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 honse 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.

All this time the priest and professor, Charles Loyson, seems not to have been a preacher nor to have lifted up his voice in any public assembly. But the Carmelite order, though characteristically contemplative, is also active, and some of its monks have been eminent preachers. In 1861, Brother Hyacinthe, with the shaved head, the sandaled feet, and the white woolen robe of a Carmelite monk, began his career as a preacher, being then thirty-four years of age. His first preaching was at Lyons; and immediately he began to be famous. The next year, and the year after that, he gave courses of sermons in other provincial cities; and it was not till 1864 that he inade his appearance as a preaching friar in Paris. There his first sermons were in the famous and fashionable Church of La Madeleine; and such was their effect that the Archbishop (Darboy) made haste to place him in the pulpit of the metropolitan cathedral, for a work to which no man since Lacordaire (at that time the last illustrious name in the roll of great French preachers) had been found competent. He was called to renew the "Advent Conferences of Notre Dame "-the yearly course not of sermons in form, but of religious discourses without texts prefixed, which Lacordaire in his time. had made so effective, but which, after his retirement from the pulpit, had ceased to be effective, and had even been discontinued. Accepting that call, he gave his first series of conferences in the Advent season of 1864, and continued to perform the service at the same season through the four succeeding years.

A glance at the distinct yet logically related subjects of those five courses (each consisting of six lectures) is enough to show that the preacher began his work with a definite conception of what is the disease of France and the age. In the first course, he asserted and vindicated against the atheism, conscious or unconscious, gross or refined, which infects so much of modern thought, that foundation truth of all knowledge, "a Personal God." For the next year his theme was, "Religion the basis of morality." Advancing from these "first principles," he exhibited, in the lectures of 1866, "the relations of Christianity to Domestic Society or the Family;" in those of 1867, "the relations of Christianity to Civil So

ciety or the State;" and in those of 1868, "the relations of Christianity to Religions Society or the Church." It is easy to understand that, handling such subjects as these, and handling them in a way to command the attention not of believers only, but of unbelievers; not of the devout only, but of the inquiring and speculative; not of habitual church-goers only, but of all Paris-speaking, too, out of a heart in full sympathy with the yearning of the age for freedom, and from the position which he had learned to take when Pius IX. was trying to be a reformer and a patriot-it was a matter of course that he had adversaries among the clergy of his own communion. Everybody knows that, whatever may be true in the United States, there are in Europe monks, priests, bishops, and cardinals, who believe devoutly that all things ought to have continued as they were before the French revolution. Those old names, Gallican and Ultramontane, are not the names to represent the two chief parties or opposing tendencies which divide the Roman Catholics of France to-day. The old Gallicanism would have made the national Church of France, like that of England, a dependency of the crown, and not much more; while the old Ultramontanism was the only form in which a Roman Catholic could assert the divine right of the Church to administer the law of Christ, or could conceive of the Church as independent of the secular power. But to-day the imminent questions among Roman Catholics, in France and everywhere else, are of another sort. There is, indeed, a Gallican remnant (p. 170); but Lacordaire, Montalembert, and Lamennais himself were Ultramontanes, when they claimed for the Church and the Pope the leadership in the great movement for liberty against absolute power in the government of nations. So intense was the Ultramontanism of Lacordaire and Lamennais that the one retracted his published opinions at the mandate of the Pope, and the other could not cease to be an Ultramontane without ceasing to be a Christian. The comprehensive question, to-day, is not how to adjust the relations between the Pope and the secular government, but how to adjust the relations between the Church and the nineteenth century; and on that question there are, if not two parties definitely formed, two opposite modes of

thinking. On the question of religious liberty-on the question of popular education in common schools-on the question whether the Church and the State ought to be everywhere separate and mutually independent-on many such questions earnest Roman Catholics hold opposite opinions. Some men who are truly Christian Catholics-liberal in their recognition of human rights, and in their opposition to those methods of government which Christendom has outgrown-liberal, too, in their readiness to recognize Christian character, "the fruit of the Spirit," whenever they find it are trying to be, at the same time, Roman Catholics. On the other hand, there are those who hold with all their hearts the old opinions, who would burn John Huss again to day if they had him in their power, who would arraign Galileo again before the inquisition, and would bring back the Bourbons into every country from which they have been expelled. These conservatives were from the first the adversaries of Father Hyacinthe.

Against the machinations of those adversaries, he was protected by the fidelity and liberality of his great patron, the Archbishop of Paris, and partly, we may presume, by the esprit de corps of the Carmelite Order. His letter of September 20, to the General of the Order (whose headquarters are of course at Rome) becomes completely intelligible only when we recollect the state of parties in the Roman Catholic communion at Paris. He begins by saying to his very Reverend Father: "During the five years of my ministry at Notre Dame, Paris, notwithstanding the open attacks and secret misrepresentations of which I have been the object, your confidence and esteem have never for a moment failed me."

At this point, then, we propose to inquire more exactly, what is it in this great preacher which made him the object of open attack and secret misrepresentation? The discourses in the volume before us will enable intelligent readers to judge for themselves concerning the character of his preaching and the tendency of his influence in the Church. What is the substance and drift of his discourses? Does he preach anything which Rome has anathematized? Does he, at any point, contradict the formulas of his own Church, or deviate from them? Is he a Rationalist, like Renan, who once stood at the threshold

of the priesthood? Is he a revolutionary fanatic like Lamennais? Is he a Calvinist or a Lutheran in disguise, waiting for the most favorable opportunity to declare himself? The discourses before us give the materials for a sufficient answer to such questions; and the position of Father Hyacinthe, including his relations to the Roman Catholic Church and to organized Protestantism, is at once so important and so inadequately understood, that such questions are worth answering. 1. The late Superior of the Barefooted Carmelites of Paris," as seen in these Discourses, is an earnest and loyal member of the Roman Catholic Church. We are not under the necessity of inferring this from the official dignity of the author, nor from the fact that the conferences were given in the great cathedral of Paris, at the invitation and with the full approval of the Archbishop. Let him speak for himself:

"When I behold the Pontiff of the Catholic Church, the father of redeemed humanity-let me call him by his name, that sweet name that grows in glory as it grows in experience of trial-when I behold Pius IX, I see upon his gentle and majestic brow three crowns not to be disjoined. In primeval times, when as yet there was no universal Pope, these three crowns were worn by the pontiff of every dwelling; he was father, king, and priest." * * "Now, from

*

the head of the father of the family. these two crowns, of priest and of king, have fallen off. The priestly crown has passed, in part at least, in the constitution of religious society, to the Catholic hierarchy. The royal diadem has passed altogether, in the organization of civil society, to the chiefs of the State." pp. 26, 27.

"For this cause [for having defended the divine institution of marriage against the attacks of secular powers] I bless thee, O my Church! Church Catholic, Church of the Middle Ages, and of the great Pontiffs Gregory VII. and Innocent III. Not alone for the sanctity of thy sacrament hast thou contended; thou hast been the defender of the liberty of our consciences, the purity of our morals, the peace and dignity of our homes. ... The Church has defended the family; and because the soul of the family is, so to speak, concentrated in the wife, a priceless treasure in a frail vessel, it is especially over woman that it extends its protection; woman, with whom the Church has affinities so affecting and sublime that it were vain to attempt to sunder them; woman, whose liberty is always appealed to when the design is to oppress or corrupt her: the Church defended her against the violence of the powerful in days of yore, as it now defends her against the barbarity of sophists." pp. 29, 30,

"All life is in the bread; maternal life, as in its substance; intellectual life, as in its instrument; religious life, as in its symbol. [He has been speaking of agriculture, the bread-producing power, as an element of civilization.] And to behold the crowning glory of the bread we must follow it to the Catholic altar, where, in the hands of Christ, by the most amazing of mysteries, it becomes the