West" can never be forgotten. But there were words spoken by him towards the end of his life, which for love for him we will not repeat, but which caused the heart of good Catholics to grieve. However, it will gladden all our readers to know for certain that Montalembert died true to the Church and to the Holy Father.

This is the most important point of all, and therefore we put it first.

"One of his visitors put a direct question to Montalembert: If the Infallibility is proclaimed, what will you do?' 'I will struggle against it as long as I can,' he said; but when the question was repeated, the sufferer raised himself quickly in his chair, with something of his old animation . . . 'What should I do?' he said. We are always told the Pope is a FatherEh bien! There are many fathers who demand our adherence to things very far from our inclination, and contrary to our ideas. In such a case the son struggles while he can; he tries hard to persuade his father-discusses and talks the matter over with him; but when all is done, when he sees no possibility of succeeding, but receives a distinct refusal, he submits. I shall do the same.'

"You will submit so far as form goes?' said the visitor.

"Still more distinctly he replied, —

"I will simply submit my will as has to be done in respect to all the other questions of the faith. I am not a theologian; it is not my part to decide on such matters and God does not ask me to understand. He asks me to submit my will and intelligence, and I will do so."

Here is the true spirit of a loyal Catholic.

Charles Forbes René de Montalembert was born in London, 15th May, 1810. Entrusted to the care of his grandfather, owing to the emigration, at the early age of fifteen months, he was brought up for some time in England. Mrs. Oliphant gives us some touching letters from the grandfather to the little boy.

"A few months later a second prefatory letter, written as people wrote when life was long, and time ample, with a care and clearness unknown to this hasty generation [this is one of the charms of Mrs. Oliphant's style, that she conveys sly hints while passing on describes the pleasure which I have enjoyed in proceeding thus far for my beloved grandchild.'

"And on Charles's first birthday this tender enthusiam burst forth still more warmly. Ut ameris amabilis esto' is the motto which the fond grandfather placed below the portrait which he then made of his darling." (p. 13, vol. i.)

Of his youth we have simply to notice one thing, the contract which he made with M. Cornudet, who is still alive, and who will give us more valuable matter about Montalembert before long.

The two boys bound themselves together by a solemn contract to support through life "God and Freedom." Montalembert wanted to sign it with his blood, but his more sensible companion persuaded him to the contrary.

"God and Liberty," he writes, at the age of seventeen; "these are the two principal motive powers of my existence. To reconcile these two perfections shall be the aim of my life."

During his youth he was more given to God than boys generally are, and more than ordinarily studious. Let the reader turn to page 40, and see what the young boy did.

There are few Catholics who do not love Ireland, and we need not be astonished when we learn that young Montalembert's heart turned towards Ireland. Happy boy to visit such a happy land,-not happy in this world's happiness, but happy in the grace of God.

Young Montalembert went through Kerry upon horseback with a witty Irish boy for his guide. And here we must be pardoned for observing, that the ignorance of the Irish peasantry is a myth. Put an English bricklayer or ploughman and an Irish peasant face to face, and see whether the Irish does not surpass the English; we will not only say in manners, shrewdness, and intelligence, for this is commonly admitted, but in extent of knowledge. His visit to Kerry was to see O'Connell. His first visit to a country Irish chapel will be found most interesting.

"I had taken only a few steps on my way when my attention was attracted by the appearance of a man who knelt at the foot of one of the firs; several others became visible in succession in the same attitude, and the higher I ascended, the larger became the number of these kneeling peasants.

He left Ireland, we are told, after spending "two of the happiest months of his life."

"He had seen a worshipping nation, and his imagination had been inspired by the sight, and all his resolutions had burst into flower." (p. 110, vol. i.)

The history of "L'Avenir" is too well known to require any treatment here. How Montalembert struggled in company with Lacordaire for liberty of instruction, how the leader of the movement, F. Lamennais, fell away,— is known to all. Still, we cannot look back on what they fondly hoped would be the future, without feeling how entirely they forgot the past, and the lessons which it teaches; for, although "radicalism" was one of their party words, "liberalism," one of the monstrous births of modern society, gave the tone to their words and works.

No doubt it was a noble aspiration, "God and Liberty"; but "where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty," and there is no liberty where the Spirit of the Lord is not, and the Spirit of the Lord has not been with modern Liberalism. It has done more harm to the Church, we do not hesitate to say, than open heresy. Like Jansenism, it has eaten like a canker into the hearts of Christ's faithful. Yet, looking back upon the history of the Church of France since the days of "L'Avenir,” it is a matter of great consolation for us to know that the evil has almost died out. The little noble band of searchers after "God and Liberty "-and with all their faults they were truly noble-have almost died away. One or two only remain. Montalembert has gone, and Lacordaire has gone, and M. Cochin has gone (we do not add the name of Père Gratry, for he belonged to quite another school of thought), and, as far as we can see, "liberalism" is well nigh extinct in the Church of France. To God be the thanks.

Yet we must not be unfair: Montalembert and his companions did immense service to the Church in their day, both by their public lives and writings, by their open witness to the faith of Christ, especially before the public tribunals, by their holy living, by their works of charity, by their ministrations

to the poor. And we all know that any one who remembers the poor is never forgotten by our Lord.

Of the life of S. Elizabeth, let us hear Mrs. Oliphant.

"The work itself is one of which no critic of the present day needs to speak. Of all the saintly studies that have followed it, and they have been many, none has successfully emulated the grace and beauty, the harmonious charm of this beautiful book." (p. 328, vol. i.)

Of the "Monks of the West," we need not also speak, except to call attention to the fact, that that beautiful work was the means of turning his own daughter's heart towards the courts of God.

As an orator, he was probably unsurpassed in France, and one of the secrets of his success, no doubt, lay in this, that he always spoke from the heart.

The one great cause of his shortcomings was (to our mind) his want of reverence towards the clergy-towards the constituted authorities of Christ's Church. As a boy of seventeen, we find him saying that the clergy did not understand the position of affairs; and at the end of his life, we find him calling the Infallible Vicar of Christ an “idol.” No doubt he submitted whenever he was condemned; no doubt he would have accepted all the Church of God required of him; but his failure lay in this, that he never fully recognized the truth of that saying of our Lord, addressed to his Apostles :-" He who receiveth you, receiveth Me." From first to last, if we may trust Mrs. Oliphant's beautiful book,-and from other sources indeed we derive the same impression, he set himself up to be a critic of the priesthood of God. And the end of these things we know. But God was merciful to one who had worked so nobly for Him, although not faultlessly; and the name of "Montalembert" shall go down to our children's children in honourable and grateful remembrance.

Before concluding, we have a word to say on Mrs. Oliphant-no unkind word.

To us, it seems like Edward Irving, whose life she has written as if she were a moth fluttering round the light, the Light which enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world. She has written the life of F. Francis of Assisi, and seems utterly fascinated by the beauty of Catholicity. She makes, however, a distinction between the heart and the reason. If the heart leads her one way, the reason condemns.

But Mrs. Oliphant is singularly fair. Take this from the Preface.

"Lest her (Madame de Montalembert's) great kindness should entangle her in a supposed assent to any of my political or religious opinions, I feel it my duty to state most distinctly that this has not been the case."

This is what she says about the Definition of Papal Infallibility.

"Certainly it is difficult to understand wherein the Papal Infallibility, which we have all our lives understood to be an article of Roman Catholic belief, differs from the Papal Infallibility proclaimed by the Council of Rome in 1870."

All through the book there are traces that the heart of the writer is leading her toward the Catholic Church, although her reason may be pointing the other way. Let us hope and pray her reason also may in due time be convinced; and that she who has written the life of F. Francis of Assisi, may be welcomed into the true Church by the "poor little one of Jesus Christ." With one ast extract we will conclude:

"The tears are scarcely dry yet that fell on his grave, and his vacant place will be hard to fill up in his country. But at least there is one thing at which all who know him will rejoice-that God took him mercifully from the evil to come, and that he did not see the lowest humiliation, or the most bitter sufferings of his beloved France."

Contemporary Review, 1872, art. I.: Is God unknowable? By Rev. Father DALGAIRNS. London: Strahan & Co.

E cannot within the compass of a notice express any sufficient appre

it justice, when the course of our own philosophical articles shall have brought us to the vital question herein treated. We will at once, however, express the bias of our own humble opinion that F. Dalgairns treats Mr. Herbert Spencer's scepticism with much greater respect than it deserves. We will add a very brief account of the position which F. Dalgairns himself takes up. He agrees with FF. Newman and Kleutgen, in assigning a primary place, among the arguments for God's Existence, to that derivable from the phenomena of man's "moral conscience." But the way of treating this argument is peculiarly his own. In his hands it assumes the shape of a "cumulative process" (p. 622). "On the one hand my analysis of moral law throws me upon a Personal Being in whom it lives; on the other, I experience a sensible pain which is a direct consequence of the same moral law. Here is a combination of intuition and experience, which is Kant's condition of knowledge."

The following criticism of the "agnostic" school is admirably true and admirably expressed :

"This system of course has great polemical advantages ... Its authors reap the profit at once of both knowledge and ignorance. To them ignorance is a harbour of refuge, from which they may issue on piratical expeditions into the realm of knowledge. Its enormous and incurable weakness is, that it excludes from the circle of knowledge what the common sense of mankind will never consent to give up to ignorance." (p. 617.)

Even an atheist, urges our author, feels a pang of conscience when he commits sin. This emotion is "the passionate cry of the Father, come to claim the child who denies that He exists." (p. 625.)

Several thinkers are led, by the existence of evil, to "the hypothesis of a good being limited in power." But this, adds F. Dalgairns with profound truth, "is to misread the phenomena of the Universe. It does not wear the

aspect of weak benevolence: it wears the sad look of yearning unrequited love." (p. 629.)

We believe F. Dalgairns was out of England when his article went through the press certainly the misprints are deplorable. "First Cause" is throughout printed "First Canon." In p. 625, line 8, "cry of recall" stands absurdly as "cry of wrath." In p. 629-"We need not assume the existence of a double Creator, of a Demiurge or an Ahriman"--the word "knowable" is substituted for "double"; as though F. Dalgairns were himself an agnostic. Manifold are the inconveniences-the present writer speaks with keen fellow-feeling-of writing an illegible hand.

The Troubles of our Catholic Forefathers related by Themselves. First Series. Edited by JOHN MORRIS, Priest of the Society of Jesus. Burns & Oates. 1872.

THE

HE readers of Father Morris's last work will eagerly welcome another volume from his hands. The present book contains nine separate papers of varied and deep interest; and although none of them are equal in length and continuity of narrative to Father Gerard's account, several of them will be found to throw so much light upon the English religious foundations, the habits of the time, and the relentless persecutions-not only external— and cruelties to which they were exposed, that each of these papers has a distinct value of its own. Mother Margaret Clement, whose life is first on the list, was the daughter of Margaret Giggs (married to Thomas Clement), who was brought up as a daughter in the household of the great Chancellor and martyr Sir Thomas More. Margaret Clement, the younger daughter, was for thirty-eight years Prioress of the Augustinianesses of S. Ursula's at Louvain, and afterwards helped to found the colony-house of S. Monica's, in the same city. In Holbein's great picture of Sir Thomas More and his family, of which there is a duplicate or contemporary copy in the possession of his lineal descendant, Charles Eyston, Esq., of Hendred, in Berkshire, Margaret Giggs is placed beside the famous Margaret Roper, the Chancellor's daughter. It was to her that Sir Thomas in his last letter wrote, "I send now to my good daughter Clement her algorism-stone (for arithmetic), and send her and my godson (her husband), and all her's, God's blessing and mine.' Young Margaret was sent to school at S. Ursula's, at Louvain, where there was a famous English nun, Elizabeth Woodford, who had been driven out of this country when the convents were suppressed. She is represented as “a substantial woman, solid in sense and judgment, very exact herself, and severe," as they used in old time to be towards youth in England. This nun, who had no doubt had her own experience of women's love of power, and whose sagacious mind had stored it up to much profit, advised Margaret the younger if she should ever found convents in England, to admit of prioresses but no abbesses, as she had seen "great abuses enter into religion thereby." Mother VOL. XIX.--NO. XXXVIII. [New Series.]

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