“The history of Championnet did some damage to the miracle ofSt.Januarius in the minds of a great many. In 1799, the French army was in Naples, where it had been well received at first.... On the 6th of May, the crowd filled the chapel of the cathedral.... For more than half an hour the priest had been turning backward and foward, on his hands, the round silver lantern with two faces of glass within which is preserved the precious blood in a small vial. The little reddish mass would not quit its state of solidity.... The exasperated populace commenced to attribute the stubbornness of San Gennaro to the presence of the French. There was danger of a tumult, when an aid hastened to notify General Championnet of the suspicious conduct of the saint. In a few moments the aid returned, approached the priest politely, and said a few words in his ear. What he did say is not precisely known, but he had scarcely said it when the blood at once liquefied, to the great joy of the people, who at last had their miracle.”
Alexandre Dumas, in one of his novels, narrates the same story much more dramatically. According to him, “General Championnet saw that it was important for his safety and the safety of the army that the miracle should not fail that year; and he made up his mind that, one way or another, it should positively occur.” The first Sunday of May was near at hand. On the vigil (May 4, 1799), the procession marched, but between files of French grenadiers. Thatnight the city was patrolled by French and Italian soldiers jointly. All day Sunday the miracle was patiently waited for; but in vain. Six in the afternoon came—Championnet, with his staff, was in his elevatedloggiaor gallery. The people began at length to lose patience and to vociferate angrily. At 7P.M.they were brandishing knives and threatening the general, who pretended not to understand or heed them. At 8P.M.the streets around were filled with other crowds equally threatening. “The grenadiers waited on a signal from the general to charge bayonets. The general continued unmoved.” At half-past eight, as the tumult was still increasing, “the general bent over and whispered something to an aid-de-camp.” The aid left the stand, and passed up to the altar and knelt in the front rank, and waited. In five minutes the canon, bearing the reliquary, came round to him in his turn. He kissed the reliquary as others did; but, while doing so, grasped the priest’s hand in his.
“‘Father, a word with you.’
“‘What is it?’ asked the priest.
“‘I must say to you, on the part of the general commanding, that if in ten minutes the miracle is not accomplished, in fifteen minutes your reverence shall be shot.’
“The canon let the reliquary fall from his hands. Fortunately, the young officer caught it before it reached the ground, and gave it back with every mark of profound respect. Then he arose and returned to his place near the general.
“‘Well?’ said the general.
“‘All right, general,’ said the young officer. ‘In ten minutes the miracle will take place.’
“The aid-de-camp spoke the truth; nevertheless he made a mistake of five minutes; for at the end of five minutes only, the canon raised the reliquary aloft, exclaiming,Il miracolo è fatto. The blood was completely liquefied.”
We suppose we may take these as the best versions of the same story.The other French and late English versions we have met of it, however they may vary in minor details, all agree as to the person—General Championnet, and as to the year, 1799. So far as we can judge, theSiècleand the other writers got their facts from the novelist. It is their way. When they attack religion, all manner of weapons are acceptable. Where the novelist got it we need scarcely inquire. Certainly, on a pinch, he was capable of inventing it out of the whole cloth. But we can only credit him with twisting and reversing an older story. In a work entitledNaples and Campagna Felice, printed in London in 1815, there is an earlier account of “the very recent experiment of General Championnet.”
“When thisChampionof liberty entered Naples with his unhosedenfans de la patrie, his curiosity, or rather his infidelity, prompted him to direct the priests forthwith to perform the ceremony before him and his companions, the philosophic worshippers of the Goddess of Reason.... ‘The miracle must be exhibited this instant, or I’ll smash your vials and all your nonsense into a thousand pieces.’... Every devout effort of the priests proved vain; even the general’s active assistance and repeated trials to give fluidity to the indurated blood, by means of natural and artificial heat, were equally unsuccessful.”
This want of success, according to, the teller of the story, was due to the fact that the relatives ofSt.Januarius were not present. The general sent soldiers to arrest them, and had them brought into the church.
“A second experiment was now instituted in due form: which, to the utter amazement of the French part of the congregation, and to the inward delight of all the pious Neapolitans, succeeded almost instantaneously.”
Were it not for the identity of names and place, we could scarcelyrecognize this earlier English version, with its characteristic contempt of French philosophers andenfans de la patrie, and its result of the experiment so satisfactory to the Neapolitans, as in reality the original form of the story, which Dumas, and after him many others, have dressed up and presented to the world with such different details, and with a result exactly opposite.
But a regard for truth obliges us to reject this earlier form, no less than those which followed, as, all of them, pure fictions. The evidence is clear and to the point.
I.On May 4,1799, General Championnet was not in Naples. He had entered that city with his army on the 28th of January preceding, and had established “The Parthenopean Republic”; but he had been relieved of his command before May; possibly on account of ill health, for he died at Antibes a few months later. His successor in the command at Naples was General, afterwards Marshal Macdonald.
II.The diary of theTesorochapel, and the archiepiscopal diary, in their accounts of the exposition on Saturday, May 4, 1799, both mention the presence of General Macdonald with his officers.
III.According to the same authorities, the liquefaction, so far from being long delayed, that day took place quite soon—after a lapse of only ten minutes.
IV.They indicate the very respectful demeanor of the French general, and his expressions of reverence; expressions which, by the way, he confirmed afterwards by presenting to theTesorochapel a beautiful silk mitre, rich in gold work and jewels, which is still shown in the sacristy.
V.Finally, to clinch the whole matter, we quote the following extractfrom a contemporary letter, published at the time in the official organ at Paris—theMoniteur,No.259, of date 19 Prairial, YearVII.(June 10, 1799).
“Naples, 21 Floréal (May 13).—The festival ofSt.Januarius has just been celebrated with the customary solemnity. General Macdonald (successor to Championnet), Commissary Abrial, and all the staff, witnessed the renowned miracle. As it took place somewhat sooner than usual, the people think better of us Frenchmen, and do not look on us any more as atheists.”
The writer little thought what a dramatic story a novelist’s imagination would conjure up, and some credulous people would believe, instead of the simple matter-of-fact statement he gaveen passantof the solemnity he had just witnessed. A more complete refutation of the whole story could not be desired than that afforded by the words and tone of this letter.
We have been diffuse on the charge of fraud. But when we consider the persistence with which it is made, and the variety of forms in which it is presented; and that, after all, for most minds, the alternative is between a suspicion of fraud, on one side, and the recognition of the miraculous character of the liquefaction, on the other—it was proper to treat this charge at length and in all its aspects.
We have seen that the publicity of everything about the exposition peremptorily forbids every form of legerdemain during the ceremony. Equally inadmissible is the supposition of some chemical compound prepared beforehand. For no chemical compound which man can prepare will liquefy, as this does, independently of heat, and under such diverse circumstances, or will present the manyvarying phases which are here seen. The most artistic attempts have utterly failed, and must ever fail. For they are all subject to the laws of nature; while, in this liquefaction, the laws of nature are clearly set aside.
Again, all testimony goes to show that the ampulla is not opened from time to time to receive any chemical preparation.
Moreover, if there were any fraud, it would have been known to nearly a thousand clergymen, and no one can say to how many laymen. Yet pious men were never heard to denounce it; repentant men never disclosed it; high-minded and honorable men never repudiated it in scorn, vile and mercenary men were never moved by anger, revenge, desire of pecuniary gain, or other potent motives, to betray it. Even political enmities and fierce party strife, so prone to indulge in charges of fraud, have failed in Naples to stigmatize this as a fraud. Evidently, there was no fraud known or suspected there. In fine, were there a fraud, this universal silence would be a greater miracle than the liquefaction itself.
It has been asked, sometimes jeeringly, perhaps sometimes seriously, if the Neapolitans are in such perfect faith and so sure of the character of the substance which liquefies in the ampulla, why are they unwilling to submit that substance to the test of chemical analysis? Is not their omission, nay, their unwillingness to do this, a confession on their part of the weakness of their cause?
To one who knows them, or who even reflects for a moment on the subject, the answer is obvious. It is their perfect good faith itself, and their consequent veneration for what they look on as sacred and specially blessed of God, and not any fear or doubt, that would make them rise inindignation against what, in their eyes, would be a profane and unwarrantable desecration.
There are limits, they would protest, to the intrusive and irreverent meddling of men under pretexts of science. Are there not many points in pathology and physiology on which further knowledge is very desirable—a knowledge which some think can be reached best and most surely, if not only, by vivisection, especially of human subjects, whether in normal health or presenting peculiar developments? Shall we, therefore, in the interests of science, pick out such cases in a community, and deliver them over to be cut up alive, and their still living bodies to be explored by these science-seeking experimenters? Knowledge is good and profitable, undoubtedly; but human life is sacred, and must be preserved intact, even though these men remain in the dark on various obscure points.
So, too, holding as they do that the ampulla contains a portion of the veritable blood ofSt.Januarius, preserved by miracle of divine Providence, and miraculously liquefied on his feasts, the Neapolitans would shrink in horror from the sacrilegious profanity of delivering it over to the retorts and crucibles, and mortars and solutions, of a chemical laboratory.
Chemical experiments, they would say, are very respectable and very admirable in their place; but there are things too precious and too sacred to be submitted to them. In refusing to do so, the Neapolitans do not confess a sense of the weakness of their own cause. They rather manifest their sincere veneration for what they believe God has specially honored.
As for the plea that this test would solve the question, the Neapolitanswould reply that for some minds nothing is ever solved. If men wish really to know the truth, let them examine the evidences which were appealed to before modern chemistry was invented. Those evidences still exist, and are ample and irrefragable. “They have Moses and the prophets; if they will not hear them, neither will they believe, though one rose from the dead.”
One other objection remains: does God act uselessly? And of what possible use is this miracle? What is the benefit of wonderfully preserving from utter destruction, through so many centuries, a small portion of blood, and of causing it to soften or liquefy fifteen or twenty times a year, when brought, even if reverently, close to the head of the martyr from whose veins it flowed? What good does this do? Is it not so trifling and insignificant a thing as to be almost ridiculous, and entirely unworthy of the majesty of God?
Who shall presume to say that it is unworthy of God—of that God without whose knowledge and permission not a hair can fall from our heads—of that Saviour who mixed clay with the spittle of his mouth, and therewith touched the eyes of the blind man, that sight might be restored to them? It is not for us to decide what is becoming or unbecoming for God to do.
Who shall say that it is useless? Has not the faith of a simple-minded people been confirmed and strengthened by it, to such a degree that the truths of divine revelation and the obligations of man before God are to them verities as strong, as clear, and as real in their daily life as is the sunlight that beams down on their fair land? How many sinners have been led, through it, to repentance and amendment of life? How often have the indifferent been stirred upto avoid evil and to do good, and the good animated to greater fervor and earnestness in deeds of piety and virtue? And, after all, are not these the grand purposes of all God’s dealings with men?
Nor is this miracle—for such we call it, although the church has never spoken authoritatively on the point—alien from doctrine. Wrought in honor of a sainted and martyred bishop, it is a perpetual testimony to the truth of the doctrines he preached, and of the church which glories in him as one of her exemplary and venerated ministers; it is a confirmation of the homage and veneration she pays to him because he chose rather to sacrifice his life than to deny the Saviour who had redeemed and illumined him. Wrought within her fold, it is a permanent evidence that she is in fact and in spirit the same now as in the early days of persecution—the ever true and faithful church of Christ.
It is a confirmation, likewise, of the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead—that special doctrine which the apostles put forth so prominently in the beginning of their preaching; which was ever present to the minds of the early Christians, cheering and strengthening them when this world was dark around them; which formed the frequent theme of their pastoral instructions and their mutual exhortations, and became the prevailing subject of their household and their sacred ornamentation in their homes and in their oratories, and over their tombs in the catacombs; which gave a special tone to their faith, their hope, and their charity and love of God, and was, as it were, the very lifeblood of their Christianity.
Nowadays, outside the church, how faint, comparatively, has belief in this doctrine become, or, rather,has it not died out almost completely from the thoughts and the hearts of men? Within the church, the solemn rites of Christian sepulture, burying the dead in consecrated ground, tells us of it. The preservation and the veneration of the relics of saints and martyrs teach it still more strongly. Does not tangible evidence, as it were, come to it anew from heaven by this constant and perpetual miracle, showing that the bodies of the sainted dead are in the custody of him who made them, and who has promised that he will raise them up again in glory?
Finally, this miracle seems to us especially adapted to our own age, when over-much knowledge is making men mad. Men are so lifted up by their progress, especially in natural sciences, that they have come to feel that they can dispense with God and substituteNATUREin his stead, with her multifarious and unchangeable laws. They boast that, under the light of their newly-acquired knowledge, everything is already, or will soon be, susceptible of natural explanation. As for miracles—direct interventions of God in the affairs of the world, reversing or suspending, in special cases, these ordinary laws of nature—they scout the idea. All past accounts of miracles, no matter when or by whom recorded, they hold to be either accounts of natural events warped and distorted by excited and unrestrained imaginations, or else the pure fictions of superstition and credulity. They are sure that, in the first case, had there been present witnesses of sufficient knowledge and caution—such knowledge and caution as they possess—the accounts of those events would have come down to us in a far simpler garb, and unclothed with this miraculous robing. They are equally sure that, in the other case, education,especially in the physical sciences, would have forbidden the creation of those numberless fictions.
Well, here, in the light of this nineteenth century, in one of the most polished, most delightful, and most accessible cities of Italy—centuries ago the largest, and even now the fourth largest, in Europe—there occurs an event to which their attention is invited. It is not an event of which a few only can be witnesses, and which all others must learn on their testimony. It occurs in public. It occurs fifteen or twenty times each year, and year after year. All may scrutinize it again and again, as often and as closely as they please. No mystery is made of anything about it. We admit it has come down to us from the middle ages, dark, ignorant, and superstitious as they are alleged to have been. But then, if it belongs to the past, it occurs still, and belongs equally to this nineteenth century. Moreover, it comes directly in contact with those physical sciences in which they think themselves strongest, and it should, therefore, interest them, and claim their attention.
Will they accept the invitation? We think very few will heed it.
Many would not dare to believe in a miracle nowadays, not even if it happened to themselves. They take their ground beforehand. Since miracles are impossible, any special one must of necessity be false—either a fraud or a delusion. They know from the beginning what the result of inquiring into this one must be—why give themselves unnecessary trouble? Such minds choose their own side, and implicitly choose the consequences that follow.
Others pretend to examine, but do it with a resolute and unshakable predetermination that this mustnotbe found out to be a miracle. They foster a prejudice which may blind their eyes to the light; and they, too, make themselves equally responsible for their conclusion and its consequences.
But if any one—Catholic, Protestant, or Rationalist—will examine it seriously and candidly, no matter how closely and patiently—nay, the more closely and patiently, the more surely—he will come to the same inevitable conclusion to which such an examination has heretofore led so many other candid and intelligent inquirers:Digitus Dei est hic: The Finger of God is here.
If the ghost of Tacitus could return from the Acherontic shades, learn the English language, and spend a few weeks in reading the most popular modern works in that branch of letters of which he was in his day the conspicuous ornament, he would rend his toga in despair, and mourn over the ruin of one of the noblest of the sciences. The “dignity of history” was not an unmeaning phrase when kings, consuls, and military commanders moved with stately pace through the polished pages, and uttered the most heroic of sentiments in the most formal of addresses. Ancient authors would have deemed it the grossest indecency to quote familiar language from the lips of any historical character, or to let theworld imagine that men who concerned themselves with the destinies of states, behaved even in moments of relaxation like the men who buy and sell in the shops, and confine their cares to commonplace domestic matters. And yet what could be more absurd than to suppose that generals addressed their armies amid the heat of battle in a speech regularly compounded of exordium, argument, exhortation, and peroration; or that great men wore the grand manner to bed with them, and put on civic crowns before they washed their faces in the morning? It is not so very many years since Cato used to be represented on the English stage in a powdered wig and a dress-sword, which was not more incongruous than the spectacle presented by all the old statesmen and fighting characters of antiquity, mouthing orations, and posing themselves in the best of the classical histories. Perhaps it was something to be thankful for that, in the eclipse of learning during the disturbed middle ages, the art of writing history after the heroic manner was lost. The chroniclers of feudal times devoted infinite pains to the reeord of facts—as well as the record of many things that were not facts—but knew little of the graces of literary composition, and cared nothing for the dignity of history. They stripped off the heavy robes, and showed us the deformed and clumsy figures underneath. Lacking literary culture and the fine art of discrimination, they left us only the bare materials of history instead of the historical structure itself. Industrious but injudicious collectors, they were sometimes amusingly garrulous, sometimes provokingly uninteresting; but their labors were invaluable, and modern scholars owe them a debt which can never be repaid. It is only within ahundred years that English writers have tried to combine the merits of the ancient and the mediæval schools, discarding the cumbrous and delusive garments in which Herodotus and Livy used to wrap up the Muse Clio, and draping the bare skeletons of the annalists with comely mantles. There was a portentous dulness in most of the earlier essays in the reviving art, scarcely interrupted until Hume embodied his sceptical philosophy in a history of England, and the infidel Gibbon threw a lurid splendor over the chronicles of the declining empire. Both these eminent writers brought to their work an elegance of style worthy of the classical period, and a vigor of thought so different from the unreflecting industry of their plodding predecessors, that the falsehood underlying their narrative was not readily perceived, or was too easily pardoned. Boldness of theory, and in Gibbon a sardonic wit, added interest to the charms of the well-told story. But Hume and Gibbon, as well as many of their less distinguished contemporaries, labored under a radically wrong theory. They accommodated historical narrative to the illustration of preconceived principles, instead of deducing the principles from the facts; and left us, consequently, volumes of sophistical argument, rather than chronicles of actual occurrences and pictures of actual society.
It was not until Macaulay arose in England, and Prescott in the United States, that the modern school of historical writing was fairly developed. Macaulay explained his own theory when he said that “a perfect historian must possess an imagination sufficiently powerful to make his narrative affecting and picturesque, yet must control it so absolutely as to content himself with the materials which he finds, and to refrainfrom supplying deficiencies by additions of his own.” William H. Prescott, though he sometimes trusted authorities who did not deserve his confidence, and was swayed by religious prejudice and an inability to comprehend the spirit of Catholic faith, came nearer to the perfection of Macaulay’s ideal than any previous writer. His imagination adorned the romantic tales of conquest and adventure in the New World with a splendor till then unknown; yet no one could charge that he had been led away by the temptations of a too luxuriant fancy, or had heightened the effect of his narrative by a single touch unauthorized in the musty chronicles from which he drew his material. Prescott’s earlier histories are stories in which the actors stand forth with as much distinctness, and incidents follow one another with as much rapidity and as close connection, as in a well-constructed novel. In his unfinishedPhilipII., he entered upon a wider field, which required a different treatment. It was no longer sufficient to tell a story well; he had to paint the manners of an age, the life and character of a nation, and to unravel the network of intrigue which constitutes the political history of Europe during a long and stirring period of time. That he did this, so far as his labors extended, with consummate art, no American reader needs to be told. But the system which he pursued was carried to a greater length by Macaulay—the best type, upon the whole, of the new school of historians of whom we purposed speaking in this article. Macaulay assumed that history ought to show us not merely the revolutions of dynasties, the clash of armies, and the intrigues of cabinets, but the daily life and conversation of all ranks of the people, from the prince to the peasant. It ought to teach us their habits of thoughtand their mode of speech. It ought to open for us their private homes, their workshops, and their churches. It ought to depict national habits and character, or it could not explain national tendencies and aspirations. To do this, it must pick up a multitude of little things which the older writers thought beneath the dignity of history. It must invade the province of the poet and the novelist. Otherwise, he who would understand the reign of King James must read half of it in Hume and half inThe Fortunes of Nigel.[116]Macaulay made many mistakes in the execution of this noble plan. He picked up too many things which were not so much undignified as untrustworthy. The sketches of society which he drew with such a masterly hand may have been true in their general effect; but he blundered in details. Besides, he was as hot a partisan as Hume, as inveterate a theorist as even the author ofThe Decline and Fall.
Whatever his mistakes and shortcomings, Macaulay rendered an invaluable service to literature by the impetus which his brilliant example gave to the new principles of historical composition. He may be said to have dealt the finishing blow to the old style, and shown us how a minute, faithful, and vivacious story ought to be set before the world—how the historian must draw his materials, not only from state-paper offices and formal chronicles, but from gossiping diaries, ballads, pamphlets, and all other sources in which are preserved traces of the condition of society and the domestic annals of the people. The period which he undertook to illustrate offered peculiar advantages for the development of his plan. It was a period when a great change was taking place in Englishcustoms and ways of thought. The revolution, which not only exchanged one dynasty for another, but metamorphosed the very system of English government, merely followed in the path of a remarkable intellectual and social transformation, without which the political reversal would have been impossible. The events of the reign of JamesII.could not be explained under the old plan of writing history on stilts. They were incomprehensible except by one who could mingle familiarly with the English people, and learn by what steps they had reached their new departure. Only one period in the history of England showed changes of equal importance. That was the period which witnessed England’s apostasy from the Catholic faith; and it is the period which one of the latest and most brilliant of English historians has chosen for the subject of a work planned (if not executed) after Macaulay’s model.
Mr. James Anthony Froude attempted to trace the development of the English nation, from the day of Henry’s formal separation from the communion of the Holy See to the final establishment of Protestant ascendency at the death of Elizabeth. This is by no means the task he has accomplished, but it is the task he set himself at the beginning of his work. He purposed to show the processes by which a people, devotedly and even heroically faithful to the Roman See, became first schismatic and then heretical; how their character under the change of faith took on a new color; how the foundations of the English supremacy over Ireland and Scotland were laid in blood and crime; and how the maritime ascendency which has lasted three hundred years was established by the daring and enterprise of English sailors during the latter half of Elizabeth’s reign. Never had historian a more temptingtheme. If Mr. Froude had been a man of philosophical spirit, acute insight, industry, and literary honesty, he might have produced a work that for brilliancy would have rivalled Macaulay’s, and for dramatic interest would have been almost unequalled in our language. There was no lack of material. Since Hume and Lingard—one the most misleading, the other the driest of modern English historians—had treated the same period, an immense store of records and official documents had become accessible to scholars. The British State-Paper Office abounded with historic wealth which the earlier writers did not know. The archives of Simancas disclosed secrets long unsuspected, and unravelled mysteries that had long baffled investigators. And from a thousand sources new light had been thrown upon the social condition of England, new illustrations given of the tendency of English thought, new explanations offered of the development of English strength and English character.
In his first volume, Mr. Froude seemed to appreciate the nature of his task, and to go about it with something of the proper spirit. He set before us a lifelike picture of England in the early part of Henry’s reign, and displayed admirable art in reproducing the manners, the conversation, and the tendencies of the common people, as well as the superficial characteristics of the chief actors in the historical drama. But even in the first volume he showed the glaring faults which vitiated all his later labors, and, increasing as the work went on, made his history at last one of the worst that the present generation has produced. Fired with the zeal of a blind partisan, he forgot all his earlier purposes and all his earlier pictorial art in the enthusiasm of a fierce religious bigotry. It becamehis object to describe a conflict for the possession of England between the powers of darkness and the powers of light. On the one hand stood the Pope of Rome and his agents, Catharine of Aragon, Wolsey, Mary Tudor, Philip of Spain, and the Queen of Scots. On the other, arrayed beneath the banner of civil and religious liberty, fought those bright beings, HenryVIII., Anne Boleyn, and Queen Elizabeth. Naturally, when Elizabeth at last triumphed in the defeat of the Spanish Armada, Mr. Froude declared the battle over, and dropped his unfinished, ill-proportioned story. One qualification he certainly had. He shrank from no paradox. He carried his theory boldly over the most serious obstacles, and took even the nastiest fences in the life of Henry without an instant’s hesitation. The most fervent Anglicans were amazed at Mr. Froude’s admiration for the bluff, carnal-minded king, and wondered how he was to justify the new views of history which he set forth with such alluring boldness. It was not long before he taught them his method. “It often seems to me,” says Mr. Froude, in one of his collected essays, “as if history was like a child’s box of letters, with which we can spell any word we please.” Of course, when the historian takes the liberty of leaving out facts which do not please him, disarranging sequences which conflict with his preconceived theories, and giving his own peculiar coloring to incidents without caring what coloring actually belongs to them, it is indeed easy enough to make history spell whatever he pleases. At the very outset, Mr. Froude had an opportunity to try his skill in accommodating facts to theories. He began his story with Henry’s project for a divorce; and his starting-point was the assumption thatthe king’s scruples were thoroughly conscientious, and no thought was given to Anne while he believed himself legally married to Catharine. To maintain this, the historian resorted to his characteristic vices—suppression and misrepresentation. He concealed the origin of Henry’s intercourse with Anne Boleyn, bringing her on the stage some years too late, with the air of one introducing a fresh arrival; and he grossly distorted the contemporary records from which he professed to quote. The king’s distaste for Catharine, he says, had risen to its worst dimensions before he ever saw Anne Boleyn. He adds that her first appearance at court was in 1525—which is an error, for she came to the court in 1522; and yet it was not until 1527 that we find Henry agitating the question of a divorce. That Mistress Anne during these five years was otherwise employed than in fascinating his majesty, Mr. Froude apparently wishes us to infer from the story that she was engaged to Lord Percy, the eldest son of the Earl of Northumberland. Lord Percy, to quote our author’s words, “was in the household of Cardinal Wolsey; and Cavendish, who was with him there, tells a long romantic story of the affair, which, if his account be true, was ultimately interrupted by Lord Northumberland himself.” This, if Cavendish said it, would indeed afford a fair presumption that Anne was not at that time (the date is given by other authorities as 1524 or 1525) the object of the royal attentions. But Cavendish really says something very different. He declared thatthe king sent for Lord Northumberland, and ordered him to interrupt the affair. Mr. Froude could not help seeing this statement if he read Cavendish at all, and we do not understand how he is to be acquitted of gross and intentional misrepresentationin making his authority convey a meaning diametrically opposed to the one intended. After this, Mr. Froude goes on with the story of the divorce as if Anne had no existence, and she does not appear again upon the scene until the stage has been nearly cleared for her.
This is a fair specimen of literary dishonesty or recklessness from the first volume. Later instalments of the work, especially those devoted to the Queen of Scots, have been dissected by an able hand in the pages of this magazine. The series of papers in which Mr. James F. Meline examined in our columns Froude’s account of Mary Stuart, have now been incorporated with much additional matter in a volume entitledMary, Queen of Scots, and her Latest English Historian.[117]No more thorough scarification of a literary offender has been published within our recollection. Mr. Meline has traced the historian’s authorities with admirable patience, disclosed his falsifications, his misconceptions, his suppressions, and his interpolations, and utterly demolished the case which Elizabeth’s advocate made against the unfortunate Mary. It is common to meet with uneducated people who cannot tell a story correctly, or repeat the words of a conversation without grossly distorting their meaning. Partly from defects of memory, partly from an intellectual deficiency which prevents them from apprehending things exactly as they are, such persons invariably misreport what they have seen and heard. What such people are to society, Mr. Froude seems to be to history. TheSaturday Reviewsays that he has not “fully grasped the nature of inverted commas.”If he quotes a state paper, he leaves out essential passages, and inserts statements which rest upon no authority but his own. He gives his conjectures as if they were recorded facts. He disingenuously combines unconnected facts so as to bear out his private conjectures.
These are serious charges to bring against a writer of history; but they are all proved by Mr. Meline’s book. We do not purpose reviewing the whole story of the Queen of Scots, or reviving the endless controversy upon her innocence, so soon after the task has been performed in the pages ofThe Catholic Worldby the author of the savage little volume now before us. But we shall select and arrange from this record a few specimens of Mr. Froude’s sins, that our readers may judge for themselves how little claim this latest English history has to an honorable place on their library shelves.
1. Mr. Froude begins early to prepare our minds for Mary’s imputed profligacy. “She was brought up,” he says, “amidst the political iniquities of the court of Catharine de Medicis.” The fact is that Mary never was at the court of Catharine de Medicis at all. Catharine had no court, no influence, no position in history, until after Mary had left France. And, besides, Mary and Catharine cordially detested each other.
2. On the authority of Knox’sHistory of the Reformation, he relates that Knox had labored to save the Earl of Murray from the dangerous fascinations of his sister Mary, “but Murray had only been angry at his interference, and ‘they spake not familiarlie for more than a year and a half.’” But Knox gives an entirely different version of the quarrel. He writes that he had urged Murray to legalize by act of the parliament the confession of faith as the doctrine of the Churchof Scotland, but Murray was more intent upon his private interests—“the erledom of Murray needed confirmation, and many things were to be ratified that concerned the help of friends and servants—and the matter fell so hote betwixt the Erie of Murray and John Knox, that familiarlie after that time they spack nott together more than a year and a half.” There is nothing about Mary’s influence over her brother; the influence was all on the other side.
3. Mr. Froude assumes to quote from a dispatch of Randolph’s to Cecil a description of Mary’s luxurious habits. “Without illness or imagination of it, she would lounge for days in bed, rising only at night for dancing or music; and there she reclined with some light delicate French robe carelessly draped about her, surrounded by her ladies, her council, and her courtiers, receiving ambassadors and transacting business of state. It was in this condition that Randolph found her.” (Randolph to Cecil, Sept. 4, 1563.) There is no such description in the dispatch. On the contrary, Mary is represented at this period, both by Randolph and by other authorities, as industrious, active, energetic, and capable, but at the same time in bad health.
4. Mr. Froude thus travesties Randolph’s account of the return of Bothwell (1565): “Suddenly, unlooked for and uninvited, the evil spirit of the storm, the Earl of Bothwell, reappeared at Mary’s court. She disclaimed all share in his return; he was still attainted; yet there he stood—none daring to lift a hand against him—proud, insolent, and dangerous.” And he adds that “the Earl of Murray, at the expense of forfeiting the last remains of his influence over his sister, summoned Bothwell to answer at Edinburgh a charge of high treason.” What Randolph reallysays is this: “The Queen misliketh Bothwell’s coming home, and has summoned him to undergo the law or be proclaimed a rebel.” It was the Queen therefore, and not Murray, who “summoned him to answer.” Moreover, Bothwell did not appear at court, but sought refuge among his vassals in Liddesdale.
5. Mr. Froude speaks of Lennox having “gathered about him a knot of wild and desperate youths—Cassilis, Eglinton, Montgomery, and Bothwell.” If he had read his authority (Randolph) with decent care, he would have seen that these were not the friends of Lennox, but, on the contrary, the strongest dependence of Murray and ArgyleagainstLennox. Moreover, Eglinton and Montgomery are one and the same person.
6. A blunder which has already excited some discussion is Mr Froude’s statement, on the authority of a letter from Randolph to Cecil, October 5, 1565, that Mary, “deaf to advice as she had been to menace,” said she would have no peace till she had Murray’s or Chatelherault’s head.” There is no such letter. It appears, however, from a letter of Randolph’s, dated October 4, that Mary was “not only uncertain as to what she should do, but inclined to clement measures, and so undecided as to hope that matters could be arranged.” The document to which Mr. Froude refers is a letter from the Earl of Bedford, who was not at Mary’s court, but at Alnwick, on the English side of the border, and who consequently had no such opportunities as Randolph for knowing the temper of the Scottish Queen. But even Bedford does not say what Mr. Froude reports. The earl merely relates the substance of information brought back from the rebel camp by one of his officers. According to this man, Murray and the other rebellords are dissatisfied with the little that England is doing to help them, andtheysay, “There is no talk of peace with that Queen, but that she will first have a head of the duke or of the Earl of Murray.”
7. One instance of Mr. Froude’s incorrigible propensity to blunder in that peculiar manner which is vulgarly called “going off at half-cock,” deserves to be mentioned, not for its importance, but because it is amusing. He describes Mary on a furious night-ride of “twenty miles in two hours,” at the end of which she wrote “with her own hand” a letter to Elizabeth, “fierce, dauntless, and haughty,” “the strokes thick, and slightly uneven from excitement, but strong, firm, and without sign of trembling.” It is a pity to spoil such a picturesque passage; but the very letter which Mr. Froude seems to have examined with such care contains the Queen’s apology fornotwriting it with her own hand, because she was “so tired and ill at ease,” and mentions, moreover, that the twenty-miles ride occupied five hours, not two.
8. In his account of the murder of Darnley, Mr. Froude pursues a singularly devious course, through which his reviewer follows him with inimitable pertinacity. The historian accepts without reserve the most notoriously untrustworthy authorities, distorts evidence, throws in a multitude of artful suggestions, and suppresses in a manner that is downright dishonest every circumstance that tells in Mary’s favor. We have no space to recapitulate here the numberless blunders and perversions of which he is convicted by Mr. Meline; but some of them are too ludicrous to be passed over. For instance, Mr. Froude finds it suspicious that Mary should have “preferred to believe” that she herself was the object of the lords’ conspiracy, though adispatch from Paris had conveyed “a message to her from Catharine de Medicis thather husband’s life was in danger.” The message was not from Catharine de Medicis, but from the Spanish ambassador in France, and wanted her to “take heed to herself,” for there was “some notable enterprise in hand against her.” Not a word is said of her husband.
9. It is again mentioned, as confirmation of her guilt, that “she sent for none of the absent noblemen to protect her,” and that “Murray was within reach, but she did not seem to desire his presence.” Now, Mr. Froude’s own authorities show that Marydidsend for many of the absent noblemen, and in particular that she twice sent for Murray, who would not come.
10. When Elizabeth sent Killigrew to Scotland to inquire into the circumstances of the murder,Murray(as Killigrew himself relates) entertained the English ambassador at dinner, and invited to meet him Huntly, Argyle, Bothwell, and Maitland—all of them among the murderers of Darnley. This was strong circumstantial evidence of Murray’s guilt. Mr. Froude accordingly (referring to Killigrew as his authority) suppresses all mention of Murray, who gave the dinner and presided at it, and states that Killigrew “was entertained at dinner by the clique who had attended her [Mary] to Seton”—thus implying that Mary, instead of Murray, was in league with Bothwell and the others to prevent his getting at the truth. The whole substance of Killigrew’s letter is most outrageously misrepresented. Mr. Meline gives the original and the false version side by side.
But we must pause. We cannot follow Mr. Meline in his admirable discussion of the authenticity of the famous casket letters, or his exposureof the extraordinary misstatements with which Mr. Froude has loaded this portion of his book. With the question of the innocence of the Queen of Scots, we are not now concerned. Our business is rather with the innocence of the Queen of Scots’ most notorious modern accuser. And whatever may be thought of the honesty of Mr. Froude’s motives, whether we decide that he blunders through sheer incapacity, or lies with malice aforethought, we believe candid students will admit that his reputation as a historical writer has been utterly ruined, and that his work will be remembered hereafter as a disastrous literary failure.
[116]See Macaulay’sEssay on History.
[117]Mary, Queen of Scots, and her Latest English Historian.By James F. Meline. New York: The Catholic Publication Society.
It comes to us, as a messenger of peace and love, a memory of home, a voice of the past, with the echo of unforgotten joys, and therefrainof ever-silent sorrows; with the sacred thoughts of that most touching feast, Christmas, of that most tender mystery, the Infant-God; with the human thoughts of friends gone from us and loved ones far away—Venite adoremus!
It conjures up pictures before us of a happy, ignorant childhood, peaceful as a meadow-brook—a young life passed amid smiling hills, and fruitful vales, and woods where the honeysuckle twines round the old gnarled hawthorns, and the oak spreads its green, trembling tent over carpets of wild hyacinths. There, before the mind’s eye, rises the vision of a house, gray and picturesque, a broad, lovely terrace, and oriel windows looking down and beyond it into a sloping orchard. At the back, leaning on the grassy bank, dotted by firs and elms, lilacs and guelder-rose, and fragrant syringa and gold-blooming laburnum, stands a gaunt old tower, clad in dark purple-berried ivy—a ghost tower, the haunt of mystery, overshadowing the little cloister and the tall, gray roof of the chapel. But it is winter, and I have been forgetting that theVenite adoremusis a snow-flower of devotion, a “Christmas rose,” not a red June rose, regal in its dusky, velvety mantle of richest, warmest color; for now we hear the chant of the holy Christmas song, and the tapers are lighted on the stone-carved altar, where, on each side of the niched reredos, white angels kneel with their eternal torches, ever still, ever adoring, like some heavenly exile bound to earth’s temples by a divine spell, of which art holds the key. Above, the Annunciation is blazoned forth on the pictured window; but you cannot see it now, the night blots out its fairness. Angels, again, on the frescoed wall, bear scrolls, whose silent voices chant a ceaselessGloriato the Babe in the tabernacle—Laudamus te,Benedicimus te,Adoramus te,Glorificamus te—and the rest of the narrow chapel is dark and voiceless, save where a taper glimmers on the desk of the little, humble harmonium, round which stand reverentially the few singers, whose only guerdon is the smile of the unseen but not unfelt God. Dark and dusky red arethe hangings that tapestry the wall, bearing over their surface thick growths of the white fleur-de-lis; while above the simple benches of stained wood, at the back, rises a long, dark gallery. It was there I heard the first Midnight Mass I ever heard in my life.
Venite adoremus!It brings back visions of a mother’s patient, doting love; of a gathering of friends; of pleasant, hushed talk of ghosts and spectres; of long, dark corridors, where the wind moaned like a soul in pain; of oriel windows, many-paned, through which came the distant sound of young owls hooting mournfully in the snow-covered plantations.
How kind a mother the church is! Are not all her feasts as many days of remembrances given to the past joys of home? Are they not a faultless calendar of our hopes and fears for years past? When the children, with earnest, unsuspicious gravity, debated upon the arrangements of the “crib,” what excitement! what interest! When the parents and the old retainers closed one room in mysterious silence, and decorated the glittering Christmas-tree, what wonderment! what whisperings!—and on the revelation, what delight! When piles of blankets and warm clothing were distributed among the poor, what curiosity to see which child got the petticoat Eleanor hemmed, or the jacket Frances put together!
All this is in the voice of theVenite adoremusas it sounds faintly now through a half-opened door, a Sunday surprise in a house hardly given to much solemnity—a house far away from the old gabled homestead and the snow-veiled chapel-roof.
But it has other scenes to show, other memories to waken. It tells of a Southern church, gaudy and bedizened, full of frivolous worshippers, whose Christmas vigil has been keptin the ball-room they have hurriedly left to listen to the operatic orchestra preparing its musical pyrotechnics for the dread moment of the Elevation. But pass we on to more congenial remembrances. It tells of a simple, white-washed chamber, a prison-ward in the Holy City, where reclaimed and forgiven women are worshipping the divine Babe, who has wrought their salvation and sent them in their hour of need to the arms of his earthly angels, the Sisters of Mercy; it tells of a high dignitary of the Vatican, leaving his purple magnificence to come among the city prisons, and spend with them a more edifying Christmas than the display of the public churches promised his humble devotion.Venite adoremus!It swells up in sweet woman-tones from some recess of faithful memory, but the halls through which the hymn was borne that Christmas night echo only to the heavy tramp of the sentinel now, if not to worse, the blasphemies of the ungodly trooper.
It brings the mediæval glories ofSt.Mark’s to the mind of a lover of that unique basilica—that petrified dream of the heavenly Jerusalem, with its curious barbaric wealth, its golden mosaics, its Byzantine spoils of victories that were not merely the victories of civilization over decay, but the triumphs of faith over superstition. The glorious church is full, dark masses of human beings sway about its broad-reaching nave, and here and there, like fire-flies, like heart-stars, shine the littlecerini—the rope-like coils of wax, the picturesque forerunners of garish gas-jets and dream-dispelling coronas. The Mass in Venice is not a real Midnight Mass, however, since, by special permission, it is celebrated at five o’clock in the afternoon of the vigil. It is sad to hear profane music even in this consecrated spot, whose dim,suggestive beauty seems to inherit the vague and solemn halo of the veiled lamps of the Holy of Holies in the temple of Jerusalem; but corrupted taste certainly does reign in the Venetian basilica, and a Mass full of modern Italianfioriturais annually performed in it at the festival of Christmas. Still, the mind sees beyond the unhappy aberrations of the modern Euterpe out into the long vista of past centuries, when graver and nobler strains rang through the low-vaulted temple, and the stern and silent heads of the state came in procession to grace the triumph of the new-born Saviour. From Venice to Geneva there is a wide gulf, but theVenite adoremusbridges over that.
Once again Christmas comes round, and the same world-wide chant rises in the now half-converted stronghold of Calvinism. It leads us towards the older town, far from the noisy port hotels, into a winding labyrinth of steep, ill-paved streets, through rows of old houses, every one of which seems to have a history of its own, and whose old-fashioned windows, and wide portals opening into silent court-yards, remind one of time-worn parchment bindings round poems for ever new. But is this analogy not a little true? for is not the poem of the human heart as old and as changeless as the ancient romances of long-dead bards, and yet do we ever tire of its repetition, any more than we are weary of Chaucer and Shakespeare, of Homer and Virgil?
Venite adoremus!It lures us on to a dark church, dedicated toSt.Germain, where there is nothing beautiful to strike the eye, nothing artistic to make the heart beat. Plain and even unsightly, tawdry and faded, as all churches are whose history lies between the dreaded persecutionof the sixteenth century and the Gothic revival of the nineteenth,St.Germain yet possesses that untold charm which the Italians so broadly but accurately describe by the wordsimpatico. Sympathy! yes, that is it. It breathes on us from every corner; it is the atmosphere of the little church; it softens every incongruity, and sweetly blinds us to every defect. After all, such churches, inartistic as they may be, are no unfit representatives of the church militant, while our glorious blossoms of stone, born of the Moses-like rod of Pugin, are types of the unfathomable beauty and jubilant repose of the church triumphant.
In this Midnight Mass at Geneva it was touching to see the crowds that flocked to the church through drifting snow and biting wind—real Christmas weather—and, without any attraction in the shape of noted preacher or imposing ceremonial, filled the church as full as the generous heart-blood does the bosom of the Christian martyr. Hundreds of silent worshippers were assembled there, and, when the last Gospel of the Mass had been said, the priests returned, in alb and stole, to give communion to the eager congregation. Hardly one present seemed to have left the church, and gradually the vast body of the faithful broke, like successive waves, at the foot of the altar. For one whole hour was this scene enacting, and no music was heard meanwhile, and, though few rules were enforced and little order reigned, yet the sight was as widely suggestive as any more carefully arranged demonstrations. Somehow these artless, unpremeditated outpourings of the heart of Christendom have a far higher power to interest, a far subtler charm to entrance, and leave a higher impression and a more healthful influence behind, thanthose wonderful pageants which from year to year draw thousands of curious spectators to Rome. Here is everyday Christianity; here is the inner working of that silent, God-wielded mechanism whose outward robes and draperies only come to us in the shape of those glittering festas; here is the real work, the real core of things, the heart whose pulsation alone gives meaning to all that external magnificence, the sun of which those ceremonies are the radiance, the consuming fire of which that glorious ritual is but the outgoing heat and the coruscant light. And when we think of the darker and varied aspects, the inner complications of the lives of those who were crowding round the altar-rails ofSt.Germain, what a wonderful, manifold history, what a spiritual landscape of infinite shades of the most delicate pencillings, do we not see! Side by side kneel souls whose life-paths run in opposite channels: here is Martha, the busy household angel, whose faith is inwoven in her every daily movement, her every thought, though it be of toil and anxiety; there is the pensive Magdalen, whose sadness is her soul’s beauty, whose memory brings before her even more tokens of merciful forgiveness and unwearied love than of her own little past, her sins and her hard-heartedness; there kneels the widow whose child has just been given back to her from the very portals of death, and whose only altar for many dreary months has been the darkened chamber and the curtained sick-bed. Close to her is a maiden whose life is one long act of pure preparation for the bridal feast, the marriage supper of the Lamb, and who, when next Christmas-chimes sound, will hear in them the glad knell that proclaims her death to the outside world, and her life-long vow of obedience to herSpouse. Here is a Monica, wrestling in prayer for a wayward son whose hopeless lapse from the narrow path of virtue is the heaviest cross her Saviour could have chosen for her burden; there again is the bride, kneeling by the side of the simple, joyous, boyish bridegroom, with whom she is just beginning a new stage on the road to eternal bliss. So rough, so uniform, so commonplace is the aspect of the crowd, that these things are only visible to spiritual sight, to the eye of the soul; and, if visible even to our darkened organs of spiritual understanding, how much more clearly and far more touchingly to the eye of eternal Wisdom and fathomless Love! What a rose-garden is a church full of humble communicants before the sight of God! How fragrant and varied the blossoms to his illumined perception! Men in every stage of conversion—those who have just timidly set their foot on the first round of Jacob’s mystic ladder; those who have struggled so far that they can dare to look down one moment, and measure the death from which God’s love has raised them, in order to gain additional grace to correspond with his future and more rapid calls heavenward; those who have left all sin and danger so far behind that they look upon them calmly, as one sees the rolling clouds far below from the crisp-breathing atmosphere of the highest mountains; those whose conversation is in heaven, and whose thoughts are silent angels walking ever with them as the living messengers of God. Such are the miracles of grace that crowd the lowly church; the mysteries that we can only guess at beneath the crust of materiality which we see; the wonders that jostle us in the swaying throng, and of which we have so little knowledge that we hardly even suspect whatangel’s robe has swept past our own garments a moment ago.
And as this scene fades away, while the silence is again broken by the sweet song of home,Venite adoremus!we see another and a last picture dawning from the gray mist of memory.
Not far from the old home where the first Midnight Mass of our childhood entranced our imagination is another house—a home, too, in some sense, yet not the home that the mother hallowed in the dear, olden days, for now she is only present in the spirit, and she never even saw the first Christmas snows in this new and stately hall.
But a church, fair and carven, stands above her grave, and her loving heart is the first stone, the foundation-stone of the new shrine. Close above her resting-place is the altar, and close below, the organ. There Christmas is enthroned again, theVenite adoremusechoes once more through wreathed arches and festooned pillars; there again a small household and a few newly-converted children of the faith of old England kneel in silent prayer, and mingle thoughts of the foundress of the church with those of the new-born King whose praises, whoseGloria, she is now singing in heaven. Thus the soul-stirring Christmas hymn links the past with the present, the memories of foreign lands with the dear thoughts of home, and binds them together as a sheaf of golden straw to lay in the crib of the Babe of Bethlehem.
Venite adoremus!It has been sung to our infancy when the nurserocked the cradle where slept the first-born; it has cheered our early childhood when the young mother-voice taught it to us at the Christmas fireside; it has thrilled our heart in youth when, far from the old home, we have listened to its solemn, familiar strains; it will stir a chord of memory through each succeeding year as our early associations grow dim and our path waxes more lonely; it will breathe a sweet farewell and echo in our ears on our very deathbed, linking the thought of our first earthly home to that of our expected eternal one in the bosom of our Jesus and the arms of our new-found, glorified Mother.
Those who are dear to us on earth, those who grew up round the same hearth, and knelt peacefully at the same father’s knee, and held his hand the day the mother-angel winged her way to her God, can never forget theVenite adoremus, the Christmas pledge of undying love and indissoluble union, which they learned and sang together for long, long years of joy, nor can they dream that, however far apart, that hymn does not make the heart beat and the eye grow dim with tears even as in the days of old; while—O happier thought even than that!—they never can forget that as on earth, so will it be hereafter, that the crown of song will lack no jewel, will miss no note, ofallthat once were in it, and that for ever and for everonewill be the undiminished chorus of father and mother, brethren and sisters, in the halls of the “Everlasting Christmas.”Venite Adoremus! venite adoremus Dominum!
“Like stars to their appointed heights they climb.”—Shelley.
The remark had become trite in the mouths of Europeans, that America has no history. Such was the inertness of our countrymen in the department of American history; such the want of works recounting the thrilling story of early adventure and colonization, the struggles of feeble colonies for existence and permanence, their long and steadfast preservation of free institutions inherited from the mother-country, and their gallantry in defending them against an unnatural mother; the birth and growth of a vast and mighty republic, maintaining at once order and liberty amid the convulsions and revolutions of European dynasties and empires, and eliciting from a European monarch, whose crown was afterwards torn from his head, the remark addressed to an American Catholic bishop, who told him of free and peaceful America, “Truly, that people at least understand liberty; when will it be understood among us?”—all these things remained so long an untold story, that it was believed but too generally that America was without a history to record. The subsequent works of Bancroft, Irving, Prescott, Parkman, and others have pretty effectually dispelled the delusion.
But it seems to have been equally thought, among the historians of the church, that her career in Americawas also devoid of historical interest, so few and meagre were our published records and histories. In the general histories of the church, such as that by Darras, commencing with the earliest ages, and coming down to our own times, with but slight general allusions to America, no mention whatever is made of the rise and progress of the church in the United States. In the American edition of Darras, there is an Appendix, written for the purpose by an American author,Rev.Charles I. White, D.D., giving aSketch of the Origin and Progress of the Catholic Church in the United States of America, and intended to supply, in some measure, the omission.
In our article on Bishop Timon, inThe Catholic Worldof April, 1871, we remarked: “Sketches of local church history, more or less complete, have occasionally appeared—sketches, for instance, likeThe Catholic Church in the United States, by De Courcy and Shea; and Shea’sHistory of the Catholic Missionsamong the Indian tribes of America, and Bishop Bayley’s little volume on the history of the church in New York. But a work of a different kind, broader in its design than some of these excellent and useful publications, more limited in scope than the dry and costly general histories, still awaits the hand of a polished and enthusiastic man of letters.”
When we penned these lines, though we knew of Mr. Clarke’s long-continued and unwearied labors in thatdepartment of American Catholic literature, had cheered at times his earnest and faithful studies, and had, by his kindness, been able to spread before our readers some of his interesting and admirably prepared biographical papers, such as theLife of Governor Dongan of New York, inThe Catholic Worldof September, 1869, and theMemoir of Father Brébeuf, S.J., in the July and August numbers, 1871, still we scarcely hoped that we should see our desires so soon realized, or that we should so soon have occasion to hail the appearance of the splendid work now before us, the fruits of his accomplished pen and energetic industry, in the two handsomely printed and elegantly bound volumes,The Lives of the Deceased Bishops of the Catholic Church in the United States. The production of such a work, prepared during the broken and fleeting moments of leisure snatched from a life devoted to professional duties, and to an active participation in the Catholic and public-spirited enterprises of our busy metropolis, is something for which we, as a Catholic journalist devoted to literature, may be permitted to express our own thanks, and those of the Catholic community, and at the same time to commend it as an instance of successful literary toil in a rich but uncultivated field, and as, what we hope and believe it will be, a reward for long and painstaking researches, careful collation, and fine literary study. There were but few published works, as we have remarked, from which to draw the facts and information necessary for such a book. Hence the author had to seek, in a great measure, his materials from the archives of the various dioceses, the unpublished correspondence and journals of the deceased prelates, their pastoral letters and addresses, from the Catholic serialpublications and newspapers of the last half-century (a task of great and protracted labor and fatigue), from the personal recollections of surviving friends, co-laborers, and colleagues of the bishops, from family records, from his own correspondence with numerous witnesses of the growth of the church and of the labors of our apostolic men, and even from the silent but sacred marble records of the tomb. The frequency with which the author cites, among hisauthorities, unpublished documents and original sources of information, which were in many cases the individual narratives of living witnesses, committed to writing at his request, and for this work, is a proof of the industry and labor with which this work has been prepared, and give us the means of appreciating the services thus rendered to our American Catholic literature, in securing and preserving from decay, oblivion, or total loss many valuable but perishable traditions and documentary materials. We will refer to two only, among many instances throughout these richly stored pages, of valuable documents thus given to the public; these are the royal charter of King JamesII., guaranteeing liberty of conscience to the Catholics of Virginia in 1686, and the beautiful and touching letter addressed by Archbishop Carroll, in 1791, to the Catholic Indians of Maine, the remnants of the pious and faithful flock of the illustrious and martyred Rale—for the publication of both of which we are indebted to Mr. Clarke.
Mr. Clarke has devoted many years to these valuable and excellent studies and compositions, and those who have read our Catholic periodical literature during the last fifteen years, will remember hisMemoirsof Archbishops Carroll and Neale, of Bishops Cheverus and Flaget, of theRev.Prince Demetrius Augustine Gallitzin, of Fathers Andrew White and Nerinckx, of Governor Leonard Calvert, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, Commodore John Barry, the father of the American navy, and Judge Gaston; which were published in 1856 and 1857 inThe Metropolitanof Baltimore. The favor with which these papers were received at the time, and the earnest recommendations of prelates, priests, and laymen, have, as we have learned, induced the author to enlarge his plans and undertake a series of works, which will give the American Church a complete biography of ecclesiastics and laymen, and, at the same time, literary monuments of classic taste and scholarship. The present book of the prelates will, as we rejoice to learn, be followed by the second work of the course, containing the lives of the missionaries of our country, such as White of Maryland, Marquette, Jogues, and Brébeuf of New York, Rale of Maine, the missionaries of the Mississippi Valley, of distinguished priests in later times, and of the founders of our religious houses, male and female. The remaining work of the series, more interesting probably than even the preceding ones, because not the least attempt has so far been made in that direction, will contain the lives of distinguished Catholic laymen, who have rendered signal services to our country, such as Calvert, Carroll, and Taney of Maryland, Iberville of Louisiana, Dongan of New York, La Salle and Tonty, explorers of the Mississippi River, Barry of Pennsylvania, Vincennes of Indiana, Gaston of North Carolina, and many others. The whole will form a complete series of Catholic biographical works, issued in the appropriate order of bishops first, priests and religious second, and finally of statesmen, captains, explorers, andjurists. We cannot withhold the expression of our pleasure at the prospect of results such as these in a department of literature which it has ever been one of the objects ofThe Catholic Worldto encourage, promote, and cherish.
That valuable materials exist in the country for all of these important works, we feel quite sure. We hope care will be taken of them and that they will be freely placed at the service of our Catholic historians and authors. Their publication would be the best means of preserving them, while rendering them useful to the present generation. We will give an incident in the experience of Mr. Clarke, in preparing hisLives of the Bishops, related by him to us, as an evidence of the danger to which valuable historical matter is constantly exposed of being lost and destroyed. He applied, in one instance, to the custodians of the papers relating to the Catholic history of an important diocese and state, and was informed that the diocesan papers and documents had been for many years locked up in a strong chest or safe, before and for some time after the death of the first bishop, and, on being opened and examined, they were found to be in a state of complete decay from the damp, fell to pieces when handled, and that scarcely a line of the writing was legible. Other cases are related of valuable materials for American Catholic history lost or sent out of the country. We observe, in the first volume before us, a new and appropriate feature—a distinct and separate return of thanks by the author to a long list of prelates, priests, and laymen who have supplied him with materials or aided him in his labors. The appeal he makes, in his preface, for the assistance of such as possess materials, has our cordial sympathy; and wehope the appeal will not be made in vain.
The book of prelates, whose appearance we now hail with so much pleasure, is the most important and valuable contribution yet made to our American Catholic biographical literature. It covers the ground of our entire church history to the most recent times, possesses the peculiar interest which attaches to personal and individual narrative, and is free, as we have said, from the dryness of the general history. Its pages teem with an ardent love of country and of our American institutions, and with a devotion to true liberty, which well accord with the traditions and education of one of the descendants of the Catholic pilgrims of Maryland, who constitute the theme of an honored chapter in our history, illustrating the magnanimity of a dominant Catholic majority in times when toleration was not the fashion, the harmony between Catholicity and liberty, and an unflinching faith through generations of Protestant persecution. Praise is freely bestowed, where praise was due, to our country and to our countrymen; and reproof is administered in the spirit of true affection, whenever there are errors or abuses to be corrected, or where there is conflict, in the civil or political order, with the sacred rights of religion and of conscience.