the present age of the world, and the advance of Christian truth? Which of them, above all, is most in harmony with the gospel of Christ?

We have not attempted to investigate or discuss the history and position of Father de Ravignan, in reference to the different parties represented in the Roman Catholic Church at this most interesting crisis of its affairs. From all we learn, he was an Ultramontanist, in close union with his order as giving implicit submission to the decisions of his church, in upholding the infallible authority of the Holy Father, in accepting the Papal dogma of the Immaculate Conception, in holding strongly to the worship and mediatorship of the Virgin Mary, as the peculiar refuge and divinity of the Society of Jesus. We should be led to suppose from some of the opinions which he expresses, and the positions he assumed, that he had very little sympathy with Gallicanism, or the present Liberal Catholic party in France.

We would, however, heartily recommend this work, upon which we have briefly commented in no carping and uncharitable spirit, but with real interest and desire to come at the truth, to the reading of theological students and ministers of the gospel, as a book from which they may highly profit and learn much.

ARTICLE III.-FATHER HYACINTHE.

Discourses on various occasions by the Reverend Father HYACINTHE, late Superior of the Barefooted Carmelites of Paris, and Preacher of the Conferences of Notre Dame. Translated by LEONARD WOOLSEY BACON, Pastor of a Church of Christ, in Brooklyn, N. Y. With a Biographical Sketch. New York: G. P. Putnam & Son. 1869. 12mo. pp. xliv., 198.

Ir is not a very long time since the American public first heard of the grand sensation which a new preacher had begun to make in Paris. Afterwards the name of "Father Hyacinthe" was reported occasionally by returning travelers, or by Paris correspondents of the newspapers. He was the successor of Lacordaire and Ravignan in the pulpit of Notre Dame; and the fame of his eloquence was a new honor to the Church which boasts of Massillon and Bourdaloue, and to the language of Fenelon. Hardly anything more was known of him on this side of the Atlantic, till his speech before a Peace Society in Paris, on the 10th of July last, awakened throughout the civilized world a new interest in the man and in his destiny. The consequences of that speech have made him still more conspicuous; and when the telegraph announced his sudden embarkation for a visit to the United States, there could not but be a demand for some translated specimens of his preaching. In answer to that demand the volume before us has been given to the American public.

Unfortunately for the compiler and translator, Father Hyacinthe is not an author, but only an orator-not a writer of serinons to be read, but only a preacher. Reports of his discourses-sometimes revised by him-have been published in French journals, especially in the monthly Revue Correspondant, but we believe that no collection of the great preacher's sermons has been published in his native country. Consequently, the translator of this volume is under the

necessity of saying in his preface, "The only principle of selection and arrangement has been to take all the published works of Father Hyacinthe which I could find, in the order in which they came to hand, and bring them out in one volume, while waiting for an arrival from Paris for the materials of another."

This little volume, therefore contains,

1. A compendious but authentic biography of Father Hyacinthe (Rev, Charles Loyson), terminating with his letter to the General of his order, Sep. 20, 1869. 2. His Speech before the Peace League at Paris, July 10, 1869.

3. The Notre Dame Lectures (or "Conferences") Advent, 1867.

4. A Sermon preached to an American lady (a member of the Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, N. Y.) on the occasion of her public renunciation of Protestantism, and first communion in the Roman Catholic Church, July 14, 1868.

5. A Charity Sermon for the sufferers by the South American earthquake, preached at the church of La Madeleine, Paris, March 11, 1869.

6. An Appendix, entitled "Men and Parties in the Catholic Church in France," translated from an article by Dr. De Pressensé in the Paris "Revue Chretienne” for September and October, 1869;—an article in which "the foremost man of French Protestantism" illustrates the position and relations of the last great preacher in the pulpit of Notre Dame.

The compiler and translator of the work before us is not unknown to the readers of the New Englander. Remembering his relation to this journal, we do not write to commend his performance. His task of compilation was very simple, merely to collect such of Father Hyacinthe's discourses as were within his reach. Whether the work of translation is well done or ill done, let others judge. It is for us to say no more than that one who, having a competent knowledge of French, is accustomed to use the English language in public discourse, and especially in preaching, ought to be censured if his translation of such sermons as these is not spirited as well as faithful. Our concern in this Article is with the orator and not with the translator. We purpose nothing more than to show, chiefly from the work on our table, who and what the man is whose protest-though he refuses to be called a Protestant-rings like the strokes of the hammer with which Luther nailed those memorable theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg.

Those who were old enough to take notice of public events at the time of the last vacancy in the succession from Numa

Pompilius, have not forgotten what a sensation was produced by the accession of Pius IX. to the Roman pontificate, and what a movement followed. It was understood that the new Pope was not only kind in his feelings and gentle in his manners, but liberal in his views of government. His first official acts were testimonies of his clemency and good-nature, conciliating the favor of his subjects, and were followed by measures that testified his desire to reform abuses both in his secular government and in the government of the Church. A liberal Pope, a reforming Pope,-the manifest fact startled all Europe; and Pius IX. was for a time the most popular man in Italy, nay in Christendom. France, and especially Paris, shared as much as Italy itself in the strange excitement; for among the French clergy there had long been a party of thinkers dissatisfied with the conflict between Rome and the nineteenth century. Lamennais had indeed made shipwreck of his faith; but his associates, Montalembert, Lacordaire, and others like them, had never given up entirely their devout endeavor to make Christianity, as represented by the Roman Catholic Church, efficient in the political and social regeneration of their country. The measures of the new Pope were quite accordant with the ideas of these men, and were accepted as evidence that a new era was at hand. Gioberti-perhaps the greatest Italian thinker of the present century—who having been chaplain to the King of Sardinia, and Professor of Theology at Turin, had been banished from his native country for the liberality of his views on political themes, but in his exile and poverty at Brussels had made himself famous throughout Europe as a theologian, a philosopher, and a patriot-hastened to Paris that he might be in a position to observe and promote the new order of things which was so evidently beginning in Italy.

It was in that year, 1846, that Charles Loyson, born of a family which had risen in the preceding generation to some literary distinction, and carefully educated in liberal studies. by his father, who was the head of an academy in the little city of Pan, came to Paris and entered the Seminary of St. Sulpice, to prepare himself for the priesthood. He was at that time in his twentieth year-just at the age when great

events, like those which were taking place in Italy, make the deepest impression on a susceptible mind. He had lived till then at home, quite secluded from the outside world, his father's house being, as he describes it, a sort of "family convent." An uncle of his, whose name he bears, and who died fifty years ago, had been the associate and dear friend and the compeer in genius of such men as Guizot, Cousin, and Royer-Collard, in their youth, and had left in his writings, as well as in the memory of his life, a testimony for liberty against absolutism and for Christian order and civilization against the reveries of atheistic democracy. From the beginning of his studies in the seminary, the young candidate for the priesthood could not but be in sympathy with those devout and generous souls who, though trained to believe that the Roman Catholic communion is the veritable and only Church of Christ, believe also that where the spirit of Christ is, there is liberty; that, therefore, the Church of Christ ought to be, everywhere and always, the antagonist rather than the ally of oppression; and that as Christ is the light of the world, so his Church ought to be the leader of the world's progress.

After five years in the seminary at Paris, Charles Loyson was admitted to the priesthood, and became a member of that society of priests which takes its name from the parish of St. Sulpice, and which exists for the education of the secular clergy in France. He was immediately employed as a professor of theology, first for three years in the Sulpitian Seminary at Avignon, then for two years in that at Nantes; and after that he was for one year vicar of the seminary in which he himself had been trained. These eleven years having been completed, he withdrew from his connection with the society and returned for one year to his old home. "His thought was, in the repose of home, to ripen, by a few months of reflection, the fruits of so many years of unintermitted and laborious study." In 1859, he passed from the ranks of the "secular" into those of the "regular" clergy, and became Brother Hyacinthe, a monk of the order of Barefooted Carmelites. The name of that order intimates the severity of its ascetic rules, and distinguishes it from the Carmelites of "the milder observance," who, in addition to other carnal indulgences, are permitted to wear shoes and stockings instead of being limited to sandals.