XVII. The Work and Wants of the Church in England

(Dublin Review, 1882.)

THE WORK AND WANTS OF THE CHURCH IN ENGLAND.

Sixteen years ago the Dublin Review began its second series. The first number contained an article on " The Work and Wants of the Church in England." Sixteen years arc half a generation: and we may without impropriety, at the opening of a third series of the Dublin Review, once more survey our work and wants.

In doing so it will not be amiss to have before us the state of the Church in France at this time, as given in the work of Abbe Bougaud, Vicar-General of the diocese of Orleans. It describes to us the condition, momentary it is to be hoped, of one of the oldest and maturest Churches of Europe on a subject which is most vital to the Catholic Faith, its vocations to the priesthood; and it is, therefore, full of instruction to us, who are the youngest and least mature of the Churches of the West.

Abbe Bougaud's book treats chiefly, it may be said exclusively, of the state of the priesthood and of the pastoral office — that is, of the sacerdotal vocations, and of the cure of souls. On this one point the health and vigour of the Church depends. It is this one point also on which the restored Church in England has need to fix its chief efforts.

What Abbe Bougaud describes as the cbicf peril to the Church iii France is the chief need of the Church in England: and yet, as we shall see, there is no peril in this need, but only a want that is being steadily and surely supplied.

But first we will give an account of Abbo Bougaud's book.

The Grand Peril opens with a remarkable passage -of Comte de Maistre, who, at the beginning of this century, wrote as follows: " The priesthood ought to be at this moment the sovereign care of the social order which is endeavouring to renew itself. Let the higher classes offer their sons to the altar, as in times past. Let them render to the Church in dignity and wealth that which they have received themselves." " If I had before me the description of the ordinations to the priesthood, I should be able to foretell great events."

Abbe Bougaud then proceeds to otter proofs of the •diminished number of vocations to the priesthood; and affirms that this evil is steadily increasing, and invading the most favoured dioceses. But he adds that this does not arise, in truth, from a diminution of vocations on God's part, which are always and everywhere abundant, but from the want of care, and culture, and piety on the part of parents and of others. One powerful cause which deters parents from encouraging and confirming the desire of their sons to become priests is the life of poverty, solitude, and suffering to which a priest is doomed. These discouragements are at present in great activity and force throughout France. The priest hood is the object of constant menace and slander.

Parents, therefore, so far from encouraging the vocation of their sons, often directly discourage and even destroy them. The consequences of this diminution in the sacerdotal vocations are manifold: all the chief offices of the Church are thereby weakened, such as the pastoral care of the country districts, and also of the towns, the work of missions, of study, and of teaching. Abbe Bougaud points out that from this cause the defence of religion, and the daily press, have passed into the hands of the laity. If he means to the exclusion of the clergy, without doubt it is an evil, not so much because the laity should become defenders of the Faith, as because the clergy ought to be so in an especial degree. He then goes on to show the bearing of this upon education: because it renders the finding and the forming of pro fessors every day more difficult: also upon the propagation of the Faith, the ecclesiastical discipline, and the evangelisation of France. Of this he says: " Our population is not hostile to religion: they are ignorant of it: they live bowed down to the earth. You speak to them, but they do not understand. The weight of three or four generations who have lived without God weighs upon them."

He then enters upon an examination of the causes of this evil, and says: ''There would have been one remedy for this mournful state of things — namely, that the richer classes, the noblesse, the middle class, those commonly called the governing classes, should enter the priesthood, and bring into it their name, their fortune, their education, their knowledge of the world. For

1 Lc Grand Peril, p. 70.

sixty years the greatest minds and the greatest Bishops have been calling to them without making them hear."2 The causes of this Abbe Bougaud finds in three things: first, •' the deplorable habit of the aristocratic families to bring up their sons to do nothing;" secondly, in the religious indifference of the middle class; in a moral abasement; and in both classes, high and low, a systematic sterility. As to the first cause, he says: "They become neither soldiers, nor magistrates, nor priests. What, then, fire they? They do not serve their country in the ministry of the sword, nor in the ministry of justice, nor in the ministry of the altar. For what, then, will they be fit? Let unexpected events come upon them, and take them unawares, they will be found wanting."3 Of the indifference of the middle class he says: 4< How shall priests come forth from such homes whore God is despised, or mocked, or absent? Alas! not even Christians come out of them. At fifteen years old the child drops the hand of his mother, even the most tenderly loved, and goes to swell the ranks of the indifferent."4 "The question of the middle class is I be great question of this age. If warned by the lightning which foreruns the storm, they return to God; then all the governing classes united together, the noblesse and the bourgeoisie, industry and commerce, the greater and the lesser proprietors, the people may be brought back who now are wandering, and, being astray, will, like children or madmen, break all things in their fury. But if, on the other hand, the bourgeoisie

« Ibid. p. 83¹ is obstinate, we must wrap our mantle about us and let the storm pass over. It will be terrible." 5 After a strong appeal to tbese classes, Abbe Bougaud points to the seventeenth century, and says: "At that time there was nothing more despised than the priesthood.

People were ashamed to have a priest in their family.

All at once there appeared three men of gentle birth, followed soon by a multitude of others: M. de Berulle,

F. de Condren, M. Olier. They began by showing themselves every Sunday at the services of the parish church. They fulfilled the humblest duties; they carried the holy water or the torches; they brought the cruets to the altar; they were exact in wearing the ecclesiastical habit. Soon arose the ordination retreats;

when Bossuet listened to S. Vincent of Paul, Cardinal de Berulle, and, still more, F. de Condren, raised the idea of the priesthood to its greatest height. M. Olier founded seminaries, and gave the definitive form to the priesthood of France. The movement spread to the provinces; everywhere men of gentle birth arose, sons of functionaries and councillors of Parliament, who desired as an honour the character of priesthood, so despised five-and-twenty years before, of which the greatest men did not then count themselves worthy.1'

" The other day," he says, " I saw a young lady of great name, and of a brilliant fortune. She said, * I pass in my family for slightly mad, for I have only one son, and I say openly that I should be proud if God could have him for His service. People say to me,

" What are you thinking of? You have him only, and

5 Lc Grand Peril, p. 83.

he is necessary for the keeping up of the name;" and I Ray, ' What more heautiful lot than for a family to extinguish itself at the foot of the altar! We shall come to an end sooner or later. In three hundred years who will remember the Counts of? They will have disappeared: and who knows? perhaps less to their honour.' "

Ahhc'' Bougaud then turns to the remedies for this evil. He classes them as follows: First, as it is God Who calls men to the priesthood, we must pray to Him for vocations; next, we must carefully and religiously search out the germs of them in youths and hoys. This duty chiefly and primarily rests on fathers and mothers, and after parents it rests upon priests, and after priests it rests on every Christian who loves God and the Church.

He then passes to the means whereby such voca tions may be unfolded and sustained. The first is the ccole presbytdrale, the priest's house. He mentions an aged Canon of Orleans, who said,:(I am eighty-three, and shall soon die. I have not done all the good I would. But one thing consoles me: I leave behind thirty-three priests, whom I have formed, and they will 'do better than 1 have done." Another priest, on the jubilee of his priesthood, was surrounded by more than twenty priests who had in like manner been formed by him. He was a disciple of the aged Canon of Orleans, who, on the day of his ordination, said to him, "Always have pupils in your presbytery. You will be their angel, and they will be yours."

• Le Grand Peril, pp. 01, 92.

The next chief means of developing vocations is the formation of the lesser seminaries. It is found that wheresover these exist, vocations multiply; where they are absent, vocations are wanting. The first act of the Bishops who, after the great Revolution had passed away, returned to their dioceses was to establish seminaries. So great was their poverty that their only schools were held in houses, damp, dark, and over crowded. The boys used to bring their dinners. The professors received no stipend. One of them after three years of work received a copy of Fleury's Ecclesiastical History. But this was the beginning of the movement which has spread so widely throughout France.

Vocations began to multiply; but in the year 1830 the lesser seminaries, which till then received clerics only according to the decree of the Council of Trent, were unable to resist the urgent prayers of Catholic parents to receive their sons as the only way to save them from the State lycees and colleges, which were corrupt both in faith and morals. But this change was fatal to many vocations. The students came out of them Christians indeed — • avocats, physicians, notaries — but not priests. In one lesser seminary, which used to have from eighty to a hundred clerics, the number fell to twenty-two; in another, out of forty-four only four persevered. In one ecclesiastical college of four hundred, in ten years there was one solitary vocation.

Abbe Bougaud then passes to the greater seminaries, and shows how the Government has suppressed even the burses in seminaries held by congregations.

VOL. III. Z

Finally, be urges the foundation of burses and balf- burses by the generosity of the faitbful, and pro poses the formation of an tcuvre des vocations ecclesiastiques as a third obligation following the <fuvre of the Denier de S. Pierre, and that of the Propagation de la Foi.

These are briefly the contents of Abbe Bougaud's able and timely book.

And such is the estimate of Abbe Bougaud as to the present state of the Church in France. Surrounded as be is with the political and social evils of his country, it is no wonder if he be depressed even out of measure. But looking upon the great Church in France, as we can, from a distance, we are perhaps able to measure more justly the magnitude of its position and its power. When we compare its present state with its condition under Louis XIV. or Louis XV., or in 1789 or, again, in 1815 or in 1830, we have no hesitation in declaring pur belief that it is more independent, more united, more pure, and therefore more powerful, than at any of these five periods. No one who has read M. Gerin's account of the Church in France in 16G2, in his Reclerches llistoriques sur rAssemblee du Clerge de France de 1682," 7 or its condition in 1789 as given by M. Taine, in his Origines de la France Contemporaine, 8 will doubt this for a moment. Take as proof the close union of the great Episcopate of France with the Holy See at this day; its compact unity in itself; the quality of its forty thousand priests; its numerous and multiplying

1 Paiis: Lecoffre, 1869, pa$sim. • Tom. i. liy. iii. c. 1, 2 seminaries, greater and lesser; its lay colleges of every class; its multitudes of religious bodies of men and women, more numerous than even in the height of its prosperity before the first great Revolution; the spreading return of faith, and of practical religion among men of every class — all these are evidence of a health and vigour not to be found in the former periods of the French Church. The warfare of the Revolution, with its indifference and its unbelief against faith and the Church, is certainly more keen than it was. But the French Church has weathered worse storms than this, and has come out purified and strengthened by the conflict. Moreover, the chief subject of Abbe Bougaud's fears would not seem to be so menacing as he believes. That in many dioceses | there is a lack of priests is not to be denied; but that the number of vocations to the priesthood in France is on the decline has been denied by responsible witnesses in the dioceses of Perigeux, Cambrai, and Meaux, which were coloured in Abbe Bougaud's map as examples of this decline. The impression made by Abbe Bougaud's statements would rather be that, at this moment, exceptional causes are producing an exceptional state, that is, a momentary retardation in the steady increase of vocations, and in the number of the clergy, which, in the greater part of France, has been advancing from 1815 to 1870. This appears from the frequent use of the words "of late" and for some years," and the like.9 It is nothing less than a miracle of grace that the priesthood of the Church in France should have so

9 Le Grand Ptril.

steadily risen again through the poisoned atmosphere of an infidel empire, a Voltairian monarchy, and a public opinion perverted by the daily mockery and cynicism of the French journalists. If there be a momentary check, there is all reason to believe that the fervour of France will soon turn again to the priesthood, and make up for a few years of slackened zeal, " redeeming the time because the days are evil." France has been passing through the fires of an inevitable and salutary purgation. A century of revolutions has burnt out to the roots the motives which once prompted men to seek the ecclesiastical state. The motives of this world exist no longer; the Budget du Ckrcjc and the starvation of the priests in the provinces have certainly no temptation for worldly, ambitious, or covetous men. The pomp and state of the old hierarchy has been withered and seared by the mockery and contempt of a hundred years of infidelity. For a moment the multiplication of the labourers seems to be slackened. But the dignity and perfection of the priesthood, and the blessedness of a pastor's life, restored with apostolic poverty and purity, are too deeply impressed upon France for this momentary stay in the tide to last long. Priests and soldiers made Catholic France; and wo might as soon believe that her armies would decline, as that her priesthood would diminish.

We will now turn homeward to ourselves. Sixteen years ago we noted five chief wants of the Church in England, as follows:

1. Diocesan seminaries according to the mind of the Council of Trent.

2. Middle-class schools.

3. Higher studies for our laity.

4. Political education, practical efficiency and participation in the public affairs of the country for our laymen.

5. A college for foreign missions.

In many of these heads we may now give no unfavourable an account.

1. The decree of the Council of Trent prescribes that there shall be attached to every cathedral church a seminary, into which those who are destined for the priesthood shall be admitted from the age of twelve years. All that is required is that they shall be able competently to read and write, and that their character and disposition give hope of their perseverance in the ecclesiastical state. The Council prefers (pracipuc vult) the sons of poorer parents, but it does not exclude the sous of the rich if they will maintain themselves. It then enjoins, " In order that they may be the better trained in the same ecclesiastical discipline, they shall at once and always wear the tonsure and the habit of the clergy.'' Such were the lesser seminaries in France before 1830, when, with the result we have already seen, they became mixed colleges. Now, until the last ten years no such Tridentine seminary existed in England. The admission of lay students into our noble and excellent colleges of Ushaw, Oscott, and S. Edmund's placed them outside of the Tridcntiue definition. Nevertheless, the Church boys and Church students, after due probation, wore the cassock, and after years of probation were tonsured.

In France it would appear that in such mixed col leges vocations to the priesthood were notably extinguished by the spirit of the lay boys. In England it has not been so in the same degree. Many have been lost, but some have been gained. Whether the loss or the gain predominate it is not easy to say. But we must remember that the youths of France are the sous of fathers reared in traditions of unbelief, or, at least, of indifference. The youths of England are the sons of fathers who were under the penal laws. If our mixed colleges have not extinguished more vocations, it may perhaps be ascribed to a tradition of Catholic fervour kindled in times of persecution. Its continuance will depend on our fidelity; and, if lost, we may find ourselves as our brethren in France.

At this moment we possess no lesser seminary, according to the Council of Trent; but in the last ten years a notable progress in greater seminaries has been made. In 18G8 the students in theology for the diocese of Westminster, with their professors, were removed from S. Edmund's College to the old Benedictine convent at Hammersmith; and a seminary, strictly so called, was founded. Soon after, the clergy and laity of the diocese of Birmingham made an offering to their Bishop on the half-jubilee of his episcopate, by which was founded the seminary at Olton. The students in philosophy and theology were removed to it from S. Mary's, Oscott. The Bishop of Salford next founded a seminary attached to his own house and cathedral, in which ecclesiastical students may be trained, and priests before entering on the cure of souls may pass an additional year of training. The Bishop of Clifton has founded a seminary at Prior Park; the Bishop of Beverley at Leeds; the Bishops of Shrews bury, Southwark, and Liverpool are already possessed of all, or nearly all, the means required, and are preparing to huild. In ten years, therefore, five dioceses have founded seminaries, either wholly or almost wholly, in conformity with the Councii of Trent. Three other dioceses are about to do the same.

A diocesan seminary is not only the necessary means to sustain and confirm the vocations of youth: it generates and elicits them. When the parents and their sons see before their eyes the diocesan seminary, and when they see the seminarists Sunday by Sunday in the sanctuary of the cathedral, or in other churches of the diocese, it is certain that many hearts are drawn to desire the same grace. Already there is reason to believe that vocations have thus been multiplied, and among us vocations are steadily increasing. We have, indeed, no lack of vocations, but only of means to support them. In most dioceses in England the diocesan clergy have been doubled since the restoration of the hierarchy; and the number of the ecclesiastical stu dents has also been either doubled or very greatly increased.

The disposition to enter the priesthood on the part of educated men is becoming more marked year after year. Our higher families, and those of the middle class, have most of them sons or daughters or kindred among the priests and nuns of England. Our middle classes count it a happiness and an honour to have a son at the altar. And the aspiration of many a poor father and mother is being daily fulfilled in the ordination of some of our most refined and holy priests. This signal grace may indeed decline among us as elsewhere; but we have safeguards against so great a decline. In Eng land and Ireland the Christian equality of classes checks the invasion of the spirit of caste. The son of the rigncron and the son of the seigneur are among our people neither abbe nor abbate, but plain father. We have no ecclesiastics up in balloons, but living and labouring in the midst of men on our common earth, and in daily contact and sympathy with the people. In no country is truer respect paid to the upper classes than in England. If they fail to receive it, they may thank themselves for the loss of it. But the priest hood is honoured by the Christian and Catholic instincts of this country with a manly and dignified respect. The families who would not thankfully see a son at the altar are few.

2. Another manifest want of the Catholic Church in England was, and is, a supply of schools for the middle class. The need of providing schools for the poor was, at the restoration of the Hierarchy, so urgent and so overwhelming, that though in the First Provincial Council of Westminster the wants of the middle class were expressly recognised, it was impossible to provide for them until the needs of the poor had first been met. To this work the Bishops and clergy gave themselves with a great devotion, the result of which is that at this moment we possess some fourteen hundred schools, with about one hundred and forty thousand children in attendance. When it is remembered that in 1847, at the foundation of the Poor School Committee, all the Catholic poor-schools known to exist in England were about three hundred, it can be no matter of wonder that the formation of middle schools had not as yet been systematically undertaken. It is rather a cause of wonder and of thankfulness that so large and complete a system of poor-schools should have been created in the last thirty years. Moreover, at that date the middle class, which is now multiplying daily, was only coming into existence. Between the rich and the poor there were individuals, but not classes. In the Catholic Church in England there were no gradations such as exist in the social order of the English people. It was with us as it was in Ireland, where, between the cities and the level of the people in villages, there were few lesser towns which in England keep up a continuity in the population, the education, and the wealth of the country. In all our large dioceses this middle class has been gradually forming, and though still not numerous, it is large enough to require a higher scale of education in separate schools. These now exist in almost every diocese, and in some they are already numerous. As the demand for higher education increases, our colleges rise to meet it. New schools on a lower level then spring up. Two schools are thus formed out of the upper and lower classes of one and the same college. What began as a commercial college rises into a classical college, and a middle school takes up its lower class. In one diocese alone there are thirteen middle schools, containing four or five hundred boys. They are examined every year by the diocesan inspector, and prizes are given on a public day to those who have gained them by competition.

3. Sixteen years ago the need of higher culture for our Catholic youth from eighteen to twenty-two years of age had forced itself upon our attention. It was alleged that our existing colleges did not provide it; and, by reason of the mixture of boys and youths, could not be made to provide it for young men. A desire then sprang up in some quarters to send their sons to the national Universities. The question was long and elaborately debated. In the Dublin Review of July 18G3 the arguments on either side of this question are briefly given. But the question was re ferred to the Holy Sec, from which the following decisions emanated:

I. On December 13th, 18(54, the assembled Bishops of Eng land declared (li ''that the establishment of Catholic colleges ut the " Protestant " Universities could in no way be approved;" and (2 1 " that parents were by all means to be dissuaded from sending their sons to the Universities." On February,'Jrd, isii."*. the Cardinal Prefect of Propaganda wrote word that "the Sacred Congregation had, after mature examination, confirmed the judgment of the Bishops, as being in entire conformity with the principles which the said Congregation had always laid down." And on March 24th, the Bishops issued a circular letter, informing the clergy of these decisions.

II. On March 12th, 1807, the Cardinal Prefect of Propaganda wrote to the Archbishop, stating " that the Sacred Congregation, by its resolution of December 18(56, with respect to the establishment of a community [the Oratory] at Oxford, had wished only to provide for the spiritual wants of the Catho lics of that city; and not in any way to lessen the force of the declarations made by the Holy See 10 against the establishment

'• It will be observe! '.bat the Cardinal Prefect ascribes these declarations to " the Holy See " itself.

-of a college at Oxford, and against the dispositions of those who should desire a pretext for sending Catholic youths to study at that University." The Cardinal Prefect further directed the Bishops to confer again on the subject, and to communicate with the Propaganda upon the measures to be taken for preventing Catholics from studying at Oxford.

III. On May 1st, 1867, the Bishops addressed a letter to the Propaganda, in which they confirmed their declaration of December 13th, 1804; and stated that they would wish to make known to the faithful, both by pastoral letters and indirectly through the clergy, the grave danger incurred by those who should enter the Universities in spite of the admonitionof their pastors. On August Oth the Cardinal Prefect wrote back, desiring the Bishops to address such pastoral letters as had been suggested. The Cardinal Prefect's letter included these words: " You will clearly explain in your pastoral letter the doctrine of the Church on avoiding the proximate occasions of mortal sin; to which occasions no one without grievous sin can expose him self, unless under the pressure of grave and adequate necessity, and unless such precautions be taken as shall remove all proximate danger. And in the present case, where, as his Holiness has declared,11 there is an intrinsic and very serious danger to purity of morals as well as to faith (which is altogether necessaryfor salvation), it is next to impossible to discover circumstances in which Catholics could without sin attend non-Catholic Universities." l-

IV. On September 19th, 1872, the Cardinal Prefect wrote to the English Bishops as follows, referring to the previous declaration of 1805: " The declaration then given was founded on the grave dangers which the said Universities presented

Not only does the Holy See perceive no reason why it should recede from the aforementioned decision of 1805; but in proportion as the reasons which called forth that decision have increased in gravity, so much the more necessary does it appear that the decision should be maintained."

V. On August 12th, 1873, the English Bishops, assembled in Provincial Synod, addressed a pastoral letter to the faithful, in which, not only they recite the above words of the Cardinal Prefect, but add that no Catholic parent can send his son to a Protestant University " without incurring grave sin."

11 Here, again, it will be observed that the declaration is ascribed to " his Holiness."

12 We take the preceding documents from the Acts of the West minster Diocesan Synod of 1872.

The Holy Sec gave two injunctions to the Bishops of England: the one, that Catholic parents are to be restrained from sending their sons to the national Universities; the other, that they should take steps so to raise the higher studies in our existing colleges as to take away from Catholic parents all pretext on that head for sending their sons to Oxford or Cambridge. It was also part of the injunction that a Board of Examiners should be formed to test and ascertain the state and efficiency of the studies in our existing colleges.

In the Fourth Provincial Council of Westminster a decree was made embodying these injunctions, with an express declaration that though the formation of a Catholic university properly so called is at this time beyond our power, yet that we would leave nothing un tried to prepare the way for founding such an university hereafter.

In pursuance of this decree the Bishops proceeded to consult the representatives of every Catholic collgee in England. The proposal to unite in a general system of examination was then made, but no practical result followed. For what reason the proposal failed of its effect it may not be easy to define; nor is it necessary to enter upon it now. Some thought that the formation of a body of examiners ought to precede the foundation of any college; others, that the foundation of a college was the only way to make intelligible the objects the Bishops had in view. The latter opinion prevailed. The Bishops decided to found a college at Kensington. They did so in the desire to provide a full and ample course of higher studies for such young Catholic men as, after leaving our existing colleges, still desired, either for its own sake or for professional careers, a more advanced knowledge of literature or of science. The staff ot professors was justly acknowledged, both by those who wished well to the college and by those who did not, to be highly qualified. The non-Catholic papers and critics bore the same testimony. During the last five years ninety-seven young men, all of whom, excepting about fourteen, were English or Irish, entered the college. Some had made good use of their past time, and were able to derive benefit from the courses of the professors. The greater part showed no high aspira tions for study. Some very little. The highest number of the students at any one time was forty-four. From that point the number declined to twelve. Two things became evident: the one, that very few came to Kensington for the sake of higher studies, which was the end and purpose for which the college had been founded; the other, that for the most part the students came for the sake of passing some examination, such as for the army, orjor medicine, or for matriculation at the London University. But this last function belongs properly to our existing colleges, and should be accomplished before students reach their eighteenth year. To matriculate at the London University is obviously no part, or only the lowest part, of the work for which a college of higher studies was intended. As to both medicine and the army, recent arrangements of the military and medical authorities require that young men destined for those professions shall enter the respective colleges and begin their technical and professional studies by seventeen or eighteen years of age. This renders the Kensington college useless to them, for it cannot receive them before their eighteenth year, and they cannot continue in it after that age. The experience, therefore, of the last five years has led to the belief that for the present it will be expedient for our existing colleges to raise their studies as high as they are able, and to retain their students as long as they can. The only test we have at this time of the efficiency, absolute or relative, of our existing colleges is in the results obtained by S. Cuthbert's College, Ushaw, and the College of Stonyhurst. Both have attained a highly creditable success, which shows that ninny of our Catholic youth are already measuring strength with the youth of England at no disadvantage. The results are, during the last sixteen years, as follows:

S. CUTHDERT'S COLLEGE, USHAW.

X umber of Degrees, tfc., obtained by Ushnw Students in the London University in the last fifteen years.

Number of matriculated students, 171. Of these, 33 obtained honours and 2 obtained pri/es.

51 have passed the first B.A. examination. Of these, 8 obtained honours and 3 obtained exhibitions.

;l:J have passed the second B.A. examination. Of these, 6 obtained honours, and 1 obtained a scholarship and 1 a prize.

4 have passed the M.A. examination and 1 obtained a gold medal in classics.

STOXYHURST COLLEGE. From 1863 — 1878, inclusive. Matriculated. 139

1st B.A. Passed. 41 B.A. „.. 2« M.A. 4

1st. B.A.

Honours:

Latin exhibition

French r> prize 10/.

Mathematics

B.A.

Honours:

Classics scholarship

Logic, &c..

M.A.

Honours:

Logic gold medal

Classics medal marks first on list

Matriculation prize!()/.

Prize marks

Five B.A. Honour men are under examination at this date.

The day will come when it will be seen that young men can hardly be formed among boys, and that boys are better trained by themselves. The disadvantage is mutual — both suffer from being mixed together, and the time of separation will come. Perhaps it is not come as yet, and we must wait for it, for there is a law of growth in all things. We can see farther than we can reach, but we can only do what is within the length of our arm. That a college of higher studies for Catholic young men will one day be demanded is certain; so also that their isolation from boys, and their treatment by other modes of discipline are of absolute necessity, cannot be doubted. We may confidently hope that the timid and narrow counsels, how soever sincere and well intended, of those who desired to see our Catholic youth at Oxford and Cambridge, will be heard no more. Such a policy would be an inversion of the Divine order of the Church. It would be an engrafting of the tradition of Catholic culture upon " the stock that is wild by nature." The Divine method is precisely the reverse. If the Catholic Church in England he at this moment impoverished in its intellectual culture hy the spoliation of its ancient schools, if it still hear upon it the most galling and humbling relics of penal laws, an impoverishment in its classical and scientific education, that is no reason for it to sacrifice the greater for the less, the sacred for the secular, the supernatural for the natural, and to abdicate its Divine commission to possess itself of all sciences of God and man and the world, and to form and develop the whole nature of its disciples. The counsel to do of our own free-will in England that which Catholics have been forced to do under Imperial laws in France and Germany — that is, to plunge our youth into the atmosphere and stream of mixed univer sities — is an advice which, in the next generation, Catholics will hardly believe was ever seriously given to the faithful at this day. Set aside for a moment the injunctions of the Holy See, the unlawfulness of exposing our youth to the proximate occasion of danger to faith and morals; there is yet another reason why the Catholic Church in England is bound to bear with patience for a time any transient disadvantage, rather than entangle itself in an un-Catholic and unstable intellectual tradition. It would render impossible the completion of its own Catholic culture. From the day in which it began to rest itself upon any basis out of its own intellectual unity it would cease to cultivate itself. Its own internal self-completion would be arrested. It would remain stunted. It would possess no more than a system of poor-schools and middle-class schools, with colleges answering to Eton and Harrow and Winchester at the best. While France, and Bel gium, and Germany, and Ireland are forming Catholic universities, the Church in England, which has been revived by a miracle of grace, and draws to itself the eyes and the goodwill of the Catholic world, would remain by its own free choice a mendicant on the un-Catholic intellect of England for letters and for science. Erom such a humiliation may God preserve us!

Let us imagine for a moment that such a half hearted counsel had prevailed over our forefathers, to whom we owe Ushaw, and Stonyhurst, and Oscott, and Downside, and S. Edmund's; the Catholics of this day would be the offspring of the boarding-schools and public schools, into which no Catholic parents with the fear of God before their eyes could trust a son. What would be the Catholic laity of England at this day nur tured in such a culture? What would the Catholic Bishops and priests and faithful of Ireland judge of us? Would they own us as their brethren? Their instincts are those of the unbroken tradition of a Catholic people; ours would be neither Catholic nor anti-Catholic,' -neither cold nor hot." We are bound to guard those who come after, as our forefathers guarded us. By their fidelity in the midst of depression sevenfold greater, and of temptation a hundredfold stronger, we are, under God, what we are. Our posterity, trained in un-Catholic universities, would be no longer even what we are. Theirs would be the privation, but the betrayal would be ours. The Bishops of England have a a given a public pledge in the foundation of the college at Kensington that they will leave nothing undone to avert so great a disaster, and they will await the time when what they offered five years ago, perhaps before it was required, shall be demanded by the fathers of our Catholic youth.

4. Another obvious want of the Catholic Church among us, which was noted sixteen years ago, was of laymen trained and able to compete and to lead in the public careers of English life. We will not say in the public life of the Empire, for in our colonies Catholics hold the highest offices, and have even formed Cabinets, and governed as prime ministers. But in England, partly from the solid and dominant strength of the non-Catholic traditions and the non-Catholic life of England, Catholics are practically excluded from the Cabinet and from Parliament. Sixteen years ago one Catholic sat for a family borough. Now not one Catholic sits for an English constituency, and yet the Catholic population is at least one million in twenty-three. The proportion of members, therefore, ought to be as one in twenty-three, or about twenty upon the representatives for Great Britain. In the sixteen years that are passed we have therefore made no sensible progress in the public life of our country. Of our progress in the civil life of England it is not easy to form a judgment. There may be more of our young men entering upon professional careers, but as yet no high office of trust is held by a Catholic. The traditions of prejudice ond social exclusiveness will no doubt go far to account for this; but if our rising men have

£qual force of character and equal cultivation with their non-Catholic countrymen they will break through those barriers. That they have not yet done so seems to point to defects either in force or in cultivation, or perhaps in both.

A list has lately been published of those wno in England during the last thirty years have submitted to the Divine authority of the Catholic Church. The intention of the compiler was no doubt good, but the undertaking was hardly to be commended. It could not fail to reopen many domestic wounds, and to retard rather than to promote an inclination to the Catholic faith. It is open also to the just censure of those who think to honour Christianity by saying that great intellects like Newton and Leibnitz were Christians. The Catholic Church receives no illustration from those who have the happiness to submit themselves to its Divine authority. Lastly, such a list, long as it may be, represents the number of those who have been gathered into the Catholic Church about as much as the Court Guide represents the people of England. It does not even represent the number of those who have been received from the " upper ten thousand," for many a name represents not only a family but a much larger aggregate of those who, through them, have one by one come to the knowledge of the truth. No such list can ever be an adequate expression of the progress of the Church in England, which is not to be measured by numbers, but by the progress of truth, and by the dissipation of false doctrines and traditional hostility to the faith.

5. Lastly, we may record one great work which has been done since our last review of the work and wants of the Church in England. It had then no college for foreign missions, or, more properly, for missions to the heathen world. It has now a nohle college, well founded, and in full activity.

When the late Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster was making his retreat in 1839, before his consecration as Vicar-Apostolic, he wrote down a number of works which he hoped to see accomplished. Among these, one was the foundation of a college for missions to the-heathen. The desire to begin such a work sprung up, in 1863, in the mind of Father Vaughan, Oblate of S. Charles. His purpose received the sanction and encouragement of the late Cardinal, and of the Bishops of England and of Scotland. He then obtained the blessing of Pius IX. and a Brief of commendation conveying the Apostolic benediction to all at home or abroad who should contribute to the work. With this sanction Father Vaughan traversed North and South America, and returned in the autumn of 1865 with means sufficient, together with the contributions at home, to begin the work. In March 1866 he began in a country house at Mill Hill with one student. In the week after Easter 1868 a public meeting was held in St. James's Hall by the Archbishop and Bishops of England, of whom eight were present, with a large attendance of the Catholic laity of all classes, to give public acceptance and confirmation to the College for Foreign Missions. In June 1869 the foundation-stone of the new college building was laid by the Archbishop, assisted by the Bishops of Beverley and Troy. In March 1870 the first stone of the church attached to the college, and dedicated to S. Joseph, Patron of the Universal Church, was laid.

In March 1871 the dwelling part of the college was opened free of debt, and Father Vaughan, with twelve students, entered upon it. A number of French students from the African College at Lyons, driven out by the Franco-German War, were received in hospitality to complete their studies.

On the 10th of October, in 1871, the Negro Mission in the Southern States of America was confided to the missionaries of S. Joseph's College, and on November 17th Father Vaughan took over with him the first four priests ordained for this mission in Baltimore.

On the Feast of S. Simon and S. Jude, in 1872, Father Vaughan was consecrated to the see of Salford and on December 3rd, 1873, said the first Mass in the new church of S. Joseph, which was still unfinished. In the following year the church was consecrated. In November 1875 five missionaries were sent to India.

The community at this time consists of four direc tors, thirty-eight students, and five lay brothers.

From the outset of the college until now, thirty-one missionaries have been sent out, of whom four are dead. The stations of the missionaries among the negro population of America were first in Baltimore, where four are attached to a church for the negroes only; two attend the negroes in Prince George's County; one is stationed at a negro chapel-school at Louisville; and two at Charleston.

The stations in India are as follows: Of the eleven missionaries now in India, two are in charge of S, Mary's Seminary, which the Vicar-Apostolic of Madras has erected for the purpose of giving a classical education to those who are destined for the learned professions. Nine are on the missions — viz. seven in the Guntoor district, and two in the Nellore district.

The Vicar-Apostolic of Madras wrote on the 13th of April 1878:

44 In all parts of the vicariate there is a consoling movement in the Hindoos towards Christianity. From the 1st of January 1^77 to the Otli of March is?s, 407 Hindoo families, numbering ls.">s souls, were received into the Church by baptism. And on Ash-Wednesday last there were under instruction for baptism!Mi:J families, numbering 37l»,"i souls. Many of these latter have already been baptised; and since Ash- Wednesday the priests have received petitions from many other villages who desire to be admitted into the Church.

There is a great work to be done in Madras at present. But it is a work of great privation and great labour. The poor villagers who seek instruction are of the very poorest class, and reside in places distant from the residence of the priests, and sa far apart from each other that the priest's work among them is extremelv difficult and laborious.

I shall be ever grateful if, in consultation with Dr. Vaughan, you can arrange to send me two new missionaries.

May t2t2nd, ls?s. — The work thrown upon the priests is very heavy indeed. I am not without anxiety for the lives of the priests, who are overtasking their strength to meet the crisis.

Ml the priests [from Mill Hill] are, thank God, working zealously. They are all pious good priests."

It was at first thought by some, of whose devotion there could be no doubt, that the founding of a missionary college while England is hardly emerged from u missionary state was premature; that it would divert men and means needed at home before we can afford to-send them abroad. But this objection did not last long. It was soon acknowledged that the Catholics of England are in an especial way bound to give to others what has been so mercifully given back to them: that we are not only bound by the law of faith, " Give, and it shall be given to you;" but by the law of gratitude, "Give, because it has been given to you." And, further, a little thought is enough to show that a love for the souls of the heathen world can hardly be awakened without awakening sevenfold a love for the souls at home: that this sixth sense, as it has been well named, will be more surely called into activity and intensity by rousing it in its amplest extent and in its highest motives. Moreover, the example of apostolic life and complete self-oblation in those who go forth from the midst of us must react upon those who have the cure of souls at home. And if the day should come when any one, who was a little while ago one of ourselves, should lay down his life for the salvation of the heathen, we should ourselves be elevated by his nearness to us all, and his martyrdom would be a part of our own inheritance. Such is the happiness of many a family in France; and the Church in France is strengthened and sustained by the prayers and crowned with the aureolas of its many martyrs in these days of its conflict at home.

Of the live wants we noted sixteen years ago, three may be said to be supplied, or in a fair way to be supplied. For our seminaries, middle schools, and our missionary college we need multiplication, and a perpetual rise in the quality of their work. Time alone can give maturity, and all good fruits ripen slowly.

Two wants still remain. But they are so large that a longer period of careful cultivation and slow growth are needed. There will be hereafter adequate higher studies for our youth, and a participation in the public and civil offices of the State. But such wants can only be supplied by laws which govern the moral and spiritual, as well as the intellectual, development of a people.

While these special works have been accomplishing, the whole internal organisation of the Church has been advancing. The following table will show what has been the multiplication of all its agencies since the year 1850. The increase in the number of priests and churches has been brought down to 1878. Under the other heads we have data only down to 1875. It will be seen that all that the last three centuries had bequeathed to this generation, of clergy, churches, colleges, and schools, has in the last twenty-eight years been doubled; that the convents are nearly fivefold; and the poor-schools and children attending them have been multiplied also fivefold, or in a proportion which cannot be ascertained.

To what is this manifold development of the Church during the last eight-and-twenty years to be ascribed? Not to any notable increase in the Catholic population of England and Wales; for, so far as we can ascertain, it remains as it was, and in some places has even diminished, though in others it may have increased; nor to any extraordinary events or agencies

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Illlllllllill for none such can be found. There is but one evident and assignable cause, and that is the lifting of the Catholic religion in England from the abnormal and mutilated state in which it had so long lain depressed and enfeebled, and its restoration to the normal and perfect order of its Divine organisation. S. Paul, in writing to the Ephesians, says that the end for which the Divine orders of pastors and of priests were ordained is " for the edifying of the Body of Christ," which lie there describes as a living frame, developing and perfecting itself by the interaction of its own vital powers and organs. And these are the orders and ministries of its pastors. But this pastoral oilice is the apostolate which the Divine Head of the Church gave first to IVter alone — that is, the plenitude of faith and of jurisdiction; and afterwards per modum minis to Peter with the Apostles. They shared the same endowments, save only that the Primacy was in Peter alone. They had by participation what he had in fulness and alone. This Divine organisation of the Church cannot be mutilated without injury to the vital action of the body, as any lesion of the human structure impedes or even threatens life. Peter and the apostolate live on for ever in the successor of Peter, and in the successors of the Apostles. The Primacy and the apostolate are both Divine and indefectible. Peter lives on in his successor, who, in strictness, is the sole successor of an Apostle, for Peter was the only Apostle who had the Primacy or plenitude of faith and of jurisdiction, and his successor has the same. But the Episcopate is the npostolate spreading throughout the world, and perpetual in all time. Every Bishop is pastor and judge of doctrine, a Christo constitutes. He has a Divine jurisdiction, ordinary and immediate, hut limited to the flock assigned to him: and he has also, not an universal jurisdiction, but a participation in the endowments of the universal Episcopate when united to its Head in Council. The Bishops as a body are successors of the Apostles as a body; not each to each, but as a whole to a whole, of which the successor of Peter is Head and Chief. S. Cyprian says: " The Episcopate is one of which each holds a share in full." ] In this sense the Council of Trent says that " Bishops, who succeed in the place of the Apostles, form a chief part of the hierarchical order, and arc set, as the Apostle says, by the Holy Ghost to rule the Church of God." And in like manner the Council of the Vatican, in defining the supreme.jurisdiction of the successor of Peter, goes on carefully to declare the Divine origin and pastoral authority of the Episcopate, Its words are grave, and full of meaning. After defining the supremacy of Peter and his successors, the Council proceeds to say, " So far is this power of the Supreme Pontiff from obstructing the ordinary and immediate episcopal jurisdiction, whereby Bishopsy who are set by the Holy Ghost and succeed in the place of the Apostles, as true pastors feed and rule the several flocks assigned to each, that this same jurisdiction of theirs is assisted, strengthened, and vindicated by the Supreme and Universal Pastor, according to the words of S. Gregory the Great, ' My honour is the

11 De Unit. Eccl., p. 180. » Sess., xxxiii cap. 11.

honour of the Universal Church. Then I am honoured indeed, when the honour due to each is denied to none.' " 15

Now, for three hundred years this Divine organisa tion had ceased to exist in England. For a long time there was no Bishop at all, then came one alone; then for another interval there was again none at all; till some men began to say that a Bishop was not wanted, except to confirm. Then there were Vicars-Apostolic without diocese, or synod, or ordinary jurisdiction, not reri pastorcs. hut Vicars and Delegates. Three centuries ran on and the Faith in England lived, not in a body, but in individuals; members of the Universal Church, indeed, but without their true pastors, and without the living organisation of the Church. From generation to generation the faithful pleaded and prayed for the successors of the Apostles set by the Holy Ghost to rule the Church as of old. But penal laws, and the state of the world, and many influences and agencies held back the day of restoration. It was 11 sore time of desolation. The Faith was invisible: families in every class fell away, multitudes were absorbed into the un-Catholic life of England, and dis appeared. The Vicars-Apostolic did great works, but their hands were weakened. A Bishop " cnjus oves non sunt proprifK " is at a great disadvantage. His priests know him to be a Bishop but cannot see in him a father who ordains them as his sons, and a verux pastor who is bound to lay down his life for the flock. All the bonds of unity are loosened, and all the motives

" Conit. Doginatica Prima, De Ecclftia Chriati, cap. 3.

of zeal arc relaxed. Great things, however, were done in this informal, provisional, and transient state. Speaking of the state of England under the Vicars-Apostolic, the Bishop of Birmingham says:

" Both the authority and the machinery of a synod were wanting. There was neither Archbishop to preside, nor suffra gans with their theologians to respond to his summons, nor chapters to send their delegates. There was no graduated rank among the clergy, as they complained. Even the Vicars-General were rather nominal than effective. The Vicars-Apostolic themselves met annually in London to take common counsel together; but, however useful those assemblies might be, they left eacli prelate standing in an authority that was isolated from that of his brethren. It was not like an organised province assembling in hierarchical order, in accordance with canonical forms, aided by the lights of the ablest of its clergy, and drawing out decrees of discipline from the vast code of the Ecclesiastical Common Law, shaped by experience to local requirements, and receiving the stamp of authenticity through a final revision >y the Holv See."115

The restoration of the Hierarchy changed all this in a moment. Thirteen pastors, with thirteen flocks in thirteen dioceses, assigned each to each by the successor of Peter, began at once to exercise a Divine, ordinary, and immediate jurisdiction of their own, still further extended in its reach as delegates of the Holy See. A close personal insight into the needs of each diocese, and into every district of each diocese by a pastor responsible for every soul, and invested with adequate authority, has changed, so far as time and many infirmities permit, the condition of the Catholic faith in England. It is now incorporated in a visible and perfect Church, engrafted into the Church throughout the world. The mind and life and vital warmth of the

1 Restoration, pp. 4, o.

Catholic Church pervade it. The table of statistics given above affords but a faint representation of the change which has passed over the Catholic religion in England. Firm and inflexible as it ever was in faith, the narrowness of its churches and the fewness of its priests made the restoration of its solemnities of Divine worship and its daily practices of devotion almost impossible. Now they are in full observance. Our then state was too informal to have old traditions, and the absence of traditions has enabled us to restore all things by the traditions and usages of the Holy See. Four Provincial Councils and Diocesan Synods, held in many dioceses year by year, in others frequently, have carried the common law of the Church in its main provisions throughout England. What was under the plough has been brought not only under the spade but under the trowel. Of this our schools for the children of the poor are a noble example. It may be doubted whether a nobler example of zeal and self-denial in a priesthood living among the poor and in poverty themselves can be anywhere found than the Catholic poor-schools of England. An old writer says, " When the husbandmen sees a tree drooping with pallid leaves he knows that it has some harm in its root: so when you see a people without religion, sine dulio cognosces, <jnia sacerdotium ejiis non est sanum, you know without a doubt that its priesthood is not sound." We have, thank God, no such sign of decay.

If there can be one test of zeal for souls more certain than another, it is the state of the children in the poor-schools. Many motives prompt a priest to

WORK AND WANTS OF THE CHURCH IN ENGLAND. 3G7 visit the sick, or sit in the confessional, or preach with out ceasing. But there is only one motive which keeps a priest regular, watchful, patient, and industrious in visiting and inspecting his schools, in teaching the children with his own lips, in hearing their confessions, and bringing them watchfully to Holy Communion-This is a work unexciting, monotonous, never ending, ever beginning, intolerable to even good men in whom the love of souls and the love of unostentatious work is not supreme. The condition of the great majority of our poor schools, the religious knowledge of the children, as tested and known year by year by the diocesan inspector, proves that the pastoral clergy in England have upon them the spirit of the Good Shepherd. If this alone had been done by the restored hierarchy in England, it would have been enough. But it is not all. The education and multiplication of the diocesan clergy, and the founding of seminaries, both lesser and greater, will mark this first period of the restored Church in England. The Bishops have not spent money in piling stones into costly sanctuaries, but in building up the living stones of " the tabernacle which the Lord hath pitched, and not man." It is this which has carried the hearts of the people with them. And it is this which makes us venture to hope that the too kindly words of the Bishop of Agen are not altogether far from truth. " The highest families in England, in returning to the truth, understand better their true interests. They freely allow the grace of vocation to take possession of their sons and their noblest off spring, and the Church has already right to be proud of the good Bishops, the learned priests, the holy religious which it counts in its bosom. This is for that old stock made young again by the sap of Catholic ism, a sure guarantee of vitality." 1:

No better words can close this article than those which the Vicar-General of Orleans addresses to the faithful in France. " If I were a man of the world I should wish to have, against all my sins, as a shield over my head and the head of my children, a priest who owes to me his education and his priesthood, and who, standing every morning at the altar, would be to me as a lightning conductor.

" Our forefathers, to expiate their faults, used to f'Hind a perpetual lamp before the Blessed Sacrament. Found a priest. That will be a better lamp, which will give to God more glory and to the world more light." 1R

" Le Grand Peril, p. 91. '• Ibid. p. 152.

Footnotes

1. Le Grand Peril, p. 73. J Ibid. p. 80. ↩