of Jesus. Pascal's celebrated " Provincial Letters," the last of which appeared in 1657, had given the order an almost fatal blow, and its mana gers saw that nothing could save it but a vigorous effort to divert the mind of the Catholic world from dwelling on the moral considerations so powerfully urged by their great assailant, and turn the current of religious thought into a new and more sensational direction. About the year 1670, the revelations of a weak-minded nun, Marguerite Marie Alacoque, suf fering under an aggravated form of heart-disease, came very opportunely to their relief, if not indeed, as there is strong reason to believe, directly inspired by the Jesuit La Colombiere, confessor of Mary Ala coque and other nuns in the Yisitandine Convent of Paray-le-Monial, where Mary was professed.* Asse- * Loyola had positively forbidden the members of the company to assume the control of female convents ; but the good fathers had man aged to evade the prohibition with their usual dexterity. They had allowed the bishop to appoint other religious directors for their con vents ; but every nun had the right to choose an extraordinary confess or, and they contrived in almost all cases to have this choice fall upon one of themselves. Mary Alacoque's revelations on the subject of obedience to her spir itual superiors could have been inspired only by a Jesuit oracle. 100 Mediaeval and Modern Saints and Miracles. line, the author of the remarkable historical essay, "Marie Alacoque et le Sacre" Cceur," agrees with some earlier writers in supposing that the Jesuits were indebted to the writings of Goodwin, a celebrated English Puritan divine of the seventeenth century, for the invention of this new and degrading form of su perstitious homage. He asserts that Goodwin preach ed that the heart of Jesus, "that part of the body in which Christ had deigned to incarnate himself," ought to be an object of special worship; and for proof of this affirmation he refers in general terms to a Latin translation of Goodwin's " The Heart of Christ in Heaven toward Sinners on Earth," which — as he says, has been shown by Father Giorgi, an opponent of the Jesuits — proves an entire conformity between Goodwin's views of the Sacred Heart and those of the nun. La Colombiere had been chaplain to the Duchess of York after the Restoration, and, doubtless, must have at least heard of the opinions of Goodwin, then considered the ablest defender of the Puritan faith Jesus appeared to Mary Alacoque, and said to her, ' ' I am pleased that you prefer the will of your superiors to mine when they forbid you to do what I should have commanded." ' ' The splendid simplicity of obedience is lost when we ask ourselves whether the thing commanded us is right or wrong." See Asseline, " Marguerite Marie Alacoque et le Sacre Coeur," Paris, 1873. From the Founding, of the Jesuits to Pius IX. 101 in England. La Colombiere, it is said, suggested to his brethren that the culte grossier advocated by Goodwin would appeal powerfully to the vulgar im agination, and prove an efficient instrument in the dexterous hands of the society. The Jesuits indig nantly repelled Father Giorgi's charge of theolog ical plagiarism, and claimed for themselves, in the name of their protegee, entire originality of invention in the new revelation. The point is of interest in the history of modern religious opinion, and we have taken the pains to investigate it by an examination of Goodwin's "Heart of Christ," and his other works, the original editions of which we have had an opportunity of consulting. Our judgment is cer tainly "not biased by partiality for the Jesuits, but simple justice requires us to say that this charge of borrowing heretical opinions from a Puritan, urged against them by their opponents, seems to us with out any solid foundation. Goodwin, indeed, held, in common with most Christians of all churches at that period, that Christ had risen in the flesh, and has a perpetual corporeal existence in heaven. He also entertained the then common opinion, that the heart is the seat of the affections ; and he argues that all the bodily organs of Christ are still acted upon by his emotions in the same way as during his incarna- 102 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. tion on earth, except that his celestial frame is free from the grossnesses and weaknesses to which his earthly body was subject. In accordance with this analogy between the modes of Christ's terrestrial and his heavenly being, Goodwin maintains that his moral essence, though exempt from all painful pas sions and disturbances, is full of love and compassion for men, and of hatred of sin ; and, consequently, that the Redeemer in heaven sympathizes with fallen and suffering humanity in a mode and to an extent of which a mere disembodied spirit could not be ca pable. But we are unable to find in the works of Goodwin any thing which countenances the worship of Christ's body as distinct from his spiritual being, still less any thing recommending or sanctioning the adoration of any organ or attribute of his person. On the other hand, Father Gallifet declares in his " Ex cellence de la Devotion au Sacre" Cceur," as quoted by Asseline: "We mean the heart of Jesus in its proper and natural, not at all in its metaphorical, sig nification. Jesus Christ speaks of his heart, taken in a real sense. This is evident from his exposing and showing his heart. It is this heart which he wills us to honor and to celebrate. It is the sensuous, sensi ble, object of the devotion which Christ is now estab lishing." — Asseline, p. 39. So in a devotional man- From the Founding of the Jesuits to Pius IX. 103 ual, published at Saint Sulpice, in 1782, it is said : "This devotion is addressed solely to the heart of Jesus Christ, without any reference to the rest of the sacred body. Heart must be taken in its nat ural signification. This is the sensuous, sensible, ob ject of the devotion which Jesus wills to establish." Many writers on the Devotion to the Sacred Heart employ more cautious language ; but it is perfectly clear, from the general tenor of the devotional treatises on this subject, that they are really advocating a strict ly material worship. But while we acquit Goodwin of having originated this cultus, we must admit that there is enough of materialism, not particularly in his views, but in those of all who believe in the res urrection and permanent existence of the body of Christ, to furnish a point d'appui for Jesuit inge nuity to rest a new fetiehism upon. Although, there fore, Goodwin's works can not be cited as the origi nal source of the devotion to the heart of Christ, it is possible that the wide -spread reputation of his writings may have induced La Colombiere to study them, and that he derived from them suggestions which he and his brethren perverted to profitable ac count in bringing forward a new object of adoration. Whatever may have been the origin of this new dispensation — for in practice it has been little less — 104 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. it is perhaps the masterpiece of Jesuit invention, and, both directly and through the proselytism of the schools established in its name in Europe and the United States, it has done more to revive the flag ging zeal of indifferent Catholics, and to secure per verts from Protestantism, than any other contrivance in the whole enginery of the society. The literature of the Devotion to the Sacred Heart, which is surpassed in folly, vulgarity, and indecency by few chapters in the history of the religious aber rations of the human intellect and heart, is well ex emplified in the early unmutilated editions of the "Yie de Marie Alacoque," by Languet, Bishop of Soissons, a man despised by his contemporaries for his stupidity, detested by the clergy of his own dio cese for his brutality and perverseness, and severely condemned by the most enlightened of his episco pal brethren.* The work is, indeed, well worthy of * De Caylus, Bishop of Auxerre, wrote thus of Languet's book : "The life of Mary Alacoque is undoubtedly, in all respects, one of the worst books of its class that have ever appeared ; it is revolting to every one, whether in the Church or out of it. It has roused the in dignation and horror of good men. Libertines have made it the sub ject of raillery. I do not think it becoming even to speak of the am orous dialogues which are supposed to pass between Jesus Christ and Mary Alacoque ; nor can I dwell upon the visions of this girl — vis ions always full of extravagance and impiety. Everywhere, in the style of this prelate, Jesus Christ employs the language of human pas sion to declare his love to Mary Alacoque. I am far from believing From the Founding of the Jesuits to Pius IX. 10& such a character. Ridicule and criticism compelled Languet to retrench some absurdities in later is- that such forms of speech — as sensual as they are indecent — may not mislead many souls and make them mistake the illusions of the flesh for the movements of the spirit." The following extracts will serve to show that the judgment of the Bishop of Auxerre was not too severe : Marie says of herself that at the age of four years she had a lively sense of the virtue of chastity, and ' ' the sight of men so wounded her modesty, and alarmed her innocence," that she would have fled into the desert but for the fear of meeting them even there. — Languet, lib. i., ch. iii. "Our Lord showed me that this was the day of our spiritual be trothal ; he afterward made me understand that he wished me to taste all that was most sweet in the tender caresses of his love. In fact, these divine caresses were from this time forward so overpowering that they made me quite beside myself, and rendered me almost inca pable of any physical exertion, and it was a subject of such strange embarrassment to me that I dared not show myself." — Languet, lib. ii., ch. xix. Jesus presses the head of Mary Alacoque tenderly to his own breast, addresses her in impassioned language, and reveals to her his purpose of establishing the worship of the Sacred Heart. Still more, he opens the side of the Visitandine, takes out her heart very carefully, places it by the side of his own, "which, through the wound in his side, ap peared to me as bright as the sun, or as a glowing furnace," and, after having given it this taste of flame, he replaces it in the breast of his well-beloved servant. — Languet, lib. iv., ch. Ii. At a mass which he was celebrating for the sisterhood, Father La Colombiere experienced an astonishing movement of divine love. "At the same time, our Lord showed Sister Mary his divine heart under the symbol of a glowing furnace ; but she saw also two other hearts which were about to unite there and lose themselves in it, and at the same moment he caused her to hear these words from within, 'It is thus that my holy love unites these three holy hearts forever.' And two of these hearts were that of Father La Colombiere and her 5* 106 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. sues,* but the book, as it is now republished and cir culated by tens of thousands, is fit for no readers but the inmates of an asvlum for cretins. own. Margaret hastened to relate the fact to the Jesuit, ' who was much confused by it. ' " — Languet, lib. iv. , ch. Ivii. "The Sovereign High-priest," says Marguerite, "requested me to make in his favor a written testament or bequest, entire and without reserve, of all that I might do or suffer, and of all the prayers or spir itual benefit which others might offer or obtain for me, either during my life or after my death. He told me to ask my superior if she would serve as notary in drawing up this act, for which he promised to pay her substantially ; if she refused, I was to address myself to Father La Colombiere. But my superior accepted." — Languet, lib. iv. , ch. lxxii. Jesus, delighted at this bequest, and not wishing to be in arrears to her, dictates to Margaret — who writes all with her own blood — the following instrument drawn up in celestial notary style: "I consti tute thee heir of my heart for time and for eternity, permitting thee to make use of it according to thy desire. I promise thee that thou shalt never lack succor until I lack power. Thou shalt be forever the beloved disciple, the plaything of my heart's good pleasure, the holo caust of its love. That alone shall be the object of all thy desires. It shall repair and supply all thy deficiencies, and acquit thee of all thy obligations." — Languet, lib. v., ch. lxxii. The Mother of God appeared to Marie Alacoque one day with her Divine Son in her lap. She presented the babe to her faithful disci ple, and allowed her to fondle it and hold it in her arms. — Languet, lib. iii., ch. xliv. * Such, for example, as when he makes Christ say that it is enough not to hate God, and when he relates that the Virgin, after having swept the dormitory for Sister Margaret, while she was playing the truant, administered to the lazy girl, on her return, two sound boxes on the ear. — Asseline, p. 33. Bomish Hagiology under Pope Pius IX. 107 III. EOMISH HAGIOLOGY UNDER POPE PIUS IX. Aftee the census of Great Britain in 1871, Car ry le said, "England has twenty -three million souls, mostly fools." The average standard of intelligence is not higher in France, we suppose, than among ces estimables insulaires on the other side of the Chan nel. Religious gobe-mouches certainly seem to be more common among the Gauls than among the Sas- senachs ; but such monstrous follies as those of Paray- le-Monial were long found too nauseating a dose for the receptivity of even the most superstitious classes in France. The genuineness of Mary Alacoque's in spirations were strenuously denied by the most judi cious portion of the French clergy, and the question was acrimoniously debated at Rome, with varying success, for two centuries. Pius IX., ever " good at need," on the 23d of August, 1846, declared by sol emn decree that the nun had practiced the " heroic " virtues ascribed to her; on the 24th of May, 1864, by another decree, affirmed the truth and reality of 108 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. the miracles attributed to her intercession ; and on the 19th of August, 1864, pronounced her beatification. The devotees of the Sacre* Coeur were not satisfied with this simple recognition by the papacy, and they have long been agitating for a more solemn and for mal act which should completely identify this devo tion with the highest worship authorized by the Rom ish Church. The signatures (entered in thirty mag nificent volumes) of twelve million petitioners for such an act,* including seven hundred bishops, heads of religious houses, and other ecclesiastical dignita ries, were presented to the pope, who, on the 22d of April, 1875, pronounced a decree consecrating the Universal Catholic Church to the Sacred Heart, thus making the acceptance of this devotion a cardinal * When we remember that as late as 1867 the Minister of Public Instruction reported that there were districts in France in which six ty-seven per cent, of the bridegrooms and ninety-eight per cent, of the brides married at the municipalities were unable to write their names, we can not help doubting whether these twelve million signa tures were all genuine. Perhaps it is a case of miraculous multiplica tion, or we may. suppose that most of the names were originally sub scribed to petitions to other authorities, and for other purposes, and have been judiciously employed to strengthen this by transfer, as in the case of indulgences per modum suffragii. But if they were gen uine, the fact is even more disgraceful. That one-third of the entire population could be induced to subscribe such a petition would be an evidence of a state of religious, moral, and intellectual culture more pitiable than the blankest ignorance. Bomish Uagiology under Pope Pius IX. 109 feature of the religion of Rome. On the 28th of April, this decree, and the formal Act of Dedication issued by the Congregation of Rites on the 26th of the same month, were published in the Osservatore Romano, and in the Voce delta Veritd; and on the 1st of June the cardinal vicar issued an Invito Sacro, exhorting the faithful throughout the Catholic world, in the name of the Holy Father, to recite the formu la of consecration to the Sacred Heart on the 16th of June, "the thirtieth anniversary of his [Pope Pius IX.'s] assumption of the Supreme Pontificate, and second centenary of the revelation made by the Di vine Redeemer to the blessed Marguerite to propagate the Devotion to his Sacred Heart." The dedication was formally celebrated in St. Pe ter's and the other principal churches of Rome, and the services in the Gesu, the official church of the Jesuits, were conducted with the utmost pomp and splendor. There were pilgrimages to Paray-le-Mo- nial and other celebrations of the occasion in France, and the new " national " church on Montmartre was formally dedicated to the Sacre" Coeur by Cardinal Archbishop Guibert in person. But, in spite of all this, there was somewhere a difficulty not yet explained ; for, notwithstanding the notoriousness of these facts, the Semaine Religieuse, 110 Mediaeval and Modern Saints and Miracles. a journal published at Paris under the authority of Cardinal Guibert himself, asserted that the pope put by the thirty volumes of signatures, with the decla ration nil innovandum, and refused to comply with the request. French journalism, including even the Journal des Debats, accepted this authoritative de nial of the consecration, and it was for some days generally believed in Paris that no such decree had been pronounced. What does the "candid" Dr. Newman think of such proceedings ? It is a fact which does little credit to the intelli gence of the governing classes in France, that the Devotion to the Sacred Heart has been accepted by them as emphatically an aristocratic religion. Its early annals belong to the Golden Age of French his tory, when the king was the State, the nobility the nation, and the struggling mass of humanity beneath had no recognized existence for any other purpose than laboring for their feudal lords, lay and ecclesi astical, paying taxes, and serving as foot-soldiers in the wars. It was invented under the Grand Mo- narque ; its origin was very nearly contemporaneous with the crowning glory of French Catholicism, the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes ; and it owes its conception to the same influence — the inspiration of the Jesuit fraternity. It was especially patronized Bomish Sagiology under Pope Pius IX. Ill by the fine fleur of the old regime, and at the pres ent day every legitimist pays his most fervent adora tion at the shrine of the Sacred Heart. It has now a vast importance as a political engine. Every one of the twelve million zealous worshipers who lately subscribed a petition to Pius IX. to dedicate the Uni versal Church to the Sacred Heart is pledged to use his utmost efforts not only for the extinction of here sy, but for the restoration of the temporal power of the papacy, and in general for the return of the old en line of the Bourbon dynasty.* * Louis XIV., whose reign has lately been extolled by Monsignor Nardi as a model of truly Christian, prosperous, and beneficent govern ment, was a most devout and constant worshiper according to the discipline of the Romish Church. His numerous works of superero gation, including the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the dragon- nades against the Protestants of his kingdom, the judicial murders of persons professing the Reformed religion, and other pious acts scarce ly less praiseworthy than the slaughter of St. Bartholomew's Day un der Charles IX., had inspired him with a conscious feeling of a right to the divine favor in all his enterprises. Hence it was not strange that in the reverses of his old age he should, referring to these meritori ous works, have pathetically exclaimed, " How can God treat me thus, after all I have done for him !" Extremes meet. King Louis, like many a Romish zealot of the present day, though a virulent hater of Protestantism, was very tolerant of infidelity. When one of his gen erals, at the commencement of a campaign, proposed to offer a con fidential post on his staff to an officer not conspicuous for his piety : "That will never do," said the king; "he is of the Religion" [a Protestant]. "Of the Religion, your majesty !" replied the general ; "he does not even believe in a God." "Oh, very well," said the king, " then you may take him." See Appendix VIII. 112 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. In all the pilgrimages to Paray-le-Monial, in all the processions in honor of Mary Alacoque, princes, dukes, marquises, counts, viscounts, and barons, with their spouses and their varletry, largely figure ; and though it is not as universally true of the French man as of the Englishman that he "loves a lord," yet all " right-thinking " people in France are much influenced by the evident predilection of those high est in blood and in fashion for the royal religion.* The participation of officers of high rank, in full reg imentals, in these manifestations is, to a certain ex tent, official; for military escorts and salutes, with martial music, are an oblige accompaniment of ev ery ecclesiastical and civil demonstration in France. We do not know that the worship of the Sacred Heart is yet a part of the general consigne of the * France professes to recognize the legal equality of Protestant and Catholic churches, and has no national, no State religion ; but the re cent action of the Legislative Assembly, prompted by Jesuit influence, in declaring the construction of a church dedicated to the Sacred Heart, on the heights of Montmartre, to be a work of " public utility,'- is very nearly equivalent to a formal recognition of that devotion as the religion of the State. By virtue of that declaration, the Archbish op of Paris, as trustee of the projected church, is empowered to ex propriate private property which he may deem convenient for its use. The Univers of February, 1875, states that eighteen parcels of real es tate, amounting in all to about thirty acres, will be taken from their proprietors for that purpose. — Michaud, L'Sglise CathoUque -Ro maine, p. 179. Would a similar declaration have been made in favor of a Protestant Church 1 Bomish Hagiology under Pope Pius IX. 113 French soldiery, but the military are making them selves extremely conspicuous, even when out of the ranks, as ardent supporters of Jesuit principles and policy. As a general rule, soldiers rely chiefly on the ultima ratio as a means of producing moral and political conviction, and think it superfluous to cul tivate the arts of oratory; but in the present mili tary service of France every pompon " hath found a tongue," and many of the most efficient apostles of the Sacred Heart and the Yirgin of Lourdes, as well as of sound principles of civil government, are to be found among gentlemen who trail the sabre and glit ter in stamped buttons and scarlet trousers. Captain de Mun, of the French army, is one of the most con spicuous among the oratorical champions of "the throne and the altar." In a speech delivered in 1873, Captain de Mun said : " I affirm that the brutal dog ma of equality is a lie ; I denounce it as a danger It has given birth to the insane theory according to which all offices, ought to be open to all, and that all have the right to participate in the government of the commonwealth It is not true that the di rection of the commonwealth, the exercise of author ity, is not the lawful privilege, the hereditary prerog ative, of certain classes After the civil consti tution of the clergy, the greatest crime of the Revo- 114 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. lution was the abolition of the corporations [trade- guilds which had the exclusive right of exercising their callings, according to their own regulations] The day will come when the vile horde of revolu tionists .... will be reduced to utter the imprecation of the apostate, ' Galilsean, thou hast conquered !' Ah, for them no mercy; they are not the people, they are hell itself." In 1874, Captain de Mun preached a lay sermon to a working-men's club, in which he defended the Papal Syllabus ; and in 1874, at the congress at Lyons, Captain de La Tour, of Chambly, argued that social doctrine was sufficiently defined by the Syllabus. Many other military men take part in behalf of Rome in public politico-relig ious discussion ; and the Jesuits, who do not scruple to declare that the great question between the Church and the world is to be decided by physical force, are doing their utmost to flatter and cajole the army, and to strengthen their influence with that branch of the public service in France. Cardinal de la Tour d'Au- vergne, Bishop of Arras, wrote to the clergy of his diocese in reference to the election of president of the republic in 1848, " I shall vote for a sabre ;" and the Bishop of Angers declared, in 1875, " The sword surmounted by the cross is the true symbol of Christian civilization." The Jesuits have organized Bomish Sagiology under Pope Pius IX. 115 an association under the name of The Militia of the Pope, which has a great number of members in the religious seminaries. In that of St. Pierre-sous-Ro- dez, in 1868, out of 184 pupils, 177 had been in the papal military service, as zouaves, soldiers of the le gion of Antibes, etc., and the 260 pupils of the semi nary of Notre Dame de Polignan had all, without ex ception, served in one or the other of those capaci ties. The Univers, the leading ultramontane journal of France, declared, on the 18th of February, 1875, that the Company of Jesus " is henceforth intimately connected with our military school," that of St. Cyr ; and a noticeable fact connected with this point is, that though in 1859 the military school of St. Cyr re ceived but five pupils who had been trained by the Jesuits, the number of their eleves admitted at St. Cyr rose to 24 in 1864, to 49 in 1869, to 99, besides 35 received at the Polytechnic School, in the academ ic year 1873-'74. From 1854 to 1874, out of 3207 pupils of the single Jesuit school of the St. Genevieve, more than one-third passed into the Government mil itary and naval academies ; and in 1875 no fewer than 688 officers, who had been prepared at this one school, were serving in the army.* * Recent statistics inform us that at the end of the year 1875 there 116 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. The success of the schools of the Sacred Heart, as instruments of religious propagandism, has encour aged the Jesuits to renewed effort to secure a monopo ly of public instruction throughout the Christian world. Their triumph in the struggle against the national universities of France, in the passage of the recent law permitting the establishment of what, by an odd perversion of language, are called " free " universities, is a signal proof of the controlling influence exercised by the society in France. But this is only a first step. The next is to be the legal suppression of all public schools except those controlled and administer ed by the Church. Pius IX. declared to the Emper or Maximilian that " all instruction, whether public or private, ought to be directed and supervised by the ecclesiastical authority ;"* and in 1868 the Bishop of Perigueux informed his clergy that " it is upon the Church, and her alone, that Christ has conferred the right, and imposed the duty, of imparting instruc tion to men Every man engaged in teaching is in conscience bound to accept her supervision and control." Citations of this kind from authoritative were in France 140,000 friars and nuns, and that out of 447,112 girls in the schools 356,000 were taught by nuns, and only 91,000 in lay schools. * The Austrian Concordat of 1855, repudiated by the emperor in 1870, contained a provision to this effect. Bomish Hagiology under Pope Pius IX. 117 sources might be multiplied indefinitely ; but though the pretensions of the Romish Church in this respect have been so often and so fully exposed, it is not yet a work of supererogation to adduce proof of the ar rogance of her demands, or even, unhappily, of the portentous success with which these claims have been urged in many countries on both sides of the Atlan tic* The tendency and the deliberate aim of Jesuit instruction is everywhere the same — the suppression of the individual conscience and reason, of the sense of personal responsibility to any authority except that of the priest, and the substitution of a blind obedi ence to ecclesiastical dictation as the only rule of Christian faith, the only principle of moral action. The layman is to be to the priest what each member of the Society of Jesus is to his hierarchical superior, a soulless, will-less creature — not a person, but a thing — or, to use the language of one of their own apostles, proinde ac cadaver, an object as pliable and unre- * The recent Romish attacks upon the public schools in the United States, and the arrogant demand of the priesthood for the appropria tion of a large share of the school-fund to their sectarian purposes, are well known. The conduct of the Roman Catholic clergy at Mont real, in refusing burial to a Catholic for having belonged to a society whose libraiy contained books condemned by the priesthood, is one of the most daring attempts to defy the law, the government, and the principles of Christian charity which we have heard of in North America. 118 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. sisting as a corpse. The thousand-times-repeated ex posures of Jesuit policy from Pascal to our own day are generally little known in England and America, but there are many recent publications on this sub ject which deserve the most serious consideration by every friend of human liberty. Among these, be sides Gladstone's " The Yatican Decrees " and " Vati canism," Lavelaye's " Protestantism and Catholicism," with preface by Gladstone, are the work of Michaud, "L'Eglise Catholique Romaine en France," already cited ; Jung's " La France et Rome ;" the " Histoire Politique des Papes," by Lanfrey, the author of the scathing exposure of the life and character of the First Napoleon; "L'Eglise etles Philosophes du dix- huitieme Siecle," also by Lanfrey ; and the works of Gasparin — a writer inspired by an eminently enlight ened conscience — " L'Ennemi de la Famille, Innocent III.," and his two posthumous volumes, " La France."* * We will not be so disingenuous as to refer to the famous "Monita Secreta" as a genuine set of rules drawn up for the conduct of the So ciety of Jesuits by its authorized heads, but it is not unjust to recom mend it as a fair exposure of the principles by which its members are guided. It is curious that this little volume disappears from the mar ket as fast as new editions are published. The suppression of dan gerous books by buying up the copies, requiring penitents to surrender or destroy them, and by other more questionable practices, accounts for the scarcity of many works of which large editions are known to have been printed. See Appendixes IX., X. Bomish Hagiology under Pope Pius IX. 119 The free institutions of Europe and America are in serious danger from, we will not say the relig ious, but from what, for want of a better word, we are forced to call the sectarian, indifference of Chris tian and especially of political men. While we would be the first to denounce sectarian intolerance even on the part of Protestants, we do think that every intelligent man is bound to resist the first ap proaches of ecclesiastical encroachment and usurpa tion ; and, now that the Yatican has openly proclaim ed itself the enemy of all human liberty, it is the first among the political duties of a freeman to be on his guard against those who, by both open and secret measures, are assiduously laboring to sap the only foundations on which freedom can securely rest. The apathy and indifference of the Northern United States, of politicians who refused to believe that the rebellious threats and secession movements of the South were earnestly meant, well nigh cost the life of the nation ; and the wounds received by the Union in that struggle will not be healed in a century. The danger of papal aggression on American liberties is as real, as obvious, and we may almost say as imminent, as was the pro -slavery war of 1861 a twelvemonth before it broke out. Let Americans jealous of their institutions be warned in time ! 120 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. We have alluded to the arrogant claims of Rome to the exclusive control of the instruction of the young as one of her pretended " liberties." Not to speak further of the political agitation of this ques tion in England and the United States, we think par ticular attention ought to be drawn to the mischiev ous character of the schools of the Sacred Heart and other institutions under Jesuit or at least monastic superintendence. Parents who care more for man ners than for morals, and wish to prepare their daugh ters to figure in society rather than to form a true womanly character by solid instruction and such a moral education as recluses and celibates can never impart, are very often seduced by the showy but shal low and hollow training of the schools we refer to.* These schools all profess not to interfere in the least with the religion of their Protestant pupils, and their teachers are artful enough to conceal the ingenious devices by which they, implant in the youthful mind germs which may lie dormant for years, but seldom fail to reveal themselves as noxious weeds in later life. The imperceptible bending of the twig in girl- * The Visitandines have always been famous for great attention to manners. Gresset, the biographer of Ver-vert, sung, a hundred years ago: "Les petits soins, les attentions fines, Sout ne's, dit-on, chez les Visitandines." Bomish Hagiology under Pope Pius IX. 121 hood injuriously affects the proper development of the stem in womanhood. Every Catholic school in a Protestant country is a missionary, a propagandist instrument. The only safe course is to distrust the professions and the influence of those who offer to prove false to the principles and to the teachings of their own Church for the sake of attracting pupils from other religions. The Devotion of the Sacred Heart lost much of its position in Catholic Europe during the suppres sion of the Jesuits ; but after its restoration the so ciety applied itself vigorously and successfully to the re-establishment of this important branch of its sys tem of operations. Nevertheless, in the distraction of religious opinion and feeling in recent times, and especially since the definition of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, appeals through the Sacred Heart sometimes failed to produce sufficient popular effect. Hence, though the governing classes in France long have been, and still are, ardent in this devotion, the stimulus of novelty was felt to be now and then needed to stir the torpid masses of the population to warmth and fervor, and the newly promulgated dog ma was relied upon as likely to prove a potent aux iliary to the Sacred Heart. The Abbe" Nau observes that, in all critical conjunctures of the world, "the 6 122 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. Church has been inspired to establish, in honor of the Mother of God, new devotional practices for effi caciously soliciting help from her, because every new homage is answered by new favors. If it were oth erwise, and if special blessings were not attached to different observances, the Queen of Heaven would not have varied her graces as she has done in her different apparitions."* The abbe" leaves it to be inferred, not obscurely, that the La Salette revelation was got up to flatter the Yirgin into fresh manifes tations, and accordingly as a coup de theatre which promised, as indeed it has yielded, brilliant results. But before noticing more in detail the apparition of La Salette and the closely similar visions of Lourdes, it may be well to dwell at some length on the early as well as the recent history of Mariolatry, or the worship of the Yirgin, which has received a new and powerful impulse under the reign of Pius IX. The weak vanity and puerile character of the pres ent pope have made him an apt instrument for the purposes of the Jesuits, and his reign has done more to revive childish superstition and arrogant preten sion in the Church of Rome than any which had pre ceded it since the Reformation. The liberal tenden- * Nau, " L' Apparition de la Salette, "p. 157. Bomish Hagiology under Pope Pius IX. 123 cies, real or simulated, manifested by Pius IX. in the first years after his election, to a degree which de luded many Catholics and even Protestants into a belief in the possibility of a reformed and reforming Rome, demanded an atonement, and this the Jesuits rigorously exacted, though, certainly, they have not found the pontiff a reluctant penitent. Fruits of this willing penance are the concordats with Spain, Aus tria, and Ecuador, all tinged with the darkest spirit of obscurantism ; the Syllabus,and Encyclica of 1864, and an almost uninterrupted succession of papal anathemas against every movement favorable to lib erty and .light ; the canonization of a numerous body of new saints and the multiplication of recent mira cles; the increased activity of the priests in the prop agation of fabulous legends ; the kidnaping of Jew ish children to train them in the Romish faith ; the definition of the dogmas of the Immaculate Concep tion and the personal infallibility of the pope; the elevation of St. A. de' Liguori to the dignity and au thority of a doctor of the Church ; the consecration of the Church to the Devotion of the Sacred Heart ; the recognition of the miraculous apparitions of the Yirgin of La Salette and of Lourdes; and the in trigues which availed themselves of the superstition of the Empress of France, the dynastic aspirations of 124 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. the emperor, and the professional ambition of the mamamouchie who surrounded the imperial throne, to plunge France into a crusade against Germany. The definition of the doctrine of papal infallibil ity is too recent to have yet allowed it to be judged by its fruits ; but the earlier dogma of the Immacu late Conception, which was much less unacceptable to the episcopal body of the Romish Church, has evidently gone far to stamp a new character on the theology and the cultus of Catholicism, and its gen eral acceptance has had much the same materializing tendency as the diffusion of the Devotion to the Sa cred Heart, on which we have already commented. The historical origin of the devotion to the Yirgin Mary as a religious exercise, and of its first virtual sanction by the Church, can not be traced. The most ancient paintings in the catacombs, which have been much relied upon as proofs that Mary was adored at Rome in the primitive ages of the Church, are now denied by competent authorities to be Chris tian at all ; and they are very probably representa tions of sacrifices to a heathen divinity. But, though there is no ground for the belief that any cultus was paid to the Yirgin in the first or second, perhaps not even in the third, century, there is no doubt that she was highly, if not idolatrously, reverenced in both Bomish Hagiology under Pope Pius IX. 125 the Eastern and the Western branch of the Church before the downfall of the Roman empire. The ad vocates of a fusion between the Greek and the En glish churches have endeavored to establish a distinc tion between Orthodox Oriental and Romish Mariola- try, on the ground that the former ascribes no special sanctity to any particular picture or shrine of the Yir gin, but considers all alike as merely memorial and incentive representations, and as all entitled to equal reverence. Theoretically, the highest theological standards of the Greek Church do deny the sacred- ness of the stock and the stone, the panel, the alabas ter slab or the metallic plate, the colors, the gold-leaf and the pearls or gems, employed to depict or to adorn the representation ; but practically, and without objection or remonstrance from the ordinary clergy, the partialities of the worshipers of favorite pictures of the Yirgin in Greece and in Russia are often as fervently expressed as in the Romish form of Cathol icism. The Russian troops in the Crimea, in 1854, were accompanied by an ancient and highly vener ated picture of the Theotokos, which was expressly referred to in general orders from the head-quarters of the army, as a sacred talisman which could not fail to insure victory to those who marched and fought under its protection. In the ascription of di- 126 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. vine attributes to the Yirgin, too, the Oriental falls little, if at all, short of the Western Church, for not only is she called the Musing, the mediatrix, in the service books, but prayers occur in them in which she is addressed directly as the giver of gifts and graces, without any reference to a higher power.* The legendary literature of Mariolatry, from its most ancient manifestations to the definition of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception by Pius IX., is an ocean, of which it is quite impossible to give the reader even a general idea within the limits of the present paper, and we must content ourselves with a brief notice of some of its leading features gathered from De' Liguori and other authoritative sources. * Dr. Schaff, whose learning and candor will not be disputed, says of the worship of the Greek Church : " The cultus is much like the Roman Catholic, with the celebration of the sacrifice of the mass as its centre, with an equal and even greater neglect of the sermon, and addressed more to the senses and imagination than to the in tellect and heart. It is strongly Oriental, unintelligibly symbolical and mystical, and excessively formalistic The worship of saints, relics, flat images, and the cross is carried as far as, or even farther than, in the Roman Church ; but statues, bass-reliefs, and crucifixes are forbidden. The ruder the art, the more intense the superstition. In Russia, especially, the veneration for pictures is carried to the ut most extent, and takes the place of the Protestant veneration for the Bible." — Johnson's Illustrated Cyclopaedia, vol. ii., article Greek Church. Bomish Hagiology under Pope Pius IX. 127 So far as pretended antiquity is concerned, the Let ter of Messina takes a high rank among the Marian legends. As this epistle is not much known out of Sicily, we think it well to give it in full. The life, death, and resurrection of Christ having been made known at Messina by the preaching of St. Paul, a few years after the Crucifixion, the municipality of that town expressed to the Yirgin their condolence with her in her affliction, by a special commission ac credited by letters which, at the same time, embraced a profession of faith in the incarnation of the Divin ity in the person of her son. This diplomatic monu ment unfortunately appears to be lost ; but we have the Yirgin's reply, the original of which is, or at least not long since was, still preserved in the cathe dral of Messina. She wrote as follows : "Maria Virgo Joachim filia, Dei humillima Christi Jesu Crucifixi Mater, ex tribu Juda, stirpe David, Messanensibus Salutem, et Dei Patris Omnipo- tentis Benedictionem. "Yos omnes fide magna* legatos ac nuncios per publicum documentum ad nos misisse constat, filium nostrum Dei Genitum Deum et Hominem esse fate- mini, et in Ccelum post suam Resurreetionem ascen- disse; Pauli Apostoli electi Prsedicatione mediante 128 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. viam Yeritatis agnoscentes. Ob quod vos, et ipsam civitatem, benedicimus; cujus perpetuam Protectri- cem nos esse volumus. "Ex Jekosolimis, an. 42 FUU nostri, Ind. 1, die Jov., 3 Junii."* * In English, thus : "The Virgin Mary, daughter of Joachim, the most humble mother of God, Christ Jesus crucified, of the tribe of Judah and of the stock of David, to the people of Messina health and the blessing of God the Omnipotent Father. "It appears by a public instrument that you, recognizing the way of truth through the preaching of Paul, the elect apostle, have in your great faith sent to us embassadors and messengers ; you confess our Son, begotten of God, to be God and man, and that after his resur rection he ascended to heaven ; for which cause we bless you and your city, and will be her perpetual protectors. " Jebttsalem, in the 42d year of our Son, Indiction first, Thursday, June 3d." The Jesuit Inchofer, we believe, first made known to the general public this letter of the Virgin in 1629, by an essay entitled "Epis- tola? B. Marias ad Messanenses Veritas." The extravagance and fol ly of this story were too much for Inchofer's brethren, and he was charged by his superiors to moderate his transports. This he did in 1632 in a new paper entitled " De Epistolse B. Virginis ad Messa- nenses Conjectatio. " The original letter, which was preserved till In chofer's time, is not now shown, but our copy is from a perfectly trust worthy source. Inchofer, acting, no doubt, under the orders of his superiors, was one of the three accusers of Galileo in the remarkable proceedings of the papacy and the Inquisition against him for his astronomico-religious heresies. The shifts to which the apologists of Rome have been driven by the recent revival of the discussion respecting the treatment of Galileo and his theories would be amusing if the subject were not of too grave a nature to be a fit theme for ridicule. It is true that the proof of the actual infliction of physical torture on the great phi- Bomish Hagiology under Pope Pius IX. 129 The comparatively humble tone assumed by the Yirgin in this epistle would indicate that this pious fraud belonged to an earlier age than the lives of St. Bernard and St. Thomas Aquinas ; but, not to men tion other obvious critical objections, the use of the mediseval mediante, and the form of the date, would naturally lead profane skepticism to question the gen uineness of this composition on purely philological grounds. It is, therefore, satisfactory to know that it has been recognized as authentic by a solemn de cree of an infallible pope, a copy of which, engraved under a portrait of the Yirgin, doubtless as genuine as her letter, is in the possession of the present writer. losopher is not conclusive. Perhaps the balance of probability is against it. But the evidence that Galileo's recantation was made un der the menace of torture if he refused to abjure bis error is so over whelming that Rome herself no longer publicly denies it. We are bound to believe that the holy men who conducted the examination meant what they said, and, of course, that they would have applied the actual torture if the victim had proved obstinate. But suppose they did not intend to go to an extreme, which Galileo's weakness rendered superfluous, is not the highwayman who presents a pistol at my head and threatens to blow out my brains if I refuse to deliver him my watch, as great a villain as the robber who plunders me of it by main force? Is it a less criminal abuse of power to extort a lie from a helpless prisoner by threats of violence to his person than to wring it from him by torture ? It is worth remembering that the de cree condemning Galileo's theories as contrary to the teachings of the Church, though practically disregarded, has never been rescinded, and it is, therefore, still in force and binding on the conscience of the faithful. 130 Mediaeval and Modern Saints and Miracles. The personality of Mary now enters into the Rom ish idea of the Godhead, and a distributive share in the attributes and functions of the divinity has been assigned to her. St. Thomas Aquinas, the favorite theologian of the present pope, and St. Bernard are cited as maintaining this position. The Abbe Nan, whom we quote because his little essay is readily accessible to our readers, observes : " ' The kingdom of God,' a celebrated personage has said, 'consists in justice and in mercy.' Now, the angelic doctor teaches us that one half of this kingdom was given to Mary when she conceived and bore the Word made flesh, and God, reserving to himself the domain of justice, granted that of mercy to Mary, so that she became Queen of Mercy. Mercy, then, is the appan age of the Most Holy Virgin ; it is, so to speak, her essence."— P. 145. The "Glorie di Maria" of St. Alphonso de' Liguori would have furnished the Abbe" Nau abundance of equally conclusive testimony in support of the divinity of Mary, and he might have silenced all cavil at once by an appeal to the authori ties collected in the three ponderous quartos of the Jesuit Passaglia's " Commentarius de Immaculato Yirginis Conceptu," published in 1855 in defense of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. Not many of our readers have access to this latter work, Bomish Hagiology under Pope Pius IX. 131 but De' Liguori's "Glories of Mary" may be found in most Catholic libraries in England and the United States, though perhaps only in editions expurgated for the Protestant market ; and, besides, a controver sy respecting the teachings of De' Liguori between the Rev. Dr. Cox and a Romish priest, in which the latter won few laurels, has made this saint familiar ly, if not advantageously, known to American Protest ants. The " Glories of Mary " and the " Theologia Mo- ralis" of De' Liguori have recently acquired increased importance, as recognised expositions of the present theological and ethical doctrines of Rome, from the fact that on the 23d of March, 1871, upon the unan imous recommendation of the Holy Congregation of Rites, Pope Pius IX., by solemn decree, referring in express terms to De' Liguori's " Theologia Moralis," as a treatise which had " dispelled the clouds of dark ness diffused by unbelievers and Jansenists," and to his defense of the doctrine of the Immaculate Con ception (which forms a part of the "Glorie di Ma ria ") and the papal infallibility, compared him to a " light set upon a candlestick," and proclaimed him a doctor of the Universal Church. This saint is thus placed on the same level with Jerome, Augustine, and the fourteen other fathers accepted by Rome as 132 Mediazval anal Modern Saints and Miracles. authoritative teachers, and his works are virtually in dorsed as inspired and infallible repositories of di vine truth. These writings are constantly cited by Romish casuists as of conclusive authority. Indeed, the Congregation of the Holy Penitentiary has for mally decreed that the simple "fact of an opinion be ing found in St. Liguori's works is ample warrant for its adoption, without any need to weigh his reasons."* * Those desirous of understanding the ethical system of the ' ' Theo logia Moralis,"as now taught and practiced by Rome, will find a can did, though too indulgent, exposition of it in an article entitled "The Doctrines of the Jesuits," in The Quarterly Review for January, 1875. Of course, the papal approval extends to De' Liguori's treatises on the confessional, some chapters of which are surpassed in indecency by nothing in the worst passages in Rabelais. It needs but a brief examination of this book to satisfy any candid inquirer that, of all the means of corruption ever invented by human ingenuity, the confes sional is the most dangerous. When we speak of the corrupting in fluence of the confessional, we refer alike to the confessor and to the penitent ; to the priest, bound by a vow of celibacy, and to the woman who is unfortunate enough to fall into the hands of a weak or unprin cipled ecclesiastic. The danger to the latter is too obvious to need to be dwelt upon here ; but it requires a certain familiarity with the dis ciplinary literature of Rome to be able to estimate the extent of the mischief to recluses whose imagination is often stimulated to an in credible degree by the study and composition of works on confession. De' Liguori, in treating the grossest questions, constantly cites St. Thomas Aquinas, and even Gerson, as having devoted themselves to their elucidation. If such is the effect on the purest minds among the professed, what mu6t it be on those of ordinary mold ? De' Liguori rendered a signal, and under the circumstances a mirac ulous, service to the Church in the confession and absolution of the Holy Father, Pope Clement XIV., who had incurred the implacable Bomish Hagiology under Pope Pius IX. 133 Will Dr. Newman deny that the " Church " is respon sible for De' Liguori's teachings ? We will supplement the Abbe" Nau's too modest use of irrefragable authorities by a few flowers from De' Liguori's anthology of encomiums of the Yirgin. The edition we refer to was published at Bassano in 1852, with the sanction of the vicar-general of the ecclesiastical province of Yicenza. It conforms with other duly licensed and approved editions, and is, therefore, authoritative. In vol. i., chap, v., entitled " Necessity of the Intercession of Mary," St. Bernard is quoted as applying to Mary the term " aqueduct " or " channel," arguing that before her birth the cur rent of grace was wholly wanting, because this channel did not exist, and adding that, as Holofer- nes broke down the aqueducts of Bethulia that he might the sooner reduce the city, so the devil tries to wrath of Heaven by the suppression of the Jesuits, and could be shriven by none but De' Liguori, upon whom, by special divine revela tion, authority had been conferred for that purpose. The saintly man was then Bishop of Naples, and by the miraculous gift of bilocation, as it is somewhat oddly called, he was able to remain at Naples and continue the discharge of his episcopal functions while present at the same time in Rome. He was, indeed, engaged in ministering at the altar in the cathedral at Naples at the very same moment when he was pronouncing the absolution of the dying sinner in the Vatican. Cretineau-Joly vouches for this as a well-established historical fact ; but why the repentant pontiff did not spend his last moments in re voking his wicked decree does not appear. 134 Mediaeval and Modern Saints and Miracles. destroy the devotion to Mary in man, because, this conduit of grace being interrupted, it is easy for him to gain over the soul. The same saint calls the Yir gin the "Gate of Heaven," because no favor can come from heaven to earth except it pass through the hand of Mary, and none can enter heaven unless through Mary as through a gate. De' Liguori quotes with approbation the words of S. Riccardo di S. Lorenzo, " Our salvation is in the hand of Mary ;" and of Cassianus, " The whole salvation of the world lies in the abundance of the favor of Mary ;" of S. Bernardino da Siena to Mary, "Thou art the dis penser of all graces : our salvation is in thy hand ;" of S. Germano, "None, O most Holy Yirgin, cometh to the knowledge of God but through thee;" of S. Riccardo di S. Lorenzo, " Whereas it is said of other saints that they are with God, of Mary alone can it be affirmed that not only is she subject to the will of God, but that God is subject to her will ;" of S. Da- miano to the Yirgin, " To thee is given all power in heaven and on earth; thou dost approach the altar of reconciliation not asking, but commanding," non rogans sed imperans; "thou art the mistress, not the handmaid ;" of S. Bernardino da Siena, "All things, even God himself, are subservient to the empire of the Yirgin," Imperio Virginia omnia famulantur, Bomish Hagiology under Pope Pius IX. 135 etiam Deus. Quotations of this sort from De' Li guori and other Romish theologians might be multi plied ad infinitum, and such expressions really form the staple of their writings on this subject. The essential relations of Mary to the Divinity are perhaps more clearly set forth in De' Liguori's ser mons, forming vol. ii. of "The Glories of Mary." Thus, Sermon IY. quotes approvingly from Suarez, " The dignity of the Mother is of a higher order, for it belongs, in a certain way, to the order of hypostat ic union ;" from St. Dionysius, " The relation of the Yirgin to God is a supreme union with an infinite person, and she could not be more infinitely united to God except by becoming God ;" from St. Bernar dino, " In order that the Yirgin might conceive and bear God, it was necessary that she should be raised to a certain equality with God, quamdam cequalitatem Divinam y" from St. Pier Damiano, " God is in the creature," Dominus creaturce inest, " namely, in the Yirgin Mary, by identity, for he is one with her ;" and again, " God dwelleth in the Yirgin, with whom he hath the identity of one nature ;" from St. Bona- ventura, " By- thy governance, Most Holy Yirgin, en- dureth the world which thou, with God, didst found from the beginning ;" and De' Liguori adds, " Thus the Church applies to Mary the passage in the eighth 136 Mediaeval and Modern Saints and Miracles. chapter of Proverbs as given in the Yulgate, ' Cum eo eram cuncta componens.' "* These citations may easily be paralleled by hun dreds not less extravagant; and, if the opinions of Romish theologians are authoritative, Pope Pius IX. was abundantly warranted in proclaiming the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, which, in the Romish sense, implies of itself a divinity of essence ; for, by the same theology, sin is inherent in all lower or finite natures. In reference to this point, our first quotation from St. Bernard, through De' Liguori, is important, because, in common with much other evi dence, it shows that Rome does not hold the Divinity of Mary to be derivative, and belonging to her mere ly as the instrumental means of the Incarnation ; for it represents her as becoming the dispenser of all graces, not from the birth of the Son, but from her own. The dogma of the Immaculate Conception, therefore, proclaimed no novelty, but it determined * This passage occurs in Prov. viii. , 30, and refers to the divine wisdom of the Creator, so that, according to De' Liguori, the Virgin Mary in her earthly life was an incarnation of what had previously existed only as a spiritual essence, as the Sapientia Divina, the in spiring agent in the creative manifestations of God. Verses 29, 30: "When he appointed the foundations of the earth; then I was by him as one brought up with him." The English authorized transla tion, as will be seen, differs from the Vulgate rendering of the Hebrew text. Bomish Hagiology under Pope Pius IX. 137 by an infallible judgment what had been before a disputable question, and it has, in effect, substituted the Mother for the Son in the Romish theological idea of the Divinity. It represents Christ as having abdicated the functions and attributes ascribed to him by the New Testament, and become an altogeth er superfluous personage. The domain of grace is divided between Mary in heaven and the pope on earth; and Rome practically teaches that to these dignities alone supreme adoration is due. We have space for but a single illustration of this proposition. In the winter of 1873-74 there was publicly exposed for sale in Rome, at a shop much frequented by de vout Catholics, where crosses, crucifixes, rosaries, im ages, religious manuals, medals, pictures, and other material appliances of Romish worship alone are re tailed, a photograph, from a carefully executed draw ing or lithograph, of the following description :* At the top of the plate is represented the Eternal Father in the attitude of bestowing benediction ; at his right hand, on a lower plane, the Yirgin Mary ; at his left, lower still, St. Peter ; beneath the Father, the Holy Spirit emitting rays of light upon the central figure, which is Pius IX., crowned with the tiara and seated * Gladstone has described this production ; but we write with the photograph before us. 138 Mediaeval and Modern Saints and Miracles. on the pontifical throne, with Europe, Asia, Africa, and America in adoration at his feet. Christ does not appear in the picture at all. The character of the establishment where this photograph is kept for sale leaves no doubt that it is approved by the eccle siastical authorities of Rome. Although the special domain of Mary is mercy, she has avenging terrors in store for those who pro fane her worship. Thus we learn from Ossequio V., in the second volume of " The Glories of Mary," that in the year 1610 the devotees at the sanctuary of the Yirgin at Montevergine had dishonored the vigil of Pentecost by dancing, drinking, and worse immorali ties, as, in fact, is usual on such occasions. To pun ish the transgressors, the Yirgin, as was testified by five eye-witnesses, appeared with a blazing torch in each hand, and set fire to the hospice in which a great number were assembled. The building, which was of wood, was totally consumed, and no fewer than fifteen hundred persons perished in the flames.* De' * This narrative will recall to many of our readers the terrible ca tastrophe at the Cathedral of Santiago, in Chili, a few years ago. On a great religious festival, the priests had opened a post-office in the church for correspondence with the Virgin. Devotees dropped their petitions to Maiy in a letter-box, accompanied by a suitable oblation, and received prompt answers through the attending clergy. At the moment when the receipt and delivery of letters was most active and Bomish Hagiology under Pope Pius IX. 139 Liguori takes occasion from this fact — and it is worth attention as, perhaps, the only passage in his works which shows a glimmering of common sense — to ad vise the worshipers of the Yirgin not to visit her sanctuaries on high festivals, which attract a great concourse of devotees. According to the general tenor of the Marian legends, the indignation of the Yirgin is excited and her favor conciliated, not by the sinfulness or the piety of the votary, but by neglecting or profaning her personal worship on the one hand, or sedulously cultivating it on the other. We are constantly told that she is incensed if observances in her honor are slighted, and gratified and propitiated when they are assiduously performed. We have given an example of her resentment which may suffice as a specimen. The following instances of the favor of the Yirgin we take from the "Aggiunta di Yari Esempi," in the second volume of De' Liguori's " Glorie di Maria :" A notorious robber in the environs of Trent, being the cathedral was crowded with worshipers, some of the decorations of the church took fire, the flames were communicated to the dresses of the ladies and other combustible objects, and twenty-five hundred men, women, and children were burned alive or trampled to death by the crowd in frantic efforts to escape. The priests saved themselves in the sacristy or other secure retreats, and few, if any, of them were lost. 140 Mediaeval and Modern Saints and Miracles. urged by a monk to abandon his mode of life, replied that it was "too late to mend." "Well," said the monk, " then fast every Saturday in honor of Mary, and on that day do violence to none." The robber accepted the advice and went on his old course of rapine and murder, fasting and abstaining from crime only on Saturday, on which day, to be the safer from temptation, he made it a point to go unarmed. He was finally taken on a Saturday, condemned, behead ed, and thrown into a ditch. The Mother of God soon appeared, accompanied by four other celestial virgins, who took up the body, wrapped it in a rich cloth embroidered with gold, carried it to the gate of the city, and delivered it to the guard. The ma donna ordered the guard to charge the bishop, in her name, to give honorable burial to the body, " because he was her faithful servant." Upon this, the whole population of that district adopted the practice of fasting on Saturdays. — Example 10. In Normandy, when a robber was beheaded by " enemies " — of course, by criminal justice — his head, which was thrown into a ravine, was heard to say, " Mary, give me confession !" A priest confessed the head, and inquired what devotion its possessor had followed. It answered that his only religious observance had been to fast one day in the week in Bomish Hagiology under Pope Pius IX. 141 honor of the Yirgin, and that the Madonna had re leased him from eternal punishment upon confession. A very wicked man in Spain, " wholly given over to the devil," never confessed, but said an "Ave Ma ria " every day. At his death the Yirgin appeared to him, and looked compassionately upon him; he forthwith confessed, and died in peace. We need not dilate upon the moral effect which the circulation of such tales, on the high authority of St. Alfonso De' Liguori, must inevitably have upon a superstitious and depraved population.* Cheap * Most of the Sicilian and Calabrian assassins and robbers find an occasional "Ave Maria" sufficiently tranquilizing to the conscience to enable them to sleep the sleep of the just, without troubling them selves about amends or restitution ; but the benevolence of the " good old pope," Pius IX., has provided a remedy for those queasy spirits who are still disturbed by compunctious visitings, in the famous Bolla di Composizione issued by him, in 1866, for the special sol ace and comfort of timid and overscrupulous thieves, brigands, and other villains who lack a lively saving faith in the Virgin. This ex cellent arrangement not only secures to the sinner peace here and hereafter, upon very easy terms, but is the source of a considerable revenue to the Church. The Bolla di Composizione is not new in prin ciple or in practice, for it has long been usual with the priesthood to pardon and absolve unlawful possessors of other men's goods upon a fair division of the spoil between the Church and the thief. But, like the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, it formulated, sanc tioned, and regulated what was generally but loosely and unequally accepted and practiced before. The object of the bull is stated to be to "temper the severity of a just satisfaction," and it provides that a thief, robber, or other holder of ill-gotten gains shall remain free and pardoned, inforo conscientice, upon devoting to pious uses about three 142 Mediaeval and Modern Saints and Miracles. editions of these books are found everywhere in Italy, and are constantly studied by the worst classes of the people who are able to read. It is a remarkable and painful fact that the robbers and assassins of Italy are not from the most ignorant or the poorest portion of the population. The majority belong to what would be called the lower stratum of the middle classes in other countries, and they, or at least the leaders of their bands, are almost always able to read and write. Books of devotion like " The Glories of Mary," and, for those of higher pretensions, the " Theologia Moralis " of De' Liguori, are their man uals of ethics ; and the robbers and murderers of the old Neapolitan and Pontifical territory are generally among the strictest observers of outward religious ordinances, and are especially fervent worshipers of the Yirgin. Her images, medals, and devotional for mulas are found upon the person of every brigand per cent, of his plunder; and " may keep and possess the remainder in good faith, as his own property justly earned and acquired ;" pro vided, always, that the person entitled to restitution be unknown to the wrong-doer. Of course, little ingenuity is required to ignore the person entitled to restitution in any supposable case, because, though the immediate loser may be known, the thief can never be altogether sure that such loser was, inforo conscientia;, the person really entitled to the property ; for the loser himself may have come unlawfully into possession of it. The bull extends not only to theft and robbery, but to gambling, cheating, and every possible mode of illegal plunder. Bomish Hagiology under Pope Pius IX. 143 who falls into the hand of justice, and to her they confidently look for aid and protection in the per petration of the frightful atrocities of which they are guilty.* The cultus of Mary, already widely diffused, is growing and spreading with a rapidity which might seem dangerous to the Devotion of the Sacred Heart ; but the latter, as emphatically French in origin and character, is the special favorite of the Government and the higher classes in France, and is therefore sus tained by very powerful influences. The Jesuits, who administer (and, to use an expressive Gallicism, ex- ploitent) both these forms of creature-worship, find it convenient to throw their great weight into one scale or the other, as circumstances from time to time render expedient. . As Spain was the birthplace of the founder of the order of Jesuits, the great apostle of Mariolatry, so that country and the sister state of Portugal have long been remarkable for the fervor of their devo tion to the Yirgin, and for the abundance of their contributions to her biography and the history of her miracles. Some of these narratives relate to her earthly life, and some to the spiritual graces im- * See Hilton, " Brigandage in Italy," vol. ii., ch. ii. 144 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. parted by her; but the great majority of the Spanish and Portuguese Marian legends are accounts of ma terial miracles performed by her through the minis try of sacred images, to, or at least before, which the prayers of the votaries are addressed. The interven tion and concurrence of the images themselves seem to be considered not less essential than the action of the Yirgin in the performance of the miracle; and in many, if not most, cases the actual presence of the pictures or statues at the place of supplication and of operation is indispensable, for they seldom ap pear to possess the power of acting efficiently at a distance.* The image of Our Lady of the Reme dies, at Alfano, in Portugal, much invoked by fisher men, is almost constantly absent from her shrine in the Church, being engaged at sea in lending a hand to navigators in peril, to the scene of whose danger * This fact serves to explain the superior promptness of the relief afforded by the images of the Virgin; for, as Saint Anselm informs us, " Velocior nonnunquam salus, memorato nomine Marias quam in- vocato nomine Jesu " — Healing is often more speedy, upon appealing to the name of Mary, than upon invoking the name of Jesus. The eloquent Father Vierra thinks Anselm did not go far enough in using " nonnunquam," often, and regrets that he had not said, rather, " sem per," or "quasi semper, " always, or almost always. — Sermoes, vol. i., p. 278. Time is an element in the transmission of all material ener gy, and hence a drowning man can be plucked from the water more speedily by a present hand than by a force, however potent, operating from afar. Bomish Hagiology under Pope Pius IX. 145 she transports herself in time of need. The image not unfrequently returns well drenched, a fact which, as her biographer judiciously observes, proves that she must have plunged into the water to rescue the sufferers. The " Santuario Mariano," from the first volume, of which we derive these facts, contains, in its ten quartos, the description and history of no few er than two thousand Imagens Miraculosas of Our Lady existing in Portugal and its foreign dependen cies, and the Marian population of Spain is propor tionally numerous. This is a matter of philosophical interest, because it helps to explain the remarkable moral and material progress of the Spanish people after the sixteenth century, when they surrendered their entire government into the hands of the Jesu its, who, with the images, are well known to be the earthly representatives and vicars of the Yirgin. We do not know the original date of the two mi raculous documents we next describe. Judging from internal evidence, we should presume them to be of quite modern fabrication, and of Jesuit paternity. They seem to be special favorites of Pius IX., and have at least received new currency from his indorse ment. They may, therefore, be properly introduced in this part of our essay. The first lays claim to some antiquity, having been found, it is said, in the 7 146 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem, and afterward pre served in a silver casket by the Emperor Charles Y. and " His Holiness." The story is that Christ ap peared to St. Elizabeth, St. Matilda, and St. Bridget, and delivered to them a written account of the de tails of his passion, stating the number of soldiers who attended the Crucifixion ; of kicks, blows, and wounds inflicted upon the Saviour by them; of punctures from the crown of thorns; and of drops of blood shed and sighs breathed by the sufferer. The fractures of the skull, it is said, were one hun dred in number, and the drops of blood thirty-eight thousand four hundred and thirty. This document, as it is now printed, is accompanied with certain prayers, and the concession of one hundred days of indulgence to every one who shall keep in his house a copy of it, and recite the prayers attached. The indulgence was granted in 1839 by the then Arch bishop of Iriiola, who has since become pope under the title of Pius IX. , , The other miraculous communication is a letter from the Saviour, printed in characters of gold, and sent, through her guardian angel, to a girl of St. Marcel, in France. It was published at Rome " by permission of His Holiness, Pius IX." It resembles the first, of which it appears to be a French amplifi- Bomish Hagiology under Pope Pius IX. 147 cation, the numbers having been multiplied in some such proportion as the dignity of a pope bears to that of an archbishop ; for the drops of blood are reck oned at three millions and eight hundred. Those who deny the authenticity of this impudent forgery are threatened . with the wrath of Christ ; while to all who maintain its genuineness, and carry, it about with them, plenary indulgence, the remission of sins, and the special aid of the Yirgin in the hour of death are promised. These disgusting and profane fables are printed, by hundreds of thousands, and ex posed for sale, together with vulgar and often im moral ballads, at half the street -corners and book stalls in Florence, Rome, and other Italian towns.* In Italy, statues and pictures of the Yirgin are so universally a most prominent feature in the appara tus of churches, and especially of rural chapels, that in some provinces "imagine" is the usual popular designation of these latter edifices. An American gentleman not long since heard a political "agitator, in addressing a peasant audience in Tuscany, de nounce the existing Government of the kingdom be cause it had not set up images of the Yirgin in the railway stations, as he said would have been done if the Italian people were " free." * See Appendix XI. 148 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. We can afford space to notice only a couple of Italian Madonnas, each typical of a class: The church of Santa Maria, at the Porta del Popolo at Rome, possesses a portrait of the Yirgin and the in fant Christ by St. Luke, which is believed to be the only one painted by that, or indeed by any, artist from the life, all the other numerous works of the sort being repetitions or imitations of this. The his tory of this picture and of the church built to con tain it is given at length by the Rev. Ambrogio Lan- ducci in a small quarto, printed at Rome in 1646, un der the title given in our list, and is a very fair spec imen of this department of religious literature. Few churches are so rich in relics as Santa Maria del Po: polo, many of which— such, for example, as a certain portion of the person of Christ — ought to be unique ; but the value of several of the relics is somewhat diminished by the fact that numerous equally well- authenticated, and in an equal degree miraculously gifted, duplicates of them exist elsewhere. The in dulgences bestowed upon this church by a long suc cession of pontiffs are such that every sin finds here its easy atonement, and the worst of criminals might secure his salvation, and that of all his accomplices, by the industry of a single day devoted to the prayers and genuflections prescribed by the ordinances. Per- Bomish Hagiology under Pope Pius IX. 149 haps the most noticeable feature of this book is the catalogue of titles and qualifications that belong to the Yirgin. They are three hundred and five in num ber, and include, of course, the common attributes, Help and Hope of Christians, Arbitress of the Di vine Mercy, Right Arm of the Eternal Emperor, Com plement of the Most Holy Trinity, Co-operatrix in Human Redemption, Giantess of Paradise, Most Se rene Empress . of the Universe, Mediatrix, Queen, First-born of the Creatures of the Eternal Father, Shrine of the Holy Spirit, Spouse of the Eternal, Temple, Complement and Conclave of the True and One Trinity, True Mediatrix between God and Man, Living Image of God, Sweetest Sugar of Salvation, etc., etc. But there is one — True and Sacred Lam prey of the Sea — which we do not remember to have seen elsewhere. We are not sure that we understand this appellation, but we suppose it to mean that, as the lamprey was the chief delicacy of Roman gas tronomy, so Mary is supremely adorable among creat ures. The pictures of the Yirgin asserted to be repeti tions or ancient copies of the portrait by St. Luke are numerous, but this evangelist was a statuary as well as a painter. He is not, we believe, thought to have wrought in marble, but there are in Italy several mir- 150 Mediaeval and Modern Saints and Miracles. acle- working statues of the Madonna in wood, which are supposed to be productions of his skill. The Ma donna of Oropa, in Piedmont, is perhaps the most celebrated of these. It is of very coarse workman ship and nearly black from^age, or perhaps quality of material, and there is reasonable proof that it is of very considerable antiquity, though there is noth ing but tradition to connect it with St. Luke. A few years ago, the Yirgin of Rimini, which rep resents a numerous class, the automatic or pantomim ic Madonnas, was in high repute; but the profane hands of the Piedmontese civil and military author ities have detected and exposed the springs, cords, pulleys, and other contrivances by which so many sa cred pictures and statues were made to roll the eyes, to shed tears, and make puppet-like gestures, that they have fallen rather into discredit. The Yirgin of Ri mini is a picture of some merit, given by the family of the artist to a church at Rimini in 1810. It man ifested no signs of life until 1850, when it was ob served by three ladies to roll its eyes upward until the pupil disappeared beneath the upper eyelid, noth ing but the white remaining visible. This graceful and expressive movement was repeated during the following days, and after some weeks' practice the image acquired the valuable additional accomplish- Bomish Hagiology under Pope Pius IX. 151 ments of turning the eye-balls laterally, and even of rolling them in different directions at the same time. The prodigy excited great attention, the bishop took the matter in hand, and it was swiftly laid before the pope himself, by whose orders an ecclesiastical com mission was organized to inquire into the genuine ness of the miracle. The testimony of one hundred witnesses was taken and recorded. The depositions filled several hundred folios of paper, and an abridg ment of them was printed, which may still be had cheap at the church of Rimini, plain copies being sold, even to heretics and scoffers, at only two francs ; to those specially blessed by His Holiness Pius IX., one franc extra. The pope authorized the corona tion of the image in his name, and bestowed upon all who should visit the Church on the day of the coronation, or within fifteen days afterward, and per form the required services, plenary indulgence and remission of all sins, transferable, per modum sufi fragii, to any of their friends in purgatory. 152 Mediaeval and Modern Saints and Miracles. TV. MAEIOLATKY ET FRANCE. — CONCLUSION. Fbance, as is well known, always has been, and still is, " the leader in the march of modern civilization and progress."* Yictor Hugo declared that, even after the catastrophe of 1870, France looked down upon the rest of the world as a giant looks down upon pigmies. But she is not less distinguished for her spiritual graces than for her military and political greatness. Her very revolutions are miraculous in their benignity. Her sovereign is the Eldest Son of the Church, the Caliph of the Faithful ; she is the official champion and protectress of Catholicism all over the world. All Catholics are, in a religious sense, Frenchmen ; just as, according to sound Mo hammedan divinity, all men are born Moslems, though too often sadly corrupted by evil communications. Hence, as France owes patronage and protection to Romanism, so all Catholics owe fealty to France, and * See any French book, passim. Mariolatry in France. 153 this is the real foundation of the claim of that power to suzerainty over Italy.* It is therefore not sur prising that the Yirgin should have had u the good taste "f to make the territory of that chosen land the Romish Palestine, the theatre of recent apparitions and revelations surpassing in splendor and impor tance all former manifestations of her glory and of her partiality for Frenchmen. Such apparitions have been very frequent since the return of the Bourbons ; but professional jealousies among the clergy have prevented the success of many of the devotions orig inated by them. Two, however, have spread a celes tial lustre over the closing years of the reign of Louis Philippe and the empire under Napoleon HI., to * For a striking picture of the effects of the domestic and foreign politico-religious policy of the French Government, see "La France," the last 'and ablest work of the lamented Count Agenor de Gasparin. MjiCh interesting information on the same subject may be found in Taxile Delord, "Histoire du Second Empire." See, particularly, the history of the Syllabus of 1864 in volume iv., and of the definition of the dogma of papal infallibility in volume v. In the latter volume is a notice of the organization of a " new devotion" in France, the mem bers of which took a "formal pledge to observe and profess the doc trine of the infallibility of the pope even to blood," usque ad effusio- nem sanguinis. They bound themselves to propagate this doctrine by all the means conferred by "authority and affection," to circulate books defending it, and to suppress those attacking it. The proceed ings of the association were secret. The pope wrote letters of con gratulation to persons of position who joined it. — Page 605. t See speech of Bishop Segur, quoted post. 7* 154 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. which latter prince, more than to any other man, the recovery of the Romish Church from the decadence with which it was threatened at the first organization of the republic is to be ascribed. The first of these was the apparition of the Yirgin, in 1846, to an igno rant and stupid peasant boy and girl,* aged respect ively eleven and fifteen, near La Salette, in the De partment of Isere. The scene of the apparition was a desert plateau, frequented only by shepherds, at the height of six thousand feet above the sea, and hence called by the devotees the " new Sinai." A dazzling cloud of light first appeared to the children, which soon spread and displayed a beautiful woman crowned with a halo of glory, but with a sad expression of countenance. She called the children to approach, saying she had great news to communicate to them. She then began to declaim against the sinfulness of the peasantry in neglecting the worship of the Yir gin on Sundays, and in taking the name of her Son in vain in their profane swearing ; for it appears that the wagoners of the Isere swore as terribly as did " the British army in Flanders." She declared, with many te^rs, that if her people did not submit, she * The dullness of the girl, Melanie, was such that, notwithstanding the illumination of her spirit by the Virgin, she was not intelligent enough to receive the communion till two years later. Mariolatry in France. 155 would let go the arm of her Son, which was growing so heavy she could no longer hold it. " I have al lowed you," said she, " six days for labor, and re served the seventh for myself, but you will not give it to me. Your wagoners can not even swear with out appealing to the name of my Son, and it is these two things which make his arm so heavy." She then proceeded to explain that she had spoiled their potato crop the year before, by way of admonition, but that this chastisement had produced no effect. "On the contrary," continued she, "when you cursed and swore about the rot in your potatoes, you always brought in the name of my Son. Well, they shall rot again, and all spoil before Christmas." Thus far the Yirgin spoke in French, and the children, who knew only the jargon of their province, did not un derstand her. Perceiving this, the Yirgin said, "Ah, my children, you do not understand French," and then repeated her discourse in their patois, not from the beginning, but only from the threat about the potatoes. How Father Berthier learned the preced ing part of her revelation does not clearly appear, but we have not the least doubt that his report of it is as accurate as of the remainder. The Yirgin then went on in the local patois, threatening the failure of the crops of wheat, of the nuts, and the grapes, a 156 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. pestilence among the children under seven years of age, and a great famine. She now relapsed into French, which, as there is good reason to think, is her habitual language. Addressing herself to the boy, in a tone inaudible to the girl, she communicated to him a secret, and then a longer secret to the girl, also in French, and in a voice not heard by the boy. The dialogue went on in the patois, and terminated by a charge to the children, in French, to make all this known " to all my people."* The Yirgin then slow ly retired, rose to the height of a metre and a half above the ground, remained suspended a moment, then gradually disappeared, the head vanishing first. Father Berthier is evidently ashamed of the silli ness of this story, but he stoutly maintains the genu ineness of the apparition, and declares that the sim plicity of the Yirgiu's discourse could scandalize none except such as have never read the Holy Script ures. We fear that most of Father Berthier's read ers are precisely in this case ; for to the faithful the reading of the Scriptures without special permission, not always easy to obtain, is tabooed. Still we be lieve that his narrative is well suited to the intellect * We regret to say that Father Berthier has not favored us with a bilingual copy of the dialogue, which would have been an interesting study incomparative philology. Mariolatry in France. 157 of his public. He finds a sufficient material proof of its authenticity in the fact of an increase of flow in a small spring, at the scene of the apparition, which formerly often dried up in summer, but has now be come perennial, and is possessed of miraculous heal ing virtues. His Holiness Pope Pius IX. desired to know the secrets confided by the Yirgin to the boy and girl, and which they had religiously kept for five years. Two ecclesiastics of the diocese of Grenoble were commissioned to obtain the important information, which, though with much difficulty, they succeeded in extracting from the children, by demanding it in the name of the pope. Having in the mean time learned to read and write, each child wrote down and sealed its secret, and the Bishop of Grenoble dele gated, a solemn embassy, consisting of two of his cler gy, to carry these " mysterious dispatches " to Rome. They were duly delivered to His Holiness, who did not seem to attach great importance to the boy's rev elation, but was much saddened by that of the girl, which, he said, threatened great woes to France, Italy, and the rest of Europe. The " new Sinai " acquired almost at once an im mense celebrity throughout France. There was a vast affluence of pilgrims, each doubtless contribu- ^58 Mediaeval and Modern Saints and Miracles. ting his mite; and by this means, by special. collec tions, and by pious gifts and legacies, money was soon raised to build a magnificent church large enough to contain twenty -five hundred worshipers, two convents, a large hospice, and a great number of subsidiary structures, monuments, and crosses; and hundreds of thousands of devotees were enrolled in associations formed to promote the worship of the Yirgin of La Salette. In 1872, a national pilgrim age was organized, as Father Berthier says, " under the protection of Ste. Philomena, the thaumatnrgist of the nineteenth century," to do homage to that saint and to the Yirgin of La Salette, "with the double object of obtaining from heaven the salvation of France and the deliverance of the Holy Father." This pilgrimage, in its successive divisions, is said to have numbered two hundred thousand votaries. The devotees of the Sacre" Coeur, who profess to embrace in their organizations in France and in for eign countries not fewer than twelve millions of mem- bers, concurred in this demonstration, and we strong ly suspect that the "national hymn" written for the occasion, and chanted by the pilgrims with wild en thusiasm, derived its lofty poetical inspiration, through a regular medium, from Marguerite Marie Alacoque ; though one may conjecture, with perhaps equal prob- Mariolatry in France. 159 ability, that it is the joint production of Maximin and Melanie, the boy and girl of La Salette. In fer vid emotion 'and lyric elevation it compares very well with Yictor Hugo's "Nous Tavons eu, voire Bhin Allemand/" and with the best of the French Tyr- taean war-songs of the late Franco-German contest. It is not strange, therefore, that the concluding stan za and the burden should have been sung by such a choir in a frenzy of religious patriotism. We regret that Father Berthier does not give the music, but it is safe to presume that it was worthy of the words : Mere d'amour, Vierge de la Sa lette, Voyez-nous tous pleurer a. vos genoux. Calmez l'orage, ecartez la tem- pete, Priez, Priez pour le Pape et pour nous ! Refrain. Dieu de clemence, Dieu protecteur, Sauvez, sanvez la France, Au nom du Sacre Cceur ! Mother of love, O Virgin of Sa lette! Low at thy knees behold! we weeping fall. Calm thou the tempest, bid the storm retreat, Pray, pray thou for the pope and for us all ! Refrain. God our defense, ' Thou mercy art ! Oh save, oh save our France, In the name of the Sacred Heart ! The most important feature of the national pil grimage of 1872 is its evident political character and purpose. It is one of the many evidences of the de liberate intention of the clerical party of France to stir up the people to a new jehad, a new crusade 160 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. against liberty and light, whose first triumph is to be the overthrow of the kingdom of Italy and the res toration of the temporal power of the papacy. Dur ing the pilgrimage the mountains everywhere re echoed the cry of " Long Live Pius IX. !" and the sermon delivered by the Bishop of Grenoble on the occasion is a modern edition of the harangues of Pe ter the Hermit. The bishop even indicates the plan and period of the campaign, in detailing a conversa tion at Rome between the pope and a prelate who bad written a paper on the next conclave. "My friend," said the pope, " your conclave may perhaps not be so very near. So long as I had not outlived the years of Peter, I could not resist a certain fear (frayeur) ; but, since the f afal crisis is passed, my heart is comforted, and I feel that my arm has still strength enough to open the doors of my basilicas at the jubilee of 1875." "Yes, my dear brethren," con tinued the bishop, "the beloved pontiff will live to share the triumph of the Ghurch, after having .wit nessed her battles. He will see, too, the salvation of France, for the destiny of the daughter is inseparable from that of the' mother." The meaning of all this is clear enough ; but the expectations of the bishop and the pope have not been fulfilled, and the period of their accomplishment must be placed in the same Mariolatry in France. 161 category as the Restoration of the Jews and the Sec ond Advent. The splendid success of La Salette soon led to new attempts to get up analogous manifestations elsewhere,* but, as we have hinted, they were often smothered by the local jealousies of the clergy. A late movement in favor of the Perpetual Rosary of Mary was formidable enough to threaten not only La Salette and Lourdes, but even the Sacre" Coeur, and it was defeated only by a solemn resolution of the General Congress of the French Catholic Com mittees at Paris. At this congress, as appears by re cent journals, Pere Edouard, a Dominican, urged, as an infallible means to save France and the Church, the Devotion of the Perpetual Rosary, while Pere Ramiere, a Jesuit, stoutly defended the Devotion of the Sacred Heart as more efficacious. Monseigneur de Segur said that the Holy Yirgin shows very good taste by choosing France for the theatre of her ap paritions, and that Gallicism in France is dead and buried since the 19th of July, 1870. He declared himself in favor of the Sacred Heart, which was finally sustained against the Perpetual Rosary. \ * See descriptions of several apparitions of the Virgin in 1872, in Michaud, "L'Eglise CathoUque Romaine en France," pp. 54, 55, 56. t The new "devotions" which are constantly springing up in 162 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. The failure of many of these attempts is more especially owing to a circumstance which, notwith standing great apparent triumphs, seems to be sap ping the foundations of the Devotion of the Sacre' Coeur and of La Salette — the want of a catch-word, a tangible rallying-point in the shape of a dogma, a quotable maxim or aphorism, in short, of what, in France, Alsace, and Belgium are not always directly connected with the worship of the Virgin. Take, for example, the recent case of Louise Lateau, a French girl, who had the stigmata, or marks of the nails of the Crucifixion, miraculously impressed upon her, was often thrown into "ecstasies" or trances, and was finally commanded, by divine revelation, to abstain from earthly food, receiving no nourish ment but the consecrated wafer of the sacrament daily administered to her by the priest. This delusion was kept up for many months, and excited great discussion in France and Germany, the genuineness of the miracle being stoutly defended bjt the ultramontane clergy. At last a "strong-minded" sister interfered, and refused the priests ad mission to the girl's room. Upon this she soon called for food, re turned to common life, and the supernatural manifestations ceased. Another late candidate for celestial honors is the blessed Germaine Cousin, a wonder-working shepherdess of Pibrac, in the French De partment of La Haute Garonne, who was beatified in 1867. The municipal council of Toulouse, having impiously refused to vote a statue to this holy girl, the city has incurred the divine wrath, and, according to the Gazette de Nimes, "it is probable that the fearful inundation of 1875 at Toulouse was a terrible punishment inflicted by Heaven for this scandalous refusal If the city council had voted what was asked, Divine Providence would not have treated the capi tal of Languedoc so severely." And, again : "We prefer," said they, "a fountain to a statue. God has sent them an overwhelming fountain." According to the same authority, the only portion of the city walls which resisted the fury of the flood was " that constructed by the old monarchy." Mariolatry in France. 163 these days of deep and thoughtful investigation into foundations, is called a principle. At one of the congresses of the Holy Alliance, the assembled sov ereigns proclaimed "Totus mundus stultizat et im- aginarias Constitutiones quserit" — The whole world is gone a-fooling after constitutions. Men now go a -fooling after principles, even if they signify no more than that "crumpets is wholesome," and gov ern their lives by jingles of words and hollow max ims which they imagine to be of necessary and fun damental truth. Of course in this enlightened gen eration a brand-new devotion will thrive the better if it has this capital stock to show as its raison oVitre. The prevalence of the potato- rot in the Isere and the profane swearing of the wagoners of that rustic and obscure department were hardly a dignus vin- dice nodus demanding the intervention of a goddess, hardly a basis on which to found a new religious dispensation. A " new departure " must clearly be taken. The picturesque and easily accessible valley of Lourdes, in the vicinity of attractive scenery much visited by tourists, and closely connected with fre quented watering - places (so that the fashionable world might conveniently resort thither " to repent at idle times"), with no rival shrine in the neighbor hood, and with a population of such advanced intelli- 164- Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. gence that a number of them could read, write, and cipher, and that several newspapers (including, of course, the Univers, and, alas ! even the Bevue des Deux Mondes) had subscribers among them, was se lected as the scene of the new avatar. It was obvi ous that with such advantages, and with the help of a good working " principle," Lourdes might do much. These expectations have been realized, and in fact the very initial wonders of Lourdes have not been surpassed even by the merveilles of General Fail- ly's chassepots at Mentana. In the mise en seine the Madonna of Lourdes much resembled Our Lady of La Salette, but it was more artistically conceived and executed — better got up, in short — and it had, what La Salette wanted, a fulcrum, a ttov o-rw, in the dogma of the Immaculate Conception promulgated in 1854 by Pius IX. This dogma had been strenuously re sisted by the wisest portion of the Catholic clergy, and though most of them had nominally submitted, yet the new article of faith had by no mean's settled down into an accepted doctrine in 1858. A revela tion on this point would do much to crush opposition on the one hand, and to edify and encourage the more docile on the other. The Immaculate Concep tion, therefore, was judiciously selected as the nucle us of the new devotion, and it is not strange that the Mariolatry in France. 165 present pope should regard this confirmation of a dog ma of his own definition with marked favor. The authoritative historian of this apparition is Mr. Hen ri Lasserre ; and the edition of the work we quote, a large octavo of 400 pages, is accompanied with a brief from Pius IX., dated the 4th of September, 1869, recognizing the genuineness of the manifestation, and praising the book and its author according to their merits, which indeed are great. Mr. Lasserre has devoted much time and labor to his work, has visited the sacred locality, taken long journeys to confer with witnesses, and made personal investiga tion into every accessible source of information as to the reality of the miracle. In short, to use his own words, he has endeavored "to follow the excellent method so admirably employed by Thiers, in acute •research and diligent and persevering labor of prep aration for writing his great work, ' The Consulate and the Empire.' " Mr. Lasserre evidently feels that he has equaled, if not surpassed, his prototype. We will not undertake to draw a parallel between the two writers in point of literary merit, especially in style, .because we are obliged to content ourselves with a Dutch translation of the new Gospel,* which * The translator's name is not given. We are unable to reveal what his blushing modesty withholds, but we run little risk in saying 166 Mediaeval and Modern Saints and Miracles. does not soothe the ear so agreeably as Mr. Thiers's well-turned periods. But, in justice to both, we are bound to say that the Chauvinism of the one and the religious enthusiasm of the other have borne fruit of much the same quality, and as historical monuments, the apotheosis of Bonaparte in "Le Consulat et l'Empire," by Mr. Thiers, and the glorification of the Yirgin of Lourdes by Mr. Lasserre, as we have it in the Low -Dutch version, "Onze Lieve Yrouw van Lourdes," have about an equal right to be considered veracious records. The Yirgin of Lourdes met with some opposition even in ecclesiastical circles; but the discipline of the Church soon put to" rest all clerical questionings. The civil authorities were not so soon disposed of. There had been doubting Thomases among the priest hood, and there were Rabshakehs among place-hold ers with figured buttons and embroidered coat- col lars. The question of patronage or suppression went from the groundlings of official life up to syndics, prefects, ministers, and was finally laid before the majesty of Napoleon III. himself, then in the height of his glory as patron of the Romish Church. But Mr. Lasserre shall tell the story in his own eloquent that the version is ab.uno e Societate Jesu. We use the fourth edi tion, printed at Ghent in 1873. MariolatryinFrcm.ee. 167 way : " The emperor had quietly watched the origin and progress of the new revelation before the minis try appealed to him for instructions. " Immovable, according to his habitual custom, si lent like the granite sphinxes which keep watch and ward at the gates of Thebes, he viewed the contest ; he observed the changing aspects of the struggle in expectation that the public conscience would, so to say, prescribe to him his decision." — Page 296. " Na poleon is no garrulous monarch. He seldom makes his thoughts known by. words, but usually by deeds only. When he learned the foolish and violent meas ures by which the minister, the prefect, and their subordinates had brought the Imperial Govern ment into contempt, his eye flashed, he shrugged his shoulders in suppressed wrath. A cloud of pro found indignation spread its wrinkles over his se vere brow. He seized his table-bell and rang it vio lently. " A servant appeared. "The emperor, meanwhile, had written with a trembling hand something upon a slip of paper. He folded the paper, gave it to the servant, and said, ' Carry that to the telegraph !' " What he had written was a very brief dispatch to the prefect, to the effect that he could not be too 168 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. quick in recalling his orders with regard to the cave of Lourdes, and in leaving the people free. " The telegraph, say the philosophers, is only light ning. " That day the prefect, Baron Massey, was of the same opinion as the philosophers. The telegraphic thunder-bolt of the emperor fell suddenly before him, and he was stunned as if his house had been de stroyed by a stroke of lightning." — Page 303. But we are anticipating our narrative. The recip ient of the Lourdes revelation was Bernadette Soubi- rans, a stupid girl of fourteen, affected with some or ganic disease, not altogether so ignorant as her sister of La Salette, but who had been taught nothing but the Lord's Prayer, the Angelic Salutation, the Creed, and the Gloria Patri, which she said with her rosary. The vision much resembled that of La Salette. Las serre describes the costume of the lady with a gusto which betrays the assistance of a professional mo diste. We can not follow him in these details, but we can conscientiously recommend the translation we are using to any lady desirous of familiarizing herself with the Low-Dutch vocabulary of the art of millinery. Bernadette saw the apparition eighteen times on different days, and on each occasion she had compan- Mariolatry in France. 169 ions or spectators, sometimes as many as twenty thou sand, who saw and heard nothing. One is not sur prised to learn that Louis Yeuillot, editor of the Uni vers, was present on one of these occasions. As the lady did not speak on her first and second appear ance, the companions of the girl advised her to bring pen, ink, and paper the next time she went to the scene of the visions — a lonely mountain glen closed by a precipice known as Massabielle, or the Old Rock — in order that the lady, whom they conjectured to be a soul in purgatory, might write her wishes. The girl offered them to the apparition, but the lady opened her lips, and said : " What I have to say to you I need not write. Do me the favor to come here [daily] for a fortnight." — Page 46. At one of the appearances the lady made two communications to the girl, one a secret for herself, the other a mes sage for " the priest," ordering that a chapel be built for her. The priest directed the girl to ask the lady, at her next manifestation, to give some token, some evidence of her power. " It is February," said he ; " tell her to make a rose-bush bloom if she wishes a chapel built." The girl communicated the message, but did not receive a direct reply. The vision smiled, told her to pray for sinners, and communicated to her another personal secret. At the next interview 170 Mediaeval and Modern Saints and Miracles. a third personal secret was communicated, and Ber nadette was told to drink and wash at the spring, and eat some of the herbs which grew around it. There being no spring near, the girl was confounded, but she dug with her hands at the spot pointed out by the Yirgin. Muddy water flowed into the hole and gradually swelled into a plentiful fountain, which still continues to flow.* At the next appearance of * Monsieur Lasserre took the pains to gauge the spring, and informs us, with praiseworthy exactness, that the delivery is 85 litres per min ute, which he computes to be equal to 5100 litres per horn1, or 122,400 litres per natural day of twenty-four hours. As only a homeopathic dose of the miraculous fluid is needed for a cure, this supply of about 1000 barrels per day is enough for the present domestic and foreign market ; and we have little doubt that it will increase in proportion to the demand. The water of Lourdes, warranted to "keep good for any length of time in any climate," is now exported by the cask to the Spanish American States ; and it is not improbable that the fervor inspired by the introduction of this new religious stimulant aided the priests to stir up the mob that murdered a Protestant clergyman in the city of Mexico a few months since ; and very likely it had » part in the still more recent burning of witches in that enlightened country, in the submission of Ecuador to papal dictation, and in the riots in New Granada. The liability of this sacred fluid to the excise tax, on sale for use elsewhere than at the spring, has proved a knotty question in France. The local authorities attempted to enforce the payment of the duty, and lawyers could see no ground for a distinction between the water of this spring and that of ordinary healing mineral springs ; but the Central Government at Paris, having duly considered this weighty problem, a grand renfort de besides, was of opinion that the water of Lourdes, not being a natural or an artificial product, is not taxable, and decreed accordingly. It appears from later advices that Mariolatry in France. Ill the lady, Bernadette begged her to tell her "who she was, and what was her name." The apparition folded her hands, looked up to heaven, said, "I am the Immaculate Conception!" and vanished from sight. The formula thus enunciated, on the author ity of the Yirgin herself, a "principle" was pro claimed around which a new organization of devo tees could rally, and the great object of the manifes tation was attained. The motive of the Yirgin, Mr. Lasserre thinks, was " to bear witness, by her appear ance and her miracles, to the truth of the latest doc trine defined and proclaimed by the Church and by St. Peter, speaking by the mouth of Pius IX., a dog matical matter of faith." — Page 169. Our philosoph ical historian attaches great importance to the form of the declaration. " The Mother of Our Lord Jesus Christ did not say, ' I am the Immaculate Mary,' but, ' I am the Immaculate Conception,' as if to express the perfect and essential quality of the divine priv ilege which she alone, since Adam and Eve were created by God, possesses." — Page 168. Bernadette's success excited emulation. Many idle children, among them one of the choir-boys in Ber- the same question is now pending at Rio Janeiro in reference to the customs duty on a case of four dozen bottles of Lourdes water just im ported into that city, on speculation, by way of trying the market. 172 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. nadette's church, saw visions apparently not less re markable than those of the girl ; but the curate, wor thy Mr. Peyramale, who seems to have been the ad ministrator of the miracle from the beginning, im mediately took active measures to suppress these manifestations, and Bernadette remained without a rival. Our readers will probably not find it difficult to conjecture how this enlightened man was able to distinguish between the true miracle and the false. The orders of the Yirgin for the construction of a house of worship were obeyed ; the foundations of a stately church, which has since been completed in a style of great magnificence, were immediately laid ; hospices and other buildings for the accommodation of pilgrims have been erected ; and the line of a rail way in course of construction from Tarbes to Pau was changed so as to pass by Lourdes, at a consider able expense as well as increase of distance. But, as we have said, the great advantage of Lourdes over its rivals, Paray-le-Monial and La Salette, lies in the possession of a catch-word connected with a favorite dogma of the Church. The revelation of the La Sa lette apparition was trivial and insignificant, and its reputation is sustained wholly by its miracles and by the patronage of a powerful party who use it for po litical purposes. But miracles grow on every bush. Mariolatry in France. 173 No religious imposture fails for lack of supernatural proof. The miracles of La Salette were outdone by those of Lourdes even in the infancy of that revela tion. La Salette, having no solid basis, and lying re mote from frequented routes of travel and places of fashionable resort, is gradually sinking into a mere local superstition. The Devotion of the Sacred Heart is, indeed, wide-spread and flourishing ; but it is only by a strong effort and the patronage of French official circles, which cherish it as especially a nation al dispensation, that it is kept up. The devotion of Lourdes, on the contrary, has all the elements of self- support. By the laws of action and reaction the won ders of Lourdes have magnified the dogma of the di vinity of Mary, and the growth and diffusion of that faith have given a new sacredness to the scene of the apparition of Massabielle which so signally confirmed it. Hence the Devotion of Lourdes is a growing re ligion, and, as nothing succeeds like success, its first triumphs have been already far outshone by its later glories. The crowds of votaries increase every day. New and more brilliant miracles are hourly wrought. The demand for its water is extending, arrangements have been made for its regular exportation to for eign countries, and it competes everywhere with the mineral waters of atheist Germany and other pro- 1 74 Mediaeval and Modern Saints and Miracles. fane sources in partibus infidelium* The "New Sinai," or La Salette, is paling before the rock of Massabielle. To the superficial observer nothing seems wanting to assure the permanent supremacy of the Dispensation of Lourdes. But France loves novelty. There is a fresh heavenly revelation some where on her sacred soil every year, as there is a new revolution in her Government. The gross and repul sive materialism of Paray-le-Monial may at last dis gust even France, and better taste may perhaps find a substitute for the fountain of Lourdes in new stars which are rising above the celestial horizon. The Yatican had, for a time, the intention of in corporating Joseph, the husband of Mary, into the Godhead ; but for the present he has been advanced only to the dignity of Patron of the Church, a posi tion which had become vacant by the downfall of its late incumbent, Napoleon III. This post has been but a sinecure during the two years which have elapsed since the promotion of Joseph, but a new ap parition and a few miracles may make him a for midable rival to the cultus of the Sacred Heart and * The administrators of the Devotion of Lourdes have added a new stimulus to the fervor of French worshipers, by announcing that the favor of their Virgin is promised to France in the coming war with the German Empire, and she is now popularly known as La Vierge de la Revanche, the Bellona of the War of Revenge. Mariolatry in France. 175 the Devotion of the Yirgin. The greatest danger to these devotions, however, is that prefigured in the photograph we have mentioned. In that design, Mary appears in the part formerly assigned to Christ, at the right hand of the Heavenly Father ; and the central position of the scene, in the radiance of the efflux from the dove, is occupied by Pius IX. Mary and the Immaculate Conception have had their glo rification at Lourdes; Pius IX. and the dogma of papal infallibility are entitled to theirs. Infallibility is a higher prerogative than sinless purity, and the material worship of Rome will reach its consum mation only when Pius IX. — possibly not before his death — shall reveal himself to some Jesuit pro tegee and proclaim, "I am the Papal Infallibili ty!" The legendary lore of modern Italy,- absurd and often demoralizing as it is, falls, nevertheless, short of that of France in a quality which is best expressed by a French word, niaiserie. The Italian intellect can not readily dive to a bathos in which Gallic su perstition floats as at its natural level, and consequent ly the better - instructed classes in Italy reject with scorn foolish and profane fables which seem to be readily accepted by the majority of even educated men and women in France, and by too many of the 176 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. same relative social position in Great Britain and the United States. The eminent Monseigneur Dupanloup, Bishop of Orleans, who, according to Nau, sustained the mirac ulous manifestation of the Yirgin of La Salette, late ly issued to the clergy of his diocese a long letter on modern prophecies and prodigies. Having unfortu nately committed himself in favor of La Salette, the bishop was obliged to be cautious in speaking of re cent miracles, but he is very severe on prophecies, and justifies himself by citing cases where the Holy Office at Rome — one, mirabile dictu! even in the time of Pius IX. — has condemned pretended revela tions, prophecies, ecstasies, visions of our Lord Jesus Christ and of the Holy Yirgin, as "frauds and false hoods." How Monseigneur Dupanloup discriminates between the^impostures which he and Pope Pius IX. have sanctioned, and those which he and Pope Pius IX. have condemned, he does not inform his clergy. He could not, of course, explicitly denounce by name the Sacre" Coeur, La Salette, and Lourdes, be cause, not to speak of his own Unfortunate self-com mittal, an authority to which he must at least affect to bow has recognized them as genuine ; but his lan guage most unequivocally embraces them all, and we can not but hope that his letter is meant as a recan- Mariolatry in France. Ill tation of the approval he had given to cheats and superstitions from which his better reason recoils. We have hinted that these devotions have been used for political effect, and have been sustained by the influence of official circles. Persons who are not familiar with the polity of states which recognize a particular sect as constituting an official or nation al church, have little conception of the vast moral power exerted by the governments of such countries in religious matters, even when no legal restrictions exist against dissent. Wherever there is a state re ligion, religion in the governing class is purely an af fair of state, and the higher circles conform to the official religion as rigorously, if not as conscientious ly, as to the court costume at royal entertainments. When the miracles reported to be wrought at the tomb of the Abbe" Paris, who died in the odor of sanctity in the reign of Louis XIY., produced an ex citement which threatened the public peace, the su pernatural manifestations were suppressed by a royal edict, which, though parodied by the wits, was acqui esced in by the multitude without a murmur. The governments of Catholic countries have rarely en countered any serious opposition from the people in carrying out measures of ecclesiastical reform. The Government of Italy has not had the slightest 8* 178 Mediaeval and Modern Saints and Miracles. difficulty — except from foreign intrigue — in abolish ing the ecclesiastical courts, in making civil marriage obligatory, in suppressing the convents, and fiually in forcibly discrowning the pope of a diadem, his usur pation of which had been sanctioned by the tame acquiescence of a thousand years. Portugal, Spain, and Naples expelled the Jesuits from their dominions even while" the society was sustained by the Holy See; and the successive tottering governments of Spain found their people readily submissive to all the late laws which tend to overthrow the domination of the priesthood. In short, for centuries civil gov ernment has proved itself to possess stronger moral power than Rome, wherever it has had the courage to defy her. The papacy lives chiefly by political support, and the shrewder of the French devotees at the three fashionable shrines of Paray-le-Monial, La Salette, and Lourdes are rather courting the favor of rulers and aristocrats than suing for celestial graces ; for the Tuileries, not the Yatican, is the real capital of the Franco-Romish religion. There is, perhaps, no one respect in which the gen eral opinion of our times so much exaggerates the achievements of modern progress, and the power and value of modern improvement, as in its estimate of the present depth and diffusion of intellectual culture Mariolatry in France. 179 among the Christian population of the world. We fancy that the Christendom of the nineteenth centu ry is too securely enlightened to be in any danger of a relapse into the blackness of darkness which cov ered the earth a thousand years ago. But the cha otic age which preceded the reign of Charlemagne gave birth to no more senseless and degrading super stitions, to no blanker idolatry and fetichism* in relig- * Idolatry is the ascription of the divine essence or attributes to a created being or thing, whether a person, an image, or a representa tive object, conceived to be entitled to worship as an impersonation or incorporation of the Deity. The term fetichism (the Portuguese fei- tico, fictitious, delusive, magical) is sometimes applied to the worship of malignant demons, but in present usage it more commonly signifies religious homage or adoration paid to a material creature or thing, supposed to be endowed with preternatural power of good or evil, and to be capable of propitiation by superstitious observances. Hence the worship of the Virgin Mary as partaking of the divine essence, ac cording to the definition we have quoted from Suarez, St. Dionysius, St. Bernardin, St. Pier Damiano, and St. Buonaventura, and as she is actually conceived of by the ignorant classes in countries where the Romish religion prevails, is idolatry. With the refined and spiritual ly minded among the devotees of the Sacred Heart, sentiments of rev erence for the divine may, and doubtless do, underlie and elevate the worship to the dignity of idolatry ; but with those who accept the ma terialism of Father Gallifet and the manual of St. Sulpice— and these, we fear, are the majority — their devotion is as purely a fetichism as the direct adoration of a block, or the propitiation of a bread-fruit-tree by a sacrifice. The worship of relics, as inherently possessed by mi raculous powers and virtues, belongs to the same class. It may, how ever, claim some indulgence, as having a foundation in the natural in terest we feel in material objects connected with the life of those whom we regard with love or veneration. But there are many Romish fe- 180 Mediaeval and Modern Saints and Miracles. ion, to no more arrogant claim, no more tyrannical exercise of ecclesiastical power, than have disgraced the generation in which we live. The impostures of miracle-workers are as gross, the abuses of ecclesias tical discipline as flagrant, the stolid slavery of the reason and the conscience to priestly authority as ab ject, in a large proportion of the highest and the low- tichisms, such, for example, as that of the abitino, or scapulary of Mary — a sort of under-jacket of blue silk — which have not this palliation. "As men think themselves honored by having in their service persons who wear their livery," says De' Liguori, "so Mary is gratified if her devotees wear her scapulary." The efficacy of this "livery" is such that those who wear the abitino of the Immaculate Conception are en titled to the benefit of all indulgences granted to any devotion, holy place or person. Every time they recite six Paternosters, Ave Marias, and Gloria-Patris, they acquire five hundred and thirty- three plenary, and innumerable temporal, indulgences, all transferable per modum snffragii to souls in purgatory or other sinners in need. The scapu^ lary must be worn day and night until quite worn out ; and if it has been duly blessed, the benediction — in bestowing which the priest plays the part of the medicine-man or conjurer — will pass by succession to the new one which replaces it, without any new ceremony, and so on, toties quoties. — Glorie di Maria, Ossequio VI., vol. ii. The abitino has the great advantage of sparing the wearer the trouble of expensive pilgrimages, visits to particular churches, charities, and good works of all descriptions, and is a convenient substitute for medals, crucifixes, amulets, and relics. Hence it is one of the most eligible contrivances yet devised for securing the soul-hele of the possessor, and at the same time for encouraging national industry, by promoting the sale of some millions of sleazy blue jackets every year. This pitiful superstition has been sanctioned by many papal ordinances, and, as might be ex pected, these have all been confirmed by the never-failing Pius IX. by decree dated December 3d, 1847. Mariolatry in France. 181 est ranks in populations which claim the Christian name, as at any period of European history known to us. It is within the life-time of most, if not of all, who will read this article, that Jewish children have been kidnaped by priests, to be educated in the Romish religion;* that erring nuns have been built * Edgar Mortara is the son of Solomon Mortara, a Jewish mer chant and manufacturer of Bologna, then under the joint dominion of ' the pope and of Austria, and was born at that city in 1852. At the age of two years he was so severely ill that his physicians gave him over, and discontinued their visits. A Catholic Jewish servant in the family seized an opportunity, when no other persons were present, to baptize the child. Edgar, however, unexpectedly recovered, and the fact of his baptism was concealed for four years. About this time an other child of the family fell ill and died. Before his death, an old woman advised the servant, who still remained in the family, to save him from eternal misery by baptizing him. The servant told her old friend that she had baptized Edgar when supposed to be at the point of death, but intimated that the sacrament had availed nothing, be cause the child had recovered, remained with his parents, and was growing up as a Jew ; she therefore refused to repeat the experiment with the other child. The old woman revealed the facts to her con fessor, who reported them to the bishop, and he, in turn, to the car dinal legate. One evening in June, 1858, by order of that prelate, a detachment of the police took possession of the house of the father, and at four o'clock the next afternoon tore Edgar from the arms of his mother, and he was carried to Rome in a carriage between two bailiffs. The family were frantic with grief, and in the course of the day the principal Jews of Bologna interceded with the cardinal to spare the child, and resorted to the means commonly employed by the Jews to escape persecution by Catholic rulers, the offer of a large sum of money, but in vain. The boy was placed in a religious house at Rome with catechumens, and afterward transferred to San Pietro, in Vincoli. The father repaired to Rome, and had audiences of the pope 182 Mediaeval and Modern Saints and Miracles. up in convent walls ; that the papacy has proclaimed itself divinely inspired and infallible; that a pon- and of Cardinal Antonelli, but got nothing but empty words. He re turned again with the mother, but even her anguish failed to soften the stony hearts of the pontiff and his minister. The parents were al lowed to see the boy, who was of an excessively timid character, but only in presence of a priest, and when his mother asked him whether he wished to go home with her, he turned to her to say yes, but a look from his keeper, which he well understood, deterred him from expressing his wish. He was now sent to Alatri, whither his parents followed him ; but they were soon obliged to flee, because the mob, whom the priests had persuaded that the parents meant to kill the child to prevent his being brought up as a Christian, assailed them with threats of taking their lives if they did not instantly leave the town. The family removed to Turin in 1859, and the father visited Paris and London, in the hope of obtaining diplomatic aid for the re lease of his son. More than one foreign power exerted itself in his behalf, and the public opinion of the whole civilized world severely condemned the papacy. Even Louis Napoleon, who was then in mil itary possession of Rome, and could, of course, have rescued the child, if so disposed, expressed disapproval of the conduct of the priests and their head, but refused to take strong measures to repair the wrong. The boy was carefully educated at Rome, made great proficiency in his studies, was much flattered and caressed by the pope, and received early ecclesiastical promotion. In 1870, after the liberation of Rome, the father and brother visited the city ; but the arts of the priests had weaned the heart of the youth, then eighteen years of age, from his natural affections, and he no longer desired to return to his family. But the priests, fearing the effect of continued intercourse with his friends, sent him to Belgium. By a papal dispensation he received full orders as a priest before the canonical age, together with a lucra tive benefice in France, where he still remains, and he has preached with much success in that country and in Belgium. Keller, author of " L'Encyclique du 8 Decembre, 1864, et les Prin- cipes de 1789," a book rivaled in absurdity only by some of the works of Donoso Cortes, affirms, p. 151, that " the Church has always pro- Mariolatry in France. 183 tifical encyclical letter has formally approved every doctrine proclaimed, sanctioned every official act per- fessed and maintained, as an inviolable principle, not only respect and tolerance for those who are not born in her bosom, but also their lib erty to educate their children in their own worship ;" and, again, p. 296 : " The [Romish] Church has always proclaimed and respected, more than any other, the right of parents to educate their children in their own belief, however erroneous. If there occurs, from century to cent ury, an exception like that of little Mortara, such exceptions have the advantage of establishing, in a formal manner, the limits which the Church has prescribed to herself and the infinite precautions with which she has surrounded the rights of the parents." He proceeds to state that the Church forbids the baptism of Jewish children without the consent of the parents, "except in case of imminent danger of death," and justifies the kidnaping of the child Mortara by the priests on the ground that " he had become a Christian, in spite of the Church, as it were," and that his baptism by the servant "gave him a right to be educated in the full knowledge of the truth," and the pope " would have given his own life rather than abandon a soul for which he had become responsible." The sincerity of the Church in such professions may be judged by the following case, in which there was no pretense of " imminent dan ger of death," and yet the child, baptized in direct violation of the pretended rules of the Church, was forcibly detained from the parents • by the priests : On the 25th of July, 1864, Joseph Coen, a boy nine years of age, the son of Jewish parents residing at Rome, disappeared from the shop of a Catholic shoe-maker to whom he had been apprenticed, and who at last confessed that he had secretly baptized the child, and given him up to a priest to be conducted to the school of catechumens. The parents repaired to the convent in search of their son, but were driven away with brutal insult, and the mother was saved from imprisonment only by the intervention of the French embassador. Influential per sons, including the Catholic members of the diplomatic corps, endeav ored to effect the release of the boy, but the Roman Curia paid no heed to their remonstrances. Upon the liberation of Rome by the Italian 1 84 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. formed, renewed every claim advanced, by the Rom ish See and priesthood in the long period of their ex istence. And, to crown all, it is but five years since one of the crudest and bloodiest of religious perse cutors was canonized by Pope Pius IX., and declared a worthy object of adoration for the perpetration of atrocities never surpassed in the wildest excesses of human wickedness.* In our self-complacent security against the return of mediseval barbarism, we habitually forget that there are important countries in both Europe and America where the proportion of the people who have received scholastic training at all, or indeed any instruction except catechetical lessons, is smaller than it is in Mohammedan Turkey and in some other Ori ental lands, and not yery much greater than it was in the darkest period of the Middle Ages in Europe. If we inquire what per cent, of the inhabitants of the army on the 20th of September, 1870, Joseph's parents, who had re moved to Leghorn, returned to Rome in the hope of recovering their child, but were assured by the superior of the convent that he had run away, and that nothing was known of him. After an active search by the new police, he was found in the house of a lay employe of the convent, to whom he had been committed for concealment, and was restored to his parents by the Royal Govemment. His discovery took place just in time to prevent him from being carried off in disguise by an Irish priest, in pursuance of an arrangement between the superior of the convent and the priest. * See Appendix XII. Mariolatry in France. 185 Latin, Celtic, or Slavonic states of the Old World, or of the Hispano -American countries of the New, or even of our own Southern and South-western terri tory, so much as know the letters of the alphabet, we shall find that in several of them, from one-tenth to one-third only of the males, and scarcely more than half of that proportion of the females, have the slight est acquaintance with the arts of reading and writ ing. And even of those whom educational statistics report as able to read, a large share are not sufficient ly instructed to comprehend any written or printed. matter except the simplest possible narrative ; while of those who read with a certain fluency, and write sufficiently well to keep their own accounts, there are comparatively few who can follow the drift of a ser mon, or a forensic or political discourse, or under stand any argument which does not assume the form of an appeal to their prejudices or their passions. In the German states, in Great Britain, and in the Northern United States, the masses are better in structed ; but even here it is constantly apparent that mere knowledge of words and facts, though an in dispensable means of mental culture, does not neces sarily imply any such discipline of the reasoning fac ulty as to qualify the possessor to form a legitimate judgment on any abstract moral proposition, or to ar- 186 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. rive at sound conclusions in problems which can be solved only by following a course of logical argu ment. This is especially seen in the total inability of multitudes of persons, highly cultivated in some directions, to weigh evidence, whether direct or cir cumstantial, and determine which way the balance inclines. We believe, indeed, that we do not go too far in saying that, even in what are called the edu cated classes, most men adopt opinions, or rather cherish prejudices or bow to authority, without ever rising to the formation of a judgment upon any ab stract question of a complex character or permanent interest. The aristocratic English pilgrims who flock to Paray-le-Monial and to Lourdes and La Sa lette do not believe the narratives of the recipients of the visions as facts established by reasonable evi dence. They do not exercise their reasoning facul ties at all on the subject. They accept these idle tales because, notwithstanding Dr. Newman's insinu ation to the contrary, their Church has recognized them as genuine and authentic. Their belief in them is a faith founded on authority, not on testimony. They are overawed, not convinced, and, in short, their minds, so far as such subjects are concerned, are in the same condition as those of their ancestors in the time of Thomas a Becket, and as those of the Mariolatry in France. 187 most ignorant classes on the Continent at the present day.* * That Rome confidently calculates on the unintellectual charac ter of the influential and professedly instructed classes, is shown by a thousand proofs, one of which falls under our eye as we write. We refer to the quotations from a letter from the Bishop of Montpellier to the deans and professors of the University of Montpellier, contain ed in the following article in a late number of the London Times. The professors are distinctly informed that all their science, even "physiology," must conform to the opinions of an infallible pontiff. "To the Editor of The Times : " Sik, — A learned French friend has favored me with a copy of a letter recently published in France, and bearing the following title : 'Letter of Monsignor the Bishop of Montpellier to the Deans and Professors of the Faculties of Montpellier.' Its date is the 8th of this month of December, 1875. One or two extracts from it may not be without their value for the people of England and of America, to whom, in our day, has fallen the problem of education in relation to the claims of Rome. " The bishop writes to the deans and professors aforesaid : '"Now, gentlemen, the holy Church holds herself to be invested with the absolute right to teach mankind ; she holds herself to be the depository of the truth — not a fragmentary truth, incomplete, a mixture of certainty and hesitation, but the total truth, complete, from a relig ious point of view. Much more, she is so sure of the infallibility con ferred on her by her Divine Founder, as the magnificent dowry of their indissoluble alliance, that even in the natural order of things, scientific or philosophical, moral or political, she will not admit that a system can be adopted and sustained by Christians, if it contradict definite dogmas. She considers that the voluntary and obstinate de nial of a single point of her doctrine involves the crime of heresy, and she holds that all formal heresy, if it be not courageously rejected prior to appearing before God, carries with it the certain loss of grace and of eternity. "'As defined by Pope Leo X. at the Sixth Council of the Lateran, 188 Mediaeval and Modern Saints and Miracles. The solid and only secure progress — if, indeed, any human gains can be said to be secure — which mod- ' ' Truth can not contradict itself ; consequently, every assertion con trary to a revealed verity of faith is necessarily and absolutely false." It follows from this, without entering into the examination of this or that question of physiology, but solely by the certitude of our dogmas, we are able to pronounce judgment on any hypothesis which is an anti-Christian engine of war rather than a serious conquest over the secrets and mysteries of nature.' "Liberty is a fine word, tyranny a hateful one, and both have been eloquently employed of late in reference to the dealings of the secu lar arm with the pretensions of the Vatican. But ' liberty ' has two mutually exclusive meanings — the liberty of Rome to teach mankind, and the liberty of the human race. Neither reconcilement nor com promise is possible here. One liberty or the other must go down. This, in our day, is the ' conflict ' so impressively described by Dra per, in which every thoughtful man must take a part. There is no dimness in the eyes of Rome as regards her own aims ; she sees with a clearness unapproached by others that the school will be either her stay or her ruin. Hence the supreme effort she is now making to ob tain the control of education ; hence the assertion by the Bishop of Montpellier of her 'absolute right to teach mankind.' She has, moreover, already tasted the fruits of this control in Bavaria, where the very liberality of an enlightened king led to the fatal mistake of confiding the schools of the kingdom to the ' Doctors of Rome.' "Your obedient servant, John Tyndall. "Atheuseum, December 16th." As an illustration of the stultifying influence of a habit of accepting legendary tales upon the authority of the priests, we give the following anecdote : A lady recently perverted from the religion of her fathers to Romanism, being asked by a friend of ours whether she believed the legend of the Holy House of Loreto, replied, " Not yet, but I hope soon to believe it, and I daily pray to God that faith may be given me to accept it. " No doubt the lady's prayer was heard. A ra tional being who has gone so far as deliberately to ask Heaven to take from him Heaven's best gift, reason, is not likely to meet a refusal. Mariolatry in France. 189 ern society has made, is founded not on the supposed superior culture, moral or intellectual, of the highest ranks, nor on the diffusion of instruction among the lowest, but on the conquests which the middle classes, and within the present generation the- female sex, have successively made, first over prejudices instilled into their minds by spiritual teachers, and next over the usurpations of their temporal and ecclesiastical rulers. It was the self-government of the mediseval burghers and commoners, and especially the practi cal discharge of civil and political duties (out of which grew clear conceptions of civil and political rights), that rendered these conquests possible. The leading principle of all these advances is, that men are to be governed not by arbitrary personal author ity, but by their own self-enacted law. This is what underlies the strenuous efforts of municipalities and small jurisdictions to secure, on every change of sov ereigns, an acknowledgment and ratification of their old usages, privileges, local laws, statutes, fueros, or by whatever other name the rules of civic and com munal administration were called. It was not mere ly a blind attachment to old and familiar forms, and to old maxims of right, which inspired these strug gles. The burghers adhered to their customary juris prudence, not because it was ancient and sanctioned 190 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. by time and acquiescence, but because it was the ex pression of their own will and reason, the exercise of self-government in the organized tangible form of law, as opposed to arbitrary rule. The essential dis tinction between law and naked authority is, that the law binds the ruler as well as the subject, and that supreme power can not be exercised except in con formity with its provisions. The real question now pending between the Church, and what ecclesiastics are pleased to call " the world " — between Rome and civilization — is, whether society is to be ruled by law, or by the arbitrary personal will of functionaries set apart from the common life of man, and in no way accountable for the use or abuse of their powers. And this is not a contest between Catholicism and Protestantism. It is a struggle between the Roman Curia, on the one side, and the reason and conscience of enlightened humanity, on the other; and it is as hotly waged within the nominal pale of the Church itself as without it. " Old Catholicism " claims to be the expression of the Catholic, not Romish, idea; and though its professed adherents number only thou sands, its real disciples compose the majority of the intellectual and conscientious men and women of the Catholic Church. If we were called upon to name the general class, Mariolatry in France. 191 not clique or circle, of persons which most favorably represents the real culture — we do not mean polish — of the British and the American population, we should say it is that from which juries are ordinarily selected. This class, though intelligent as a whole, is by no means conspicuous for literary or scientific attainment. On the one hand, it admits none who have not a certain amount of education, of familiar ity with active and practical life, of reputation for candor and integrity, and a certain moral and social status in the community. On the other hand, it usually excludes professioual men, whether lay or ecclesiastical, academic teachers, persons in the mili tary and civil public service, and, by legal provision or practical indulgence, artists, authors, editors, per sons devoted to scientific pursuits, and very generally the members of the wealthy and aristocratic circles. Its principal characteristic is a superior good sense, and this is in no small degree the fruit, not of book- lore, but of the training it receives in the ordinary transactions of business life, and in the exercise of municipal functions. But the best discipline enjoyed by this class is from frequent attendance, as parties, witnesses, or jurors, in courts of law, where questions of fact, depending upon the comparative weight of a vast variety of modes of proof, are constantly sub- 192 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. jected to searching examination by acute and prac ticed investigators. The persons of whom juries are composed form, too, a large part of the audience when questions of finance and matters of political economy are publicly discussed in municipal assem blies and at political gatherings, and in this way they become familiarized with reasoning upon ques tions of a more abstract nature than those upon which they are usually called to pronounce in the jury-box. The devotees of the experimental sciences, or sci ences of observation, the knowledge of which may be, and often is, carried very far with an incredibly small amount of general culture and a mere infinitesimal degree of large intellectual discipline, and, indeed, all persons engaged in special studies or occupations acquire much acuteness of judgment in their own particular fields of thought and observation, but out of this narrow sphere, they are inferior to average jurymen in the practical exercise of the logical fac ulties in general reasoning. And yet, incontestable as is the superiority of the stratum of society from which English and Ameri can jurors are drawn to any other large division of the population, as sound judges upon questions of fact, or mixed law and fact, what is the present opin- Mariolatry in France. 193 ion of the most experienced British and American lawyers in regard to the system of trial by jury as a means of arriving at justice and truth? What we call the ornamental circles of modern society give abundant evidence that there may be a great deal of "sweetness" with very little "light." Conspicuous as they are for elegance of manner and phrase, and sometimes for a quickness of apprehen sion and readiness of wit which help them to shine in repartee, in persiflage, in dexterous equivocation and double-entendre, in ironical expression and sar casm, and even in an aphoristic Weltweisheit which simulates wisdom, they rank, nevertheless, quite below the middle classes in real practical power of thought and judgment. The worship of fashion in manner and opinion, as well as in dress, creates not only an outward material uniformity in these circles, but a mental and moral solidarity which is eminently hos tile to all original and independent exercise of the higher and better faculties. This is especially true of the latest phase of English society and of its too numerous American imitators. Even so lately as fifty years ago, personal individuality of thought and character was the most conspicuous feature of En glish humanity. With the wide extension of what is considered elegant life in England, this trait is fast 9 194 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. disappearing. The animal gregarious instinct has triumphed over the rational social impulse. The suppression of individuality is demanded by the in exorable law of fashion, and good taste forbids any departure from the forms consecrated by the self- elected hierophants who preside in the drawing- rooms of approved society. An affectation of admi ration for all that belongs to European mediaeval life, often accompanied with the profoundest igno rance of the real spirit and essence of mediaeval his tory, has been for some time the mode in England as well as in America ; and the revival of ecclesiasti cism in religion, made fashionable by Dr. Pusey and his associates, has been followed by a like revival of mediaeval taste in art, and by the unearthing of mul titudes of half-forgotten popular superstitions, which any person of ordinary intelligence would have been ashamed to own half a century ago. In the circles we refer to, old fooleries revived, whether in dress, in opinion, in manners, or in religion, are more at tractive than new. Hence it is fashionable for Prot estant gentry to attend the services at semi -popish places of worship, to build new churches after Mid dle-age models of most ungraceful, clumsy, and bar barous styles of architecture, to discourse about " ori entation" of churches and the " eastward posture" of Mariolatry in France. 195 the priest ;* it is thought a graceful feminine weak ness to shrink from dining thirteen at table, or from sitting at a stand lighted by three candles ; and, above all, among persons affecting the slang and cant of modern aesthetical criticism, it is fashionable to talk of the peculiar character impressed on mediaeval art by the devotional feeling of the builders and carvers and painters of the "Ages of Faith." * See a letter from E. B. Tylor in a late number of the London Times on this "childish fancy," which is unequivocally a heathen observance, accepted, indeed, by the Greek, but not by the Romish Church. Catholic metropolitan churches or cathedrals, it is true, are often placed east and west, but this is because they are built on the ancient foundations of duly "oriented" heathen temples, and in gen eral no attention whatever is paid to the points of the compass, in erecting churches in Catholic countries. They conform to the lines of the streets, or are posited in compliance with other considerations of convenience, as any one may see by referring to a plan of Florence, Rome, or any other Italian city. We have witnessed ludicrous mistakes by Protestant ecclesiologists who have attempted to find the cardinal points and steer their course in Italian cites, by " the church ;" but the most extraordinary case of "orientation" known to us was in the building of a chapel at a well- known scientific school in the United States. It was supposed by the learned gentleman consulted on the occasion that not the rising of the sun at the equinox, but Jerusalem, was the time Christian Kiblah, and therefore that the chapel should front the Holy City. To deter mine the precise direction of Jerusalem was not altogether a simple matter, and after much discussion it was decided that the main aisle, or longer axis of the chapel, should coincide with a great circle pass ing through its site and the city of Jerusalem, which would of course, be the shortest route between the two points. Hence the chapel fronts a point some degrees north of Jerusalem, and indeed does not face any part of Palestine. 196 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. There were even in the darkest period of the Mid dle Ages, as there have been among the absolute skeptics of ancient Greece and Rome, the Moham medans, the Buddhists, and even the pagan popula tions of the world, individuals distinguished by the possession of every intellectual quality, every moral virtue, which sheds lustre on humanity. But these were always, as they are to-day, rare exceptions; and a vast majority of the rulers and the people of all classes and all countries, in those long -centuries, were characterized by arbitrary tyranny, vice, igno rance, and superstition to a degree to which the pres ent day scarcely furnishes a parallel ; and we are not speaking at random when we affirm that, with a few very narrow and very brief exceptions, the best Euro pean government, the best general condition of so- called Christian society, in the Middle Ages, were worse than the worst now existing in any portion of the civilized or even semi-civilized world. The pre tended "Ages of Faith"* are a pure historical, or * Romish and Romanizing authors are generally wise enough to re frain from fixing precise dates and localities in their rhapsodies on the "Ages of Faith ;" and the chronology and geography of the times and countries when and where humanity enjoyed the blessedness they fable of are much like those of the old romances of chivalry and the legends of the Romish Church. Sometimes, however, a writer is reck less enough or ignorant enough to "lay the venue," as lawyers sajr, of his fiction with a precision which enables the reader to detect the Mariolatry in France. 197 rather, ecclesiastical, fiction, a deceitful and dishonest fable, wholly without any basis of fact — at least in falsity of his representations. Thus Keller, " L'Encyclique, " etc., p. 167, in general eulogium on all that is detestable in the history of Eu ropean Christendom, speaks of " les beaux jours de Gregoire VII. et d'lnnocent III.," the noble age of Gregory VII. and Innocent III. To the reigns of these popes belong the establishment of the celibacy of the clergy and of obligatory auricular confession — two of the most demoralizing measures ever ordained by human power ; the proclama tion and confirmation of the temporal as well as religious supremacy of the papacy over all civil governments ; the renewed activity of relig ious persecution stimulated by Innocent III. in his letter to an arch bishop in Western France in 1209, ordering that heretics "per prin- cipes et populum virtute materialis gladii coerceri, "be exterminated with the sword by princes and peoples ; and in the crusade against the Albigenses, undertaken and prosecuted with unscrupulous blood-thirs tiness at his instigation. These beaux jours were followed by an un interrupted succession of others not less splendid, under the papal sway of the following centuries down to the reign of Alexander VI. , soon after which the reaction caused by the Reformation, although it did not reclaim Rome, yet checked for the time her further progress in the direction she had been so long pursuing. The commencement of the "Ages of Faith " is lost in the obscurity of early mediaeval history, but they embrace the whole period from the earliest trustworthy annals of the papacy down to the reign of Leo X., an era, as Gasparin has well described it, "of darkness, of tears, of blood, of triumphant iniquity and immeasurable calamity," an "iron age, in which Rome ruled all, and humanity sunk to the lowest point at which its existence was longer possible." The impression made on all candid minds by the thorough study of this period is that, to the vast majority of men, its centuries were Ages of Despair, illumi nated by no ray of earthly hope, no intelligent faith in a blessed here after. And yet Keller, "L'Encyclique," etc., p. 155, thinks that even the Inquisition ought to be regarded as a beneficent institution, be cause it "served as a dike against the overflow of the cruelty of the people " toward heretics ! What a religious training the people must 198 Mediaeval and Modem Saints and Miracles. the sense usually ascribed to the phrase — a period when the popular masses, or even the more intel ligent ranks, devoutly believed in, worshiped, and obeyed an unseen God. The faith of the centuries thus designated in fashionable religious circles was what the Jesuits and their nominally Protestant al lies are trying to make the religion of this genera tion — a faith in fetiches, far more degrading than the blindest worship of natural forces impersonated as gods ; a faith not a whit more intellectual, more spir itual, or more Christian than that which prompts the native population of many countries of British India to build, at this day, heathen temples rivaling in di mensions, in cost, in splendor, and in constructive skill the proudest triumphs of European religious archi tecture.* If such a halcyon period, such a Golden Age, as religious enthusiasts dream of had ever real ly existed, its central point of supreme excellence would, of course, have been at the focus of Romish devotion, the Eternal City and the Pontifical States ; and other countries would have been favored with have received from their priests if their fury had made them more terrible to Jews and Protestants than even the tortures of the Inqui sition! See Milman, "History of Latin Christianity;" Gregnovius, " Geschichte Roms im Mittelalter;" the chronicles of Burchardus and Sufusura ; and the dispatches of Giustinian, just published by Villari. * See Fergusson, " History of Architecture," 1867, vol. ii., p. 630. Mariolatry in France. 199 spiritual and temporal blessings in proportion as they yielded to the influences which radiated from Rome. But the history of the Romish capital and State dur ing the whole mediaeval period is that of an earthly pandemonium, where crime reveled unchecked and vice received the honors due to virtue. Foreign lands, too, have at all times been degraded, depraved, and miserable according to the extent to which their government and their social institutions have been molded and controlled by Rome. Nor is there the slightest historical ground for be lieving that the ecclesiastical builders and artists of the ages in question were intellectually or morally above the general level of their times, or above that of the architects and hod-carriers, the railway con tractors and navvies, who execute the plans of " ec- clesiologists " and engineers in modern London and New York. The sickly sentimentality of ecclesiasti cism infers the piety and purity of life of the church- builders and decorators of half-forgotten ages from the character of their works, as the critic, judging from the internal evidence of his writings, thought that Thomson must have been a great lover of ath letic sports, rural life, and cold bathing ; or as Tom Moore's hymnics prove him to have led a devout and godly life, while, with rare exceptions, all we know of 200 Mediaeval and Modern Saints and Miracles. the actual biographies of mediseval religious artists shows that Calandrino, and Buffalmacco, and Dore di Topo, and Mariotto Albertinelli, and the like, were on the same moral plane as the majority of their profes sional brethren. Many among the most ignorant and degraded classes in France, in Spain and Portugal, in Italy and in Spanish America, do not believe or profess any form of even nominal Christianity; while those of the same classes who call themselves Catholics are often as completely polytheistical and idolatrous in their religious faith and practice as the followers of any superstition ever invented by man ; and Dr. Newman can not be ignorant that it is the teaching of his and their Church and its clergy which have made them so. If they worship " many gods, but no God," it is Jesuit Rome whose instructions and ex ample they are following. It is fashionable, especially among essayists, re viewers, and pamphleteers, to sneer at any expression of apprehension of danger from the extension of ec clesiastical influence and the spread of popular su perstition in England and the United States, as, in deed, at earnestness of feeling on any moral question, or, in fact, on any subject more serious than the mer its of a danseuse, the genealogy of a pug or a lap- Mariolatry in France. 201 dog, or the approaching nuptials of a couple in high life. The diplomatic maxim, Surtout,pas de zele, is a sacred canon in good society, especially in questions of ethics, criticism, and religion. A settled moral conviction of any sort is a weakness or provincialism, implying a want of knowledge of the social culture which is the real. religion of this age; and any at tempt at an exposure of the policy of Rome is tri umphantly put down by classing it with the old vul gar mob-watchword of " No Popery." The most ef ficient allies of obscurantism and intellectual slavery are those who affect to believe that the religious lib erties of Christendom are in no danger. It is un doubtedly true that in Protestant states, as England, Prussia, the United States, and in all countries where there is a strong, even if numerically small, Protest ant population (as in France before the Great Catho lic revival under Napoleon III.), Rome uses much cau tion in her policy, and employs every art to allay the jealous "prejudices" of the Protestants against her encroachments. The sermons of her clergy, her pe riodical press, her popular religions literature, her schools, are dexterously toned so as to disarm suspi cion and veil her real aims and purposes. Hence the populations of these countries are generally wholly ignorant as to the real pretensions and purposes of 9* 202 Mediaeval and Modern Saints and Miracles. that Church ; and few of those under whose eyes this essay may fall have any knowledge of Romish leg endary lore — the sole religious popular literature now current in Catholic nations — much of which has never been translated into English or German, but which will be introduced elsewhere as fast as the people can be prepared for it. This remark, how ever, is far .less true at the present moment than it would have been twenty years ago. Since the defi nition of the new dogmas of the Immaculate Concep tion and especially of papal infallibility, Rome has become far bolder and more undisguisedly aggress ive than before, and threats of the ultimate suppres sion of religious liberty have appeared even in Amer ican Catholic journals. Yarious political events have recently occurred which have supplied the priesthood with new arguments, if not new instruments. Many liberal-minded persons in various European countries have lately been driven into conservatism by the art ful use made of the excesses of the Communists of Paris, who certainly perpetrated in 1871 atrocities frightful enough to need no exaggeration, but upon whom the Thiers Government has succeeded in throwing the responsibility of much destruction com mitted by its own troops in putting down the Com mune, and commencing the work of "vengeance" Mariolatry in France. 203 so emphatically threatened by Mr. Thiers. The fear of "petroleum" has been a very efficient bugbear among the wealthy and aristocratic circles. The Jesuits have availed themselves of this feeling, and their own ranks, as well as those of the older regular orders, have in recent years been, in an uncommonly large proportion, recruited from those classes. The notion of a solidarity between the aristocracy and the Church is industriously propagated. Titles of no bility, orders, and decorations are largely distributed by the papacy, and many a vacillating Catholic in the higher ranks is reclaimed by the bestowal of a star or a ribbon. At the same time, as nothing comes amiss to the net of the great " Fisherman," Rome has profited by the lessons of Napoleon III., who taught, in his doctrine of universal suffrage, the importance of securing the lower classes, which wield the brute force of nations, and, of course, will be especially needed in the appeal to the sword now undisguised ly proclaimed by the Jesuits, as the final arbiter of the great social question. They are as assiduous in wheedling the mud- sills as in cajoling the ranks which form the pastigia, the summits and pinnacles, of the social fabric. In short, Rome is preparing to attack, both from above and from below, the middle classes, who are everywhere the true depositaries of 204 Mediaeval and Modern Saints and Miracles. the strength, the intelligence, and the virtue of the modern world. The real security of modern society from a return of the moral and intellectual midnight of the "Ages of Faith" is not to be found in the dilettantisms of social or literary culture, or in the indifference of skepticism. If we are saved at all from these men acing perils, it must be by appeals to the reason and conscience of classes whose training comes, and must always come, as much from active, intelligent, and re sponsible participation in the serious and thoughtful duties of life as from literary and scientific attain ment. One of these classes we have already pointed out, and the other is fast growing in strength and im portance by what we do not hesitate to call the most hopeful movement in the social and intellectual his tory of man since the Founder of the Christian relig ion virtually proclaimed the emancipation of the fe male sex by prohibiting arbitrary divorce at the pleas ure of the husband. We mean the recognition of the right of woman to the best development of her faculties which the resources of modern progress fur nish to either sex. The redemption of the mind and heart of woman from the blind submission to moral authority, which has so long been inculcated upon her as the natural law of her sex, will deprive priest- Mariolatry in France. 205 craft and imposture of their easiest conquests and their most efficient instruments. The saints and seers of modern superstition are nearly all women. In all ages, women, from their depressed and depend ent position, their feeble and nervous bodily organiza tion, the comparative ignorance in which their lords have kept them, and their consequent too general weakness of character, have been frequently medi ums, if not originators, of religious imposture. The prevalence of the false and demoralizing principle, proclaimed by priests and libertines alike, that wom en should " cultivate the affections " at the expense of the intellect, prepares them to become willing instru ments in the hands of any designing man who suc ceeds in securing their sympathy and good- will ; and the cunning so often found associated with physical and even intellectual weakness makes them dexter ous auxiliaries in spreading popular delusions. These circumstances explain the readiness with which they habitually abandon the faith of their fathers and their childhood for more sensational or more imag inative forms of religious belief and worship. Relig ious propagandism finds in them its first disciples, its most efficient apostles, and the recruiting-sergeants, the SeelenverTcdufer, of Rome begin their operations upon Protestant circles by misleading the women. 206 Mediaeval and Modern Saints and Miracles. So long as the current of fashion sets toward cere monialism in religion, so long " Cowls, hoods, and habits * * * * * * rags, relics, beads, Indulgences, dispenses, pardons, bulls," and the preachers who teach their flocks to "seek to please A God, a spirit, with such toys as these," will succeed in catching the fancy of shallow wom en; but when knowledge, mental discipline, and, above all, a far wider and higher sphere of action, shall have become the acknowledged right and the actual possession of the sex, they will, in much larger proportion, cherish faiths which ask the evidence of no new miracles, worships which can be paid without help of material appliances. APPENDIX. ECCLESIASTICAL FORGERIES. The monastic forgeries of the Middle Ages form a subject al together too vast to be disposed of by a simple reference to their existence as a well-established and familiarly known fact. The multitude of these spurious documents, the wide range of ob jects they embrace, and the extent to which the Romish Church is indebted to them for the success of her usurpations of power, are little understood in Protestant countries. The thorough investigation and complete exposure of these fabrications is no longer possible, for so many of the evidences of their falsi ty have been destroyed by the keepers of the ecclesiastical ar chives where they were deposited, that in many cases the his tory and immediate purpose of the concoction of documents now certainly known to be false can not be traced. This much, however, is certain : that there are few cases of contested right on the part of the Romish Church in which forged documents, adduced by the papacy, have not at some period or other con tributed to the support and final acceptance of its claims. In the case of the " False Decretals," the work of an unknown author, though ascribed at first to Isidore of Seville, and aft erward to an apocryphal Isidore Mercator, or Peecator — and which, from the middle of the ninth to the end of the fifteenth century, received the almost universal assent of Catholic eccle siastical writers— the genuineness of the documents is no long er insisted upon by Rome. They have served their purpose. Use has confirmed the usurpations they sanctioned, and the pa pacy now holds by prescription what it indisputably first ac quired by forgery and fraud. 208 Appendix. Catholic historians, though acknowledging the fabrication, sometimes affect to doubt whether the Decretals ever had much practical influence. But Dollinger, who, however heretical at present, was orthodox in 1863, when he published his " Papst- fabeln des Mittelalters," speaking, in the preface to that work, of these and other mediseval ecclesiastical forgeries, says : "All these fables and inventions, however different may have been the occasions which gave birth to them, and however definite or indefinite may have been the objects of their composition, [wie absichtlich oder unabsichtlich sie entstanden sein mogenj, exerted nevertheless a great and often decisive influence upon the whole current of opinion in the Middle Ages, upon the his torical and poetical literature, and upon the theology and juris prudence of that period." The " False Decretals " contain the Apostolic Canons, the pretended donation of Constantine, fifty- nine letters or decrees attributed to thirty different popes of the primitive ages, various genuine extracts from an older col lection long supposed to have been made by Isidore of Seville, and thirty-seven apocryphal pontifical decrees, with some other less important pieces. Although the collection contains here and there an unimportant authentic paper, and some garbled and distorted extracts from genuine documents, yet in general it is a work of sheer invention, and for three centuries has been universally admitted to be so by all Catholics, except possibly some half-taught English or American perverts to whose new born zeal the spurious origin of the Decretals is not a fatal ob jection. Perhaps the most important single document in this conge ries of forgeries is the alleged donation of the Emperor Con stantine giving to the Church, in sovereignty, a great multi tude of houses, lands, and extensive territories in every part of the empire, numerous civil and ecclesiastical jurisdictions, rights, privileges, and honorary distinctions, all crowned by the bestowal of Rome and Italy upon the papacy, in return for his baptism and his miraculous cure of the leprosy by Pope Silves ter ; the baptism, the cure, and " Pope Silvester " alike being all invented for the occasion. The comprehensive language of tho donation gave room for much variety of interpretation, and by some it was held to embrace all the Mediterranean islands, and Appendix. 209 even Ireland, which the papacy afterward generously bestowed upon the crown of England. The mere fact that the grant professed to convey an immense number of estates and other rights to which the emperor himself had no title was no argu ment against its authenticity; for in all ages men generally, and a fortiori emperors and princes, have found it an easy mat ter to give what did not belong to them. The genuineness of the grant was doubted by nobody except the unlucky owners of the territories transferred, and they were in the minority, and in most cases not strong enough to resist a claim advanced under the authority of the emperor and supported by the thun ders of the Church. Not a voice was raised against the gen uineness or validity of this preposterous instrument, until the time of Wycliffe, near the close of the fourteenth century. Many, indeed, seeing the enormous evils resulting from the ex ercise of temporal power by the Church, a power founded on this forged donation, deplored the important grant,* but none questioned its authentic character or legally binding force, and for more than five hundred years the title of the papacy to all the vast possessions thus ostensibly conveyed to it was sup posed to be as incontestable as the right of any sovereign, or any private possessor, to the territory or estate over which he claimed dominion. Although the date and authorship of the "False Decretals" have not yet been historically established, yet they are known to have been in existence as early as the middle of the ninth century, and Pope Nicholas I. (a.d. 858-867) recognized them as authentic, and gave them the full weight of the papal sanction. The place of the fabrication of the " False Decretals " is as un certain as the authorship. There is every pr'vmd-facw probabil ity that they emanated from Rome, and the rule citi bono points unmistakably to the chancery of the Papal Cnria as the locus in * " Ahi, CoDStantin, di qaanto mal fu matre, Non la tua conversion, ma quella dote Che da te prese ii prirao ricco patre 1" Dante, Inferno, canto xix., vs. 115-11S. "Ah, Constantine ! Of how much ill was mother, Not thy conversion, hut that marriage dower Which the first wealthy Father took from thee !" 210 Appendix. quo of their composition. Still, the point is disputed, but it is unquestionable that from the time of Pope Nicholas I. to that of Alexander VI. they were accepted by every occupant of the Romish See, and formed the real basis of the pretensions of Rome to ecclesiastical and temporal sovereignty. To use the language of Milman, "Latin Christianity," book v., ch. iv. : " The ' False Decretals ' do not merely assert the su premacy of the popes — the dignity and privileges of the Bishop of Rome — they comprehend the whole dogmatic system and discipline of the Church, the whole hierarchy from the highest to the lowest degree, their sanctity and immunities, their perse cutions, their disputes, their right of appeal to Rome. They are full and minute on Church property, on its usurpation and spoliation ; on ordinations, on the sacraments, on baptism, con firmation, marriage, the eucharist ; on fasts and festivals ; the discovery of the cross, the discovery of the reliques of the apos tles ; on the chrism, holy water, consecration of churches, bless ing of the fruits of the field, on the sacred vessels and habili ments." Take these away, and what is left of the characteristic and peculiar features or exclusive claims of the Romish Church ? The Decretals constitute the foundation of the claims of Rome to temporal and ecclesiastical supremacy, of most of her dogmas and all her discipline. In short, whatever is distinctive in her faith and practice is traceable directly to what Rome herself has been forced to acknowledge to be a magazine of lies. " They are now," says Milman, "given up by all ; not a voice is raised in their favor ; the utmost that is done by those who can not suppress all regret at their explosion is to palliate the guilt of the forger, to call in question or to weaken the influence which they had in their own day and throughout the later history of Christianity." The period during which these forgeries were universally be lieved to be both genuine and for the most part of divine au thority, embraces the reigns of the great pontifical organizers of the Romish Church, as the supreme head of ecclesiastical and temporal power ; Nicholas I., Sergius II., Gregory VII., Alexan der III., Innocent III., Gregory IX. ; in short, nearly the whole of what is known as the second, or strictly mediseval, era of the Catholic Church. It is to this ora, and to the "False Decretals " Appendix. 211 which, during those many centuries, were constantly appealed to as the highest of sanctions, that most of the worst abuses of the Church belong ; and it is certain that Rome by means of them became what she is, and acquired that "possession" of her usurpations which, according to the proverb, constitutes nine points of the law. Rome, it is true, does not now directly quote the " False Decretals " as evidences of her title, but she constantly cites them at second-hand as irrefragable proofs and authorities, in pontifical decrees which have no other founda tion. The denunciation of this atrocious forgery by Wycliffe and his followers by no means checked the career of Romish falsi fication. Forged conveyances and testaments appropriating lands to what were called "pious uses" — in other words, to the benefit of the priesthood — were so frequent that it is hardly ex travagant to say that a mediseval deed or will of this character is, as a general rule, presumptively spurious. The manufactur ing of false writings was by no means confined to legal instru ments ; but, after the revival of learning, it extended into the domain of literature. Not only were classic authors pervert ed and corrupted in the monastic copies, but whole works were composed in the names of ancient writers, and some of those long maintained currency as genuine productions of ancient Greece and Rome. The detection of the forgeries of Annius of Viterbo and other counterfeiters produced, for a time, a gener al panic among the devotees of ancient learning, and the feel ing of distrust in regard to old manuscripts went so far, that some able critics even maintained that the whole body of ex tant Greek and Roman literature was but a product of the in genuity and leisure of mediseval cloisters. The learned Lipsius, though too good a Catholic to charge such frauds upon holy men who had retired from the wicked world to the sacred se clusion of conventual life, argued in the sixteenth century, in an essay now little known, that the " Commentaries " of Caesar were not the work of the great Roman, but of a counterfeiter as ignorant as he was impudent. One of the most signal instances of ecclesiastical forgery is that of the bull establishing the Inquisition in Portugal. A saintly and zealous priest, to save himself the trouble of a jour- 212 Appendix. ney to Rome to obtain the necessary authorization to worry the obstinate Moorish, Jewish, and Albigensian heretics of that kingdom, drew up a papal bull nominating him Grand Inquis itor of Portugal, with full power to arrest, imprison, torture, and burn guilty or suspected persons, and entered at once, with a sufficient staff, upon the discharge of his sacred functions. When he was in the full tide of successful experiment, and had already celebrated several joyous autos-da-fe', in which he had immolated many unbelieving men, women, and children, a pi ous confrere, jealous of the success of his excellent brother, re ported his proceedings to the papacy, to which, of course, the bull was known to be spurious. But though "Rome never authorizes, she sometimes pardons invasion of her exclusive rights," and as the self-constituted Grand Inquisitor had shown himself as merciless and as energetic a persecutor as Torquema da or De Arbues, it was thought prudent not to convert so pi ous an act into a scandal to the Church, and accordingly the counterfeit bull was confirmed, and the zeal of the ingenious inventor was rewarded and inflamed by the bestowal of new powers and new honors. The principles of what is called " diplomatic " criticism were first investigated in the scholastic establishment of the Broth ers of Common Life — of whom we shall give some account in a following page— and we are not aware that any forgeries are chargeable to the members of this order, which, though at last sanctioned by the papacy, was never regarded with favor by the Holy See. If modern scholarship is provided with a sound paleographical code, and with safe tests by which to try the genuineness of ancient writings, it is indebted for this advan tage much more to the patient labors of the humble Fi-atres Com munis Vitce than to the papal chancery, which has exhibited far greater zeal in defending than in exposing forgeries, however palpable. Appendix. 213 II. OPINION IN CATHOLIC COUNTRIES ON RELATIONS BETWEEN CHURCH AND STATE. The extent to which Catholicism is interwoven with the political institutions, the social system, and the daily life of the French, Spanish, and Italian peoples has not always been duly considered in speculations on the possibility of weaning these nations from their adherence to the Romish Church. At the close of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth century, indeed — when the old Roman empire appeared to have vanished altogether; when the corruptions of the Church had brought the papacy into almost universal discredit ; when France, Spain, and Italy had no longer any great interests in common ; and when the latter country had not yet begun seriously to hope for the restoration of the national unity — there was a strong tend ency in the intelligent classes to the abandonment of the tradi tional religion of Rome, and the adoption of a faith drawn from purer sources. Each of those countries had its reformers, sym pathizing more or less with Luther ; and there is abundant rea son to believe that but for the intervention of the civil power they would all have, in a great degree, emancipated themselves from the moral and spiritual tyranny of Rome. The triumphs of Charles V. not only restored the ascendency of the Romish See, but by bringing into subjection to a single sceptre a vast proportion of the territory of old Rome, and more than compen sating the loss of the remainder by the possession of the Indies. they revived the fading memories of the dominion of the Caesars. and encouraged dreams of the revival of a universal empire The papacy had, from an early period, claimed to be the legiti mate successor and representative of the emperors of the West and this pretension, though not formally recognized, has not been thoroughly and radically repudiated by any of the Latin races. The pope claimed to reign through the territorial sov ereigns. They were to receive investiture from his hands ; they were accountable to him for the exercise of powers derived from him, and liable to deposition by him for abuse of those powers. 214 Appendix. It was this political superstition which led Napoleon I. to de sire the imposition of his crown by the hands of a pope ; and Na poleon III. was animated by this feeling in his visionary plans for consolidating the " Latin peoples " into a sort of confedera tion of sovereignties, of which he was to be the temporal, and the pope the spiritual, head. The expedition to Mexico was avowedly a part of this insane scheme, which embraced also the overthrow of the American Republic ; and this explains in part the persistent hostility of Rome to the Federal Government — a fact admitted and lamented by Montalembert — during the whole of our late civil war. The liberalists in all the countries of Southern Europe are theoretically in favor of severing all connection between Church and State ; but when they come to the practical division of rights and duties between the two, unforeseen difficulties present themselves. First, there is the inborn and inbred conviction, or at least vague sentiment, that a state church, or national or ganized spiritual power, is a necessary part of the machinery of civil government. When you enter into questions of detail on this subject with a Frenchman, an Italian, or a Spaniard, who may have personally repudiated all allegiance to Rome, you do not get far before your interlocutor meets you with the query, But what are we to do with the papacy ? In a conversation of this sort with one of the most eminent European scientists, the writer replied to this inquiry, Deprive it of all legal power, sub ject it to the general law of the laud, and let it alone. "Well," said he, "I see that that is the logical result of my own princi ples ; but I can not overcome the prejudices of my education, which prompt me to sustain a church in which I do not believe." The idea of a political state is complex, and the notion of the Church as an element in the State is too firmly rooted in the Eu ropean mind to be easily eradicated. There are thousands of intelligent statesmen everywhere in the Old World who utterly reject the papacy as a moral or spiritual guide for themselves, but to whom a proposal to deprive it of its usurped privileges and possessions, and to reduce it to the level of a private corpo ration, is as startling as a suggestion for the amendment of the British Constitution by abolishing the judiciary system, and leaving the citizens to sottlo their legal controversies between Appendix. 215 themselves, would be to an Englishman. The Spaniard may see plainly that the Church is an embarrassing institution, which interferes very seriously with the proper action of the organs of civil government, but still he can not get rid of the impres sion that, after all, the superfluous fifth wheel to the coach is connected with the normal four by some sort of obscure cog- greasing, the removal of which might derange the whole ma chine. For this reason, and for the supposed solidarity between the interests of the Church and those of the aristocracy, to which we have alluded in the text, there is in all Catholic countries a wide-spread feeling that a moral Mezentian neces sity has indissolubly united the breathing and palpitating body of the living nation to the dead corpse of the Church, and that Rome and the Latin races must stand or fall together. This sentiment is in a great degree the inspiring element in Giober- ti's speculations on the Primato d' Italia. It floated hazily and confusedly in the mind of the first Napoleon, when he said, "The Mediterranean is a French lake." One of the greatest blessings which could befall these races would be the laying of these ghosts of the CsBsars which spook in the national brain of the whole of them. Even Protestant Latins are not wholly free from this superstition. Guizot cherished it in his dotage, and in 1861 he wrote a pamphlet in defense of the temporal power of the papacy. With Catholics it is almost universal. A Catholic politician may himself shun the church as a pest- house, and even encourage his sons to share in his skepticism ; but he commits his daughters to clerical instructors, and is not content unless his wife keeps on good terms with her confessor. When the dogma of the personaHnfallibility of the pope was under discussion in the Ecumenical Council, and most liberal Romanists hoped for its defeat, a well-known protesting Cath olic predicted the triumph of the measure, and added that his co-religionists were mistaken in supposing that the adoption of the dogma would practically weaken the papacy. On the con trary, he argued that the defiant boldness of the council in obey ing the condgne of its Jesuit leaders would overawe opposition, both within the Church and without it ; that the civil govern ments in the Latin countries would not have the moral cour age to resist this aggression on the liberties of their peoples ; 216 Appendix. that the adoption of the dogma would give a unity and concen tration to the government of the Church which would redouble its energy, and render it practically irresistible. In all contests, he said, the assailant has the advantage of the momentum of a movement of attack, as well as of the fear inspired by the con fidence displayed in the attitude of the aggressor. Rome will abandon her defensive position, march out from behind the in- trenchments, and make a desperate and probably successful ef fort to storm the camp of the enemy. Thus far these predictions have been at least partially veri fied. Governments have paltered with the insolent encroach ments of the papacy on their proper prerogatives, and tamely submitted to attempts to corrupt the loyalty of their citizens, and even of their soldiery, which in a moral, if not in a strict ly technical, sense amount to treason ; weak men have trembled before the arrogance of a power which proclaims itself supreme over the God-given faculties of reason and conscience ; and thus far the advancing march of Rome to universal conquest has been nowhere, except in the German states, formally resisted. Time will show, we trust, that this blare of trumpets, though full of sound and fury, signifies nothing. An open attack, how ever audacious, or even appalling in its display of force, often proves less dangerous than the insidious advance of a concealed foe. It is only slaves who quail at the threat of scourges and shackles ; and the nations which shook off the papal yoke when Rome was sustained by all the power of a Charles the Fifth will not resume it at the bidding of a council. III. THE BROTHERS OF COMMON LIFE. The fraternity entitled the Brothers of Common Life was es tablished and organized by Gerhard Groot, a religious and ed ucational reformer of the fourteenth century, and it continued to exist, in a modified form, until the invention of printing superseded its literary labors, and the spread of the Reforma- Appendix. 211 tion dissolved most of the religious houses of Northern Europe. Groot was a native of Deventer, but was educated at the Uni versity of Paris. After completing his course of study at that famous seminary, he engaged in instruction in the higher branches of knowledge, and acquired great reputation as a lect urer on metaphysics and theology. After some years spent in academic teaching he was ordained a deacon, and devoted himself to popular preaching, not occu pying himself with theological discussion or definition of dog ma, but directing all his efforts to the reformation of the lives of the clergy and the laity, who vied with each other iu impie ty and profligacy. The death of his father having left him in affluent circumstances, he resolved to devote his means to the cause of instruction, and he collected at his own house a num ber of scribes whom he employed in copying Bibles, works of the fathers of the Church, and other religious books, some of which he translated himself, from Latin into Dutch, for the copyists. The sphere of activity of the fraternity was enlarged, and its members adopted the rule of living neither upon the liberality of Groot nor upon charity, as was then common among the monastic orders, but upon the proceeds of their own labor in writing and in giving instruction in schools, of which they founded a large number. The adoption of the principle that the members should earn their own bread excited the hos tility of the mendicant friars, as Groot had foreseen, and the Brothers of Common Life underwent a long persecution from these orders, but finally succeeded in obtaining the papal rec ognition. Thus far the Brothers were under no vow, but later they became organized in regular monasteries, retaining, howev er, the cardinal principles of their original organization. Their houses were numerous in Holland, Germany, and France, and they rendered important services to literature by their tran scriptions of religious and of secular manuscripts, by their crit ical labors in the establishment of correct texts, and by their schools, in which many of the ablest scholars and theologians of the Reformatory period— among others, Erasmus and Thom as & Kempis — were trained. The teachings of the " Imitatio Christi " are believed by those who ascribe that celebrated work to Thomas a- Kempis to be 10 218 Appendix. the expression of the doctrines of the Brothers of Common Life, and to have been imbibed by him in their schools. But, in gen eral, the views of the Brothers seem to have been of a less sub jective and quietistic tendency than those of the author of the "Imitatio;" and it is not, perhaps, out of place to remark here that the conclusions as to the authorship of the treatise in ques tion, which have generally prevailed since the publication of Monseigneur Malou's essay on the subject, have been contested with much learning and ability by Carlo Dionisotti, in a memoir in his "Notizio Biografiche dei Vercellesi Illustri," Turin, 1862. Dionisotti claims the "Imitatio Christi" as the production of neither & Kempis nor of John Gerson, Chancellor of the Univer sity of Paris, a member of the Council of Constance, to whom many have ascribed it, but of John Gersen, a Vercellese of the fourteenth century. If Dionisotti has not conclusively estab lished this theory, he has at least refuted the arguments of Monseigneur Malon against it, and the question must be re garded as still subjudice. IV. THE INQUISITION AT ROME. Keller, iu " L'Encyclique du 8 Decembre, 1864, et les Priu- cipes de 1789," in speaking of the mildness of the Inquisition, says: "Ses buchers n'ont jamais fume' b> Rome" — its piles have never smoked at Rome ; and defenders of the Romish Church in both England and the United States have publicly declared that no instance has ever occurred of the infliction of the pun ishment of death through the agency of the Inquisition at Rome. These sweeping statements are so notoriously false, that it is surprising that their authors should have presumed so far upon the ignorance and credulity of the public as to make them. The case of Giordano Bruuo alone, which is as familiarly known to the students of Romish Church history as the martyrdom of John Rogers to those of the religious persecutions in England, ought to have deterred the apologists of the Inquisition from making an assertion so easily refuted. Appendix. 219 Before the thirteenth century, the functions of the Inquisition were discharged by the bishops in their respective dioceses, and it is doubtful whether the Inquisition had any organization as a distinct institution at an earlier period. In 1238, Gregory IX. instructed the Provincial of the Order of Preachers in Lombar- dyto appoint special ecclesiastical officers charged regularly, and, as it seems, exclusively, with the functions of the Inquisi torial office. Regular inquisitions were soon after established throughout Catholic Europe, and the Holy Office at Rome was organized as early as the fourteenth century. It is true that, for reasons of policy, the papacy denied itself the luxury of gen eral autos-da-fe" at Rome itself; but the dungeons of the Inquisi tion at that city were frequently crowded with prisoners, who, as there is reason to believe, were often secretly dispatched by starvation, or by prolonged torture or other violence. The sta tistics of the Roman Inquisition were never accessible to the public ; and all the compromising records of that institution, together with many other dangerous papers, were burned just before the entrance of the royal troops into Rome, on the 20th of September, 1870. In various works, and among othera, in a life of Garibaldi, published in 1849-'50, it is asserted, upon what appears to be good authority, that after the hegira of Pius IX., the repub licans found in the prisons of the Roman Inquisition a great number of human skeletons, which could have been no other than those of victims of that tribunal. We shall not, however, insist upon these statements, because we have not the means of verifying them. It would lead us too far from our present im mediate purpose to go into an examination of the administra tion of the Holy Office at Rome, and, without referring to re searches the results of which might be disputed, we will con tent ourselves with citing a very few well-known and undeni able instances, from which our readers may judge of the good faith of those who palliate or deny the atrocities with which the Inquisition is charged. Arnold of Brescia was an eminent reformer, who made him self particularly odious in the twelfth century by preaching against the vices of the clergy and the temporal power of the Church. Iu the time of Adrian IV. the partisans of the tern- 220 Appendix. poral power drove Arnold from the city, but he was soon after arrested in the Neapolitan territory, at the personal request of the pope, brought to Rome, tried, condemned, and strangled; his body was publicly burned, and his ashes thrown into the Tiber. It may be said that this is not shown to be a technical case of condemnation and punishment by the Inquisition, be cause it is not certain that the Inquisition had yet been formal ly organized ; but the arrest was made at the instance of the pope, the trial and condemnation were by the ecclesiastical functionaries who officiated as Inquisitors in other cases, and in all but possibly in name it was an instance of Inquisitorial action. Early in the fifteenth century, B. degli Ordelaffi, Merenda, and Matteo di Frosinone were arrested upon a charge of here sy. Ordelaffi escaped by bribing his jailers, and was condemned in contumaciam. His less fortunate companions, Merenda and Matteo, were brought before" the Inquisition at Rome, tried as heretics, and sentenced to be burned at the stake. The sentence was executed at Rome, and the houses of the heretics were lev eled with the ground. In the sixteenth century permission was given to reoccupy the vacant site, and houses were built upon it which were inhabited by Michael Angelo and Salvator Rosa. The case of Aonio Paleario is scarcely less notorious than that of Giordano Bruno. Paleario wrote several anti -Romish theological works, and is the probable author of a treatise more celebrated than any of his positively known writings. This is the " De Beneficio Christi Mortis," or the Benefits of the Death of Christ, which had an immense circulation, and, though it did not directly attack the Church, was most damaging to her pretensions by its advocacy of the doctrine of justification by faith instead of by works, that is, by performing the penances imposed by the priest, which were among the most productive sources of gain to the Church. Paleario was arrested in Tus cany, by order of Pius V., and brought to Rome. He was tried before the Liquisition and charged with having countenanced some of the doctrines of Luther, and with having said that the Inquisition was a weapon against free discussion of religious questions. He was condemned, and hanged at Rome on the 3d of July, 1570, and his body was publicly burned. Appendix. 221 Equally indisputable, and even more celebrated, is the case of the famous Giordano Bruno, a Neapolitan philosopher, born not far from 1550, to which we have already alluded. He enter ed the Dominican order, but abandoned the monastic habit, and passed several years in France, England, and Germany, in all of which countries he acquired immense renown as a lecturer and philosophical writer. His views were much the same as those of Spinosa ; and, though he did not engage in controversial attack upon Rome, his opinions were heretical. Returning to Italy, he was arrested by the Inquisition at Venice in 1598, sent to Rome, confined two years in prison, and upon his refusal to recant, condemned by the Inquisition to be burned at the stake, which sentence was executed in Rome on the 17th of February, a.d. 1600. "Banks and his horse" are often mentioned by English writers of the Shakspearian age. Banks was a professional horse-tamer, the Rarey of his time, who had taught a horse to dance and perform various other tricks. He exhibited his ani mal with success in many cities on the Continent, and at last unluckily ventured to Rome, where he hoped to fill his pockets by diverting the pope and his court. But Banks was an En glishman and, presumably, a heretic. There could be no doubt, therefore, that the horse was a devil incarnated in the form of a quadruped, and horse and man were brought before the Inqui sition, condemned on a charge of sorcery, and burned alive to gether. These cases, were others wanting, would be sufficient to show that the pretense that the Inquisition never took life at Rome is without foundation. Of course, in a city filled with priests and priestly spies, and where almost every citizen was directly or indirectly a pension er of the papacy, heresy would not often be publicly professed, and the occasions for the intervention of the Inquisition, to pun ish and suppress it, would be less frequent than in strictly secu lar communities inhabited by multitudes of lay citizens, differ ing widely from each other in habits, education, and associations. It is, therefore, not strange that among the Jewish and Moorish population of Spanish aud Portuguese towns there should be found a larger number of unbelievers than in clerical Rome. 222 Appendix. The pretended mildness of the Inquisition in the Roman State is a pure fiction ; and there is no doubt that the proceedings of the Holy Office at Rome, though conducted perhaps with more secrecy and less ostentation of inhumanity, were as cruel and as unchristian as those of the sister tribunals in Spain. The notorious "Directorium Inquisitorum," or "Inquisitori al Manual," of Eymeric was designed and employed as a guide aud an authority to all Inquisitorial tribunals, whether exercis ing these functions at Rome or elsewhere. The edition of 1578, as appears from the preface, was prepared at the express in stance of the Directors of the General Inquisition at Rome, aud printed at the public press, in cedibus populi Romani, in that city, under a privilege from Pope Gregory XIIL, who permitted this sad monument of wicked bigotry and sanguinary fanaticism to be dedicated to himself. No Inquisition acted under any authority but that of the papacy. Its first officers were appointed, its earliest tribunals organized, its jurisdiction defined, its modes of procedure and the punishments it was empowered to inflict determined, by the Holy See. The condemnations for heresy almost uniformly charged the accused with the denial of Romish supremacy as the greatest of his crimes. The chief office of the Inquisition everywhere was, not the promotion of a pure and holy life, but the maintenance of the powers and prerogatives usurped by the papacy. It was an agent of the papacy, which was, and, uot having repudiated its atrocities, still is, morally responsible for all its crimes against God and man. We are told that the Inquisition now nowhere exists except in the form of an offico for the censure of books. But why does it not exist ? Simply because, with all its short-comings, civil society in Catholic countries has become, iu spite of the resist ance of Rome, too enlightened and too humanized to tolerate this nefarious instrument of papal ambition and papal hate against religious light and liberty. Had Rome the power, the Holy Office would at once resume its functions over the whole civilized world. The rules which the papacy prescribed for it, the jurisdiction the popes conferred upon it centuries ago, are still in force, unrepealed, unmodified by the unchangeable, irre- formable Church. The Encyclical of 1864 condemns as a damna- Appendix. 223 ble error the doctrine that the Church has not the right to resort to force in the maintenance of what she claims as her rights ; and none who have watched the recent history of Rome can doubt that she would use force against every material and ev ery moral resistance to her aggressions, if her ancient moral and physical power were restored to her. The tone of the papal briefs respecting the suppression of heresy by the Inquisition and by other measures shows clearly that, so far from admitting that any of her powers were sub servient to the uses of the State, the Church always claimed and exercised authority to dictate civil legislation against her etics, and to compel the lay authorities to enforce the penalties prescribed by such legislation or by the Church. Thus Innocent IV., in a brief of the year 1252 addressed to the Provincial aud Inquisitors of Lombardy and the adjacent provinces, after reciting that it was considered that enlarged powers and jurisdiction would make their ministry more fruit ful, proceeds to instruct them to require all municipal bodies, of whatever designation, in those provinces, to incorporate into their jurisprudence all the decrees of the papacy and other ec clesiastical and secular ordinances against heretics, their pro tectors, and associates, and strictly to observe and enforce them, upon pain of ecclesiastical censure, without appeal. In sup port of this brief, the pope issued another of the same date ad dressed to the municipalities and other civil authorities of the above-mentioned provinces, referring to the former brief, and repeating the same injunctions on pain of ecclesiastical cen sures. Not content with these general instructions, His Holiness, ap parently on the same day, issued a much fuller brief, addressed to the same municipalities and other civil authorities, setting forth, at great length, certain constitutions for the suppression of heresy, which the municipalities were to accept and record as a part of their own legislative codes, and adding that the provincial and Inquisitors had been commanded, in case of fail ure to accept and enforce these constitutions by the civil au thorities, to proceed against such authorities by personal ex communication, and interdict against those territories, without appeal. 224 Appendix. The constitutions require every chief civil officer to swear that he would observe and enforce all ordinances, civil and ec clesiastical, against heretics, and declares that all such civil of ficers as may refuse to take this oath, u pro potestatxbus vel rectori- bus nullatenns hdbeantur, et quce, ut potestates vel rectores fecerint, nullam penitut habeant firmi talem" — shall be holden to be au thorities aud rulers no longer; and whatever they may do in the capacity of authorities and rulers shall be wholly without validity. The civil authorities are to pronounce a decree of banishment against all heretics, of whatever age or sex, and any person may seize and retain as his own the goods and ef fects of any heretic. All houses in which heretics have been found are to be destroyed, and the property contained in them confiscated. The constitutions contain about thirty other pro visions on the subject of proceedings against heresy. The same pontiff issued, in 1254, a brief addressed to the same provincial and Inquisitors, by which a crusade against heretics is ordered to be preached, and the ecclesiastics are directed to confer upon all who will take it upon themselves to aid in ex tirpating heresy the sign of the cross, with all the indulgences and privileges granted to crusaders to the Holy Land. Another general brief of Innocent IV., addressed, in 1^54, to all the faith ful in Christ, renews the condemnation of heretics, and pre scribes additional penalties against them and their patrons or defenders ; and the preaching of a crusade against them is again ordered, with many additional privileges to the crusaders, by a second brief issued at Anagni in the same year. We do not find in these briefs, or, indeed, in any pontifical declarations, any evidence of the pretended subserviency of the Inquisition to political supremacy. On the contrary, all civil authorities are held subject to the orders of the Inquisition. Some of the briefs above cited, as well as other early pontifical writings of similar character, refer to the laws of the Emperor Frederick against heretics, and enjoin the strict observance of them. These laws were promulgated by the emperor as a con cession to the papacy to which they were in some sort necessa ry, because the Inquisition had not yet been formally organized. But after this tribunal bad been generally established as a spe cial jurisdiction, the Church required the sanction of civil law Appendix. 225 no longer, and issued its decrees directly to the Inquisitors as its own peculiar functionaries. At this day, when " ecclesiastical censures " not only are gen erally without legal validity, but are resorted to only as a means of constraint upon individuals, and have become wholly obsolete as a weapon against the civil power, the threat of such censures does not seem very formidable. But in the thirteenth century, the ecclesiastical censures, which prelates and other officers of the Church were authorized to inflict by the briefs above quoted, included the power of laying an interdict on both places and persons recusant ; and, in fact, one of the briefs we have cited expressly menaces the disobedient with the imposi tion of an interdict. Since the Reformation, no pope has dared to impose any thing beyond a personal interdict on any Catho lic state, except in the case of Venice, which Pope Paul V. thus laid under the ban of the Church in 1606. There were also in terdicts against England after her emancipation from the papal yoke, but this pretended exercise of ecclesiastical jurisdiction over a country which had renounced allegiance to the papacy was but brutum fulmen, or, as we say, thunder without the bolt. So long as the power of the Church was sustained by the ig norance and superstition of the Middle Ages, the interdict was the most terrible of the weapons wielded by the Romish clergy. An interdicted person was an outlaw; none might give him fire or clothing, food or water. If the interdict was local, the churches were closed ; no bells could be rung ; religious serv ices, if allowed at all, could be performed only in secret ; the crosses and decorations of religious edifices were veiled or hid den ; Lenten food only could be taken ; the mother could not even give a kiss to her babe. Interdicts were enforced with various degrees of severity, and were sometimes, like the gen eral excommunications and anathemas which the present pope scatters with so liberal a hand, little more than nominal. The papacy has never renounced the right of imposing them. But though interdicts have long been disused, traditional popular superstition still regards them with great dread in many Catholic countries. During the French occupation of Naples near the close of the last century, a French general em ployed the interdict as a weapon against brigandage. It is true 10* 226 Appendix. it would have been well understood in an enlightened nation that such means of coercion were not within the power of a general ; but the very threat of an interdict by a French officer produced the speedy submission of a large district in Calabria. The people understood that the bells would be silent aud the churches closed; that the priests would perform no religious functions, not even baptism, absolution for the dying, or the office for the dead ; in short, that they could neither be boru, married, nor buried, except under a curse. They did not stop to inquire into the authority of the general, but they knew that if he had not the right, he had at least the material power to prevent the priests from performing their usual functions, and they were glad to purchase the restoration of these important privileges by accepting the terms dictated by their foreign op pressor. V. PAPAL APPROVAL OF CONDEMNATION OF HUSS. The formal approval of the condemnation of Huss and Je rome of Prague, with the denunciation of the heresies of Wyc- liffe, was anioug the most important official acts of the first year of the pontificate of Martin V. It was promulgated at Constance while the Council was yet iu session, in the month of March following the election of the pope. It fills ten large and closely printed folio pages, and is principally occupied with exhortations to Inquisitors and other ministers of the Church to be zealous in the extirpation of heresy, and in directions as to the modus procedendo in the examination and trial of persons suspected of that crime. The enumeration of the errors of Wycliffe consists of five articles, some of which are pure calumnies against his teach ings, and were probably not really believed to have been ever held by him, either by Pope Martin or by the members of the Council, to all of whom the writings of Wycliffe were better known than they are to the theologians of the present day. The errors most obnoxious to the Rome of that day are the de- Appendix. 221 nial of the doctrine of the real presence, in the Catholic sense ; the propositions that if a sinner is duly contrite, auricular con fession is unnecessary ; that an ecclesiastic in mortal sin can not lawfully exercise his office ; that a pope profligate in char acter has no authority except as derived from the emperor ; that the civil authority may sequester the property of a church administered by wicked men ; that the people may hold their rulers accountable for abuse of power ; that friars ought to earn their bread by their own labors, not by begging— the first clause of which proposition is denounced as scandalous and presumptuous, the last as erroneous; that the Decretals are apocryphal, and tend to wean from faith in Christ, and that the study of them by the clergy is folly ; and that a belief in the supremacy of the Romish Church is not necessary to salvation. The concluding charge is that Wycliffe taught that all relig ions were inventions of the devil. The errors of which Huss was convicted are thirty, most of them relating to the supremacy of the Romish Church and the authority of the papacy. Many a member of the late Ecumen ical Council, in opposing the definition of the dogma of infalli bility, took as strong ground against the pretensions of the pa pacy as Huss seems to have done, and not a few Catholic theo logians now hold that the condemnation, not to speak of the sentence, of Huss was not sustained by the proofs against him. VI. PAPAL REMONSTRANCES AGAINST THE ABOLITION OF THE FORUM ECCLESIASTICUM. The allocution Acerbissimum was pronounced in consistory on the 27th of September, 1852, in reference to the abolition of the Forum Ecclesiasticum in the republic of New Granada. It is too long for insertion in this place, but the following is a synopsis of its contents. It begins with a complaint that iu April, 1845, a law was enacted by the Government of that re public providing that when a criminal charge was pending in 228 Appendix. a civil tribunal against an ecclesiastic, of whatever rank, such ecclesiastic should suspend the exercise of sacerdotal functions until the charge were disposed of. It then proceeds to state that the Holy See protested energetically against this law aud also against the proposed legislative measures of the same Gov ernment — one abolishing tithes without consultation with the papacy, the other guaranteeing to all foreigners who should emigrate to New Granada the public exercise of their religion — and demanded that these laws should not be carried into ef fect, and" ut Ecclesia suis omnibus juris acplendfrueretur libertate" — that the Church should continue to enjoy all her rights and her full liberty. The allocution goes on to recite that the re monstrances of the Holy See had not been heeded, but that New Granada had made laws against the religious orders, and con firmed the expulsion of the Jesuits, " a religious family which, after being long desired and finally invited to establish itself in that country, had been of such great utility in regard to both social and Catholic interests." The republic had even gone so far as to forbid the establishment within its territory of any religious order bound by a vow of passive obedience, and had en couraged the abandonment of the monastic profession. Other enormities complained of were a legal provision that curates should be chosen by the heads of families of the parish, who had also power to fix their.compensation ; the transfer of the vis- itorship of the national college to the lay authorities ; and a new constitution guaranteeing the liberty of the press and of public worship. Then follows a long kyrielle relating to the enforce ment of these wise and just laws by the Government, and, at last, a passionate condemnation of the New Granadian Govern ment for regarding marriage as purely a civil contract, and a solemn declaration that all marriages concluded otherwise than with the forms and sanctions prescribed by the Church are not only null, but criminal. The allocution Nunquam fore was pronounced in consistory on the 15th of December, 1856, on occasion of like abuses by the Government of Mexico, and by that of the Swiss Confederation, and in tone and temper much resembles the Acerbissimum. Besides these allocutions, His Holiness, in justice to himself, ought to have cited his consistorial allocution of November 1st, Appendix. 229 1850, and his letter of September 19th, 1852, to the King of Sar dinia, both of which are most objurgatory and most lachrymose, qualities, however, in which both are, perhaps, surpassed by the apostolical letter of August 22d, 1851, in condemnation of the er rors of John Nepomucene Nuytz. Nuytz was a pestilent heretic, professor in the University of Turin, who had written a couple of scandalous works, entitled "Institutions de Droit Ecchisias- tique," and " Traite" de Droit Eccle"siastique Universel." Nuytz has the honor of having furnished much matter for reprobation in the Encyclical and Syllabus of 1864. VII. ROMISH OPPOSITION TO THE TRANSLATION OF THE SCRIPTURES INTO MODERN LANGUAGES. The modern European tongues had no sooner become writ ten languages than the hostility of Rome was aroused against the employment of them as a medium of religious instruction. Latin, the language of the Church, was at that period but im perfectly known except to persons educated for the priesthood, and who might, therefore, be safely intrusted with the use of the Scriptures in that tongue. At the beginning of the thir teenth century, French had already become a literary language, and Innocent IH. thought it expedient to interfere to check the use of it for dangerous purposes. About the year 1200, he is sued a brief, addressed to two high French ecclesiastics, setting forth that the Bishop of Metz had reported to the Holy See that in the diocese and city of that name a certain number of lay men and women, laicorum at mulierum non immodica multitudo, were applying themselves to translating the divine Scripture into French, holding secret meetings, and scorning the remon strances of the priests. The Bishop and Chapter of Metz, says the brief, had been instructed to inquire who were the authors and what the motives of their translation, and whether the translators duly reverenced the Apostolic See and Holy Church. The bishop had reported that some of those people refused obe- 230 Appendix. dience to the apostolic letters, were going on with the transla tion, continued to hold conventicles, to preach, though not li censed, and, worst of all, publicly to proclaim that God alone was to be obeyed by man, obediendum esse soli Deo. Of course, instructions were given for the suppression of the translation and the punishment of the offenders. The principal danger then, as now, apprehended by Rome from translations of the Scriptures was that men who studied the word of God would adopt the rule, " Obediendum esse soli Deo " — we are to obey God rather than the pope, which, of all heresies, is the most pernicious. VIII. THE EDICT OF NANTES, AND ITS REVOCATION. For a large part of the following sketch we are indebted to Lanfrey, " L'Eglise et les Philosophes au dix-huitieme Siecle," Paris, 1857. The Edict of Nantes, issued by Henry IV. of France, in 1598, after his abjuration of Protestantism and his elevation to the throne, and declared " irrevocable " upon the face of it, was ac cepted by the French nation, in spite of the resistance of Rome, as a part of the organic law of the kingdom. It restored peace and tranquillity to a country desolated by thirty-six years of civil war growing chiefly out of religious questions ; and though it by no means placed the Protestants on a just and equal foot ing, it was, both iu its character and its actual effects, one of the most beneficent measures ever adopted by the Government and people of that country. The Edict of Nantes, drafted, it is said, by Jeannin, Schom- berg, Calignon, and the celebrated historian De Thou, permit ted to the Huguenots, or Protestants, the public exercise of their worship. It made them eligible to all offices ; established in each provincial (judicial) parliament a chamber composed of magistrates of each religion ; it allowed general conventions of persons of the Reformed religion ; it authorized the Reformed Appendix. 231 to lay taxes on members of their own Church for its support ; it provided for the payment of their clergy, aud gave them the possession of four fortified towns, including, as the most im portant, La Rochelle, to which so many English and American Protestants look as the old home, or, at least, resting-place, of their families, and the seat of the national patriarchate of their religion. The Reformed, or Huguenots, remained liable to the payment of tithes and the observance of the days of fast and feast appointed by the Catholic Church. The Edict of Nantes not only restored peace to Fiance, but it re-established France in the position she had long enjoyed in the great European commonwealth ; it produced the revival, or rather the creation, of industrial arts of great economical impor tance, many of which were exercised almost exclusively by the Protestants ; and it consequently augmented the commerce and contributed immensely to the material prosperity of the king dom. Henry IV. was wise enough to turn these new moral and material conditions to as good account as the state of physical and political science then permitted, and if his successors had been as able, and as seriously devoted to the good of their peo ple as he, the surpassing natural advantages of France would have been developed in the course of the seventeenth century to a degree which would have placed her far in advance of ev ery other European nation. During the early part of the long reign of Louis XIV., France was ruled by a regency, and it was not till 1661 that the king took into his own hands the government of his vast domain. In the mean time, though the stipulations of the Edict of Nantes had often been violated by the Catholic Government of the State, the aspirations of the Protestants to official power and con sideration in the kingdom had been disappointed ; and every measure had been employed to depress and humiliate the social position of the Reformed ; yet they had grown in strength and in material prosperity. This increased importance had been gained rather by the elevation of the lower than by the influ ence of the higher classes, and by the development of industry and the general spread of intelligence which everywhere char acterize Protestant in a higher degree than Catholic communi ties. Rome had never ceased to intrigue against the French 232 Appendix. Protestants ; and the two cardinals, Richelieu and Mazarin, who so long governed France, were animated in their policy toward the Reformed as much by sectarian hate as by jealousy of the rising power of the Protestants, which they affected to consider as the abnormal growth of a state within a state. Louis XIV. imbibed the prejudices of these ministers, who selected for him dexterous confessors, and cunningly brought to bear upon him the powerful influence of the Society of Jesuits as well as that of his mistresses, and they had little difficulty in obtaining his assent to the initial measures of open warfare against the Prot estants. The final triumph was reserved to their successors. As early as 1657, the clergy had already procured the revoca tion of various concessions to the Reformed. In the quinquen nial Catholic clerical assembly of 1660, the priests complained of the erection of new Protestant churches and colleges; of the occupation of Catholic cemeteries by the Huguenots ; of their proselytism, etc. ; all of which they stigmatized as acts of force and violence against their quiet Catholic fellow-citizens. It was usual for the clergy to fix, at these assemblies, a con tribution to be paid by them to the exchequer of the State, which they treated as a donation, but which was claimed by the Government as a tax. The nature and amount of this dona tion or tax were always the subject of disputes which generally terminated in some new concession to the clergy, some new in fraction of the liberties which had been solemnly promised to the Huguenots. On the occasion we are now considering, the chief among the many grievances of the priests was the fre quency of apostasies from the Church, brought about by the ef forts of the Protestants. They demanded a decree forbidding the abandonment of Mother Church ; the corporal punishment of relapsed heretics according to an ordinance of Charles IX. ; and the exclusion of Protestants from all public office. " It is true," said they, " that by the terms of the Edict of Nantes, the king declared that those of the pretended Reformed religion might hold public office ; but this privilege is contrary to divine law, because it is inconsistent with the dignity (les bienseances) of our religion. ^It violates the civil law, too, as well as the canon, which forbids the bestowal of office on the enemies of the faith." When the Intondant of Finance appeared before the Appendix. 233 Assembly, according to custom, to demand what he claimed as a debt to the State, he met a prompt refusal which was twice repeated on a renewal of the demand. The intendant humbled himself before the Assembly, and the contribution was prom ised simply as a pure gratification. And gratis ? Oh no ! but upon certain conditions, of which no jot or tittle should be abated. The Church had suffered such wrongs that the As sembly was dismayed, and could not act directly on the subject till they were repaired. The intendant promised signal reparation, and the clergy promised the money — when the reparation should have been made ; and if not, not. Time passes, and the contribution is not forthcoming. The intendant appears for the fourth time, with a sachel full of decrees agaiust the heretics. "As a mat ter of principle," said he, " conditions ought not to be imposed on the king ; nevertheless, your conditions have not diminished his majesty's good-will. He gives you generously all you ask in anticipation of your donation. The vapors which may have arisen in the royal bosom from the warmth of this little discus sion have been condensed into a gentle dew, a shower of de crees and declarations, which his majesty offers you in token of his affection." Then he produces from his port-folio thirteen edicts in favor of the clergy and against the Protestants. He spreads them out on the table, and exclaims, " Now the money, if you please !" Not at all. His majesty had rejected certain demands which seemed too oppressive. The clergy insist on the pound of flesh, and postpone the proposed gratuitous dona tion until these demands shall have been granted, and reduces the amount from four millions of livres to one million eight hundred thousand, which, upon due satisfaction, it raises to two millions. At the Assembly of 1665, the intendant appeared again, and asked a new donation in a discourse evidently borrowed from a romance of the day. "Messieurs," said he, "on entering this hall, I felt, from the lustre of your persons and your purple, an effect, as it were, of the rays of the rising Aurora on the Egyp tian statue of her son, which she animated every morning, and gave it an impulse which produced a melodious tune from the lyre and the bow in its hands." Fine words, though their rheto- 234 Appendix. ric was a little marred by the evident supposition of the in tendant that the lyre of Memnon was a fiddle. Even the touch ing conclusion, "Majesty's coffers are dry and empty," found no generous response from the mitred prelates. " Times are hard," said the presiding bishop ; " the clergy are poor ; you asked a great deal at the last Assembly." Iu short, you have not car ried out your promises against the heretics. A little later, the deputy of the clergy addressed a formal harangue to the king in person, thanked him for the " wonderful zeal of his indefati gable defense of the altars, for demolishing the temples and suppressing the colleges of the Reformed." "Heresy is at its last gasp, great sire," said he, " but it must be crushed altogether. Strike the final blow !" etc., etc. He then went on to demand the suppression of the Protestant parliamentary chambers (a judicial guarantee granted by the Edict), and severe penalties against relapses. Banishment did not suffice ; nothing short of the galleys, and now and then a little hanging, drawing, and quartering, would answer. The granting of these trifling favors was rewarded by a " gratuitous " donation of four million livres. L'appe'tit vient en mangeant, and when, in 1670, our old friend the intendant, came again, the sour looks of his most reverend audience showed him at once that a stout resistance must be encountered, and he framed his action accordingly, on the prin ciple of the song : " Oh ! how Shall I deal with this horrible cow P I will sit on the stile, And continue to smile, Till I soften the heart of this cow." " I confess, messieurs," said he, " that the sight of your august Assembly hath coufouuded me, for I thought that after having so many times enjoyed the felicity of appearing before it, and contemplatiug its arraugement, the posture aud the persons which compose it, my eyes, feeble though they be, would not be dazed by the gorgeous lustre of yourselves and your purple. " But I experience the reverse, and acknowledge that I am gifted with naught of that high faculty which enableth the eaglet to gaze fixedly on the sun. "The astonishing brilliancy of so many heavenly bodies overpowers me, and would strike me dumb, but that strength Appendix. 235 is infused into me from the aspect of a dominant sun,* which comforts my sight and gives me courage to pronounce his orders. The dominant sun is our incomparable monarch of France, and I may justly apply this title to him as the first luminary, not only of France, but of the universal world, before whose brill iant rays the greatest stars of all other sovereignties pale their fires." He concluded with the usual formula, "Date obolum Bellsa- rio." After the shameful decree of 1665, the king had vacillated in his policy toward the Huguenots, who were secretly favored by the great minister Colbert as the creators of the industrial pros perity of France. The clergy reproached the orator with the weakness of his master, observed that the public finances were flourishing — an improvement which they had not the honesty to ascribe to its true authors, the Huguenots — and, therefore, the king could have no need of extraordinary aid from the clergy, and con cluded by refusing the subsidy. Louis was irritated, but he wanted money. He promised compliance with the desires of the clergy, and they iu turn resolved, " Since his majesty has communicated to the Assembly many very weighty reasons for asking extraordinary aid, and among them sundry which indicate great designs for the advantage of religion, for which he has pledged his royal word, we consent to give him two million four hundred thonsanddivres, which his majesty will understand as an effect of our entire confidence in his royal word." The Assembly then formulated its demands, which were thir ty in number, including the removal of all Huguenot temples built near churches, the incorporation of the separate parlia mentary chambers into the general body of the tribunals, for which this curious reason is given : " Since the motives for the establishment of these chambers exist no longer, there having been, for forty years, complete peace and unison of feeling in the people." What an admission of the inoffensive character and * Had Goethe read this magniloquent oration when he wrote : "Ihr Anblick giebt den Engeln Starke" (Its sight doth give the angels strength f) 236 Appendix. conduct of the persecuted Huguenots ! . The clergy demanded, further, that the Huguenots be deprived of the right of taxing themselves for religious purposes ; that they be required to con tribute to the support of Catholic churches and schools; that their temples and cemeteries pay the land-tax; that in their schools children shall be taught only reading, writing, and arith metic ; that foreign ministers be expelled from France ; that Protestant creditors shall not sue their debtors who turn Cath olic for three years; that Catholic curates, accompanied by a bailiff, may demand and obtain by force admission to sick Hu guenots. In 1675, the Assembly demanded that Huguenots be forbidden to possess cemeteries in hamlets, villages, or towns ; that mixed marriages be declared void, and the children of such incapable of inheriting ; that in cities and villages where there may be a town physician, no Huguenot physician be allowed to practice. In 1680, the clergy expressed satisfaction that almost all they could ask had been granted. In this year the dragon- nades were introduced as a means of conversion. The dragon- nades consisted in quartering soldiers upon Protestant families, and encouraging these rude guests in every form of brutality toward their heretic fellow-citizens. It appears from a letter of Louvois that in 1685 a company and a half of dragoons were quartered on a single family, who were inevitably ruined in a week. If the family did not renounce their religion, the men were beaten, the women abused, and then dragged to the church by the hair; if they still held out, the dragoons scorched their feet and hands by a slow fire. Sometimes they would take turns for several days in preventing a Huguenot from sleeping by pinching, pricking, and dragging him about, until he would sell his religion for a little rest ; and all this the Government and fashionable society approved ! " The dragoons make very good missionaries," wrote Madame de SeVigne\ Madame de Mainte- non wrote to her brother that in Poitou lands were to be had almost gratis on account of the ruin of the heretics, and ad vised him not to let slip so fine an opportunity of acquiring an estate cheaply. In the Assembly of the clergy in 1685, the president said : " Let us strive, messieurs, to compel the heretics to render to God the worship which is his due, and we shall then enjoy our Appendix. 237 good things in peace. The king has done much for the Church, but you will be surprised, messieurs, after what we have ob tained from his justice, that we still have any thing more to ask." Among the things which it still remained to ask were : That it be permitted to the ecclesiastics, in places where there is no public worship, to baptize the children of heretics in spite of the opposition of the parents ; that those of the Religion be for bidden to perform any of the functions of an advocate, or of a printer or book-seller, all which the king at once granted. The Edict of Nantes was now virtually rescinded ; none of its guaranties subsisted ; the Huguenot churches were every where demolished ; all the liberal professions were interdicted to the heretics ; their schools and academies were closed, their judicial representation abolished; their ministers had been driven into exile. The Edict of Nantes was but a dead letter, but it had not been formally revoked. It still served as a ral- lying-poiut for the Protestants, and as a reproach to their per secutors. It must be canceled, obliterated, annihilated. This the clergy demanded at the Assembly of 1685 ; and at the next general assembly after the fulfillment of their behest by the king, they voted him an extraordinary aid of twelve millions of livres, a truly enormous sum, considering the value of money two centuries ago. The king, no doubt, was acted on more or less by influences outside of the clerical Assembly ; but the successive revocation of the privileges conferred by the Edict, and the final abolition of even the form of it, were substantially the work of the cler gy, performed at their suggestion, and paid for with money which they had wrung from the people. A courtier was one day comparing Peter the Great to Louis XIV. " He was greater than I," said Peter ; " but in one thing I have surpassed him : I have reduced my clergy to submis sion ; he was controlled by his." The revocation interdicted the public exercise of the Reform ed religion, but permitted those who professed it to remain in the kingdom, " without being disturbed on pretext of religion." The Marshal de Noailles complained that this clause would pre vent conversion to the true faith. Upon this the miuister, Lou- 238 Appendix. vois, issued a new proclamation revoking even this last vestige of religious liberty, and the clergy at once recommenced their persecutions. Three hundred thousand, or, according to some authorities, eight hundred thousand, men, women, and children, fled from France : those who could not escape were reduced to choose between the mass and the dungeon; children were torn from their mothers' arms ; the ministers were hanged or sent to the galleys ; women were trampled underfoot by the horses of the dragoons ; the bodies of those who had fortunately escaped torture by death were dragged about on hurdles; the whole kingdom was bathed in blood, and covered with ruins. These horrors Bossuet approved, and celebrated the revoca tion of the Edict with turgid eloquence and the most groveling adulation of the tyrant who had perpetrated them. "Let us not omit to celebrate this miracle of our time," cried he ; " let us hand down the recital of it to future ages. Take your con secrated pens, ye who indite the annals of the Church ; make haste to place Louis by the side of the Constantines and the Theodosii." When Legendre and Basville, two ferocious ene mies of the Protestants, laid before Bossuet their plan of exter mination and asked his counsels, the trio differed as to certain measures of detail, but in the main were agreed. " He was hap py," he said, "to avail himself of their experience." Fenelon, too, whom even Protestants venerate as a, saint, wrote in 1685, "I find scarcely any Huguenots left at La Ro- chelle, since I have paid those who betray them. I imprison the men, and, with the consent and by the authority of the bish op, send the women and girls into convents." He asks that the military force be strengthened. " It appears to me," adds he, " that the exercise of the royal authority ought to be relaxed in nothing." At a later period, indeed, when he himself was a victim of religious intolerance, and had suffered under the per secution of Quietism, he grew more moderate toward the Hu guenots, though stimulating always measures of rigor against Jansenism. Flechier sanctioned the atrocities of the revoca tion. Massillon approved them, as did also Fontenelle and La Fontaine; and even Arnaud said, "These measures are rather violent, but not at all unjust." Madame de Sevigne' was en thusiastic in hor admiration of this great act of the Grand Mo- Appendix. 239 narque. " There can be nothing finer," exclaimed she, " than the tenor of the act of revocation. No king ever did, or ever will do, any thing so memorable." If we admit that the language and conduct of these distin guished persons, who had their points of greatness and even of goodness, are in some degree palliated by the spirit of the age, what are we to say of Monseigneur Nardi, so often the mouth piece of Pope Pius IX., who refers to the reign of Louis XIV. as the Golden Age of France, and contrasts its glories and its pros perity with the moral and material decay of that nation in 1875! True, France has sinned and suffered; but her transgres sions and her calamities are the natural consequences of her submission to the dictation of a church of which Monseigneur Nafdi himself is one of the chief apostles. The consequences of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in the desolation of flourishing provinces, the destruction of a vast amount of valuable property, the prostration of productive manufactures, the exile or murder of hundreds of thousands of peaceable and industrious inhabitants, the rekindling of the spirit of hate and ferocity with which the priests had inflamed the people in the memorable slaughter of St. Bartholomew's, and which still celebrates its centennial saturnalia of violence and blood in France, were most disastrous to the material prosper ity and the moral interests of the nation. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes was but a revival of the crimes of 1572 ; and the horrors of the Revolution a hundred years later, and of the Commune after yet another century, were the legitimate fruits of the tiger-like instincts which the odium theologicum of Rome had made a part of the nature of the French people. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes had its retribution. In many cases what France cast out, gainful arts and skilled artisans, were not only lost to her, but transferred to other countries, where they laid the foundation of industrial estab lishments the effect of whose rivalry of her own workshops is felt by her to this day. Another singular effect of these persecutions has been no ticed by Michaud and other recent writers. Among the exiled French were very considerable numbers of literary men, print ers, and book-sellers, who immediately entered on a new sphere 240 Appendix. of professional activity in the countries which hospitably re ceived them. They devoted themselves much to criticism, and to all forms of periodical literature. The political and econom ical journals which sprung up in Protestant Europe were, in numerous cases, established by French refugees, and these ex iles became the founders and creators of a moral force.known as the " collective public opinion of Europe." This opinion France has more than once defied, and again and again paid the penal ty of her arrogance ; but it is still mightier than all her savants, all her soldiers. Italy has witnessed a similar crime, a similar retribution. Her patriots and scholars, whom Naples, the Austrian misgov- ernment of her Italian provinces, and papal Rome thrust out, proved in all parts of Europe the most potent enemies of their persecutors, the most eloquent advocates of their oppressed country. Their talents, their virtues, their sufferings, won for themselves and their country the admiration and sympathy, and even the political support, of Europe. The curses of the papacy have come back to perch under the roof of the Vatican, and the whole civilized world rejoices at the return of the ban ished and the downfall of their oppressors. IX. THE "MONITA SECRETA" SOCIETATIS JESU. The first edition of the " Mouita Secreta " was published at Paderborn iu 1661, and an authentio copy of the original manu script, found among the records of the Jesuit college at Rure- monde, when they were taken possession of by the Government upon the suppression of the order, is stated to be preserved in the archives of the Palais de Justice at Brussels. The question of the genuineness of the "Monita Secreta" has been much dis cussed, and a good deal of evidence has been adduced to estab lish it. The work has been accepted as authentic by many able writers ; but there is a strong improbability that so subtle an association as the Jesuits would intrust to paper a set of Appendix. 241 rules, the exposure of which would seriously prejudice the po sition of the order. It is now generally believed to be spurious in form at least, though hardly to be considered a caricature of the principles which govern the action of the society. The latest edition we have seen is that published by C. Sauvestre at the press of Dentu, Paris, 1864. This edition contains the Latin text, with a French translation, full notes, and other illustrative matter, and, like its predecessors, has now become rare. It consists of seventeen chapters, treating of the following points: Of the mode of proceeding when the society commences a new establishment ; how the fathers of the society may ac quire and retain intimacy with princes and other distinguished persons ; how the society is to act toward persons of authority in the State, and who, even if not rich, may render other valua ble services ; what ought to be recommended to the preachers and confessors of great personages ; how to act toward ecclesi astics who perform in the church the same offices as ourselves ; of the means of gaining over rich widows ; how to take care of widows and dispose of their estates; how to induce the children of widows to embrace the profession of a religious life ; of in creasing the revenues of our colleges ; of the rigor of discipline in the society; how we are to behave toward those who may have been dismissed from the order ; whom we ought to retain in the society ; of the choice of young men to be admitted to the society, and of the means of retaining them ; of reserved cases and of dismissals from the society ; how to behave toward nuns and devotees ; of affecting to despise riches; of the means of securing the advancement of the society. X. SUPPRESSION OF BOOKS BY THE PRIESTS. As soon as the support of the civil power had given the cler gy confidence in its own strength, confessors began to require their penitents to surrender to them all heretical writings in their possession. These were generally mutilated or destroyed 11 242 Appendix. by the priests ; and hence, as we have shown in the text, the disappearance of many works known to have been widely cir culated at various periods, but disapproved by the Church. The burning of such books was not only commended, but en joined, by a brief of Innocent IV., in 1243. The brief recites that the chancellor and doctors of the University of Paris had, with praiseworthy zeal, publicly burned, in the presence of the assembled clergy and people, the Talmud and other condemned volumes, and charges the King of France, to whom the brief was addressed, to cause all books disapproved by the doctors of the university to be seized wherever they could be found within his realm, and consumed by fire. But the zeal of the faithful did not always wait a formal con demnation by the clergy. Even before the brief »f Innocent IV., the crusaders had destroyed all the Arabic books which fell into their possession, and the conquest of a Moorish town in Spain by the Christians was generally followed by a hecatomb of the Hebrew and Arabic books found in public libraries or in the hands of private possessors. The ignorant and fanatical soldiery supposed all Hebrew manuscripts to be Talmuds, all Arabic books"to be Korans ; but even at comparatively later and better-instructed periods, large collections of Oriental books were condemned to the flames by the Spanish clergy, with lit tle or no examination, upon the presumption that they were hostile to Christianity, because found in unchristian hands. In recent centuries, the Church is more circumspect. It does not often hold a public auto-da-fe' over heretical books ; but Cath olic confessors are instructed to require their penitents to deliv er to them all condemned or suspected books, and these are pri vately made away with. A special condemnation by insertion in the "Index," by title, is not necessary, for the "Index" pro scribes all works on moral or religious topics by heretical au thors. The secret of the confessional, in general, covers these transactions, and it is not often that the intentional destruction of such books can be brought home to the incendiaries. The following extract from the London Publishers' Circular of December 18th, 1875, however, cites a case in point, which is a ' good illustration of the Christian charity of the devotees of Rome: Appendix. 243 "A new auto-da-fe" has just been chronicled in the Times, which is of great interest to all authors and publishers, and which, in connection with the celebrated Guibord case, should give us pause. Mr. Guibord was not allowed to be buried in his own freehold grave, and when so permitted had that grave dese crated or cursed because he belonged to a club the library of which held some Protestant books condemned by the papal " In dex." It was not alleged that Guibord had purchased or even read the books. It is enough that he was librarian. What, then, if, as a publisher,he sold such books? But even worse than this is the following. M. de Gasparin was a well-known writer on the side of Christianity. He assailed the fortress of Skepticism, and pleaded in gentle and persuasive tones for faith, goodness, and religion. In short, his writings, tender rather than strong, are much like those that we find in the best works of our own Christian societies. They are esteemed and welcomed by all who wish well to the Christian religion. Madame Gaspa rin, the well-known Protestant writer, and widow of the author named, having presented a copy of her late husband's work, 'Les Ecoles du Doute et les Ecoles de la Foi,' to the popular library of Boussenois, in the C6te d'Or, has received, says the Times, the following extraordinary letter from its director, M. de Geroal: 'We can not thank you too much on this occasion. M. de Gasparin's works and those of the Franklin Press are most useful to us. This very morning we made the finest fire ever seen with all these works. How pleasant, now the mornings are chilly, to warm one's fingers with M. de Gasparin's books ! They burn splendidly. Once more thanks, madame. Geneva paper, especially M. de Gasparin's, has done us a great service, and we hope to warm ourselves again with his books. Mean while, pray accept our warmest compliments.' " The satire in this is not very strong, but there is no doubt of the intention. As Mr. Artemus Ward has it, there is every evidence that M. de Geroal ' spoke sarcastuck ' when he asks a lady, with fingers hot from the fire made of her husband's books, to ' accept his warmest congratulations.' So the old auto-da-fe" is coming up again. History repeats itself. 'As well kill a man as kill a good book,' says Milton ; but, then, M. de Geroal is not Milton. The publisher of Peter Bayle, it is said, declared 244 Appendix. that the Sorbonne had burned some of his books so as to give them a rapid sale. Perhaps M. de Geroal will thus have the mortification to find that he has advertised 'The Schools of Doubt and the Schools of Faith.' An English edition- would sell well. If, according to Milton, a good book is 'the precious life-blood of a master spirit,' he who sheds that blood is indeed guilty. But it is one thing to burn a book, and another to an swer and confute it. In this case the curiosity of the matter lies in the fact that the book was not controversial, was against doubters of Christianity, and was entirely on the side of relig ion, law, and order. But it was written by a Protestant, and that, we presume, was quite a sufficient reason for the strange use to which M. de Geroal put it. Paper, however, makes a bad fire — we prefer coal. They must be miserably off for fuel at Boussenois, to chronicle in such gleeful terms ' the finest fire they had ever seen.' " XI. LETTER FROM THE SAVIOUR TO A GIRL OF ST. MARCEL IN FRANCE. We here give the original of this letter at length, without translation, referring to Part III., p. 146, for an explanation of its purport. Lettera vera di Gesii Cristo, mandata per mano dell' Angelo Custode ad una Fanciulla chiamata Brigida, 9 miglia distante da S. Mar- cello di Francia, stampata a lettere