Imagens das páginas
PDF
ePub

within six years of the July Revolution, the latest period to which his work reaches down.

"At no period had there been more frequent attempts at self-destruction; and those who abandoned life in cold blood, in order to explore the strange mysteries of death, were not men of mature age, whose years had been steeped in fruitless pleasures or bitter delusions; they were, for the most part, young men, and especially young girls; every morning the journals announced five or six suicides; here lovers, scarcely emerged from childhood, locked in each other's arms, sought a common grave in the waves, and their bodies were recognized a few miles lower down; there they flung themselves down upon the pavement from a roof, or from some high tower; or they opened their veins like the ancients; or they had recourse to suffocation by charcoal, that deathsleep into death. Suicide was especially common among frail creatures between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one; sometimes even children attempted their life with a feeble and trembling hand. Whence arose all this disgust, this disenchantment of life? From the absence of all spiritual ideas, from that materialistic system of doubt and sensuality, which, destroying the tints by which the illusions of life are coloured, made life appear like a bottomless abyss and a causeless result. There was no remedy for this disgust, no means of arresting the ennui of souls blighted by void and despair. The character of the new generation had been fashioned under the influence of plays and novels written against the regular state of the family and of society; boundless ambitions exhausted themselves at the first start; all was to be enjoyed hastily before plunging into annihilation. There was a zest and a pleasure in raising the cup to the lips and draining it at one draught. The "worm which dieth not" was every where, in the depth of the heart and under the fresh outside of earth's fairest fruit; the imagination having presented to it so many pictures of exhausted vice, of darkened existence, of asphyxy, poison, assassination, had grown familiar with the tomb, in the eyes of some the end of every ill. Youth stands in need of faith for its preservation; if at its commencement life is without illusions, what has it left? nothing but a melancholy disgust, whence it seeks to penetrate the riddle of the tomb." Capefigue, L'Europe depuis l'Avènement du roi Louis-Philippe, vol. viii. pp. 260 -262.

The close juxtaposition, not to say identification of "faith" and "illusion,” in this passage, is not calculated to inspire us with much confidence in that system of religious belief which the author professes, and which is proposed by him and others as the panacea for the moral disease which he so eloquently describes. But we must not digress. M. Capefigue goes on to illustrate his general statement by the particular circumstances of two cases, celebrated in the annals of French criminal jurisprudence, those of La Roncière and Lacenaire, and after tracing their conVOL. VI. NO. XI.-SEPT. 1846.

D

1

nexion with the literature and the materialistic theories of the day, he thus proceeds :

"In this way was society delivered up to the sophists, as in the days of the deep decay of the Roman empire. Its pleasures, its amusements, its festivities savoured not a little of this absence of moral principle; the world was moving in the extremes of sensuality. The whole of this period is marked by open adulteries, by outrages upon the public morals, by the bestial condition of the lower classes; among whom there were scarcely any marriages, but cohabitation under the same roof, incest, worn out libertinism. According to statistical data which may be depended upon, the number of illegitimate children at Paris, equals that of children born in wedlock; the superabundance of vice overflows on all sides, and, as it were by way of compensation, one half of those who die, take shelter in the hospital during their last illness."-Capefigue, l'Europe depuis l'Avènement du roi Louis-Philippe. vol. viii. pp. 264, 265.

Having thus corroborated the testimony of M. de Polignac by that of a historian less liable to the suspicion of hostility against the existing state of things, we now resume the thread of the Prince's reflections at the point where we interrupted them :

"When one beholds such scenes of depravity carried to such an excess in the heart of the society of France, one is indeed struck dumb with astonishment to hear one of the coryphées of the eclecticism of the university (M. Cousin) proclaim aloud, that it is the business of society to interfere in education, and to fashion it, as it were, after its own image. Is that erudite philosopher really ignorant that education is never to be moulded upon the image of any society? for every society is nothing more than an aggregate of men, and every man is by nature the slave of his passions; while, on the contrary, the object of education is to teach man to struggle against his inordinate affections, and not to listen and to yield to them.

"At the sight of so monstrous a deviation from the laws enjoined by simple prudence, and from the first notions to which a knowledge of man's frailty leads, can it be a matter of surprise that the Church of France, afflicted and alarmed by the scandals likely to arise from it, should lift up her voice and endeavour to avert the evil which she foresees? Has she then no longer the mission of separating the chaff from the wheat, and of teaching those eternal truths of which she alone is the faithful depository? Is the faith of her people no longer committed to her, and is it not her first duty to enlighten and to sustain that faith, by preserving it from the snares of falsehood and seduction? No doubt she has no other weapon than the word; but that word ought to be authoritative, powerful, instant, for, in matters of moral and religious instruction, it is the echo of the word of God."-Polignac, Études Historiques, pp. 380, 381.

This eloquent appeal which M. de Polignac makes on behalf of the Church of France, a Church unhappily disqualified by her impregnation with popish corruptions for answering the call which the present state of society in that country makes upon her, and to fulfil the high destinies of a Christian Church placed among a godless people,-that same appeal we make on behalf of the Catholic Church of England. The same tendency to moral and social disorganization is corroding the vitals of our people. The same symptoms are developing themselves, though as yet in a less acute degree. Religious indifferentism, the fruit with us not only of the wide diffusion of an infidel philosophy under the garb of "useful knowledge," but of the interminable gainsayings of a prolific sectarianism, is at the root of the disease under which the social system labours. The deadening effect which it produces upon the vital powers of the soul, is aggravated by the practical materialism of the age; a materialism far more ignoble than the theoretical materialism of speculative philosophy, because, while this refines upon abstruse questions from an unwillingness to believe in the reality of any thing but matter, the other-the practical materialism-debases the mind by teaching it to value and to love nothing but what is material, of the earth, earthy. Hence the utilitarian spirit of our social theories, the utilitarian character of our entire system of government and legislation; hence the reckless competition, the fraudulent trading, the gambling speculation, the jobbing corruption, the sordid love of pelf and the heartless selfishness, which pervade all classes of society, and set upon every occupation and every rank of life the base stamp of Mammon service. Hence, again, the gradual decay of the deeper and more ennobling studies, and the prostitution of literature, which, forgetful of her high origin, and lost to a sense of her own dignity, panders to a depraved taste, rendered daily more vicious by its influence. Minds of a loftier stamp, which cannot descend to the mercenary methods on which success in the race of life has become dependent, are ground between the upper and nether millstone of necessity and anxious care, while a public which has neither time for thought nor taste for food of a more solid or a more refined description, bestows its literary patronage on minds which make merchandize of their gifts in a host of ephemeral productions, whose only object is to divert the mind, and to beguile the hours of dull exhaustion which succeed the unhealthy excitement of an overstrained existence. And while this canker of moral and intellectual depravation is eating daily deeper into the national mind and character among the higher and middle classes, the lower classes of the population are living in a state of civilized helotism, forced to toil beyond measure for their daily

subsistence, cut off from the means and opportunities of innocent and rational recreation, driven to drown the sense of their miserable existence in the stupefaction of animal indulgence, seasoned on the holy day of rest by the weekly supply of an infamous journalism, which fills their imagination with hatred and contempt for their rulers and teachers, and with images of cruelty and profligacy, taken from the melancholy annals of vice and crime. And while such is the wretched and hopeless condition of the parents, their children are growing up amidst ignorance and squalor, untaught, undisciplined, unblest, baptized but not christianized; the immoral example before their eyes, and the instinct of vice within their hearts, adding year after year to the impure and enervated multitude whose existence is brought under the notice of society only by the penal inflictions of the law, and by the, alas! too impotent voice of philanthropy; and all the while the action of the Church, the only power that can rescue and heal amidst such causes of moral degeneracy and spiritual perdition, is kept in abeyance, or nearly so, by the opposition of the principle of godless education, in accordance with the godless character of the age.

When, then, will the Church-by which term we understand not her clergy only, but her clergy and laity together-arise to assert her position as the instructress of the nation, her right to train, in the way he should go, every child which parental authority does not individually and expressly claim for the separate folds of popery and dissent? When will she rise to the height of her destiny, and oppose to the fearful and daily increasing invasion of infidelity, of error and superstition, that power of truth and love which the true Church of Christ alone can wield? When will she, laying aside the crotchets of antiquarian pedantry, the dulness of an erastian conservatism, and the treacherous dependence on wealth or political influence, lay hold on the national mind and heart of England, and with a tender sympathy for the sorrows of each individual heart, and a godly zeal for the salvation of each individual sinner, confound the shallowness and selfishness of the age by deep thought and generous feeling, such as the truth of Christ and his holy love can alone beget in the heart of man?

ART. II.-1. Sanctus Thomas Cantuariensis. Ed. J. A. GILES. Oxford, 1845-6, 8 vols. 8vo. [I., II. Lives. III., IV. Letters of Becket and others. V., VI. Letters of Foliot and others. VII., VIII. Works of Herbert of Bosham.]

2. The Life and Letters of Thomas à Becket, now first gathered from the Contemporary Historians. By the Rev. J. A. GILES, D.C.L., late Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. 2 vols. 8vo. London, 1846.

3. The Lives of the Lord Chancellors and Keepers of the Great Seal of England. By JOHN, LORD CAMPBELL, A.M., F.R.S.E. 3 vols. 8vo. London, 1845.

WITHIN the last year we have had two new biographies of Becket1. We might have looked for a third; but the Littlemore Myths have come to an untimely end; the authorities of the communion to which the writers have joined themselves being, it would seem, by no means desirous that such productions should go forth to the world as from their own body, however willing they may have formerly been to welcome them as the testimonies of aliens. We must, consequently, be content to draw our information from less poetical sources.

It cannot be said that either of the late biographies is any great addition to our means of understanding the subject. Lord Campbell was not led to write the life of Becket by any especial interest in him. He has not singled him out as an eminent ecclesiastic, but has taken him in his turn, as one of a series of chancellors. The life is in quality such as might be expected,-a clear and lively sketch, written apparently in haste, with little reference to the original authorities, and without any very scrupulous acknowledgment of the author's obligations to his immediate informants. It is to Lord Campbell's credit, that, in a matter so little connected with his usual studies as the general question of Becket's merits, he does not pretend to dogmatize, but contents himself with a simple statement of such arguments as he has met with on either side.

1 The prefix a, which has latterly been dignified with a French accent, appears to have originated in vulgar colloquial usage. See H. Wharton, quoted in Wordsworth's Eccl. Biog. i. 31. 3rd ed.

« AnteriorContinuar »