ROMAN CATHOLICISM. FRANCE. SPIRIT OF THE ROMAN CHURCH. One of the most daring attempts to revive the bloody traditions of the Roman Church has been recently made in a circular of the Archbishop of Toulouse, calling upon the people of his diocese to celebrate in a pompous style the restoration of Roman Catholicism in the city of Toulouse in 1562. This restoration was effected by the massacre of four thousand Protestants, when, after a contest of six days between Roman Catholics and Protestants, the latter concluded a capitulation, according to which their lives were to be spared. The impression produced by the publication has been profound, and has once more clearly shown that even in Roman Catholic countries the principle of religious toleration has taken deep root. All the leading dailies of Paris, both of the liberal party and of the government, agreed in blaming, in the very strongest terms, this outrage on public opinion. Hardly have two or three of the Jesuitical party dared to make a timid apology on behalf of the archbishop, while Roman Catholic organs in other countries have openly censured him. The official organ of the French government published with regard to it the following note: "The government has decided that all processions or outward ceremonies relative to the celebration of the jubilee shall be prohibited." So general and emphatic has been the public dissatisfaction that the archbishop has been himself compelled to send to the journals an explanatory letter, in which he states that the object of the jubilee is not to glorify the excesses committed in the religious conflict, but to bless God for having granted to the Roman Catholics a victory which preserved the city of Toulouse from becoming a kind of French Geneva. He even pretends to be "tenderly united in heart to his dissenting brethren." This weak attempt of justification, as was to be expected, has utterly failed to make any impression on the public mind. The persecution of the Protestants in Spain leaves no doubt what the bishops would do if they had the power. ITALY. THE GREAT ASSEMBLY OF BISHOPS.For the second time during his pontifi cate Pope Pius IX. has convoked the bishops of the Roman Catholic world to assemble at Rome. They have been officially invited to take part in the canonization of twenty-three Japanese martyrs, who were put to death about two hundred years ago for refusing to apostatize from Christianity. But even Roman papers indicate that this invitation is merely a pretext, and that in reality the presence of the bishops is wanted in order to give the more weight to some papal declaration respecting the temporal power of the pope. The behest of the pope has, however, been duly obeyed in all the countries of the world, and the assemblage is expected to be very numerous. From the United States the Archbishops of New York and Cincinnati, the Bishops of Brooklyn, Albany, Buffalo, Boston, Newark, Dubuque, Chicago, St. Paul, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and probably others, will be present. Of the French bishops about one half (36) have declared their intention to proceed to Rome, although the French government has requested them not to go. From Spain the departure of two cardinals and twenty bishops is announced. All the Bavarian bishops will be there, except one who is blind. From Russia three bishops are expected, whose expenses their government has volunteered give even of Western Asia, will send a to pay. All the other countries, inclularge contingent. It is expected that about four hundred bishops in all may attend. Little doubt can be entertained that the bishops almost unanimously will give their consent to any declaration, however strong, which the pope may see fit to propose. Among the lower clergy it will be in no country met with so much resistance as in Italy. Especially in the lower part of the peninsula a liberal association, called the Mutual Aid Society, is making great prog ress. The membership of the society is between four and five thousand, the great majority of whom are priests. Among the lay members are about forty depu ties of the Neapolitan provinces. Only the priests, however, are entitled to aid from the funds; and it is by them that the Colonna di Fuoco (“Pillar of Fire") is edited, printed, and circulated. This bi-weekly paper and the society whose organ it is, seek not only the removal of the temporal power, but look also for ward to the overthrow of the spiritual supremacy of the pope, or, as they call it, the "autocracy of the papacy." They still cling to Rome as the center and to the pope as the head of the Church; but at the same time they plead in a memorial addressed to the pope, and signed by six hundred priests and four thousand of the laity, for the removal or rectification of indulgences, the confessional, the superstitious worship of images and relics, the introduction of lay influence into the councils of the Church, and the improved and liberal education of the priests. The movement is headed by a Bishop Caputo, who, in virtue of the office of Chaplain-general, which he held under the Bourbons, has been able to open all the royal chapels, such as San Francesco di Paolo, opposite the king's palace, to the ablest preachers in the society. In the north Passaglia remains the center of the reformatory movement, though he does not, however, go so far as the Neapolitan Society, but as yet aims only at the abolition of the temporal power of the pope, hoping that the spiritual power in its present condition will be vastly increased. In this sense he intends to present a petition to the pope previous to the meeting of the bishops in Rome, and hopes to obtain for it the signatures of twenty thousand priests. ART. X.-FOREIGN LITERARY INTELLIGENCE. ENGLAND. SIR GEORGE CORNEWELL LEWIS, besides performing the arduous duties of Secretary of War, which he performs with a very thorough energy, astonishes her majesty's subjects by publishing treatises whose depth and value would seem to require the devotion of a man's whole time to scholastic study. His "Inquiry into the Credibility of Early Roman History" is ranked among the most notable achievements of English scholarship. His "Historical Survey of the Astronomy of the Ancients" is a solid and learned work, the fruit of his vacation hours. It begins with the primitive astronomy of the Greeks and Romans, which is that of Homer, as well as that of Deacon Homespun, and every other person who judges by obvious sense without science. To the savage and the rustic the world is "a circular plane, surmounted and bounded by heaven, which was a solid vault or hemisphere, with its cavity turned downward. Sir George is utterly destructive upon Bunsen and the whole group of Egyptological chronologists. His irreverent words are: "Accordingly, the operations of Bunsen and the other modern critics upon the ancient history of Egypt rather resemble the manipulation of the balance-sheet of an insolvent company by a dexterous accountant, (who, by transfers of capital to income, by the suppression or transposition of items, and by the alteration of bad into good debts, can convert a deficiency into a surplus,) than the conjectures of a speculative historian, who undertakes to transmute legend into history." And again: "Bunsen's work on Egypt is a book of metamorphoses. By his method, Agamemnon or Achilles might be identified with Alexander the Great, Pompey might be identified with Cesar. and Hannibal with Scipio. Such identifications as that of William the Conqueror with William of Orange, or of St. Louis with Louis XVI., would be so obvious and natural as not to require formal proof, and would be disposed of in a parenthesis, if this mode of dealing with evidence were transferred to modern history." This is just enough, perhaps, so far as the stupendous chronologies of Bunsen are concerned. But Birch, Poole, and Sharpe, belonging to a more modest school, may seem to rescue Egyptology from the imputation of being pure ro mance. Who was the St. George claimed by England as her tutelar, with his cross upon her banner? Gibbon and others identify him with an Arian Bishop of Alexandria, who, in spite of his canonization, was a thorough villain, rather than a saint. The point of identity has been greatly debated. John Hogg, Esq., Honorary Foreign Secretary of the Royal Society of Literature, professes to have settled the question by new documentary evidence. In a pamphlet entitled, "Sup plementary Notes on St. George the ' Martyr," he says: In the year 1858 I was fortunately enabled, by careful examination of the Greek inscription (No. 40) which Mr. Cyril Graham had, in the previous summer, copied from a very ancient churchoriginally a heathen temple-at Ezra, in Syria, to determine most satisfactorily that Saint George had died before the year A. D. 346, in which he is expressly called a "holy Martyr." Also, it is clear that this date occurred during the lifetime of the other George-the Alexandrian bishop-who survived for fifteen years longer, namely, to A. D. 362; and who then, having expiated his vices and base conduct by assassination, could not, under any consideration, be esteemed a Martyr. This confusion of identity is supposed, and indeed with much probability, to have been purposely made by the Arians, in order to raise the credit and repute of their own bishop, George, whom they had elected at Alexandria in the place of Athanasius, and while he was in retirement, at the expense of the fame and virtues of George the Syrian martyr. From the authorities detailed in my preceding and present papers, we find, on the one hand, that Saint George was born at Lydd, or Lydda, in Syria; that his parents, being in good circumstances, and Christians, nurtured him "in the fear of the Lord," as in fact we know that "all who dwelt in Lydda" had "turned to the Lord," even as early as the year of Christ 38, after St. Peter had come down to them. That his parents took him when young into Cappadocia, from whence he went to Nicomedia, where the Emperor Diocletian resided, and in whose army he served as an officer. By the orders of that emperor he, with a great many more Christians, suffered cruel torments, during, in all likelihood, the ninth persecution. That, according to the legends, shortly before his death, he rescued, by his prayers, the Empress Alexandra from the depths of hell, and vanquished by his prowess the ferocious Dragon, both being merely fabulous, but excellent emblems of the true Christian's victory over hell, and conquest of sin, or the Devil. On the other hand, we learn that the second George was born in a fuller's mill, according to some, in Cappadocia, or, as others state, in the neighboring district of Cilicia; that after certain disreputable acts he, assuming "the profession of Arianism," proceeded to Alexandria, in Egypt, of which city he was chosen bishop by the followers of that heretical sect; that, in consequence of his vile conduct and intolerable exactions, the heathen populace there murdered him, with his two friends, the master of the mint, Dracontius, and Count Diodorus. Hence the confusion, whether designedly or erroneously, may have arisen from both Georges being reported to have been from or in Cappadocia; from the stories of the Empress Alexandra, of the city of Alexandria, and from the slaughters of the beast Dragon, and of the man Dracontius. Stier's "The Words of the Angels; or, Their Visits to the Earth, and the Messages they Delivered," has been published by Hamilton & Co., London. The translation is said to be clear, and the work equal to Stier's reputation. Christ the Life of the World: Biblical Studies on John's Gospel, Chapters xixxi, by Rudolph Besser, D. D., translated from the German by M. G. Huxtable, is published by the Clarkes. Alford, the Commentator, has published a work entitled, The Old and New Dispensations Compared. Perhaps the most accomplished exegetical scholar in England is Professor Charles J. Ellicott, of Kings College, London, author of the Life of Christ, noticed in a former number of our Quarterly. A volume of his sermons, under the title The Destiny of the Creature, has been published in London, delivered by him before the University of Cambridge, in his capacity of select preacher, during the month of March, 1858. They are estimated very highly by English critics. They discuss with great thoroughness, with a full reference to modern science, but a profound reverence for Scripture, the great topics of man's creation, the fall, human suffering, death, and restitution. In the restitution he recognizes no blotting out of the ineffable contrariety of good and of evil. In the nature of man he recognizes body, soul, and spirit, as three distinct elements of the human constitution. Calvin's Works åre published by Clarke, of Edinburgh, in fifty-one volumes. Of these, three are his Institutes, three are tracts, and forty-five are Commentary. The Religions before Christ; being an Introduction to the First Three Centuries of the Church, by Edmund de Pressensé, Pastor of the French Evangelical Church, and Doctor of Divinity of the University of Breslau, translated by L. Corkran, with a preface by the author, is published by the Clarkes, of Edinburgh. This work is fully noticed in our Synopsis notice of the Revue Chrétienne. GERMANY. The increasing acquaintance of scholars with the languages and literatures of the East has already led and is still leading to a considerable enlargement of our knowledge of ancient Church history. Nearly every year furnishes several publications opening new sources of information. Among the recent works of this kind is a translation of the Church History of John, the Monophysite, Bishop of Ephesus, by Schönfelder.* The third part of the Syriac original was published by Cureton, in 1853, who, in a brief introduction, spoke of the great importance of this author, especially for the Church history of the East and the Patriarchate of Constantinople. In 1856 a young Dutch scholar, Dr. Land, published a treatise under the title, "John, Bishop of Ephesus, the first Syriac Church historian," (Johannes Bishop von Ephesus,) in which he discussed the general relations of Syriac literature, and the productions of the Syriac Church historians in particular, the person and history of Bishop John, his style and treatment of Church history, and the contents of his work. The promised translation of Cureton having not yet appeared, Schönfelder resolved to make the work accessible to those who do not read the Oriental languages, in a German translation. He has added to the translation a treatise of the Tritheites, tracing the history of the controversy and the doctrine of this sect. An entirely new source of information on the history of Manicheism has been opened by the publication of an extract of an Arabic history of literature ("Fihrist") of Abu'lfaradj Mohammed ben Ishak al-Warrâk, edited, together with a German translation, commentary, and index, by Gustavus Flügel.+ The history of Manicheism, the most dangerous of all the sects of the third and fourth centuries, and the life of its author, Mani or Manes, are still far from being sufficiently elucidated, for there are two greatly varying accounts of them, the one found in Greek, the other in Oriental writers. It is especially to the latter class of writers that we must * Schönfelder, Die Kirchengeschichte des Johannes von Ephesus. Aus dem Syrischen übersetzt. Mit einer Abhandlung über die Tritheiten. Svo., pp. 811. München, 1862. + Mani, seine Lehre und seine Schriften. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Manichäismus, etc. Yon G. Flügel, Leipzic, 1862. look for new light on points still in- David Frederick Strauss, who, several years ago, announced his intention to quit theological studies altogether, has resumed his attacks upon Christianity in a work on Reimarus, the author of the Wolfenbüttel Fragments.* Reimarus (born at Hamburg in 1694, died in 1768, as Professor of Oriental Languages) was one of the fathers of Rationalism, yet he did not dare to publish himself his principal work, which, in the manuscript used by Strauss, bears the title, “An Apology for Rational Worshipers of God, written by. Hamburg, 1767." It was imparted by him to his intimate friends, and a few years later edited (in an abridged form) by Lessing, who had secured a copy, and represented them as manuscripts belonging to the Wolfenbüttel library, of which he had the charge. The original manuscript is in Hamburg, embracing two volumes, of two thousand and forty-four pages. A complete edition of it has never been published, and also Strauss has not undertaken to publish one, as many of the opinions of Reimarus are so absurd that even the Rationalists are ashamed of owning them. Strauss gives a brief The origin of Christmas, the customs and (occasional) superstitions connected with it, are the subject of a new book of Paulus Cassel, a converted Jew and prolific writer. The author opposes the opinion frequently advanced in modern times, that institutions and customs like those of Christmas are only remnants of paganism transplanted upon Christian soil. His work is divided into Strauss, H. S. Reimarus und seine Schutzschrift für die vernünftigen Verehrer Gottes. Leipzic, 1862. Weihnachten, Ursprünge, Bräuche, und Aberglauben. Ein Beitrag sur Geschichte der Christlichen Kirche und des deutschen Volkes. Berlin, 1861. three books. In the first, which bears the heading, "Origin of the Festival," he attempts to show that the birth of Christ really coincides with our Christmas, and that already the prophets of the Old Covenant have pointed to the Christmas night, (from December 24 to 25.) The second book, headed "Names and Customs," gives a very full and interesting description of the mode of celebrating Christmas; the solemnities in the church, the Christmas-tree, the crib, the Christmas-fire, Christmas presents, etc. In the third book we find an account of a large number of superstitions which have attached themselves to the celebration of Christmas. An appendix gives copious literary references. The history of the patriarch Cyril Lucaris, and his attempts to effect a union between the Greek Church and Protestantism, has not yet been treated so thoroughly as the important subject demands. The work of A. Pichler* on "The History of Protestantism in the Eastern Church in the Seventeenth Century; or, the Patriarch Cyril Lucaris and his Times," is the first complete monography on the Protestantizing Patriarch, and his attempts at a reformation of his petrified Church. The author says that he has endeavored to compare carefully all sources of information, part of which have not been made use of before. The Roman Catholics have paid no attention to the history of Cyril; the Calvinists, on the other hand, are charged by the author with having "transmitted their historical lies and adventurous distortions from book to book, and from generation to generation, more faithfully than a truth of the Gospel." The work begins with briefly characterizing the religious and political condition of Europe and of the Christian countries of the East, which must be known in order to understand the labors of Cyril. Cyril was born in 1572 upon Candia, studied at Venice and Padua, later visited Germany, especially Wittemberg and Geneva, where he became acquainted with the Protestant doctrine, by the introduction of which he tried to improve the Greek Church. About 1601 he became Patriarch of Alexandria; in 1612, vicegerent of the exiled Patriarch Neophytus of Constantinople; in 1621, Patriarch of Constanti Pichler, Geschichte des Protestantismus in der Orientalischen Kirche in 17st. Jahrhundert. 8vo., pp. 254. Munich, 1862. | nople. In consequence of his reformatory exertions he was repeatedly exiled, and on account of having taken part in a translation of the New Testament into modern Greek he was strangled in 1638. The science of language has been undoubtedly making great progress since the beginning of the present century, however much some of its foremost champions may have deviated from the firm ground of facts into the lofty region of fanciful speculations. The relation of the results of modern linguistic researches to the biblical account of the original unity of the human language is, therefore, a subject well worthy to engage the deepest interest of the theologian. It has recently been treated of in an elaborate work by Franz Kaulen,* a young teacher of Roman Catholic theology at the University of Bonn. "In the history of human development," says the author, "there is after the first sin no event of greater importance than that of the great apostasy, which is designated by the confusion of language at Babel and the subsequent separation of the human family. The account in Genesis forms the sum of all the knowledge which the science of language must regard as the highest aim of its investigations. Two points are contained in the catastrophe at Babel, the original unity of language, and secondly, the ceasing of this unity, or the confusion of language, and, connected with it, the dispersion of the human family. In order to vindicate the biblical account from infidel negations, it must be shown, with regard to both points, that they are not only not at variance with the results of linguistics, but also that they are integral links in the chain of the entire development within which God has prepared the human race for redemption." The author first investigates the original unity of language; he examines the inferences drawn from the present multiplicity of languages, and argues that science has not been able to show the original plurality of languages; and that, therefore, the stand-point of faithful submission to the account of the Bible cannot be shaken. In the second part he discusses the separation of the languages, the relation of this occurrence to the other great facts in the history of the race and of Divine revelation. The FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XIV.-32 Kaulen, Die Sprach verwirrung zu Babel. Linguistisch-theologische Untersuchungen über Gen. xi, 1-9. 8vo., pp. 248. Mainz, 1861. |