The Vickers and Purcell Controversy.Respectfully presented to all the lovers of truth.By John B. Purcell, Archbishop of Cincinnati,Printed for the benefit of Mt. St. Mary's Seminary of the West. Benziger Brothers, Printers to the Holy Apostolic See, Cincinnati and New York. 1868.
The gentleman calling himself the Rev. Thomas Vickers, Minister of the First Congregational Society of Cincinnati, is a living contradiction in terms. According to the statement in the volume before us, he believes in no personal God, declares "the Christ" to be "a theological fiction," and the Bible "a crutch." What there is "reverend" about Mr. Vickers, what sense there is in his claiming the title of minister, or what appropriateness in his professing to belong to a Congregational Society, we are at a loss to divine. What greater absurdity of nomenclature can there be, than calling a pantheistic lecturer against Christianity and Theism by the name of a Congregational minister? Of what use is a church, or a minister, on his principles, or, rather, denial of principles? Nevertheless, in this very absurd and unnecessary character of minister, Mr. Vickers appeared at the laying of the corner-stone of a new temple of German infidelity, denominated, with a ludicrous disregard of common sense, St. John's Church, and made a speech, which occasioned the controversy contained in the little volume under notice. In this speech, Mr. Vickers welcomed and blessed the undertaking of the society of German infidels calling themselves St. John's Church, in the name of the Anglo-American portion of the population of Cincinnati. At the same time, he gave utterance to the most contemptuous scorn of everything which the professedly Christian part of that population holds as sacred and divine in religion. This was, to say the least of it, a piece of cool impertinence on the part of the young gentleman in question. Mr. Vickers, we believe, passed a few years in Germany, studying what he calls "science;" and he appears to have returned with a strong impression on his own mind that he is destined to enlighten the benighted believers in the Christian revelation in Cincinnati with the rays of this German luminary. He is not the first to engage in this experiment. It has been tried before, and we recommend to the attention of the illuminati of Cincinnati the following description of its result, from the pen of Dr. Hedge, of Harvard University. It is extracted from an article in theChristian Examiner:
"Some thirty years ago, a club was formed of young men, mostly preachers of the Unitarian connection, with a sprinkling of elect ladies—all fired with the hope of a new era in philosophy and religion, which seemed to them about to dawn upon the world. There was something in the air—a boding of some great revolution—some new avatar of the Spirit, at whose birth these expectants were called to assist
'Of old things, all are over old:Of old things, none are good enough:We'll show that we can help to frameA world of other stuff.'
'Of old things, all are over old:Of old things, none are good enough:We'll show that we can help to frameA world of other stuff.'
"For myself, though I hugely enjoyed the sessions, and shared many of the ideas which ruled the conclave, and the ferment they engendered, I had no belief in ecclesiastical revolutions to be accomplished with set purpose; and I seemed to discern a power and meaning in the old, which the more impassioned would not allow. I had even then made up my mind, that the method of revolution in theology, is not discussion, but development. My historical conscience, then as since, balanced my neology, and kept me ecclesiastically conservative, though intellectually radical. There haunted me that verse in Goethe's bright song, 'The General Confession,' as applicable to ecclesiastical incendiarism as it is to political:
'Came a man would fain renew me,Made a botch and missed his shot.Shoulder shrugging, prospects gloomy:He was called a patriot.'And I cursed the senseless drizzle,Kept my proper goal in view:Blockhead! when it burns, let sizzle;When all's burned, then build anew.'
'Came a man would fain renew me,Made a botch and missed his shot.Shoulder shrugging, prospects gloomy:He was called a patriot.'And I cursed the senseless drizzle,Kept my proper goal in view:Blockhead! when it burns, let sizzle;When all's burned, then build anew.'
Others judged differently; they saw in every case of dissent, and in every new dissentient, the harbinger of the New Jerusalem. 'The present church rattles ominously,' they said; 'it must vanish presently, and we shall have a real one.' There have been some vanishings since then.Ah me! how much has vanished! Of that goodly company, what heroes and heroines have vanished from the earth! Thrones have toppled, dynasties have crumbled, institutions that seemed fast-rooted in the everlasting hills have withered away. But the church that was present then, and was judged moribund by transcendental zeal, and rattled so ominously in transcendental ears, is present still.
"It was finally resolved to start a journal that should represent the ideas which had mainly influenced the association already tending to dissolution. How to procure the requisite funds was a question of some difficulty, seeing how hardly philosophic and commercial speculation conspire. An appeal was made. Would Mammon have the goodness to aid an enterprise whose spirit rebuked his methods and imperilled his assets? The prudent God disclaimed the imputed verdure; and the organ of American Transcendentalism, with no pecuniary basis, committed to the chance and gratuitous efforts and editing of friends, if intellectually and spiritually prosperous, had no statistical success. It struggled, through four years, with all the difficulties of eleemosynary journalism; and then, significantly enough, with a word concerning the 'Millennial Church,' sighed its last breath, and gave up the ghost. I prize the four volumes among the choicest treasures of my library. They contain some of Emerson's, of Theodore Parker's, of Margaret Fuller's, of Thoreau's best things; not to speak of writers less absolute and less famous.
"Meanwhile the association, if so it could be termed, had gradually dissolved. Some of the members turned papists—I should say, sought refuge in the bosom of the Catholic Church. A few of the preachers pursued their calling, and perhaps have contributed somewhat to liberalize and enlarge the theology of their day. Some have slipped their moorings on this bank and shoal of time. One sank beneath the wave, whose queenly soul had no peer among the women of this land. Of one
'A strange and distant mouldWraps the mortal relics cold.'
'A strange and distant mouldWraps the mortal relics cold.'
Finally, a fragment of this strangely compounded body lodged in a neighboring town, and became the nucleus of an agricultural enterprise in which the harvest truly wasnotplenteous, and the competent laborers few; and of which, the root being rottenness, the blossoms soon went up as dust."
Mr. Vickers may thank the Archbishop of Cincinnati for having given his very boyish lucubrations a little momentary notoriety, which they never could have acquired by their own merit. They are crude, ill-mannered, replete with commonplace, effete, and senseless vituperations of all that is venerable in Catholicity and Christianity, and betray an ignorance of the subjects treated of which makes them unworthy of any serious attention. The point which the discussion chiefly turns upon is "freedom of thought." If Mr. Vickers is a disciple of the German pantheistic school, as we suppose him to be, he is not in a condition to maintain that there is any such thing as thought or freedom. We intend to give abundant proof of this assertion, in a series of articles, to be published in our Magazine, on Pantheism, in which we shall show, to the satisfaction of any person capable of metaphysical reasoning, that pantheism destroys the possibility of thought, in the true sense of the word, as the intellection of real, objective truth. Pantheism destroys, also, all possibility of freedom by reducing all phenomena to a fatal, invincible necessity. A pantheist is bound to accept all the persecutions of the middle ages, all the definitions of the church, and the encyclical of the pope, as manifestations of God. Our godlike friends are too much like the wife of the Connecticut corporal, who replied to the query of her innocent offspring, "O ma! are we all corporals now?" with the haughty rejoinder, "No, indeed! onlyyour pa and I." Mr. Vickers and the members of the free-thinkingcoterieare not the only participators in the universal deity. If Mr. Vickers's brilliant exposition of the doctrine of the immaculate conception was a divine inspiration, Archbishop Purcell was equally moved by divine inspiration to the paternal castigation which he administers to his young and somewhat forward fellow-celestial. In fact, Mr. Vickers, the archbishop, the book containing their controversy,The Catholic World, ourselves, our readers, St. Thomas, Torquemada, Luther, Heidelberg University, and the Jesuits, are all one thing, or one nothing; aSeyn, or aWerden, or aNichtseyn; all bubbles on the fathomless ocean of infinite—nonsense.It is a wonder that Mr. Vickers lays so much to heart, and makes such a serious business out of that which has no reality. A nephew of the great German philosopher, Hegel, who was also a favorite pupil of Feuerbach, and who is now a devout Catholic, told us, some time ago, that he asked Feuerbach why philosophy was making no progress, but seemed to be at a stand-still. The latter replied, that they had already proved by philosophy the nothingness of everything, and it was, therefore, useless to push philosophy any further, adding, that it was time to go back to common sense. Such is the end of that lawless, intellectual activity which Mr. Vickers calls "free thought." It is like a head of steam that bursts its boiler, and is then dispersed in the circumambient atmosphere.
Memoirs and Letters of Jennie C. White—Del Bal.By her mother, Rhoda E. White,1 vol. royal 8vo, pp. 363. Boston: Patrick Donahoe. 1868.
We must presage our notice of this interesting book, by saying we have a dislike to memoirs written by fond and partial friends. Lives of the saints we love to read, but our digestion was early impaired by the memoirs of good children (who all died young) with which we were fed for Sunday food, and we have latterly been in the bad habit of turning away from a book labelled,Memoirs of, etc.
However, we read Jennie's life with interest; and it is a beautiful story, giving to the reader a delightful insight into a truly Catholic family, where the breath of piety permeates the daily walk of every member, mingling with and heightening the light-hearted pleasures peculiar to the seasons of childhood and youth. The tale of her courtship and marriage is told with a sweet and winning grace, which charms us by its naturalness. Quite unlike the prevailing spirit and sentiment of "Young America" is the history of the prompt obedience to the mandate of parental authority, in giving up their engagement. The accepted lover, a resident of Santiago, New Granada, had promised his aged father not to forsake his own country, and Jennie's father could not give his consent to the taking of his first-born to that far-off foreign land. After a struggle, they parted with aching hearts, released from their engagement; but the influence of the true woman in the mother reunited that broken bond.
Contrary to the fate of many American girls who go to foreign homes, Jennie's marriage was an exceedingly happy one. The secret is very plain—they were both earnest Catholics. Oneness in faith, and earnest-heartedness in that faith, are the best securities for happiness in married life. The sight of this happy young creature, leaving so fond a circle of friends, and such a home as Jennie left behind in New York, to go to a comparatively unknown land—a country distracted by revolutions, with churches closed and priests exiled—gives us a glowing picture of the self-sacrificing spirit of true love. Her journeys by land and by sea, before she reached her destination, were perilous indeed; and we could not but ask, Yankee-like, why such a refined and cultivated and intelligent people as those among whom her lot was cast should never have provided some more comfortable way of reaching their country. She was the first American lady there, and attracted much attention and admiration by her brave, active spirit, as well as by her large Catholic heart. Her letters to her home friends are lovely from their childlike simplicity and truthfulness; giving us glimpses of many homesick heartaches, even when she was decking herself for the dance. Sometimes there appears a little excess in her efforts to be gay, when she writes, "I danced every piece but one till five in the morning." Mrs. Del Bal went to New Granada at a time when the so-called "Liberals," under Mosquera, were in the ascendant, proclaiming a pretended religious liberty, of which some of the first acts were the disbanding of all religious communities, turning the sisters upon the world, shutting up the churches, banishing the priests, unless they took an oath whereby they would cease to be Catholics; in fact, Mosquera made himself pope. Professing to establish a government in which there should be no connection between church and state, the government framed this article for the twenty-third of their Constitution:
"In order to sustain the national sovereignty and to maintain public peace and security, the national government, and in some cases the state government, shall exercise the right of supreme inspection over all religious worships, as the law shall determine."
This is a law of liberty very like those the English Catholics enjoyed under Queen Elizabeth.
Mrs. Del Bal exerted herself to give the press at the North the true state of the case with regard to this matter, since the public papers have loudly lauded Mosquera and his government. How far she succeeded in influencing minds that swallow eagerly anything called "liberal," we are not told. Our friend Jennie was loyal to her heart's core, and never ceased to call herself and her husband American citizens; and her thorough celebration of the "glorious Fourth" was a complete success. American thrift and industry carried her through what would have been impossible to a New Granadian.
But it is Jennie's almost superhuman efforts to revive the faith in the land of her adoption which excite our wonder and admiration, even more than the tender breathings of her woman's heart, separated for ever from the earliest loved. She had everything to struggle against in her work; "deplorable ignorance among the lower classes, and the falling away from faith and duty in the educated;" and this in a land once hallowed by the daily sacrifice. Well might she call the country "God forsaken," when those who should have cared for the sheep became themselves grievous wolves devouring God's heritage. The secret of the country's desolation we may read in this sentence:
"It is a well-known fact to Protestant travellers and a wound in the heart of the Catholic world, that the Catholic priesthood in this part of the world and in the West India Islands, scandalize the faithful. Why are they permitted to remain in the church? is asked often by Protestant and Catholic. Because they are sustained by a government which will not acknowledge papal authority; and if the archbishop were to remove them to-morrow, if need be, they would be reinstated by the bayonet. Hence these scandals."
But we turn from this sad picture to our young friend. Working with all the ardor of a soul given to God, filled with the love of Christ, her prayers and labors brought forth abundant and immediate fruits; but not till that day when the Great Master shall make up his jewels will it be known how many were brought back to faith and duty by her efforts. The missionary spirit pervaded all her life, and we may believe that love for souls, in part, led her to give her consent to so sad and final a parting from her early home; for she laid her plans for these poor, neglected people before she left her father's roof. She found some pious, devoted women in Santiago, (where are they not found?) and she gave them work to do. Everything prospered in her hands: Sunday-schools, altar societies, associations of the Sacred Heart; and at last, through her instrumentality, the laws were repealed that closed the churches, theTe Deumwas sung, the sanctuary lamp was relighted, and 'la nina Jennie' was acknowledged, by the grateful people, as a public blessing God sent.
It is extremely touching to mark how, amid the constant terror of revolution, the wearing care of churches, hospitals, Sunday-schools, altar societies, plantations, and housekeeping, with a retinue of easy-going, lazy servants, she turns to entertain a dear friend with tales of her beloved parents, recalling the happy and united life at home, and then runs to console these absent ones by telling them, in her letters, with the artlessness of a child, that her husband must be good, since she is so happy with him, away from all she loved before! Only four years was she permitted to cheer the heart of her fond husband—only four years to lead the life of a devoted missionary in that desolate vineyard. The snapping of the chain by death that bound that household; the departure of her noble father—we may well believe— coming upon a heart filled with care for the souls about her, lying in worse than heathen darkness, hastened her own death.
As we close the volume, we can not mourn for her nor for her dear family; it is a blessed privilege to have such a friend in heaven.
"Life is only bright when it proceedethToward a truer, deeper life above:Human love is sweetest when it leadethTo a more divine and perfect love."
"Life is only bright when it proceedethToward a truer, deeper life above:Human love is sweetest when it leadethTo a more divine and perfect love."
No, we mourn for Santiago, and pray our dear Lord to compassionate a country so piteously torn by revolutions, and abandoned by those who should be first to hear the cry that comes over the land to all Catholics, "Send us priests who have an apostolic spirit, good judgment, and tact!"
The publisher's portion of the work is well done. It is well printed on fine paper, and the binding is in keeping with the rest of the book. It is, in fact, the handsomest book Mr. Donahoe ever published, and we are glad to see so great an improvement in his book-making.
The Woman Blessed by all Generations; or,Mary the Object of Veneration, Confidence, and Imitation to all Christians.By the Rev. Raphael Melia, D.D.London: Longmans, Green & Co. 1868.For sale at The Catholic Publication House, New York.
Dr. Melia is an Italian priest, residing in London; a man of solid learning, great zeal for the conversion of Protestants, and possessing a competent knowledge of the English language. His work is a comprehensive treatise on the dignity and office of the Blessed Virgin, and the reasons for the veneration and invocation of Mary practised in the church; to which is added a devotional treatise on the imitation of her virtues. The author goes thoroughly into the arguments from Scripture, tradition, reason, theology, and antiquities. His style is lively, popular, and somewhat diffuse, so that his learning is brought to the level of the understanding of ordinary readers, and his arguments made plain by ample and minute explanations. The book is also illustrated byfac-similesfrom ancient works of art. It is a treasury of knowledge on the charming and delightful subject of which it treats, and both Catholics and Protestants who wish to gain thorough, solid information respecting the Catholic devotion to Mary, with ease and pleasure to themselves, will find this book to be the very one they are in need of. The author is entitled to the thanks of all English-speaking Catholics for this labor of love, and we trust that his excellent work may be the means of increasing and diffusing, both in England and America, that solid and fervent devotion to the Blessed Mother of God which is both the poetry and an integral part of the practical piety of our religion.
We have just received from Messrs. Murphy & Co., Baltimore,The Acts and Decrees of the Second Plenary Council of Baltimore.The Catholic World, for August, contained an elaborate article on this work, written from an advance copy kindly furnished by Mr. Murphy. It is unnecessary to say anything more with regard to its contents, except to reiterate what was then said as to its external appearance. It is a handsome volume, finely printed on good paper, and bound in various styles and in the best manner known to the art of binding, and is a credit to the publisher. It is for sale at the Catholic Publication House, New York.