The judgment is improved. This is essential, and if the other faculties are developed in the same proportion; if proofs under the pen take a form the most original, if the love of the good, the beautiful, and the true, inflame the heart; if a vigorous imagination seize on new contrasts between error always varying and truth always immutable; if the memory is enriched with facts; if by the aid of a sure judgment and an exquisite tact, one is able to cull from exhaustless materials, to add the imposing authority of experience to the authority of reason, it will need only persevering labor to enable him to elevate himself to a level with the greatest intellects which have ever adorned the church, or reflected honor on humanity.

Let us, says the archbishop, endeavor to acquire this solid and profound instruction. It is that possessed by all the great masters. They arrived at it through severe labors. Let us disdain the glory which is easily acquired; it is not durable.

What has been said of method is equally true of style, the rules of which the archbishop does not stop to develop. He shall content himself, he says, with merely indicating them in describing the errors of a literary heresy, known under the name of Romanticism. Several pages then follow on the bad taste, bad logic, the confused medley of all sorts of styles, vague assertions without proof, frigid thoughts, pompous puerilities, bombast and extravagance, of this new and fantastic schoolthese demagogues of literature, who set at defiance all the laws of good writing and all the principles of common sense. Genius, it is added, must impose on itself certain laws, and not proceed at hap-hazard. Submission to these laws does not necessarily impair its originality, nor repress its sublime inspirations. The eagle mounts upward by the same physical laws as the humble sparrow, but rises on a more vigorous wing, takes a loftier flight, and enjoys a broader field of vision.

The two measures, on which the archbishop chiefly relies for the remedy of existing evils, are the conferences, that is, meetings of the clergy at stated times, for the discussion of particular subjects of interest and importance to the welfare of religion; and the reëstablishment, on a new basis, of the Faculty of Theology. The first of these we shall pass over, and proceed to speak of the New Faculty of Theology.

This is an object which the archbishop regards with the most lively solicitude. The knowledge acquired in the seminaries, he says, is not sufficient to authorize the priest to dis

pense with severe study during the exercise of his ministry. Experience but too clearly proves that with whatever success he commence his career, he may remain for the rest of his life undistinguished, or even fall below mediocrity, if he deliver himself over to idleness, or is destitute of the knowledge which is acquired by choice reading, united with careful meditation. In the acquisition of this knowledge the conferences will be a great help. But a more extended course of Theological study is indispensable, and to promote this, the Faculty of Theology is established on a new and improved footing.

The archbishop takes a rapid glance at the character of the ecclesiastical instruction given during the last forty years. During that term, he says, the Lectures from the chairs of the Faculty have been useless; and the reason is given. He compares them with the instruction given in the seminaries or religious houses.

From the time of the Concordat in 1801, it appears that the exercises in the seminaries have been conducted with a good deal of freedom, and in a familiar form. The old masters of conference permitted questions to be asked, as do the professors now, sometimes asking them themselves. They were not scrupulous to avoid repetition when they thought it would be useful, and they neglected no means of making themselves fully understood. Confining themselves generally to the scholastic method, they yet allowed themselves to depart from it at times, because the subject required developments, illustrations, and applications to which it was not adapted.

This method was entirely successful, because the divinity students found it useful. They were interested in it; they prepared themselves for the exercise; they listened; they took a summary of the argument. But this method could not be pursued by the public chair. The consequence was the Lectures were completely useless. The pupils had not time to prepare themselves for the two courses, and listen with advantage; and as that of the seminaries was better adapted to their wants, they of course neglected the other. The élèves of the numerous seminaries of Paris went every day and occupied the class seats with scrupulous assiduity, but it was with the determination not to listen to the learned Lectures which were given. These circumstances explain why the distinguished men, who have composed the Faculty of Theology since 1808, have been no more successful than their predecessors.

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The instructions of the new Faculty are to take a different form. A more free method is to be adopted, but still there is to be method, and very rigid method. In every discussion the question must be distinctly stated, there must be a plan marked out, the divisions must be natural, the connection of ideas rigorous, and the laws of sound reasoning must be strictly adhered to. The proofs to be developed will be chiefly of a historical character, since the Catholic religion is founded essentially on facts. They who profess to disregard tradition still attribute as much importance as others to facts. How is it at the present day? Deists, naturalists, and others, who reject the authority of tradition, cease not to recur to it; they interrogate all oriental literatures, theogonies, cosmogonies, the philosophical and theological books of all countries, where the primitive inhabitants of the globe fixed their habitations. Wherefore a zeal so contrary to their principles? Because their principles are contrary to the nature of man, and respect for facts is conformable with it. The teaching of the Faculty will be dogmatical as well as historical. Still, in all, light will be sought in the experience of the past. The rise and progress of opinions, and the reasons of them, will be searched out; and carefully examined, for a doctrine, as also a rule of duty, is best understood by being traced back to its source.

It will be the duty of the Professor of Hebrew, after having duly explained the language of the Old Testament, so necessary to the right understanding of the Scriptures, to direct his attention to the erroneous or too hardy interpretations which come from over the Rhine, which are not so much the fruit of a profound knowledge of language, as the result of the influence exercised over the philology of that country by an audacious rationalism.

The professor of Sacred Literature will adopt the free method pursued in the seminaries, already described. He will treat, among other things, of the authority, integrity, and divinity of the sacred books, having due reference to the doubts and objections of the Deists of the latter part of the 18th century, and of the German naturalists. He will find some knowledge of natural science and of chronology necessary, as also a degree of familiarity with the manners, laws, arts, and theology of the Pagans, and with the annals of ancient nations, whose history so often blends with that of the Hebrews. Relieved by the Hebrew professor from the task of grammatical criticism, and

by the professor of pulpit eloquence from examining the use which the Fathers made of the Scriptures, and that which the Christian orator should make of them, the Professor of Sacred Literature will nevertheless explain the different senses of the inspired books, and offer remarks on their style, and especially their poetry, viewed in reference to a literary standard.

The Professor of Ecclesiastical History has a grand career before him. Limiting himself to the reëstablishment of numerous facts which have been perverted or misrepresented, he will perform a work of immense importance. There is needed a preservative against the influence of a multitude of works, in which Christianity, and the spirit and character of the church are misapprehended or calumniated. If a good professor cannot himself bring a remedy to the evil, he may prepare the way for its correction by forming future historians well-informed on all the facts of religion. What darkness has been spread over the science of history, which has equally enveloped that of religion. At the present day more than ever the former is made use of, if not to render the other odious, at least to confound it with institutions purely human, or sometimes with such as are false and pernicious.

In placing facts in their true light, in tracing the effects of ambition, intolerance, and other vices, the professor will remark what in the transactions, which are objected to us, is censurable, but is to be ascribed to the passions of men, or the misfortune of the times; what is just, but has been unjustly condemned by irreligious prejudices; and what contains in itself a blended mass of good and evil, religion and error.

He will not confine himself to partial refutations. He will expose the radical vice of those systems in which all sorts of facts are constrained to lie, to establish some puerile or senseless paradox, which is sufficient nevertheless to give celebrity to its inventors. If, for example, one of them is pleased to find in a nation the principle of immobility, permanency, and identity, he will find priests, magistrates, people, tenacious, obstinate, and opinionated, in all their acts. Unfortunately for the author this people will be one which is remarkably yielding, which has never been reproached with the fault ascribed to it by the historian. He does not acknowledge a revelation. Hence the idea of the Divinity, found among the ancient Gauls, must have been a conquest of the human intellect. He maintains, with the German visionary Herder, that from the worship of material objects

man rose to a deification of the agents of nature; and at a later period, to that of the general laws which regulate its phenomena. History tells quite a different story; for it shows us that these errors are the consequence of forgetfulness of God, the Creator, Preserver, and Judge of men, and Lord of the Universe. But where would be the glory of a historian, if he were found in harmony with the most ancient and authentic annals of the race?

The Professor of Ecclesiastical History will labor to render such glory ephemeral, and by monuments not to be contradicted, will prove the error. He will demonstrate the thing is easy- that not only the obscure historians of our epoch, but the most celebrated, must, before the examination of monuments, be read with distrust, because they advance the most contradictory assertions on the same facts, and seem to be animated by a foolish emulation to color, distort, and invert the past for the benefit of their sympathies, their antipathies, and their reveries. To make truth triumph by the same means employed of late to establish error, will be the labor at once honorable and useful of the professor of ecclesiastical history.

The Professor of Pulpit Eloquence, after illustrating the rules of the art, will speak of the more eloquent of the Fathers, and their successful or feeble imitators. He will remark upon their simplicity of expression, their style abounding in images and similitudes, and tinctured with a scriptural phraseology. He will comment on their eloquent passages, and the circumstances which inspired them, not forgetting, however, to take notice of their ordinury manner, when in their instructions and homilies they address artisans and laborers.

After the Fathers came preachers, who were too much enslaved to the scholastic method, or who were in other respects faulty. A criticism on this kind of preaching will not be without its interest and utility. It will be sufficient to institute a comparison between preachers of this kind and their successors, who, retaining only so much of this dry method as was necessary to regularity of plan, filled up their discourse with solid and just thought, altogether scriptural in its general tone and coloring, and expressed with dignity, with simplicity, and with inimitable clearness. Such were the Bossuets, the Bourdaloues, and the Massillons. The professor will note their feeble and frigid copyists. These have been succeeded by a different race animated with a pure zeal others ranking in the class of in

some