CATHOLIC WORLD.

VOL. XXIV., No. 143.—FEBRUARY, 1877.

Copyright: Rev. I. T. Hecker. 1877.

FREDERIC OZANAM.[148]

Ozanam’s name and writings were made known to the portion of the English-reading world interested in the Oxford movement by the brilliant pages of the British Critic more than thirty years ago, while he was still in the bloom of his youthful fame and success as a professor of the Sorbonne. The preface to his biography says that he is not widely known in England, and the same is probably true of America, speaking in reference to non-Catholics. Among Catholic scholars here, and we fancy in England also, his name and works are well known and in high repute. They deserve, nevertheless, to be better known and more highly honored. There is scarcely a purer or more brilliant career to be found recorded in the annals of Catholic literature in this century than his. He was the founder of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul—a sufficient title to honor and gratitude. He was a model of moral loveliness and Christian virtue, a type of the true Catholic gentleman, adorning a high sphere in society, and at the same time heartily devoted to the welfare of the humblest, the poorest, and even the most degraded and vicious classes. He was a thoroughly learned man in his own department, a captivating writer, a master of the minds and hearts of the studious youth of France, a knightly champion of the faith without fear and without reproach, an author of classical works of peculiar and enduring value. The charm of his private, personal character, as a child, a friend, a husband and father, a member of the social circle, equals the lustre of his public career. Spotless and fascinating from the beginning to the end of his life, the bright and winning grace of the figure which he presents in the history of his life receives dignity and pathos from the suffering which overshadowed and eclipsed his light before its meridian was attained. He was born in 1813; his professorship at the Sorbonne filled the space between his twenty-seventh and thirty-ninth years of life—that is, from 1839 to 1852—and he died the next year at the age of forty, after seven years of repeated attacks of illness and a continued decline. We will Pg 578 pass in rapid review the incidents of this brief but fruitful career, and endeavor to place before our readers a reduced sketch of the character and work of Frederic Ozanam, as faithfully and artistically portrayed by his accomplished biographer.

The family records of the Ozanams trace their origin to Jeremiah Hozannam, a Jew, who was prætor in Julius Cæsar’s thirty-eighth legion, and received the township of Boulignieux, near Lyons, as his share in the military partition of the conquered Gallic territory. His lineal descendant, Samuel Hozannam, was converted by St. Didier in the seventh century. The name was altered to Ozanam by the grandfather of the subject of the present notice. Dr. Ozanam, Frederic’s father, was a distinguished man, and both of Frederic’s parents were persons of remarkable virtue and piety. He was born in Milan, but educated at Lyons, every possible care being taken of his intellectual, moral, and religious culture. In childhood and youth he was delicate, precocious, exemplary in morals and religion, extremely diligent and successful in his studies, and every way admirable and lovable in character. At one time during his boyhood he was tormented by temptations against faith, which were so rife, and to a multitude of the studious youth of France so dangerous, at that epoch. To him they were not dangerous, but salutary; for they had no other effect except to stimulate him to a study of the rational evidences of the Catholic religion, and to leave in his heart a vivid and tender sympathy for the victims of doubt and error. After a very thorough course of classical study under an eminent teacher—the Abbé Noirot—which he completed at seventeen years of age, Grande Chartreuse, corresponded with his friend Lacordaire, and held many consultations with his director. The final result was that he chose the profession of literature, and married, with the full and hearty approbation of his friend and counsellor, the Abbé Noirot. His chief end in choosing his profession was the advancement of the cause of religion and the church; and the generous aspirations, directed by the most elevated and enlightened views, which developed into so glorious and successful, albeit in time so brief a fulfilment, already preoccupied his mind and heart from the time that he was seventeen years old.

In point of fact, he had really found his vocation at that time, and, Pg 579 notwithstanding his apparent divergence to the legal profession and his various waverings of purpose, he actually began to prosecute it steadily by his studies and by such active efforts as his age and condition permitted, from that early but prematurely ripe period of his life. The programme of his studies and literary labors is laid down in a letter to a friend, written when he was seventeen years old. Without neglecting his professional studies, he was able, thanks to his wonderful mental gifts, his retentive memory, and his habits of intense, continuous application, as well as to the definiteness and unity of the scope and plan which he followed, to acquire that solid and accurate erudition which furnished the material fused and moulded into such beautiful forms by the fire of his eloquence and the constructive art of his imagination.

The state of things among men of science and letters, and the youth studying at the great schools, when Frederic Ozanam went to Paris, was, in a religious aspect, most dreary. His father had feared to send him there on account of the infidelity and immorality with which the whole atmosphere was poisoned, but had at last resolved to trust to the firmness of his principles and the purity of his character. His trust was fully justified. During his student-life Ozanam began, in concert with a few other young men like-minded with himself, that counter-revolution or crusade for the restoration of the old religion of France, among the young students and also among the working-men of Paris, which we devoutly trust will end in the fulfilment of De Maistre’s prophecy that within this present century France will be once again completely Christianized.

Pg 580 as a body, although a great multitude of apostates have deserted the faith and loyalty of their ancestors, and the revolution which they stirred up under the traitorous banner of Voltaire, “the wickedest, the meanest, and the most unpatriotic Frenchman of the last century,”[149] has swayed to a great extent the politics and education of France for a hundred years. Paris has gone far beyond France in this road of apostasy, but even there impiety has never gained a complete and lasting conquest. On the contrary, martyrdom, heroic charity, and intellectual valor in the sacred cause have made it their most illustrious palestra, and, we trust, have expiated the guilt of that peerless city, and averted the doom which would seem to await it if the divine justice should exact the due meed of retribution.

Among the élite of the youth of France, the class most immediately and universally exposed to the deadly influence of impious literature and education and withdrawn from the control of the clergy, gifted and pure souls have arisen, filled with the inspiration of genius and religion, like Daniel and his companions in the captivity, who have escaped the violence of fire and stopped the mouths of lions. First among these is Chateaubriand, who in his old age honored Frederic Ozanam with his special friendship and was loved reverently by him in return. Notwithstanding a short period of defection from the faith, and considerable faults in his character and writings, Chateaubriand deserves to be called the father of the new generation of Catholic youth in France. There is no similar autobiography of more exquisite Pg 581 and irresistibly, alienated from real faith in the religion of their baptism, and every principle or duty of practical Christian morals and piety, by their utterly secular and free-thinking education in the public schools, so long as no counter-influence was brought to bear upon them, as if the Catholic religion had been proscribed by penal laws. It was possible, however, to bring this influence to bear upon them. The liberty granted to indifferentism, infidelity, and atheism might be made use of to the advantage of Catholicity. In the schools where free thought and free expression were a law, the possessors might be invaded and overthrown by intellectual and moral weapons, if there were found aggressors able to wield them and bold enough to enter the arena. On such a battle-ground, where the field is in the domain of history and philosophy, where reason is umpire, and where facts and arguments, eloquence and logic, appeals to the intellect and the heart, the lessons of the past and the examples of those men to whom the verdict of time—the most impartial of judges—has decreed an apotheosis, are the arsenal of the combatants, the Catholic cause must win, if its champions are worthy of their cause.

When Frederic Ozanam came to Paris the other side had the field to themselves, like the challengers of Ashby-de-la-Zouche on the morning of the tournament, before the young Ivanhoe rode into the lists. The venerable Sorbonne, that ancient shrine of sacred learning, had become a theatre, where shallow, rationalistic philosophers like Jouffroy declaimed against revelation and the Catholic Church. Ozanam soon found a small number of resolute, high-spirited young men like himself, who had been well trained St. Vincent de Paul. The Abbé Lacordaire, the Abbé Gerbet, and other eminent priests of Paris, and even the archbishop, interested themselves in the band of young Catholic students, and under their guidance the career of their leader, Frederic Ozanam, became, during his whole student-life, a truly noble and successful apostleship. Thus the way was prepared for him to carry on the same work in a much more efficacious manner as a professor at the Sorbonne.

In the year 1839 Ozanam, being then twenty-six years of age, a professorship of philosophy at Orleans and one of commercial law at Lyons were offered him, and the latter appointment accepted. He resigned it, however, after one year, in order to accept the position of assistant-professor of foreign literature at the Sorbonne. At this time an additional professorship of foreign literature at Lyons was offered to him, which would have secured to him, together with the law-professorship, an income of $3,000 a year. He was just about to be married to a young lady of Lyons. Nevertheless, he chose the position of assistant to the profesor of foreign literature at the Sorbonne, Pg 582 although it was a precarious one, and brought him an income of less than $500, in order that he might be better able to carry out the one noble purpose to which he had devoted his life. Together with his professorship at the Sorbonne he held also, for a few years, another at the Collége Stanislas, which he was obliged to relinquish when, in 1844, on the vacancy of the chair of foreign literature at the Sorbonne, he received the appointment to fill it from the government. For all these early and brilliant successes he was in great measure indebted to the warm friendship and patronage of M. Cousin and M. Villemain, a fact most honorable to these distinguished men, who, as is well known, were leaders of the rationalist school, yet nevertheless, like the eminent Protestant, M. Guizot, really carried out in respect to Catholics their professions of liberality. M. Ozanam continued to fulfil his duties at the Sorbonne during twelve years, with some considerable interruptions caused by illness. His published works are chiefly composed of the substance of the lectures which he delivered.

The great idea which was before the mind of Ozanam from the period of his early youth was, the justification of the Catholic religion by the philosophy of universal history. Eventually, he was led to concentrate his attention principally upon the period embraced between the fifth and fourteenth centuries, with especial reference to the German empire and to the mediæval philosophy reflected in the poems of Dante, whose strong attachment to the German party in Italy is well known, though perhaps not so generally well understood. Frederic Schlegel has said: “It is pre-eminently viz., their common reference to man, his destinies and energies. History, if it does not stop at the mere enumeration of names, dates, and external facts; if it seizes on and sets forth the spirit of great times, of great men, and great events, is in itself a true philosophy, intelligible to all, and certain, and in its manifold applications the most instructive. Then history, if not in itself the most brilliant, is yet the most indispensable link in that beautiful chain which encompasses man’s higher intellectual culture; and history it is which binds the others more closely together. It is the great merit of our age to have renovated the study of history, and to have cultivated it with extraordinary zeal. Within the last two or three decades alone so much has been achieved and produced in this department, that historical knowledge has been perhaps as much extended in that short space of time as formerly in many centuries.”[150] The scope and solution of universal history are found in the history of Christianity viewed in connection with the Judaic and patriarchal epochs of revealed religion which preceded the advent of the Messias. The most important portion of Christian history is that which relates to Western Christendom, the European family of nations which grew up under the immediate spiritual and temporal authority of the popes. This was the true civiltà cattolica, the millenial kingdom of Christ on earth, whose rise, progress, and gradual decadence occupied the space between the fifth and sixteenth centuries, whose Pg 583 remnants are all that has any moral grandeur or value in the modern age, whose restoration and triumph under a new form are the only future hope of humanity.

The foundations of heresy and infidelity are laid in the falsification and perversion of history, and in the general ignorance of historical facts which opens the way for sophists to spin their webs of lies around the deluded minds of the multitude. To find some other source of the greatness, virtue, happiness, evolution in the line of its destiny, already actually exhibited in its history by the human race, especially its elect portion, and still possible in futurity, besides the revealed religion and Catholic church of God, is the problem of the anti-Catholic, anti-Christian, anti-theistic sophists. Germany is their principal territory, the Gath and Ascalon of the Philistines who defy the armies of the Living God with their weapons of erudition and reasoning that are like a weaver’s beam. From the days of the old secular and ecclesiastical princes of Germany who revolted against the supremacy of Rome, down to Luther, his associates and successors, even to our modern German sophists, apostates and persecutors; the pretence of an autochthonous culture has been set up for Germany with a degree of pride, arrogance, and insolence which has no parallel, and is frequently so offensive and boastful as to be ridiculous not only in the eyes of the rest of the world but in those of all sensible and catholic-minded Germans. Christianity is considered by men of this school as the cause of a decline from the autocthonous civilization. War with the Christianity of the Latin races, and a return to unalloyed Teutonism, are regarded as the conditions of

Ozanam’s chief object was to combat this claim by showing, not that Germany has nothing to be proud of and no greatness to aspire after, but that she is indebted for her past and present glory, and must be indebted for any fulfilment of a glorious destiny in time to come, to Christianity and Roman unity, without which the Germans would have remained always, and will again become, barbarians. We must refer the reader to Miss O’Meara’s interesting pages for a fuller account of the way in which Ozanam prepared himself for his task, and afterwards fulfilled it by his lectures on German history.

Schlegel had given him a brilliant example of the way in which history can be brought up to that high standard of scientific, ethical, and literary excellence which is set forth in the quotation we have made above from his lectures. The value and practical utility of the ideas there presented and illustrated so nobly by the literary career of Ozanam cannot be too much insisted upon. History is emphatically the modern field most necessary and advantageous for Catholic polemics. The history of particular epochs, of special classes and orders in society, of individual men of mark, of institutions, of branches of science, art, or learning—in a word, of every kind of topic which can be made distinct and interesting by being localized, limited in respect to time, or otherwise so brought within clear and defined boundaries that it becomes vivid and real to the intellect and imagination—is that which we have specially Pg 584 within our intention. Moreover, the charms of style are essentially requisite. Happily, we have begun to supply the dearth of such books in the English language, partly by such as are originally written in English, partly by translations. John Henry Newman has given us a certain quantity of historical writing worthy of comparison with “Livy’s pictured page,” and justly meriting for him the title, so felicitously invented by an Italian critic, of “the Claude Lorraine of English literature.” The accomplished authoress of Christian Schools and Scholars is another skilful miner in the gold-fields of Catholic history; and Mrs. Hope, also, has shown in her volumes on the conversion of the Teutons and Anglo-Saxons how specially adapted to labor successfully in this department are cultivated women. Montalembert’s Monks of the West is an unrivalled masterpiece, as all know; and if we were to catalogue all the various pieces of historical composition on similar topics to be found in recent European literature, enough of them would be found to make a small library. All books of this kind in the English language would, however, make but a small collection, merely enough for a nucleus of a library of Catholic historical literature. The educated and reading classes in England and the United States have been, within a very recent period, shockingly ignorant of the history of all except a few nations during a few epochs, in regard to which they have received a certain amount of information from popular works, mixed up with a great amount of error and misrepresentation. There has doubtless been an improvement slowly taking place for the last thirty years, and becoming continually more Pg 585 instruction and imparting delight to inquisitive minds by the skilful use of their vernacular idiom in a way suited to the capacity and taste of their listeners or readers. Teachers in colleges and schools who are able to lecture to their pupils will, in our opinion, stimulate their minds to thought and study much more easily and efficaciously by lectures on topics of this kind than by adhering exclusively to the mere class routine. And we venture to suggest also to those who give lectures to literary associations or general audiences, that they would do well to exchange their usually trite and abstract topics of vague and general declamation for specific and individual subjects taken from the historical domain. We may say the same to those who undertake to write books, or articles for the periodicals. And here it occurs to our memory to refer to certain historical and biographical articles which have appeared in some of our magazines as specimens and illustrations. The Civiltà Cattolica has published a long series of brief but remarkably accurate and graphic historical sketches of the lives and reigns of the Sovereign Pontiffs, under the title of I Destini di Roma. The Month has repeatedly given short articles of the same kind, either singly or serially, which are perfect models of the popular historical style. Our children and young people, and indeed all people whatever who can be induced to hear or read anything instructive, with the exception of a small class of severely-disciplined minds, must be charmed in order to be taught. Truth must be made visible; in concrete, distinct, and brilliant pictures, images, representations of actual realities, living examples; as Æneid or the Cid sustain to Latin and French grammar. They should be composed with such a charm of style that an intelligent boy or girl would eagerly take them under a tree of a fine summer-day, and beguile delightfully a long afternoon in their perusal, if they are for juvenile readers; and if they are of a more ambitious aim, that they allure their readers to burn the midnight oil over their pages. Nor would we exclude historical romances from the category of useful and instructive literature, if they are constructed in conformity to the truth of history and inculcate wholesome moral lessons.

It is an error to consider literature as merely a means of instruction for a secular purpose or of transitory pleasure, and to confine the effort at cultivating the spiritual faculties in view of the soul’s everlasting destiny, to the use of means directly religious. This is one form of the erroneous doctrine that the Pg 586 temporal order ought to be separated from the spiritual order, and therefore education be secularized. If there are any who think that the clergy have no interest in any but their own technical, professional studies, and that catechisms, didactic sermons, ascetic books, and biographies of saints written in that formal method which is so inexpressibly unnatural and tedious, with virtues tied up in separate bundles and commonplace dissertations overloading the narrative, are the only and sufficient means of salvation, we might say to them: Look at the Bible, and study the method which the divine Wisdom adopted. It is a book of history, poetry, eloquence; with little of professedly abstract, didactic instruction. It is an inspired literature, and the sermons of our Lord even are thrown into a popular and concrete form which addresses the imagination more directly than the understanding. The Bible, as well as nature, reason, and experience, teaches us the practical lesson that for the young and for the multitude object-teaching is the proper and only successful method. The divine philosophy, as well as the human, must be taught by example, and history is philosophy teaching by examples. In the history of Christendom, both public and private, the sacred history of the Old and New Testament is continued. The church is the spouse of Christ. The Evangelists paint the picture of the bridegroom, and Catholic historians of the bride. To win admiration and love for her, it is enough to represent her as she is.

Frederic Ozanam was inspired with this idea, which was infused into his soul by the Holy Spirit who consecrated him to his high vocation. He devoted himself to

“No man in his position was ever so much beloved in Paris; it was almost an adoration. After hanging upon his lips at the Sorbonne, bursting out every now and then, as if in spite of themselves, into sudden gusts of applause, and then hushing one another for fear they should lose one of the master’s words, his young audience would follow him out of the lecture-hall, shouting and cheering, putting questions, and elbowing their way up for a word of recognition, while a band of favored ones trooped on with him to his home across the gardens. They never suspected what an additional fatigue this affectionate demonstration was to the professor, already exhausted by the preceding hour and a half’s exertion, with its laborious proximate preparation. No matter how tired he was, they were never dismissed; he welcomed their noisy company, with its eager talk, its comments and questions, as if it were the most refreshing rest. There was, indeed, only one reward that Ozanam coveted more; this was when some young soul, who had come to the lecture in doubt or unbelief, suddenly moved by the orator’s exposition of the faith, as it was embodied or shadowed forth in his subject, opened his eyes to the truth, and, like the blind man in the Gospel, cried out, ‘giving thanks.’

“One day, on coming home from the Pg 587 Sorbonne, the following note was handed to him: ‘It is impossible that any one could speak with so much fervor and heart without believing what he affirms. If it be any satisfaction—I will even say happiness—to you to know it, enjoy it to the full, and learn that before hearing you I did not believe. What a great number of sermons failed to do for me you have done in an hour: you have made me a Christian!… Accept this expression of my joy and gratitude.’ You have made me a Christian! Oh! let those who believe and love like Ozanam tell us what he felt, what joy inundated his soul when this cry went forth to him.”[151]

Ozanam’s authority over the students was never more strikingly manifested than on the occasion of the excitement caused by the public announcement which the celebrated historian Lenormant made of his conversion to Christianity. He had been an infidel, then a waverer between scepticism and faith, for years before he declared himself on the Catholic side. The leaders of the infidel party stirred up the students who attended his course of historical lectures to violent demonstrations of hostility. Ozanam espoused his cause with the most chivalrous courage, and took his place by the side of M. Lenormant in the lecture-hall. When the storm of yells, hisses, hootings, and blasphemous outcries burst forth in a deafening tumult, he sprang to his feet beside the lecturer with an attitude and a glance of indignant defiance which evoked at once from the fickle mob of youths a counter-storm of violent applause. A scornful gesture hushed them into a sudden silence, broken only by the thunder of Ozanam’s invectives and the eloquence of his appeals to their honor and the principles of liberty which they professed to respect, but had M. Lenormant then proceeded to deliver his lecture without interruption. The next day, however, through the influence of those consistent advocates of toleration, Michelet and Quinet, the course was closed by an order of the government.

The active labors of Ozanam were by no means restricted to his department of duty as a professor. He was a zealous leader in Catholic associations, a frequent contributor to the journals, an untiring workman in the cause of practical charity and all undertakings for the improvement of the class of artisans and laborers. It is impossible to make any accurate estimate of the actual results of his efforts in the cause of religion and humanity. In the words of his biographer: “The work that he accomplished in his sphere will never be known in this world. God only knows the harvest that others have reaped from his prodigal self-devotion, his knowledge, and that eloquence which so fully illustrated the ideal standard of human speech described by Fénelon as ‘the strong and persuasive utterance of a soul nobly inspired.’ For Ozanam was not merely a teacher in the Sorbonne—he was a teacher of the world; and his influence shone out to the world through the minds and lives of numbers of his contemporaries who did not know that they were reflecting his light.”

What is awaiting France we know not. The world, but especially all Catholics throughout the whole extent of the church’s domain in the world, have watched with intensest interest the events which have occurred in France since the reign of Pius IX. began under such unwonted and marvellous auspices, Pg 588 and has continued so much beyond the period of human expectation. They have never ceased to pray for France, to sympathize with the heroic efforts of genuine French patriots, the true children of Charlemagne and St. Louis, and to watch anxiously for the time when the prognostic of the learned and eloquent Dr. Marshall shall be fulfilled: “When France falls upon her knees, let the enemies of France begin to tremble.” The blood of three martyred archbishops of Paris, the blood of Olivaint and his noble fellow-victims, the blood of Pimodan and those generous youth who fell at Castelfidardo, the chivalry of Lamoricière and La Charrette, the vows of the pilgrims of Lourdes and Paray-le-Monial, the valiant struggles of the champions of the faith, the prayers and sacrifices of that crowd of the noblest daughters of France which fills her renovated cloisters, cannot surely remain for ever powerless to lift the dark cloud which overhangs the kingdom of the fleurs-de-lis. There has been enough of the blood of the just poured out in France within the last century to redeem not only France but Christendom. If Christendom is to be regenerated, France must first come forth renewed out of her second baptism in blood and fire. The cry of anguish, though not of despair, which she sends up to heaven by the mouth of her eloquent spokesman, the bishop of the city of Joan of Arc, “Où allons nous?” must be answered: “We go to victory over traitors within and enemies without, and our triumph shall be that of the Catholic Church.”

Frederic Ozanam had once said to the young men of a literary circle: “Let us be ready to prove that we too have our battle-fields, and that, if need be, we can die on naïveté than good sense, he observes that “one has to be prudent, so as not to injure one’s health by the pressure; but little by little the constitution grows used to it. We become accustomed to a severe active life, and it benefits the temper as much as the intellect.” Notwithstanding the remonstrances of friends, he continued almost the same extent of application to study, until his health gave way entirely; and even during the journeys he was obliged to take for relaxation he rather varied the kind of labor in which his restless mind engaged than exchanged it for rest and recreation. His first severe illness attacked him only four years after he began lecturing at the Sorbonne. This was followed at intervals by other attacks, and a general failure of health which obliged him to intermit his courses and take several journeys in France, Italy, England, and Spain, during which he gathered the materials of some of the most delightful of his minor works. It is a curious and characteristic incident of his visit to England, worth recording, that he was turned out of Westminster Abbey by Pg 589 the pompous beadle, whom all tourists must well remember, for kneeling down to pray at the tomb of Edward the Confessor. His last lecture at the Sorbonne was given some time during the spring of 1852. It was a dying effort. He had persisted in dragging himself to the lecture-hall while a remnant of strength remained, in spite of the entreaties of friends and medical advisers. At length he had been forced to take to his bed, exhausted with weakness and consumed by fever. His cruel and unreasonable pupils clamored at the deprivation of the intellectual banquet to which they had been accustomed, and, with the inconsiderate spirit of youth, accused him of neglecting his duty through self-indulgence. Ozanam heard of this, and, in spite of all remonstrances, he rose from his bed, was dressed and taken in a carriage to the Sorbonne. Pale and haggard, unable to walk without support, but with an eye blazing with unwonted fire, and a voice clear and shrill as a silver clarion, he sang his death-song amid enthusiastic applause.

As the peroration of his last speech and of his life he exclaimed: “Gentlemen, our age is accused of being an age of egotism; we professors, it is said, are tainted with the general epidemic; and yet it is here that we use up our health; it is here that we wear ourselves out. I do not complain of it; our life belongs to you; we owe it to you to our last breath, and you shall have it. For my part, if I die it will be in your service.” With ardent but foreboding congratulations and applauses, which all felt to be farewells, the students of the Sorbonne heard and saw the last of Ozanam. The finale of his career had been reached; his St. Vincent de Paul. His published works fill eleven volumes of considerable size, and for a just appreciation of their character and value we refer the reader to the twenty-fifth chapter of Miss O’Meara’s biography.

We have endeavored to excite rather than to allay the curiosity of our readers, by merely designating the salient points of a life which is crowded with a great variety of traits and incidents such as make up a subject worthy to be handled by a skilful artist in the painting of character. We have not by any means exhausted the material furnished by the intelligent and graceful narrator of Ozanam’s life, or even touched upon those personal and private details of his domestic history which lend so poetic a charm to the story of his public career. Those in whom we have awakened an interest for one who presents the living ideal of a perfect Catholic layman in an exalted sphere of action, will defraud themselves grievously if they fail to make themselves more fully acquainted with it by the perusal of his biography. The author, although she now appears for the first time under her own proper name, Pg 590 is already known by her Life of Bishop Grant, published under the nom de plume of Grace Ramsay, and is a daughter of Dr. O’Meara, the author of Napoleon in Exile; or, a Voice from St. Helena. Her contributions to the pages of this magazine have been numerous and always considered as among the best of our literary articles. In the work we are reviewing she has done justice to the high estimate we had previously formed of her merit as a writer, and to her subject, the one most suited to call forth her power which she has thus far attempted. Besides a full knowledge of her subject; that ardent glow of admiration for the hero of her story which is so requisite, and is one of the special charms of portraits of noble men drawn by a feminine hand; and graphic power regulated by delicate and correct taste in delineation and description, the author has shown remarkable tact and good sense in respect to all those questions which have caused division and discussion between different Catholic parties in France. Without suppressing any part of the history of M. Ozanam and his period, or attempting to throw a veil over any of his opinions which involved him in the domestic controversies then existing, and not yet settled, respecting the relations of the Catholic cause and national politics, she has judiciously avoided taking the part of an advocate, and preserved the quiet, impartial attitude of a historian. We have occasionally noticed some evidences of haste, and neglect to put the last finishing touches upon the construction of sentences or the details of the narrative. We are also at a loss to understand the author’s motive for using certain French words, such as angoisse and découragement, Life and Works of F. Ozanam, we suppose the publisher is accountable; for the author has entitled her own work very properly on the title-page, Frederic Ozanam, Professor at the Sorbonne: His Life and Works—a phrase whose meaning is essentially changed by the inversion of its parts, and made to convey the impression that the complete works of Ozanam are contained in one small volume, together with his life. Apart from this blemish, which can be easily corrected, the mechanical execution of the work is neat and tasteful. The Life of Ozanam is another gem added to our small cabinet of treasures by the skill and industry of a gifted, cultivated woman. We trust the success of Miss O’Meara’s first appearance under her own name will encourage her to new efforts, and stimulate other women similarly gifted to follow her example by laboring in a department of literature for which they are specially competent. The example of Frederic Ozanam, mirrored in her clear, impartial pages, presents its own native, intrinsic beauty and splendor as a model for pure, disinterested, high-souled Catholic young men who aspire towards an ideal of true intellectual and moral greatness which is elevated and at the same time attainable in the laical state and a secular profession. It is to be hoped that the publication of this Life will make the Catholic students of England and the United States generally acquainted both with Ozanam’s beautiful character and with his thoroughly erudite, yet classically elegant and attractive, works on the history and literature of the middle ages.

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AMID IRISH SCENES.

II

Who has not heard of the Rock of Cashel—Cashel of the Kings? “The first object,” exclaimed Richard Lalor Sheil, “that in childhood I learned to admire was that noble ruin, an emblem as well as a memorial of Ireland, which ascends before us, at once a temple and a fortress, the seat of religion and nationality; where councils were held, where princes assembled; the scene of courts and of synods; and on which it is impossible to look without feeling the heart at once elevated and touched by the noblest as well as the most solemn recollections.” From whatever side the traveller approaches the ancient metropolis and residence of the kings of Munster, the first object to meet his eye is the Rock, which lifts itself above the surrounding country, as proud to wear its monumental crown. From the earliest times this hill seems to have been dedicated to religion. Its Round Tower, which is still entire, would lead us to associate it with the pagan rites of the ancient Irish; and the tradition which designates the Rock as the place where the kings of Munster were proclaimed confirms this view. St. Patrick, St. Declan, St. Ailbe, St. Kiran, and other holy men held a synod in Cashel.

St. Patrick’s visit was in 448; he baptized Prince Ængus and held solemn feast in Cashel of the Kings “till all the land was clothed with Christ.” Here on the Rock he gave the shamrock its immortal fame:

Without entering into the controversy concerning the origin of the Round Towers, we will take Cormac’s Chapel to be the most ancient Christian ruin on the Rock.

This stone-roofed church was built, as is generally supposed, by Cormac McCullenan, the famous king-bishop, who began to reign in the year 902. But Petrie is of opinion that we owe this chapel to Cormac MacCarthy, King of Munster, and that it is the Teampul Chormaic of whose solemn consecration by the archbishops and bishops of Munster, in presence of the priests, princes, and people, the Pg 592 Annals of Innisfallen make mention in 1134.

However this may be, all agree that the chapel is one of the most curious and interesting specimens of early Christian architecture in Ireland. Like all the stone-roofed chapels of the primitive Irish Church, it is divided into nave and chancel, with a tall, square tower at their northern and southern juncture. Within the southern tower, which on the outside is ornamented with six projecting bands, there is a stone staircase leading to apartments above the chapel said to have been occupied by King Cormac. These rooms receive the light through windows which are circular on the outside, but square within, and were heated by hot air, conveyed into them through flues in the wall—the first instance known to us of the use of a method of warming houses generally thought to be of very recent invention. The doorways leading into the chapel are in its northern and southern walls, and are richly adorned with columns, capitals, mouldings, and sculptured figures. On the lintel of the northern entrance there is a group in basso-relievo representing a Centaur in the act of shooting a lion which is about to devour some smaller animal that is crouching at its feet. This is supposed to represent the contest between paganism and Christianity for the possession of Ireland during the repeated invasions of the Danes.

The cathedral stands between the Round Tower and Cormac’s Chapel, embracing them in such way that they all seem to be but parts of one magnificent ruin. This church, which consists of a choir, nave, and transepts, with a square tower in the centre, was

This formerly contained a vaulted apartment having no exterior windows, and but one small entrance. Over this vault was the great room of state, which could be reached only by stairs within the walls, barely wide enough to admit one person. The roof was surmounted by battlements and a parapet. The monuments whose ruins crown the Rock of Cashel were all built before the Saxon had set foot in Ireland, and it is impossible to look upon them without admiration for the men who called them into existence. They certainly had little to learn, in architecture at least, from the rude Norman barons who, taking advantage of the internal feuds which distracted the people, overran and subjugated the country.

It was in the year 1101 that Murtogh O’Brien, King of Munster, convened a great assembly of the clergy and people of Ireland at Cashel, “and made such an offering as king never made before him—namely, Cashel of the Kings, which he bestowed on the devout, without Pg 593 the intervention of a laic or an ecclesiastic, for the use of the religious of Ireland in general.” We have a letter of St. Anselm to Murtogh O’Brien, in which he praises him for his excellent administration of the kingdom. His successor, Cormac MacCarthy, by whom the chapel was built, was the intimate friend of St. Malachi.

Driven from his throne by Turlough O’Conor, King of Connaught, he refused to take up arms to regain it, but withdrew from strife and placed himself under the direction of this great saint. In his society he led a penitential life, taking no nourishment but bread and water, and wholly absorbed in heavenly contemplation. After some years he was replaced upon the throne, and, in gratitude, built two churches at Lismore, where he had been the companion of St. Malachi, and one at Cashel of the Kings.

The most famous of the bishops of Cashel was Cormac McCullenan, who was at the same time King of Munster, and who has been considered as the founder of the chapel on the Rock which still bears his name. In his reign, which began in 902, the throne of Cashel had become almost in every respect the equal of that of Tara. No longer content with his own provincial resources, he put forth a claim to tribute from the whole southern half of Ireland. This involved him in war with the people of Leinster, who, supported by the supreme monarch, met Cormac in battle and routed his army. The king himself was slain, and his body was conveyed to Cashel for interment.

In the northern wall of the chapel there is a recess, once filled by a sarcophagus which is now in the cathedral. Upon the slab which covered this tomb the name of

After Murtogh O’Brien’s gift of Cashel to the church in the year 1101, its bishops gained in importance and power. In the latter half of the twelfth century the see was filled by Donald O’Heney, who was of the royal family of the Dalcassians. The Four Masters declare that he was the fountain of religion in the western part of Europe, that he was second to no Irishman of his day in wisdom and piety, and that in the Roman Law he was the most learned doctor in the whole kingdom. He took part in a council held in 1097, in which Waterford was erected into a bishopric, and died in the following year.

In 1152 Pope Eugene III. sent Cardinal Paparo as legate to Ireland with authority to confer the pallium upon four of the Irish prelates. One of these was Donat O’Lonargan, Archbishop of Cashel, during the lifetime of whose immediate successor Henry II. invaded Ireland. He landed at Waterford on the 18th of October, 1171, with five hundred knights and four thousand men-at-arms, and appeared rather as a protector than as an enemy of the Irish people. From Waterford he marched with his army to Lismore, and thence Pg 594 to Cashel. Early in the following year, by his order, a synod was held in Cashel for the purpose of regulating ecclesiastical matters in Ireland. The chief pretext, as is known, for the Norman invasion was the correction of abuses in the Irish Church, and it was ostensibly with a view to effect this that the council was called. Its decrees have been preserved by Giraldus Cambrensis, the eulogist of Henry and the enemy of the Irish, and, far from confirming the prevailing notion concerning the existence of grave disorders, they furnish the strongest argument in favor of the purity of the Irish Church at that time; and even had there been serious abuses, the murderer of St. Thomas of Canterbury was, one would think, hardly a fit instrument for doing away with them.

Giraldus himself, the avowed partisan of the English and the author of innumerable falsehoods relating to Irish history, was forced to admit that the clergy were faithful in the discharge of their spiritual duties, pre-eminent in chastity, and remarkable for their exceeding abstinence from food.

“The clergy,” he says, “of this country are very commendable for religion, and, among the divers virtues which distinguish them, excel and are pre-eminent in the prerogative of chastity. They attend also diligently to their psalms and hours; to reading and prayer; and, remaining within the precincts of the churches, do not absent themselves from the divine offices to the celebration of which they have been appointed. They likewise pay great attention to abstinence and sparingness of food; so that the greatest part of them fast almost every day until dusk, and until they

As an off-set to this confession, drawn from him unwillingly, he accuses the Irish clergy of drinking at night more than is becoming (plusquam deceret), but does not go the length of saying that they drank to inebriation, which, indeed, would be altogether incompatible with the virtues which he is forced to admit they possessed. Felix, Bishop of Ossory, who was present when Giraldus made this statement, resented as false his allusion to the indulgence of the Irish clergy in wine. But, even taking the account of Giraldus in its full extent, we must admit that the Irish priests, at the time of the Norman invasion, had nothing to learn from the example of the ecclesiastics who had followed the conquerors from England; and we are inclined to hold with Lanigan that there was in that day no church in Christendom in which there were fewer abuses.

It was to Maurice, Archbishop of Cashel, who died in 1191, that Giraldus made the objection that Ireland had never had any martyrs. “It is true,” replied the archbishop; “for, though the Irish are looked upon as barbarous and uncultivated, yet have they always paid reverence and honor to priests; nor have they ever raised their hands against the saints of God. But now there is come amongst us a people who know how and are accustomed to make martyrs. Henceforth Ireland, like other nations, shall have her martyrs.”

Giraldus has himself recorded this retort as a sharp saying. His heart would have failed him could he have looked into the future and beheld the whole people weltering in their martyr-blood; the sword always uplifted ready to strike, the Pg 595 land made desolate, the populous cities empty, the solemn cathedrals in ruins, the monasteries sacked and burned, until Ireland, that made no martyrs for Christ, became, for him, the great martyr-nation of all time. Cashel itself was to have its martyrs, chosen some of them from among its archbishops. Maurice Fitzgibbon, of the noble family of the earls of Desmond, filled this see when Elizabeth ascended the throne. His birth was not more eminent than his virtue. Every effort was made by the queen to induce him to prefer honors to conscience. But in vain. He spurned the royal favor which could be obtained only by the sacrifice of his faith, was arrested for refusing to take the oath of supremacy, and thrown into prison in Cork, where, after years of suffering and cruel treatment, he died on the 6th of May, 1578. His successor was Archbishop O’Hurley, who, through his mother, Honora O’Brien, was descended of the house of Thomond. A wretched informer was set to watch him, but, through the timely warning of a friend, he escaped just as he was on the point of being delivered into the hands of the officers of the government, and found an asylum in the castle of Slane. His place of refuge was soon discovered, and Lord Slane was ordered under the heaviest penalties to bring the archbishop with the least possible delay to the Castle of Dublin. On his trial he was put to torture, in the vain hope that his excruciating sufferings might bring him to renounce his faith. In the midst of his torments his only sister was sent into his prison to add her prayers to the cruelties of his tortures. He implored her to fall upon her knees and ask pardon for so great a crime. As a last resort he was offered pardon

The first Protestant Archbishop of Cashel was the notorious Miler Magragh, who apostatized during the reign of Elizabeth, and whom Camden calls “a man of uncertain faith and credit, and a depraved life.” During the fifty-two years of his occupancy of this see he squandered its revenues, alienated its lands, and, lest the memory of his misdeeds should perish, took care to erect in the cathedral a monument to himself to recall to succeeding generations the lavish manner in which he spent the ill-gotten goods of apostasy and servility. The epitaph, which he wrote himself, records among other things that for fifty years he worshipped England’s sceptre and pleased her princes. When Donald O’Brien’s grand cathedral passed into the hands of Protestant bishops, it began to be neglected. In 1647 Lord Inchiquin, one of Cromwell’s generals, laid siege to it, and, after a severe bombardment, took it by storm. Twenty priests who had taken refuge in the castle retired into the vault, and the soldiers, not being able to break in the door, brought turf and made a fire, by which they were either Pg 596 roasted or suffocated. The western tower, which was directly exposed to the battery of Inchiquin, was greatly damaged, and after the capture the roof of the cathedral was blown off with cannon. When the troubled times of the Commonwealth had passed away, the choir was again fitted up and used for religious worship, until in 1749 the Protestant Archbishop Price abandoned this hallowed sanctuary altogether, leaving it to the mercy of time and the elements. The groined arch underneath the belfry was broken down, and the bells were carried off to Fethard and Clonmel. The interior of the church was filled with the fragments of the fallen roof, beneath which were buried tombstones, capitals, corbels, and pillars; and the noble Rock where for ages the heroes and saints of Ireland had dwelled and prayed, abandoned of men, was given up to the owl and the bat. In 1848, while the people were dying from hunger, the great tower, that had been battered by Cromwell’s cannon, opened, and the southern half fell to the ground with a terrific crash; but so excellent was the mortar which had been used in the building that it remained firm while the stones were shattered. The walls of the cathedral still stand firm and unshaken as the Rock on which they are built. There is no nobler ruin in Great Britain. The abbeys of Melrose, Dryburgh, and Holyrood are contemptible when compared with the Rock of Cashel. Even in its fallen state it has the lofty bearing of a king.

When Cromwell beheld it he exclaimed: “Ireland is a country worth fighting for.”

Pg 597 of a superstitious faith, and prize them only as trophies of conquest. The Irish people cling to memories and are governed more than others by their affections; and so long as the English government persists in maintaining a state of affairs which constantly places before their eyes the wrongs and outrages of which they have been the victims, so long will they be restless and dissatisfied.

To continue to allow an ecclesiastical establishment, which has never been and can never be anything else than a political contrivance for the humiliation and oppression of the Irish people, to retain possession of these shrines of religion, is a wanton insult to the double love they bear to their country and their faith. It was this twofold love, flowing in one channel, that upheld them in all the dark centuries of woe; and now that brighter days have come, England cannot fail to recognize the increasing strength of Irish patriotism and Irish faith.

Let the Rock of Cashel, with its holy ruins, its sacred tombs of kings and bishops, be given back to the people to whom it belongs. It is valueless except for its associations, and these associations are without value to the persons in whose hands it is allowed to remain. Let the glory of other days come back to these sacred walls. Millions of Catholics in the United States would consider it an honor and a privilege to be permitted to rebuild this sanctuary of God. Again on the holy mount let the lamp of Christ’s real presence burn as glowed the light that for a thousand years burned before St. Bridget’s shrine. Let the swelling notes of the deep-toned organ lift again the soul to God, while mitred bishops and surpliced priests, with all the

Seven miles north of Cashel, and three miles south of Thurles, on the banks of the river Suir, lie the ruins of the Abbey of Holy Cross. A convent was built on this spot at a very early period of the Christian history of Ireland. The fame of the sanctity of the monks attracted members to the community, and also pilgrims from a distance. In 1169, two years before the Norman invasion, Donald O’Brien, King of Limerick, accompanied by a brilliant retinue, visited the place, and was led by his devotion to found and endow the abbey. The charter of foundation, one of the witnesses to which was Maurice, Archbishop of Cashel, of whom we have already made mention, opens with these words: “Donald, by the grace of God, King of Limerick, to all kings, dukes, earls, barons, knights, and Christians of whatsoever degree, throughout Ireland, perpetual greeting in Christ.” This charter was afterwards confirmed by the English kings John, Henry III., Edward III., and Richard II. The abbey received its name from the possession of a portion of the true cross which was given in 1110, by Pope Pascal II., to Donough O’Brien, King of all Ireland and grandson of Brian Boru. Princes and bishops were eager to enrich this monastery, and the fame of the miracles wrought by the sacred relic drew to it crowds of worshippers. With increasing wealth, the buildings grew in splendor and extent. The church is built in the form of a cross, with nave, chancel, and transept. At the intersection of the cross Pg 598 there is a lofty square tower, and in the transepts two beautifully-groined chapels. In the monastery there were eight dormitories for the monks, besides numerous chambers for the entertainment of visitors attracted by devotion; for the laws of hospitality were never forgotten. The abbot, who was mitred, was a peer of Parliament and secular lord of the county of “The Cross of Tipperary.” When Henry VIII. suppressed the great abbeys of Ireland, he granted Holy Cross, with its temporalities and also the spiritual jurisdiction, to James, Earl of Ormond and Ossory, whom he regarded with special favor. Elizabeth confirmed this grant to Thomas, Earl of Ormond, who, though educated in the Anglican schism, became a Catholic several years before his death, and left his estates to Earl Walter, a stanch defender of the faith.

The monks who had been expelled from the abbey still lingered in its neighborhood, in the hope that they might somehow be permitted to return and end their days in the sacred cloisters in which they had given to God the best part of life. At times they met by night within the hallowed enclosure to offer up the divine Sacrifice; and when Mary ascended the throne, they once more took possession, but were again expelled by Elizabeth, and finally dispersed. The cells, dormitories, and guest-chambers, so long consecrated to meditation and all holy exercise, were converted into stables for the housing of cattle. The church, which contained the tombs of many noble families, escaped desecration, but not the ravages of time and neglect. From the year 1580 to the close of the century no priest dared appear in public throughout the province

“They were not long there,” say the Four Masters, “when the holy Rood was brought to them, and the Irish gave large presents, alms, and offerings to its conservators and monks in honor of Almighty God; and they protected and respected the monastery, with its buildings, the lands appropriated for its use, and its inhabitants in general.”

The monks remained in possession of the abbey for several years, and for the first time since its suppression in 1536 an abbot of Holy Cross was chosen. The succession was kept up till the beginning of the eighteenth century, and expired in the first dark years of the Penal Code with Thomas Cogan, the last of the abbots of Holy Cross, who died on the 10th of August, 1700, and was buried in the choir of the old church, in the tomb where the bones of his predecessors are awaiting the day of resurrection.

O gray walls, sacred ruins of Holy Cross! ye have a spirit’s feeling, and work upon the soul till it forgets all glad and pleasant scenes to blend with the gloom and desolation that have come to abide with you. The gentle river still flows by, but where is the great strong life-current of faith and love that here was fed from God’s eternal fount? Cold are the burning lips of love that wore the pavement smooth; cold the great warm hearts that beat with highest impulse of divine charity. No more from their chalices mysterious monks Pg 599 drink deep love of God and men; no more at early morn is heard their matin song; no more to heaven ascends their evening hymn. Gone is the dim religious light that shone through mystic windows. The tapers are quenched, the belfries mute. No more floats on the breeze

The dead only are here, and around them the silence they so loved and broken walls, which, if they mourn not, make others grieve.

As a monastic ruin the Abbey of Holy Cross is, in the estimation of the people, second to no other in Ireland; and it owes this celebrity less to the beauty of its architecture than to the possession of the holy Rood.

The marble shrine in which this famous relic was preserved may still be seen in the southern transept of the church. The relic itself, at the time of the suppression of the abbey, passed into the hands of the Earl of Ormond, in whose family it remained for nearly a century, when Earl Walter gave it for safe-keeping to Dr. Fennell, who left it to James, second Duke of Ormond. It was finally deposited, in the early part of the present century, in a shrine in the chapel of the Ursuline Nuns at Blackrock, near Cork, where it is to remain “until such time as the church of the Holy Cross, with the monastery of Cistercian monks attached thereto, shall be rebuilt.”

Though Holy Cross is a ruin and in the hands of Protestants, the Cistercian Order still survives in Ireland in the monastery of Mount Melleray.

Mount Melleray is but a few hours’ ride from Cork. The excursion is made by railway to Youghal, an ancient town, once famous in Irish history, lying near the mouth of the Blackwater. At the entrance to its splendid and picturesque harbor, now almost entirely abandoned, there stands a ruined tower, which was formerly part of a convent of nuns who at night kept torches blazing in this lighthouse to enable vessels to enter port with safety. Near the town the house which Sir Walter Raleigh owned, and in which he lived for several years, is still pointed out to the traveller. In his garden here he planted in 1586 the first potatoes grown in Ireland.

A boat leaves Youghal twice a day and ascends the Blackwater as far as Cappoquin. The trip is made in about two hours. The scenery is unsurpassed even in Ireland. There is nothing finer on the Rhine. The river winds through fertile valleys with rich meadows and fields of waving corn, until a sudden turn brings us into the presence of barren mountains, which, in their desolation, seem to mock the smiling prospect below. From almost every jutting rock ruined castles or churches look down upon us. In these mountains above Cappoquin, and overlooking the Blackwater, lies the Trappist monastery of Mount Melleray.

Forty-five years ago a few poor monks, driven from their peaceful home, settled here in the midst of a dreary wilderness. They had obtained from the Protestant landlord of the place six hundred acres of mountain peat-land on a lease Pg 600 of ninety-nine years. No one but an Irish landlord would have thought of demanding rental for what had always been a desert, and, so far as he was concerned, might for ever remain a desert. The monks, however, paid him his price and set to work to make the desert bloom. On their land there was not a tree or blade of grass, and before they could begin to plough or dig they had to go over the ground and pick up the stones with which it was covered. But for them a life of solitude was to be a life of labor, and they were not discouraged. They knew that half the soil of Europe had been reclaimed and brought under cultivation by monks, whose lives were none the less consecrated to prayer and study. Half a century has not yet passed, and the barren waste is covered with rich fields of corn and green meadows. With their own hands the monks have built a large monastery and church, whose tall spire is seen from the whole surrounding country. In their gardens the finest vegetables grow, and in their dairy the best butter is made. A few years ago they opened a college, in which they give an excellent classical education to youths whose parents may not be able to pay the higher pensions of other institutions. The buildings are large and well provided with whatever is necessary to the health and comfort of the students; and the food, though plain, is of the best quality. A part of the monastery is fitted up for the accommodation of guests; and, as the hospitality of the monks is well known, they are rarely without visitors, drawn thither sometimes by curiosity, but oftener by the desire of spending a few days in solitude in communion with God. In the guests’ book St. Peter we exclaim: It is good to be here! A single day, O Lord! spent in thy tabernacles is more precious than a thousand years.

In this life in death is found a life the world dreams not of, as

as in the presence of the dying we see only the blackness and the Pg 601 gloom, when the soul already hears God’s angels sing, and beholds the light that never fades.

The highest joy is of the soul, and the more it lifts itself from flesh and earth the greater is its delight. In these solemn walls, with their silent monks clad in white, it seemed to us that we were upon the threshold of another world, far away from the ebb and flow of men’s affairs. We felt no more the feverish throb of the great world’s pulse, nor heard the noisy hum of commerce or the nations’ angry battle-cry. The blatant shout of Progress no longer deafened us. We were in the mood to ask ourselves: Is it not, after all has been said, progress towards death that men speak of? Do not all the lines along which they advance converge until they meet in the grave? But we crave life, not death. Is there no hope? Must we join the rabble, the common herd, that stands in wonderment in the world’s great toy-shop, eagerly peering at stones and metals and skins of beasts, gazing at blank walls and rattling machinery, and shouting: Ha! this is progress? Is there no room for the soul, no hope of life? Is mechanism all in all, and is all progress mechanical? Here, at least, were men who believed in the soul; who, despising all the counsels of fear and cowardice, had turned from the world and set their faces towards the life that is and is to be. They never speak

It is easy for us to deride the life which we have not the courage or the strength to lead. These, at least, are men with brave hearts and great thoughts. They are not the creatures of circumstance, the slaves of routine, the self satisfied and unconscious victims of the universal tyrant. They are not held by bonds of flesh and blood. No mean ambition moves them. A king’s crown is but a bauble, like the toy of a child; and whatever ceases to be has no kindred with the soul that was not born to die. They wage battle for the possession of the infinite, and in the divine struggle take on the heroic mood that makes all things possible. And we who stood for a moment on this heavenly battle-ground, a looker-on, unfit to take part in such celestial warfare, would fain have lingered on the hallowed spot, knowing full well that the world to which we turned again has no happiness even to promise like that which is found in this holy mountain where God is seen and loved.

Pg 602

A STORY OF THE FAR WEST.

Gold City they had called it in its palmy days, though even then it was a city in name only. It was known as Gomorrah now; and its few inhabitants gloried in the title, for Edverson had struck a vein of gold there in the first flush of the mining fever, and a crowd of fortune-hunters flocked to the place, only to discover, when it was too late, that the first “lucky find” was the last. Then the tide of population ebbed away, leaving behind it the refuse—those who were too poor, too discouraged, too sunk in idleness or sin, to try for anything better. The houses were no more than shanties, which the women made no attempt to keep tidy; children lived and died there who never heard God’s holy name except in curses; to most of them even the day of the week was unknown.

Three men ruled the place, one by fear, one by kindness, one because he was tavern-keeper. They were familiarly known as the Lawyer, the Doctor, and the Parson. One day, worthy to be marked with red ink joyfully in the sad annals of Gomorrah, the Lawyer—most evil soul there, and most dreaded—announced his intention of going to England, and, when the next day dawned, he had departed with no more warning and with no word of farewell. Men, women, and children drew a long breath of relief, yet spoke of him for weeks afterwards in whispers and guarded words, as if they feared at any moment to see his hated presence among them once again, and feel his heel of iron on their necks.

He was far superior to them in most respects. Gentle born, with wealthy surroundings, he had received a superior education, and gave promise of superior excellence in his profession, but had never been taught to curb a single passion. From one level to another he fell, till in Gomorrah he hid himself from all who had known him or his in his brighter days. Yet no man there was so liked and did so much to help as he. The love of his profession clung to him through everything, and it was impossible for him to see disease and accident without trying to alleviate the trouble. Boys and girls playing and quarrelling in the streets would stop the maddest sport, the bitterest fight, to help the Doctor home as he came reeling from the tavern, or to cover his face from the hot sun as he lay like a log by the roadside; would do it with a grateful remembrance of the time Pg 603 when “he nursed me in the fever” or “he splintered my broken leg”; and often he was saved from a midnight carousal by a call to some forlorn bedside, where he waited on filthy wretches with as quick skill and attention as once he had served the finest ladies in his great city home. No one knew how he hated the place in which he lived, and above all the man with whom he sat that autumn afternoon; but he had lost all hope of better things.

Through their gloomy silence and the clouds of tobacco-smoke the Parson and the Doctor beheld a sight which had not been seen in Gomorrah for many a day—the white cover of an emigrant wagon.

“Tom Townsend, from High Bend,” exclaimed Syles, “the Lawyer’s old chum there. Who’s he got with him?”

The Doctor made no reply, but stepped forward to meet the strangers. Behind the driver sat a young man with a good, kindly face, but lacking in practicality and force. On his arm he supported a woman, whose broad forehead, square chin, and firm mouth bespoke strong character, if one was able to think of that in noticing the serene holiness of the eyes and expression. Her face was pale as death.

“You’re wanted here, Doctor,” called the driver. “Here’s a case of chills and fever that’s not a common one, and I’ve seen ’em by hundreds.”

“Are you the Doctor?” the young man asked with a look of relief, as if he had heard of him before; and together they carried into the tavern and laid upon the settle the powerless form of the woman.

“Not this place!” the man exclaimed, lifting his head when he had laid his precious burden down. “Where is Mr. Dalzell’s house?”

“Why, surely—yes, we must be right. He came from here, he said.”

“Who? What?” his hearers asked, with a grim suspicion in their hearts. “Where are you from, sir?”

“I am Reuben Armstrong, from Suffolk, England. A Mr. Dalzell sold me his house and claim in Gold City. Where are they?”

The Doctor’s eyes fell, and Syles slunk into the shadow of the door. It was long before they could make him understand the truth; and when at last he comprehended it, Syles stole out of his presence with a sense of shame such as he had never felt before, leaving the Doctor to give the almost heart-broken fellow the only reason for courage that he knew how to give him—to bear up bravely for his wife’s sake.

It was but too easy to grasp the sad story. Armstrong had been a well-to-do gardener, with a pleasant little house and a snug sum of money in the bank; but, as the Doctor inferred even then, he had married a woman much his superior in character and station, whose friends looked down upon him, and thought he could never do anything worthy of her. When the Lawyer told his plausible story and showed his well-planned map—when he described his possessions, to be sold at a very low figure, because, as the evil owner dared to affirm, he must be with his aged parents in Nottinghamshire during their declining years—Reuben was only too ready to drop into the net.

They told his wife—his “poor Esther”—nothing that night. Indeed, she was too ill to notice that they moved her from the tavern to Pg 604 the cabin next door, which was their home. In that tavern Reuben declared she should not stay one hour.

That night the first snows fell, shutting off Gomorrah for the winter from any intercourse with the outer world, and for weeks the Doctor strove against all odds to save Esther Armstrong’s life. But for her Reuben would soon have sunk to the level of his neighbors—not in sin, but in inertia. He seemed to have no courage left to begin life over again; he was sure that Esther must die, and then there would be no use of his living. He spent his time in watching beside her, doing everything about the house for her that was possible; refusing all help save the physician’s, and only accepting that because he could not avoid it.

When the Doctor came in to see Esther on the morning after her arrival, Reuben had made the room as comfortable as he could with the furniture which they had brought from home, and Esther was lying in her bed, everything white about her, and she herself looking more pure and white than even the falling snow without.

“Am I very ill?” she asked calmly; and before the grave eyes bent upon him the Doctor could return no answer but the truth.

“You are a very sick woman, Mrs. Armstrong,” he said, “but I hope we may see you pull through bravely yet.”

“Will you ask the priest to come to me?” she said.

The Doctor started to his feet and made a rapid stride across the room. It brought him face to face with a crucifix, a picture, and a rosary.

“Madam,” he said reverently—she seemed to him like a saint as

“Oh!” she replied serenely, “you must mistake. Mr. Lazell certainly told us that there was one. We would never have come else.”

The Doctor bit his lip to keep back the oath which rose. “Mr. Lazell, as you call him, lied, madam.”

She asked no questions, but her searching eyes drew the truth from him. Sooner or later she must know all. Before that holy calm a tempting desire came over him to try how deep her religious feeling really was.

“Madam,” he said, “you call this place Gold City, but we know it as Gomorrah. There is no priest within miles of us. God isn’t here at all.”

She pressed her hands hard against her heart. He felt that she shrank from him inwardly.

“Is there any woman who will come to me?” she asked.

“There is not one who is fit to touch you,” he replied—“not one. We do not know what goodness is. You have been deceived into coming here. Now, if you love your husband, live for him; for nothing else can keep him from being like the rest of us.”

“You are mistaken,” she said gravely. “You do not know my husband. But, Doctor, if I must die, will you promise me to send in time for a priest?”

The Doctor bit back an oath. If “Mr. Lazell” had been there at that moment, not even Esther’s presence could have saved him from the hatred of nine wretched years kindled that day into relentless fury. The Doctor had known enough of Catholics at home—God help him! but his had been Catholic Pg 605 baptism in his babyhood—to fear the effect on her of what he had to say. Had it been of any use, he would have lied to her; but the next neighbor entering would have revealed all.

“There is no priest near us,” he replied, “and it is impossible to get one in the winter.”

She put her hand quickly to her heart again. “God’s will be done,” she said slowly; “God’s will be done” over and over and over again. They could not stop her. Reuben begged her to hear him, to rest, to grow calm, but it was of no avail. All day long, and far into the night, she tossed in fever, delirious always, but her holy self even in her delirium. Now she sang snatches of hymns; and now an exquisite strain of some old chant, which the Doctor had heard in great cathedrals, rose upon Gomorrah’s tainted air; but oftenest she called for a priest, or said: “God’s will be done.” Late that night the fever abated a little, and she opened her eyes calmly; but it was only to hear the clamor upon the night air of stamping feet, ringing sounds like tankards dashed on table or floor, the twang and clash of noisy instruments, scraps of vile song, brawls and oaths and blows.

“What is it?” she cried. “Where are we? Oh! I know”; and then sank into delirium again.

So for a week it lasted; then the fever died away, leaving her like a shadow. She made no complaint, never asked again for a priest, never spoke again of death; yet the Doctor knew, as well as if he had seen it, that hers was a broken heart. But another life was bound up with her life, and for its sake, as well as for Reuben’s, she tried and prayed to live. It was plain that

He and Reuben strove to keep sight and sound of evil from her; yet all their care could not banish at times strange visitors from her bedside—haggard women, flaunting women, all of them with evil tongues; no care could keep the children always from door or window, and often she saw, by frosty dawn or at high noon or in the early twilight, wild, wolfish eyes staring at her, gaunt fingers pointing, and heard children’s voices speak of her in terms wherewith oaths and low epithets were mixed—not through malice, but because they knew no other way.

No one knew what hours she lay awake by day and night in one Pg 606 agony of intercession; and she herself, praying often and hoping against hope for the sacraments to prepare her soul for death, never knew here into what union with her Lord that passion of prayer for souls was bringing her, as hour by hour the awful days wore on.

The Doctor saw her face, as it grew more sharp and thin, grow more holy, till he often felt unworthy to look upon it, and wondered how Reuben Armstrong had ever won a treasure of which it seemed to him no mortal man was worthy.

A poor, weak soul was Reuben’s, truly, in man’s sight. But God and the angels must have loved it with a special love. God knew how earnestly that sorrowful heart implored that the light of its eyes might be taken from it, if so Esther might escape from suffering and enter into peace; and when night shut him in with her alone, the angels heard how he strove to drown the riot next door by prayers and litanies beside her, till often he slept exhausted on the hard floor by her bed.

But the children most of all weighed heavily upon Esther’s soul. Even when she could not see them she heard their voices; even when she could not hear them, she fancied how their lives were spent, though even her keen fancy did not reach the whole of the painful truth; and as the birthday of the Holy Child drew nearer, she felt more keenly their ignorance of all sacred things, shuddered to think of her own child being born in such an atmosphere, then came to love those little ones as if they were her very own, and to plead for them with a mother’s insatiable pleading.

Eight days before Christmas they laid her baby in her arms and saw her smile a happy mother’s smile.

“Didst thou not die for them, Jesus, my Jesus—for them as well as for me? Save them with me, save them with me—with me, my Jesus! By thy Sacred Heart that broke for us, save us, have mercy on us!” And then, over and over, as if with some peculiar, long-sustained intention or compact, “Remember, O most pious Virgin Mary! Remember, remember!”

And there was one frequent supplication in which no name was mentioned, as if it were borne so constantly from her heart to the Sacred Heart that she had ceased Pg 607 to need to speak the name: “Gain thyself that soul, my Jesus. By thy Cross, thy Heart, thy Mother, gain thyself that soul.”

They heard only one petition for herself, but that so anguished, so desperate, that the strong man broke into sobs to hear it: one hungry cry for God’s holy sacraments, for God’s anointed priest, to come to her before her death, yet never uttered without a more intense prayer still—“My God, my God, thy will be done, thy will be done”; and even that was entirely merged at last in her prayers for those who had made her life one long agony at its close.

Suddenly she sat straight up in her bed, her eyes blazing as if with an unearthly, reflected light, her cheeks brilliant with more than the fever flush.

“Hark, hark, hark!” she said, with a ring of ecstatic joy through every word. “Do you not hear the sacring-bell? Kneel, all of you. The priest comes—comes with my Lord at last.”

Her eyes were fixed upon the door that no hand opened, yet she seemed to watch some one enter, and to see some one draw nearer, nearer to her, and she folded her hands reverently, and bent her head as if in adoration. They understood: she believed a priest was there; and they, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, of what she evidently was sure she saw and heard—they who watched her fell down upon their knees and hid their faces as in some divine presence. The next words that broke the stillness were the words of a dying penitent alone with a priest of God: “I confess to Almighty God and to you, my father.”

Steadily, as if for weeks she had prepared her soul for this in faith

They moved to give her nourishment, and the movement roused her, though not to recognition. She started up once more, lifting her hand.

“Hark, hark!” she said again. “Do you not hear him? He is saying Mass, and they sing sweetly as angels.”

All round the world, that Christmas day, one song of praise was rising, one pure offering was offered up to Him who was born and given for us on that day. Grand cathedrals were ablaze with lights and rich with bloom; far down the choir the altar tapers shone like stars through clouds of incense waving upward to the fretted roof, and the full tide of chant swelled high to join the chant of angels; in lowly chapel as in great cathedral the priest of God and the people of God adored the Holy Babe upon his Mother’s breast. In Gomorrah, in a decaying chapel, while oath and brawl sounded without, one soul heard seraphic music which no other ear could hear; one soul beheld a Priest whom no other eye could see—joined in his offering of the tremendous Sacrifice. For an hour, upheld by superhuman strength, she knelt upright, rapt in an ecstasy of spiritual communion that grew too deep for prayer. When the clock struck twelve, she said slowly, “Ite missa est; Deo gratias”; then, with a long-drawn, rapturous sigh, lay down again, but not as if Pg 608 she knew or remembered husband or child or friend.

The Doctor left her then, but at the close of the day he was summoned hastily, to see now without mistake that the battle of her life was almost ended.

“Stay with her, Doctor,” Reuben pleaded. “It’s a sore struggle. Try something more.”

“I can’t stay, man,” he answered. “There is no more to do. I’d give my right hand to save her; but I can’t see her suffer and be unable to help her. She’s the only white soul here, and now she is going.”

He turned to the bedside, and stood silently looking at the face with the dread shadow on it. Suddenly opening her eyes, her gaze fell first on him, and, startled out of her usual composure, she gave an irrepressible shudder. He understood what it meant. She had treated him always with perfect courtesy and confidence as her physician and true friend; he knew—for there had not been wanting those to tell him of it—that she had silenced with dignified rebuke the evil tales that more than one had tried to tell her of him, not because they disliked him, but because they loved to talk. But he knew also, what they did not, that in her pure heart she shrank from him, that his very presence was loathsome to her; and there had been times when, in her bodily weakness, she had been unable to control her aversion to his slightest touch. He had borne it quietly, humbling as it was, but it was doubly bitter to bear at the very last.

“I will bid you good-night, Mrs. Armstrong,” he said, trying hard to steady his voice. “You will not want me any more this evening, I think.”

“You will not want me,” he repeated mechanically.

“I want you—there,” she answered with a great effort. “Promise me that you will be there.”

He did not speak.

“Promise,” she repeated, and the tone brought back the memory of her prayers that morning. “I am dying—dying; and yet I cannot die. Night and day I prayed it: ‘Gain thyself that soul, my Jesus. By thy Cross, thy Mother, thy broken Heart, gain thyself that soul.’ I prayed and prayed it; I am worn out with the praying, and yet I cannot die. Promise me to be there.”

The sweat stood on his forehead in great drops. “You do not know what you ask,” he cried. “There are sins enough upon me without adding that of a broken vow to you, and here. There is no saving a soul like mine.”

She did not answer him. She lifted up her eyes, away from him, away from earth, to God.

“Sacred Heart of my Jesus,” she prayed in agony, “win this soul, and let me die.”

For weeks he had kept himself sober and decent for her sake; now he had thought to rush out from her presence, to drown his grief in viler sin than ever; and, lo! she was still holding him, was binding eternal chains upon him, to draw him away from corruption unto God. As a physician he knew that it was a case where a mighty will alone was keeping life in a body nearly dead; it would have been an awful sight to see, even had he had no interest in it. She was living only to win him unto immortal life. Angels and devils may well have stood still before that struggle, where one Pg 609 dauntless soul at the point of death held Satan’s power at bay.

“I promise,” he said at last, as if the words were wrung from him. “But pray for me always.”

“The Mother of God prays for you,” she said with strange emphasis. “Call upon Jesus and Mary night and day. You will not need me.”

And then he saw that she needed him no longer, thought of him no longer, and he went away.

Reuben Armstrong shut and locked the door behind him. There was no more that science or skill could do. Now, for one brief hour, Esther was his alone. The eyes which the Doctor had seen grow dim to him lit up with untired affection as Reuben drew near the bed; a look of rest came over her, and she signed to him to lay her baby on her arm.

“My baby, my little Christmas baby,” she murmured tenderly. “Did the priest baptize her this morning, Reuben? Oh! how could you overlook it, dear? Then you must do it. Now—now!”

There was an excited ring in her voice, and Reuben hastened to do at once what he had felt from the first must soon be done; for the baby’s life evidently hung upon a thread. A few drops of water, a few divine words, and Esther’s eyes shone exultingly upon her child.

“She will never be anything but God’s child,” she said. “Oh! I am glad she cannot live. It is the other children, that are not his, that you must care for, Reuben.”

“No, no!” he cried. “No, Esther, I cannot live without you.”

“Listen, Reuben,” she said. Lying there with her child upon her arm, she looked like a vision of the Holy Mother herself, and when she spoke her voice had a tone in for him.”

“O Esther!” he sobbed, “not without you—not without you.”

“Yes, Reuben, without me—all alone. My darling, my darling, save these little children’s souls for God.”

One greater than she spoke, on that holy night, through Esther’s lips, and touched and won her husband’s wounded heart.

“I will, Esther,” he sobbed. “I will try hard”; and even then, upon that solemn parting, as if to stamp the promise with an awful seal, the tavern clamor broke shrill and vile upon the Christmas air.

How long it was that she spoke no word—wrapped for the last time in her passion of intercession—Reuben did not notice; he only knelt on beside her, living upon every breath she drew. But, at the turn of the night, she looked full at him, clasped both his hands in hers, spoke so that the voice and the words rang in his heart through all his after-life—spoke not to him, but for him, and her words were those of the Memorare. Then, like one who has laid down for ever in most safe and tender keeping a heavy burden borne long and painfully, she crossed her hands upon her heart, but not now as if in pain; a look of glad surprise came upon her face.

“Hark!” she said. “He is coming again. My Lord and my God!”

When the Doctor entered Reuben’s cabin next morning, he found it in perfect order—the baby asleep in its cradle beside the hearth; Esther lying in a sort of funeral state, all done for her that could be done; and beside her knelt Reuben, whom the Doctor scarcely recognized at Pg 610 first for the change upon him. In that night he had become an old man, and his friend believed that but for the baby’s sake he would have died; yet, two days later, the baby died, and still Reuben lived.

* * * * *

“A poor fool!” people called him. He had lost all interest in temporal matters, seemed hardly to know the use of money, and barely supported himself by the odd bits of work which he did for the idle women from house to house. Soon, however, they discovered that he had one talent, and that was for managing children. A woman one day suggested to him that he should “bide at home, and mind some babies for ’em, to keep ’em out of harm’s way; and he might teach the five-year-olds their letters, too—being fit for naught else,” she added in a tone as clear as that she used for the other words; but Reuben did not mind.

The proposal met with general favor; the women promised to supply him with meals from their own poor tables, “better than he’d get hisself, anyhow,” they said; and that was all he needed to keep him through the winter.

It seemed at first sight a very forlorn life. Where others less careless and simple could have lived in comfort, he lived in cold and hunger; one by one everything which he had brought from his distant home disappeared—given away to people in distress, or yielded without question to exorbitant and unfounded demands. Yet that bare, poverty-stricken room grew to be the one fair place in Gomorrah. There, for long hours of the winter days, might be seen a cluster of children gathered about a man who seemed in some respects as much a child as any of them, and who

But he had another work with which they meddled much. The promise which the Doctor had made by Esther’s death-bed was not forgotten by him who made it, but it was broken again and again. His own lower nature which had ruled him all his life would have been enough, and more than enough, for such a man to struggle against; but, besides that, the fiends in human shape who peopled Gomorrah seemed leagued with invisible evil ones to work his utter ruin. They scoffed at his feeble efforts to do right; they lured him or they maddened him—it was all one to them—into the old haunts of temptation; and the very efforts which he made to escape, the very memory of Esther’s words and holy looks, the very thought of purity and self-control, seemed to make the evil deadlier and grosser, when, after sore struggle, he gave way.

And he did struggle, he did pray, poor soul! There were hours when he lay upon the earth in some cold Pg 611 hut or in the open air, fighting, it seemed to him, with no less than Satan’s self. But he had been a slave to self too long and too deliberately to be able to gain freedom easily. Scenes of the past rose before him; he knew himself in his true degradation. Sins about which a kind of lurid fascination can be thrown in books or real life for a time he saw more and more plainly in their actual shape and color, and it drove him mad with disgust and shame. Few were daring enough that winter to trust their sick folk to his skill. For days together he would join in riot and carousal, till delirium tremens followed, and then strong men fled in fear before him.