p. 279Obstacles to Manliness (Continued)

TENNYSON.

It were hard to show which is more baneful to the health and growth of all true manliness, the influence of human respect or that of evil example. The sneer or scoff of the base or the perverse, acts through fear of ridicule, on the soul like the chilly atmosphere or late frosts of springtide, preventing the fair buds from bursting their sheaths, or blighting, as by one breath, the opening flowers, and thus marring all the promise of the year. Evil example, on the other hand, is like the sickly atmosphere that broods over some marsh-covered region, converting the very bounty of the soil into a rank luxuriance that is worse than barrenness, and slowly but surely poisoning in man all the springs of health and bodily vigor.

Nothing can be more lovely to the beholder than the Italian regions known as the Maremma and the Roman Campagna at the springtide of the year,—or the plains and forests of Guiana, when the rainy season is past, and the earth clothes itself with the incomparable magnificence of its tropical vegetation.

If, while visiting, near Ostia, the scenes where Augustine and Monica conversed at eventide fifteen hundred years ago,—just when the malarial fever was draining in the heroic mother the last sources of life,—you should be tempted to repose at evening beneath the wide-spreading ilexes or pines, or to spend the night beneath the clear, calm sky, with the mingled fragrance of a thousand wild flowers around you,—we bid you beware! There is death in that balmy air, death in the grateful coolness and serenity of the treacherous atmosphere. It is not an unapt picture of the scenes where evil example is all-powerful. Let us pause awhile, and take in the salutary truth gently and pleasantly.

The cities which once studded that shore have long ago ceased to be inhabited. The shepherds and swineherds forsake the lowlands at sunset and betake themselves to their villages among the surrounding hills, for they know that Fever is king on the plain.

Universal Sway of Evil Example

Such is the silent, pestilential, irresistible power of evil example in the world.

Example is potent in the home,—from the court of the sovereign or the mansion of the chief magistrate, to the hut of the backwoodsman, or the most wretched lodgings of our laboring poor. Example is all-powerful of father over sons, of the mother over her daughters, of elder brother over his younger, of prince or magistrate over their subject people, of priest over his flock, of every man placed in authority over those beneath him.

Need we describe the baneful effects over the minds and hearts of children of the evil example of their parents? There is not one of us who cannot daily convince himself of it by observing near his own home how the evil life of a father or a mother slowly but surely perverts the happiest dispositions in their children.

It is, nevertheless, of the utmost importance that we should take a few lessons from the history of the past as well as the experience of our own time.

Jeroboam, a descendant of that Joseph who had been the second parent of Israel, as well as the savior and ruler of the Egyptian empire, was forced to take refuge there from the jealousy of Solomon. There, however, he imbibed a great admiration of the barbaric civilization of the people, sought an alliance with the reigning family, allowed the sensuous worship of the Egyptians to captivate him, returned to his home in the mountains of Ephraim with a heathen wife,—and, when chosen king of the new kingdom of Israel, erected, in opposition to the Temple of Jerusalem, two places of worship in which he installed the statues of Mnevis, the god-calf, so well known to Moses and his contemporaries during the captivity in the land of the Pharaohs. He consecrated a priesthood of his own, flattering the rebellious Ten Tribes with the declaration that the deities which had made Egypt so prosperous and so powerful would now secure their own national supremacy: he was the first on that same revered site of Bethel so dear to Jacob and hallowed by so many traditions, to offer incense to Mnevis with his own hand, forbidding thenceforth any of his subjects to go to worship in Jerusalem.

They were but too faithful imitators of his apostasy, induced to forsake or blaspheme the God of their fathers, not so much by the edicts of their chosen ruler, as by the seduction of his example. And thus we find in Jeroboam the pattern of more than one Christian king.

Achab, Jeroboam’s successor at the distance of half a century, knew well what ascendency royal example had in swaying the conduct of court and kingdom. He married a Phenician princess, Jezabel, and with her brought into his realm the abominations of the Phenician idolatry, and into every family almost the added pollution of his wife’s morality. Achab, though believing in the God of his fathers, was seduced by his wife’s example to bend the knee to Baal and to erect to him a magnificent temple with a retinue of thousands of ministers in his own capital. And so, to please Jezabel and Achab, all Israel worshiped Baal.

Fatal Weakness of the good King Joshaphat

There was worse than this. Contemporary with Achab at Samaria, reigned the good King Joshaphat in Jerusalem. There was nothing he could think of for the glory of the true living God, for the extirpation of idolatry, the education and welfare of his people, that Joshaphat did not undertake with his whole heart. Nevertheless, the necessity of uniting against common foes having forced him into an alliance with Achab, he and his son were thus brought within the fatal influence of Jezabel and her court, so full of superstition and sensuous enchantments.

The pious King of Juda was induced by the wiles of the enchantress to seek the hand of Athalia, Jezabel’s daughter, for his son and heir. Athalia’s seduction made a Baal-worshiper of her husband, induced him, when he ascended the throne, to cut off his brothers and their offspring, and to have Baal proclaimed in Jerusalem as the national god.

Was it not by flattering, in a like manner, the national vanity of the English, by nursing the natural hatred of foreigners and foreign domination, even in things spiritual,—that Henry VIII. separated England from the Holy See? He could not obtain from the Sovereign Pontiff a decree divorcing Queen Catharine, and the faculty of raising Anna Boleyn to his bed and throne, nor persuade his people to countenance his adulterous hypocrisy. But he did succeed in making the national anti-Roman prejudice favor his creation of an independent national church, with a schismatical Archbishop of Canterbury, who soon granted the divorce sought for, and the faculty of having as many wives as Henry chose.

And so was verified the saying as old as the world:

In all this Henry had only followed the example of the Archbishop of Constantinople, Photius, and his Greek Emperor. They nursed and fanned into a fatal blaze the inveterate jealousy entertained by Greeks against Latins, by Constantinople against Rome,—severing from union with the See of Peter the whole of Eastern Christendom for upward of a thousand years! And in the footsteps of Photius walked every Greek bishop, in the footsteps of the bishops walked the priests,—just as the princes and nobles followed the example of their emperor!

Is not this the history of the English Reformation?

Still nearer our own times we have in the personal examples of two kings of France, the direct cause of the downfall of the monarchy, of the ruin of morality and of religion itself. The uncommonly long reign of Louis XIV. and of his immediate successor and great-grandson, Louis XV., were one unbroken series of the most shameless scandals. The palaces of these descendants of St. Louis had become, in the eyes of all Europe, the abode of openly avowed and almost legalized adultery,—the fearful scandal of the sovereign’s private life and the open immoralities of his home setting a pattern to be imitated by every one of his nobles. And thus, for upward of a century, corruption and licentiousness in the home-life of the leading nation of Christendom spread from above downward, from royalty and nobility, to the wealthy middle classes, and from these to the laboring masses in city and country.

With licentiousness spread extravagance, and with extravagance grew the oppression of the poor by the governing classes. Step by step with immorality, venality, and oppression, progressed distrust in religion; in the French society of the 18th century, the gay vices of the court of the regent D’Orleans and of his pupil the fifteenth Louis were in fashion, and equally fashionable were the infidel and skeptical opinions of Voltaire and his Encyclopedists,—the example of the high-born loosening in the bourgeoisie beneath them all belief in royalty, in virtue, in morality, in religion, all respect for everything till then held most sacred by the nation. And so the popular masses, having lost all respect for those above them, for laws, legislators, and magistrates, and having been moreover systematically trained for several generations to connect religion with all the vices and oppressions of royalty and nobility,—rose at length, in a moment of deep and general distress, and were let loose by their wily leaders upon the governing classes,—sweeping away in a deluge of blood every institution in Church and State.

Evil Example at Our Own Doors

Have we not warning examples nearer still to our own day, to our own homes? Suppose,—in the freest country under the sun, and amid all the mineral and agricultural wealth, all the most splendid industrial and commercial resources that God’s fatherly providence can bestow as a heritage on a people,—suppose that the sole purpose of gaining sudden wealth becomes the mainspring of action in the men who monopolize the nomination of candidates for every office, national, State, municipal; that the amassing of wealth by the use of official patronage and legislative action becomes the darling aim of office-holders and legislators;—suppose that corruption on the one hand, and venality on the other, in a great State, is carried on so scientifically and successfully as a trade by one bold bad man, that the entire administration, legislature, and judiciary seem devised to secure immunity in plundering the public,—and that this systematic plunder is carried on for years, while the paralyzed arm of the law is powerless to arrest the malefactor, and a depraved public opinion only feebly denounces the enormity,—will the evil, think you, stop with one man, or be confined to one locality, or to one department only of the public business, or one sphere of private enterprise?

Peculation carried on in the halls of legislation or in the departments of government whenever vast commercial or industrial enterprise call for the highest legislative or administrative action,—will, if unvisited with condign punishment, be imitated in every corporation throughout the land.

Let one public officer trusted for years with the custody of large funds or the management of vast moneyed interests, betray his trust, and be only so feebly punished by the law or so lightly whipped by public opinion,—and you will find the example presently imitated all over the land. If the municipality that should guard sacredly and vigorously economize the interests and moneys of a city, prove faithless to their trust, will the bank in which the poor man deposits the savings of his hard-earned wages, be more faithful, more conscientious?

And if the clerk who keeps the books, or the agent who collects the funds of any one private merchant, sees men, placed above him in the hierarchy of official trustworthiness, shameless and secure in their peculations,—will he not be tempted by these examples, to go and do likewise?

No! there is no hope for public morality, where the highest personages in the community show by their conduct that they take no account of honor, of principle, of conscience,—of the fear of God and the dearest rights of others, when they have the hope and the means of gratifying their cupidity.

And one of the most deplorable results of the unrestricted freedom of the public press, is to make these instances of dishonesty and triumphant fraud familiar to every home, to every child in the land,—thereby taking away from the innocent mind of childhood the impression that dishonor is a something rare and frightful, and that the men who hold the place and fulfill the functions of the fathers of their country, are untainted with the sordid vices of the thief and the low cheat.

It is a sad day for any people, when the divine precept “Honor thy father and thy mother,”—becomes one of practical impossibility, because those on whom its obligation falls, as they look inside their home and abroad throughout the land, find it difficult to reverence those, who, while bearing the responsibilities of fatherhood, bear also stamped on their brows and their lives the brand of indelible dishonor.

How many children do we not see in the homes made wealthy by the plunder of the public treasury, or the betrayal of private trust, who, instead of holding down their heads in shame, or deeming it imperative not to enjoy or retain a shilling of the ill-gotten gain of a father,—will continue to brazen it out, to marry and give in marriage, to consort on a footing of equality with their former acquaintance,—as if the wealthy classes of the community were the immediate descendants of a penal colony of thieves, swindlers, forgers, and pickpockets, with whom the “professional cleverness” of their fathers was rather a thing to be cherished and honored in the possessor, than a title to dishonor and exclusion?

Debasement of Public Character

It is not to the praise of a nation when it ceases “to visit the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, upon the third and fourth generation.” It would be a false and fatal mercy, a most baneful liberality, that would set up in the lowliest or in the highest home in the land, any other ideal of ancestral honor or of the priceless inheritance of an unspotted name, than that which has been revered before us, since the world was a world.

“When Don Beltram¹1In La Verdad Sospechosa of Alarcon;—quoted by Digby, “Compitum,” book i., ch. ix. inquires respecting the character of his son Don Garcia, on returning from the university, and hears that he has no evil quality, but that of not always speaking the truth, he exclaims: I would pardon him for everything but for that. I should prefer his being dead. What! he utters what is not true! O honor! O ancestors! How am I fallen!... ” ‘Garcia, art thou noble?’—‘I am your son,’ replies the young man.—‘Is that sufficient?’—‘I think so.’—‘Absurd thought! To act nobly, is to be noble. Such is the beginning of noble houses. But thou, if infamous by thy habits, art no longer noble. Paternal escutcheons, ancient descent—of what avail? Thou noble! Thou art nothing! Thou noble, who utterest an untruth! Thou art nothing. Whether noble or plebeian, no one can lie without being the scorn of the people.” What dishonor and infamy would such men have deemed it in their sons to add to falsehood, dishonesty, betrayal of the most sacred trusts, the appropriation to one’s private uses of the moneys confided to one’s keeping by clients, by widows, by orphans, by the poor laborer seeking to provide an independent home for his dear ones? Alas! alas! is it so uncommon in these calamitous times, that even members of the most honored of all secular professions,—the law,—should forget what they owe to it and to themselves, and betray the trust of even the widow and the orphan? And has not the abasement of professional honor, this deadening of private and public conscience, not been the consequence of evil example, set, at first, by one placed high in public esteem and public trust, and acting downward and around on others, like leprosy communicated to companies of the noblest and the best, by drinking out of the cup of some secret leper who had long sat, unknown, at the common board, and grasped their hands in brotherly friendship, and poisoned the atmosphere with his very breath?

Should the close of the nineteenth century bring no change for the better to the courses pursued in public life by the men whose example is authority, the next century shall see but little of the manhood which founded the Republic and first administered its government.

The Remedy in the Eloquence of Good Example

Religion, love of country and kind, the noble ambition to transmit to one’s children the inheritance of an honored name still further increased by one’s own blameless life, and the still more noble ambition of making an obscure name glorious by true merit, of founding by one’s own exertions the imperishable nobility of public virtue and private worth,—all these motives, and many more than these, some even loftier than these (did we dare to express our thought fully) impel the true man to make it the aim of his life to be to others, with the assistance of divine grace, a shining light in his own generation.

Those who have traveled through Belgium and Holland,—known formerly as the Low Countries,—cannot have helped admiring the indomitable perseverance and wonderful ingenuity with which, during the lapse of so many centuries, an entire people has labored to win and to preserve their native land from the inroads of the adjacent ocean. At the beginning of the Christian era it was little better than a vast morass, but the untiring labors of so many generations have now made it one vast garden. Need we say that there was a period when the Republic was the first maritime and commercial power in the world?

But there is the sleepless and relentless ocean ever thundering at the gates of this people; for their country is, in reality, like a mighty fortress evermore beleaguered by a still mightier foe. The slightest breach in the gigantic walls would at once admit the resistless waters, and the labor and sacrifices of ages would go for nothing.

In such a country, then, it is the duty and the interest of every man to see to it that the stupendous embankments which keep out the sea shall be kept in constant repair; it would be the duty of every man, woman, and child almost, if there was a single breach apparent in their wide extent, to rush to the spot and help repair the ruins and stop the inflow of the devastating tide.

Is not this also the case in our own Louisiana, where the most precious portions of the low-lying country have been only saved from the ravages of the Mississippi by the persistent labor of man? When some breach has been made by the swollen river in the dikes or embankments that guard the lowlands from inundation,—where is the true man who does not hasten to the scene of danger, to aid with main and might in repairing the evil?

Surely, there are contagious moral disorders as resistless in their spread as the swollen river in its flow, as blind and unsparing in their destruction as the ocean waves impelled headlong by the utmost fury of the tempest. We have described two of them in these chapters, and to the ravages of the last and most destructive, the only preservative lies in the withstanding force of good example.

Let us begin with the family circle. Just as a parent’s evil life is most baneful within the home, as well as outside of it in proportion to its social standing and influence, even so and exactly in the same proportion, is a father’s good example helpful toward every noble aim and deed. Had Providence permitted the virtuous and accomplished son of Louis XIV. to live and reign in his father’s stead, there can be little doubt but that his pure life and generous spirit of self-denial would have gone far to repair the scandals of his father’s reign. The economy which his example would have made popular, would have become a rule in every noble household, and from private life it would have passed into the public administration, thereby saving France from ruin and her people from despair and the hatred of all authority.

Even when the Great Dauphin was prematurely cut off, and his royal father continued his career of self-indulgence and ruinous extravagance,—the Dauphin’s worthy son, the saintly pupil of Fénelon, would have become the savior of the monarchy and his home the model of every household within the kingdom, had not he and his young wife been poisoned by members of their own family.²2See the article Marie Adelaide de Savoie, Duchesse de Bourgogne, in Le Correspondant of the 10th and 25th March, 1878.

As it was, the regency of Philippe d’Orléans surpassed in profligacy the preceding reign, and the tide of corruption held on its course, ever increasing in volume and velocity, till the throne and Church of France went down in the deluge.

Would you see how the example and devotion of one man can rouse an entire people to withstand and shake off the tyranny of a degrading and inveterate vice? Then you have only to recall the life and services of Theobald Mathew.

In the home itself nothing can be more familiar as well as consoling than to remember how the life of a father in every way worthy of the position and character of a Christian parent and true man, will continue to be for generations the living law and practical ideal of his descendants. Even when these depart momentarily from the right road, they can easily be recalled to it by the memory of their ancestor’s goodness, and the authority of his lofty example.

This nobility of virtue, so honored, exalted, and praised by the Church in all ages, is transmitted by a true father to his sons with the name that he bears. Thereby to bear that honored name,—honored even among a race of peasants and borne by them with a pride that shrinks from a stain as from a something worse than death,—is to feel one’s self bound to nobleness of sentiment, of aim, and deed. This, in the old Catholic lands, was the foundation of the popular saying, Noblesse oblige (‘Nobility obliges’). Not alone in the ancient provinces of Spain, inhabited by the Basques, could every husbandman in the country hamlets, like every denizen of the cities, proudly recall his lineage and point to the escutcheon over his door, but even in other lands where families occupied for centuries the same homesteads, though far removed from the pretensions of modern wealthy abodes, the nobility of a good name filled and surrounded every home like an atmosphere, and neighbors far and wide saw above each door,—though no escutcheon was emblazoned there,—the spotless family name inscribed; while every man and woman and child who bore it knew that it obliged them to be true to the blood in their veins. You have only to recall the example of the Rechabites, quoted above, to understand what we would here inculcate. Doubtless, this glorious race of true men, during all the centuries that they have been faithful to the obligations of their ancestral nobility of virtue, bore on their banners no emblazoned shield. Houses they have never built, and, therefore, their dwellings had neither sculptured doorway, nor escutcheon of marble or bronze to tell the traveler of the possessors’ lineage. All knew them to be the sons of Rechab. That unsullied name was a prouder patent of nobility than that of baron, or count, or duke.

Not undeserving of serious consideration are the words of one who knew the Rechabites well and could appreciate, in a degenerate age, their shining example of inviolable fidelity and unshaken constancy.

“Woe to them that are faint-hearted, who believe not God; and therefore they shall not be protected by Him. Woe to them, that have lost patience, and that have forsaken the right ways, and have gone aside into crooked ways. And what will they do when the Lord shall begin to examine?”³3Ecclesiasticus, ii. 15, 16, 17.

We can never forget the noble examples set by the gentlemen of the Society of St. Vincent of Paul in Paris. Not content with mapping out the whole of that vast capital, and distributing it to the conferences or district committees, in order that not one street should be left unvisited by these apostles of charity, and not one needy home should escape their active beneficence,—they studied the science of edifying by good example much more than the delicate art of bestowing relief without distressing or humiliating its recipient.

The civilized world knows how fatally the skepticism of Voltaire, aided by the evil life of the governing classes, had blighted the growth of faith in the souls of the laboring population in Paris and in the surrounding provinces. Then came the fearful excesses of the French Revolution, in which these classes actively participated, leaving the stain of blood on so many fathers and mothers of the existing generation. Of course, undying hatred of the Christian name and of all that related to religion became a household worship with these parents and their children. How could they ever become reconciled to Religion, to her worship, and her sacraments? Not by the voice or the ministrations of the priest. Him they would not listen to. By the examples of the noble men, men of the world, soldiers, lawyers, magistrates, men of illustrious birth, or rendered illustrious by their talents and public services,—whom they saw daily seeking out every form of obscure or secret privation and suffering, and ministering to the poor and sick with supreme devotedness and supreme delicacy. When they saw these men on Sundays devoutly assisting at Mass, or reverently approaching the Holy Communion, their hearts began to soften toward the religion of their fathers. The eloquence of true charity set forth beneath their eyes in so many touching deeds of beneficence, self-denial, and self-sacrifice, won their hearts, first, and thus opened the avenue of their minds to the knowledge of the true faith. For,—such has been the invincible logic of all ages. True Charity is the divinest form of True Religion.

In the churches of Paris, as well as of those in the neighboring dioceses, but very few men comparatively, at the fall of Napoleon I., had courage enough to be seen at confession or communion. The force of human respect was so great that such as dared to profess and practice what they believed, had to do so with more or less of secrecy. The yearly lectures in Notre Dame given by the two apostolic men Lacordaire and De Ravignan, broke the force of antichristian opinion and custom. The latter it was who made the happy innovation of closing his Lenten course of sermons by the solemn exercises of a retreat of eight days in favor of men exclusively, and closing on Easter Sunday by a general communion. Then it was that revolutionary and skeptical Paris was given the extraordinary and edifying spectacle of beholding the thousands of men,—the élite of French manhood,—who filled the vast Cathedral, pressing forward rank after rank, to partake of the Bread of Life, and to glorify the God of their fathers by receiving adoringly the divinest of His gifts.

Thenceforward it became the custom of the generous members of that advance-guard of Faith and Charity, the Society of St. Vincent of Paul, to send some of their members, every Sunday in the year, to receive Holy Communion publicly in the various churches of the capital and in those of the surrounding cities and villages, far and near. General officers of the army and navy, the foremost members of the learned professions, officials of high rank, and men who bore the proudest historic names in Europe, were thus to be seen giving forth the light and warmth of their pious examples in those centers of Voltairian unbelief and revolutionary impiety, where all faith had been utterly killed in souls by the evil examples and teachings of the preceding age.

And thus do they continue to edify and build up in the France of to-day the ruin on which desolation and despair seemed to have settled as utterly as on Thebes and Memphis, and Babylon and Nineveh.

A Sublime Instance of Self-Sacrifice

One instance taken from the history of a man whose air of childlike simplicity and innocence remains impressed on the soul of the author, and whose fame as a mathematician is only inferior to his generosity as a Christian, must find place here. It will tell our readers, that, whereas France is still fruitful in such heroic souls, there is sure ground to hope for a revival at some future day of the living and chivalrous faith of St. Louis.

Baron Augustin Louis Cauchy had been preceptor to the Comte de Chambord, or Henri V., as he is called by the French Royalists, and had ever remained as loyal to the cause of legitimate monarchy as he was to his baptismal faith. No promise of advancement, no prospect of emolument or honor could ever induce him to swear allegiance to any form of government that was not administered or sanctioned by the lawful princes. Nevertheless, and while winning the admiration of the whole scientific world, he remained the most simple-hearted and amiable of men, the most fervent and charitable of Christians. Of course his whole life was devoted to good works. After 1830 he was never seen at the courts of the sovereigns elected by the French people, and he was but ill at ease in the receptions of the legitimist nobility to which he belonged and where his virtues and talents were fully appreciated. Every leisure hour was given to Christ in the persons of His poor, or in the performance of the most heroic works of charity.

As he was daily thrown into the society of the most learned men in France, being himself a member of the Institute and having filled the highest professorships in the University, his heart was continually saddened by the practical unbelief of so many of his colleagues, the victims of a godless and anti-Christian system of education. More than one of these had been induced to study the Christian religion, and to embrace it heartily, by the pure life and ever-active charity of Baron Cauchy.

One young Academician, in particular, had won the Baron’s sympathy. He had been from childhood exposed to the worst influences of French infidelity, and had not the remotest idea that the Catholic Religion or Christianity itself could be anything else than the worst enemy of science and civilization.

It so happened that in the summer of 1857 the young Academician fell sick of the small-pox, the case presenting such virulent symptoms that all the friends and acquaintance of the young man fled from him, leaving him to such care as hirelings could give him. Baron Cauchy thereupon resolved to win that dear soul to God at the risk of his own life. So, he became his friend’s nurse, never leaving him for a moment, and lavishing on him all the loving and gentle care which was to be expected from one so naturally noble and tender, but who seemed transformed into an angel of God in the sick-room.

The patient recovered, gaining health of soul with that of the body. But his savior died, having caught the malignant disease, and rejoicing with unspeakable delight to see his friend a true believer. The spirit of the illustrious dead seems to have passed into his convert; for, ever since he stood over the grave of his benefactor, he has taken up the apostleship bequeathed to him by the departed.

All Paris heard the story of that heroic death and of the conversion which was its consequence. No city in the world witnesses more of such examples of all-sacrificing charity, of angelic piety than Paris the Magnificent, where the two extremes of Goodness and Wickedness are found side by side at every step, where the two great armies of Catholic charity and anti-social Hatred confront each other in every street. Which is to be victorious,—the Love ever ready to give its all and to lay down its life for the suffering and the needy, or that Hatred that would sacrifice all to its unreasoning fury or its insatiable thirst of enjoyment?

This is the mission of laymen, of men of the world. We need not tell the true Christian man that the wisdom which can alone avail to light one forward on the path of such urgent and arduous duty, is that which borrows her lamp from Faith, and that the only love capable of triumphing over the armed battalions of Hate, is the charity born of the Crucified.

But in order to recruit and warm with a divine enthusiasm these armies of the God of Charity, we priests must fire our own souls with that flame which is more penetrating, far-reaching, and irresistible than the fire from heaven which the winds bear about in the thunder-cloud. Its overwhelming suddenness and energy must tell the nations that God is in the cloud, the whirlwind, and the fire.

Oh! that all the children of God in this age of reasoning unreason, unbrotherly humanity, intolerant liberty, and most destructive progress, were vessels filled with the fervent spirit of the Gospel and the sweet odor of Christ,—how resistless would be their every word and example! If only all of us who have at heart the cause of Christ, and with it the cause of humanity, and the dearest interests of country,—would only proclaim aloud in our heart and life as well as by our lips, that the Cross is our banner and the Crucified our sole chief, how the ideal of true manhood and true manliness would soon be gloriously realized in our homes, our associations, and the whole outside world!