the systematic repression now resorted to by despotism. Even in France, decried and enthralled by the specious pretences of new-fangled cæsarism professing to hold from popular suffrage, there is a noble and heroic band of Catholics who have remained firm amid all defections, who have not bowed the knee to Baal, or offered sacrifices in his temple, and who may yet retrieve the honor and liberty of their glorious country. We English-speaking Catholics, who are free to speak out our full thought, must send to our brethren in these countries, languishing in secret and silence for the liberty we enjoy, words of sympathy, encouragement, and hope. Something we say may reach them, and if not, it may still serve to undeceive our nonCatholic countrymen, and prove to them that we can be devout Catholics, and at the same time the enlightened and unflinching friends of both civil and religious liberty, even in the American sense of the terms."

MISSION OF AMERICA.*

[From Brownson's Quarterly Review for October, 1856.]

WE called attention to Dr. Spalding's volume of Miscel lanies when it first appeared, and we call attention to it again, for though it has been well spoken of and well received, we fear that it has not met with a success proportioned to its intrinsic merits. It should be in every public and every private library in the country, and studied by every American who makes the least pretensions to literary taste and judgment; for it is really one of the richest and most valuable works that have ever proceeded from an American author. It is the production of a distinguished American prelate, who feels that this is his own, his native land, and who identifies himself with the American people, and consults their interests as his own. He speaks to us from an American heart, and what he says is hardly less

Miscellanea: Comprising Reviews, Lectures, and Essays on Historical, Theological, and Miscellaneous Subjects. By M. J. SPALDING, D. D., Bishop of Louisville. Louisville (Ky.): 1855.

valuable under the point of view of patriotism than under that of religion. He is not only a bishop and a theologian, but also a learned man, an accomplished scholar, an eloquent, fresh, and vigorous writer, who counts nothing foreign to his purpose that affects the welfare of men, either in this world or in that which is to come. His reviews, lectures, and essays are well thought and reasoned out; they are written in a free, flowing, and popular style, and filled with precisely the sort of information most needed by our countrymen in the present crisis of our national life. They are not written solely or primarily for theologians, or even Catholics; they are addressed to the American people at large, whatever their religious or political preferences or tendencies.

The views of the right reverend author on the deposing power, and one or two other points, are indeed not precisely those we have from time to time set forth, and pertain to a school which we have not been accustomed to follow; but we pass them over, for we have already sufficiently discussed the subjects to which they relate. But his reviews of Bancroft, Prescott, and other popular historians of the day, are admirable specimens of enlightened and dignified criticism, and place him in the first rank of American authors. They prove, too, that the American critic, when he does take up a subject, treats it with a candor, a fairness, a depth and fullness, that we usually look for in vain in the criticisms which come to us from the writers of other nations. In them Dr. Spalding shows that these popular authors, especially Prescott, are not up to the level of the age, and that they are very far from appreciating the true province of history. He rectifies their principles, corrects their errors, and exposes their prejudices. His essays on civil liberty and the social condition respectively of Catholic and Protestant countries prove him an enlightened friend of freedom, and a generous sympathizer with the poorer and more numerous classes. We want more essays of the same sort, whose tendency is alike opposed to an impracticable and undesirable aristocracy on the one hand, and to a wild and destructive radicalism on the other. They teach us to distinguish in Catholic countries what is by the church, or in harmony with her principles, from what exists in spite of her authority, and against her teachings and influence. They furnish us principles applicable to the present state of society; and while they do

not blind us to the faults of Catholic states, or to the defects of our own republic, they deepen our gratitude to the church, and kindle in our hearts a pure, enlightened, and vigorous patriotism.

What we more especially admire in Dr. Spalding as a writer, is his free, manly, independent American spirit. He is a Catholic, a Catholic bishop, and, as a matter of course, free from all national bitterness, and above all, the narrow and narrowing prejudices of race or country. He knows that God has made of one blood all the nations of men, and that he has instituted one Catholic Church, one spiritual kingdom on earth, for the government and salvation of all. Wherever he sees a man, he sees a brother, for whom Christ has died,―a neighbor whom he is to love as himself. But he is an American, free born, a citizen, and feels that he is in bondage to no man. He was bred and born in an atmosphere of freedom-in a country where man is man in all the integrity of his manhood. His spirit is free, lofty, independent, firm and unbending, yet gentle, sweet, loving, through the charity of the Gospel, such as should be the spirit of every American. His faith purifies and elevates his manliness, and his religion intensifies and consecrates his patriotism. It does not extinguish it, or permit it to lose itself in a vague philanthropy, or an unmeaning cosmopolitanism. He makes the brotherhood of the race a living fact, not a watery sentiment, and seeks to promote the welfare of mankind by laboring specially for those committed to his care, or with whom his own lot in God's providence is bound up. In this respect at least, he is the model of an American citizen, an American prelate, an American scholar, and an American author, especially worthy of the study and imitation of our literary aspirants.

Any one who reads Dr. Spalding's book must find the objection, now growing somewhat stale, that Catholicity is hostile to our political and social order, for ever silenced, if not by his arguments, at least by his tone and spirit. No American can read it without feeling that the Catholic religion is at home in the American breast, if we may so speak, more American than the greater part of Americans themselves, and that it is just what is needed to complete and consecrate the American character. The author is not one of those Americans who have no sympathy with the institutions of their own country, and are really foreigners in their sentiments and affections. He sees, what some Cath

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olics even, though of American birth and lineage, do not see, that the natural relation between our religion and the ernment is that of concord, and not of antagonism. The dominant sentiment of the country is non-Catholic, but the political and civil order is in accordance with Catholicity, and the duty of all Catholics is to place a generous confidence in the government, to love and cherish it as their own. Dr. Spalding never thinks of asking whether he is American in thought and feeling, for he lives Americanism, which his natural, as Catholicity is his supernatural life. He tells us by his spirit and example that Catholics are an integral portion of the American people, and that we are to let the warm current of American life flow through our veins, to assume as a matter of course our position as free American citizens, and to study, understand, and loyally perform our duties as free-born Americans.

The lesson conveyed by the illustrious Bishop of Louisville, is opportune and important. Owing to the fact that the active Catholic population of the country is in great part made up of recent emigrants from various foreign nations, with habits, manners, usages, sentiments, affections, and traditions, different from those of the great body of the American people, an impression has been produced that Catholicity is here a foreign religion, or, in the main, only the religion of certain classes of foreigners, and that to beCatholic is to be un-American. Hence a war is excited against us in the name of American patriotism. On the other hand, a considerable number of Catholics confound. the sentiments of a portion of the American people with the American political order itself. Finding a majority of the people hostile, or at best indifferent to Catholicity, they look upon the American civil and political order as at war with their religion, separate themselves in their feelings from it, and forget that the government is as much our government as it is that of non-Catholics, and that we are as responsible for its doings as any other class of citizens. They obey the laws, but do not love the American institutions, and look upon the government as an enemy to be distrusted, and whose actions are always to be construed in a hostile sense. They have no confidence in the American state, and believe neither in its will, nor in its ability to serve our holy religion. They do not admit that as Catholics they are under any obligations to it, and they regard themselves as at liberty to express their distrust of it, or to

declaim against it as loudly and as fiercely as they please. Certainly these are not the majority, they are in fact only a feeble minority of the Catholic body; but they are numerous and clamorous enough to give the Know-Nothings a pretext for opposing us in the name of American patriotism. They do more harm than is commonly imagined. They check the free expression of the deep loyalty so natural to the Catholic heart, and obstruct by their coldness, their suspicions, and their lack of American sympathy, those efforts which Catholic charity and Catholic zeal, in obedience to the earnest exhortation of our Holy Father, Pius IX., would prompt for the conversion of those of our countrymen who are still in spiritual darkness, and sitting in the region and shadow of death. They exert an unhappy influence within and without, and are, if they did but know it, as uncatholic as unpatriotic in their spirit and tendency. The very poorest way in the world to make authority your friend is to treat it as your enemy. By treating it asyour enemy, you give it a good excuse for not treating you as its friend. In a country like Ireland, under a Protestant government, whose persistent policy has been for ages to crush out its nationality and with it the Catholic faith, we can well understand that Catholics should regard the government as their enemy, as hostile to their interests, as having no claim on their loyalty, and to be distrusted, evaded, resisted, as far as prudence will warrant. There the Catholic has the right to do it, because the government is in his regard a tyrant, makes him its victim, and his self-preservation demands it. But here every thing of this sort is misplaced and uncatholic. Here the government is no more Protestant than it is Catholic,-nay, in its principles it harmonizes far better with Catholicity than with Protestantism, and Catholics and Protestants are placed by the constitution and laws on a footing of perfect equality. We, as Catholics, are not slaves or helots; and the feeling expressed by an American-born Catholic the other day, in a Catholic journal, that he has no country, that he is a helot in the land of his birth, is as unfounded as it is unpatriotic. The American-born Catholic has a country in the same sense and to the same extent that an American-born Protestant has a country. If he find public sentiment hostile to him, it is no more than many a Protestant finds. If he looks upon himself as a helot, the fault is his own, or that of those who had the forming of his childhood and youth.