Lecture III. St. Philip in England

They who have looked long and often on the pictures of St Philip, and with a loving scrutiny that would fain find out the interpretation of that heavenly face, because he was their master and their father, to whom they had given, with the most unconditional surrender, the leading-strings of their life, have not failed to mark the pale freshness of his skin, from which the olive hue of an Italian complexion is entirely absent, and to wonder whether there might not be the northern blood of a German race mingling with the Italian in his veins. His small blue eyes, whose flashing changefulness forbade any painter to attempt their lustre or expression; and the fact that he was a native of Tuscany, where families of German extraction dwelt, and German intermarriages abounded; may have fostered the natural desire of a dweller on this side of the Alps to believe that Philip had in him the spirit of the northern nations, as well as that of the more highly favoured peninsula of the south. What is, however, more certain, is, that in the midst of his apostolic career at Rome, his eye, as his biographer tells us, was cast on "the northern parts of Europe 99 with an intense and painful sympathy, because of the desolating ravages of heresy in those far-off lands. From that sympathy came his command to Baronius to compose his famous Ecclesiastical Annals. It led him h 2 also to take the warmest interest in the conversion of such transalpine heretics as might find their way to Rome. It may be about three hundred years since this anxiety in behalf of the "northern parts of Europe " was so keen in the capacious heart of St. Philip. Since then he has multiplied himself in his children, and wrought effectually by their hands for those distant countries. Hainault and Flanders saw him busy among their people. Brabant boasted its Oratory at Montaigu. Bavaria possessed him at Munich and at Auffhausen, and Austria in the crowded streets of Vienna; while five flourishing Oratories attested his benignant influence in Poland. Nearly all this was in the latter half of the seventeenth, and the first half of the eighteenth centuries: and now the middle of the nineteenth finds him trying, after his own fashion, to work his way into wealthy, powerful, proud, protestant, national England. How it will fare with him, who can say? But we are not concerned with prophecy just now.

In the two last Lectures, I have tried to give you what I believe to be a faithful idea of St. Philip, of his place, and work and influence in the Church of God; it only remains that I should try to shew whether in that idea of him we can discern any capabilities for English work, any peculiar reason for hoping that by the blessing of God he would suit. England, and be a benediction to her shores, not in the way of startling conversions, of the evangelization of multitudes, of the impetuous success of controversies — those are not his departments, — but in his own special unobtrusive and hidden manner, which is so utterly his own that we can only style it "Philip's way." This is an interesting consideration, my Brethren, both for you and me, and it shall form the subject of this concluding Lecture.

It is easy to be narrow-minded and foolish about the love of one's own country; but the English mind is one very susceptible of the influences of tradition, and therefore, like the German, eminently patriotic. To spend his whole boyhood amid her green landscapes — to grow up in her schools and universities — to feel, to see, to know, to touch the immense amount of goodness and of wisdom and of gentleness which he has inherited as an Englishman — to have drunk deeply of the various genial and abundant, though, alas! corrupted, fountains of her religious life — to have taken his side with an English decisiveness in his historical enthusiasm in the contests which have been fought or debated or written about, on her fields, or within her parliaments and colleges — to have lingered with a not reluctant fondness of forgiving admiration over the honest earnestness and heroic self-sacrifice for principle of those whose principles he yet put from him — to have felt with the most intimate reality, which every succeeding year was strengthening and identifying more and more with his better self, that he was living in the mind of the nation, a part and a power in her institutions, his aspirations breathing in her spirit, his heart beating in her life and heat, her prayers his prayers, her hopes his hopes, her fears his fears, that all that England is or has was his, and he, of little worth truly, yet such as he was, all for England, and that his first thought on waking, and his fresh ratification of it on going to rest, should have long and steadily been, that because he was an Englishman and believed in the English religion, his lot had been thrown in fair places: — I say, that to have gone through all this, and to have come out of all this, because God commanded it, must leave a convert to the Catholic faith in England a man with a ruling passion still upon him, modified, heightened, purified, but not a whit subdued incite affectionate intensity. He has no time to lose himself in poetic dreams about the conversion of England, of which there is not one betokening phenomenon. He has arrears of the hardworking years of a past youth to make up; he has to overtake the seasons that have gone. by. He must be up and doing with a rough hand, a ready will, and a loving heart This may, my Brethren, be the case with a number to whom I am now speaking; and if it is, you will respond to me when I say that the object which lies nearest to our hearts is, by God's help and our dear Lady's, to make our holy faith part of the national mind and life, to give an English look, to turn it into English channels, to endear it to English hearts, to teach it English words and English sounds, to obtain a bill of naturalization for it, not so much within the cold embrace of an Act of Toleration or a Repeal of Disabilities, as in the intimate depths of the religious aspirations; interests, sympathies, and seriousness of the good, earnest English people: for our holy faith, remember, is not a foreigner; she is but an outlaw with an older and more native right than that of those who have outlawed her.

Will St. Philip help us to do this? Here is our question for to-night.

I. Our first business, in endeavouring to find an answer to this question, must be to take a cursory and bird's-eye view of the present religious condition of England, in order that we may have a clear idea of the field of action into which St. Philip is descending to bear his part. The first object of our attention will of course be Catholicism itself. A very great increase of numbers, and that by no means confined to the less educated classes, combined with almost an indefinite amount of diminution of prejudice in those who are not of the fold, are facts too palpable to be denied. The growth and multiplication of the Religious Orders, which are the nerve and muscle of the Church, and the fostering zeal of the Holy See,.which, never slack, seems of late years to have turned towards England with even greater fondness than before, are also symptoms which fill us with hope and joy. While they, who are best acquainted with the interior of our body, find a still more certain ground for thankful affectation in the growth of spiritual energy and the apparent abundance of grace, which is among us. The success of the Catholic educational movement, thanks to the concentrated energies of some who might be named, and the sights and sounds of material activity and episcopal vigour which are seen and heard combining in every diocese, all look like so many blessings of God upon His English vineyard; and fervent devotion to our Blessed Lady, and enthusiastic loyalty towards the Holy See, together with a growing frequentation of the Sacraments, are as it were the quicksilver by which the temperature and promise of our faith may be discerned. I need do no more than name these things to you, for they are doubtless a portion of your daily ponderings and prayers.

The National Establishment next courts the eye. Signs of doom have multiplied and are multiplying upon it. Its three schools of Latitudinarian, Evangelical, and High-Church principles are in the same pertinacious discord as ever, though just at the present moment the differences between the Latitudinarians and Evangelicals are unnamed, though not forgotten, while the two parties unite in raising the cry of almost ferocious triumph at the signal victory they have recently gained over the discomfited High-Churchmen. The merely political character of the Establishment, as a simple branch of the Executive, has never been brought out so strongly before; while the babel of its angry and discordant divines, the seethings of its irreconcileable theories, the veerings and shiftings of its parties, the evolutions of its party leaders, like the tiresome doublings of a hare which ought to let itself be worried without more ado, the disclosures of its heterogeneous opinions in the almost incredible phenomenon of its late pamphleteering literature, have completely shaken its hold upon the respect of the people: and it never had diviner ground to build upon, unless the divine right of kings be tenable. Meanwhile that section of the Establishment which we naturally look upon with more especial interest, is at present in confusion and dismay. To the eyes of an affectionate impatience its partisans seem to proceed from their premisses to their conclusions somewhat more tardily than is fitting. They who have now through God's mercy the supernatural vision of faith, have much ado not to be disquieted, lest those whom they love should not at all times and altogether be corresponding to the movement of grace within their souls; and charity may not always find it easy to remember how little there may be of bitterness in unkind words spoken by bewildered men, or how much the first turmoils and agitations of conviction may be disclosed by the very vehemence of protestation* Men's principles are being tried beyond what they looked for. We must love them with patience; for they will not be angry with us long. If they speak evil of the Church, and her doctrines or devotions, they know not what they say. If they take hard views of the state of things among us, it is out of an honest ignorance or an unconscious prepossession. They must not be judged by their words and ways just now: they are better men than they allow themselves to look. They will one day preach the faith which now they persecute, and they will let us be happy in their happiness over their new-found faith. If at present they tease their own co-religionists by tortuous views of equivocation and reserve, it may be in some measure their misfortune, and not altogether their fault. If they tire us by what looks like pride and perverseness, their position, perhaps, is more than they can bear. We must be content to give them line, and those, whom God has ordained thereto, will in His time be brought to shore. Think no thoughts of them, which will slacken prayer for them. An atmosphere of perplexity is over this earnest portion of the Establishment, and grace works within its twilight; while the necessary stimulus of German theories, or the animal tranquillity of a less mischievous indifference, fill up, in clergy and laity, the gaps which the fierce life of party-spirit has been unable to replenish. The race of this national creation is well-nigh run; the doomed thing is drawing to its close; though they must know little of its wealth, wisdom, conservatism and manifold social fastenings who can cheer themselves with a confidence that its decrepitude and dotage will not be both wearisome and harsh. To many of us its undignified sufferings, and its dishonour so much more sudden than was looked for, is a truly painful spectacle. But it is the work of God's Hand, and He will not be unmindful of many a gentle and suffering soul He knows within its pale I

Dissent presents a not less interesting, because a more ignoble aspect. Presbyterianism, properly so called, as it was never so hiuch a system of theology, as a platform of discipline, having no room to set up or try its legislation, has in England almost died away into Sorinianism. Indeed, so far back as the close of the seventeenth century, the trust-deeds of the Presbyterian meeting-houses were left as unconditional, and as unlimited in regard of dogma, as the Toleration Act would allow. So quickly had that sect worked out its volcanic Calvinism, and found its inherent sympathies with the colder but more endurable deductions of Socinus! In Scotland it lives, because it is established, and has room for its pet scheme of ecclesiastical legislation: as a doctrinal system there, it is a dry Calvinism watered down and weakened by the modern metaphysics of Edinburgh. In England it can hardly be called an influence at all. The Quakers and the Baptists, both General and Particular, have little theological life in them. The energy of both those sects is chiefly absorbed in external schemes of philanthropy, with* little care for dogma at all. The goodness and zeal that are among them find a vent in those more respectable and business-like occupations. The cement is falling fast from the hastily but cleverly built edifice of Methodism; the wedge-like principle of protestant free judgment is splitting it up, as the pressure of spiritual monopoly, and an overbearing hierarchical domination drive it farther and farther into the mass. Methodism is wearing threadbare its own unintellectual vulgarity, in proportion as its spiritual freshness evaporates; though, like the disturbed surface of a lake, the distant rings of its influence will continue feebly to propagate themselves even when all life is dead at the heart. What remains of the vigour of the old Puritan life, with its fierce earnestness and grotesque heroism, seems to be preserved among the Independents, of whom it is not easy to speak without a kind of patriotic tenderness. There are more signs of life among them than among any of the other dissenting bodies, and of a life entitled to respectful notice. If English dissent has any fresh conquests to make, we should expect them either from the Independents, or from a new developement altogether; yet dissent seems past the day of its fertility. Peace be with it! It has a very interesting history, and is the most English-looking feature in the records of the last three hundred years, in spite of the Genevan stiffness engrafted on it The Irvingites, whose apostles find themselves almost without disciples, and the Mormonites of the coal-pits, who in twos and threes draft themselves yearly to some American Sion hardly deserve notice as influences in the religious life of England. The Unitarians have a widespread name; but how much of that surface is but a mask for a much simpler and more straightforward form of infidelity, who can tell? Speaking, however, of those who are true Unitarians, it would seem that the younger and fresher part of the sect are deserting the old rigid school of Priestley and his unmanageably stiff rationalism. His was a point at which no collection of various minds could possibly arrest itself. Plain Deism was beyond them, and consequential, which is always a temptation; but it is poor food in the way of religion. The English Unitarians, therefore, have honestly diverged from Priestley, and are not ashamed of confessing it, in spite of all that Belsham, and Lindsey, and Cappe, and the Arian Price would have said of them. The new apostle around whom they have gathered themselves, and in whose light they fancy they have gained new life, is the German Schleiermacher, the inventor of a system midway between the supernaturalist and rationalistic views of the Gospel, and much more poetical than the last¹. His distinguishing feature is enthusiastic devotion for the person of the " Redeeming Founder of Christianity," whom he surrounds with a kind of cloudy and distempered hero-worship. He is said in Germany to have created an epoch in theology. It is remarkable how, in his later years, Dr. Arnold had a growing devotion to our Lord's Person, which yet any Catholic can see to be very far removed from our simple worship of Him, and animated by an altogether different idea. Yet it is not uncommon, in modern Unitarian books, to read, and still more to hear in their sermons, a style which must remind Catholics, and startle them while it reminds them, of orthodox expositions of devotions to the Sacred Humanity of Jesus, our ever blessed Lord and God.

Unitarianism brings us to the outermost limits of dissent; and the English Unitarian disciples of Schleiermacher hand us over, almost unconsciously, to the new school of Transcendental Infidelity, which is spreading so rapidly among us. The literature of this school may be divided into three portions; first, what has been imported from Germany in the way of select translation, next the contributions of America, especially of the state of Massachusetts, and, lastly, what is English; and it is no mean sign of the times, that, amid the few English writers of this school, are to be found three clergymen of the Established Church, and some other graduates of the Protestant Universities. This is not the place to enter into an examination of the teaching of this school. It is sufficient to say, that, compared with the old school of English deism, discordantly represented by Toland, Blount,

Shaftesbury, Collins, Woolston, Morgan, Chubb, and Bolingbroke, it is, as a system, much more attractive, and much less logical. In the imbecile torpor of the helpless and unhelpful Establishment, in the lazy decrepitude or pusillanimous factiousness of the various departments of English dissent, and in the necessity of stimulus for the superabundant supply of racy youthful intellect in this generation, the Transcendental Infidelity is spreading with great rapidity among the young. It is becoming decidedly a power in the country, and, whatever may be the intellectual price we put upon it, the merest accidental influence is influence, and deeply interesting to those who are engaged in saving souls. An evil, of which the young are the especial victims, is doubly interesting to the followers of St. Philip. Even the Edinburgh Review is taking the alarm, and dealing out dire denunciations against the writers of this school, some of whom may, perhaps, be ill-natured enough to think it hard they should be so visited for conclusions of which they thought they infallibly discerned the premises in the pages of the same Review. Neither do they see clearly any greater divergence between their popular Christianity or " Christian Theism," and the orthodox Protestantism, than between the same national orthodoxy and the new-fashioned Christianity propounded in the brief Summa Theologiae appended by Sir James Stephen by way of Epilogue to his Essays. Thus you see the character of our controversies is changing; and if polemics are to be our atmosphere, the Puritan is a more interesting controversy than the Anglican, because it brings us into collision with deeper principles; and the Infidel Controversy, which seems likely to supersede them both, is more interesting than either, not only because it is fresher and more to the purpose, but because it gives a wider field, and — would there were any rational ground for adding! — fairer foes.

But there is still a large portion of English society, not a class, but a portion, fragments of many classes, which is not embraced within any of the foregoing descriptions. It is the immense multitude of English men and English women, who simply have no religion, and do not care to have one, because they experience no want of it. Just as dress is a part of civilization, and the style of dress a part of the reigning fashion, so too there are religious conventionalities and forms which these persons are not without, nay, might be uncomfortable without, just as a man is uneasy in the street when he is conscious that he is either singularly or badly dressed; and as, of these forms and conventionalities, the most respectable, as well as the most innocuous in their bearing on daily life and interference with self-indulgence, are those of the Established Religion, the great bulk of this multitude add to the power of resistance of the conservative element of Anglicanism: for our national character in this century is decidedly more Anglican than Puritan. An animal life of industrial utilitarianism, combined with a great deal of domestic amiability, drowsy benevolence and very moderate accomplishments, may be taken as a fair description of this section of our fellow-countrymen. A few young men in town, and a number of persons residing in the provinces, manage to find in the dulness of modern politics, out of which all the nerve and charm of principle have gone, enough life to satisfy their appetite for energy. The majority find greater stimulus, and certainly a much completer recreation, in a smattering of some one or more of the physical sciences. This multitude too may be called a power in the country, first, simply because of its bulk 9 and next because of its resistance and opaqueness.

Such is the aspect which the superficies of English society presents to our view; and, with two exceptions, the features of it are lassitude, selfishness, indifference, exhaustion, decrepitude, and the prognostics of a most uninteresting dissolution. Those two exceptions are the Catholic aggression on the country, and the New Infidel School: and may not he be called " a dastard, whom such foretaste doth not cheer "? Surely, when light and darkness are ranged in separate, cognizably separate armies, there will be consolation in the warfare, however bloody it may be. But that phase of the warfare is not yet Meanwhile we shall want for our work many powers, many saints, many stout-hearted operatives with all manner of religious habits and secular apparel upon them; and God will bless us and send us all we want. My question is a narrower one — what can St Philip do in all this? What can he bring out of his peculiar genius, as depicted in the last two Lectures, that will be good service for England? — St Ignatius is here to help; he has been long in the field, has won his ground, and, as ever with him, has stoutly kept what he has conquered. - St. Alphonso too has come; not little is the trust we put in him: St Benedict too is in the field, and others, and they will multiply. The Venerable Paul of the Cross sees now, what was once but prophetic vision to his eye, the meek bearing and the unworldly habit of his discalceated children on the green fields of England.

II. There are two ways in which St Philip can speak to us and work with us in England, and which flow naturally from his spirit and genius as already described. The one is by correcting, modifying, or purifying external defects under which we labour, and imparting to us an interior spirit which improves, while it is congenial to, our own. The other is by the adaptation to our tempers, tastes, and necessities, of certain external modes of working, which belong, and are, to some extent, peculiar to himself. And St Philip's fitness for the English people does not rest in any, or in all separately, of these points, but in the accumulation and convergence to them all in his one idea: neither does the display or application of his fitness belong by any means exclusively to his own Congregation; for his spirit is the spirit of the Secular Clergy, and to them does he belong and they can use his arts and walk upon his ways: we of his Congregation have no exclusive property in our dear Founder; he is the property of the Secular Clergy always and everywhere: and this fact will enable me to speak more freely and more broadly of St Philip's work in England than I could have done, had I thought the holy Father was with us his more immediate children, who wear his livery, and with no one else.

1. I will speak of the internal spirit first.

When an old man looks back upon a long life of alternate good and evil fortune, he not only sees the mistakes he has made, but, in the calmness of the unimpassioned retrospect, he sees the principle which has actuated him in all his blunders, and discerns the character of the evil genius which has haunted him. So it is in the study of history. In the long chronicles of centuries, we come to see the evil genius which has from time to time come in the way of a nation, and misled it One of the worst of the evil geniuses of England has been nationalism. It was in a measure forced upon us by our insular position, then concentrated by the loss of our continental possessions, and last of all exaggerated in our self-multiplication in colonies. It has been the cause of almost all that is little and pusillanimous in us, and has retarded us in all growths, except that of material and industrial prosperity, which it was not its business to hinder, but which perhaps it rather forwarded. I see no reason against conceding this. In religion it produced the Establishment, and, in saying that, how much is involved! At present the great Catholic movement throughout the world is distinguished by nothing so much as the clear ascendency of the grand, magnanimous and vigorous principle of Ultramontanism. It is the tendency of modern civilization to render more and more nugatory and indistinct all national separations, peculiarities of blood, and territorial boundaries. Philosophy, science, diplomacy, literature, feeling, all go the same way. But to what centre? It is hard to say. So far it has mimicked the divine Catholic system. But we have our sacred centre, all the more sacred because it seems so frail, the Roman Throne, the image of the Throne Invisible.

You will not think that I am trifling with you, then, when I make much of St Philip's being especially a Roman Saint; indeed, in a sense in which no other Saint ever was, since authority itself has named him Rome's apostle. Whatever drifts our affections more and more towards Rome — whatever increases in us a mysterious love and loyal homage towards the Jerusalem of Catholics, whose claim to our respect rests no more on the character of its populace than did the claims of the Holy City of David on the virtues of the rabble that chose Barabbas — whatever inspires us with a fondness for all that breathes of Rome, and looks like Rome — whatever instils into our hearts that old religious instinct which bade our Saxon kings come down from off their thrones and wander in enthusiastic pilgrimage to that strange old city of ruins and of tombs, where God has fixed St. Peter's living Throne, a Throne all eyes world-encompassing, all hands world-subduing, all wisdom world-inspiring — whatever makes that home and hearth of Christendom dearer to us, and each day more dear, — is a real and substantial blessing. Out of it will come Catholic life. Out of it will come generous strength, and health. Look at the Church of France, who so nobly leads the way, oblivious of her old selfish Gallican glories. Look at America, and her robust young Church. See! it is the instinct of the earth, everywhere awakening to the faith, with its wide and princely episcopate, to rise up and throw itself on Rome, and to lean all its weight upon that central point which the finger of God has touched, and which will sustain the world, when all else shall rock to and fro. Is there no significance then in the coming of Rome's own apostle to help Us in the fight, and to pitch his quiet but busy little tent amid those of the host of God, waiting for the battle, the tents of Israel that are beautiful as "tabernacles which the Lord hath pitched, as cedars by the water-side?"

The other nations of Europe say of us, and it cannot be denied that there is some truth in the reproach, that we are not a happy people. It has been said of us by one of our own writers that we have produced the greatest poets of any nation in the world, and yet are ourselves, of all nations, the least poetical; and that the lack of poetry betokens or causes, or both, the want of happiness. This is perhaps an exaggeration; and it is at any rate more true of the higher than of the lower orders. It must be acknowledged, however, that without doubt the aspect of our character is sober, serious, solemn, nay, not unfrequently sour and sombre. We are wanting in light-heartedness. We should have more energy, or perhaps elasticity would be a truer word, if our spirits were more gay. Foreigners exaggerate this. They always misunderstand us. We are as hard a people to understand as any on the face of the earth. No one can lead an Englishman, but an Englishman. No one can persuade an Englishman, but an Englishman: neither Scotchman, nor Irishman, much less a man from overseas. It may be part of our pride. It may be something else. But so it is.

It fell to my lot some time ago to have to read some American books, which surely are next-door to English. But the very thing that struck me was, "What different principles the Americans reason on from what we do! Arguments like these would never persuade men in Oxford or in London." We shut ourselves up, and make ourselves a hundred times more gloomy in appearance than we are in reality. But, now, was this our national character in the old ages? Why, our very nick-name was " Merrie England and merry did not only mean that her fields were greener than anybody else's fields, but that her hearts were as light, her faces as bright, and her words as blythe, nay, I will say it, because of her ' freedom, lighter, brighter, and blither. " It is an enemy hath done this." It is our evil genius of Puritanism, and that, too, as history testifies, not a native genius, but a foreign one naturalized, from Frankfort and Geneva; burnt into a generation together with the gall and bitterness of exile and the rancour of religious strife. You will say, all this is an argument against St Philip because he is a foreign Saint. But I answer that it is not: first, because I cannot admit that, in matter of religion, anything from Rome is or can be foreign anywhere; and next, because St Philip translates himself into English, and makes himself into a number of Englishmen before he comes, and gives his spirit to many more (may it be a growing number!) than are called by his sweet name. And what I am bent upon saying now, is, that his peculiar spirit of playfulness, and gaiety, and tenderness, and insinuating variety, and graceful pliability, and sunshiny religion, is just what we want to neutralize our puritanism, which has impaired, by disgusting, all the earnestness of the land.

Then, again, simplicity was one of Philip's foremost graces. He was quite Franciscan in this respect No one studies his life, without catching a love of this unearthly simplicity. If you give yourself up to St Philip, and lay yourself open to his spirit, his simplicity will enter into you, and be a living spirit within you. It will grow with your growth, and strengthen with your strength. And is not our want of simplicity quite a curse upon us just now? Such a crookedness in everything, such a diseased disingenuousness of tastes, and antiquarianisms, and politics, and tryings to get a-head of each other! Such tortuous morals about political rights, and the relations of rich and poor, of buyer and seller, of borrower and lender, of giver and receiver! Such a multitude of words, and flood of professions, and solemnity of oral pledges to a comparative non-existence of actions performed and promises redeemed! No one knows what to lean upon, or what to believe in, or whom to trust, or how to be consistent Every one is unsimple. Doubt gnaws at the heart of everything, and a levity, whose very effervescence is of a bitter spirit, is the child of doubt Men use old names for new things. Faith is a cant word in their schools, and means no one knows what; only that in their pain men talk loud of faith, in order to stun the sense of scepticism, and then, strangest unsimplicity of all! become sceptical by doggedly making up their minds to doubt nothing, but to believe in everything. Then trade makes us lie, and agriculture makes us lie, and machinery makes us lie, and pauperism makes us lie, and diplomacy keeps us lying, which was its old trade; and now, from the new ethics of reserve which the hard-handed necessity of subscription to contradictories has caused suffering men to excogitate, the national religion sets us lying, and, last of all, as it compels infidels to call themselves by dissenting names to keep up respectability and appearances, even our good, honest, national prejudice against freethinking sets us lying too. The manifold wickednesses of the world are in a conspiracy to set plain blunt Englishmen lying. Now, if St. Philip can catch but seven thousand men up and down the metropolis and the manufacturing towns, and make them open, simple, truthful to a fault, with their hearts on their lips or in their hands, we shall have in England as great a number of the right kind of men, with the blessing of God in them, as there were children of Israel, the strength and leaven of the land, who in the bad times of Achab had not bowed their knees before Baal, nor " worshipped him kissing the hands." He can have but little confidence in St Philip, who can despair of his doing at least this.

There is another element of St Philip's school which eminently fits him for England. The whole tendency of his teaching is to put the force of religion into its internal spirit, its hidden life. He does not, of course, with the one-sidedness of a false teacher eschew ritual, or the accessories of beauty and art, in worship. No one less so. He has even more of the spirit of Clugni than of r

Citeaux about him, despite those naked catacombs. Time was when his sons were the chief interpreters of rubrics at Rome; and wheresover there has been an Oratory, there, as circumstances allowed, have music and painting found a home, and become an integral part of the Oratorian movement and the Oratorian Ufe. Still he did in a very unusual way lay a marked stress on internals, on the unseen interests of the soul as taking precedence of everything, on cleanness of heart, on interior union with God, on delicacy of conscience and utter loathing of sin, on detachment from creatures and on the atmosphere of prayer. He was frightened of forms, and times, and change of apparel, and conventionalities, and all externals, until the spiritualities had had all their rights and precedencies solemnly and authentically and unquestionably guaranteed to them. Now this was the very meaning, the power, the spell, the significancy, the endurance of puritanism. This is the thoroughly English view of religion, and no other view will take root among us.

• Men sickened of the Establishment because its forms were only forms, and its conventionalities had neither heat nor grasp in them. This drew the bulk of the lower

There is still another, and a yet more interior function which St Philip is well calculated to perform for us. It directly concerns ourselves and the Church, but of course indirectly, as benefiting the Church, it runs over and blesses the nation also. We all see and acknowledge,²

(we confess our surprise at it in conversation,) the abundance of grace, actual grace, which God seems to have been giving of late outside the Church, in order to bring men within the one true fold of salvation. We ought equally to acknowledge, what is of far higher import, the copious pouring out of more than common supplies of grace within the fold itself, in order to higher degrees of holiness, greater heights of perfection, more sublime vocations, and closer union with God. Where shall we look for a system of spiritual direction fitted for the circumstances of England, and able to control the highly educated minds which are most often the subjects of these extraordinary graces? We are all busy with our missionary duties. Souls on the brink of perdition have a prior claim to souls in spiritual difficulties and interior trials. Our missionary occupations press us to the earth; we have no time to turn ourselves to anything else; the penury of priests is the only limit to our work and our success. Books will not supply the place of living directors; grace does not promise to sustain itself without them. If we train our penitents on the Italian liberty of spirit exclusively, they become lax, and indifferent to little things. An Englishman is not an Italian. If we subject them to the minute discipline of French regimental spirituality, they become scrupulous, narrow-minded, tame and pusillanimous. An Englishman is still less a Frenchman. If we should happen to be agreed that the Spanish mixture of gallantry and common sense is the most English style, as we see it developed in St. Theresa and Baltasar Alvarez, still there are modifications necessary; and again there is English valetudinarianism to be reckoned fpr, as a disturbing force. It is like getting into a magnetic current: we must look to our bearings,

K else we shall land we know not where. And, after all, books will not do, by themselves. We want tutoring. When God granted to the French Church the wonderful movement of the seventeenth century, He raised up an astonishing school of spiritual directors among them, and Saints blossomed in those days in France, as thick as the blooms on the apple-tree by the paved road-side. Now who so likely to help us in this work as St Philip? and that not among his own children only, or even chiefly, God forbid! they have no business to be first in anything; it is not their vocation. No! through the length and breadth of the land he must do it To teach perfection in the world was his foremost mission. " Early and late, getting and spending," when or where was the world so much in us and upon us and around us, thick, stifling, inextricable, as it is in English society of the nineteenth century. Why, St Philip never had such a battle-field before. And he knows it, and he has made up his mind to do great things, greater than you and I have a dream of. On earth he was a man who, when he willed a thing, did it; and wills are freeer in Heaven, both to plan and to do, than they were on earth. If God has given His servant St Philip liberty in England, he will run his race, and come to the end whereto he was sent

2. You see I am obliged to go quickly over my ground. Take these as some of the interior ways in which St Philip's spirit will confirm and corroborate our spirit, and purify and heighten what is foolish, low, crooked, or amiss in ours. Now let us say a few words of his outward ways.

When George Whitfield preached, it was not only the grim-faced colliers with tears making white gutters down their feces, or the excited groups of sun-burnt plough-men, who threw themselves before him and let the lava of his impetuous heart run over them and do what it would with them. But Hume and Franklin, Pulteney, Bolingbroke. and Chesterfield, " maids of honour and lords of the bed-chamber," came to hear him. Nay, dignified bishops of the Establishment hid themselves behind curtains to listen to the tapster of a Gloucester tavern. Yet the poor servitor of Pembroke College had only a poor pittance of Oxford lore about him. He was there but a little while, and of that little while the most had been spent in praying and fasting with the two Wesleys at Lincoln College, or in meditating and fighting with the evil one for whole nights together in the wet grass of Christchurch meadow. His power was first of all in the heart and the simplicity and the interior doctrine of his preaching. Bating his heresy, he preached just as St Philip would have taught him to preach if he had been an Oratorian novice, which, unluckily for his poor soul, George Whitfield never was. And, secondly, his power was in the fact that the English are a hearing people. A popular author of the day, of much power and more onesidedness, and whose works are full of a prelusive Gibbonlike infidelity, in enunciating with his usual breadth one of the half-truths, which are at once his characteristic and his strength, complains of the English taste for hearing. Be it so: yet it is a fact, and you must rule people with their wills, before you can rule them against their wills: and if you believe in individual souls you cannot afford to lose time in saving them. The "dumb dogs," the non-preaching clergy of old times, are a proverb in English history; puritanical life was in preaching; the magic of Methodism was in preaching; Whitfield preached on an average forty hours a week for many years. You cannot drive out the English taste for preaching by ritual or aught else. You must convert them by the excess of the foolishness of preaching, before you can mould them more to your mind, if you wish to do so. Benedict XIV. mentions St. Philip's remarkable devotion to Savonarola; it almost gave offence; the Sacred Congregation of Rites, however, found no fault in it, and took no scandal at it This devotion of their holy Father is not likely to escape the minute and thoughtful attention of his children. When all Rome first rang with Philip's name, what was it men said that he had done? Established the " daily Word of God:" that was the very protestant-sounding phrase that passed from mouth to mouth, from the Vatican to Santa Croce, from the Porta del Popolo to St Paul's beyond the Walls: established the daily Word of God! Think Of his times, of men's wants, of nascent protestantism, of the working of minds, of the irresistible thirst for doctrine that was throwing off swarm after swarm of heresy, fast as the steam-press flings forth the sheets of the popular journal of our day — and then what wisdom, what significance, what an austere, single, divine idea — " established the daily Word of God"! You see, St Philip's outward dress no less than his hidden spirit, fits England to a nicety. If the land had been measured for him and for his Oratory, the fit could not have been completer.

It can hardly be denied that there is a Protestant look about St Philip's Oratory, especially in England, where men, in gazing on Catholicism, fix their eye just on what separates it off from the national religion, and on this exclusively. A first look detects differences; the perception of points of agreement comes later on. A Protestant conventicle resounds with a vernacular hymn, characterized by its frequent repetition of the name of Jesus: so did St Philip's Oratory at Rome some half century before conventicles were invented. The multitudes of England follow after Methodism because of its incessant preaching: the multitudes of Rome with equal admiration followed St. Philip because of his daily Word of God. The Oratory, with its prayer-meetings, its familiar use of holy names, its vernacular hymns, its prominence given to preaching, its homely style, is older than Puritanism in England, and it sprung up in the Sacred City itself, under the shadow of St Peter's Chair, and the Church has canonized the man who set it going: here is our fact What does it mean? Or is it unmeaning? Suppose we say, as we have said, that it was the remedy God provided for the very state of things in which poor England finds itself, and that^ interpretation does not please, at least the fact remains, and must have its meaning put upon it The " methodism " of the Oratory is a purely Catholic birth, and is a century and a half older than Methodism proper. How is this, unless St Philip be the representative of Modern Times, their Godfather and their Saint?

Surely the English people are greatly in need of holyday and recreation. These long hours of work, these unwholesome atmospheres, these steel-filings, soap-boilings, poison-polished cards, stereotype-plate castings, gasometers, tan-pits, vitriol-works, and the rest of it, well-nigh drain the life out of a man. His gloomy, wearisome, slowfooted Sunday is all he has for his own; almost to be accounted lucky if, sometimes, work even then interferes with the dead weight of his reflective unhappiness on that day. The English artisans are in need of recreation. They will be a happier people when they k2 have it, and a holier people when they are happier. Yet you must make a man happy in his own way. A king and an archbishop have no divine right to issue a book of sports, and thrust happiness down men's throats, against their will and out of their own way. As matters are at present, it is most unlikely that the great multitude of serious England will find their recreation otherwise than in their religion. Anyhow, some will look for it there, and some in scientific meetings, literary-institutes, and political clubs. Now let us take the first half of the question first Some will look for their recreation in religion. Given the hypothesis — there have been wilder ones — that St Philip had an Oratory in all the large towns, or places opened on the model of an Oratory. The evening comes; the gates of the factories are thrown wide open; the streets are filled with crowds of artisans, each one of whom is full of noblest capabilities of good, and the worst has an immortal soul. He has time to go home, to wash, to rest, to refresh himself. After all that toil there must be excitement; there can be no rest without it He goes, if he wills, and hundreds do will, to the Oratory. If he is early he can pray in silence; he can visit the altars; the pictures and the images soothe him and teach him; the silence round the tabernacle of the Most Holy excites him and heats him into more loving prayer. The hour comes; he can join in the English prayers, respond to the Litanies, share the Paters and the Aves, in his own Saxon tongue, which is much to his heart's content Then he can sing, at least in his way; everybody sings there, why not he? he is a hymn-loving animal, as his puritan fathers were before him; this is yet more to his heart's content Then comes the sermon; a stranger or chance dropper-in would think it portentously long in most cases; the fact is, it was not meant for him; the place is a factory of sermons, meant for people who make a nightly business of hearing; the artisan is an Englishman, and thus a hearing animal, and so this is most of all to his heart's content So he joins in the next hymn more joyously still; then, perhaps, the altar glows with its starry lights, and he can go home with no less a benediction than His who made him, given to him there and then in His own gracious Bodily Presence. Or if there be aught upon his mind, his Lord is waiting in the free confessionals, ready to bleed balm upon his wounds, and send him home happy, if any son of earth there be that night who is so. What does he think, that body and that soul of his, of Philip's recreation?

I wonder what St Philip would have thought of a People's Hall or a Mechanics' Institute. One thing I am quite certain of, that he would not have let them alone. That " old man of sixty, and wonderful in many respects, and of astonishing prudence and dexterity in inventing and promoting spiritual exercises," of whom Ancina spoke in 1576, in his letter written May the 28th, this very day, would have had his People's Hall and his Mechanics' Institute, and had his daily Word of God after a fashion within their precincts, just as he had his processions, and his pilgrimages, and his frolics and picnics in vineyards for carnival times and the like: for Philip's ((Word of God " includes many things; it is not mere missionary preaching; it included Baronius' Annals with all its secular learning. Perchance men may some day hear St. Philip lecture on Physical Geography, on the danger of Biela's Comet, or the Physiognomy of Plants in a Mechanics' Institute, or on English Literature, or the

Principles of Poetry in a People's Hall. He has been seen in odder places, and to some purpose, before now. His views are anything but narrow. You may trust him for that

Now here is a Saint in the Roman Calendar, who founded a Congregation three hundred years ago; and, strange to say! he made it a fundamental rule of its communities that they should be fixed in large towns. For himself he never slept out of Rome for a good part of a century. No green fields, no wood-encircled monasteries, no countrified noviciates, nor even a house of studies in the fresh air were his children to have. In the murky alleys, in the half-eternal fog, in the cheerless sight of odds and ends of blue sky now and then seen between the housetops, in the din and whirl, in the fret and " slow fever," as one of his holiest children called it, of half-hourly interruptions, they were to live in their cells, and pray as if they were in a wilderness, and preach as if they were in a heathen land; and when their faces got white and their limbs aching, and their heads stunned and good for nothing, then they might off to some country-house for a while to get gulps of fresh air, which they were to take in with all reasonable rapidity, like men drinking uncomfortably in a hurry. Now is not this just what we want? It is as if the old man, the type of Modern Times, saw far onward. These large towns, unheard-of terrifying agglomerations of overworked and not overcontented people, sprinkled like black charged storm-clouds all over the land — these are our dread, our difficulty, our problem, our opprobrium medicorum reipublicae. Who will undertake to draw off their electricity in safe and regulated ways? The poor Establishment? Alas! Lord Nelson used to say — and it was the first moral lesson, perhaps, that some of us rememher to have been taught — that he owed everything in life to his always being a quarter of an hour before his time. The Established Religion has just been the reverse. Its characteristic has been, that it has always been a quarter of an hour behind its time; and so it has let the large towns slip, irretrievably now. I think St Philip could do something for them, which they would not be sorry to see done. Anyhow, his spirit is the spirit of large towns, unmistakeably so; and it is therefore quick to sympathize with the masses, which is what we want in England so » much just now, not a kindness or a condescension, not a j cricket-club or a Victoria park, but a generous, cordial, human give-and-take sympathy with the masses. And the youth of large towns — it goes wandering about: poor shepherdless thing! it is Philip's flock, the flock of his choice, his first-love; it will hear his voice, &s of a shepherd, and know it though it heard it not before, and gather together, and be in peace and joy and gay liberty of spirit round about the dear old Saint One such troop of factory youths in a dozen large towns, and St Philip's work will be worth England's having.

And now, my dear Brethren, I have finished my little task. I have spoken to you very familiarly. I have often forgotten that you are not all Oratorians; but indeed I am sure that in one sense you are so, if to love St Philip, and to wish to love him more, be as good a badge as the black cassock and boylike turn-down collar of the Oratorian habit And now I wish I could tell you how much I love you all, and how earnestly I beg St Philip to bless you. What have I meant by all I have said? St Philip has come among us: what will he do? Convert England? No I no! hard work and no dreams — that is^St Philip's watch-word to his people. Let me tell you what the great and good Baronius once said of St Philip, when the Saint had gone to his glory. " What shall I say of that Father, who, being present with me and haying aided me in everything, has sb many times begotten me with the Apostolic spirit, and with the* same spirit has from my youth up kept me in chijck, and N restrained me from the slipperiness of my boyvopd clined to evil, and brought into subjection to tls divine laws the untamed colt of Bay youth, and set Jesi s Christ, to sit thereon?" — I repeat— St Philip has come among us — what will he do? Miracles? Very likely — ^>ut that is short of what we want, and in ho wise to the purpose. < Convert England? No. Do things which will make men lpok in wonderment on Rome's Apostta? No. What then Jvul he do? I will tell you; — somethi;ig which a man of tfie world would think, for it$ very littleness, a most " lame and impotent conclusion " to all I have Said: he will save the souls in England which God sends him to save; and, among them, may there be found every soul of you, i% Brethren, and the souls of all my fathers and brothers, and, by a stretch of grace, my own!

ijenry Lucas, Printer, 3, Burleigh Street, Strand.

MEMOIRS

OF

FATHER EIPA,

DURING

THIRTEEN YEARS' RESIDENCE AT THE COURT OF PEKING IN THE SERVICE OF THE EMPEROR OF CHINA;

WITH

AN ACCOUNT OF THE FOUNDATION OF THE COLLEGE FOB THE EDUCATION OF YOUNG CHINESE AT NAPLES.

SELECTED AND TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN,

By FORTUNATO PRANDI.

LONDON: JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET.

London: Printed by William Clowes and Sows, Stamford Street.

(i")

Footnotes

1. See the remarks on the " Eclectic Christology of Schleiermacher, " in the dissertation on the " Dogmatic Import of the Life of Jesus," at the end of Strauss's Life of Jesus. ↩

2. orders from it. Englishmen will not be converted by the outsides of things, no matter how proper and decorous, or how beautiful and orthodox those outsides may be. This is the simple arcanum of the Oratory, its Sampson's lock. This is the ruling principle of St Philip's institute; take that away, and the Oratory is no more. ↩