2. Yet we cannot but observe that, as we become acquainted with him in this volume, he gives due prominence to those really catholic truths which (if the current opinion of Protestants is correct) are ordinarily, in Roman Catholic ministrations, overshadowed by the peculiarities of Romanism. We find here very little about the invocation of saints or their intercession for their worshipers, very little about works of supererogation, very little about purgatory or the efficacy of masses for the dead, but much about those great verities of the Christian revelation which the Church Catholic held before the Reformation, and which the Reformers did not surrender. The truths which are the foundation of all Christian thinking are the foundation of his thinking. On this point, instead of culling sentences from the lectures on the relation of Christianity to civil society, we refer only to the sermon on the South American earthquakes:

"Doubtless suffering and death, in the inferior races, are older than the sin of Adam, and stand in no direct connection with the moral system." "But when Adam appeared, born at once of the ruddy clay and of the breath of God, the earth kept silence before him: the sacred tie that binds together the physical and moral laws was drawn fast in his consciousness. Therein perfect innocence and perfect happiness had stricken covenant, and amid the peace of Eden was heard only the song of nature at rest with man, of God in a sabbath which bade fair to be eternal. This sabbath-day-how came it to an end? How came nature to be in revolt against its king? How was death with its attendant plagues able to intrude into this upper world from which it had been warned away? By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin.' You have heard the stern language of St. Paul, you have recognized the cardinal doctrine of original sin. It is, then, simply a matter of logical consistency-it is simply following out the Bible to its conclusions-when, notwithstanding those laws of science which are mistakenly offered in evidence against us, we persist in see:ng, in the evils which rest in common upon all our rare, in the disasters which smite individuals or isolated countries, the various applications of one constant law of the moral system—that death is the punishment of sin." pp. 141, 142.

"Guilt is universal: so, also, will punishment be, at least in the future life, unless penitence should avert it before the hour of justice comes. But the thunderbolts which, in this life, from time to time break through the sheltering clouds of loving kindness, do not always smite the guiltiest, do not necessarily spare the most innocent. Why, then, do they smite at all, since they do but obey His will who sendeth forth the lightnings that they may go upon His errands, and returning, answer, Here we are? Why? I don't know, brethren; I don't know; and nobody else knows any better than I do. An inscrutable Providence presides over the judgments of God in the regions of space and time. His judg. ments,' says the psalm, 'are a great deep;' and it was on the verge of this deep

that one gazed down from the third heaven, and as if with swimming brain, cried out, 'O the depth !'

We talk of sin, and of sins. The word of God answers back to us and speaks of the sin, the one sin, the sin of the world. Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world!' Our faults are not separable and independent; there is not one of them but has somewhat to do-is somehow mysteriously implicated-with the transgressions of the race; just as, in its turn, the collective weight of human guilt lies on each several conscience, and oppresses and burthens it from the cradle upwards. Doubtless conscience is an individual matter." ** * "But face to face with this individual conscience, there appears a universal—if I may use the word—a humanitarian conscience. Over against the responsibility proper to each, is set the responsibility common to all." # * *

"Solidarity—the universal community of interests! It is the great law which positive science establishes everywhere in nature—which a generous statesmanship demands everywhere in society. Why might it not be, under forms more mysterious, but not less real, the law of the moral and religious world?

"In this way, without having recourse to any narrow or obsolete ideas, we explain the great Bible doctrine of the unity of mankind in the apostasy and in the atonement. There is something more than the man; there is humanity— humanity which falls as one in Adam, and in every one of the sons of Adam; humanity that is lifted up as one in Jesus Christ, and in every one of the brethren of Jesus Christ." pp. 141-145.

All this is undoubtedly Catholic doctrine and Romanthough it is what some men try to refute as Calvinisın—as if Calvin invented all this and none but his followers accepted it. Here are those old doctrines of what we have learned to call the evangelical system "-the primitive apostasy and ruin of the human race in the apostasy of its first parents; the universality of human guilt; the atonement by "the Lamb of God," whom the preacher elsewhere speaks of as "the Son of God made man;" the certainty of punishment in the future life for the impenitent; the sovereignty of God in his providence over men. Throughout the volume, this style of religious thought, which we recognize as evangelical, predominates over the distinctively Roman style; the simply Scriptural thought is rarely if ever overshadowed by the traditional exaggeration; the common-sense, practical view of the Christian life is more conspicuous, as it is in reality more sublime, than the mystical enthusiasm which is the parent of asceticism. For example, having said that, as men of serious thought, "we need and must have a great object, worthy of ourselves and God," he asks, "But what shall it be? On an earth once trodden by the feet of Christ, amid the course of

ages that are illuminated from his cross, is there for the soul of man and for all the race, any other object than God's salvation?" Then, fixing the thought of his hearers on the "salvation of souls," he says: "But how? For the vast majority almost the entire mass of men salvation is not achieved in the deserts and in ecstatic visions, but in the midst of society. It is realized by faithfulness to the duties of family and civil life, to all those holy obligations which bind us to our fellow-men; by the practical effort of a life which turns heavenward in prayer for light and strength, and then turns back to earth for wealth and liberty, and above all, for righteousness." As we read, we are reminded of what De Tocqueville said, thirty years ago, about the influence of American civilization on the religion of Roman Catholic citizens. "There are no Roman priests who show less taste for the minute individual observances, for extraordinary or peculiar means of salvation, or who cling more to the spirit and less to the letter of the law, than the Roman Catholic priests of the United States. Nowhere is that doctrine of the Church which prohibits the worship reserved to God alone from being offered to the saints, more clearly inculcated or more generally followed."* The philosophic Frenchman's generalization may have been too hasty, but his language shows that he had at least conceived the possibility of a Roman Catholic priest preaching to Roman Catholic hearers with honest loyalty to the peculiarities of Romanism, yet without making those peculiarities so prominent as to overshadow the greater truths of essential Christianity.

Can it be thought that this characteristic of Father Hyacinthe's ministry was the occasion of his becoming the object of open attacks and secret misrepresentation? We must say that this common-sense Christian thinking is very unlike what we find in some Roman Catholic books-for example, in the Life of Father Ravignan; and we can easily understand that men, whose religion has practically more of Mary in it than of Christ, whose prayers are offered, proximately, more to canonized saints than to the Father of lights, and in whose habitual thoughts the simple truths of Scriptural Christianity

*Democracy in America, vol. ii, P. 47.

are overgrown and choked by the traditional enthusiasms which Rome has shaped and hardened into dogmas, might be shocked beyond measure to hear in the church of La Madeleine, or in the cathedral of Notre Dame, such sermons as we read in this volume, and might make haste to report the preacher at Rome as verging toward heresy.

3. Father Hyacinthe's catholicity of doctrine very naturally affects his habitual judgment of what Christ's Catholic Church is. In his view, very freely expressed, the true Church of Christ-that Church outside of which there can be no salvation-includes many who are not in any outward and visible communion with the Roman Catholic Church. Of this, the sermon on "the profession of the Catholic Faith" is a sufficient illustration. An American lady, whose name the newspapers have freely mentioned in connection with her story-a member of the Plymouth Church in Brooklyn-had been convinced of her Protestant errors by seeing at Rome "that temple of St. Peter, the most vast and splendid ever reared by man to his God," which "images the universal brotherhood of the children of God upon the earth" (p. 128), and had de termined to be a Roman Catholic. She chose to make her new profession at Paris, and to have a sermon on the occasion from the most celebrated preacher of the Roman Catholic world. She gave him for his text, Ps. lxxxix., 1: "I will sing of the mercies of the Lord forever." Preaching from this text Father Hyacinthe tells her, "I will endeavor to speak of the designs of God in your past, your present, and your future." Expatiating first on the mercies of her past life, he says, "Born as you were in the midst of heresy, you were no heretic. No, thank God, you were no heretic; and nothing shall force me to apply to you that cruel-that justly cruel name, against which all my knowledge of your past makes protest." (p. 24) He alleges the authority of Augustine in support of his position that the member of Plymouth Church, who was in the act of renouncing her Protestantism, had never been a heretic, and then asks, "What were you then?" Answering his own question, he says, "This is just what you were a noble, womanly nature, seeking the truth in love, and love in the truth; more than that, you were a Christian-yes,

a Catholic." (p. 125.) He tells her, "Before coming to us, you were a Christian by baptism, validly received; and when the hand of the minister sprinkled the water on your brow with those words of eternal life, 'I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,' it was Jesus Christ himself who baptized you. The hand is nothing,' says Saint Augustine, be it Peter's or Paul's, the hand is nothing-it is Christ that baptizes."" (p. 126.) "You were a Christian, also, by the gospel, as well as by baptism. The Bible was the book of your childhood, and you learned from it the secrets of this divine faith which belongs to every age because it comes from eternity, with the accents of that Anglo-Saxon tongue which belongs to every land because it prevails throughout the world by virtue of its civilizing force." * ** "When we read over again together that gospel which separated our ancestors, I was pleasantly surprised, at every page, to find that we understood it in the same sense, and that, consequently, when you read it outside of the Church, you did not read it without the spirit of the Church." (pp. 125, 126.) And then he tells her, "You had prayer; an inward thing, invisible, unspeakable, and yet real above all things besides and preeminently the language of the soul to God, and of God to the soul, the direct and personal communion of the humblest Christian with his Father in heaven."

The language, then, which he uses in the "prefatory letter" addressed to the translator of this volume, is hardly more explicit than his language in the sermon on "the profession of the Catholic faith." In the "letter," he says, "I have never deemed that the Christian communions separated from Rome were disinherited of the Holy Ghost, and without a part in the immense work of the preparation of the kingdom of God. In my intercourse with some of the most pious and learned of their members, I have experienced, in those depths of the soul where illusion is impossible, the unutterable blessing of the communion of saints. Whatever divides us externally in space and time, vanishes like a dream before that which unites us within, the grace of the same God, the blood of the same Christ, the hopes of the same eternity." We are all laboring in common for the upbuilding of that Church of the Future which shall be the Church of the Past in its

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