CATHOLIC WORLD. (continued 4)

Charles Carroll, Sr., died at a patriarchal age, more than four-score years. Like Simeon of old, he had long waited for the consolations of Israel, for the day when the spouse of Christ would cast aside the slave’s garb, and, emerging from American catacombs, come forth in the radiant panoply of freedom and celestial splendor. He himself never had faltered in this hope. He always felt that Mary’s land would not be forsaken by her in whose name it was first held. He saw his country free, and he rejoiced. He witnessed around him the beneficent results accruing from the influences of mother church. He raised his hand to bless God, to bless his kin, to bless the land. But how shall we portray the emotions of his heart when no more in hiding-places, but in full noon-day, openly and freely, he saw the clean Sacrifice offered by the priests of the Most High? And when the form of his beloved son knelt before him for a last blessing, how with the father’s benedictions must have mingled feelings of pride and gratitude because even by the untiring labors of that son had the blessings of liberty to church and state been won!

It was the writer’s good-fortune, a great many years ago, to seek for rest in what, among Catholic Marylanders, was formerly known as the “Jesuit Tusculum.” In a secluded nook in Cecil County, on the Eastern Shore, lies embosomed within dense thickets and shady lanes the Bohemia Manor, a dependency of Georgetown College. When the Catholic youth of Maryland were debarred the privilege of collegiate training in their native schools, the members of the Company of Jesus had, at a very early period, opened there a boarding-school, especially for such of the American boys as would afterwards, like their persecuted peers in England, seek for a sound education and a thorough Christian training at the well-known academies of Belgium and France. Wandering through those woods, rowing over the meandering streams whose soft murmurings give life to the silent homes of the crane and gentle game, the youthful forms of the Carrolls and Brents, Dorseys and Darnells, haunted the imagination and brought one back to those days of fervent Catholic spirit, pure hearts, and high-minded youths who waxed in years and strength under the saintly training of Hudson and

Young Charles Carroll, who was born in 1737, was sent thither to drink the first pure waters of secular learning and Christian training. At one time well-nigh twoscore of the sons of the more fortunate colonists were there united with him at the Tusculum of the Company of Jesus.

But a day of separation dawned. Charles was in his eleventh year when not the swift steamship of our time but a laggard craft was to convey him to distant shores. He was accompanied in his journey by his cousin, John Carroll, with whom many years after he accomplished a most delicate and important mission at the command of the government. Thus he added to the ties and sympathies of blood a link of such friendships as are so apt to knit in college life and ever after congenial souls and hearts beating in unison. True, when the day arrived on which each was to enter an avenue of life that would lead to the career for which each was fitted by nature, they chose different gates, but came forth on the great drama of life to be the leaders of two generations, one in the church, the other in the state. Charles Carroll with unerring finger points to the Catholic layman the resources which he should improve for the perfect execution of his part; John Carroll has represented him who is the infallible guide of the church, becoming at the same time the model of bishop and priest, the pride and the joy of the anointed minister of that same church in the United States.

Six years did young Carroll spend at St. Omer’s, in French Flanders, in the study of the classics of ancient and modern times under Jesuit tuition; thence he passed to Rheims; and lastly he entered the college of Louis le Grand in Paris. In the two last places he applied himself, under the guidance of learned Jesuits, to the study of logic and metaphysics, mathematics and natural sciences. When at Louis le Grand the elder Charles crossed the ocean a third time to feast his eyes and gladden his doating heart on the son who had waxed in years as well as in grace. He found the promising boy grown into a manly youth, and bade him say farewell to the charms of a life whose days glided on in unruffled peace, breathing in an atmosphere of religion and science. His intercourse there was with men whose aspirations were to the greatest glory of God, whose conversation was in heaven. These men, so noble, so learned, so perfect, had entwined the hearts of their pupils with their own.

In 1757 Charles Carroll removed to London to enter upon the study of law. Admitted to the Inner Temple, an inmate, or at least a frequenter, of those halls wherein surely the Holy Ghost did not hold an undisputed sway, the noble-minded and pure-souled Maryland youth must have felt the change to the quick. What a contrast to the simplicity of his western home at the paternal manor, the sweet influences and innocent life at the Bohemian Tusculum, and in the blessed halls of Bruges and St. Omer’s! At the Temple he spent the five years requisite in order to be called to the bar; but

A great change had meanwhile come over the moral atmosphere of his native State. Whilst bickerings about religion were growing distasteful, a rumbling noise of threatened disasters in the distance drew the hearts of the colonists together. Indistinct and sombre figures of enemies lurking around the premises counselled measures of internal peace, equal distribution of civil rights, and a unity of sentiments and aims as the only hope of averting ruin and of conquering a powerful foe. Ties of friendship were strengthened, measures of concerted action were discussed, whilst religious questions were laid aside, and arrogant claims of superior rights on the part of non-Catholics forgotten, in the presence of an impending danger; the more so because it was felt that there was a party brooding in their midst which was in accord with the enemy outside.

When the boy left the land of his birth, and the prow of the ship that bore him ploughed the waters of the Atlantic, his soul expanded with a heretofore unexperienced sentiment of liberty; for only then did he begin to feel that freely under the canopy of heaven he could practise his religion without let or hindrance, without the sneers or intermeddling of his neighbors. Add to this the anticipated enjoyment of the liberty in wait for him on the eastern lands of Catholic faith. Yet the prospective and future return to the land of bondage must from time to time have thrown shadows of sadness over the gushing and joyful youth at school. But now comes a truce to religious dissensions and family quarrels; a victory is gained: the church is free, her shackles broken. Catholic and non-Catholic worship at the altar of their choice freely and publicly. They are all children of the same political family, members of the same moral body!

But the liberties of the colonies are crushed by the mother country, and Charles Carroll lands on these shores only in time to be one of the mourners at the funeral of liberty. His countrymen had been galled with bitterness by the contempt, insolence, and arrogance of the British soldiery, and felt a contempt for the martinet leaders of the Braddock defeat, while at the same time a feeling of superiority was engendered in their heart by the warlike qualities displayed by rank and file under the leadership of him who was already first in the hearts of his peers. They chafed at being made the hewers of wood and drawers of water to British indolence; they felt the sanctuary of their homes desecrated by the writs of assistance; their inmost souls were moved with indignation at being ordered to sacrifice their hard-earned comforts, their very subsistence, to the pleasure of a ribald soldiery. Such things could not be endured by the sons of liberty. And thus it happened that Charles Carroll was not welcomed with the cheers of a hearty greeting; he only heard the groans, the smothered curses, the oaths of vengeance deep and resolute, uttered by his oppressed fellow-colonists.

His soul was fired with wrath and zeal; but a wrath subdued by self-control, a zeal swayed by prudence. His was a self-possession that was never thrown off its guard. He seemed ever to be on the alert against surprises—a foe more fatal to armies than cannon and shot.

It is not necessary for us here to relate how the obnoxious law was repealed—a tardy and unwilling act of atonement (“an act of empty justice,” as McSherry well defines it); yet its revocation was hailed by the colonies with great rejoicings as the harbinger of a better rule and the dawn of a day of just polity in the home government. Surely, the rulers in the mother country had felt the temper of her children abroad; they loved her fondly as long as she proved herself a mother; woe were she to forget the ties of love and harshly deal with them!

Charles Carroll was neither blinded nor hoodwinked by this sporadic token of motherly justice. Those years of residence in England were not lost to him. He well knew the temper of the British lion, his arrogance and his treachery. Sooner or later another paroxysm of exigencies would come over him; they must be met, cost what it may.

“Wicked is the only word which I can apply to the government of your colonies. You seem to regard them as mere material mines from whence the mother country is to extract the precious ore for her own luxury and splendor.”[151]

The victory gained and the danger averted for the nonce, Mr. Carroll devoted himself to promoting the welfare of the colony. In fact, whilst a short period of comparative peace lasted outside the colonies, Maryland was not free from internal disturbance. Two sources of disquietude were then opened—the Proclamation and the Vestry Act. Nor was the colony less annoyed by the unfaithfulness of leading merchants in Baltimore, who, goaded by thirst of money and not prompted by feelings of love for their country, had slackened in their opposition to the encroachment of the government at home. They only followed in the wake of New York and Philadelphia, and even of Boston. The love of lucre and the diseased tastes of what was then called the quality allowed the merchants of those cities to fall away from the compact entered upon with the sister colonies. To advance their interests and to satisfy a portion of the community, they forsook their principles and paid the hated tributes for proscribed commodities. But outside Baltimore the people in the counties remained firm and unshaken in their patriotism.

Charles Carroll was young in years, but ripe in judgment. The future statesman lost no opportunities. It was of the utmost importance that he should thoroughly

The main point of dispute turned on the rights of the government of the colony to tax the people arbitrarily for the payment of officers and the support of the clergy. The history of the Proclamation, drawn up by Dulany himself, and the burial thereof amid a most solemn pageant by the freemen of Annapolis on the 14th of May, 1673, are too well known to require detailing here. It is enough to say that by general acclamation the people acknowledged Charles Carroll as their champion. He could not be selected as a delegate, enthralled as he was, but in public meetings held in Frederick, Baltimore, and Annapolis they unanimously voted and formally tendered him the thanks of the people.

Mr. Carroll entered the lists veiled under the name of First Citizen, whilst Dulany met him in combat as Antilon—an unnecessary disguise, for he was too well known, being the patriot “who,” says McSherry, “had long stood the leading mind of Maryland.” The war was carried on in the columns of the Maryland Gazette, and Mr. Carroll sustained his character of “finished scholar and accomplished gentleman.” Never did he swerve from the high tone of a writer who was conscious of his own powers. Assailed with offensive names by his adversaries, he never descended to their level. When the real name of the First Citizen was yet unknown, the excitement created by his articles, written in a style ready and incisive, and withal most graceful, was enhanced by and received a keener zest from the stimulus of curiosity. Wonderful was the avidity with which they were sought and read. These articles fed the public spirit, inspired the people with courage, and shaped the course to be pursued not only by the colonists of Maryland, but even in sister colonies. The articles by First Citizen were held in so much esteem that Joseph Galloway, when speaker in the Pennsylvania Assembly, would copy them with his own hand, on the loan from a fortunate subscriber, and send them to Benjamin Franklin.

Thus the popular party triumphed. The party of oppression, with the established clergy at their back, was discomfited. Hammond and Paca were elected. Maryland was saved, and her saviour was Charles Carroll. Amid these controversies arose a young man, spirited, p. 170). That young man, only seven-and-twenty, was already a renowned statesman.

A distinguished non-Catholic historian remarks that Charles Carroll brought to play on whatever he undertook “a decided character, stern integrity, and clear judgment.” Truly, the star of his name had reached the meridian of its course already. There it became fixed. His countrymen were guided by it during the dark days of the most perilous events, through battles and storms, dissensions and heart-burnings, the exuberancy of victories and the dejection of defeats. Thirty years, the best of his life, his whole manhood, a long manhood—for he grew old only when others cease to live—he devoted to the welfare of his country.

The life of Charles Carroll becomes at this period so entwined and blended with the history of the country that our article would swell into a portly volume were we to undertake a narrative of the details of his public career. We have endeavored to give a faithful portrait of the character of a man who is the pride of the secular history of the Catholic Church in America. It has been our aim to give a key to open the inmost recesses of that soul the noblest of the noble, that heart the purest of the pure, that mind greatest among the great. Therefore we shall only hint at the events of his public life, omnia quæ tractaturi sumus, narratione delibabimus, as Quintilian would teach us.

As foreseen, the British lion awoke from his apparent lethargy, and with a roar and a spring he bounded anew. Stung to the quick at being, even only once, foiled in his endeavors to saddle on the colonies unjust burdens, he made renewed attempts, and the tax on the “detestable weed” was revived. The people arose in their indignation, and gave vent to it in the hazardous but successful festivities of the famous Boston Tea Party. Massachusetts was disfranchised. Indeed, it was the vent of a petty spite. Not the Bay State alone, but all the colonies, would soon disfranchise themselves, all in a body, and in a way of their own. But Massachusetts had given the example, and Maryland followed close in the wake. The latter even improved on the act of the former; for what had been achieved in the Boston Bay under disguise the citizens of Maryland consummated at Annapolis openly and undisguised. And yet brave Maryland had intestine troubles that engrossed her attention—troubles which were aggravated even by the fact that the abettors thereof were interested in carrying out the measures of the home government. But there shone above them the guiding star—Charles Carroll led them to victory. Undaunted and uncompromising, Mr. Carroll looked coming events in the face; and when Mr. Chase indulged in the hope that there would be no more trouble, for “had they not written down their adversaries?” he would not thus flatter himself with illusions of enduring peace. To other means they would have yet to resort. “What other means have we to resort to?” asked the other. “The bayonet,” calmly rejoined Charles Carroll. And so firm was his conviction that they should resort to arms that he held his opinion against many at home M.P., who averred that six thousand soldiers would easily march from one end of the colonies to the other, is too characteristic of the statesman not to copy it here: “So they may, but they will be masters of the spot only on which they encamp. They will find naught but enemies before and around them. If we are beaten on the plains, we will retreat to our mountains and defy them. Our resources will increase with our difficulties. Necessity will force us to exertion, until, tired of combating in vain against a spirit which victory after victory cannot subdue, your armies will evacuate our soil, and your country retire, a great loser by the contest. No, sir; we have made up our minds to abide the issue of the approaching struggle, and, though much blood may be spilt, we have no doubt of our ultimate success.” In these few lines the spirit, the gallantry, the tactics, the greatness of our armies from Lexington to Yorktown are both eloquently and accurately described.

And when a second cargo of the “detestable weed” entered the waters of Maryland, the friends of Mr. Stewart, a leading merchant in the colony, to whom the brig Peggy Stewart belonged, and to whom the cargo was consigned, appealed to Charles Carroll for advice and protection. The First Citizen was ever consistent. Was not the importation an offence against the law? Was not the majesty of the people insulted? To export the tea to the West Indies or back to Europe was no adequate reparation—what if Mr. Stewart was a friend of his?… “Gentlemen, set fire to the vessel, and burn her with her cargo to the water’s edge!” With sails set and colors flying, she floated, a sheet of fire, amid the shouts of the people on shore.

Besides the powerful promptings of a heart burning with love of country, Charles Carroll felt moved to deeds of heroism and self-defence by motives of equal, if not superior, importance. He became, nay, he seemed to feel that he was, in the hands of Providence, the chosen champion to assert Catholic rights and liberty—ay, might we not look upon him as the O’Connell of America in the eighteenth century? It can be proved beyond all doubt that the Catholics of the colonies placed great trust in him. Surely he became their representative. There was power in his name. He had become a leading genius, inspiring with wise resolves, and determination to carry them out, those valiant men of his faith who had clustered around the Father of his Country, or were admitted to the councils of the nation, or formed part of the rank and file in the American army, or had it in their power to swell with generous hands the national resources. This power of Mr. Carroll was felt even outside the pale of his own church. The case of the Peggy Stewart is one to the point.

Another and far more important illustration of his power is the following: Thomas Conway, a meteor of sinister forebodings, with his plots of disaster and ruin, has defiled a very short page of American history. Yet, brief as his career was in this country, it worked mischief. “Conway’s Cabal” is well known. It is well known how the despicable adventurer was bribed into a conspiracy against Washington in favor of an unpopular superior officer. Charles Carroll was a member of the Board of War. In that not removed; and under God’s favor was not George Washington the chosen leader, the appointed conqueror, the Moses of his day, the Josue of his people? Who was there to take his place as the first over those fierce legions of sturdy and resolute assertors of a nation’s life?

We must be allowed here to transfer to these columns, in words far more eloquent and true than we could ever command, both the source and the development of the ideas to which the deeds of those two men in the infancy of the nation has given rise in our mind.

In a dialogue between himself and a mysterious apparition on the threshold of that Temple whose entrance was forbidden to the Emperor Theodosius, Frederick Faber, yet an Anglican, thus addresses his companion:

“Do you not think that we should be in a more healthy state if there were a greater indifference to politics amongst us?”

“No,” replied he; “I know of no indifference which is healthy, except indifference to money. The church has a great duty to perform in politics. It is to menace, to thwart, to interfere. The Catholic statesman is a sort of priest. He does out in public the secular work of the retired and praying priesthood; and he must not be deserted by those spiritual men whom he is arduously, wearily, and through evil report conscientiously representing.”

Could modern publicist ever utter words more squarely tallying with the circumstances of our own times?

We have followed our hero only to the performance of his first acts in the great drama in which the Ruler of nations had appointed him to bear such important parts. Charles Carroll, in his adjuncts and circumstances, as regards both his cast of religion and politics, stood alone among his peers. Much he had to destroy ere he could build. But he addressed himself to his work with well-appointed tools, a clear mind, a steady hand, a glowing heart, and an immovable reliance in Him who hath said that “unless the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it; unless the Lord keep the city, he watcheth in vain that keepeth it” (Ps. cxxvi.) Thus appointed, he never faltered. On, on he advanced, step after step; stretching forth himself to those things that were before him, he pressed towards the mark, until he had received the prize.

More than onescore years and ten he labored as man never did labor for the well-being of his

We well remember how, in days long passed away, old men who had known him in the days of his manhood were wont to speak of him; how that heart, so noble and so pure, fondly watched the healthy growth of that tree of liberty to plant which he himself had lent a strong hand. These men would tell how the ripe and veteran statesman felt as much zest in the enjoyment of surrounding events as when, a boy and a youth, he applied himself to literary studies, or pursued the more arduous acquisition of scientific lore in the halls of philosophy or in those of law and jurisprudence. His was an equanimity of character seldom witnessed in man. And that placid, calm bearing which made his countenance the mirror of a soul preserved in patience and perfect in self-control never forsook him to the very last hours of his life. A very old member of the Company of Jesus, a professor and superior of the Georgetown University, has more than once related, within hearing of the writer, that the appearance of Charles Carroll riding into the college enclosure, on a docile and yet lively pony, when the great patriot had already overstepped the fourscore years of life, conveyed the impression of a youthful and innocent old age, so full of charm and gravity, pensiveness and gayety, authority and condescension, that it was felt indeed, but could not be described. It was the reflection of a past without reproach, and of a future without fear. His very carriage, the manner of his conversation, were an embodiment of his last words: “In the practice of the Catholic religion the happiness of my life was established!” Holy words! Sublime expression of the hopes of Christianity! May the example of such a man never fail, and be for ever the mould in which the young American spirit should be cast! Providence seems to have granted him so long an existence because he was the purest of the Revolutionary patriots, and he wished his example to last the longest!

After his death no page was ever written to vindicate his character or plead in behalf of one single shortcoming! No word of merciful forgiveness was heard at his grave. His peers, his descendants, had naught to forgive. With one voice of acclamation from one end of the country to the other, amid wreaths of unspotted lilies and fragrant roses, his name was emblazoned on the fair escutcheon of the American nation as the name of

THE CHRISTIAN KNIGHT WITHOUT FEAR AND WITHOUT REPROACH.

On the shield of this untrammelled

Not by the ties of blood alone were those two souls knit to one another, like David and Jonathan of yore; but inspired with love of country, and deep, holy, unswerving affection for the church, they fully appreciated the resources, moral and physical, which with proper culture would make of this land a favorite portion of the mystical Vineyard and the asylum for the oppressed. John within the sacred enclosure of God’s tabernacle, Charles in the halls of legislation, they worked in different departments, yet with one accord, the former to give the great garden fit husbandmen, and provide it with every appurtenance in nurseries of virtue and learning; the latter to lead the instincts born with a people, purified by trials and trained to justice, into a current which, swelling in its course within the bounds of Christian discipline, would, the one directing, strengthening, hallowing the other, run to endless days in great majesty and overwhelming power.

Charles outlived the archbishop by many years, and witnessed the triumphs of the Redeemer’s spouse to the achievement of which his great kinsman had devoted the resources of his extraordinary mind, the most tender and inviolate affections of his exuberant heart, and the untiring exertions of a long apostleship.

And here we feel as if we may lay down our pen and look upon our task as accomplished. We have endeavored to be the faithful limner of a character noblest among the noble, the pride and the guide of our Catholic laity in the American Church.

How grand that figure loometh in the galaxy of our greatest men! Great and grand, pure, unselfish, guileless, wise, loving, he stands on a pedestal of imperishable renown, religion blended with wisdom, charity with prudence, firmness with condescension!… When shall we look upon his like again? Yea, the memory of his deeds is fresh, and his many virtues as a Christian and as a statesman are even mirrored in the lives of many noble, devoted, valiant followers—bright examples of true patriotism and golden righteousness to our rising youth, on whose stern vigor, unfaltering courage, and sterling virtues mother church will lean for comfort and defence—a youth called, may be, to fight even fiercer battles than our great ancestor, their shining model, had to meet; battles that will need stout hearts, level minds, souls prompt in bold resolves. But the God of yesterday is the God of to-day; and with Charles Carroll in the van our gallant youth will advance to the battle, sure also of the victory.

THE CATHOLIC SUNDAY AND PURITAN SABBATH.

“Mamma, what kind of a place is heaven?” inquired a boy, after a two hours’ Sunday session in a parlor corner, with the Bible for mental aliment. “Why, my child, heaven is one perpetual Sabbath!” “Well, ma! won’t they let me go out sometimes, just to play?” Absurd as was his mode of expressing it, the boy was right as to the fundamental idea; and though he could not have given the steps by which he reached the conclusion, yet he judged well that the Almighty, when sending us into this world, did not decree that we should be perpetually miserable in it. The enforced performance of what was intended for a devotional exercise was, in his case, beginning to bear its legitimate and inevitable fruits of irksomeness at the outset, wearisomeness while it lasts, and loathsomeness at the end.

All who claim the name of Christians observe, with greater or less strictness, one day in seven as a day of rest and worship; the devotional exercises conjoined therewith, emanating from the authority of the church in the case of Catholics, and from the varying taste and fancy of the sect, congregation, or even, it would seem, of the individual, among non-Catholics. We propose in this article to inquire into the origin of the Catholic usage regarding the Sunday; the grounds and mode of its observance among Protestants; the difference between the sectarian modes of keeping it and that enjoined by the church. And as about every religious practice where variance exists there must be a right and a wrong—a method of observance consistent with authority and reason, and one either less so or entirely incongruous therewith—we shall try to find (apart from the authority of the church, which, though ample for us, would be of little avail for outsiders) on which side right reason is, and to show the absurdity of wrong custom in the matter.

The church tells us simply what the law of nature informs us of, the existence of God the Creator, and of our duty of worshipping him; but the time when all other things must be abandoned for this special purpose is subject to another law—the ceremonial—and as under the Mosaic dispensation that law was only a shadow of future good, to be laid aside when the true Light should descend upon earth, so the Jewish Sabbath, which was clearly established in the third commandment of the Decalogue, is no longer to be held sacred, but the first day of the week, which was consecrated by the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the descent of the Holy Ghost, is by her ordered to be kept holy; and she enjoins on all her children at least to hear Mass devoutly and to abstain from servile labor on that day. Having to provide, however, for all sorts and conditions of men, the church adds that reasons of necessity or transcendent charity will excuse us from either obligation. And this is all that our holy mother enjoins on the subject. As Catholics we accept and celebrate the Sunday wholly on her authority; and, à fortiori, we are not bound to any further observance of it than she dictates.

While it is clear from Holy Scripture that the apostles did meet with each other and with the early converts to Christianity twice on the Dominica or Lord’s day, yet there κυριακὴ, or Dominica). As we go on we find them frequently enjoin, both expressly and by clear implication, the obligation resting upon all Christians of meeting together on that day for participation in the Holy Mysteries. Later still we find them affirm this duty as of apostolic institution. To give a single example of many, St. Saturninus, before suffering martyrdom at Abitina, in Africa, in the year 304, under Diocletian, for celebrating Mass on Sunday, exclaims, in presence of his judges: “The obligation of the Sunday is indispensable; it is not lawful for us to omit the duty of that day!” From the earliest Christian records to the present day there is no break, no link wanting. Historians have clearly shown the practice of the faithful, and councils have firmly enjoined and reiterated it. So much for the origin and history of Sunday worship in the Church.

It is, of course, one of the cardinal principles of Protestantism—in fact, its sole raison d’être—that “the Bible is the only rule of faith and practice”; that everything therein commanded should be performed literally; and that whatever has no clear and direct warrant of Scripture is purely of man’s device, and, by consequence, of no authority whatsoever. All very fine, in words; but when we examine how the doctrine works in point of fact, we shall find an amazingly great discrepancy between the expressed faith and the actual, tangible practice. There has certainly been no considerable drain upon the reservoirs of our large cities in carrying out the injunction that “if ye wash not one another’s feet, ye have no part in me.” It is not, so far as we are informed, peculiarly characteristic of any sect of Protestants, when “smitten on one cheek,” immediately to “turn the other” for a repetition of the blow. No special alacrity has ever been shown, even by the straitest sects, in eager obedience to the command, “From him that borroweth from thee, turn not thou away”; and so far are they from obeying the absolute injunction of the Apostle James to “call in the priests of the church to the sick,” and to “anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord,” that they rave and rage against Catholics for doing so, and affirm it to be a superstitious observance. If St. Paul ever expressed himself clearly on any point, he certainly does so most unmistakably when he says that “it is a shame for a woman to speak in the church”; yet the sectarian world is now very largely supplied with “reverend” ladies, widowed, married, and maiden, who evangelize with great acceptance, and even officiate as regular pastors to various congregations throughout the country. It would seem, therefore, that the cardinal principle aforesaid

Now, the only texts of the New Testament that mention the Sunday in such way that it would be possible to draw from them any inference in regard to its observance are Acts xx. 7 and 1 Cor. xiv.. 1, neither of which declares the abolition of the ancient Sabbath or enjoins the observance of Sunday. But notwithstanding this fact, Protestants at large have accepted our Sunday, whether on tradition, which they reject; or on the authority of the church, which they despise; or, finally, of their own good pleasure—certainly not on Scripture, since it is not instituted therein. It is hardly worth while, owing to their paucity, to mention as exceptions the Sabbatarians, who maintain that Christians have no authorization for changing the divine institution of the Jewish Sabbath, and who consequently observe Saturday. Luther does not pretend any divine authority for the change, but takes for granted that “mankind needs a rest of one day, at least, in seven; and the first day, or Sunday, having prescription in its favor, ought not lightly to be changed.” He says elsewhere that “if any man sets up its observance on a Jewish foundation, then I order you to labor on it, to ride or dance on it, or to do anything whatever on it that shall remove its infringements on Christian liberty.” The Augsburg Confession pointedly says: “Those who judge that in place of the Sabbath the Lord’s day was instituted, as a day necessarily to be observed, do very grossly err.” Calvin says in his Institutes: “It matters not what day we celebrate, so that we meet together for the desirable weekly worship; there is no absolute precept”; and he adds that the sticklers for Sunday are “thrice worse in their crass and carnal view of religion than the Jews whom Isaias (ch. i. 13) denounced.” The doctrine of the English Reformers on the subject is most concisely and strikingly put by Tyndale, who, in his Answer to Sir Thomas More, thus speaks:

“As for the Sabbath, we be lords over the Sabbath, and may yet change it into Monday, or into any other day, ass we see need, or may make every tenth day holy day, only ass we see cause why. We may make two every week, if it were expedient and one not enough to teach the people. Neither was there any cause to change it from Saturday, but to put a difference between ourselves and the Jews; neither need we any holy day at all, if the people might be taught without it.”

Even in Scotland John Knox, who attached himself to the innovators with a bigoted zeal, did not pretend to find any Gospel warrant for what he was pleased to call the Sabbath; and Dr. Hessey candidly acknowledges that the strained sabbatarianism of Scotland is by no means to be attributed to him or his coadjutors, mentioning at the same time that Knox, when on a visit to Calvin at Geneva, found that eminent Reformer occupied, on the Sunday of his arrival, at a game of bowls! If, then, it be plain that the arch-innovators are not responsible for that peculiarly unlovely, rigid, and ultra-Judaic observance of the Sunday (the traces of which, growing fainter year by year, are yet plainly discernible in the laws, institutions, habits, and manners of the English-speaking portion of the Protestant world), whence did

Fuller (in whose pages much quaint and naïve information about the history of those transition days is to be found) tells us that the Puritans, “who first began to be called by that name about 1564,” and who dissented from the church of King Henry on the ground that the Reformation had not gone “far enough,” were, like all other renegades, anxious to distinguish themselves by hostility at every point to the camp they had abandoned. They preached that to throw bowls on the Sabbath “were as great sin as to kill a man”; to make a feast or wedding dinner on that day “were as vile sin as for a father to cut the throat of his son with a knife”; and that to ring more bells than one “were mickle sin as is murder.” Of this brood was Vincent Bownde, whose great work on the Observance of the Sabbath first appeared in 1595; and to this book, which began the polemical controversy on the subject, is due the rabid sabbatarianism of the English Puritans during the remainder of the reign of Elizabeth and the dynasty of the Stuarts. The Scottish Calvinists eagerly seized the cry, and from both sects (their influence, pertinacity, and numbers being much greater than those of the Anglican Establishment, which was itself, of necessity, largely tinctured by their practice), through our own hard-headed but harder-hearted Puritans of New England, who practised this unmitigating observance of the day with the same zeal of enforcement that they displayed in many other grimly ludicrous things, we of this age and country are still to a great extent under the sway of an intolerant and enforced sabbatarianism which the spread of intelligence and liberality is gradually wearing away, but which, after all, dies very hard. Just as no enmity is so envenomed, no hatred so intense, so in like manner no distinctive practice or usage disappears so slowly, as those originally engendered by religious faction. It was clear that no Scriptural authority existed for the abrogation of the Jewish Sabbath, and equally evident that the denial of the authority of the church destroyed for ever all ecclesiastical sanction for Sunday. There remained, consequently, no possible authorization for it but to insist that the mere meeting together of the apostles on that day (which, so far as anything to the contrary can be shown from Scripture, might have been accidental) constituted sufficient warrant; and next to regulate the observance of the day by the practice of the Jews with regard to the Sabbath. This Bownde did without hesitation. His book, gratifying as it did at once the malignity of the Puritans against the church, their envy of the established sect, and their own exclusiveness, became exceedingly popular, was largely read and quoted, and its influence remains to the present day. Here in the United States we yet retain traces of it in our laws; as, indeed, we still do of that other intolerance by which Catholics were, in former days, not allowed to hold civil office. In some of the New England States Sunday (or Sabbath, as they wrong-headedly insist on calling it) begins at sunset on Saturday; but in most of them it legally begins at twelve o’clock on Saturday night, lasting twenty-four hours. In some States contracts made on that day are Sunnan-dœg, equivalent to the Roman dies solis, so called in both tongues from its being anciently devoted to the worship of the sun. Sabbath is the Hebrew noun shabbāth (rest) from the verb shābath (to rest).

To ourselves and those who think with us that the state, in legislating about matters of religion, whether doctrinal or merely of exterior observance, is overstepping her proper limits—nay, who go further, and insist that government was no more instituted to educate our children than to feed and clothe them; that there is not an assignable ground for the former which would not be even more conclusive for the latter—it follows that all such legislation, from that of Cromwell’s Puritans and the Six Sessions of Scotland, down through the Blue Laws of Connecticut, to the last municipal regulation that allows no concert on Sunday unless it be a “sacred” one, and no procession accompanied by a band of music on that day, seems, what it really is, an absurdity and a monstrosity, a relic of odious strifes and bitter hates; and we would be glad, in common, we think, with sensible and tolerant men of all creeds, to see our statute-books rid of its remotest traces.

In speaking of any religious practice enjoined by the Catholic Church we have this advantage: viz., that what it is at one place or time it is in all places and at all times. The practice, then, of Catholics, in accordance with the church teachings above stated, is to hear Mass on Sunday, and, except in cases of necessity, to abstain from servile labor. Most Catholics also attend Vespers on that day, though there be no absolute obligation. We take no extreme cases, either of the very pious on the one side who for their souls’ sake may be said to make a Sunday of every day in the week, or of those on the other hand whose religion sits so lightly upon them that it is sometimes difficult to tell whether, beyond a feeble claim to the name of Catholic, they have any religion at all. Among the 200,000,000 Catholics of the world are to be found many of both descriptions. We speak, however, of the average. Among these, Mass and Vespers being over, there will be found no strait-lacedness; no tone peculiar to a Sunday, put on for that day, and not observable on other days; no hesitation in conversing about sublunary affairs of all kinds that can and may engage the attention during the week. Should a concert-hall be open, as in Europe is often the case, the Catholic hesitates not to go there, providing it be one to which he would go on any day—i.e., if it be a proper place for himself or family under any circumstances. He converses on business or for pleasure with his friends in the public gardens, at the cafés; with his family he visits other families with whom they may be intimate. He does not hesitate to write a business letter, to view a lot which he thinks of purchasing, or to take the railway train on that day. It is needless to go further. He has complied with the command of the church, and, not being a law unto himself spiritually, he invents for himself no obligations superadded to those of the church, which, in accordance with the commands of Scripture, he believes himself bound to hear.

In speaking of Protestant doctrine or practice we are, of course,

We give the doctrinal teaching of the Presbyterians on Sunday and its observance, or at least of so many of the different religious bodies going under that name as still subscribe to, and say they deduce their doctrines from the Bible via the Westminster Confession of Faith. It was formerly, and is to some extent still, the most generally received teaching on the subject of observing the Sabbath among English-speaking Protestants, who seem to have had a monopoly of spiritual information and an exclusive enlightenment on this whole matter. How much the bitter hatred existing between Roundhead and Cavalier had to do with the firm hold the said observance took on Puritans and their descendants is not to the present purpose to inquire. In response to the question, “How is the Sabbath to be sanctified?” we have this answer:

“The Sabbath is to be sanctified by a holy resting all that day, even from such worldly employments and recreations as are lawful on other days; and spending the whole time in public and private exercises of God’s worship, except so much as may be taken up in works of necessity and mercy.”

What was meant by this is sufficiently indicated by the legislation effected both before and subsequent to the meeting of the “Assembly of Divines.” We are assured by excellent authorities that in England, some twenty years after the appearance of Bownde’s book, people “dared not, for fear of breaking the Sabbath, kindle a fire, or dress meat, or visit their neighbors; nor sit at their own door nor walk abroad; nor even talk with each other, save and it were of godly matters.” In 1643 the Long Parliament enacted laws “for the more thorough observance of the Sabbath,” and caused to be burnt by the hangman James I.’s Book of Sports. In the next year the Court of Six Sessions forbade in Scotland all walking in the streets on the Sabbath after the noonday sermon; and soldiers patrolled the streets, arresting both old and young whom they should find outside their houses and not on the way to or from church. The gates of Edinburgh were ordered to be shut from ten P.M. of Saturday till four A.M. of Monday; and the case is on record of a widow who had to pay a fine of

It is told of an English lady of rank in our own day that, having procured some Dorking fowl, she some time after asked the servant who attended to them whether they were laying many eggs; to which the latter replied with great earnestness: “Indeed, my lady, they lay every day, not excepting even the blessed Sabbath!” Nor is the puritanic feeling still existing to a considerable extent among some few of the sectaries in Scotland badly illustrated by Sandie’s remark when he saw a hare skipping along the road as the people were gathering for sermon: “Ay! yon beast kens weel eneuch it’s the Sabbath day!” And the countryman passing on his way to “meeting,” who, when asked by a tourist the name of a picturesque ruin in the vicinity, answered: “It’s no the day to be speerin’ sic like things,” gives the reader an idea of certain peculiarities (formerly quite prevalent among Protestants, and still too common for the comfort of those who have many of the straiter sort for neighbors) which, we believe, are gradually but surely fading out before the progress of intelligence and with the wave of superstition and intolerance. For it must be borne in mind that the same Westminster Confession, relying too on Scripture, insists on the right and power of the civil magistrate circa sacra, contends that “he beareth not the sword in vain,” and that kings should be “nursing fathers” and queens “nursing mothers” to the church. We will do our modern Presbyterians the charity to believe that in subscribing to this instrument, they do so with some “mental reservation”; otherwise the cry against union of church and state that we so frequently hear from them would (when taken in connection with their former antecedents as a sect and their present professed standards) be quite unintelligible.

Now, of the mode of keeping Sunday followed by Protestants in Continental Europe we need not speak, nor of the practice of Anglicans in the same regard, save in so far as the latter have (principally through the lower or evangelical division of their body) been modified and influenced by its former subjection and present proximity to the Puritan element of the English population. In the countries of Europe claimed as Protestant, and as a very natural as well as logical result of the indifferentism taught by the so-called fathers of reform, Luther and Calvin, it is difficult for the tourist to discern in Prussia, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, or Norway, save by the greater number of people at the theatres, concerts, and exhibitions, in the beer-gardens, taverns, and other places of resort, whether the day be Sunday or not. Some, of course, attend church on that day, it being almost the only day of the week on which such service is ever held. Geneva and the non-Catholic cantons of Switzerland may be passed with the same description, which completely exhausts Protestant Continental territory in Europe. Nor of the mode of observing Sunday inculcated by the Anglicans in England can we say that it is at all overdone or puritanical. They have, at least, escaped the dismal parody of asceticism which distinguishes such of their Scotch neighbors as have any trace of the ancient practice left.[152] Let us Sabbath” in the “Plymouth Code”:

“This court, taking notice of the great abuse and many misdemeanors committed by divers persons profaning the Sabbath, or Lord’s day, to the great dishonor of God, reproach of religion, and grief of spirit of God’s people, do therefore order that whosoever shall profane the Lord’s day by doing unnecessary servile work, by unnecessary travelling, or by sports or recreations, he or they that so trespass shall forfeit, for every such default, forty shillings, or be publicly whipped; but if it clearly appear that the sin was proudly, presumptuously, and with a high hand committed, against the known command and authority of the Blessed God, such a person, therein despising and reproaching the Lord, SHALL BE PUT TO DEATH, or grievously punished, at the discretion of the court.”

In support of the same wretched Sabbath superstition the colonies of Hartford and New Haven issue the following edicts:

21. “No one shall run on the Sabbath day, or walk in his garden or elsewhere, except reverently to and from meeting.”

22. “No one shall travel, cook victuals, make beds, sweep house, cut hair, or shave on the Sabbath day.”

23. “No woman shall kiss her child on the Sabbath or fasting day.”

Omitting, for very shame’s sake, to say anything of No. 38 of Governor Eaton’s code, the reader will perceive in the above quotations to what absurd results logical consistency drives the fanatic when he becomes so by cutting adrift from the safe moorings of God’s church and trusts his salvation to the puny cockboat of private judgment. These Puritans had disclaimed the title of the church which originated the Sunday; they would not, like Cranmer, accept it as “a mere appointment of the magistrates”; so there was nothing left for them but to slur over the utter vagueness of its mention in the New Testament, and refer the whole observance back to Moses and the Third Commandment. In doing this why were they not consistent throughout? Why did they not let their lands rest in the seventh year? Why not observe the year of Jubilee ordered by the sanction of the same Lawgiver?

As before stated, Protestant practice, like the doctrines from which it emanates, is Proteus-like in form and phase; nor is the method followed in the observance of Sunday any exception to the general rule. But, upon the whole, the offspring of Knox, the descendants of Bownde, and the adherents of the straiter sects stand up more strenuously and make a stouter fight (not in argument, but by sheer persistence) for the rigorous keeping of the “Sabbath” than they have found it convenient to do for many doctrines and usages which, logically speaking, were of far more importance to Protestantism as a system. Our outward and visible life in the United States, in Canada, and in the British Isles is to this day, in this one matter, largely tinctured and deeply palavers of New England Societies, Plymouth Rock orators, Fourth of July and other spread-eagle speakers; and though their other doctrines and practices have vanished, leaving on their chosen ground scarce a trace behind, yet we are reminded of their spirit and quondam influence by the shackles of legal enactment in regard to Sunday observance; by the tumult that rises from certain classes of Protestants as silent custom or outspoken enactment from time to time sweeps out of existence some one or other of the trammels with which Puritanism, in its day of power, enthralled us. With what persistent zeal do they not agitate in the newspapers and petition authorities, municipal, State, and federal, against the running of the horse-cars, the rail-cars, and the mail steamers on the Sabbath! How terrible, in their eyes, are the Sunday excursions of the laboring people of our large cities! How clearly do they not perceive that liberty is a good thing only so long as everybody thinks and acts exactly as they do! Did they not prove that we lost the day on a famous occasion during the civil war by delivering battle on Sunday? How insanely anxious are they not to have the Almighty (their Almighty, that is to say) in some way constitutionally harnessed to the already hard-racked instrument which consolidates the government of these States! It is true that these men are the têtes montées of fanaticism of this sort, and we are far from affirming that a majority of their co-religionists go with them. Indeed, we know, from daily observation, that in many of the sects there exists but little of the spirit indicated, and that what remains is fast disappearing. But there exists enough of the embers to render walking amid them very annoying, and, with the assistance of a good breeze from the preachers, these embers may easily, and on small provocation, be fanned into a flame! Has not fanaticism displayed an unexpected vigor in connection with the question of opening our great Centennial Exposition on the only day on which the industrious poor can have the chance of seeing it without manifest injury to their temporal interests?

Our Protestant friend of the stricter sort awakes on the Sunday morning, bethinks himself of the Call, or Boston’s Fourfold State, and descends to the parlor; that is, he would descend but that he hears one of his boys whistling in an adjoining room, who must at once be reproved therefor, to be more fully punished next day.

Having thus effectually “borne testimony” and quenched the spirits of the juvenile members of the family, who, fully knowing what Sunday means to them, have learned experimentally that

he sits down gazing at his book, fancying, in some vague way, that he is doing God service (though how or to what end would seem indistinct, since, according to his most cherished doctrine, there is no merit whatever in good works). He hears with disgust the bell of the irreligious milkman, sees the unsanctified horse-car pass his door, the irreverent baker make his round, and notes the profane newsboy cry the Sunday papers. This last is the most afflictive dispensation of all, and the one against which he has most vainly and frequently petitioned, never thinking that, even on his own grounds, the real gravamen is in the papers of Monday morning, the work for which must necessarily be done on Sunday. Breakfast comes at length—eaten in solemn silence—the children being “hard up” for an apposite moral or religious observation, and fearful lest, should they say anything, it might be something mundane. Nor can the mother help them to diminish the gloom of the occasion, having been herself furtively engaged in eking out the shortcomings of the servant in preparing the meal, and painfully aware that, according to the family scheme of orthodoxy, she has not been sanctifying the Sabbath. Family worship (on this day longer in the prayer than usual) adds in no way to the general cheerfulness. Each boy and girl, supplied with a Sunday-school book of the stereotyped pattern and contents, and given to understand the enormity of even the desire to take a walk on that day, longs in the inmost heart that the day were over. Church time comes, when, with a warning that they will be expected to answer on the text, the sermon, and an admonition against drowsiness, all are trooped off to meeting, the parents bringing up the rear. Then ensues an hour and a half of dreary listening to what most of them cannot, by the remotest possibility, comprehend. More than likely some of them may have been overcome by sleep; in which case even the negative pleasure of apathy is taken away, and its place supplied by a fearful looking-for of judgment, either by rebuke or castigation. The dinner is, in want of hilarity, a repetition of the breakfast; for no secular idea may be expressed, and the spirit does not move the younger branches, in any special degree, to an interest in the rather languid remarks of the paterfamilias upon the theological tendencies of the sermon; said observations being delivered in his Sunday tone, compared with which a gush of tears would be exhilarating. Books are retaken; no cheerful game or romp among the children; Edwards on the Will in her hands, yet there is much reason to believe that the washing of to-morrow has more than once intervened to prove Edwards in the right; not to mention the occasion on which she caught herself recalling the trimmings of Mrs. X—‘s bonnet in the front pew. No visit from, none to, any family of their acquaintance; either would be a sin against the sanctity of the Sabbath! We need not visit the Sunday-school, to which the superstitious folly of the parents, fear of their fellow church-members, the Mrs. Grundyism of sects, or an unfounded belief that something valuable is learned there compels the parents to send their children. Probably most of our readers know how these things are managed; what is the causa causativa of a Sunday-school superintendent; what is the calibre of the young men who teach, and the object which takes them there. We all, of course, know and recognize the high moral aims as well as the literary and theological ability of the misses who form the grand staff of instructors in those institutions! But we must not be diverted from our sabbatarian Sunday.

Then follows a dreary tea, meeting and sermonizing again, from which two of the children, having gone hopelessly asleep soon after the exordium, are brought home in a dazed state, nor does a protracted bout of family worship much assist in arousing them therefrom; and then to bed! We suppose the father to be honest. Many such men are. We doubt not but many of the Puritans were sincere, and slit the ears of the Quakers with the serenity of good men engaged in the performance of a virtuous action. But let us put the question squarely to reasonable men: Will it be a matter of surprise if this man’s children, when they grow up, loathe and abhor all religion, thinking it all of a piece with that in which they were brought up—if they turn out, in short, what the descendants of the Puritans have become? Why, the writer is acquainted with a school, kept by a well-meaning man, in which, by tedious Bible-reading, hymn-singing, and long-winded prayers at the school opening and closing, the teacher is unwittingly the cause of more of what he would consider sacrilege, in an hour, than is heard of profanity among all the hackmen of New York on the longest day of the year; and his great object, which is to bring up Presbyterians, is thereby rendered as utterly futile as though he were an ingenious man doing his utmost to make infidels of them.

Curiously enough, people of this kind (we refer to the strict keeping of Sunday) are never satisfied with the liberty they enjoy (and which nobody wishes to curtail) of observing the day just as rigorously as they may desire. Not at all. There is no happiness or ease of spirit for them until by legal pains and penalties they can force you, me, and all their neighbors to their own peculiar way of thinking and acting. This was well illustrated by the Scotchman who, in telling how pious a people he had got among, said: “Last Sabbath, joost as the kirk was skailin’, there was a drover chiel comin’ alang the road, as happy as gin it was the middle o’ the week. Weel, sir, oor lads is a God-fearin’ set o’ lads, an’ they wur joost comin’ oot o’ kirk. Od! they yokit on him, an’ amaist kilt him.” This is, after all, the point of the matter. We neither can, by right, ought to have, nor have we any objection to any observance of the Sunday, however rigid or however much (to our mind) it may seem strained, overdone, and even ludicrous. That is the affair of the man himself, and should lie between his own conscience and his Creator, where we have no right to interfere. But we all want and have a right to the same privilege for own conviction, or want of conviction, that we cheerfully accord to him. Now, this such people as he never will accord to us so long as they can possibly prevent it. They never have done so in the history of the world, and, taking experience for our guide, we have no reason to suppose that they ever will. They prate largely of liberty of conscience, but that phrase means in their mouth liberty to think as you please, so long as you think with them. Though he is my neighbor, may not my daughter play the piano on Sunday on account of his tender conscience? Must I not, because he fancies the Sunday thereby desecrated, practise the flute? I do not attempt to interfere with his drone of family worship; why should he be eternally petitioning to stop the delivery of my letters, or to prevent my going down-town in the horse-cars on that day? I insist that he has as much as he is called on to do in attending to the affairs of his own conscience; that the contract is quite as much as he can conveniently and creditably get through with and I object (I think with reason) to giving up mine to his charge. I want a keg of beer in my cellar, or, it may be, a basket of champagne. Because he is virtuous, shall there be no more cakes and ale? Shall his being scandalized because I think proper to take a walk on Sunday confine me all that day to the house? Must his scruples of conscience prevent myself and family from entertaining our friends on Sunday? In short, must I always be on tenterhooks to know how his conscience regards every act of mine on that day? It would seem, though, as if that were just what my neighbor and his atrabilious friends have been aiming at. For, now that I think of it, they have been since ever I remember the self-same people, who have all along got up meetings, been active in urging petitions, and done their utmost to thwart every convenience or facility that for the past twenty-five years has been contrived for public accommodation on Sunday.

On further reflection, they are the identical individuals who have publicly and privately been marplots in every matter in our vicinage, during the same length of time, which did not fully recognize their little Ebenezer or Bethel as its fount and origin; and though they are possibly not to be convinced, yet it is highly important for these people and all their class to learn once for all that the days of Puritanism are gone, and that nowadays every man is responsible for his own acts to his Creator, and not to Mr. Jones next door, nor to the congregation with which he worships. We do not wish Mr. J—— to read his letters on Sunday, nor will we force him to patronize the street-car on that or willy nilly, they are bound to accept.

Thus it will be seen that our objection is not to our friends of the various illiberal “schemes of salvation” as individuals, nor to their practice of a peculiar and, to us, by no means an alluring primness of speech and gait on Sunday; but to their unwillingness to allow us, who see things differently, to follow our own convictions, and to their manifest determination that we shall, in the event of their ever having the power, be forced to adapt ourselves to their views and practices. This overbearing spirit seems to be inseparable from their pharisaic practice and its resultant prejudices, so that our dislike to both is well founded. As to the sanctification of the Lord’s day, they have an indisputable right to celebrate it just as austerely as may best suit them, though we think them grossly and foolishly wrong therein. They may call the day Sabbath, if they please, though we know that word to signify Saturday, and nothing else. But in return for this (not concession, for it is their right) we wish to suggest mildly that we also have certain inalienable rights; that among these, according to a highly-respectable and much-lauded document of which we sometimes hear, “are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”; and we modestly venture the additional suggestion that the municipal and other laws which already exist, and those which these people would fain enact, touching an enforced observance of the Sunday after their fashion, interfere largely with our just liberty and militate strongly against our chances of success in the pursuit of happiness.

Finally, which method of observing the day seems the more in accord with right reason? And here we wish the Protestant to lay aside a moment, if he can, the prejudice engendered by the tyranny of early education, surrounding usage, and personal habit. Our having been accustomed from early youth to a specific article of diet, clothing, or to a habit of any kind, physical or mental, does not necessarily make an entirely different usage wrong or the direct reverse sinful. If it be a command of God that Sunday shall be observed after the fashion of the ancient Jews with their Sabbath, we have nothing to say, except that even then we object to its observance being made a matter of legal enactment. No man was ever yet driven to the Almighty by fear of temporal pains and penalties; nor is any worship acceptable to our Creator unless it be a free-will offering of the heart. But when Protestants admit with us that the Mosaic dispensation is past and the type done away with in the fulness of that which it prefigured, we certainly cannot consider the law of the Pentateuch any more binding upon us in this respect than in regard to the rite of circumcision, the usage of polygamy, or the obligation of a brother to marry his deceased brother’s wife. But there is, in the New Testament, no warrant at all for the change of the day, much less any rule for its special observance; and consequently, on Protestant principles, any day in the week—indeed, any one in ten days, a fortnight, or a month—would answer the purposes of religion equally well; and as there is no Scriptural command, the mode of

We of course do not speak here of the Sunday, or of any one day in seven, employed (apart from religious purposes) solely for the purpose of recruiting the jaded physical energies of him who toils on the other six days in the week. The necessity for a periodical suspension of toil and labor depends on physical laws to which no reference is now made; and as the turmoil of trade and the competition of labor go on increasing, the necessity for the regular recurrence of a day of rest becomes more and more evident. The laboring classes are too numerous and too deeply interested in the preservation of the stated holiday for it ever to die out. In this view of the question—the purely physical one—the mode of observance would be simply a matter of discretion and utility, and would not come within the purview of the civil law at all; though the actual appointment of the day might, for the sake of uniformity and for many other reasons, very properly be considered as pertaining to government. We, however, speak of the day as a divine or an ecclesiastical institution, in which light its observance will depend upon the direct word of God or command of his church; but in no case will the civil law have any right to interfere either by dictum or permission.

But even supposing, for argument’s sake, what we by no means admit—viz., that the Sunday should be observed in accord with the prescriptions of the Pentateuch—we do not see how it follows that innocent and healthful recreation should be denied on that day, either to the young, for whom it is absolutely necessary, or to the middle-aged and the old, to whom it is at least desirable. There is a great and palpable distinction between recreation and labor. The latter is forbidden on the Sabbath in the Decalogue; but does the former stand in the same case? The words are: “On it thou shalt not do any work.” It does not say: “On it thou shalt take no recreation, nor shalt thou play.” It is one thing to say to the hod-carrier or the navvy that he shall not mount the ladder with the heaped hod or ply the mattock and spade; and it is another and quite a different thing to say to either that he shall not take a walk in the suburbs, go with his family on an aquatic or rural excursion, or visit the “Exhibition buildings” on a Sunday. It is against such superstitious abuses, which had, in course of time, grown up on the authority of the sophistical Rabbins touching the Sabbath, that our Saviour so frequently and pointedly protests; and against the same or similar illiberal practices we now protest.

We Catholics say that the Sunday is like other holidays of obligation, of the same enactment, and on the some footing with them—i.e., they are all instituted by command of the church. Now, with the Sunday, as well as with the other church festivals of obligation, comes the duty of hearing Mass and refraining from servile labor; but the law of the church ceases at that point, and “where there is no law there is no transgression.” The Catholic believes the other days ordered by the church to be observed just as binding as Sunday; but it never enters his head to attempt to coerce Protestants either into the same belief or observance. His firstly fined, then whipped, and for stubborn persistence put to death for this; but in these degenerate days all I can do is to put every legal and social obstruction in your way that our decaying numbers but ever persistent determination will enable us to do. Alas for the days that are gone!”

Now, with the parents on either side we have little to do. The mind of the Catholic is made up; his conscience is informed from the precepts and instructions of the church; and we have no desire to change his views or practice in the premises. And, in the case of his opponent, there are few tasks so hopelessly wanting in results as that of convincing a man against his will; as that of trying to surmount religious prejudice in the adult. But we put it to fair reason, to common sense, to the community (which has a manifest interest that its members shall be under the influence of some religion, and not utter infidels), to answer: In which of the two families exists the stronger likelihood that the children will grow up stanch and ardent believers in religion? Will any one tell us that it will be in that in which a dark, overshadowing pall, under the name of piety, was made “to press the life from out young hearts”; in which every thoughtless, merry, or exuberant word or act of theirs was represented as sin “deserving God’s wrath and curse for ever”; in which no memory of youth connected with religion can be other than sombre, dismal, and remorseful? Or will it be in the Catholic family, where the child is taught, not merely in words, but in fact, that “my yoke is easy and my burden is light”; where, as he grows up, religious observance constantly appeals to him as a privilege, not as an infliction; where cheerfulness, mirth, and jollity are

The answer is plain. Statistics of the result, with children brought up under each set of influences, bear us triumphantly out; and, in fine, thankful as we are for the daily and yearly decrease in numbers and influence of those who maintain this rigorous observance of the Sunday, we shall be still better pleased, and it will be a happy day for this and the other English-speaking peoples among whom they ever existed, when the quibbling, narrow-minded, and sophistical principles and practices represented by such persons shall have been entirely stamped out beneath the onward march of tolerance and Christian charity.

THE ETERNAL YEARS.

BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE DIVINE SEQUENCE.”

CONSUMMATION.

We have spoken of the way in which the arch-enemy, the seducer of God’s children, is aping the mysteries of the still hidden future, according as his subtlety and his enmity direct him. But while his rage and cunning are devising new deceits for those who are not enlightened by divine truth, or who have hid their light under a bushel, our attention is called in a special manner to her whose office it is, and ever has been, to crush his head. Whenever and wherever the deceits of men and devils are putting out the light and wrapping the soul of man in darkness, there does the Virgin Mother come more openly and more directly to counteract the fatal influence. It has been reserved for the cold, matter-of-fact, utilitarian last half of the nineteenth century to see awakened in the multitude the simple and romantic faith in pilgrimages and in the childlike, pathetic histories of Mary’s appearances upon earth that lent such charm to the ages of faith. If the enemy of mankind seems to have more power allowed to him in the evil days on which we have fallen, so the Mother of fair love, from whose pure hands the divine odyle streams, is deigning to speak to children and childlike souls, showing herself to be the great channel of special graces, the medium of divine communications, and the sure refuge against Satan’s acted prophecy and pantomime of God’s loving intentions. “We will come to him, and dwell with him”—and Mary is the precursor and the channel now as she was then to his first coming, when he took flesh in her womb. The promise to the individual soul is the promise to the church: and vice versa. The revelation of God in the church is also the life of God in the soul—the two are bound up in one. The life of the church is the guarantee of the life of the soul; it is the only sure foundation of such life; and the golden house, the domus aurea, of that life is devotion to the divine Mother. For as her presence, her sweet virginal life, was the necessary preliminary to the first coming of Christ, so will the Son of God not appear on his glorious second mission till Mary has come in the hearts of her people as an army with banners; all her prerogatives known and worshipped, all her position, flowing from her rights as the mother of the God-man, acknowledged and understood, and her court of angels following in her mystic footsteps upon earth, even as the bees follow their queen wherever she may choose to alight; and so preceding the second coming of our dearest Lord and ushering in the new glories of the kingdom of God upon earth.

The Holy Ghost could only be sent by Jesus glorified. The sacrifice of the cross needed to be accomplished and the precious blood

Time was when she might touch those blessed feet, not with her hands only but with her lips. Does he love her less now that her repentance is complete, and her salvation accomplished? Do not her rapid thoughts go back in one rush to the time when she sat at his feet unrebuked, whiling away the contemplative hours as she listened to his words and heard him say she had chosen “the better part”? Does she not with a pang of wounded love recall the moment when she wiped the precious ointment with her hair from the feet she had bathed with it and with her tears? But now he says, “Touch me not!” Yes, there is a change. But, O loving heart! it is not a change of loss but of gain. It is true there is an interim in which our beloved Lord is shrouded from us in too much glory for our human sense. The cradle-time of his sweet infancy is past, the grace of his youth, the glory of his manhood, and all the bitter-sweet ignominies of his cross. He has passed somewhat beyond our ken. He is risen, but not yet ascended. The first Mass[153] had not then been offered. The bloody sacrifice was over; the Eucharistic Sacrifice had not been celebrated by mere priestly hands, only by his own divine hands on Holy Thursday. Until Mass had once been said, there was something as it were incomplete in the condition of the church. The next touch, the only touch possible for us (save by a special command to St. Thomas and his faltering disciples), was in the Blessed Sacrament.[154] Now we touch him daily, and fear no rebuke. Jesus is ascended, and the Paraclete has come, and is ever coming more and more; and as the Holy Dove sheds the light of his wings upon the church and speaks through her utterance, so the privileges and the status of Mary are more revealed and more developed. We know more of our queen, and we are learning more of her court, and when both have taken their place in the hearts of men and have prepared for the reign of the Holy Ghost, when the angels have accomplished their mission, the far-off glories of which are hardly dawning on us, then will he make us know all that lies hidden in the deep mystery of his second coming, and God and man and angels will be united in the sweet bonds of Jesus, and through the mediation of her who is clothed with the sun, with the moon beneath her feet, and a crown of twelve stars on her virgin head.

This is the divine progression, and this is leading to the divine consummation.

* * * * *

Our task is drawing to a close. It has been our endeavor to encircle nunc fluens of time. Wherever we have fancied a contradiction to exist, or even a disparity, the error has lain in our partial vision and not in any shadow of change in the great God. He meant always what he means now, but mankind could not always equally bear that meaning. Therefore, as pitying his creation, he has condescended in past ages to pour the divine waters of revelation in diverse colored vessels; so that at one time the limpid liquid seemed to us of a different hue from what it assumed subsequently, until at last the waters of life were held in the crystal vases of the church, pure and white as they. We perceive and understand that the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob is the same God as our God of Bethlehem and Calvary. And the unity of God’s nature becomes ever more and more obvious to us as we study the characteristics of his government. At no period and in no place has the loving Creator forgotten the work of his own hands. And lest we could not find him, he has adapted the light he poured upon us to the weakness of our sight. In the unity of God and in his unchangeableness we find our own link to the past, and discover how we are the inheritors of former ages and the heirs of the years to come. We have indicated (we could do no more) the great fact that all is because God is; that he has and can have no other end than himself; and that it is exactly in that great truth that lies all our hope and all our salvation. For he is absolute goodness as certainly and as necessarily as he is absolute being. This being so, it is impossible for us to wish anything that he has made not to be. Dreadful as is the thought of hell, we could not wish hell were not—we cannot wish evil to exist. But we find it there, and we are silent because he has permitted it. We hate it, because, though he permits it, he hates it. But we see how it grows out of the free will of men and angels; and that, as all merit lies in deliberate choice, there could be no choice if virtue were a necessity. Evil is not, like good, an original and universal principle. It is the negation of that; and required, to give it an actual existence, the free power of deliberate selection, like that of the devils when they fell. We see as we read the history of the world, in the light thrown by the knowledge

As we enumerate all these things, what is the result we arrive at except one of illimitable joy and confidence—exultation beyond all expression in the might and majesty of our God—a hopefulness that exceeds language—a courage too large for a narrow heart, and a boundless, passionate yearning towards all living souls, that they may learn how great a God is our God, and how good and grand a thing it is to be alive and to serve him?

We can only measure life with any accuracy by the amount of thought which has filled it—that is, by the quantity of our intellectual and spiritual powers which we have been able to bring to the small aperture in the camera obscura by which to contemplate the ever-flowing eternity that lies beyond, and cut it up into the sections we call time.

Another example will show us how plastic is the nature of time. Take the life of an animal. We are inclined to give the largest possible and reasonable importance to the brute creation. It is an open question in which we see great seeds of future development, all tending to increased glory to the Creator and to further elucidation of creative love. Nevertheless it is obvious that brutes perceive only, or chiefly, by moments. There is, as compared with ourselves, little or no sequence in their perceptions. There is no cumulative knowledge. They are without deliberate reflection, even where they are not without perceptions of relations and circumstances, past or future. Consequently, they are more rigorously subjected to time than ourselves. Therefore, when we deprive an animal of life we deprive him of a remainder of time that is equal to little more than no time, in proportion to the degree in which his power of filling time with perception is less than our own.[155] All we have said tends to prove that time has in itself only a relative existence; it is a form or phase of our own being.[156] It is an aspect of eternity; the aspect which is consistent with our present condition.

From the way in which we have seen that God has made use of different races to work for the establishment and development of his church, we have opened a glorious vista of hope in the future, and we have rejoiced over the work to be done, and the laborers who at the eleventh hour shall be called into the vineyard, until even the fragments that remain shall be gathered up, so that nothing may be lost. We have dared to maintain, against modus operandi is inferior to him who employs it. We have as much difficulty in conceiving of God apart from his operations as we have in realizing eternity apart from time. And therefore is all honor due to the vast creation whereby we see the evidence of things not seen, and everything becomes to us “holy to the Lord.” It is for this reason that the true and intelligent love of nature is essentially the offspring of the Christian faith. The ancients cannot be said to have had it in any degree beyond a remote possibility in their intellectual nature. To them nature was a weird enchantress, hiding her terrible secrets with a jealous care. The silence and solitude of the forests and the mountains were full of a sense of horror. The separate trees held a lamenting and imprisoned spirit; the gay, sparkling streams were a transmuted nymph, which, like the perfumed shrubs and flowers, told some tale of the anger of the gods and their swift revenge. All that was inanimate inspired sadness. And when their pastoral tales rose into cheerfulness, it was that the lowing herds and bleating sheep formed a part. The sounds and motion of at least animal life were essential. The solitudes of nature were simply awful and terrific; for nature was then only a mystery to unredeemed humanity. She held deep secrets in her bosom, but the curse had set its seal upon them all, and she waited in long mournful silence for the hour when the human feet of the Creator should press her varied fields, and by his thrilling touch break the iron bars of her captivity, and teach her to tell of him in the whispered music of her thousand voices. In truth, her secrets were his, nor dared she break silence until he had come to set free the mystery of love for which she was created and instituted. But when Love himself had walked the earth, and mingled his tears—ay, and his precious blood—with the dews of his own creation, then the dark melancholy of nature grew into sweet pathos, and her solitudes were filled with secrets of his presence.

But what was then hidden from the pagan world could hardly be so to the first father of our race, he who out of the vast stores of his infused science named all created beings. When Adam saw the corn growing bright in thick array, and the vine bending down with purple fruit, surely he understood, as in Rosa mystica. And when to sad Eve, after her exile beyond the gates guarded by the flaming sword of the cherubim, the rose appeared bearing thorns among her five or seven leaved foliage, she guessed at the sacred crown and the divine wounds of the God-man, and at the sevenfold desolation of the mother who bore him. And what to us are the bright autumn hedgerow leaves dabbed with blood, not red now but tawny? Are they not tokens that he has trod that way and left the traces of his past glorious passion—past, because that blood was shed once for all, but still and for ever remaining; while the scarlet poppy takes up the theme, and in every corn-field, on barren tracks, and meeting the way-worn traveller by the road’s dusty side, reminds him that the sacrifice is renewed hour by hour the wide world over, fresh and life-giving as ever? Can the rich woodlands fail to bring before us the thought of him who gathered from the forests of his own creation the wood for his own cross? Can we sit beneath the dappled sunshine of the flickering boughs without remembering how it dared to lay its quick vibrating touch upon his sacred head, as he walked amid the olive groves of Gethsemane, but withdrew itself, and gave place to the cold moon before the scene of his great agony?

Surely these shadows are full of uncreated light; and from time to time the church retrims her lamps of dogmatic theology, and each time the light streams further down into the still, dim, uncertain regions of natural science, another precious secret is revealed, another ancient doubt dispelled; and matter and natural laws prove themselves each more and more to be the depositories of divine truth and the faithful creatures of the omnipresent Creator.

While acknowledging the force of law, we have denied that law can have an independent existence apart from a self-existing, self-conscious lawgiver, of whom it is the exponent. We have asserted the same as regards force, which is but another name for law, or, rather, which is law in posse. And we have stated that as science proves the absence of all direct contact in the material world, the world of atoms, so the only real contact is that of spirit on matter, of the divine Creator on his own creation. For he is nearer to us than we are to ourselves. All forces, all active powers, emanate from God. They are the evidences to us of his existence. They could as little exist without him as a shadow can exist without light. They are one in their nature, though they are diverse in their effects, because they are God’s constant touch on his own creation. He exists formally in all space and beyond all space. And everywhere he is the same: the immutable and absolute Ens. In his touch on his creation he gives rise to the active forces which virtually declare his being, and which are extended throughout space, but under a million varied degrees of being and a million varied forms. They

We have not enlarged upon this theme as we might have done. We have only pointed out to our readers how God’s touch on his creation is the only absolute contact that exists, and that science goes to prove the absence of all other, that is, of all material contact. We have abstained from trying to demonstrate how this truth sweeps away a hundred doubts respecting God’s ways towards man, and a thousand difficulties that might prove stumbling-blocks to our faith. We have desired no more than to put the thought, nay, we might say the fact, before them, and leave them to work out all its corollaries in love and devotion. We are not writing for sceptics but for those who believe, and would fain believe yet more surely, giving a reason for the faith that is in them, and dwelling in prayer on thoughts which reveal more of God’s character to the soul. We are to be perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect. That is, in our measure and degree, we are to aim at a faint reflection of the harmony, the proportion, the justice of God. To do this, and to aim at doing it, we need to form in our own minds an accurate though but a limited view of the character of God. And to effect this, we must as it were look at his character all round—for which purpose the past, the present, and the future are all-important to us; and we have to view him as he reveals himself to us in his creation, in his government, and in his promises. We have ventured to maintain that the whole of his creation is with a view to his Incarnation; that the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity is enhanced by his glorious passion and most precious death working our redemption; that it is glorified by his resurrection and ascension; and only completed in his sacramental presence; that as this sacramental presence is the one great fact virtually enclosing in itself all the others, as it is the coping-stone of the great mystery of the Incarnation, its lowest depth and greatest height, so is it the link that rivets the creation to the God-man, and the keystone to all the science of matter and dynamic force. For it is the divine epitome of all the laws that govern both, the reason of their being, and the last exponent of their rootedness in God. It completes the circle within whose bounds lies the entire cosmos as a globe environed by the serpent. It is the golden ring with which the divine Spouse has wedded himself to his church and to all the world, if they but know it. Words fail us. We cannot say enough; for these are thoughts too deep for words, and which seem to be rather darkened than expressed by language. And, like all that is greatest, they come to us from that which seems most simple and most hidden of all—a silken-curtained Tabernacle; and behind the little closed door lies all; every secret has its solution within the round white limits of the Host, for that Host is the great ultimatum of the creation, and the absolute consummation of God’s giving himself to man, while the latter is in the condition of viator.

We have entreated our readers not to be deluded by the dimness of the present times, but by prayer and solitary thought to strain their spiritual vision to behold the brightness

The time of figs was not yet. Nevertheless, he in his eternal justice cursed the fig-tree that yielded him no fruit, when he deigned to look up among the broad, scented leaves of its knotted branches. There are souls who are called to bear fruit out of season as well as in season, and woe to them if they fail in their higher and exceptional spiritual vocation. They are to be beforehand with time; they are to be, though in a silent, hidden way, the spiritual heralds of the future, the harbingers of God’s coming spring, the pioneers of prayer. They are the human messengers that are to prepare his way before him, in those never-ceasing conquests which multiply in proportion as our hearts are ready to receive him. They are to live, as all the great saints have done, in advance of their age. St. Francis was centuries before his time in the refinements of his exquisitely spiritualized nature; St. Vincent of Paul was the same in the creations of his charity; and St. Francis of Sales like St. Philip Neri in the blending of deep piety with the exigencies of modern life. The nearer we approach to the consummation, the more numerous will become the watchers of the night, the souls that are looking out for a new dawn, and who meanwhile are leading an inner life in advance of the present. God alone can know them, and those on whom he has bestowed the gift, though but partially, of the discernment of spirits. To others they will appear as men walking in a dream, visionary and unpractical. It matters not to them. Even here they have in a measure their great reward, for they can say, with their divine Master, “I have meat to eat which you know not.”