thing, informed by an interior sentiment of the falsity or truth of certain propositions, often without having pursued the studies necessary to be in a condition to examine them thoroughly. I believe that, even in questions which appertain to the exact sciences, or which seem to rest wholly upon experience, this rule of intellectual consciousness is of much import to those who are not initiated into this kind of knowledge; so that I confess to having doubted things that pass generally without question, such, for instance, as the theory of the tides, gravitation, &c. And I find myself irresistibly impelled to believe that some genuine man of science will one day convince us of our error in regard to these things."

De Maistre finds himself irresistibly attracted towards the spiritualists of all ages,― Pythagoras, Plato, Cicero, Origen, Descartes, Cudworth, Fénelon, and takes to them by an instinctive penchant, without any investigation of their writings. It is a rare phenomenon, this transcendental upholder of an absolute, external authority. He feels the influence of that current of spiritualism which, reacting upon the old, material dogmas of the eighteenth century, flows onward, imparting a living energy to every sphere of thought, life, and social development. The highest philosophy to-day protests against the mechanical formulæ of the preceding periods, and pants for a free, spontaneous life. It enunciates a connection between the natural and the spiritual worlds, recognizes a divine origin of language, reverences the primal instincts of truth, beauty, and goodness, and calls for the baptism of science into the true spirit of religion. De Maistre is the apostle of such ideas, though in his view they are indissolubly associated with the Catholic faith.

It is very natural that he should see no good in the negative philosophy of the eighteenth century, and should have no sympathy with the material tendencies of the Baconian system, while he looks through the medium of his beloved Mother Church, cast down from her seat and trailing her glories in the dust. He considers her as a martyr, and not as a criminal. He looks upon her degradation and suffering as an incomprehensible trial of faith, and as in some way to subserve her future conquests. He cannot see that humanity has gained anything by the practical tendencies of science, the applica

tion of religion to life, and the transfer of divineness from the priest and the king to the interior realities and human attributes which these external symbols represent. He covers himself with sackcloth and mourns for Zion, the beautiful city.

There is often expressed among us a fear of the increase of Romanism. We counsel all who entertain such apprehensions to read the genuine productions of the Church as represented by the Ultramontanists of the last twenty-five years, and to become saturated with the neo-Catholic spirit. They will feel that they are breathing the atmosphere of a different age. To us, every prognostic indicates decay, notwithstanding some apparent counter-tendencies on the surface, such as we mentioned at the beginning of this article. The Romish Church has no sympathy with the predominating activities of the modern era, and can never be the soul of such a body. If she does not directly oppose them, she is felt to be unfavorable to the natural sciences, as withdrawing man from the sphere of the priest; to commerce, as the corrupter of morals and the worship of gold; to political economy, as an earthward-pointing knowledge, withdrawing man from the things of the soul; to popular sovereignty, as the violation of all hierarchical order; to the inner light, as a fatal will-o'-the-wisp of fancy; to self-government, as mere anarchy; to progress, as an unsanctified substitute for a future heaven; and to education, as food for pride, the nurse of disobedience, and as sowing the seeds of discontent and presumption. As these great phenomena of modern life have appeared, the Church has stood aloof. To these rising influences she has succumbed for the last three centuries. Since the Council of Trent, she has held merely a negative position. Her doctrines have become a formula, her faith a retrospect, and her life a petrifaction. Her converts have been from among those who were impenetrable to the inspirations of the new age, the dead, and not the living. The strength they have brought has been only nominal, as they are possessed by some dream of the past, and not by an insight into the present.

And can the theology and the ideal which have fallen back, wilted, sapless, before the rising sun, abide its midday splen

dor? The great Ecumenical Councils were once the proof and the means of vital circulation. But as the Church becomes separate from the universal life she finds it inexpedient to hold these; and, declaring herself an absolute monarch, sits in grand isolation from the great human mass, and, like all monarchs, is approached by flattery and obeyed with slavish fear. The honest pulsations of the common human heart do not thrill through her any more. She is the organ of no worldwide thought and aspiration. De Maistre says that the Councils were adapted only to the youth of the Church. And, without meaning it, he here pronounces the sentence of condemnation upon her. She is, in other words, grown old. She can no longer hear willingly the stirring plans and dreams of the active life of to-day, full of noise and foolish enthusiasms, it may be, but yet as earnest, as divine, and as full of a future greatness, as the early periods of the Church. She has lost her youthful pliability of muscle and her elastic tread, having her fixed, life-long prejudices, her dreamings upon the achievements of her pristine strength and beauty. Once she could govern by yielding, and lead by seeming to follow. But now the throat cannot open wide enough “to swallow the formulas." She shuts mouth and She shuts mouth and eyes, muttering only anathemas. She has fully matured her plan of life, laid out her work, made her will, and we even read occasional obituary notices, extolling the promise of her youth and the vigorous beauty of her prime. She could then meet and conquer the hordes of barbarians, and win them to her side, taming their rudeness and absorbing into herself their restless energies. But this modern inroad of wild liberty, individual thought, irrepressible desire for light, expansion, brotherhood, she does not understand, and therefore cannot adequately meet. She can only reason against the sufficiency of reason, and define the mysteries of faith by showing that they are undefinable. Says Auguste Comte: "The most eminent thinker of the Catholic school, the illustrious De Maistre, bore involuntary testimony to the necessity of his time, when he endeavored, in his principal work, to re-establish the Papal supremacy on historical and political reasonings, instead of ordaining it by divine right, which is the only ground appropriate to such a doctrine, and VOL. LXXIX. - No. 165.

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the only ground he would have proposed in any age but one in which the general state of intelligence precluded such a plea."

The Romish Church presents no overshadowing shrine for the intellectual, moral, and social needs, but a negative criticism of negative dogmas. The ideal she offered to the barbarian is no ideal for the children of the present, as they swarm from the wilderness of social degradation, the hives of industry, the marts of trade, the streets and highways of life. They must have something else than a demonstration of the nothingness of philosophy and the heartlessness of modern mechanism. They rightly look to the future, instinctively feeling that what is offered to them as bread is but a stone, and that the Universal Father will feed the hungry and clothe the naked.

Every forcible presentation, such as De Maistre gives us, of the worth and reality of Catholicism in the past, only suggests to us the comparison of its magnificent office then with its condition now. We cannot help asking, when we read of a Europe brought into one monarchical union, Where is now the spiritual force to fuse the contending nationalities into one; the power which could enforce "the truce of God"; the noble philanthropy which could free the serf and die for the slave; the voice which could make kings tremble and august emperors do penance; the erudite zeal which could organize schools and universities, encourage learning, and discover new worlds in the physical and intellectual spheres? We cannot help asking whence come the suspicion of all ideal tendencies and the retrograde policy of Catholicism, and we cannot help regarding these as the necessary symptoms of decline.

The literature of Romanism is also evidence to the same point. More even than that of Protestantism at the present time, it is critical and negative merely. It exhibits as salient features only a technical, verbal scholarship, antiquarian research, correctness of taste in mediæval literature and art, a vapid pietism appealing to fear, and a self-satisfied comparison with other creeds. De Maistre is a remarkable exception for geniality, freshness, and spontaneous glow. But we cannot help feeling that he was harnessed into a vulgar car,

and made to draw wood and water in the service of a religious creed narrower than the great, divine truths whose gleamings he discerned. No virtue now goes forth from the seven-hilled city to uprear the cathedral, construct the poem, awaken heroic effort, and mould youthful energies in accordance with the eternal harmony. The strait ecclesiastical coat represses development.

And what more manifest evidence of decline could be given, than the attempt to revive the worst features of miraculous displays, under forms which not only science, but common sense and the deepest instincts of a religious fitness, must class with the lowest types of Fetichism and the most impotent deceptions of an expiring Polytheism? Winking eyes, bleeding hearts, charmed beads, consecrated images of the Blessed Virgin, and exorcising formulæ, are poor appeals to the earnest soul of the nineteenth century. It is by an irresistible law, that, in the declining period of a religion, its defenders are compelled to fall back upon what is peculiar to it, and thus most offensive to the rising opposite tendency. A profound thinker reckons it as one of the testimonies to the noble efforts of Catholicism, "that, in its contests with Polytheism, it enlarged the field of human reason, as yet narrow, at the expense of the theologic spirit." In its decline, it seeks to narrow the circle of reason, uniformly casts slurs upon it, and would extend as far as possible the bounds of credulous ignorance. And by the same judicial necessity, exscinding itself from the real wants and work of the times, it must exert its powers in some chosen sphere, conjuring up phantoms while not discerning the real foes. Cardinal Wiseman, the exponent of the Church to the leading nation of Europe, says, "We are living in a perfect atmosphere of invisible enemies, who disturb nature, thwart the Providential direction of things"; and the Church is the antagonist and vanquisher of this hostile crew. Such a development is not arbitrary, but in accordance with essential laws. We might gather up volumes of the same purport. But enough has been said to show that the Church has lost the divine clew which she should put into the hands of earth's pilgrims. The souls which cleave to her she lulls with The devoted, beating hearts which yearn

a pleasant song.