Part 11 — CHAPTER XXII. (continued 2)

Before the eye has become accustomed to the darkness, a great sense of disappointment is felt in groping through scenes of such interest with insufficient light. This feeling, however, gradually wears off, and the guides burn oiled paper, blue-lights, etc., when we stop to inspect some special marvel.

After leaving the Narrows, we soon enter the Rotunda, the ceiling of which is one hundred feet high, and its greatest diameter seventy-five feet. This chamber is said to be immediately under the dining-room of the hotel. The floor is strewn with the remains of vats, water-pipes, etc., used by the saltpetre miners in 1812. From the entrance to this point, wheel-tracks and the impressions made by the feet of oxen used to cart the saltpetre more than fifty years ago may still be seen. At the time these indentations were made by the cleft foot of the ox and the cartwheels, the earth was moist from the recent process of lixiviation in the saltpetre manufacture, and upon drying had attained the stony solidity of petrifaction; and the indentations aforesaid are yet distinct, though they have been walked over by thousands of visitors for many years. Leaving the Rotunda, we pass huge overhanging rocks, called Kentucky River Cliffs, and enter the Methodist Church, where services have been frequently held. The pulpit is formed by a ledge of rock twenty-five feet high: the logs used as benches were placed in the church fifty years ago, and are still in a good state of preservation. In this part of the cave, and in all the avenues near the entrance, millions of bats make their winter quarters. We saw only a few flitting about, but were told they returned in the autumn by hundreds. What wonderful instinct wakens these creatures from a winter’s sleep, with tidings that the glorious summer is at hand? Various objects of minor interest are noted, and we pass on to Giant’s Coffin, an immense rock, forty feet long, twenty wide, eight in depth—fit sarcophagus for one of the giants of old; but Kentucky has herself of late years produced

Soon we notice several enclosures, formerly occupied by invalids, who vainly imagined that this pure and unchanging atmosphere would restore them to health.

Up to this point walking has been an easy matter, the way quite level, a path winding among loose stones of some size, and in many places a smooth, broad avenue offering no obstruction; but when, one by one, we climb a steep ladder placed against the wall to the right of Giant’s Coffin, there is a realizing sense of “rocks ahead.”

The Gothic Arcade, which we have now entered, has a flat ceiling, smooth and white as if it had received a coat of plaster, and leads to Gothic Chapel—a very beautiful room, yet not purely Gothic in its style of architecture, the roof being quite flat, supported by gigantic stalactites, extending so nearly to the floor that they present the effect of fluted columns and graceful arches. Here was once performed a marriage ceremony under romantic circumstances. A young lady, having promised her mother that she would never marry Snooks “on the face of the earth,” evaded the letter of her contract by marrying the same in the bowels thereof. Two of the stalactites in this chapel, called the Pillars of Hercules, are said to be thirty feet in circumference. These stalactites being peculiar to caves, it may interest the general reader to note their formation. If water, holding bicarbonate of lime in solution, drop slowly from the ceiling, exposure to the air allows one part of carbonic acid gas to escape, the lime is then deposited in the form of proto-carbonate of lime, and the stalactite, similar to an icicle, is slowly formed; if the deposit accumulate from below upward, it is termed a stalagmite; sometimes, meeting in the centre, they become cemented and form a solid column. An instance of this is given in the illustration of the Devil’s Arm-Chair. These forms are made more interesting from their variety of color: if the limestone is pure, the stalactite will be white, or semi-transparent; if it contain oxide of iron, the result will be a red or yellow color; black stalactites containing a large proportion of oxide of iron. Many other things of interest, but too numerous to mention, are pointed out before we reach Lake Purity, a pool of shallow water, so perfectly transparent that stalactites are seen at the bottom. Gothic Arcade terminating a short distance beyond the lake, we retraced our steps to the ladder by which we had reached this upper and older portion of the cave, and found ourselves again in the main cave near the Giant’s Coffin, passing behind which we enter a narrow crevice, where, half crawling and stooping, a descent is made to Deserted Chamber. At this point, the water, after it had ceased to flow out of the mouth into Green River, left the main cave to descend to the lower regions and Echo River. Here we again leave the regular route to visit Gorin’s Dome, to us far the most beautiful of the many so-called domes.

Passing over a small bridge, and ascending a steep ladder, we are, one by one, assisted by the guide to a point where it is not easy to retain a course outside of the cave, else why is the sky above so deeply, darkly blue? those countless stars shining?—shining, did we say? We vow they twinkled. The Milky Way is there; we will not vouch for the Dipper, but other constellations are visible, even a comet blazes across the heavens. The guide retires with his lamp to some mysterious lower region to produce shadows, and suddenly clouds sweep across the horizon, a storm is brewing, the stars are almost hidden, now they are out, utter darkness prevails, until we hear Mat stumbling about, a faint light is in the east, and a fine artificial sunrise, as he appears with his lamp. All this may read like child’s play, yet so complete is the optical delusion that, when the lamps were all returned to us, the mystery dispelled, we drew a long breath of relief that we were not really shut up in that lonely defile, looking up longingly to the stars, but actually several miles underground, and merely under the influence of Glauber’s salts! Beyond is Proctor’s Arcade, a natural tunnel, nearly a mile long, a hundred feet wide, forty in height; the ceilings and sides are smooth and shining, chiselled out of the solid rock. This tunnel leads past several points not specially interesting, to Wright’s Rotunda, which is four hundred feet in diameter. It is astonishing that the ceiling has strength to sustain itself, being only fifty feet below the surface of the earth; but no change need be anticipated, for at this point the cave is perfectly dry. A short distance beyond, several avenues branch off from the main cave, none worthy of note, except that which leads to Fairy Grotto, a marvellous collection of stalactites, resembling a grove of white coral. Here indeed might the fairies have held high revelry, with glow-worm lamps suspended from

The Chief City or Temple, situated in the main cave beyond the Rocky Pass, is rarely visited by strangers now, yet, before the discovery of the rivers and the wilderness of beauty beyond, it was considered one of the great features. It is an immense chamber, excelling in size the cave of Staffa. The floor at different points is covered with piles of rocks, presenting the appearance of an ancient city in ruins.

Three miles beyond Chief City, the main cave is terminated abruptly by rocks fallen from above, which, if they could be removed, would no doubt open communication with a cavern similar to the one we have been exploring. So many wonders, viewed in a few hours, leave the mind in a chaotic state, and the weary explorer is now ready to return to the creature comforts of the hotel, there to ruminate, and, if he can, arrange in some sort of order, in his “memory’s mansion,” sights and sensations so new and strange. In returning to the upper world, the appearance of the mouth is very beautiful. To eyes so long accustomed to darkness, the light is a subdued radiance, a fairy land in the distance, until we emerge from the cave into the outer world, which seems, since we left it, to have been dyed in millions of rainbow hues; everything, the leaves, the trees, shone and sparkled in the blessed light! But—the air! the pure atmosphere we have been breathing all the morning, renders the senses painfully conscious of the decomposition of vegetable matter, causing such a feeling of oppression that fainting may be the consequence if issuing from the entrance is not made a matter of easy stages.

As a result of the wise maxim, “Early to bed and early to rise,” we find ourselves on the following morning breakfasting in our cave dress, and prepared before nine o’clock for the “Long Route.”

We now feel quite at home in the under-world, and, should any stranger join our party, he would doubtless be much impressed by our manner of going over the familiar ground; evidently we know all about this; nothing can impress us now but “fresh fields and pastures new.” On this day we are to realize something of the geography of the cave, therefore a word on the subject of its formation.

Green River, only a few hundred yards from the entrance of the cave, has evidently cut out the channel through which it runs. On either side, its rugged banks tower above the water three hundred feet, and this the only valley of the plain, proving conclusively that the river has excavated its bed to the present level by the chemical and mechanical agency of water. The avenues of the cave, no doubt, were cut through in the same manner, the lowest and last formed being Echo and Roaring rivers, which are now on a level with Green River, and with which they have subterraneous communication.[126] As Green River deepens the valley through which it passes, the rivers in the cave will also continue to descend, until the avenues through which they now flow shall become as dry as Marion Avenue, which, in ages past, must have been the most beautiful of subterranean rivers.

Limestone, or carbonate of lime, which constitutes the strata of rocks

In this way the process of excavation continued until communication with running water was established, and the mechanical agency made to assist the chemical. Another disintegrating power is the crystallization of sulphate of lime, known also under the names of gypsum, plaster-of-Paris, alabaster, etc. The force of gypsum in the act of crystallizing is equal to that of water in freezing, and, when it occurs between ledges of rock, they are fractured in every direction. Many instances of this may be seen.

As to the mechanical agencies in the excavation of the cave, they are instanced in the transportation of gravel, clay, and sand from one part to another. By observing the points at which they are deposited, and the order in which they come, it is possible to tell the direction in which the water formerly ran in many of the avenues, and the rapidity of its motion. But enough of technicalities—the entrance to the “Long Route” is before us in the crevice before mentioned, situated behind Giant’s Coffin.

The first new name which strikes upon the ear is that of Wooden Bowl—an apartment deriving its name from the fact of a bowl being found here, such a one as was used by the Indians. Various traditions of this race meet the explorer in other parts of the cave; among others, that of a mummified female and child found in Gothic Avenue, in 1815, said to have been sent to the Antiquarian Society of Worcester, Massachusetts, and to be still there in a dilapidated condition; another still more remarkable mummy is said to have been exhumed in one of the neighboring small caves, and sent to Cincinnati, where it was burnt in the museum many years ago.

If such discoveries were really made, it is a matter of profound regret that these relics of an unknown past should have been removed from their resting-places, where they were secure from the ravages of time, and would, at the present day, greatly enhance the interest of Mammoth Cave.

We descend the Steps of Time, which is an unpleasant reminder to those of us who already feel stiff in the joints, and enter Martha’s Palace, not so palatial as its name implies, but near by is a spring of clear water, which all hail with pleasure. Side-Saddle Pit and Minerva’s Dome are soon passed, and we reach Bottomless Pit. Do not shudder! there is no necessity of descending, and there is bottom at the distance of one hundred and seventy-five feet. It was not until the year 1838 that it was supposed possible to bridge this fearful chasm; it was then crossed by Stephen, the celebrated black guide, who is identified with most of the discoveries. We now cross on a substantial wooden structure, known as the Bridge of Sighs. This leads to the Revellers’ Hall, and, judging from the number of empty and broken bottles on the floor of this wild-looking room, all visitors have done their part to perpetuate the name. A low archway, the Valley of Humility, leads to Scotchman’s Trap, a circular opening, through which you descend a flight of stone steps. Directly over the opening hangs a huge flat rock, which would, should it fall, completely close the avenue to the river. The number of slight, slippery ladders we have descended gives a very realizing sense that we are getting down, down, deep into the bowels of the earth.

hams depending from the ceiling. After walking three-fourths of a mile in Sparks’ Avenue, we reach Mammoth Dome, the largest in the cave; it is two hundred and fifty feet in height. Climbing over immense shelving rocks, whose jagged sides and yawning crevices offer slight foothold and a very unpleasant prospect in case of a fall, we reach the top of a terrace forty feet from the base, where the view is taken. A grand, solemn spectacle it is! At the left extremity are five large pillars, called Corinthian Columns. A vast, solitary waste stretches out before the eye on every side; gloomy recesses and yawning abysses, illuminated by the weird blue-lights, form a sublime picture. One can only fancy it to be the primal state of chaos. The descent from the terrace of rocks is even more perilous than the ascent, but, once in the avenue, we return quickly to River Hall. Our attention is now drawn to a body of water forty feet below, called Dead Sea, a gloomy spot, deserving its name. Passing on, the distant roar of invisible waterfalls strikes the ear, and at the foot of the slope we are descending lies the River Styx:

This river is one hundred and fifty yards long, from fifteen to forty in width, and in depth varies from thirty to forty feet. It has a subterranean communication with other rivers of the cave, and, when they rise to a great height, an open communication with all of them. The Natural Bridge spans River Styx about thirty feet above it.

The next body of water we approach is quite peaceful, and, the ceiling being ninety feet above the surface, one loses the cavernous sensation of the gloomy overhanging rocks. Lake Lethe is one hundred and fifty yards long, and, being crossed in boats not large enough to convey all of the party at once, some of our number embark, with Charon himself at the helm. All are hushed by the solemnity of the scene, the lamps shed a dim light upon the rippling water and phantom boat, which silently glides outward and on around a projecting angle of rock, when it is lost to vision. For those who wait upon the shore the return of the boat, this is a solemn moment; we felt ourself a ghost, doomed to wander a hundred years ere Charon would ferry us over Avernus! After a brief interval of this musing, a faint light appears from behind the rock which before intercepted our view. Charon with his solitary lamp in the prow of the boat is returning; soon we also embark, but not before we had drunk of the waters of Lethe, that all experience of the upper world might be forgotten, for now we enter into dream life. Our friends

An occasional song to wake the far-famed echoes is the only sound to disturb the stillness and the unutterable thoughts which fill the soul. Echo River is an idyl! Alas! that it should be so short—yet three-quarters of a mile of bliss should compensate poor human nature for many ills. Some of the gentlemen, in the adventurous spirit of youth, made their passage through a rugged avenue called Purgatory; from their description of which we prefer journeying to paradise by the river. Landing on the farther banks, we enter Silliman’s Avenue, extending a mile and a half to the Pass of El Ghor, the walls and ceilings of which, being of recent formation, are rugged and water-worn. Here is Cascade Hall, a circular chamber with vaulted ceiling, from which falls a stream of sparkling water, disappearing through a pit in the floor. The avenue leading to Roaring River takes its rise in this hall.

The Infernal Region is an irregular down-hill passage, the floor covered with wet clay. Such essentially and persistently sticky mud was probably never known above ground. The scrambling, slipping, miring, ejaculating crowd made an amusing scene. Our black guide, Mat, is a character, rarely relaxing into a smile, but displays a grim humor by saying “Sot her up,” when some heavier slush than usual reveals the fact that somebody is down. Now, sotting her up is not nearly as easy as sotting her down. In some places the water is ankle-deep. Here the gentlemen pick up the ladies, and carry the fair creatures to dry ground. Several laughable incidents were the consequence of this manœuvre. One gentleman, feeling the mud slipping under his feet, fancied himself in a quicksand, and hurriedly set his wife down in the water to rescue himself. Another, a bashful young swain, felt a delicacy about the manner of picking up his young lady, so carried her under one arm, her heels on a line with her head. What a funny picture those little dangling boots presented! Alas! for the uncertainty of human events. When we started out fresh in the morning, we had observed the secret pride with which that young woman contemplated her jaunty tasselled boots, the neatest fit in the party, and amply displayed by her short dress.

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This pass finally communicates with a large body of water, the “Mystic River,” which has not been explored by visitors. Ascending a very high, steep ladder, we enter Martha’s Vineyard, twenty feet above the Pass of El Ghor. Here a stalagmite, extending from the floor to the ceiling, forms the stem of a grapevine, from which all over the walls and ceiling depend bunches of black grapes—nodules of carbonate of lime, colored with the black oxide of iron—and here the vintage never fails, for is there not sulphur at hand?

An avenue directly over Martha’s Vineyard, which we did not explore, is said to contain a miniature chapel of stalactites, in a dark room adjoining which, without ornament of any kind, is a grave hewn out of the rock. This was considered so suggestive by a Catholic priest that he named it the Holy Sepulchre.

The next place of great and general interest is Washington Hall, where were unpacked the hampers carried by the extra guide, detailed for that purpose. Keen appetites were brought to bear upon the liberal luncheon supplied by the proprietor of the hotel. Some of the party had added champagne, so we filled generous bumpers to the genii of the cave. After an hour spent in rest and refreshment, we leave Washington Hall, and, passing through Snow-Ball Room, covered with nodules of white gypsum, enter Cleveland Cabinet, an avenue two miles in length, and so beautiful that the sight of it alone would fully repay for the fatigue and time devoted to the cave.

It is a perfect arch of fifty feet span, averaging the height of ten feet in the centre. Thus every part may be viewed with ease. From summit to base is a dazzling expanse of alabaster bloom—a grand conservatory where the Snow Flora moulds her flowers ere she transports them to the upper world and endows them with a soul. Here are clusters of pale white roses sprinkled with diamond dew, waiting only the enchantress’ wand to convert them into a coronal for some fair bride; again, a perfect cross of flowers, which may yet be the only companion of a rare soul entombed. Stately lilies, nodding tulips, graceful fern shapes, are showered in endless profusion on these fairy walls. Here and there are little niches lined with flowers, a feathery veil of rock bloom hanging over the entrance. We peep in curiously, but no Peri is there. This seems truly the “Enchanted Palace of Sleep,” but the princess is too deeply hidden for mortal eyes to discover.

Lingeringly we leave this wondrous scene. At the very end is pointed out the last rose of summer, resting against the ceiling; it is of snowy whiteness, about eight inches in diameter, and is really the last to be seen in the avenue. A short distance beyond is Rocky Mountain, one hundred feet

This part of the cave is evidently near the surface of the earth, and from the comparative abundance of animal life it is probable there is an open communication at some point not far distant. The rat found here differs from its Norway brother in that it is a size larger; the head and eyes, which are black and lustrous, resemble those of a rabbit, while its soft fur is of a bluish gray and white. Crickets and lizards are numerous; they are sluggish in their movements, and the cricket never chirps. Why should he, indeed, having neither hearth nor tea-kettle to inspire him? All these animals, although provided with large eyes, seem quite blind when first caught. The fish found in the various rivers are of the class known as viviparous; they have rudiments of eyes, but no optic nerve. There are also eyeless crawfish; both these and the eyeless fish are nearly white.

At certain seasons ordinary fish, crawfish, and frogs are washed into the rivers of the cave from Green River, the inference being that they also in due course of time lose the power of vision.

At the end of Crogan Hall we are said to be nine miles from the mouth of the cave, and somewhere under ground near Cave City. Here is the Maelstrom, a frightful pit, one hundred and seventy-five feet deep, and twenty wide. It has been explored by two or three adventurous spirits, the first of whom was a son of the late George D. Prentice.

It is needless to describe our return, which was over the ground already explored; devoting less time, of course, to the examination of wonders, and not at all tired, for exercise in this exhilarating atmosphere is unlike that of the upper world. We finally reach the entrance, and emerge—into darkness again—for it is nine P.M., and only a few twinkling stars remind us that we are not still underground.

I shall not do more than mention Proctor and Diamond Caves, which we explored on the following day, but they excel in stalactitic formation and well repay a visit. They are on the direct route to Glasgow, a station three miles nearer than that of Cave City, and where there has been recently built a comfortable hotel on the site of the ancient “Bell’s Tavern,” well known to Kentuckians in former days. Those who have never visited Mammoth Cave will scarcely credit the assertion of the guides that two hundred and fifty miles of travel are necessary to see all of the known avenues of the cave. When we add to this the statement that new discoveries are constantly being made which reveal the fact that there is still a wilderness of cave untrodden by the foot of man, speculation passes all bounds.

None but a soul absolutely impervious to the impressions of the sublime and beautiful handiwork of the world’s great Architect, can fail to realize the highest expectations in an exploration of this greatest of caves now known.

OUR EPIPHANY.

THE COSMIC PHILOSOPHY.[129]

Biology, has been specially noticed by us. He is usually classed with the positivists, and we have ourselves so classed him; but he protests against this classification, and, after studying carefully, or as carefully as our patience would permit, the volume before us, we confess the classification appears to be inexact, and even unjust to the positivists. There are considerable differences between his philosophy and the Philosophie Positive as we find it set forth by M. E. Littré, its greatest living chief; for, as set forth by its founder, M. Auguste Comte, in his own works, we would rather not speak, for, to confess the truth, we have never had the patience to read them so as to master their doctrines. Yet, as far as we do know the system, it differs on several points, and much to its advantage, from the cosmic philosophy set forth in Mr. Spencer’s First Principles, especially as to the relativity of knowledge and the theory of evolution. It is the product of a higher order of mind than Mr. Spencer can boast, and of a mind originally trained in a better school.

Mr. Herbert Spencer is a man of considerable native ability, of respectable attainments in what is called modern science, and a fair representative of contemporary English thought and mental tendencies; but he has made a sad mistake in attempting ingegno filosofico, and we have not discovered a single trace of a philosophic principle, thought, or conception in any or all of his several works. He is or might be a physicist, or what old Ralph Cudworth terms a physiologer, perhaps not much inferior to old Leucippus or Democritus, but he has not in him the makings of a philosopher, and his cosmic theories are not even plausible to a philosophic mind.

“In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed is king.” The not inconsiderable reputation Mr. Herbert Spencer seems to have acquired is probably due not to his merits so much as to the low state into which philosophical studies have fallen in the Anglo-Saxon world, and the tendency to anti-Christian and anti-religious theories and speculations which Protestantism, when it begins to examine its own foundation and to account for itself, everywhere encourages. The party we meet here and in England, with “advanced views” as they are called, and which every day grows in numbers and strength, welcomes with enthusiasm any and every writer who helps or promises to help them to explain the problem of the universe on physical principles, without recurring to the supernatural or the fact of creation. The party, profoundly ignorant of Christian theology and philosophy, and devoted to the study of physical facts and phenomena alone, have persuaded themselves that Christianity is unscientific, and that it tends to degrade men, to enfeeble reason, and to prevent the free expansion of thought; and they regard as their benefactor whoever is able to strengthen their cosmic or atheistic tendency. Such a man they esteem Mr. Herbert Spencer. He is apparently just the man to be accepted as the chief of the sect, or the philosopher of negation. Its adherents wish not for their leader an avowed atheist or pantheist, for the world is not just yet advanced enough for that, but they do wish one who is skilful in disguising his atheism or pantheism in the forms and terms of science; and who can do this more successfully than Herbert Spencer?

Mr. Spencer divides his book into two parts. In Part I. he treats of what he calls “The Unknowable”; in Part II. he treats of what he calls “The Knowable.” Under the head of “The Unknowable” he seeks the relation of science and religion, to ascertain the ultimate verity or ideas of each, and to show the ground on which they meet and are reconciled. He asserts that all knowledge is relative, is knowledge of phenomena alone, which are nothing outside of their relation to consciousness, itself phenomenal, and to a Something underlying them, and of which they are the appearances or which they manifest. We are compelled to admit, he says, this Something, because the phenomena cannot be thought without it; and as we can assign no limit to these manifestations, we are compelled to assert this Something, Power, Being, or Reality is infinite. But this Infinite Something which is the reality of the cosmos is absolutely unknowable and even unthinkable. How, then, can it be asserted?

Every religion seeks the solution of the problem of the universe, the explanation of the great cosmic mystery that surrounds us on all sides, and all religions agree that the solution

Science deals with the same cosmic problem, and, rising by generalization to generalization of the cosmic phenomena up to the higher and broadest possible, is compelled to admit the same Infinite Something, and to admit that it is not cognizable nor cogitable. Consequently, the ultimate scientific ideas are identical with the ultimate religious ideas. Both religion and science are fused together, and reconciled without any compromise, and the old feud between them extinguished, in the bosom of the Infinite Unknowable.

“He makes a solitude, and calls it peace.”

As we have no predisposition to accept the new system of philosophy, we cannot find this conclusion perfectly satisfactory. The cosmists object to the Comteans or positivists that they absorb the cosmos in man and society; the cosmists, on the other hand, seem to us to absorb man and society in the cosmos, and subject them to the same physical law Mr. Emerson does when he asserts the identity of gratitude and gravitation. By asserting that only phenomena are cognizable, and subjecting man to the common cosmic law, they include him in the cosmic phenomena, and make him simply an appearance or manifestation of the unknowable, without any real or substantive existence of his own. We thus lose in the infinite variety of the cosmic phenomena both the thinking subject and the object thought. The soul is a cosmic appearance.

Furthermore, by declaring the phenomenal cannot be thought in and by itself without the Infinite Something that underlies it as its ground or reality, and then declaring that something to be unknowable, unthinkable even, the new system declares that there is no knowable, and consequently no science or knowledge at all. The new system of philosophy, then, reconciles science and religion only in a universal negation, that is, by really denying both. This can hardly satisfy either a scientist or a Christian.

In the second part, Mr. Spencer defines philosophy to us, as near as we can come at his sense, to be the unification of the several religions and several sciences in their respective or special generalizations in a generalization that comprehends them all. Generalization with him means the elimination of the differentia, or abstraction. He therefore, in making philosophy a generalization, makes it an abstraction, and, so to speak, the abstraction of all particular abstractions. But abstractions in themselves are nullities, and consequently philosophy is a nullity, and science and religion are nullities. Mr. Spencer maintains that we have “symbolic conceptions,” in which nothing is conceived—symbols which symbolize nothing. Is his “new system of philosophy” anything but a generalization and unification of these “symbolic conceptions”?

Mr. Spencer starts with the assumption that all religions, including atheism, have a verity in common as well as an error. The verity must be that in which they all agree; the error, in their differences, or in the matters in which they do not agree. Eliminate the differences and take what is common to them all,

Atheism is not a religion, but the negation of all religion. Exclude that, take all religions from fetichism to Christianity inclusive; eliminate the differentia, and take what they all agree in asserting. Be it so. All religions, without a single exception, however rude or however polished, agree in asserting the supernatural, and that, if the cosmic mystery is inexplicable by human means, it is explicable by supernatural means. A true application of Mr. Spencer’s rule, the consensus hominum, would assert as the common verity the supernatural, that is, the supercosmic, which is precisely what the cosmic philosophy denies and is invented to deny. Mr. Spencer does not appear to be master of his own tools.

All religions concede that the cosmic mystery is inexplicable by our unassisted powers, by secondary causes, or by physical laws; but none of them admits that it is absolutely inexplicable, for each religion professes to be its explanation. Mr. Spencer is wrong in asserting that all are seeking to solve the cosmic mystery; for each proposes itself as its solution, and it is only as such that it claims to be or can be called a religion. The question for the philosopher is, Do any of these religions give us a solution which reason, in the freest and fullest exercise of its powers, can accept, and, if so, which one is it?

Mr. Spencer tells us, p. 32: “Respecting the origin of the universe, three verbally intelligible suppositions may be made. We may assert that it is self-existent, or that it is self-created, or that it is created by an external agency.” The second supposition he rejects as the pantheistic hypothesis, which is a mistake, for no pantheist or anybody else asserts that the universe creates itself. The pantheist denies that it is created at all; and the philosopher denies that it creates itself; for, since to create is to act, self-creation would require the universe to act before it existed. The third supposition, which the author calls “the theistical hypothesis,” he denies, because it explains nothing, and is useless. He explains it to mean that the universe is produced by an artificer, after the manner of a human artificer in producing a piece of furniture from materials furnished to his hand. “But whence come the materials?” The question might be pertinent if asked of Plato or Aristotle, neither of whom was a theist; but not when asked of a Christian theologian, who holds that God creates or created all things from nothing, that is, without pre-existing materials, by “the sole word of his power.”

The first supposition, the self-existence of the universe, the author denies, not because the universe is manifestly contingent and must have had a beginning, and therefore a cause or creator; but because self-existence is absolutely inconceivable, an impossible idea. He says, p. 35: “The hypothesis of the creation of the universe by an external agency is quite useless; it commits us to an infinite series of such agencies, and then leaves us where it found us.” “Those who cannot conceive of the self-existence of the universe, and therefore assume a creator as the source of the universe, take it for granted that they can conceive a self-existent creator. The mystery of the great fact surrounding them Self-existence is rigorously inconceivable, and this holds true whatever be the nature of the object [subject] of which it is predicated. Whoever argues that the atheistical hypothesis is untenable because it involves the impossible idea of self-existence, must perforce admit that the theistical hypothesis is untenable if it contains the same impossible idea.” But who ever argued that the atheistical hypothesis is untenable because it involves the idea of self-existence? Atheism is denied because it asserts the self-existence of that which cannot be, and is known not to be, self-existent.

But it is evident that the author rejects alike self-existence and creation; that the cosmos is self-existent, or that it is created by an independent, self-existent, and supercosmic creator. How, then, can he assert the existence of the cosmos, real or phenomenal, at all? The cosmos either exists or it does not. If it does not, that ends the matter. If it does, it must be either created or self-existent; for the author rejects an infinite series as absurd, and self-creation as only an absurd form of expressing self-existence. But as the author denies self-existence, whatever the subject of which it is predicated, and also the fact of creation, it follows rigorously, if he is right, that the cosmos does not exist. The author cannot take refuge in his favorite nescio, or say we do not know the origin of the cosmos, for he has positively denied it every possible origin, and therefore has by implication denied it all existence. A moment ago, we showed that he denied by implication all science or knowledge, and now we see that, if held rigorously to his system as he explains it, he denies all existence, and, by implication at least, asserts absolute nihilism. Surely there is no occasion to apply to his new system of philosophy the reductio ad absurdum.

The author is necessarily led to the assertion that at least nothing is knowable by his doctrine, that all knowledge is relative. The Comtists restrict, in theory, all knowledge to sensible things, their mutual relations, dependencies, and the conditions and laws of their development and progress; but they at least admit that these may be objects of science and positively known. But our cosmic philosopher denies this, and asserts the relativity of all knowledge. We know and can know only the relative that is, only what is relative to the absolute, and relative to our own consciousness. In this he follows Sir William Hamilton, J. Stuart Mill, and the late Dr. Mansel, Anglican Dean of St. Paul’s. But relative knowledge is simply no knowledge, because in it nothing is known. The relative is not cognizable nor cogitable in and by itself, because it in and by itself, or prescinded from that to which it is relative, does not exist, and is simply nothing. What neither is nor exists is not cognizable nor cogitable. The relativity of all knowledge, then, is simply the denial of all knowledge. It is idle, then, for Mr. Spencer to talk of science. His science is only a laborious ignorance.

Mr. Spencer labors hard to prove the relativity of all knowledge. He either proves it or he does not. If he does not, he has no right to assert it; if he does, he disproves it at the same time. If the proof is not absolute, it does not prove it; if it is absolute, then it is not true that all knowledge is relative; for the proof

The relativists are misled by their dealing with the abstract and not the concrete. They regard all that is or exists either as relative or absolute. But both absolute and relative are abstract conceptions, and formed by abstraction from the concrete intuitively presented or apprehended. They exist, as St. Thomas tells us, only in mente, cum fundamento in re. There are no abstractions in nature or the cosmos, and there is and can be neither abstract science nor science of abstractions, for abstractions, prescinded from their concretes, are simply nullities. The absolute is, we grant, unknowable, and so also is the relative, for neither has any existence in nature, or a parte rei. They are both generalizations, and nature never generalizes. Whatever exists, exists in concreto, not in genere. Hence, the ens in genere of Rosmini is no ens reale, but simply ens possibile, like the reine Seyn of Hegel, which is the equivalent of das Nichtseyn; for the possible is only the ability of the real.

Now, because the abstract absolute is unknowable, unthinkable even, it by no means follows that the concrete, real and necessary being, cannot be both thought and known, or that things cannot be both thought and known in their relations to it, without reducing it to the category of the relative. Sir William Hamilton says the absolute is the unconditioned, and is incogitable, because our thought necessarily conditions it. This would be true if the absolute is an abstraction or mental conception, but is false and absurd if applied to real, necessary, infinite, and self-existent being, which, as independent of us and all relation, is and must be the same whether we think it or not. The thought does not impose its own conditions and limitations on the object; certainly not when the object is real and necessary being, and in every respect independent of it. We cannot, of course, think infinite being infinitely or adequately, but it does not follow that we cannot think it, though finitely and inadequately. The human mind, being finite, cannot comprehend infinite being; but, nevertheless, it may and does apprehend it, or else Mr. Spencer could not assert the Infinite Something, which he says we are compelled to admit underlies the cosmic phenomena and is manifested in them. The human mind can apprehend more than it can comprehend, and nothing that is apprehensible, though incomprehensible, is unthinkable or unknowable, except in Mr. Spencer’s New System of Philosophy.

Sir William Hamilton says, in defending the relativity of all knowledge: “Only relations are cogitable. Relation is cogitable only in correlation, and the relation between correlatives is reciprocal, each is relative to the other. Thought is dual, and embraces at once subject and object in their mutual opposition and limitation.” This merely begs the question. Besides, it is not true. Relations are themselves cogitable only in the related; correlatives connote

It is true, Mr. Spencer denies creation, and relegates all causative power to the dark region of the unknowable, and calls the origin of the universe in the creative act of being or God “an hypothesis,” and rejects it with ill-concealed scorn; yet creation is not “an hypothesis,” but a scientific fact, and a necessary principle of all science. Without it the cosmos would not be cognizable, for it would have no dialectic constitution. It could not even be thought, for every thought is a judgment, and no judgment is possible where there is no copula that joins the predicate to the subject. Rejecting creation, the author cannot assert the relation of cause and effect; rejecting cause and effect, he cannot assert even the cosmic phenomena. They are not able to stand on their own bottom, and therefore not at all, unless the Something of which they are, as he says, manifestations, is a cause producing and sustaining them. We submit, then, that Mr. Spencer’s doctrine of the unknowable, and the relativity of all knowledge, estops him from asserting anything as knowable, for it really denies all the knowable and all the real—omne scibile et omne reale.

The second part of Mr. Spencer’s work on “The Knowable” we might well omit, but as it is that in which he claims to be original, and in which he supposes he has made most valuable contributions to the philosophy of the cosmos, an omission to examine it might seem ungracious. Besides, the inventors of new systems of philosophy must not be held too rigidly to the logical consequences of their own doctrines, non omnia possumus. It is impossible for the founder to foresee all that his doctrine involves, and it is but fair, if he really has said anything new that is true, that it should be recognized, and he receive due credit for it, even if it is an anomaly in his general system of philosophy. We proceed, therefore, to consider Part II.

In this second part, the author professes to treat the knowable, not indeed in its several details, but in its first principles, or ultimate generalizations. The generalization of a group of phenomena is science; the generalization of the several groups of phenomena observable in the cosmos constitutes the several special sciences; and the combination of these special sciences into one higher and more comprehensive generalization, which embraces them all, is philosophy. In constructing philosophy, the author, be it observed, like the coral insect, begins below and works upward, and bases the universal on the particular.

The great point, or novelty, in this second part, however, is unquestionably, as the author claims, the doctrine of Evolution. By evolution, the author does not understand evolving

Minerals, plants, and animals, including man, are all formed by the evolution of matter, motion, and force. The elimination or loss of motion, mechanical, chemical, or electrical, is followed by the concentration of matter and force, which may assume the form of a pebble, a diamond, a nettle, a rose, an oak, a jelly-fish, a tadpole, a monkey, a man. Life is simply the product of “the mechanical, chemical, and electrical arrangement of particles of matter.” The concentration of motion is followed by a diffusion or dispersion of matter and force, and the disappearance of the several groups of phenomena we have just named; but as matter is indestructible, and as there is always the same quantity of motion and force, they disappear only to reappear in new groups or transformations. The diffusion of the mineral may be the birth of the plant; of the plant, the birth of the animal; of the ape, may be a new concentration which gives birth to man. Nothing is lost. The cosmos is a ceaseless evolution; is, so to speak, in a state of perpetual flux and reflux, in which diffusion of one group of phenomena is followed by the birth of another, in endless rotation, or life from death, and death from life. Dissolution follows concentration “in eternal alternation,” or both go on together. This is not a new doctrine, but substantially the doctrine of a school of Greek philosophers, warred against both by Plato and Aristotle, that all things are in a state of ceaseless motion, of growth and decay, in which corruption proceeds from generation, and generation from corruption, in which death is born of life, and life is born of death. Our cosmic philosophers only repeat the long since exploded errors of the old cosmists. But pass over this.

The author is treating of the knowable. We ask him, then, how he contrives to know that there is any such evolution as he asserts? He assumes that matter, motion, and force are the constituent elements of the cosmos; but he can neither know it nor prove it, since he maintains that what matter is, or what motion is, or what force is, is unknown and unknowable. He denies the relation of cause and effect, or at least that it is cognizable; how, then, can he assert the cosmic phenomena are only concentrations and diffusions of matter, motion, and force? A certain elimination of motion and a corresponding concentration of matter and force produces the rose, another produces an ape, another produces a man, says the author of this new system of philosophy. Does he know that he is only a certain concentration of matter and force, resulting from a certain diffusion or loss of motion? Can he not only think, but prove it? But all proof, all demonstration, as all reasoning, nay, sensible intuition itself, depends on the principle of cause and effect; for, unless we can assert that the sensation within is caused by some object without that affects the sensible organism, we can assert

Mr. Spencer, in his work on Biology, asserts that life results from the mechanical, chemical, and electrical arrangement of the particles of matter. If this were so, it would, on the author’s own principles, explain nothing. It would be only saying that a certain group of phenomena is accompanied by another group, which we call life, but not that there is any causal relation between them. That the supposed arrangement of the particles of matter originates the life Mr. Spencer cannot assert without the intuition of cause and causes he either denies or banishes to the unknowable. Analytical chemistry resolves, we are told, the diamond into certain gases; but is synthetic chemistry able to recombine the gases so as to produce a diamond? Professor Huxley finds, he thinks, the physical basis of life in protoplasm. Protoplasm is not itself life, according to him, but its basis. How does he know, since he denies causality, that life is or can be developed from protoplasm? Protoplasm, chemically analyzed, is resolved into certain well-known gases; but it is admitted that synthetic chemistry is unable to recombine them and reproduce protoplasm. Evidently, as in the case of the diamond, there is in the production of protoplasm some element which even analytic chemistry fails to detect. No synthetic chemistry can obtain the protoplasm from protein, and there is no instance in which life, feeling, thought and reason, are known, or can be proved, to result from dead matter, or from any possible combinations of matter, motion, and force. If it could so result, the fact could not be proved, and would remain for ever in the unknowable.

The new philosophy resolves all the cosmic phenomena into the concentration and diffusion of the unknowable elements called matter, motion, and force. The quantities of these elements remain always the same, but they are in a state of constant evolution, and all the cosmic phenomena result from this evolution, and are simply changes or transformations of the same force. Now, the evolution either has had a beginning or it has not. If it has not, we must assume an infinite series of evolutions, or concentrations and diffusions; but an infinite series is absurd, and the author himself denies it. Then it must have had a beginning; but no phenomenon can begin to exist without a cause independent of the phenomenon, or the causatum. But the author denies the cause in denying the origin of the cosmos in creation, or its production by a supercosmic creator. We are sadly at loss, then, to conceive how he contrives, consistently with his new system, to assert either the law of evolution, or even evolution itself. Will he tell us how he does it?

We need not follow the author through the alleged facts and illustrations by which he seeks to explain and sustain his system of evolution; because evolution is not assertable on his own principles, nor is it provable aliunde by any possible deductions or inductions of science. So far from being science, it is not even an admissible hypothesis; because it contradicts and refutes itself. Mr. Spencer has attempted to construct a system of philosophy or explication of the cosmic phenomena, and the law of their production or transformation, without recurrence to any metaphysical principles, and from physical principles alone, or by the generalization that persistence; but that persistence is not a fact of consciousness. How, then, can it be asserted, unless force is, and is apprehended as, a persistent substance? But substance is unknowable.

The author adopts the method of the physicists, the so-called inductive method, and proceeds from particular phenomena to induce by generalization their law; but no induction is valid that is not made by virtue of a general principle, which is not itself inferable from the phenomenal, and must be given and held by the mind before any induction is possible. This is the condemnation of the method of the physicists, for, from phenomena alone, only phenomena can be obtained. A method without principles is null, and leads only to nullity. The author does not understand that the reason why the cosmic phenomena are not cogitable without the assumption of the cosmic reality underlying them, is because the mind intuitively apprehends them as dependent on something which they are not, and at the same time, and in the same intellectual act, intuitively apprehends a reality beyond them, which by its causative act produces and sustains them. He is wrong in declaring that the something real is unknowable; it may be incomprehensible, but, as we have seen, it must be cognizable, or nothing is cognizable.

That the men who follow in the physical sciences the physical or, as they say, the inductive method, inducing general conclusions from particular facts or phenomena, have really advanced those sciences, and by their untiring labors and exhaustless patience achieved all but miracles in the application of science to the mechanical and productive arts from which trade and industry have so largely profited, we by no means deny; St. Augustine says, the mind really has cognition of God in the idea of the perfect, but does not ordinarily advert to the fact. They suppose they obtain the law they assert by logical inference from the phenomena, because they do not observe that the mind has intuition of the causative or creative act, which is the ideal principle of the induction. The mind is superior to their philosophy, and they reason far better than they explain their reasoning. We may apply to them the advice Lord Mansfield gave to a man of good sense and sound judgment, but of little legal knowledge, who had been recently appointed a judge in one of the British colonies: “Give your decisions,” said his lordship, “without fear or hesitation; but don’t attempt to give your reasons.” So long as they confine themselves to the proper field of scientific investigation, they are safe enough; but let them come out of that field and attempt to explain the philosophy or the principles of their physical science, and they are pretty sure to make sad work of it. Ne sutor ultra crepidam.

Mr. Spencer protests against being regarded as an atheist, for he denies the self-existence of the universe, and neither affirms nor denies the existence of God. But atheist means simply no-theist, and, if he does not assert that God is, he certainly is an atheist. It is not necessary, in order to be an atheist, to make a positive denial of God. His disciple, Professor John Fiske, who has been lecturing on the cosmic philosophy before Harvard College, contends that the cosmic philosophy is not atheistical, because it asserts in the unknowable an infinite power, being, or reality, that underlies the cosmic phenomena, of which they are the sensible manifestations; yet this does not relieve it, because what is asserted is not God, and is not pretended to be the God of theism, but the reality or substance of the cosmos and indistinguishable from it. It is the real, as the phenomena are the apparent, cosmos.

The author denies that he is a pantheist, for he denies the hypothesis of self-creation; but, if he is not a pantheist, it is only because he does not call the unknowable infinite power or being he asserts as the reality of the cosmos, that is, the real cosmos, by the name of God, Deus, or Theos. But asserting that power as the reality or substance of the cosmic phenomena is precisely what is meant by pantheism. Pantheism, in its modern form, is the assertion of one only substance, which is the reality of the cosmic phenomena, and the denial of the creation of finite substances, which are the real subject of the cosmic manifestations. Pantheism denies the creation of substances or second causes, and asserts that all phenomena are simply the appearances of the one infinite and only substance; and this is precisely what Mr. Spencer undeniably does. The only difference between atheism and pantheism is purely verbal. The atheist calls the reality asserted cosmos or nature, and the pantheist calls it God, but both assert one and the same thing. The power Mr. Spencer asserts is simply the natura naturans of Spinoza, and that is nothing the atheist himself does not accept, and, indeed, assert. Neither asserts, nor does Mr. Spencer assert, any supercosmic being, or power

Mr. Spencer hardly once refers to Christian theology, and, without ever having studied it, evidently would have us think that he considers it beneath his attention. Yet he, as evidently, has constructed his system for the purpose of undermining and disposing of it once for all. This may be seen in the fact that, when he refers to religion at all, it is always to some heathen superstition, which he assumes to be the type or germ of all religion, carefully ignoring the patriarchal, Hebrew, or Christian religion. He tells us “the earliest traditions represent rulers as gods or demigods.” This is not true even of heathenism, which is in fact an apostasy from the patriarchal or primitive religion, or its corruption. The apotheosis of Romulus, according to tradition, took place only after his death, and it is only at a later period that the pagan emperors were held to be gods during their lifetime. Mr. Spencer’s real or affected ignorance of the whole order of religious thought is marvellous, and we cannot forbear saying:

There is no philosophy or science, if God and his creative act are excluded or ignored, because there is no cosmos left, and neither a subject to know nor an object to be known.

Mr. Spencer misapprehends the relations of religion and science, and consequently the conditions of their reconciliation. He says they are the two opposite poles of one and the same globe. This is a mistake. Religion and science are indeed parts of one whole; but religion, while it includes science, supplements it by the analogical knowledge called faith. The truths of faith and of science are always in dialectic harmony, and between the Christian faith and real science there is no quarrel, and can be none; for religion only supplies the defect of science, and puts the mind in possession of the solution of the problem of man and the universe, not attainable by science.

There is a quarrel only when the scientists, in the name of science, deny or impugn the supplementary truths of revelation, and which are at least as certain as any scientific truths or facts are or can be; or when they reject the great principles of reason itself, which are the basis of all science. Let the scientists confine themselves, as we have said, to the study and classification of facts, or the development and application to them of the undoubted principles of the intuitive reason, and not attempt to go beyond their province or the proper field of scientific investigation, and there will be no quarrel between them and the theologians. The quarrel arises when men like Spencer, Darwin, Huxley, and others, profoundly ignorant both of philosophy and of theology, or the teachings of revelation, ignoring them, despising them, or regarding them with sovereign contempt, put forth baseless theories and hypotheses incompatible with the truths alike of reason and faith; and it will continue till they learn that an unproved and unprovable theory or hypothesis is not science, nor a scientific explanation of the facts either of the soul or of the cosmos, and is quite insufficient to warrant a denial of the belief of the great bulk of mankind from the first man down to our own

We said, or intended to say, that a philosopher is known by his principles. We add that he is also known by his method. The physical method is unscientific and illogical; for it seeks through phenomena to arrive at being, and from particulars to obtain general or universal conclusions. Induction that is not based on a universal principle can never attain to anything but the particular. Generalizations of particulars are only abstractions, and abstractions, prescinded from their concretes, are nullities, as the possible, without the real to actualize it, is nothing. There is no rising from particulars to the universal unless we start with a universal principle intuitively given. It is impossible to conclude, by logical inference, substance or being from phenomena. The reality which Mr. Spencer says we are compelled to assert, though itself unknowable, as underlying the cosmic phenomena, is no deduction nor induction from these, but is given intuitively as the ideal or intelligible in the very act in which the phenomena themselves are apprehended. Mr. Spencer is wrong in asserting it, as we have said, to be unknowable, and still more so in asserting it as the subject of the cosmic phenomena, which is simply pantheism. These phenomena are not the appearances or manifestations of the Infinite Power or Being which Mr. Spencer asserts as unknowable, but of the finite and dependent substances which God, the Infinite Being, creates and upholds as second causes.

The universal is not contained in the particular, the infinite in the finite, the identical in the diverse, the immutable in the mutable, the persistent in the transitory, unity in plurality, or the actual in the possible, and therefore cannot be concluded from it. The two categories are not obtainable, either from the other, by any possible logical inference, and therefore must be given intuitively or neither is cognizable; for, though not reciprocal, they connote, as all correlatives, each the other, since neither is knowable without the other. This is the condemnation of the physical or inductive method, when followed as a method of obtaining the first principles either of the real or of the knowable. We say only what Bacon himself said. He said and proved that the inductive method is inapplicable in philosophy, or out of the sphere of the physical sciences. The great error has been in attempting to follow it in philosophy, or the science of the sciences, where it is inapplicable, for no science can start without first principles.

We feel that some apology is due our readers for soliciting their attention to anything so absurd as Herbert Spencer’s New System of Philosophy; but they must bear in mind that Mr. Spencer is a representative man, and has only attempted to bring together and combine into a systematic whole the anti-Christian, anti-theistical, and anti-rational theories, hypotheses, and unscientific speculations which, under the name and forms of science, govern the thought et id omne genus, and has succeeded in proving that no advance has been made by the non-Catholic world on the system of old Epicurus, which is rapidly becoming the philosophy of the whole world outside of the church, and against which the Bascoms, the Hodges, and the McCoshes, with honorable intentions and a few fragments of Catholic theology and philosophy, protest in vain. This is our apology for devoting so much space to Herbert Spencer’s inanities.

ST. CECILIA’s DAY IN ROME.

St. Cecilia is one of the few figures among the representative throng of virgin-martyrs that strike us at once as the most familiar, the most lovable, and the most to be exalted. Every one knows the legend of her life, and the conversion of her husband and his brother, brought about by her prayers, as also by the miracles she obtained for their further confirmation in the faith. Her death, in itself a miracle, needs no retelling, neither does the history of her wondrously preserved remains, that are now laid in the shrine beneath the altar of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, a church erected, by her own wish and behest, on the spot where her palace stood. This church is a basilica, and has its altar raised many steps above the level of the mosaic floor of the nave, and the front of the altar turned away from the people so that the celebrant at Mass stands facing the congregation, as in many other ancient Roman churches. Under the altar, on the lower level of the nave, is the shrine of the saint, and there lies her marble image, small and frail, though it is said to be life-sized, and reverently and truly copied from the sleeping body, whose form remained entire and uncorrupted, at least until the last time it was solemnly uncovered. To the right of the church is a dark side-chapel, floored with rare mosaic, once the bath-room of the young and wealthy patrician, and the consecrated spot where heathen cruelty twice endeavored to put an end to the sweet singer’s life. The actual bath is said to be within the railings that divide a narrow portion of the chapel from

Cecilia, in her short and heavenly life, seems a fitting model for all women, and especially for young maidens and wives. She was of those who know well how to put religion before men in its most beautiful garb and most enthralling form; purity with her was no ice-cold stream and repellent rocky fastness: it was beauty, it was reward, it was glory. Crowns of lilies and roses, heavenly perfume, and angelic companionship were to be its lovely guerdon; and not otherwise should it ever be preached, nor otherwise surrounded, when its precepts are presented to man. Had we more Cecilias among our Christian women of to-day, there would be more Valeriani and Tiburtii among our men, and virtue would be more readily deemed an honor than a yoke; home would be more of a temple, rather than a mere resting-place; home-life more of a prayer, rather than a simple idyl. For blamelessness is not Christian purity; righteousness is not Christian faith. We want the visible blessings of the church on our daily lives, even as Cecilia brought into the circle of home the visible, angelic gifts of flowers; and we know that to those who seek them where Valerian and his brother sought the heavenly apparition—that is, through faith and prayer—these blessings, these gifts, these blossoms, these safeguards, are never denied.

And to pass from these aspirations after a more Christian ideal of home to the impressions made on an eye-witness by the feast of St. Cecilia in Rome, we will merely say that this feast had been eagerly looked forward to, and had always held a special charm over the mind of the writer of these pages.

On this day, the 22d of November, Mass is said from dawn till noon in the catacomb chapel, where the martyr was first buried. This chapel is one of the largest and most interesting in the Catacomb of St. Callixtus. The distance from the Eternal City to this shrine is not long, but the old Appian Way that leads from the one to the other is crowded with memories and monuments, each a history in itself.

The most noticeable of these is very near the catacomb, and is none other than the mausoleum of Cecilia of all ages, all ranks, all nations, bearing in their hands the charity born of Cecilia’s death-bed generosity, and in their hearts the faith of her death-bed professions.

And so, past the stately tomb worthy of Egypt’s solemn magnificence, the road leads to a small door in a wall, which opens on to a field. A path fringed with red and purple flowers, the last-born children of a southern autumn, winds through the field, to the head of a steep but wide flight of stairs, at the foot of which is the entrance to St. Callixtus’ Catacomb. The pure air, just mist-veiled in the morning coolness, shows the landscape around to its utmost advantage; the omnipresent dome of St. Peter’s basilica clears the line of the blue horizon; the wide purple plain is crossed here and there by dust-whitened roads and arched aqueducts, as by the gigantic bones of a decayed and now powerless monster; the distant hills, darkened at their base by chestnut woods, and dotted with white villas, as with the loosened beads of a string of pearls, throw bluer shadows on the dusky, olive-spotted expanse: and we pause, and wonder whether, after all, things looked so very unlike this on the dawning day when the Christians bore the happy Cecilia to her first resting-place. Their hearts surely must have felt as ours do now, full of joy and thanksgiving, and, above all, full of peace. There would have been a silent throng, a quiet gradual gathering of the future martyrs around the narrow grave of their blessed-forerunner; for in those days no one knew how soon he or she might be called from the altar to the stake, and summoned to carry the unconsumed sacrament within his bosom to the tribunal of an unjust and ignorant judge.

The avenues of the perplexing labyrinth St. Cecilia’s, so that no one may stray from the one chapel where service is going on. Close to the entrance is the small recess where the saint was laid in her first sleep. It is low and reaches far back into the damp earth-wall; myrtle and bay-leaves are strewn over its floor, and flowers and little oil-lamps are spread about like stars. As each person leaves the chapel, he takes away a leaf or flower as a holy remembrance. Two altars are erected, one close to the martyr’s grave, just beneath a Byzantine fresco head of our divine Lord, the other on the opposite side of the chapel. The space, small enough for a modern congregation, though large for a catacomb chapel, is so crowded that it is difficult for the priests to pass in and out from the altars to the temporary sacristy, and the worshippers almost lean upon them when they stand to say the “Judica me, Deus.” No noise is heard, save the murmured words of the Mass and the tinkling of the elevation-bell. Foreigners are there with fair-haired boys serving the Mass of some favorite friend and accompanying chaplain; Romans are there with their intense, if not deep, southern devotion; rich and poor, prince and beggar, student and peasant, are alike crowding the virgin-martyr’s shrine. A few hundred years ago, this was the church’s cradle, and patrician and slave came to be baptized together and wear for one day the white robes that to-morrow twilight would see red with blood on the deserted sand of the gladiator’s amphitheatre. The priest who said Mass in those days hardly knew, when he came to the consecration, whether the hand of the pagan soldiery might not be upon him before the communion; the mother who knelt in tears, half of natural sorrow, half of heavenly joy, and thought of the fair young boy she had but yesterday given back to God on the scaffold, did not know whether tomorrow’s dawn might not find her herself prostrate and headless on the same place of execution. Partings then were seldom for long, and, even when the Christians parted with our Lord on the hidden altars, they knew they would meet him soon again at the right hand of his Father. Not unfrequently, the Blessed Sacrament was kept in a silver vessel made in the shape of a dove, and one cannot help thinking how sweet a union must have existed between this custom and the idea of the protection and the teaching the Holy Spirit was to afford to his spouse, the church. “When the Spirit of truth cometh,” Jesus had said, “he shall teach you all things.” And so the Dove of heaven taught the church the hidden beauties of the ineffable sacrament, and protected this greatest treasure of the Bride in its integrity of doctrine and its continuity of love. May we not so interpret, lovingly and reverentially, the olden custom of the dove-shaped tabernacle?

Beautiful as the day was, it was a sore trial to leave the darksome, silent chapel, where generations of older and braver Christians than ourselves had spent their triumphant vigils and been brought back to sleep their peaceful hero-slumbers—it was a trial, I say, to return to the carelessly beautiful earth, the unheeding theatre of such wondrous mysteries. To leave the catacombs in Cecilia’s times was to go forth to almost certain death; to leave prayer and solitude, the catacombs of the heart in our day, is to encounter certain sorrow and possible sin. It is hard to leave God’s temple and mingle with proud stone pyre, a mound of stones, each of which bears an imperial inscription, a rude shepherd’s fence, or irregular stone wall, that is all you see. Not far from here, in a cornfield whose waves of brown and gold a few months ago kissed the foot of an ilex-crowned hillock, is the fountain of Egeria, a grotto, fern-clothed, with a broken goddess of mouldering stone. The water and the “maiden-hair” fern are there still, as beautiful as when the king of Rome is said to have wandered here in search of wisdom; the sage himself and the problematic nymph of tradition are dead and gone, forgotten by the owner of the corn-field, ignored by the peasant who drinks at the fountain, unknown to the brown, barefooted child who gathers the feathery fern.

Of what use is it to say any more? Facts are more cruel commentaries on the past than any words.

Yet we have just seen children and peasants, women from northern lands, men from eastern climes, bearing away as a relic a leaf of bay or a starry flower from the once filled recess where Cecilia lay in peace-sealed slumber.

Where is the difference, and why?

A little child can tell, but the philosopher will not listen.

St. Cecilia, though to the writer of these pages it ended on the threshold of the catacomb, is not completed here.

At her church in the Trastevere, the church already mentioned, takes place the ceremony of solemn vespers, in which the artists of Rome assist and take part gratuitously, out of homage to the queen of music. The antiphon “Cantantibus Organis” is magnificent in art, but unresponsive in devotion. The phantom of the unhappy Renaissance breathes in these strains, religious only in so far as they are a fabric built on sacred words. The simple solemnity of the church’s service dwells not in them, and the touching silence of the catacomb recalls the saint to our mind far more sweetly than these outbursts of paganized minstrelsy within the halls she once called her own. Still, if honor to God be meant by this concourse of the artist fraternity, let us be simple of intention, and see in it, as God does, the first-fruits of what they have offered to the God of all.

Reader, if you ever pray before the early shrine of the virgin-martyr in St. Callixtus’ chapel, remember the writer of these few words, and let our prayers go up to God together, “as a morning sacrifice” and “as incense in his sight.”

FLEURANGE.

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH OF MRS. CRAVEN, AUTHOR OF “A SISTER’s STORY.”

PART FIRST.

THE OLD MANSION.

I.

It was the third time Dr. Leblanc had repeated these words in the presence of his sister, Mademoiselle Josephine, who remained so mute that she might have been thought deaf, had not the irregular click of her knitting-needles, and two or three indistinct exclamations as she paused in her work, testified to a preoccupation quite equal to that of her brother. The latter at first manifested his by swiftly striding up and down the apartment in which they were, but now he resumed his usual place in the chimney-corner opposite his sister, opened and shut his snuff-box noisily, taking a useless profusion of pinches, which he forgot to convey to their destination, and tapping the floor with his foot in a manner that expressed great agitation or extreme perplexity.

Mademoiselle Josephine continued to knit without replying, and seemed no less absorbed than her brother. At length she said:

“At least, if she were not, as you say, so young and so beautiful!”

“And so poor and alone in the world, you should add. A sensible remark, indeed! It is evident if she were old, ugly, rich, and surrounded by friends, her situation would be

“Do not be impatient, brother. I am only repeating what you have just said. To continue the subject: if she only had a different air—”

“Well, go on!”

“And another name—”

“Another name! Why so? What has her name to do with the matter?”

“A name which was not ridiculous.”

“Ridiculous! The name of her father? Poor Gerard d’Yves’ name was very respectable, and even noble, I believe. He committed a thousand extravagances and ruined himself. He then became an artist, and displayed talent enough to have repaired his fortunes had he been wise. Besides, he was of a good family, and his name—”

“I am not alluding to his name, but to his daughter’s.”

“Well?”

“Well, brother, do you think this young girl’s name bears any resemblance to a Christian name?”

“Fleurange? I acknowledge it is perhaps an odd name. Her father had a taste for odd things, and hearing the name of Fior Angela in Italy, he translated it.”

“Her mother should have had more sense.”

“Her poor mother died when she was born, so she had nothing to do with it.”

“Did you not say her mother had a brother who was a professor in some city in Germany?”

“Yes, at Leipsic; but who knows where to find him now? Her whole family disapproved of her marriage, which was finally effected without her father’s consent. Poor Margaret lived only a year, and Gerard, who remained a widower, declined all intercourse with his wife’s relatives. He remained many years in Italy, and placed his daughter, as soon as she was five years old, in some convent near Perugia. He took her away only two months before he came here, already ill, to linger and die three days ago in this poor child’s arms, leaving her entirely alone in the world.”

“But was it not very injurious to his daughter’s interests to withhold her thus from all intercourse with her maternal relatives?”

“He began to realize it himself, but only when it was too late. During his illness, finding his case daily growing more serious, he made some efforts to ascertain what had become of Ludwig Dornthal, of whom we have just spoken, who was Margaret’s favorite brother, and never faltered in his affection for her. But he could ascertain nothing respecting him. Ludwig had married, and, long before, left Leipsic to settle in some other part of Germany, he could not find out what, and this fruitless effort was a source of pain, which was not the least he suffered during his last hours. He reproached himself, and not without reason, for the frightful loneliness in which he was about to leave his daughter. The poor, unhappy man bitterly expiated the imprudent and thoughtless act of alienating himself from those whose pardon he should rather have implored, or at

“Poor child!” said Mademoiselle Josephine, raising her small black eyes, with an expression almost celestial lighting up her pale and wrinkled face. After a moment’s silence, she added: “God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb! You will see, brother, that some good luck will befall her, or we shall have some fortunate inspiration.”

“Well, the sooner the better, for I have none. Your confidence truly excites my admiration.”

“I trust in God,” simply replied Mademoiselle Josephine.

“Parbleu! and I too,” said the doctor. “I truly believe in his goodness; I hope in his mercy; but in this case—”

“You would prefer to have the affair in your own hands?”

“Come, come, Josephine, let us stick to the point this time. It is eight o’clock, and we must positively go for that poor child. She is more lonely than ever to-day, for the sister who nursed her father, and remained with her after his death, left this morning. She must not, after so sad a day, pass this first night all alone up there.”

“Certainly not,” said the other.

The doctor continued: “She has not left that little room in the fourth story for a fortnight, with the exception of this morning, when she followed her father to the grave, and since her return how do you imagine she has been occupied? Here, look at this.”

Mademoiselle Josephine took the paper her brother held out, and glanced over it. It was a list of the poor artist’s debts.

“The whole amounts to five hundred francs, which are here. She asked me to settle the bills and procure the receipts.”

“I see that, according to her calculation, one-fourth of this sum is intended for the physician who attended her father,” said Mademoiselle Josephine slowly.

“Who, in such a case, will not accept it, of course.”

“Of course not,” said his sister. “Out of this sum one hundred and twenty-five francs will be returned to her, then?”

“Yes, sister, and that will be the amount of her fortune.”

“While we are talking, then, she has absolutely nothing?”

“Nothing at all.”

Their conversation at this point was interrupted by a low knock at the door, and almost immediately the girl of whom they had been talking appeared before them. She stopped and leaned against the wall. The doctor sprang toward her.

“Poor child!” he exclaimed. “While we were idly talking, she was faint from exhaustion and fatigue.”

She had, in truth, fallen into a chair against the wall, and seemed losing consciousness. Mademoiselle Josephine hastened to support her head, and bathe her pale brow and colorless cheeks with cold water. Every movement of the doctor’s elderly sister had become prompt and decided. At a sign from her brother, she disappeared an instant, but returned almost immediately with a vial and a glass of water in her hand.

“That is it,” said the doctor. He let fall a few drops into the glass, which he then held to the young girl’s lips. Two or three swallows seemed to revive her.

“Do not talk now, but drink the remainder of this.”

Fleurange put the glass to her lips, but returned it to the doctor without tasting it. “I cannot,” she said, “I feel dizzy. I do not know what ails me—perhaps it is the surprise I have just had. Here, monsieur, read this. It was to show you this letter I came down.”

The doctor took the letter, but, before reading it, led Fleurange to the fire, while the active Josephine, divining her brother’s wishes, placed on the table a bowl of soup and some bread and wine.

Fleurange took Mademoiselle Josephine’s hand between her own: “Thank you,” she said in a low tone. “Yes, I think it was that: I am generally strong, but—but—”

“I dare say you have not eaten anything since yesterday?”

“No; and I am hungry.”

The doctor briskly rubbed his spectacles, and abruptly opened his snuffbox, while the young girl hastily took the slight repast, which brought a lively and unusual color to her cheeks. Her face was generally very pale. Her large eyes, calm and mild, gray rather than blue, shaded by lashes black as her hair, gave her a peculiar and striking appearance. But notwithstanding this peculiarity, notwithstanding her paleness, the delicacy of her features, and the pliancy of her form, which swayed like a reed at every movement, if obliged to characterize in two words the general impression produced by the appearance of Fleurange d’Yves, those words would be: simplicity and energy. Doctor Leblanc was doubtless right in thinking that one so young, beautiful, and destitute needed protection, and yet it required only a glance to see that she, better than any else, could protect herself.

The doctor still held in his hand the letter she had given him. It was dated at Frankfort.

“My Dear Niece: It was only yesterday, and by the most unforeseen chance, we at last learned the state of your father’s health and where he lives. None of us have seen him since his marriage with my poor sister Margaret twenty years ago. You know there was at that time a profound hatred against France throughout our country, and my father would never consent to receive a Frenchman as his son-in-law. Then my poor sister (God forgive her!) left the paternal roof to marry the man of her choice. My father was exceedingly grieved, very angry, and at first implacable, but before his death he forgave her. She was past knowing it. From that time we lost all trace of your father. We only learned he had left Pisa with his child, and, for a long time, had given up all hope of ever seeing him again, or knowing my poor sister’s daughter, when yesterday a stranger, passing through this city, accidentally showed me a picture he had just purchased at Paris—the work, he said, of a dying artist. This painting represented Cordelia kneeling beside her father, and the canvas bore the name of Gerard d’Yves. The painter’s address was given us by the owner of the picture, and I hasten to profit by it to tell you, my dear child, that your mother’s relatives have not forgotten the tie that binds them to you. If you ever need a shelter, you can find one beneath our roof. My wife and children already regard poor Margaret’s daughter with affection. The

“Ludwig Dornthal.”

“Josephine! Josephine!” exclaimed the doctor. “Here, read this: but, first, embrace me. Yes, you were right. Your trust was better than my wisdom! Yes, yes, God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb. Poor child, embrace me also.”

Fleurange rose: “Oh! very willingly,” said she as she threw herself sobbing into the doctor’s arms. Fatigue, grief, and the emotion caused by the unforeseen and unhoped-for offer of a refuge at the very moment of extreme need, all combined to agitate her mind, excite her nerves, and exhaust her strength. Her heart swelled with the emotion she could not repress, and tears unrestrained came to her eyes, rolled down her cheeks, and fell like rain on her clasped and icy hands, while a convulsive movement agitated her breast, and her trembling lips gave utterance to a feeble cry.

The doctor allowed her to weep a long time in silence, not uttering a word to increase her agitation, and yet saying nothing to repress it. At length the paroxysm subsided, and Fleurange rose quite confused.

“Excuse me once more,” said she; “I am distressing you, instead of showing my gratitude as I ought. I could not restrain myself, but I think I can safely promise it will not happen again. I seldom give way to tears.”

She uttered these words in a firm tone, drying her tears, and throwing back her hair with her two hands as if to cool her brow, then she rose.

“Where are you going, pray?” asked Mademoiselle Josephine in an abrupt tone of authority.

“Why,” stammered Fleurange, “I am going up-stairs. I—”

“Perhaps you are thinking to spend the night all alone in the cabinet next the chamber—the chamber—” She stopped. Fleurange turned pale, and her lips trembled as she replied:

“What can I do? It is sad, it is painful, I know well; but it must be done. Besides, I am not afraid: I feel I am under your roof.”

“Well, for the present you shall also be under the protection of our lock and key,” said the kind Josephine: and, taking Fleurange by the arm, she led her into a little chamber next her own, where a small bed surrounded by white curtains was in readiness for the young girl. This little chamber, with its walls covered with blue paper, and lit up with a good fire, had a most cheering aspect.

“Here, child, is your chamber and your bed,” said she. “Come, come, no thanks, and, above all, no tears! Go to bed at once without giving yourself the time to think, still less to say a word. You think you are not going to sleep, but you are mistaken. On your knees? Well, I consent to that, but let it be a short prayer. That is right. Now stop till I gather up your thick hair. Is your head easy on that pillow? Well, I am glad. May God, and all good angels, watch over you! Allow me to kiss your forehead. Good-night!”

Mademoiselle Josephine lowered the curtains of the bed, and softly

The chamber to which Mademoiselle Josephine had taken Fleurange rightfully belonged to the doctor’s niece, now at school in one of the convents at Paris, but which she occupied during her vacation. However, it was far from being vacant the remainder of the year. Mademoiselle Leblanc was one of those persons who are devoted to the searching out of the unfortunate, and the alleviation of their woes. In such cases, he who seeks finds, and that without difficulty, consequently a week seldom passed without offering a good reason for opening the blue chamber for a few days’ shelter to some poor girl out of work and destitute of a home, or to a poor abandoned child, or some one recovering from illness but too feeble to resume work. The doctor heartily approved of this. He would gladly have added to his dwelling a veritable succursale for the accommodation of his poor patients, and if he was not yet rich enough for that, though he reaped the benefit of his skill and celebrity, it was partly because he gave away with one hand what he received in the other, and that with a generosity not always in conformity with prudence. When there was a question of benevolence between the brother and sister, one was not more disposed than the other to count the cost. They had invented a proverb, worthy of the Gospel, which they made use of in reply to the remonstrances of their friends: “He who gives alms, grows rich,” they said; and they continued to enrich themselves in this way by giving themselves up, both of them, to a noble excess of charity. Fortune, in fact, had not been unfavorable to them, and thus far had remained unfulfilled the sinister prophecies of those who take as a devise quite a different proverb, respecting charity, too well known and too often acted upon in the world. Doctor Leblanc and his sister knew nothing, it is true, of the luxury of elegant quarters and fine equipages. They still lived in a street of the Latin quarter where they were born; an old servant was the sole assistant of the cook; and Mademoiselle Josephine continued to preserve order and neatness around her with her own hands. But at all times they were magnificent in their own way; and the artists they encouraged, the scholars befriended, and the sick gratuitously attended and generously aided, added to the renown of the distinguished physician and gave to his name a reputation he did not seek. Simple and learned, healing the body and respecting the soul, he loved his profession as a mission from heaven, and practised it as a sacred ministry with respect and with love.

II.

When Fleurange opened her eyes on the following morning, it was late, for it was broad daylight and in the month of December. She must have slept very profoundly, for she had not heard any one kindle the fire already blazing in the chimney. Her slumbers must have been such as in youth succeed great fatigue or prolonged efforts to endure anxiety and grief in silence. The fit of weeping the evening before and the long repose of the night had brought double refreshment to the exhausted strength of the young girl, and her first sensation was one of delicious comfort.

But her remembrances soon became more distinct, and the anguish of the first awakening after a great misfortune made her heart sink within her. She had, it is true, known her father but little. The convent where she had been reared was not even in the town where he dwelt, and she saw him but seldom during her childhood. But the days when he appeared at the convent were to both great festivals. It was difficult to understand how a father so glad to see his child could voluntarily have allowed her to grow up away from him. But the time of reunion came at last, and for several weeks they rambled around Italy together. In unveiling all its wonders to a mind naturally capable of appreciating them, the artist felt all the enthusiasm of his youth revive. But it was a flame only rekindled to be extinguished. Soon came symptoms of illness, the sad return to Paris, the fluctuations of disease, which enfeeble the mind as well as the body, and separated the child from her father while he was yet alive, and she night and day at his bedside. His look that gave back no answering glance, the words she murmured in his ear without making him understand, convinced her of her loss before the separation by death which soon followed.

“O father! father scarcely known and so soon lost!” Such was Fleurange’s cry, and perhaps an involuntary reproach mingled with her accents of grief. She did not suspect it was a sublime and paternal instinct that had influenced the poor artist in separating from his child. He wished her to be self-reliant; he wished her to be pious and pure; he wished her rare mental gifts only to be developed when order, an immutable and divine order, was established in her soul; finally, he desired her to be all that he himself lacked, and God blessed this desire.

In a beautiful spot near Perugia, he found at the head of a charity school one of those women whom the world itself would honor and venerate if it comprehended them. By the world, I mean the mass of light and scoffing people who are hostile to every sentiment in which they have no share, and, above all others, to religious sentiments. Yet this world is, on the whole, suspicious rather than unjust, and incredulous than false: if it sees the semblance of evil, it immediately supposes it real; if it sees the appearance of goodness, it at once imagines this appearance deceitful; but when virtue is unquestionably manifest, irrecusable in its simplicity and truth, and succeeds in being regarded in a true light, the world—even the world of which we have been speaking—generally bows down before it. The thing is rare, it is true, more so than it should be, because the most perfect natures aim not at displaying themselves, but at concealment; and the world to which I refer seeks not to discover, but to deny, their existence.

Madre Maddalena was one of these great hidden souls. No one ever spoke of her, or of her little monastery, intended for the education of poor children, but where a limited number of girls of a more elevated class were also admitted. Like so many other monasteries in Italy, this one was in a poetic and charming situation, but not one of those visible afar off on the lofty summits that command views which ravish the eye and transport the soul—views that kindle a desire in the most indifferent heart to keel before them, and that have inspired Christians to