After taking it up, we found ourselves unwilling to lay it down, before reading to the end of the second volume. It is, upon the whole, the most interesting and the least objectionable of any of the popular religious novels, written on this side of the water, that have appeared since Father Rowland. Nevertheless, it is not without its faults. As a work of art it cannot assume a very high rank. The characters want individuality, and the dialogue is frequently stiff and awkward. There is too frequent a recurrence of the same epithets, and a little too much dearing, embracing, and kissing. An author may leave some things to be supplied by the knowledge or imagination of his readers. The incidents, some of which are very interesting in themselves, are often superinduced upon the main design, instead of being developed from it. The argument is sometimes needlessly minute, at other times quite too summary, and the whole work wants originality. The serious portion is avowedly copied from very common books of controversy, and the romance is hashed up from Bulwer, James, Dickens, and others. The author, moreover, looks with too much forbearance on the marriage of a Catholic with a Protestant, and, in one instance, at least, not necessary to specify, makes a concession to Protestants which is fatal to his whole argument, if strictly taken. But, notwithstanding these faults, the work, as the times go, is very creditable to the author, and leads us to hope for better things from him hereafter.

The last two works we have mentioned belong to that class of religious novels which we criticized with some severity in our last Review. This class of works, under the relation of art, are as offensive as a picture in which the painter joins the beautiful head of a maiden on to the body and tail of a fish. They are literary hybrids, formed by the union of the modern novel or novellette with the theological tractor pamphlet, and as such we have no toleration for them. What we think of them as romances we have heretofore told our readers. But it is not merely as romances, or works of art, that they are to be considered. They have another and a higher aim ; and it is in relation to this other and higher aim that we wish now to examine their claims on the Catholic public. Waiving their character of romances, they pertain to the department of polemical theology, and are designed to set forth, recommend, and vindicate the Catholic faith. This is their principal aim. It is proper, therefore, to consider them in this latter character, and to examine with some care their probable influence, supposing them to be extensively read, both on those who are without and on those who are within. If, under both or either of these relations, they are fitted, here and now, to exert a favorable influence, we must approve them, whatever may be our objections to them as mere romances or works of art.

I. In relation to those without, these works do not seem to us to be of the sort we want. The very fact that they mix up a love-story with the controversy is a drawback upon their good influence. They who are not sufficiently interested in the questions discussed, to read the arguments without the story, will hardly be sufficiently interested by it to read them with profit. They will read for the story, and, if they read the arguments, it will, in general, be as if they read them not. But those who are sufficiently interested to read the discussion with profit would read with more pleasure and profit the same matter without the story. The tone of these works is also against them. Protestants expect us to be less worldlyminded, and to possess more evangelical simplicity and humility, than they, and they are repelled from us just in the same proportion as they find us like themselves. The worldly and aristocratic tone which these works breathe, the bankering after wealth and fashion they exhibit, the care taken to introduce no Catholics upon the scene but such as are rich, learned, refined, or fashionable, in a country like this, where it is well known that the great majority of the faithful belong to the poorer and humbler classes of society, are more likely to disgust and repel intelligent Protestants, already prejudiced against our religion, than to charm and attract them to the Church. They show us too much like themselves for them to draw an inference favorable to Catholicity. These works would have a far better influence, if they laid their scene in some damp cellar, some miserable garret, or wretched shanty, and contrasted the poor Catholic, exiled from the land of his birth and all the cherished associations of his childhood and youth, in the midst of poverty, sickness, labor, destitution, and death, purified, sustained, consoled, made cheerful, joyous even, by his holy religion, with some rich and voluptuous heretic, surrounded by his troops of satellites, educated, learned, refined, with all that wealth and luxury can give, yet tortured by a gnawing within, weary of himself and the world, with no sweet recollection behind, no inspiring hope before, and seeking to drown the present in gay dissipation or in vice and crime. He who has been an inmate in the houses of our rich and luxurious heretics, undazzled by the splendor of the outside, and able to look beneath the veil of elegant manners and refined hospitality, and who has also witnessed the simple faith and fervent piety of our poor Irish Catholics, sat down with them in their scantily furnished dwellings and shared their warm household affections, loses for ever all his hankering after high life, wealth, fashion, and feels his heart melt in unaffected pity for all whom the world envies.

It is also an objection to these works that they seek to present Catholicity in its resemblance to, rather than in its contrast with, Protestantism. The aim appears to be to make the faith as much like heresy as it can be, and still be called faith. This is very questionable policy, and betrays no profound knowledge of human nature in general, or of American Protestant nature in particular. In proportion as we diminish the differences between Catholicity and Protestantism, we should remember, we diminish, in a country like this, where all the worldly advantages are on the side of the latter, the motives there are for one to embrace the former. The Protestant does not become a Catholic in order to retain what he already has, but in order to get what he has not ; and to arrest his attention and induce him to investigate the claims of our religion, we must hold out to him, not what we have in common with him, but what we have which he has not, and cannot have, unless he becomes one of us. Assuredly, few men in this country will abjure Protestantism for the sake of receiving it back under the name of Catholicity.

On this point the works in question seem to us to commit a grave mistake. They adopt too low a tone, and seem to be afraid to present the Church in her imperial dignity and glory, as claiming always to be all or nothing. They appear to wish to conceal, rather than to display, her exclusiveness, forgetful that it is her recommendation to those without as well as to those within. Men of the world, cold and indifferent as they are, will not listen to the Church, unless she speaks in a tone and language which none of the sects can or dare adopt. The sects are proud and arrogant, but they are also timid and cowardly. When it comes to the point, their courage oozes out, and their speech falters. Not one of them dare say that out of its bosom there is no salvation. They rely, and they know they rely, on man for their support, and they are al

ways in trepidation lest they should say something which may be offensive to the human pride and prejudice on which they depend. The Church relies on God, and has no fear of men or devils. She speaks in the calm tones of authority whatever she has been commissioned to speak, and remains quiet as to the result. It is this which, more than any one thing else, penetrates the hearts of heretics, and makes them feel that she is not one of the sects, but something totally distinct and diverse from them all.

The great mass of Protestants, as we have known them, of all denominations, have a lurking suspicion that Protestantism is a nullity, - what Carlyle calls a sham, - and they cling 10 the simulacrum, only because they persuade themselves that there is nothing more real or less empty to be found. Their position is by no means what they wish it ; but they are unwilling to change it, because they have concluded that there can be no other position less unsatisfactory. They place Catholicity among the sects, and look upon all sects as substantially alike ; wherefore, then, should they change? It is to this state of mind the Catholic controversialist must address himself, and his first and chief care must be to show that Catholicity cannot be included in the category of the sects, that her Christianity is generically distinguishable from that of each and all the sects, from Puseyism to Straussism, and that, under the relation of Christianity, she knows no one of the sects, or if so, only as St. Polycarp knew Marcion as

primogenitum diaboli.” She will be all, or she will be nothing; and as such should always be presented to the public. When so presented, doubtless the Protestant's first impulse will be to reply with a sneer, -Let her be nothing ; but his second impulse, as he reflects on the nullity of his own faith, what he knows of her past history and present condition, the wants of the soul, and the goodness of God, even as manifest by the light of nature, will be to inquire, if, perchance, she inay not, in very deed, have the right to be all. It is always better to present the Church in her strength than in her weakness, as she is and has the right to be, than as shorn of her glory, and compressed into the smallest possible dimensions, for the sake of eluding the attacks of her enemies. There is always less to be apprehended from offending Protestants than from failing to arrest their attention and engage

them earnestly in the work of investigation.

These works, furthermore, assume too much as already ac

cepted by Protestants. It is a mistake, rather than charity, to assume that Protestants in general are in good faith and really concerned about their salvation, and therefore are to be treated always as men who are willing to hear reason and yield to the force of argument. We make also an unwarrantable assumption, when we assume that they generally believe that our Lord has made a revelation, in the strict sense of the word, and instituted some sort of a Church for its dispensation. Individuals there are, among them, who, indeed, believe this much ; but, in general, if not always, these are to be regarded as persons who have received a special grace, and who are already on the high road to Rome, whither they are sure to arrive, if they persevere. The bulk of the Protestant world have no solid belief in the fact of revelation, and really admit nothing like a Church in any sense intelligible to a Catholic. There is a differentia generis between the views of even your High Churchmen and those of Catholics ; Dr. Pusey's notions approach no nearer to Catholicity than the vegetable oyster does to the animal ; and, for the most part, one must reason with a Tractarian as if he were a No-churchman.

It is never safe to assume, whatever a Protestant may profess to believe, that he believes any thing with sufficient firmness to warrant us in taking it as our point of departure in an argument against him. The majority of Protestants, it may be, still profess to believe the primary articles of the creed, and we do not question but they really believe that they believe them ; but, if we wish to deduce from these articles conse

; quences in favor of the Church, or in favor of any conclusion they are not prepared to believe, we shall find they deceive themselves, and that we are to make no account of their profession. Their belief may be strong enough to bind them by consequences they wish to believe, but never strong enough to bind them by consequences, however legitimate and necessary, to which they are opposed. This cannot surprise us ; for we know, and it is one of our strong arguments against heretics, that they who reject the authority of the Church necessarily deprive themselves of all possible means of firm faith, even in those articles of the creed which they may flatter themselves they still retain. We ought, therefore, never to expect them to be bound by the consequences of their own avowed principles. If they cannot deny the necessity of the consequences, we may be sure they will escape conviction by casting doubts, in their own minds, on their premises.