scribable dignity and joy, to one who trusts in the benignant spirit and beneficent order of the LIMITLESS UNKNOWN, surrounding all that he can know. And if one endowed with this stupendous vision be a morbid and shuddering doubter, distrusting the providence of God, filling the unknowable with frightful spectres, his impious distress is not the fault of his too much knowledge, but of his too little faith; not the retribution for what he has won, but for what he has failed to win. His exacting and rebellious self-will has vitiated his very wisdom: the discord of his soul has poisoned the world.

Thus it is seen, that, without the previous saving of the soul, there can be no true gaining of the world, but only of some hollow symbol of it; such as wealth, rank, or opinion. For the possession and use of the reality, or of any solid equivalent for the reality, a healthy and vigorous soul is indispensable. Thus the false opposition, so perniciously supposed between the world and the soul, is exploded by the affirmation of the true identity of their claims in the actual coalescence of their enjoyment. The true conception of a divinely fulfilled life, therefore, is the picture, not of an impoverished and ascetic soul opposed to a renounced and hostile world, but of a richly equipped and happy soul exercising its prerogatives over the contents of a tributary world expanded to the utmost limits of consciousness. The present state is no less truly a work and gift of God than the unseen one to which we look forward in eternity. By a healthy and devout keeping of the laws of God here, then, men should seek to cleanse, edify, and furnish their souls, fitting them for the conquest and enjoyment of the world which is to come, through a preliminary conquest and enjoyment of the world which now is. He makes an ennobling sacrifice who foregoes cheap and mean indulgences for high and costly achievements, abandoning inferior advantages for superior ones. But he commits an injurious error who puts a fancied contradiction between forms of good where no real contradiction exists. And the grandest thing a man can do, a feat which will immeasurably profit him as long as he has a being anywhere in the universe of God, is to gain the whole world and

save his own soul.

contradictory one.

Nor let any one deem this double work a It is but the two sides of the same reality. For the only substantial mastery or enjoyment of the outer creation, either in this world or in any other, consists in the development and freedom of the self-possessed spirit.

The whole gist of the subject as we have presented it, in contrast to the prevalent ecclesiastical treatment of it, may be condensed into one crucial instance. Here is a man of the liberal Christian school, without any belief in the essential formularies of theological Orthodoxy, who has gained the whole world by his vast fortune, his generous culture, and his high social position. He has gained it without violating the strictest integrity or in any way defiling himself in the process. Has he thereby lost his own soul? He has retained the frank, untainted affections of boyhood, adding to them the firm principle, the sober wisdom, and the experienced faith of manhood. The love of his mother, long since a saint in heaven, is a fountain of holy feeling in his breast. He has kept himself unspotted from the temptations and vices which have borne down so many around him. A lover of men, a pure patriot, a generous patron of whatever is worthy and needy, the track of his past sparkles with good acts, like a pavement of diamonds. Are the poor laborers of his adopted city suffering from the high rents charged for inconvenient, badly ventilated, and filthy houses? He appropriates millions of dollars to build for them the most excellent residences, which they shall inhabit at the lowest interest of the cost. Has a large portion of his native country been desolated by war, ignorance, and misfortune? He devotes millions more to redeem and uplift it by the best means of education and refinement. Is an illustrious servitor of science in ill-health and desirous of a change of scene and work? He fits him out from his private purse, on a scale which kings and proud nations have seldom rivalled, for an exploring expedition to a tropical clime. Are the children of the good physician who ministered to his parents, left in poverty? He pays their expenses through college. He founds academies, endows hospitals and other public charities, in a spirit as unostenta

tious as the munificence is princely. The hidden good he does is not less than the known, his daily life a galaxy of benevolence strewn with starry deeds unnamed. Genial in friendship, steadfast in trial, unaffectedly devout before God, his beneficence haloing him with a noble glory in the sight of the community, the benedictions of those blessed by his innumerable kindnesses envelop him with an invisible incense of love and praise as he passes. As to his future fate, he

leaves it with meek trust in the hands of his Maker.

Now will any bigot dare to say, "There is no hope for this man after death, because he is a Unitarian, denying the blood that bought him"? God himself, through the everlasting validity of his laws, everywhere in silent execution, declares that the gates of salvation shall never be shut against such a man. By the intrinsic fitness of his character, harmonized with the divine will, his heavenly destination is assured. Is it credible to any rational mind that a man of this stamp, because by his honest merits he has won the world, and by his magnanimous purity and liberality made a noble use of it, shall hereafter be condemned to hear the words, "Son, thou hadst thy good things in thy lifetime, and now thou must be tormented"? No: instead of being thrust down to perdition because of his meritorious triumph on the earth, he shall on that account be raised to a double height in heaven, with the five mortal talents gaining five immortal ones, and winning from the Master the sentence, "Well done, good and faithful servant! Thou hast been faithful over a few things; I will make thee ruler over many things. Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord."

The Orthodox, in the average of their laity, will no doubt indignantly deny that their belief dooms such a man to hell. But the logical necessities of their unrepudiated creeds do thus doom him. And that is the doctrine which has been, and still is, currently preached. Will they assert that a man can go to heaven without any belief in the Trinity, in the plenary authority of the Bible, or in the atoning blood of Christ? If so, then they are theists like us, their faith grounded on the great ethical postulates of natural religion.

They ought either consistently to stand by their theory of a dogmatic and sacramental salvation, or else manfully to abandon it. They have no right to the illicit advantage of holding two contradictory views at once, -vociferating, when in their own conventicles, the narrowest and most shocking terms of superstition and bigotry; claiming, when they address a more free and enlightened public, to believe only in flexible and rational conditions of redemption open for all men. They will see eye to eye with us when they outgrow the childish folly of believing only in a verbal God of tradition, cast in the metaphor of a fickle human monarch, and acquire faith in the living God of benignant and unchangeable law. To the Infinite, time and eternity are one; the soul and the world, the obverse and the reverse of a serial act; and judgment no critical climax or crash, but a continuous process. The true possession of our earthly environment and the salvation of our personality are therefore identical.

ART. IV. — IS THERE A CATHOLIC CHURCH IN

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AMERICA?

I. The Catholic History of North America. Five Discourses, to which are added two Discourses on the Relations of Ireland

and America. By THOMAS D'ARCY MCGEE, Author of the "Reformation in Ireland," &c. Boston: Patrick Donahoe. 1855. 12mo, pp. 239.

II. The Path which led a Protestant Lawyer to the Catholic Church. By PETER H. BURNETT. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1860.

8vo, pp. 741.

"THE Catholic History of North America" was published several years ago, and did not then attract much attention in either Protestant or Catholic circles. It contains some good things, and on the whole it is not an unreadable book. The public papers and other documents given in the appendix have an historical value, and several of them are very

interesting. But the author's conclusions and anticipations are, to say the least, illogical and ridiculous.

"I have announced to the public," he says, " for some time that I am prepared to prove in these discourses three propositions; to wit, first, that the discovery and exploration of America were Catholic enterprises, undertaken by Catholics with Catholic motives, and carried out by Catholic co-operation."

Therefore, according to our author's logic, America belongs by right to the Catholics, or rather to the Irish, owing to the fact that the Irish have contributed more than their share to increase the Catholic population in the United States.

"In kind, as in quantity," he tells us, "this [Irish] emigration was materially more valuable than any the colonial times had known. Its uniform poverty was its most useful quality. The German villagers, who march in compact procession from the ship's side to the far West, do better for themselves, but not for the country. A steady supply of cheap labor, a force which could be freely moved from point to point of national development, was the great want of this republic in the last half-century; and that want Catholic Ireland supplied."

Does it not follow that, to make up for the moderate wages they received, the Irish should, at some future time, become the owners and rulers of the land?

The next proposition which the author is prepared to prove is, "that the only systematic attempts to civilize and Christianize the aborigines were made by Catholic missionaries." Therefore, in the opinion of the modest and truthful historian, the Catholic Church is certainly the oldest institution in America, as it is in Europe; and is alone entitled to rule American consciences as it does those of half the Christian world! How the preceding statements can be made to agree with the following is more than we would venture to say. "The first Irish emigrants had failed to implant Catholicity in British North America. In retired spots of Maryland and Pennsylvania, a few had the happiness never to be totally deprived of the sacraments; but the vast majority, in the absence of church and priest, had fallen insensibly away."

VOL. LXXXVII. - NEW SERIES, VOL. VIII. NO. II.

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