tempt or scandalize a believing child, has only the appalling image of the immortal worm and the everlasting fire. Si quis scandalizaverit unum ex pusillis istis qui in me credunt, expedit ei ut suspendatur mola asinaria in collo ejus et demergatur in profundum maris. Can we wonder that ineffable goodness should pronounce such words? But let us suppose the tempter at his work. What were he best to say? The Church had failed for eight hundred years and more? or shall he say those saints whose names you bear were false? Under what title shall he woo for heresy, that it may seem pleasing to their tender years? Well might a later poet say, that unconsciously the child aims stern lightnings when he resists such cavils against the Church of our Lord, and what his saints have judged. "God gives the frail and feeble tongue

A doom to speak on sin and wrong."*

Their words may be as nothing, yet the unshaped use of them can move the hearers to collection, and accomplish the marvel which the Church commemorates on the day of Holy Innocents, exclaiming, Ex ore infantium, Deus, et lactentium perfecisti laudem, propter inimicos tuos. What think you would be the answer of the child to each proud negation? to each fierce Tolle of the crowd? Truly its astonishment and sorrow would be a sufficient refutation, a sufficient resistance perhaps; for as poets say,

"truth its radiant stamp

Has fix'd, as an invulnerable charm

Upon our children's brow, dark falsehood to disarm."

Or, as Shakspeare expresses it, "The silence often of pure innocence persuades, when speaking fails.”

The Fathers of the Order of Mercy remark in their great history, that S. Peter Nolasco, when a boy, held the heretics of that age in horror. Whenever he saw one at the table of the Count of Toulouse, he left it immediately, regardless of all remonstrances.† Truth was before him in all its loveliness. Hear how a modern poet describes a Catholic child in an unhappy land, where he could speak of the Catholic religion as fallen:

"Early in years, and yet more infantine
In figure, she had something of sublime
In eyes which sadly shone, as seraphs shine:
All youth-but with an aspect beyond time;
Radiant and grave, as pitying man's decline;
Mournful-but mournful of another's crime,

* Lyra Inn.

+ Hist. de l'Ordre de la Mercy, 86.

She look'd as if she sat by Eden's door,

And grieved for those who could return no more.
She was a Catholic too, sincere, austere
As far as her own gentle heart allow'd,
And deem'd that fallen worship far more dear
Perhaps because 'twas fallen; her sires were proud
Of deeds, and days when they had fill'd the ear
Of nations, and had never bent or bow'd
To novel power; and, as she was the last,
She held their old faith and old feelings fast.
She gazed upon a world she scarcely knew,
As seeking not to know it; silent, lone,
As grows a flower, thus quietly she grew,
And kept her heart serene within its zone.
There was awe in the homage which she drew ;
Her spirit seem'd as seated on a throne

Apart from the surrounding world, and strong

In its own strength-most strange in one so young!"

To those of the household of faith the strangeness disappears; for clear and short they know must be the way to truth before the steps of those whom Truth itself in an especial manner loves. While yet He was on earth, to show how dear was this first sweet age to our Redeemer,

"Whose arms eternal are young children's home,"†

little need be said; nor to cite instances of his gracious familiarity with it, are we driven to borrow ideal images, as from the book ascribed in early days to St. Thomas, in which our Lord is represented at play with other children, and already exposed to reprehension from some Jews, who complained of profanation on the ground of his amusing playmates on the sabbath day. Doubtless, in a direct manner the great God communicates Himself often to the mind of children, and in secret visions to their unconscious thoughts discloses home at their first steps towards it :

Youth, says the proverb, has no truth;
But that is a peevish error:

Ingenuous Youth, he dwells with Truth,

And they travel the same path together.

Youth, in the joyful home of Truth,

Must aye and for ever abide ;

And merrily Truth will go forth with Youth,
And march with him, side by side!" +

But it is through the Church that the ordinary guidance is supplied, and here we may well pause to admire and adore. "I came to the place of my birth," says an Arabic poet, "and De la Motte Fouqué.

* Byron.

+ Lyra In.

cried, The friends of my youth, where are they? And an echo answered, Where are they?" There were sweeter echoes for the Christian at his return. The Church was there; the Church which had blessed and sanctified the pure smiles of his infant playfulness; which had watched his first deep glance of awe, and won his steadfast eye by showing him a path of light, a glorious way to guide his soul on high. St. Germain of Auxerre, we read, proceeded to the country of Autun, which he had never revisited since the time of his early youth, and he traversed it in all directions, seeking to recall the emotions which he had felt there when a boy, and pleased without regrets at their remembrances.

To show with what reason the opening mind of children might recognize the goodness of their Creator in the care which the Catholic Church had ever taken to preserve them from the perils and evils of all kinds to which the ancient world and the greatest of its philosophers had left them exposed, is a task that has occupied many authors. The hollow brazen image of Moloch at Tophet, in the valley of Hinnom, on which the Canaanites offered a child in honour of their infamous idol; the temple of Juno on the rock near Hierapolis, where parents destroyed their children by precipitating them in sacks from the summit, in honour of the goddess; the mountain of Abn-Dalama, near Mecca, where the Arabs used to bury alive their female children; Mount Taygetus, at the base of which the Spartans exposed their weak or deformed children to perish in the caverns; the statue of Saturn at Carthage, in honour of which at one time two hundred children were burned alive; the osier statues, which used to receive to the same horrible death the children of the pagan Germans, who used also to expose them the Velabrum, near Mount Aventine, the mouth of the cloaca maxima of Tarquin, where every night heaps of children used to be thrown to perish, some being caught up by sorcerers for their rites, and others by the mendicants, whom Seneca coolly describes carrying them away to their obscure dwellings, where, by mutilation or dislocation of their limbs, they used to render them objects of horror, to excite commiseration, and derive profit from their deplorable appearance; the laws of the twelve tables, which even required that such infants as were weak or deformed should be put to death; the doctrines of the philosophers, who with Plato himself all commanded or authorized infanticide;-then descending to times posterior to the great deliverance, and visiting the various nations not yet regenerated by the Gospel,-the custom of the American tribe, which sanctioned the strangling of children by their fathers;

* Seneca, Controv. lib. v. 33.

;

the sacrifice of their first-born to the sun; the torture and immolation of children for the sake of a good harvest; the use of their blood and particles of their flesh as manure to improve the soil, as in the province of Madras; the continued value attached to their blood by the professors of magic, as in the pagan days of Rome, where the magicians used to repair to Mount Esquiline to collect the exposed children for the sake of composing with their blood draughts and even baths; the murder of delicate or deformed children, according to the customs of Africa, of India, of the Oceana, of China; in fine, confining our view to the nations where heresy has weakened or destroyed the principles of the ancient Catholic civilization, the slow but no less sure destruction to which children are doomed in manufactories, and the numbers that are annually put to death since the suppression of the Catholic provisions against infanticide by the sophists who have legislated for other nations :-all these attest the extent of the material benefit conferred on children by the Redeemer, and consequently of the attractive force which should bind them in fidelity to his Church. Gaume has developed this theme with much erudition;* but sufficient details might be obtained by merely referring to what the stranger's late lamented friend, the venerable Bishop of Nancy, had collected when founding his institution of the holy childhood for the redemption of infants in China and other idolatrous countries. Local traditions and innumerable instances in confirmation of the universality of the evil might easily be added from the monuments of European history. The inhabitants of Arles, before the coming of St. Trophime, are said, in order to appease their gods, to have sacrificed annually, on the first of May, three children, who had been carefully nourished during a year by the governor of the city; and the altar that received their blood is still to be seen there. It was in the year 315 that the first Christian emperor, by a general edict, comprising Africa and Italy, prohibited the sale and exposition of children, and required the treasury to come to the assistance of such parents as were too poor to nourish their own children.

The Church did not rest there. Even in a late age we read of holy legates proceeding to Poland and to Prussia, charged by her to suppress the atrocious customs of the population, according to which numbers of female children, and those of weakly constitution, used to be put to death. But without leaving the most favoured countries, let us observe how the * Hist. de la Société Domestique, ou Influence du Christianisme sur la Famille.

+ Du Port, Hist. de l'Eglise d'Arles, 49.

Troplong, de l'Influence du Christianisme sur le Droit Civil des Romains, 274.

protective legislation of the Church, watching over the life and liberty of children, dates everywhere from the moment when she acquired civil power. The right of inflicting death taken from the parents; the right of inheritance and of closing its minority secured to the child; condemnation of the philosophers who advocated infanticide before and after birth; long years of public penance and perpetual imprisonment enacted against those who caused the death of children; death against those who stole them :-such were the results of the holy canons throughout the Roman empire. Then, after its dissolution, the codes of the converted barbarians pursue the same objects. The Salic, German, Anglo-Saxon, and other laws, evince the like solicitude. The celebrated trial of the Gueux de Vernon proves that death was the penalty for Bohemian mendicants who stole children, and mutilated them after the ancient manner.*

It would be curious to follow the legislation of the Church with a view to observe traces of her solicitude in watching over the interest, safety, health, and even recreations of children. One council decrees, that if a mother should leave her infant near the fire, and another person should spill boiling water on it, or cause its death, the mother was to do penance for her negligence, while the other person was to depart with impunity.+

Institutions of mercy soon arose to co-operate with this protective legislation, and provide for the safety and freedom of children. Babes that are commended strangely to some place where chance may nurse or end them, she takes up, and finds those who will nurture them as their own for the love of our Redeemer. The new privilege was beautifully expressed by Datheus, the priest of Milan, who in 787 erected a foundling hospital in that city, where he ordained that the children should be taught some trade, and that at the age of eight years "they should be emancipated from all servitude, and free to depart and dwell wherever they might choose."

"Sancte, memento, Deus, quia condidit iste Datheus
Hanc aulam miseris auxilio pueris."

Such was his simple and sublime epitaph.

The whole second book of the great work by Antonio de Guevara, the Spanish bishop, is occupied with instructing mothers, nurses, and governesses, and denouncing the abuses which endanger the health of infants, and the interests of the tender objects placed under their care. We might almost suppose that this holy and illustrious bishop had devoted his

* Gaume, Hist. de la Famille, p. ii. c. 13.

+ Concil. Tribur. c. 37, ap. Regin. Abb. Prum. De Eccles. Discip. lib. ii. 221.