times, when the world wearies him, and his pride ebbs for the hour and lets him feel the aching void in his own heart, he remembers his mother's teaching, and the Faith of his first years:

The tenderness which drenches the lone mind,
Insensibly as dew distilled at night,
Made him, of late, cast many a look behind
Of fondness towards a Creed abandoned quite.
He felt his hands clasped by a parent kind
In infant prayer; he saw each dear old rite ;
He heard the hymns of childhood, and he breathed
The scent of flowers, with sacred incense wreathed.

For not in scorn, but he, bowed down and blenched,
Had passed out from the Temple. Ere he went,
With secret tears the altar-steps he drenched,

Aware he sped to utter banishment.

From home, hearth, Heaven, reluctant heart he wrenched,
The stern exiler of his past content;

Bidding adieu to Faiths which, well he knew,

Cease not to comfort, ceasing to be true.

He will ever revere the ancient Faith, remembering its white-robed virgins and its army of saints, the wise and the holy of the earth. He remembers, too, that "Rome's hoary Creed" was the great trunk from which sects but branched off and died. But for him it is obsolete. He sees none truer, fitter, but it is all gone. The world has passed it long ago-a world "where Christ's meek banner longwhile hath been furled." One day he ascends the Esquiline Hill, and with the shrine of Our Lady on one hand, and ruins of pagan Rome on the other, pours out the lament of his despair:

"Mankind! Faith! Future!" mournfully he cried,
Folding the letter; "Who shall build new faith
Mid ruins such as these! The Gods have died,
The beautiful grand Gods, and but their wraith
Haunts the forsaken spots they sanctified.
Empire, Religion, Truth-all perisheth.
Cæsar hath gone, and Christ seems following fast;
Only our wants and weak deceptions last."

He sees people coming out of the Church:

Happier that they before the Babe who cried
In Bethlehem had laid life's heavy pack;
Monk, peasant, mendicant, the halt, the hale,
But all-sad burthened with some human tale.

"I, too, must go," he murmured; "Unlike those
Who have passed onwards, I can nowhere cast
The burden of my weakness and my woes,

Which I, unhelped, must carry to the last.”

What a wail of long-enduring anguish is breathed out in those words. He has gone out from God. He is too proud to turn back from his path of self-reliance, and the wilderness stretches before him. All is doubt. He has not one single inch of reposeful certainty on which to rest and gather strength. But the worst of all is that his misery is self-inflicted, and still grace wages the long war. The spirit will not tolerate within its immortal self the belief that it can perish; and there is no peace. We can conceive no depth of sorrow which calls so loudly for pity as his. Imagine a man of talent, great aspirations, and youthful vigour who is suddenly paralyzed and has to wear out his long life in living death. His state is not so worthy of compassion as that of the soul that in an hour of rash pride and self-confidence takes its own life, and, still existing, dwells in what is but death. It can, but will not, return to light and life. knows but half its own wretchedness, and the everlasting spirit is every day stifling the yearning of its true self for the spiritual and eternal. We cannot imagine the world without God's Revelation and His Church. Scepticism is a man's own doing if he abandons that Church as Godfrid did. We were not created to endure the torments-often felt, slowly, silently, trampled on and unrecognized by men themselvesof that hell on earth through which the sceptic passes before he is lost in the unfathomable abyss of unbelief, where there is no doubt, no question, but a delusive peace, until the awful advent of eternity.

It

It is no wonder that Godfrid looks for his heaven to human love, "beacon and bourne of us wayfaring ones." In the language of the author there is nothing else which man is sure of having through the ages to solace his existence. Whether the day of peace, liberty, light, that he looks for, dawns, or whether the world remains in so-called darkness; whether nations fall or creeds die out, love will stand as of old; therefore he clings in his shipwreck to this one plank of happiness, and deifies that which is but a gift of Him whom the Evangelist tells us is Himself Love, Caritas. But even human love, let it be the greatest, strongest, purest that ever was, leaves something wanting yet. Or even if it seems to satisfy the heart entirely, it is but for a time, and who shall sustain us when the inevitable end comes, and either we are helplessly drifting away from those we love alone into the

unknown future, or when they precede us, and death has snatched from our arms all that we cherished and fondly believed to be imperishable. No, though love may be our beacon, as it has been to many, it can never be our bourne ; and however blessed it may be, the shadow of coming grief lies deepening upon it, if we have closed our eyes to the gloom of Calvary and the glory of the Resurrection.

Godfrid's nature is generous; his instincts are those of the old days of chivalry. In his eyes the wealthy at home possess stagnant worthless lives when they exist only for their own ease and enjoyment. He is fired with the desire of taking some active part in the world. Therefore, when his own vision of happiness has vanished, he throws himself heart and soul into the cause of United Italy, but without wishing to raise his hand against the altar before which he once knelt. He professes to seek, not to destroy the Tiara, but to strike down "one story of the too proud edifice." He regards the authority of the throne as sacred, and his quasi-conservative views on this point ought to have kept him and many of similar opinions out of the Garibaldian ranks. Despite his impartial professions, the doctrine he really holds is that the throne of Italy is the one to be upheld on the old principle of Might is Right; and as for the Papal throne, with its centuries of venerable age and its immemorial traditions, the fact that it belongs to a priestly monarchy makes it at once an exception, and sets it outside the bounds of fairness in words and justice in deeds.

To the cause he espouses he brings no half-hearted devotion. His own self is blotted out at need in the warm impulse of his generosity. He is stubborn, but at the same time impressionable; brave, but full of thoughtful tenderness. There is nothing small in Godfrid; every quality or power he has is great. But there is in him nothing that an estimable Pagan might not have possessed unless it be his esteem for the Christian religion; and doubtless there were Pagans who had that too. We look in vain for supernatural virtue, for one trace of the humble spirit that is most exalted when it stoops lowest, for the spirit of prayer, the spirit of worship. This large heart, this great mind can best be likened to a rich tract of country, which might have produced a glorious harvest that would excite joyful admiration, and give wealth out of its fruitfulness, but which the owner in culpable neglect has left to itself, till its luxuriance, though beautiful to the sight of the passer-by, is in reality as fruitless as the sea, and in the harvester's eyes as barren as the desert.

It is this perversion by man of the best gifts of God that

gives the "Human Tragedy" its scope, and affords the author a foundation for his plan. Why should Love, Religion, Country, Mankind, be called Protagonists, if it be not because man makes them such in the perversity of his fallen nature? What is the first, whether it be that love round which a halo is thrown from Heaven itself by the nuptial benediction, or the father's, brother's love, the mother's more than earthly tenderness, the strong fealty of the friend; what is it all but a gift for our happiness and well-being sent from Him who bade us love one another even as He loved us, who poured out His life like water for our sake? Again, what is Country, patriotism, but one of the noblest emotions of which we are capable? It raises the mind above itself and its own small interests; it enlarges our range of vision, and gives men a common cause in which they may unite. Still wider the mind is opened when it takes mankind into its large embrace; and Religion, that has blessed the affections of home, and fostered our love of country, comes here as the greatest and first of all the four to make our hearts more tender and sympathetic in their human brotherhood. Who shall say that Religion, the sunshine and life of the soul, was not to be aided by the other three in working out man's happiness in the designs of God? And here, whether they affect individuals or whole peoples, these powers do not make up the human tragedy or fill life with storms and blighted hope and woe. They do not evolve the tale of man's misery, unless he himself misuses them and bends them to his own false views and selfish ends. Love, in the first Act, is only the effect of weak impulse on undisciplined hearts. It is a different thing from the love of Godfrid and Olympia, which of itself would never have led to a struggle. Religion does not become a Protagonist till doubt usurps its rights; and it would have been a truer inspiration to make scepticism the struggler with love, that blighted two lives in the second part. The cause of Country comes before us upheld by the Garibaldians, who were fighting for a false idea, wronging their own nation and obstinately contending for States where the very people begged to take up arms against them, and vindicate their right to peace and legitimate rule. Lastly, the cause of the Commune of Paris was as far from being the cause of mankind as that bloodthirsty and ambitious rabble was from representing the needs or desires of the human race. So it is that, from the first incident to the last, it is not the four powers sanctified by Heaven that evolve the "Human Tragedy"; but the Protagonists are rather the craving of the flesh, the self-inflicted blindness of the intellect, zeal without guidance, and revolt

against authority. These are the four that are every day assailing home, country, and religion, and that come one by one upon the scene of the story to struggle with truth and goodness, to destroy peace, and to embitter life.

ART. VII.-A FEW MORE WORDS ON FESSLER.

Letters to the TABLET on Mgr. Fessler's Treatise: by "H. I. D. R.”

BY

Y way of introduction to the ensuing correspondence, one or two facts must be recalled to the memory of our readers.

Bishop Fessler, in his treatise on infallibility, says that "many theologians think it may be assumed as doubtful" whether the Syllabus was issued ex cathedrâ, "until some fresh declaration is made on the subject by the Holy See " (English Translation, p. 92, 3).

The French and afterwards the English translators of his treatise stated, on the authority of an anonymous correspondent in the "Germania," that this treatise had received very especial sanction at Rome.

The Pope had directed a translation of it to be made into Italian, and instructed a Commission of learned theologians of different nationalities to examine it and report on it. Both of these commands were put into execution without delay. The Pope made himself thoroughly acquainted with the contents of Bishop Fessler's work; and as his own judgment of it fully corresponded with the judgment of the Commission, he wrote a letter with his own hand to the Bishop of St. Polten, praising him for this highly valuable work, and begging him to persevere in the laborious task he had undertaken of correcting the erroneous opinions which had been spread abroad in various directions ("Introduction," p. ix.).

When we wrote on the treatise in April, 1875, the notion had not occurred to us that a statement, confidently put forth with so much particularity of detail, could be unfounded. Accordingly, in a discussion on the "Unam sanctam " (p. 491), we wrote as follows: "Considering that Mgr. Fessler's treatise on infallibility has been passed by a committee of theologians and complimented by the Holy Father-we may not suppose that any position, prominently advocated in his volume, violates any existing Catholic obligation." And in