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likely be obliged at last to abandon their theory; and if they are not yet convinced that they must do so, they yet will do well to desist for a time from urging it upon the public. We have spoken to them plainly, but not unkindly, if seemingly uncourteously. If in any thing we have wronged them, we ask their pardon in advance, and shall only need to have the wrong pointed out to retract it, and to make all the amends for it in our power.

ART. IV. - The Life of St. Stanislaus Kotska, of the So

ciety of Jesus, Patron of Novices. From the Italian. First American Edition. Baltimore : Metropolitan Press. 1847. 16mo. pp. 144.

The Catholic public owe a large debt of gratitude to the Sulpicians of Baltimore for establishing the Metropolitan press, and for the excellent works they have printed and circulated. Their publications are selected with Catholic taste and judgment, and are admirably adapted to the edification of the faithful. They are from a class of works which are always deeply interesting, and which cannot be read without advancing the cause of truth and piety. Excepting one or two school-books which we do not much like, we can cordially recommend every publication we have seen from the Metropolitan press ; and, indeed, the fact that a work is sent forth from that press is of itself a much higher recommendation than ours, or that of any other editor in the country.

These excellent fathers would deserve our lasting gratitude for their edition of Butler's Lives of the Saints, if for nothing else. They have given us a complete edition of that invaluable work, in twelve numbers, making four handsome octavo volumes, well printed, on good paper, and fair type, at the low price of three dollars, instead of twenty dollars, the price, we believe, of the English edition, and have thus placed it within the reach of every Catholic family in the country wishing to possess it. There could be no better work selected for general circulation, or one the reading of which could be more instructive and profitable. It is the best history of the Church which we have in English, and, at the same time, it furnishes the best description of spiritual reading. Nowhere can we so well study the history of the Church as in the lives of her saints ; and nowhere can we better learn the maxims of holy living than in the examples of those who have successfully reduced them to practice. To all who object to our holy religion, and, in their blindness and rage, declaim against it, we hold up these Lives of the Saints, and say, Read these, and then doubt, if you can, where is the true Church, where the Holy Ghost is infused, or where are truth, sanctity, heroism.

We have but one fault to find with Butler's Lives of the Saints. The learned author is an Englishman, and, like too many English Catholics, writes with the fear of heretics before his eyes, and prunes away whatever he fears may not be able to withstand the most searching criticism. Perhaps this is well ; but we wish the excellent author bad written with less reference to those who are without, in exterior darkness, and consulted more exclusively the edification of the faithful. His pages are learned, critically accurate, recording no fact not proof against the cavils of the critic; but we cannot disguise the fact that they are often cold, dry, destitute of the glow and the unction we look for in the genuine Catholic writer. Alas !

! our noble mother tongue has so long been all but monopolized by heretics and unbelievers, that it is not easily pressed into the service of truth and piety, and not without immense effort is it made a passable medium for expressing even the more ordinary emotions and affections of the Christian life. It has well-nigh lost its power of expressing any thing which pertains especially to the Christian experience. It has no celestial sense, and its terms are rarely significant of any thing which goes out of the natural order. It may answer the purposes of business and practical politics; it may even lend itself with some facility to the poet of external nature, or of merely human love; but, according to its ordinary usage, it is wholly unfitted to express that higher, purer, richer, and more delicate class of affections which are peculiar to the Christian. Whenever we seek to make it express the deeper religious experience, the fervent and tender love of the soul for her celestial Spouse, her ardent longings for the visits of her Divine Lover, who engrosses all her thoughts, absorbs, as it were, her whole being, her detachment from the world, her entire self-annihilation, her sweet peace, her ineffable repose as she leans on the arm of her Beloved, or her raptures when he deigns to embrace her with his love ; the associations with which the terms we must use are invested in the popular mind are all foreign to our purpose, and we are more likely to suggest what we would not than what we would. What is highest, purest, and most holy in our thought becomes cold, dry, or coarse in our expression. The most we can do is to talk about these things, we cannot talk them themselves ; as it was said of Dugald Stewart, that he discoursed about philosophy, but did not discourse it.

Language is the exponent of the life of the people who use it, and it can be the exponent of only such life as they live. The native capacity of our language is equal to that of any modern tongue.

It might have all the delicacy, flexibility, and liquid harmony of the Italian, the depth and tenderness of the German, the pomp and dignity of ihe Spanish, the vivacity and unction of the French, as well as a directness and energy peculiarly its own. No language has a richer vocabulary than it has or may have, for it has the power of naturalizing whatever is excellent in every ancient or modern tongue. But the boasted and boasting Anglo-Saxon race, since it rebelled against the Church, has been a stranger to the Christian religion, and living without God in the world. There is no Christianity, and therefore no true religion, distinguishable from the Church. None who live out of her communion do or can live the Christian life. The terms of religion they retain they soon cease to understand in a Christian sense. Their whole order of ideas becomes contracted to what is of the earth, earthy, and their language is restricted in its meaning to what is low, outward, and sensual. We charge the stubbornness and defects of our language, not to the language itself, but to the fact that it has been all but monopolized for three hundred years by the enemies of God and his holy religion, who have lost the Christian life, and have bad no occasion to express its phenomena.

But, after all, our language is not the property of heretics and infidels. It was ours before it was theirs. They are only usurpers by violence, and as such bave acquired no rights by prescription. They have and can have no right to frame its laws, or to determine its usage. It is ours by right, for we never do and never can forfeit our rights. We should therefore reclaim the dominion which in unhappy times was wrested from us, and at least, so far as it concerns ourselves, restore to our language its Christian character and habits. We already constitute no insignificant portion of all who speak it, and in a very few years we shall be the majority. There is no longer, if ever there was, any occasion to consult heretical and infi

We are false to ourselves and to religion, if in writing we place the Protestants who speak our language before our eyes, instead of Catholics, and seek to adapt ourselves to the tastes of the former, instead of the wants of the latter. We must write with a view to the edification of Catholics, not with a view either to commend ourselves to sectarians, or to escape their criticisms.

del usage.

The beretical and unbelieving who speak our language, no doubt, at the present moment, outnumber the faithful, and surpass them in worldly position and influence ; but we need not mind that. There is just as little occasion for us to defer to them in matters of language, of science, of art, of taste, as in matters of religion. We have nothing to learn from them, and can teach them in those very things in which their attainments are the most respectable. We are all of us disposed to overrate them, and to conclude, that, where so much is pretended, there must needs be some little reality. It is all a mistake. They affect airs of superiority, talk largely, pompously, and even venture to sneer at some of our own great masters ; but their persuasion of their own superiority results solely from their ignorance. In the law, which was systematized by their Catholic ancestors, there is found not unfrequently a Protestant who can reason, and reason well. In matters of business we also find Protestants who are shrewd, able, and not ridiculous ; but in almost every thing else, it is rare to find one who can talk for five minutes in succession, without committing the most laughable blunders, or betraying the most deplorable ige norance. By rejecting religion, by scorning the Gospel, they have gone far indeed, magni passus, but out of the normal order, extra viam, and retain the normal exercise of none of their faculties. We almost always estimate too highly their attainments, and in our addresses to them, or in our arguments with them, are almost always too profound, too scientific, and too logical for them to follow us. We suffer ourselves to be imposed upon by their lofty airs and loud pretensions ; yet they never reject the truth because they have attained to a high state of mental cultivation, but always because they want true mental and moral discipline. Our most illiterate servant-girls can teach the best of them, and are familiar with great truths, to the conception of which the most learned of them are not equal. The simplest elements of religion are too recondite for them, and the most ordinary sermon of the most ordinary Catholic priest, if they catch its sense, is full of novelty for them. Poor souls ! how little do they reflect that there is a wisdom which is folly, and a folly that is wisdom! How little do they

suspect the ridiculous figure they cut in the eyes of even an ordinary Catholic! Poor Pat or Bridget laughs, or is shocked, at their ignorance; and yet they swell up, and are fain to persuade themselves that they are the great lights of the age. Alas! if the light that is in you be darkness, how great is that darkness !

We speak not disparagingly of the natural ability of heretics and infidels; God has dealt as bountifully with them as with others. Nor do we speak disparagingly of their zeal for education, or their unwearied efforts to cultivate their minds and hearts, and to advance in science and literature. Their wrinkled brows, sunken eyes, furrowed cheeks, and care-worn countenances, indicate plainly that they waste not themselves in idleness; but, alas! it is not easy to fill a sieve with the waters even of the ocean; and labor misdirected yields ordinarily but a poor return. One must look long indeed before he will behold and appreciate the beauty upon which he turns his back, and long and rapidly indeed must be run before overtaking the truth from which he recedes. We need not wonder that they toil and study in vain. We need not wonder that they amass no treasures, and that they remain poor and destitute in the midst of abundance. They have turned their backs upon God; they have thrown themselves out of the Divine order; they are running from all that is true, beautiful, and good; and what is there for them to acquire but emptiness and nothing? The treasure can be found only in the field in which it is hid, and, if they will not seek there, they must seek in vain. Confining themselves to the earthly, only the earthly can exist for them. The book of celestial truth is a sealed book for them, sealed within and without with seven seals, and none but the Lion of the tribe of Juda prevails to open it, or to loose the seals thereof. Yet no man does or can know the earthly as it is, save as he beholds it in the light of the celestial. Alas for them!-esteeming themselves wise, they become fools; are ever learning, but never able to come to the knowledge of the truth. There is only one thing more deplorable than their mistake, and that is for Catholics ever to write with the fear of them before their eyes, or to consult their tastes and habits in using the language which, in their blindness and unbelief, they have emasculated, made weak, and meaningless. Let us, unless when writing directly for them, forget their existence, leave them entirely out of the account, and study to write solely for the edification of Christians. It is for them to come and learn

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