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been no expression here of Roman Catholic respect for the "distinguished visitor." Probably no American Romanist of the sort recognized among their clergy as "good Catholics " has read Father Hyacinthe's letter to the General of his order, without being shocked at its impiety.

Father Hyacinthe, then, is quite dissociated, at least for the present, from the party which begins to be called, and sometimes calls itself, Liberal Catholic. That party can ill afford to lose him, for it has no strength to spare; but it is not eady to stand where he stands, and must therefore let him go. We call it a party, for, though it is not organized with a definite platform of principles and aims, it is more than a merely fluctuating difference of opinion about particular measures. It is not strong if we measure its strength by the number of votes it can give in the ecumenical Council. It is not numerically strong as compared with the great body of the clergy, "secular" and "regular." It is strong in men of thought and learning, strong in the dignity and character of its leaders, strong in the ideas which are its life, and strong in its sympathies with Christian liberty and with the progress of Christian civilization. On the question which the Pope and the Jesuits are now forcing to an issue-the double question of the Syllabus and of Papal infallibility-it is strong in the good will of those enlightened laymen, throughout Europe,-statesmen, scholars, poets, artists-who have not lapsed into indifference to all religions questions, but who know that personal infallibility in the Church means personal government in the State, and that the anathemas of the Syllabus, imposed upon the people by the clergy in the name of the gospel, can hardly fail to make all the intelligent people irreligious. Some of the Liberal Catholics, though knowing that the Encyclical, with its Syllabus, was aimed at them and really came out in reply to Count Montalembert's rousing speeches in their "Catholic Congress" at Malines in 1863, have endeavored to construe that manifesto "in a non-natural sense," and to make themselves believe that the Pope did not mean what he said. But if they had the courage to grasp the fact and to use it, the Encyclical might be an irresistible weapon in their hands. Can an intelligent man of this nineteenth century-be he

ever so confident that infallibility is lodged somewhere-interpret that document honestly, and believe for one moment that the author of it is infallible? That is really the question, and if the Liberal Catholics would courageously put the question in this concrete form-if they would dare to say outright, This proposition of the Encyclical, and that, and that, are notoriously untrue, and the author of them has made it impossible for the Church to believe that he is infallible,—they would have their adversaries at the greatest possible disadvantage. Some propositions are too preposterous to be refuted-so preposterous that any attempt to disprove them gives them a factitious dignity; and the proposition that the Pope's Encyclical and Syllabus of 1864 were dictated by infallibility is of that sort.

Our "Roman Catholic brethren " in the United States are represented by the "Catholic World." We are not aware that any other periodical can be regarded as expressing with so much of official authority and responsibility the opinions, the sympathies, and the aims of American Romanism. How, then, does the "Catholic World" stand in relation to the questions of the nineteenth century? It tries to be, in some sort, Liberal-Catholic. By means of it, Father Hecker and the rest of the Paulists, are endeavoring to make the Roman Catholic system acceptable to the American people. They have in hand the very serious task of proving that their infallible Church, here in the United States and everywhere else, is altogether in favor of civil and religious liberty not only for its own adherents but for all men; and that being infallible, it has never taught or held any contrary doctrine. They have very much misrepresented themselves if they do not believe that freedom of conscience and of religious worship is the proper right of every man, and ought to be proclaimed and secured by law in every well constituted State. They would charge us with being false witnesses against them, if we should impute to them the opinion that their religion ought to be considered the only religion of the State, to the exclusion of other modes of religious worship. We, the people of the United States, hold with remarkable unanimity, that citizens have a right to the fullest freedom in expressing their opin

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ions, whatever they may be, by printing or otherwise; that the Church, be it ever so Catholic, has no power to employ force; that the Church, of whatever name or dogma, should be separated from the State, and the State from the Church; and that civil government is under no obligation to repress religious error by legal penalties. Father Hecker and his colaborators in the Catholic World, do not profess-nor so far as we know, do they admit-that in regard to liberty of conscience and of worship, liberty of speech and of the press, the freedom of the Church from State control, and of the State from ecclesiastical dictation, their principles differ from ours or from the principles incorporated into the constitutions and laws of the United States.

Yet, in the Council at Rome, the American bishops, one and all, are as ready as the Italians to accept and affirm the personal infallibility of the Pope, and in so doing to accept and affirm the infallibility of the Encyclical, which calls on all the faithful to condemn all the principles most essential to the American idea (which has become the nineteenth century's idea) of good government. Some persons, reasoning in a common-place way from known principles of human nature, ascribe this remarkable phenomenon to the fact that those American bishops are in no sense representatives of the great communion which they govern, but, being designated as well as consecrated by the Pope, are simply functionaries of his. The Paulists, in the "Catholic World," assure us that the Roman Catholics generally in the United States, and in particular those of them who were once Protestants, are eagerly waiting to accept with religious confidence the dogma of Papal infallibility-in other words, the declaration that the Encyclical, with all its denunciation of civil and religious liberty, came from an infallible author. We are willing to believe that not only the bishops and the Paulists, but the Jesuits, and the Redemptorists, and the monastic orders generally, in the United States as in other countries, are the devoted adherents of the Pope-his "regular army," and venerate him as embodying in his person the infallibility of the Church, which is to them the infallibility of God. But we do not believe that the secular clergy-the "militia" of the Church, the priests who

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have the charge of congregations, and are in contact with the people-still less do we believe that the more intelligent laymen of their communion are ready to accept a dogma that draws after it such consequences. If the laity could speak and vote in the ecumenical Council of 1870, the decrees and acts of that body would be very unlike what we are likely to see. But that so-called Catholic system which has the Bishop of Rome for its Head-Center, excludes the Christian people from all participation in ecclesiastical affairs. It is an absolute hierarchy; and its professed infallibility—whether lodged in the Pope or in the Council-is simply hierarchical. Under that system the Christian people have only to accept whatever dogmas the hierarchy may define, and to bear all burdens, however grievous to be borne, which the hierarchy may lay upon their shoulders.

ARTICLE IV.-REVIEW OF THE LIFE OF DR. JOSEPH ADDISON ALEXANDER.

The Life of Joseph Addison Alexander, D. D., Professor in the Theological Seminary at Princeton, New Jersey. By HENRY CARRINGTON ALEXANDER. New York: Charles Scribner & Co. 1870. 2 vols. 12mo.

WITHIN the last few months the public have been favored with biographies of two of the eminent men who, for many years, were instructors in the Theological Seminary at Princeton. In the case of both alike the work of recording their history has been delayed for a much longer period than usual -eight years in the one case, and nineteen in the other-and for a longer period than is ordinarily desirable. But it is better that such a work should be done late, than that it should never be done; and, in the reading of these volumes, we feel anew the regret, which we believe many have often felt, that no one has as yet undertaken to give to the world the record of the lives of one and another of those remarkable men, who gave to Yale College its wide reputation in the last generation. The one point, however, to which we have referred, is almost the only one wherein these two biographies resemble each other. Dr. Miller was a man whose whole career, from his early manhood, was connected with the public life of the Church. Dr. Alexander, on the other hand, was a retiring scholar, who mingled little with the outward world, and had little to do with the controversies of his time. As a natural and necessary result of this wide difference between the two men, we find the volumes, which speak of the former, abounding in incident, and largely filled with a wide extended correspondence; but those which have reference to the latter have almost nothing to tell beyond the limited circle of his daily studies and his nearest friends. The life of a scholar, however, possesses a peculiar charm belonging to itself, and the story of it must have, to appreciative minds, something of the same interest

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