CATHOLIC WORLD.

VOL. XXIII., No. 137.—AUGUST, 1876.

Copyright: Rev. I. T. Hecker. 1876.

THE NEXT PHASE OF CATHOLICITY IN THE UNITED STATES.

The history of the universal church, replete as it is with miraculous conversions and great moral revolutions, presents no parallel to the growth and spread of the Catholic faith in this republic; and if we be allowed to forecast the future by the light of the past, we may without presumption predict for Catholicity a career of usefulness and glory, an influence far-reaching and all-pervading, on American soil, hitherto unequalled, even in the most triumphant days of our holy and venerable mother.

In the early ages of Christianity whole tribes and nations were won over bodily to the Gospel, not alone by the superhuman efforts of a comparatively small number of apostolic men, but incidentally by the attractions of the purer and higher order of civilization which everywhere followed their footsteps and resulted naturally from their teachings. The primitive missionaries were reformers of manners and governments, advocates of mercy and equity, promoters of peace, industry, and education, as well as expounders of divine law. They indeed realized the fabled power of Orpheus, and tamed the brute passions of paganism by the harmony of their lives and the melody of their doctrines.

Far different have been the circumstances which surrounded the first permanent introduction of Catholicity into what is now the United States. Though we can dwell with commendable pride on the devotion and self-sacrifice which characterized the Spanish and French Dominicans, Franciscans, and Jesuits in their arduous labors among the aborigines; and recall with deep gratitude the beneficent and indefatigable exertions of the zealous pioneers of our present hierarchy and priesthood, we cannot help feeling that we have had no national inheritance in the merits of those extraordinary men of the Old World, those confessors and martyrs, whose names shine forth with such resplendent lustre in the calendar of the saints of God.

We look in vain, also, for any great name, distinguished for political power or intellectual supremacy, among the humble immigrants who first raised the standard of the cross in the hostile atmosphere of colonial Protestantism. As in the crumbling yet still luxurious Roman Empire, the foundations of our infant church were laid on what, in a worldly sense, may be called the lowest class in the social scale, the poor, the simple, the neglected and despised. Wealth, fashion, and self-interest were opposed to it. A people shrewd, intelligent, and in their own way religious, were in possession of the country, and had neither the will nor the disposition to yield one jot to the professors of a faith which they had been taught to regard as debasing and idolatrous. Only a hundred years ago the Catholics of the United Colonies consisted of a few isolated groups, principally in Maryland and Pennsylvania, without influence, authority, or legal recognition. In the aggregate they counted about one in every thousand of the population, and, save some descendants of the original Maryland settlers, and a few private gentlemen who afterwards rose to eminence in the Revolutionary War, they were alike devoid of wealth and social standing.

Still, this very obscurity was their safeguard and defence. Though soon declared free by the fundamental law of the new confederacy, public opinion, or rather popular prejudice, was against them, and for many years after the achievement of our independence their numbers increased with more steadiness than rapidity. Recruits came from all quarters. Attracted by the guarantees presented by the Constitution, Catholics of various nationalities hastened to place themselves under its protecting ægis.

In 1810 the Catholics within the limits of the United States were estimated at upwards of one hundred and fifty thousand, and the clergy numbered eighty, or double the number reported in 1800. Twenty years afterwards the laity had increased to 450,000 and the clergy to 232. The hierarchy, which only dated from 1789, at this time reckoned thirteen bishops.

From 1830 may be dated the extraordinary growth in numbers, influence, and activity of the Catholic Church in this country. The tide of European immigration, which has flowed on with undiminished volume till within a year or two, then fairly began. Between that year and 1840 over 300,000 arrivals were reported from Ireland, 58,000 from France, Spain, and other Catholic countries, and 150,000 from Germany, a strong minority of whom may also be credited to the church. All these accessions, added to the native-born and already adopted element, brought the Catholic strength in the latter year to over one million, and swelled the ranks of the priesthood to 482, or one for every 2,000 souls.

Satisfactory as were these results, the next decade was destined to witness an advance much more magnificent as to numerical strength, and infinitely more salutary when we reflect on the quarter from which some of that strength was drawn.

The Oxford movement, as it was called, had already spread consternation among the Anglicans. Many of the ablest and most erudite scholars of Oxford University, wearied and dissatisfied with the contradictions and pretensions of English Protestantism, had sought peace and rest in the bosom of the church. Their writings and example produced a profound sensation wherever the English language was spoken, and nowhere a more decided one than in this country. Men who had formerly exhibited nothing but contempt or indifference for Catholicity, and some even who had displayed a marked hostility to the faith, eagerly read the works of such thinkers as Newman, and, as a consequence, guided by Providence, abandoned their favorite heretical notions and became reconciled to the church. This spirit of investigation and submission pervaded all classes, particularly the more studious, conscientious, and influential. Judges, journalists, artists, authors, physicians, ministers, and doctors of divinity openly declared their adhesion to the Catholic faith, and arrayed themselves beside the contemned and obscure Irish immigrant and his children. Many of the ablest publicists of to-day, not a few of the most energetic of the clergy, and at least one illustrious member of the hierarchy are the fruits of this sympathetic movement

Another cause which helped to swell the Catholic census about the same time was the annexation of Texas, which eventually led to the acquisition of New Mexico and California. The population of those Territories could have scarcely numbered less than two hundred thousand, nearly all of whom were Catholics. By a strange coincidence the sons of the Puritans, who claimed the land and the fulness thereof as theirs, were brought into the same fold and under the same jurisdiction simultaneously with the native Mexican, whose ancestors were Catholics before the keel of the Mayflower was laid.

German immigration, also, had assumed large proportions. From 1840 to 1850 the arrivals were 440,000, of whom it may be safely said one-fourth, or 110,000, were Catholics. This stalwart element sought what was then considered the far West-Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa, and the Territories—where to-day we find them and their descendants among the most devoted children of the church.

But all these influences combined did not equal in effect that produced by the tremendous exodus of the Irish people—a spontaneous movement of population unexampled in modern times. Though immigration from Ireland had steadily increased from the beginning of the century, it was only during the latter half of the decade of 1840-50 that it assumed its phenomenal proportions. Notwithstanding its political servitude, that remarkable island in 1845 presented the spectacle of a population as happy, moral, and law-abiding as any in Christendom. Her people had increased from year to year in a ratio unknown to less virtuous and more pampered lands. The voice of her great leader could at any time call together hundreds of thousands of her enthusiastic sons to listen to the story of their wrongs or to descant on the near approach of legislative independence, and dismiss them to their homes with the promptitude of a general and the authority of a parent. Father Mathew, of blessed memory, had exorcised the demon of intemperance, and counted his followers by millions. Agrarian crime and faction fights, those twin children of misgovernment, were almost unknown, and the soil, as if in unison with the general spirit of peace and harmony, never put forth such an abundance of agricultural wealth. In one night, it may be said, a blight came over all those fond hopes and bright anticipations. The food upon which three-fourths of the people mainly subsisted was destroyed, and Famine, gaunt and lean, suddenly usurped the place of generous abundance.

The destruction of the potato crop of Ireland in 1846-7-8 was undoubtedly the act of an inscrutable Providence; the misery, suffering, and wholesale sacrifice of human life which followed were the work of man. At the worst times of the famine there was always more than enough cattle and grain in the country to feed the entire population. Under a wise or just government a sufficiency of these would have been retained to supply the primary wants of the people; as it was, they were exported and sold in foreign markets to satisfy that most insensate and insatiable of all human beings, the Irish landlord.

Appalled by the suddenness and

Never were a people less prepared to encounter the difficulties and dangers which necessarily beset strangers coming into a strange land and among a community so different from themselves in manners, habits, and methods of living. Unlike the Germans and other Europeans, who had had leisure and means to organize emigration, the Irish of that memorable epoch acted without concert and without forethought. They had fled precipitately from worse than death, and brought with them little save the imperishable jewel of their faith. Fortunately, this proved to be for them even better than worldly store; it was their bond of unity and best solace in the hour of trial and disappointment which awaits most of those who come among us with exaggerated ideas of the wealth and resources of this country. Numbers of those helpless strangers paused upon the threshold of their new home, and helped materially to swell the already overcrowded population of the large towns and cities; but very many, the majority perhaps, sought the manufacturing villages of New England, the mineral regions of Pennsylvania, and the Western prairies.

Then began in earnest the labors of the resident priesthood, which, though reinforced by numbers of their brethren from abroad, were still hardly equal to the herculean task of providing for the spiritual wants of so vast a mass of people scattered in every direction. Some means, however, had to be found to reach and minister to those faithful though helpless outcasts; some roof under which the holy sacrifice of the Mass might be occasionally offered up and the essential sacraments of the church administered. The churches already built scarcely sufficed for the Catholics settled in the country, yet here was a new congregation arriving in every ship. In the large centres of population the difficulty was not so great; for with the increase of priests the number of Masses said in each church was multiplied, while the sick and the penitent seldom went unattended or unshriven. In the smaller towns and remote settlements the case was far different. Private houses, “shanties,” barns, ball-rooms, court-houses, lecture-halls, markets, and even sectarian

But the clergy had other and scarcely less sacred duties to perform. Such heterogeneous masses of humanity huddled together for weeks in the foul holds of rotten emigrant vessels, where was germinated the seeds of disease sown by famine and pestilence, could not but bring infection to our shores. From Gros Isle in the St. Lawrence, and along the Atlantic seaboard to New Orleans, the deadly ship-fever polluted the atmosphere, and hundreds who, flying from starvation, had braved the dangers of the ocean, found that they had endured those hardships only to die within sight of the promised land. One prelate and several heroic priests fell victims to the dire pestilence, but others were found equally zealous, not only to soothe the last moments of the dying with the consolations of religion, but to comfort and care for the helpless survivors.

At the beginning of the second half of the century we find the Catholic population of the country estimated at two and a quarter millions, the clergy at eighteen hundred, or one to every thirteen hundred of the laity, while the number of dioceses had increased to thirty-three.

Had immigration entirely ceased at that time, and the growth of the Catholic population been limited to its natural increase, the labors of the priesthood in ministering to the spiritual wants of so large and scattered a body would have more than taxed the energies of a less devoted class of men; while the pecuniary resources of the laity, always so generously expended in the building of churches and asylums, could have to a certain extent borne the unusual draft on their means which the exigencies of the times demanded. But it did not cease. On the contrary, it continued for many years with augmented volume. The causes which had impelled such vast multitudes to renounce home and country for ever were still active. From 1850 to 1860 the immigration from Europe was reported as follows:

From Germany, 950,000; ¼ Catholic, 237,000[159]

From France and other Catholic countries, 105,000; ¾ Catholic, 78,750

From Ireland, 1,088,000; ⁹⁄₁₀ Catholic, 979,200

Total in ten years, 1,294,950

Thus another million and a quarter were added to the church in America, making a grand total at the end of this decade of four and a half millions of souls under the charge of 2,235 priests, or one for every 2,000 persons. Thus we see that, though the priesthood had received an accession of 435 members in ten years, the labors of each individual had been almost doubled.

Incredible as these figures may seem, the next decade showed little diminution in amount. From 1860 to 1870 the Catholic immigration, calculating on the above basis, may be set down as follows:

From Germany, 268,000

“ France, etc., 51,000

“ Ireland, 841,000

Total in ten years, 1,160,000

If to this reinforcement be added those who have come among us since 1870, we find that the past fifteen years have increased the Catholic census by about one and a half millions from abroad, and materially helped to bring it up to what, on the best authority, it is said to be in this year of grace, 1876—seven millions, or about one-sixth of the entire population.

Fortunately for the interests of religion, the increase in the number of priests kept pace with the wonderful augmentation of the laity. In 1785 there was one priest to every 1,000 laymen; in 1808, one to every 1,500; in 1830, one to every 1,900; in 1840, one to 2,000; 1850, one to 1,200; 1860, one to 2,000; and in 1875, one to every 1,300, or 5,074 priests of all ranks.

Yet, numerous as had been the accessions to the priesthood in those years, the duties and responsibilities of the clerical order increased in greater proportion. The millions of strangers who had sought homes among us, while they preserved their faith and brought with them the grand moral lessons learned in the Old World, could not bring their churches, schools, and asylums. These had to be provided here, and the American priest thus became from necessity a builder and a financier, as well as a teacher and instructor of his people. When the abnormal Irish immigration began in 1847, we had but 812 churches, several of which were small frame buildings, hastily constructed and totally inadequate to the wants even of those who erected them. Many of those have since been pulled down, reconstructed, or rebuilt, and replaced by substantial brick or stone edifices. This in itself was a work of considerable merit; but when we reflect that since then no less than four thousand three hundred new churches have been added to this number, we are lost in astonishment at the magnitude of the work performed in so short a space of time. Nor are those modern buildings generally of that rude and fragile class which were so common fifty years ago, but, on the contrary, most of them are excellent specimens of solid masonry and architectural skill. The noble cathedrals especially which adorn Baltimore, Albany, Buffalo, Philadelphia, Pittsburg, Cincinnati, Boston, and other sees, are models of design, durability, and grandeur of which any country or age might be proud. The same may be said, but with greater emphasis, of the Cathedral of St. Patrick now nearly completed in New York—that grand epic in marble, from the tall spire of which the glittering emblem of our salvation is destined at no far distant day to shine down upon a million faithful followers of the cross.

Thus it may be well said that the past quarter of a century was the era of church-building as well as of increase. But the vast energy so displayed was not employed solely in one direction. While thousands of temples have arisen to the honor and glory of God, his afflicted creatures, the sick, unfortunate, and helpless; the foundling infant and decrepit grandsire; the orphan bereft of its natural protectors, and the worse than orphaned—the pariah of her sex—all have been cared for, fed, clothed, consoled, and housed. Eighty-seven hospitals and two hundred

It was formerly said that the Catholic Church could not prosper under a free government; that it needed the help of kingcraft and despotic laws to enforce its decrees and sustain its authority. We have proved the fallacy of this calumny pretty thoroughly—so conclusively, indeed, as to excite real or pretended alarm among bigots of all sects and of no sect at all. No people are more at home and thrive better in all respects in this land of liberty than Catholics.

It has also been asserted that we are the enemies of enlightenment. Our hundreds of convents and academies, and thousands of parochial schools, might be considered a sufficient answer to this falsehood. But, in the providence of God, the time has come when we are called upon to take a further step and demonstrate that in the domain of the highest intellectual studies we are a match for the best of our opponents.

We have no means of ascertaining the exact number of schoolhouses which have been built during this period; probably one thousand would not be too high an estimate, and we are inclined to think that there are even more. In the large cities most of the churches have a building for educational purposes attached; in the rural districts the basement is generally used. There are also a number of what are called charity schools, generally under the charge of some of the teaching orders, of which New York alone boasts twenty-four, erected at a cost of four million dollars. There are six hundred and forty academies and select schools for females, with an average attendance of sixty thousand pupils, for whose accommodation, as well as for the nuns and sisters who watch over them, an equal number of buildings, some very extensive and costly, have been provided.

Though our seminaries and colleges do not show a proportionate ratio of increase, either in numbers or attendance, the result, if taken by itself, is highly satisfactory. In the last century only two of them existed in the United States; up to 1850 ten more were added; in 1874 we had eighteen theological seminaries, attended by 1,375 students, and sixty-eight colleges with over ten thousand pupils and about six hundred professors and teachers.

With all this it must be confessed that, as far as human knowledge is concerned, the Catholics of the United States are as a body behind their non-Catholic fellow-citizens. We acknowledge this inferiority, and can satisfactorily account for it. Under the peculiar difficulties of our position it became a matter of primary necessity that our co-religionists should first have churches wherein to worship God, asylums and hospitals to shelter and succor the weak and afflicted, and free schools for the training of the children of the poor, whose faith and morals were endangered by the plan of instruction pursued in the schools of the state. But now that all these wants have been supplied as far as practicable, and that we may safely confide to posterity the task of completing the work already so far advanced, our next duty plainly is to provide for the generation growing up around us facilities for a higher and more thorough system of education than has yet been attempted in our colleges and academies, equal in all respects, if not superior,

Remembering what has been already wrought by the zeal and unswerving perseverance of the Catholic body in other directions in the past, we should look forward with undiminished courage and confidence to the future. If with a disorganized, unsettled people like ours, generally poor in the world’s goods, and with never-ending personal demands on their limited resources, we have been able to build and maintain so many churches, institutions, convents, and schools in so short a time, what may not be expected from the same class, now that they are regularly domiciled, and a portion, at least, of the wealth that ever rewards industry and application is fast becoming theirs?

What is wanted in the first instance, in order to give tone and direction to the young Catholic mind, is a Catholic national university, one on a scale comprehensive enough to include the study of all branches of secular knowledge—law, physics, medicine, languages, art, science, literature, and political economy. Such an institution, properly founded and conducted, would find no lack of public patronage. We are satisfied that American parents, whether the descendants of the old Catholic settlers or those who have embraced the faith in later years, instead of sending their sons to Yale or Harvard, to France or Germany, would much prefer to have them educated at home in a university where their religion would be neither a scoff nor an obstacle in the way of their preferment, and where they would grow up American citizens, in fact as well as in name. The German element, also, which constitutes so large a portion of the Catholics of the West, would find in it an adequate substitute for those celebrated homes of learning they left behind in Fatherland, and, under its fostering care, would continue to develop that spirit of profound thought and critical investigation so characteristic of the Teutonic genius.

But the Irish and their descendants, who will long continue to form the majority of the Catholic population of this republic, would derive most benefit from such an establishment. That subtle Celtic intellect, so acute yet so versatile; fully capable of grappling with the most difficult problems of human existence and social responsibility, yet so replete with poetry, romance, and enthusiasm; so long repressed, yet never dimmed, would, we feel assured, spring into life and activity beyond the conception of most men, were such an opportunity presented. In the three centuries following the conversion of the Irish their schools were unsurpassed throughout Christendom in extent, numbers, and attendance. The whole island, in fact, seemed to be turned into one vast reservoir of learning, from which flowed perennial streams of Christian knowledge over the then sterile wastes of semi-civilized Europe. The number of missionaries and teachers which Ireland produced in that most brilliant epoch of her history is almost incredible, and her zeal and energy in the dissemination of Catholic doctrine, even in the most remote parts of the Continent, became proverbial.

Civil wars, long, bloody, and desolating, destroyed her institutions and scattered her libraries, while penal laws of preternatural ingenuity and cruelty completed the work of desolation

Perhaps now is the most fitting time for the beginning of a work such as we have endeavored briefly to intimate. From all appearances the flood of immigration which, for twenty or thirty years, has flowed so steadily yet strongly, is fast receding into its former narrow channels. We shall have still, we trust, many foreign Catholics coming among us each year to help to develop the resources of our immense country, and to find peace and freedom under our Constitution; but we need not expect, during this century at least, such an influx as was precipitated upon us by the dreadful Irish famine. The Catholic population henceforth will present a more stable and homogeneous character, and will have more leisure to devote a portion of its wealth and energy to purposes other than erecting buildings and providing for the necessities of homeless and churchless millions. Churches and charitable institutions will, of course, continue to be built to meet the wants of our ever-increasing numbers, but their augmentation, being the result of a normal growth, will be more gradual and natural. We will, in other words, have more time to devote to education and the cultivation of the refinements and accomplishments of life, without in any wise neglecting the primary duties of Christians.

We have had our epochs of immigration and church-building, of extraordinary growth in popular education and incredible effort to supply the wants of the poor and friendless. We are now entering upon an era of mental culture, higher, more elaborate, and more general in its application than it was possible, or even desirable, to initiate amid the distractions and occupations of the busy past. But, ardent as is our desire to see such an important step taken in a direction which we feel would lead to certain success, we only look on it as a means to definite and ennobling ends, and not as the end itself. Mere mental training, dissociated from moral tuition and habits of manly thought and action, would be worse than useless; it would be dangerous alike to the student, to society, and to the cause of morality and religion. To develop the intellect merely at the expense of those greater attributes of the soul in the proper cultivation of which consists the real ostensible difference between man and the brute creation, would be to multiply infinitely the number of educated imbeciles of which the world has already too many.

It cannot be denied that the object of all education ought to be truth, a knowledge of God and of his works, that in the study of them we may learn to love and worship his holy name. Though the custodians of the divine gift of Pentecost are few, as children of the church we may all become sharers in the ineffable benefaction conferred on the apostles. Truth is one and indivisible,

Unfortunately for religion and civilization, the last three centuries have been remarkable more for confusion of ideas on this important subject, and utter perversion of the natural laws, than any other period in the whole Christian era. The war engendered by the Protestant Reformation, the atheistic philosophy of the Encyclopedists, the destructive dogmas of the secret societies, and, in our own day, the gross materialism of the new school of scientists, have so clouded and bewildered, so perverted and debased, the human understanding that the world has come to look upon mere brilliancy of diction, novelty of opinion, and audacity of assertion as the highest evidences of intellectual superiority. Modern Europe, from end to end, is the victim of this lamentable delusion, and our own otherwise favored country is rapidly falling under its malign influence. Shall this foul plague be allowed to enshroud us all, and blight with its deadly breath the future of our young republic?

If such is to be the case, we may read our fate in the past decadence of the most enlightened nations of the Old World. From the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation they have gone steadily, almost blindly downwards, until, as to-day we see, they have ended in blank infidelity. The favored intellectual lights of the last three centuries in Protestant Europe have been men without faith and without conscience, who, with the help of Protestant governments, have sapped and undermined and utterly destroyed even the remnants of the faith in Christianity and a divine Creator of this world that still lingered here and there about the old homes of Christian learning; and literature may be said to have been given over to the service of the enemies of Christ and of his church.

If we contemplate the condition of modern art, we witness degeneracy almost as lamentable. Men wonder that no great sculptors and painters have arisen since the Italian, Spanish, and Flemish schools of the middle ages ceased to exist. Since then we have had artists who draw as well as, and who understood anatomy better than, the best of the old masters; but the inspiration, the spirit that made the figure on the canvas seem to live, is wanting.

The best of our modern painters are but copyists of nature, of landscape, man, or animals. They display no creative power; they are incapable of producing anything original, anything like the least of those historic pieces, those almost superhuman groups, which illustrate in a thousand varieties the incidents in the earthly career of our Redeemer and his holy Mother. Why? Because the mind must first be able to conceive in all its integrity and beauty what the hand is designed to execute. No matter how exact the eye or how deft the touch, if the imagination be not purified by religion and guided by truth, it is vain to attempt to represent on canvas or in marble pure, exalted types of excellence of which we are incapable of forming within ourselves more than an indefinite conception.

When we assert this we are well aware of the magnitude of the work to be accomplished and the apparent paucity of the laborers to execute it. But our confidence in the future is sustained by experience. Whoever would have said at the beginning of this century that this hundredth year of our independence would find the Catholics of the United States counted by millions, and their priests, churches, and schools by thousands, would have been looked upon as a dreamer or a rash enthusiast. Who shall say what the beginning of the next century may not be destined to usher in?

As the church is the divinely-commissioned teacher of the world, we desire to see our young Catholic men, the flower of her children, whether they be destined for the liberal professions or otherwise, sent forth into society armed at all points, prepared not only to sustain and defend the faith that is in them, but to demonstrate in their own persons and by their individual conduct how infinitely superior is secular knowledge even when based on eternal truth, to the vague theories and absurd speculations of those who foolishly seek to fathom the designs and comprehend the laws of God while denying the very existence of the Creator of all things.

Any system of education which falls short of this would be worse than none at all. To confer a degree on a student, and allow him to enter the world with the éclat of a university course to give his opinions a certain intellectual character, without qualifying him to uphold the honor of his Alma Mater and the integrity of his creed, would of course be an act of egregious folly. As well might we uniform a soldier and send him into action without arms, or entrust our lives and liberties to the keeping of a statesman of whose loyalty and fidelity we were not fully assured.

Years ago it was confidently asserted by a prominent dissenting minister of this city that the United States would eventually become the battle-field upon which the contest for permanent supremacy between Protestantism and Catholicity would be waged. We agreed with his views then, and everything that has happened in the religious world since confirms the sagacity of the remark. We desire nothing better than that this struggle, if it have to come, shall take place here,

Since rebellion against God’s law first raised its crest at Worms in 1521, the church has never had so favorable an opportunity of exposing the hollowness, rottenness, and insincerity of the leaders of dissent in all its forms as that presented in this country and generation. In older nations where Protestantism still flourishes it is as the mere tool of the state, the plaything of royalty, without the support of which it could not subsist. Supposing the British Parliament, in the plenitude of its power, should disestablish the Anglican Church, confiscate its property, and imprison its prelates, as Bismarck has done to the Catholics of Germany; how long would that luxurious Establishment remain in existence? The same may be said of Lutheranism in Prussia and Calvinism in other parts of Europe. They are of the earth, earthy, and require the aid of the temporal arm to protect them against their more logical though more destructive offshoots, the free-thinkers and revolutionists. Here, on the contrary, though the sects have through their politico-religious combinations an undue influence in public affairs, they have no appreciable direct state patronage, and must stand or fall by their own merits.

Now, it is well known and pretty generally acknowledged that sooner or later the Catholic Church has always suffered from its connection with the state, even when the alliance seemed to be more than favorable to her. From the very nature of her organization she cannot long be made an instrument of despotism or of selfish ambition. In non-Catholic countries she has generally been persecuted and proscribed: in others she has been as often the victim of impertinent interference and injudicious patronage on the part of temporal rulers. In none has she been free to carry out her divine mission; and, sad to relate but true nevertheless, on all the broad and fair earth the only spot where the church of Christ may be said to be unshackled and disenthralled is this young republic of the West.

This fact is in itself a great gain for us in view of the opposition we may expect in the time to come; but there are others which, though less apparent, are well worthy of consideration. Few persons who have not devoted special attention to the matter can form an estimate of the radical change which has been taking place, gradually but surely, in the American mind regarding Catholicity. Fifty years

The rural American, who, with all his deficiencies, is usually a fair-minded and reflective man, being thus brought face to face with the things he had been taught to loath, begins to feel the mists of prejudice lifted from his judgment, and ends by respecting the devotion and unaffected piety of those he lately contemned. Many other causes have likewise contributed to this desirable revolution in popular feeling, such as the annual visit of so many of our wealthy and influential citizens to Europe, where the ancient splendor of the church may be seen in all its perfection; while the conduct of the dissenting ministers, their perpetual quarrels among themselves, and the open disregard shown by them in so many instances for public decency, have disgusted many of their most attached followers, and set them groping after truth and spiritual rest in the direction of the church.

It may now be justly said that bigotry of the former malignant type which affected all classes can at present only be found among the lowest and most ignorant, and that Protestants of a higher grade in society, convinced of their errors, have gracefully abandoned them. So far have they advanced in charity that they are now willing to admit that Catholics may be good citizens, agreeable neighbors, and honest dealers; but still they cannot be persuaded but that mentally, if not morally, they are inferior in natural capacity and acquired information to their own co-religionists. There only remains one thing more to be done to make persons who think thus sincere friends and possible allies, and that is to demonstrate to their satisfaction that there is nothing in the teachings or practices of our religion tending to dwarf the intellect or weaken the understanding; but, on the contrary, that the more closely we assimilate human knowledge to the revealed law of God as expounded by the church, and the more we are governed by the rules which she has laid down for our mental conduct, the better qualified we become to stand in the front rank of the highest social and intellectual movements of the age. This accomplished, as we fondly hope it soon will be, the future destiny of our half-converted brethren lies in the hands of a power superior to that of man.

Every indication of the popular desire for such an educational establishment as we have foreshadowed points out the present as the most propitious time for its foundation. By and by it may be too late. The national character of

Herein lies the great future of the Catholic layman. Never before did such a career open before him. His sires of past ages met the infidel with sword and spear and the weapons of the flesh, and beat him back from the then hallowed soil of Christendom. To-day he faces a subtler, fiercer, and more resolute infidel than the Turk. As the flower of the Turkish hordes was composed of the janissaries, the perverted children of Christian parents, so to-day the standard-bearers of infidelity are the lost children of the cross. The weapons with which this new crusade is to be fought out are the moral and intellectual forces. Every portion of the civilized world is a battle-field. All must not be left to the pulpit, the confessional, the priest. The layman moves where the priest never penetrates, where the confessional is unknown, the pulpit mocked. Let him bear his faith with him, and its influence will tell. Let his wit be keener, his temper cooler, his knowledge wider and deeper than that of his foe, and infidelity, that brawls to-day with braggart tongue, will soon learn, if not to repent, at least to dread an encounter where there can be no doubt as to the issue.

We cannot have a healthy Catholic literature and a correct standard of public taste without lay aid any more than we can fill our colleges, schools of art and science, conservatories and gymnasiums, without such cordial assistance. Catholic laymen have to a great extent the destiny of their children and of the church in America in their keeping; and as their responsibility is heavy, so will be their reward or condemnation signal, according as they use or abuse the trust reposed in them by an all-wise Providence.

So far they have shown every indication of a willingness to make all possible sacrifices for the education of their children, and a reasonable desire to encourage Catholic literature, much more so than those can appreciate who do not know our country and the peculiar difficulties we have had to overcome. Some of our foreign contemporaries, in England especially, are in the habit once in a while of drawing pleasing distinctions between the state of Catholic literature abroad and in this country. In this comparison we naturally appear to no very great advantage. We are frequently reminded of the lamentable condition of things that compels us to draw on foreign sources for our literary stores, while it is hinted that it is almost time we looked to ourselves for intellectual support. All this, of course, we take placidly enough, while thoroughly understanding the spirit that gives rise to it. We are proud to concede the superiority of the great body of English and other Catholic writers who have done such service to the church and conferred such honor

As a people we have no long line of princes and statesmen to defend, no schism to apologize for, no national outrages against God’s church to explain away or palliate. We have every confidence in the Catholics of this country to accomplish, under Providence, whatever they undertake for the benefit of religion and the spread of Christian enlightenment. The future of America is for us. While the professors of the sectarian creeds, in their efforts to force on the public and on each other their peculiar views, have reached their climax and are descending into the depths of nihilism and refined paganism, the church in this republic enjoys the pristine vigor of youth and an unexampled unanimity both in spirit and in action. In her organization there is a vast amount of latent force yet undeveloped, a mine of intellectual wealth that awaits but the master hand of the explorer to bring it to the surface. Great indeed will be the reward, high the fame, of him who will help us to utilize this unsuspected and unused treasure.

THE LIFE AND WORK OF MADAME BARAT.[160]

Madeleine-Louise-Sophie Barat was born on the 12th of December, 1779, in the little village of Joigny, in Burgundy. Her father was a cooper and the owner of a small vineyard, a very worthy and sensible man and an excellent Christian. Her mother was remarkably intelligent and quite well educated, far superior in personal character to her humble station, very religious, and endowed with an exquisite sensibility of temperament, controlled by a solid virtue which made her worthy to be the mother of two such children as her son Louis and her daughter Sophie. The birth of Sophie, who was the youngest of her three children, was hastened, and her own life endangered, by the fright which she suffered from a fire very near her house during the night of the 12th of December. The little Sophie was so frail and feeble at her birth that her baptism M. le Curé, and allowed to receive the most Holy Sacrament. She was then ten years old, and it was the dreadful year 1789. Until this time she had been her mother’s constant companion in the vineyard, occupied with light work and play, and learning by intuition, without much effort of study. At this time her brother Louis, an ecclesiastical student eleven years older than herself, was obliged to remain at home for a time, and, being very much struck with the noble and charming qualities which he discerned in his little sister, he devoted himself with singular veneration, assiduity, and tenderness to the work of her education. This episode in the history of two great servants of God, one of whom was an apostle, the other the St. Teresa of her century, is unique in its beauty.

The vocation of the sister dated from her infancy, and was announced in prophetic dreams, which she related with childish naïveté like the little Joseph, foretelling that she was destined to be a great queen. When Sophie was eight years old, Suzanne Geoffroy—who was then twenty-six, and who entered the Society of the Sacred Heart twenty-one years afterwards, in which she held the offices of superior at Niort and Lyons, and of assistant general—was seeking her vocation. Her director told her to wait for the institution of a new order whose future foundress was still occupied in taking care of her dolls.

Louis Barat divined obscurely the extraordinary designs of Almighty God in regard to his little sister, and, faithful to the divine impulse, he made the education and formation of her mind and character the principal work of the next ten years of his life—a work certainly the best and most advantageous to the church of all the good works of a career full of apostolic labors. He was a poet, a mathematician, well versed in several languages and in natural science, very kind and loving to his little sister, but inflexibly strict in his discipline, and in some things too severe, especially in his spiritual direction. In a small attic chamber of his father’s cottage he established the novitiate and school composed of little Sophie Barat as novice and scholar, with brother Louis as the master. The preparatory studies were soon absolved vintage Sophie was allowed to take a short vacation at home, of which she availed herself gladly; for she was still a gay and playful girl, submitting with cheerful courage to her brother’s severe discipline, yet not without a conflict or without some secret tears. She was a timid little creature, and the injudicious severity of her brother’s direction made her scrupulous. Often she was afraid to receive communion; but she was obedient, and when her brother would call her from the altar of their little chapel, saying, “Come here, Sophie, and receive communion,” she would go up trembling and do as she was bidden. Her great desire was to become a lay sister among the Carmelites, and her companions were also waiting the opportunity to enter some religious order. Father Barat did not doubt her religious vocation, but he wanted to find out more precisely how it could be fulfilled. Her divine Spouse was himself preparing her for the exalted destination of a foundress and spiritual mother in his church; and when she had attained her twentieth year, this vocation was made known to her and accepted with a docility like that of the Blessed Virgin Mary to the angel’s message.

The history of the origin of the Society of the Sacred Heart of Jesus requires us to go back some years and relate some events which prepared the way for it. Four young priests, Léonor and Xavier de Tournély, Pierre Charles Leblanc, and Charles de Broglie, had formed a society under the name of the Sacred Heart, intended as a nucleus for the re-establishment of the Society of Jesus. The superior was Father Léonor de Tournély, a young man of angelic sanctity, and a favorite pupil M. l’Abbé Emery. This young priest received an inspiration to form a congregation of women specially devoted to the propagation of the devotion of the Sacred Heart and the higher education of girls. The first woman selected by him as the foundress of the new society was the Princess de Condé, under whom a small community was formed at Vienna, but soon dispersed by the departure of the princess to join the Trappistines. Soon after Father de Tournély died, having scarcely attained his thirtieth year, leaving in his last moments the care of carrying out his project to Father Varin. Joseph Varin d’Ainville was a young man of good family, who, after passing some time in a seminary, had left it to join the army of the Prince de Condé, with whom he made several campaigns. He had been won back to his first vocation through the prayers of his mother, offered for this purpose on the eve of ascending the scaffold at Paris, and the influence of his former companions, the four young fathers of the Sacred Heart above named. On the very day of the prayer offered by his heroic mother he was determined to return back to the ecclesiastical life on receiving communion at Vanloo, in Belgium, when he had met his four saintly friends, whose society he immediately joined. Having been elected superior of the society after the death of Father de Tournély in 1797, Father Varin was persuaded to merge it in another society formed by a certain Father Passanari under the title of the Fathers of the Holy Faith, which was also intended as a nucleus for the revival of the Order of Jesuits. The Archduchess Maria Anna, sister of the Emperor of Germany, was selected to form in Rome, under the direction of Father Passanari, a society of religious women according to the plan of De Tournély, and she went there for that purpose, accompanied by two of her maids of honor, Leopoldina and Louisa Naudet. Early in the year 1800 Father Varin returned to Paris with some companions, and Father Barat was received into his society. In this way he became acquainted with Sophie, and her direction was confided to him, to her great spiritual solace and advantage; for he guided her with suavity and prudence in a way which gave her heart liberty to expand, and infused into it that generosity and confidence which became the characteristic traits of her piety, and were transmitted as a precious legacy by her to her daughters in religion. As soon as Father Varin had learned the secrets of the interior life of his precious disciple, and had determined her vocation to the same work which had been already begun in Rome by the three ladies above mentioned, three others were admitted to share with her in the formation of the little Society of the Sacred Heart. One of these was Mlle. Octavie Bailly, another was Mlle. Loquet, the third was a pious servant-girl named Marguérite, who became the first lay sister of the society. On the 21st of November, the Feast of Our Lady’s Presentation, the little chapel was decorated in a modest and simple way. Father Varin said Mass. After the Elevation the four aspirants pronounced the act of consecration to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and afterwards they received communion.

This was the true inauguration of the Society of the Ladies of the Sacred Heart, for the attempt made at Rome by the archduchess proved

The first house of the Ladies of the Sacred Heart, the one which has always been called the cradle of the society, was founded at Amiens one year after the consecration of the postulants in the little chapel of the Rue Touraine. A college was established in that city by the Fathers of the Holy Faith, and a visit which Father Varin made there early in the year 1801, for the purpose of giving a mission and preparing for the opening of the college, led to an arrangement with some zealous priests and pious ladies of Amiens for transferring a small school of young ladies to the care of Sophie Barat and her companions. Two of these ladies of Amiens, Mlle. Geneviève Deshayes and Mlle. Henriette Grosier, joined the community, of which Mlle. Loquet was appointed the superior. This lady proved to be entirely unfit for her position, and after some months returned to her former useful and pious life in Paris. Mlle. Bailly, after waiting for a considerable time to test her vocation, at length followed her first attraction and left her dear friend Sophie for the Carmelites. Sophie Barat, with the consent of her companions, was appointed by Father Varin to the office of superior, much to her own surprise and terror, for she was the youngest and the most humble of her sisters; and from this moment until her death, in the year 1865, she continued to be the Reverend Mother of the Society of the Ladies of the Sacred Heart, through all its periods of successive development and extension. It was on the 21st of December, 1802, soon after her twenty-third birthday, that she was definitively placed in this her true position, for which divine Providence had so wonderfully prepared her. She had been admitted to make the simple vows of religion on the 7th of June preceding, in company with Madame Deshayes. The community and school increased and prospered, and on the Feast of St. Michael the Archangel, Sept. 29, 1804, they were installed in their permanent residence, one of the former houses of the Oratory of Cardinal de Berulle. The community at this date comprised twelve members, including postulants. Their names were Madeleine-Sophie Barat, Geneviève Deshayes, Henriette Grosier, Rosalie-Marguérite Debrosse, Marie du Terrail, Catharine-Emilie de Charbonnel, Adèle Bardot, Felicité Desmarquest, Henriette Ducis, Thérèse Duchâtel, Madame Baudemont, and Madame Coppina. The two last-mentioned ladies afterwards brought the society into a crisis of the gravest peril, and finally withdrew from it, as we shall see later. Of the others, Mesdames Deshayes, Grosier, de Charbonnel, Desmarquest, and Ducis were among the most eminent and efficient of the first set of co-workers with the holy foundress herself in the formation and government of the society and its great schools and novitiates. The final rupture with Father Passanari had already been effected, and Madame Barat was therefore the sole head of the society, under the direction of Father Varin. Twelve years elapsed before the constitutions of the society were drawn up and St. John of the Cross says that “God bestows on the founder such gifts and graces as shall be proportionate to the succession of the order, as the first fruits of the Spirit.” The whole subsequent history of the Society of the Sacred Heart shows that this was fulfilled in the person of Sophie Barat. After the second foundation had been made in an old convent of the Visitation at Grenoble, Madame Baudemont was made superior at Amiens, and the first council was held for the election of a superior-general. Madame Barat was elected by a bare majority of one; for a party had already been formed under sinister influences which was working against her and in opposition to Father Varin, and seeking to change altogether the spirit of the new institute. From this time until the year 1816 Madame Barat was merely a superior in name and by courtesy at Amiens, and she was chiefly employed in founding new houses, forming the young communities, and acquiring sanctity by the exercise of patience and humility. The new foundations were at Poitiers, Cuignières, Niort, and Dooresele near Ghent; and of course the society received a great number of new subjects, some of whom became its most distinguished members—as, for instance, Madame Duchesne, the pioneer of the mission to America, Madame de Gramont d’Aster and her two daughters, Madame Thérèse Maillucheau, Madame Bigeu, Madame Prévost, Madame Giraud, and the angelic counterpart of St. Aloysius, Madame Aloysia Jouve. We must not pass over in silence the benediction given on two occasions by the august pontiff Pius VII. to Madame Barat and her daughters. At Lyons she had a long conversation with him, in which she explained to his great satisfaction the nature and objects of her holy work, and she also received from his hands Holy Communion. At Grenoble all the community and pupils received his benediction, and of these pupils eleven, upon whose heads his trembling hands were observed to rest with a certain special insistance, received the grace of a religious vocation. Another incident which deserves mention is the last visit of Madame Barat to her father. The strict rules of a later period not having been as yet enacted, she never failed, when passing near Joigny on her visitations, to stay for a short time with her parents, often taking with her some of the ladies of her society who were of noble or wealthy families, that she might testify before them how much she honored and loved the father and mother to whom she owed so great a debt of gratitude. On her annual fête she used to send them the bouquets which were presented to her. During her father’s last illness she came expressly to see and assist him in preparing for death, and, though obliged to bid him adieu before he had departed this life, she left him consoled and fortified by her last acts of filial affection, and he peacefully expired soon after her departure

At the first council the spirit of disunion already alluded to prevented Father Varin and Madame Barat from undertaking the work of preparing constitutions for the society. A brief and simple programme of a rule was drawn up and approved by the bishops under whose jurisdiction the houses were placed, and Madame Barat became herself the living rule and model, on which her subjects and novices were formed. Father Varin had resigned his office of superior when Madame Barat was formally elected by the council of professed members their superior-general. Another ecclesiastic of very different spirit, who was the confessor of the community and the school at Amiens, M. l’Abbé de St. Estéve, was ambitious of the honor and influence which justly belonged to Father Varin. He obtained a complete dominion at Amiens by means of Madame de Baudemont, a former Clarissine, who was gained over by his adroit flattery and artful encouragement of the love of sway and pre-eminence which her commanding talents, her former conventual experience, and her mature age, together with the advantage of her position as local superior, entrusted to her against Father Varin’s advice, gave a too favorable opportunity of development. M. de St. Estéve arrogated to himself the title of founder of the society, and planned an entire reconstitution of the same under the bizarre title of Apostolines, and with a set of rules which would have made an essential alteration of the institute established by Father Varin. All the other houses besides Amiens were in dismay and alarm. Madame Penaranda, a lady of Spanish extraction, descended from the family of St. Francis Borgia, who was superior at Ghent, separated her house from the society by the authority of the bishop of the diocese. She returned, however, some years later, with seventeen of her companions, to the Society of the Sacred Heart.

In the meantime the Society of Jesus had been re-established and the Society of the Fathers of the Holy Faith was dissolved, most of its members entering the Jesuit Order as novices. Father de Clorivière was provincial in France, and Madame Barat, encouraged by the advice and sympathy of wise and holy men, waited patiently and meekly for the time of her liberation from the schemes of a plausible and designing enemy who had crept under a false guise into her fold. This was accomplished through a most singular act of criminal and audacious folly on the part of M. de St. Estéve. Having gone to Rome as secretary to the French Legation, in order to further his intrigue by false representations at the Papal Court, he was led by his insane ambition, in default of any other means of success, to forge a letter from the provincial of the Jesuits of Italy to Madame Barat, instructing her to submit herself to the new arrangements of M. de St. Estéve, which he declared had been approved by the Holy See. In this crisis Madame Barat submitted with perfect obedience to what she supposed was an order from the supreme authority in the church, and counselled her daughters to imitate her example. Very soon the imposture was discovered. Mesdames de Baudemont, de Sambucy, and Coppina left the society and went to join another in Rome, and the rest of the disaffected members of the community St. Francis de Sales, when a young student, had been delivered from the terrible temptation to despair which is related in his biography. It was composed of the Reverend Mothers Barat, Desmarquest, Deshayes, Bigeu, Duchesne, Geoffroy, Giraud, Girard, and Eugénie de Gramont. Father de Clorivière presided over it, and Fathers Varin and Druilhet, previously appointed by him to draw up the constitutions, were present to read, explain, and propose them to the discussion and vote of the council. The whole work was completed in six weeks. The Reverend Mothers Bigeu, de Charbonnel, Grosier, Desmarquest, Geoffroy, and Eugénie de Gramont were elected as the six members of the permanent council of the superior-general, arrangements were made for establishing a general novitiate in Paris, the society was placed under the government of the Archbishop of Rheims as ecclesiastical superior, who delegated his functions to the Abbé Pereau, a solemn ceremony closed the sessions on the 16th of December, and early in January the reverend mothers returned to their respective residences. The constitutions were received with unanimous contentment in all the houses, including Amiens, approved by the bishops in whose dioceses these houses existed, and, finally, a letter of congratulation, expressed in the most kind and paternal terms, was received from his Holiness Pope Pius VII. From this period the authority of Madame Barat was fully established and recognized, harmony and peace reigned within the society, and a new era of extension began which has continued to the present time. The society with its constitutions was solemnly approved by Leo XII. in a brief dated December 22, 1826, which was received at Paris in February, 1827, during a session of the council. By the authority of the Holy See an additional vow of stability was prescribed for the professed, and the dispensation from this vow reserved to the pope. The rules were made more strict in several respects, and a cardinal protector was substituted for the ecclesiastical superior. The royal approbation for France was at this time also solicited, and granted by Charles X., then reigning. In 1839 another effort was made to give a still greater perfection to the statutes and to provide for the more efficacious government of the institute, now become too great for the immediate government of the superior-general, by a division into provinces under provincial superiors.

At this time the society passed through another dangerous crisis, and for four years was in a disturbed state which gave great anxiety to the Rev. Mother Barat, diminished seriously her influence over her subjects, and even occasioned a menace of suppression in France to be intimated by the government. The cause of this trouble was an effort made by a number of persons IX., who decreed the establishment of provinces under the name of vicariates, each one to be governed by the superior of its mother-house with the rank and title of superior-vicar, subject to the supreme authority of the superior-general. At the close of Madame Barat’s administration, which ended only with her life, on Ascension Thursday, 1865, there were fifteen vicariates. Since then the number has been increased. There are three in the United States, one in British America, one in Spanish America; and in these five vicariates there are about eleven hundred religious of the first and second profession, including lay sisters. The number of houses in various parts of the world is about one hundred, and the total number of members four thousand. Madame Barat herself founded one hundred and fifteen houses, and many others have been established since her death. But of these some have been suppressed in Italy and Germany, and others were given up or transferred by the superiors of the order. Madame Goëtz, who was vicar-general to Madame Barat during the last year of her life, succeeded her as superior-general, and was succeeded after her own death, in 1874, by Madame Lehon, the present superior-general.

Our limits will not permit even a succinct narrative of the events which filled up the half-century during which Madame Barat governed the Society of the Sacred Heart, from the memorable council of 1815 until 1865. We cannot omit, however, some brief notice of the foundation of the American mission and the ladies who were sent over to establish it. The first American colony was composed of three ladies and two lay sisters: Madame Duchesne, Madame Audé, Madame Berthold, Sister Catharine Lamarre, and Sister Marguérite Manteau. Madame Philippine Duchesne was a native of Grenoble, where she received an accomplished education, first at the Visitation convent of Sainte-Marie-d’en-Haut, and afterwards under private tutors in the same class with her cousins, Augustin and Casimir Périer. At the age of eighteen she entered the Visitation convent as a novice, but was prevented by the suppression of the religious orders in France from making her vows. During the dark days of the Revolution her conduct was that of a heroine. After the end of the Reign of Terror she rented the ancient convent above mentioned, and for several years maintained there an asylum for religious soirée, as she went before a mirror in her boudoir, she saw there, instead of her own graceful and richly-attired figure, the face of Jesus Christ as represented in the Ecce Homo. From that moment she renounced her worldly life, and soon entered the novitiate at Grenoble as a postulant. Even there, her historian relates, “on souriait de ses manières mondaines, de ses belles salutations, de ses trois toilettes par jour! Même sous le voile de novice qu’elle portait maintenant, elle laissait voir encore, pas sans complaisance, l’élégance de sa taille et les avantages de sa personne. On ne tardera pas à voir ce que cette âme de jeune fille changée en âme d’apôtre était capable d’entreprendre pour Dieu et le prochain.” This great change was wrought in her soul during a retreat given by Père Roger on the opening of the general novitiate at Paris during November, 1816. When called to join Madame Duchesne two years later, she was twenty-four years of age, and, after a long period of service in the United States, was finally elected an assistant general and recalled to France. Madame Octavie Berthold was the daughter of an infidel philosopher who had been Voltaire’s secretary. She was herself educated as a Protestant, was converted to the faith when about twenty years of age, and soon after entered the novitiate at Grenoble. She volunteered for the American mission, animated by a desire to prove her gratitude to our Lord for the grace of conversion, and was at this time about thirty years of age. “Caractère sympathique, cœur profondément devouée, intelligence ornée, spécialement versée dans la connaissance des langues étrangères, Mme Octavie était fort aimée au pensionnat de Paris.”

Mgr. Dubourg, Bishop of New Orleans, was the prelate who introduced the Ladies of the Sacred Heart into the United States. It was during the year 1817 that the arrangements were completed at Paris. On the 21st of March, 1818, the five religious above mentioned embarked at Bordeaux on the Rebecca, and on the 29th of May, which was that year the Feast of the Sacred Heart, they landed at New Orleans, where they were received as the guests of the Ursulines in their magnificent convent. Their own first residence at St. Charles, in the present diocese of St. Louis, was as different as possible from this noble religious house, and from those which have since that time been founded by the St. Louis, Manhattanville, Kenwood, and Eden Hall. Her aspirations were entirely for labor among the Indians and negroes, and, to a considerable extent, they were satisfied. She began with the most arduous and self-sacrificing labors upon the roughest and most untilled soil of Bishop Dubourg’s diocese, and one of her last acts was to go on a mission among the Pottawattomies, from which she was only taken by the force of Archbishop Kenrick’s authority a little before her death. The present flourishing condition of the two vicariates of New Orleans and St. Louis is well known to all our readers. The foundation at New York was due to the enlightened zeal of the late illustrious Archbishop Hughes, although the first idea originated in the mind of Madame Barat many years before. In the year 1840 the celebrated Russian convert, Madame Elizabeth Gallitzin, a cousin of Prince Gallitzin the priest of Loretto, and assistant general for America to Madame Barat, was sent over to establish this foundation and to make a general visitation, in the course of which she died suddenly of yellow fever at St. Michel, on the 14th of November, 1842.

The first residence in New York was the present convent of the Sisters of Mercy in Houston Street, from which it was removed, first to Astoria, and afterwards to the Lorillard estate in Manhattanville, where is now the centre of an extensive vicariate comprising eight houses in the States of New York, Rhode Island, Ohio, and Michigan, about five hundred religious, a novitiate containing at this moment forty-eight novices exclusive of postulants, and flourishing schools both for the education of young ladies and the instruction of the children of those parishes which are adjacent to the several convents. It is not necessary to describe for the benefit of our American readers with more detail the history and present condition of the Society of the Sacred Heart in this country. Our European readers would no doubt be interested by such a history; but, besides the imperative reason of a want of space in the present article, there is another which imposes on us the obligation of reserve in respect to works accomplished by the living, to whom has been transmitted the humility as well as the other virtues of their holy foundress. There is one venerable lady especially, now withdrawn from the sphere of her long and active administration to a higher position in the society, who is remembered with too much gratitude by her children, and honor by all classes of Catholics in her native land, to require from our pen more than the expression of a wish and prayer, on the part of thousands whose hearts will echo our words as they read them, that she may resemble the holy mother who loved her and all her American children so tenderly, as “sa plus chère famille,” in length of days, and in the peace which closed her last evening.

We have already alluded briefly to the blessed departure of Madame Barat from the scene of labor to the glory which awaits the saints, in the eighty-sixth year of her age and the sixty-sixth of her religious life, on M. Baunard, leaves us but little room for any such remarks. The character of this saintly woman must be studied in the details of her private and public life, and in the expression she has given to her interior spirit in the extracts from her vast correspondence published by her biographer. No one could ever take her portrait; and we are assured by one who knew her long and intimately that the one placed in front of the second volume of her life is not at all satisfactory. How can we describe, then, such a delicate, hidden, retiring, subtile essence as the soul of Sophie Barat in a few words, or give name to that which fascinated every one, from the little nephew Louis Dusaussoy to Frayssinous, Montalembert, and Gregory XVI..? Extreme gentleness and modesty, which, with the continual increase of grace, become the most perfect and admirable humility, were the basis of her natural character and of her acquired sanctity. In the beginning her modesty was attended by an excessive timidity, so that Father Varin gave her the name of “trembleuse perpetuelle.” This was supplanted by that generous, affectionate confidence in God which shone out so luminously in the great trials of her career. In all things, and always, Madame Barat was exquisitely feminine. She conquered and ruled by love, and this sway extended over all, from the smallest children to the most energetic, commanding, impetuous, and able of the highly-born, accomplished, and in every sense remarkable women who were under her government in the society, to women of the world, to old men and young men, to servants, the poor, fierce soldiers and revolutionists, and even to irrational creatures. With this feminine delicacy and gentleness there was a virile force and administrative ability, a firmness and intrepidity, which made her capable of everything and afraid of nothing. Her writings display a fire of eloquence which may be truly called apostolic, and would be admired in the mouth of an apostolic preacher. Besides the great labors that she accomplished in the foundation and visitation of her numerous houses, and in the government of her vast society, Madame Barat went through several most severe and dangerous illnesses, beginning with one which threatened her life in the first years at Amiens; and was frequently brought, to all appearance, to the very gates of death. Besides these sufferings, and the great privations which were often endured during the first period of new foundations, she practised austerities and penances of great severity, to the utmost limit permitted by obedience to her directors. With her wonderful activity she united the spirit of a contemplative; and there are not wanting many evidences of supernatural gifts of an extraordinary kind, or proofs of her power with God after her death. Mgr. Parisis has publicly declared that her life was one of the great events of this century, and comparable to those of St. Dominic, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Catharine of Siena, and St. Teresa. There is but one, universal St. Peter. A prayer under her invocation has been already sanctioned by Pius IX., and the cause of her beatification has been introduced, the issue of which we await, in the hope that we may one day be permitted and commanded to honor the modest little Sophie Barat of Joigny—who went away weeping in the coach to Paris at sixteen to found one of the greatest orders of the world—under the most beautiful and appropriate title of Sancta Sophia.

When we consider the work of Madame Barat as distinct from her personal history, we observe some peculiar and remarkable features marking its rise and growth. It came forth from the fiery, bloody baptism of the French Revolution as a work of regeneration and restoration. Many of its first members had been through an experience of danger, suffering, and heroic adventure which had given them an intrepidity of character proof against every kind of trial. The stamp thus given to the society at the outset was that of generous loyalty to the Holy See, and uncompromising hostility to the spirit and maxims of the Revolution.

Another fact worthy of notice is that so many small communities, private institutes for education, and persons living a very devout and zealous life in the world, were scattered about the territory over which the destructive tornado of revolution had passed, ready to be incorporated into the Society of the Sacred Heart, and furnishing the means of a rapid growth and extension.

New orders are not absolutely new creations. They spring from those previously existing, and are affiliated with each other more or less closely, notwithstanding their differences. Many of the first members of the Society of the Sacred Heart had been previously inclined to the orders of Mt. Carmel and the Visitation. The spirit of the Carmelite Order was largely inherited by the new society, and from the Order of the Visitation the special devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus was received by the same transmission of mystic life. The organization was produced by the engrafting of the principles of the constitutions of St. Ignatius on the new and vigorous stock. From this blending and composition sprang forth the new essence with its own special notes, its original force, and its distinct sphere of operation. Cardinal Racanati thus expresses his judgment of its excellence: “My duty has obliged me to read the constitutions of almost all ancient and modern orders. All are beautiful, admirable, marked with the signet of God. But this one appears to me to excel among all the others, because it contains the essence of religious perfection, and is at the same time a masterpiece of unity. The Sacred Heart of Jesus is at once the pivot around which everything moves, and the end in which everything results.” Pope Gregory XVI.. said that the Rule of the Sacred Heart was in every part the work of God. Although not an exact counterpart of the Society of Jesus, the Society of the Sacred Heart is nevertheless, in its government and method of discipline, modelled after a similar type, with equally efficacious means for producing in its subjects, in a manner proportionate to their feminine character, all the highest religious St. Ignatius. The more humble occupations to which so many admirable religious women in various orders and congregations devote themselves form an integral part of the active duties of the society. A large portion of its members are lay sisters, and a great number of the religious of the choir are engaged in the instruction of poor children or domestic duties which have no exterior éclat. The specific work of the society is of course the education of young ladies, with the ulterior end of diffusing and sustaining Catholic principles and Catholic piety, through the instrumentality of the élèves of the Sacred Heart, among the higher classes of society. There cannot be a nobler work than this, or a more truly apostolic vocation, within the sphere to which woman is limited by the law of God, human nature, and the constitution of Christian society. What an immense power has been exerted by the daughters of Madame Barat in this way as the auxiliaries of the hierarchy and the sacerdotal order in the church, is best proved by the persecutions they have sustained from the anti-Catholic party in Europe, and the fear they have inspired in the bosoms of tyrannical statesmen like Prince Bismarck, who tremble with apprehension before the banner of the Sacred Heart, though followed only by a troop of modest virgins. It is after all not strange. The women of the revolution are more terrible than furies led on by Alecto and Tisiphone. Why should not the virgins of the Catholic army resemble their Queen, who is “terrible as an army set in array”?

It is with great regret that we abstain from setting forth the enlightened, sound, and thoroughly History of Madame Barat deserves to be ranked with Mother Chauguy’s Life of St. Frances de Chantal and M. Hamon’s Life of St. Francis de Sales. We trust that an abridged life by a competent hand may furnish those who cannot afford so costly a book, or read one so large, with the means of knowing the character and history of the Teresa of our century. There are also materials for other histories and biographies of great interest and utility in the rich, varied contents of this most admirable and charming work, which we hope may not be neglected.

SIX SUNNY MONTHS.

BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE HOUSE OF YORKE,” “GRAPES AND THORNS,” ETC.