charity that traverse it, leading thereby all that pass along them to the Church of God. In the first place, then, the horror alone excited by the thought of captivity points to the Catholic Church, which always felt, and, as soon as was compatible with order and justice, which always evinced by deeds more eloquent than words the same impression. The Fathers of our Lady of Mercy commence the great history of their order by stating the paramount importance of its object, for the reason, that "slavery deprives man of liberty, which is the richest appanage that he has received from God in the order of nature." Have you led, or transmitted, or sold any one to captivity? is the question for confessors in the ninth century. If so, unless it was pro pace communi, you must do penance for three years. In the Ordo Romanus, when the Rogation days are spoken of, the first rank among good works is ascribed to the gift of freedom; for which in fact the Church was always willing to make the greatest sacrifices, and to extend indulgence farthest. The bull of Nicholas III. granted deliverance from purgatorial pains to the souls of the parents and relations of those who, imitating the pontiffs, gave certain alms for the ransom of slaves. The deliverance of men from slavery in pagan times had directed, no doubt, multitudes during that epoch to recognise the divine character of the Catholic Church, which was so constantly, though so cautiously and wisely, occupied in that work from the beginning. Pope St. Clement says, that he has known many Christians, who, to obtain freedom for other Christian captives, made themselves slaves in their place. It would be long to give even a summary of this glorious work, as carried on during the first ages. "No one," says Fortunatus, "could relate the number of captives for whom St. Germain, bishop of Paris, obtained freedom-Spaniards, Irish, Bretons, Gascons, Saxons, and Burgundians, are witnesses. When the abbot St. Eparchius died in the year 579, the funeral was attended by two thousand of the poor captives whom he had ransomed with the alms given to him by pious persons."‡ St. Philibert applied vast funds at Jumiège to the ransom of captives. Antonio de Ypes, in his history of the Benedictines, observes, that this work from the beginning formed one of the many objects to which that truly universal order directed its labours. The monks enfranchised their serfs * Regino Abb. Prum, De Eccles. Discip. lib. i. 144. everywhere, and that, too, without selling liberty to them. Those of Pontigny set the example in that part of France. If we, again, open the letters of St. Gregory the Great, we soon find traces of the zeal which always animated the Holy See in performing this task. Thus a physician of the emperor, residing in Constantinople, sends his money for the redeeming captives.* A princess named Theoliste sends him thirty golden livres for the same work. It would require a volume to state the services in this respect of that one pontiff alone. Balmes shows admirably how well the Church deserved by redeeming captives and gradually abolishing slavery. Addressing Protestantism, he demands, "Where were you when the Catholic Church accomplished in Europe this immense enterprise? and how do you dare to accuse her of sympathizing with servitude, of degrading man, and usurping his rights ? Can you present a single title which so merits for you the gratitude of the human race?" ‡ The fact is, that so late even as the last century, acts of parliament were passed in England expressly to encourage the slave-trade, while Johnson, so Catholic in mind and often in expression, stood at one time alone among Protestants in denouncing the infamy of such measures. Catholic statesmen in England, during the middle ages, legislated under a different banner. The parliament was then guided by the canons. The tenth canon of the Council of Celchit, held in 816, provided for the emancipation in a few years of all the slaves of the Church in England. The Council of Armagh in 1172 gave liberty to all the English who were slaves in Ireland; for the English at that time were so barbarous that they used to sell their own children to the Irish for slaves, like the Africans at the present day. This practice was the common vice of the nation. Hence the necessity for that council in London in 1102, which proscribed as infamous this odious traffic. The Council of Armagh, moved by the enormity of such a sin, declared that the purchasers were as criminal as the unnatural parents, and therefore, with the universal consent, pronounced all such slaves eman emancipated. Long before, in the sixth century, we find an ancient author relating, to the eternal praise of the pious queen Bathilde, that she prohibited reducing Christians to captivity, and proclaimed everywhere "ut nullus in regno Francorum captivum hominem transmitteret." Forty-five bishops at the Council of Châlons-sur-Saône, in the year 550, decreed, saying, it is the end of religion and the height of piety to ransom Christians from captivity. There * Lib. iv. ep. 40. + Lib. vi. ep. 25. + Le Prot. et Cath. comp. c. xx. fore this holy council declares that no slave shall be taken beyond the frontiers of the kingdom of Clovis to be sold, lest, which Heaven forbid! any Christian should be involved in slavery.* The queen Bathilde ransomed many slaves of her own nation, and many young Irish captives, whom she used to place in monasteries, desiring them to pray for her. This road leads also near old feudal castles, and has signals pointing to the Church consisting in proofs of her having often by her pontiffs and monks, by her prayers and miracles, racles burst their dungeon doors, and set free the wretches who had been confined within them. As time presses, we can only notice two memorials of deliverance by the latter; and they are memorable, although the issue from them may not be thought so direct or so easily effected by all feet; for some contrive to entangle themselves, when others find a passage open to a mystic and glorious view of truth. "At the time," says Cæsar of Heisterbach, "when the Lord Engelbert, archbishop of Cologne, built a castle in Furstinberg against the nobleman Gerrard de Brabach, a certain youth of his army, named Theodoric, wishing to make a reputation for himself, was taken before the same castle. There being long incarcerated, having promised to give money for his ransom, he was taken out of the prison and placed in an upper house, with chains on his limbs, and servants to guard him. He had iron rings round his feet, and manacles on his arms, and was fastened to the wall with a chain fixed in it. One night, sleeping amongst other prisoners and the guards, after-invoking our Lady and other saints, he slept, and lo! in a dream he saw himself transferred to our monastery; from which, wishing to go out sitting on a horse like a woman, in consequence of the chains, two of our monks, Monegondus and Henry, both his relations, said to him, 'Go not forth, but return, for St. Mary of Heisterbach will deliver you.' At this he awoke, and, doubting whether the vision were true or phantastic, he tried to move his limbs, and found to his great astonishment that both hands and feet were free. While moving the chains, one of the servants awoke, when he tried in vain to replace the ring, and lay still till the servant fell asleep again, when rising up, and having the iron still round one foot, he let himself down by a sheet through the window, and fled. A great cry was soon raised on his escape being discovered. Many followed him with hounds and horses, and he had to lie hid under bushes; but human hands could not take him whom divine virtue protected. Coming to us, he offered the irons on the altar of blessed Mary, and related all * Ap. Dom. Pitra, Hist. de S. Léger, 136. that had passed. This was in 1219; and we have all seen the irons."* The next instance is found in the annals of the order of Grandmont. "In the country of Limoges, they say, two nobles, Itherius and Peter, on the road of St. Junian, being captured by a certain soldier, were thrown into a horrible dungeon and kept two months in chains and fasting. They prayed earnestly for deliverance, and on the eve of St. John the Baptist, being miraculously delivered, they arrived at our monastery of Castaneriis, where they reposed three days, being received with exultation and reverence by the brethren. The chains with which their hands were bound were tren solemnly suspended over the tomb of St. Stephen, to be a memorial of the miracle for ever."† Again, the redemption of captives by Catholic monarchs may be said to point to Catholicity as the source from which rulers drew the impressions which actuated them when they accomplished it. The king, Don James I. of Arragon, took such an interest in the order of our Lady of Mercy, that at its beginning he gave the first Fathers a quarter of his palace in Barcelona, which formed their first monastery, and the escutcheon of his arms for them to wear upon their habit, as a perpetual witness of his friendship and zeal for the redemption of captives. St. Louis, Charles V., Ferdinand, and Isabella, were all impelled by their faith to co-operate in the same work. I said that this ancient, overgrown, and broken track was once followed by a prodigious crowd of persons, who passing on it could not fail to see the Catholic Church inviting them, as a true mother, to her bosom; and in reference to them, by directing our view a few ages backward, the road of captives forms still one of the great avenues which direct men to Catholicity. Those that can pity, here may, if they think it well, let fall a tear; the subject will deserve it. The numbers of sufferers from captivity during ages of the Mahometan power were indeed immense. When Ferdinand and Isabella took Grenada, there were thirty thousand Christian captives in the city. Charles V., on taking Tunis, delivered twenty thousand who had been detained there. By the victory of Lepanto fifteen thousand Christian slaves were delivered. In the curious description of the city and state of Algiers by the Reverend Father Michael Auvry, vicar-general of the congregation of Paris of the order of our Lady of Mercy, written at the beginning of the seventeenth century, it appears that there were thirty thousand slaves, besides blacks, in that territory alone. Italy, Spain, France, and the ships * vii. c. 29. + Levesque, Annales Ord. Grandimontis, cent. ii. 1 of all nations, furnished a fearful contingent each year. In France, the towns that had most suffered from the calamity of slavery, as Marseilles, Toulon, Castellane, Aix in Provence, and others at a distance, as Nantes in Brittany, and Mas Saintes Pucelles in Languedoc, as also the bishops of those dioceses, used to etition the generals of the order of Mercy to establish convents in their respective localities, and the magistrates used to offer ground for the site.* In the time of Henry IV., Pierre Matthieu says that there were more than ten thousand Christian slaves chained in the grottos of Algiers;† and he relates the fact, not a little remarkable, that while Catholicism was ransoming captives, Protestantism was furnishing it with objects for its compassion; for during the reigns of Elizabeth and James I. the Moorish seas were infested with English corsairs, as terrible to the French Christians as the Moors themselves; so that the Grand Signor, at the desire of France, had even to remonstrate with the English government.‡ Though a recent historian affirms that Mahometanism has exhibited a truly philosophical spirit of toleration, § all that we read of the rage of Diocletian and Valerius, which caused whole cities to flow with the blood of martyrs, does not come near to what the Turks have made the slaves suffer to oblige them to renounce their faith.|| The Matemores were the subterraneous places in which they confined the captives at night. There was the bourn of the spiritual mysterious journeys of Marina de Escobar, which she journe so often describes, as when she says "On the last day of February, 1627, we passed from England to the dungeons of Africa, where the Christian captives suffered incredible afflictions from that barbarous and cruel people. There we gave the spiritual alms which refreshed and strengthened, and consoled them who were, before our arrival, vehemently cast down in deep sorrow." Yet, however great were the material sufferings, it is affecting to find that one of the bitterest complaints of the poor slaves used to be, that the Sundays and festivals were made days of labour and tears, the Moors giving them the severest work on those days through hatred of their faith.** From the year 1190, several gentlemen of the first families of Catalonia had been accustomed to employ their riches and * Hist. de l'Ord. 948. + Hist. de Hen. IV. lib. iv. Pierre Matthieu, Hist. de Hen. IV. lib. vi. § Prescott's Ferd. and Isab. ii. 415. || Hist. de l'Ord. de la Mercy, 2. Vit. Ven. Virg. Marin. P. ii. lib. ii. c. 14. ** Hist. de l'Ord. de la Mercy, 39. |