had offended by refusing to engage in commerce, he was adopted by an uncle, who left him to himself with the use of a good library. His unguided reading was of the most desultory kind, until he was fifteen, when, resolving to pursue a regular course of study, he took up his abode with his brother in a retired house near Dinan, where, besides amassing an immense amount of classical and general erudition, he mastered the Fathers and historians of the Church. He took the tonsure in 1811, and entered the little seminary of Saint-Malo, founded by his brother, but made no further step in the ecclesiastical profession till 1815, when he was ordained priest by the Bishop of Rennes, having first written to his sister that it most assuredly was not his taste that he indulged in deciding for it. A tract, in which he had assailed Napoleon at the beginning of 1814, compelled him to take refuge in England during the Hundred Days, and for some time after his return and settlement in Paris he was glad to earn his livelihood as an assistant tutor to the Abbé Carron in a school. One fine morning he awoke and found himself famous, or (to use his own words) he found himself invested with the power of BosThe first volume of his Essai sur l'Indifférence en Matière de Religion' burst upon the religious world like a thunderclap, and gave him European celebrity as much by the opposition it excited as by the admiration it called forth. The second (1820) and the two concluding volumes (1824) were equally successful, and on his first visit to Rome, although half of the conclave were against him, the Pope, Leo XII., declared him the last Father of the Church,' offered him a cardinal's hat, and hung up his picture amongst

suet.

the chosen saints in his cabinet.

'Le Père Lacordaire,' by Montalembert, is rather a biographical essay, composed as a vehicle for personal reminiscences, than a biography. Left to discover as we best may when and where Lacordaire was born-he was born at Recey-sur-Ource, Côte-d'Or, the 12th March, 1802-we are told that no adventure, no stroke of fortune, no passion, occurred to trouble the course of his boy.

hood:

'Son of a village doctor, brought up by a pious mother, he had, like all the young people of his day, lost the faith at school, and had not recover

ed it either at the law school or the bar, in which he was enrolled for two years. To all outward seeming, nothing distinguished him from his contemporaries. He was a deist, as all the youth was then; he was, above all, liberal, like the whole of France, but without excess. He has said it again and again: no man or book was the instrument of his conversion. A sudden and secret flash of grace opened his eyes to the nothingness of irreligion. In a single day he became Christian, and the very next day from Christian he wished to be priest. Seminarist at almoner in 1828, college almoner in 1825, he Sulpice in 1824, ordained priest in 1827, convent seemed not to depart on any side from the ordinary course of things and men. thing singular about him but his liberalism. By seminarist, this almoner of nuns, insisted on rea then unheard-of phenomenon, this convert, this maining liberal as in the days when he was only student and advocate.

There was no

'He comprehended, then, in his youth and in his solitude, that of which no one around him seemed to have a glimpse: first that the Church, after having given liberty to the modern world, had the right and the imperious obligation to invoke it in her turn; secondly, that she could no part in the common patrimony of the new world. more invoke it as a privilege, but only as her

'M. de la Mennais, then the most celebrated and the most venerated of the French priests, starting from the opposite pole, had arrived at the same conclusion. It is that which had all of a sudden brought him into proximity with the obscure almoner of the Collége Henri IV. It was upon this ground that they both planted the ban

ner of the "Avenir."

The first number of the 'Avenir' appeared on October 15, 1830. The Church was then at a low ebb in France it was

not popular with the people, and it was kept in strict subordination to the State. All ecclesiastical dignitaries were appointed by the government. The priests could hardly venture into the streets in the dress of their order for fear of insult, and when the cholera was raging in Paris they had to be smuggled into the hospitals, dressed as laymen, to administer the last Sacraments when required. Then, again, they were practically excluded from any interference in the national education, which was under the control of the University and the Minister of Public Instruction. No school could be opened without a licence, and no licence was given for denominational schools, or for any distinct religious teaching, except in the seminaries, in which none but youths intended for the ecclesiastical calling were received. In fact, the only accessible education for the laity at large was the mixed or 'godless' system which the Roman Catholic hierarchy of Ireland have so indignantly repudiated; with the aggravation, consti

tuting a real grievance, in France, that those who were dissatisfied with it were not permitted to provide a substitute at their own expense.

The triumvirate, therefore, had plenty of useful work cut out for them which they might have performed without hurrying into extremes; without flying in the face of lawful authority on the one hand, or venturing to the utmost verge of intolerance on the other. In most of their grand efforts they contrived to do both. We take, by way of specimen, the first article by Lacordaire which is quoted with commendation by his young admirer. The subject was the refusal of a priest to bury a man who had died without calling in the aid of religion, and the forcible introduction of his remains into a church by the sous-préfet. The form adopted was an apostrophe to the priesthood:

'One of your brethren has refused to a man who died out of your communion the Christian service for the dead. Your brother has done well: he has acted as a free man, as a priest of the Lord, determined to keep his lips pure from servile benedictions. Woe to him who blesses against conscience, who speaks of God with a venal heart! Woe to the priest who murmurs lies at the edge of a coffin! who conducts souls to the judgment of God through fear of the living or for a vile fee! Your brother has done well. Are we the sextons of the human race? Have we made a pact with them to flatter their remains more wretched than the courtiers to whom the death of the prince gives the right of treating him as he deserved by his life. Your brother has done well; but this shadow of a proconsul believed that so much independence was not becoming in a citizen so vile as a Catholic priest. . . . . The domicile of the citizen cannot be violated without the intervention of justice. Justice has not been so much as summoned to say to religion, "Veil thy face a moment before my sword."'

Precisely the same appeal might be made and the same range of sympathies invoked, should sepulture in a church or churchyard be denied (as it frequently has been) to those who, like players, died in an unhallowed vocation, or, like many of the greatest men in all domains of genius, departed this life without due preparation by a priest. The Archbishop of Paris did well who sought to deny sepulture in holy ground to Molière; the Curé of Saint-Sulpice did well who denied it to Adrienne Lecouvreur; the Dean of Westminster did well who excluded the bust of Byron from Westminster Abbey; and, in spite of the

church which he erected to God, Voltaire should have been buried like a dog.*

Sir George Beaumont used to tell a story of his asking the Pope to authorize a Protestant burial-place at Rome; and the reply of the Holy Father, that he could not bless a locality for such a purpose, but had no objection to curse one, if, in default of consecrated ground, the heretics were con tent to repose in desecrated. The editors of the 'Avenir' appear to have been moved by the same spirit as this Pope: only they were serious and his Holiness was laughing in his sleeve.

It was the favorite theory of Lacordaire that great causes were to be fought out, as in ancient Rome and England, in legal proceedings before the tribunals in the full light of publicity: he was fond of reverting to his old profession of advocacy in which he shone, and he was never better pleased than when brought into open conflict with the procureur du roi. The Government were ready enough to give him the opportunities he sought, and on the 31st January, 1831, he appeared with de la Mennais before the Criminal Court to answer for two articles bitterly assailing the King for exercising the constitutional right of nominating bishops. He made a spirited defence, and they were both acquitted.

"The decision was not given till midnight," says Montalembert. "A numerous crowd surrounded and applauded the victors of the day. When it had dispersed, we returned together alone, in the darkness, along the quays. When we reached his threshold I hailed in him the orator of the future. He was neither intoxicated nor overwhelmed by his triumph. I saw that for him the little vanities of success were less than nothing, mere dust of the darkness. But I saw him at the same time eager to spread the contagion of courage and self-devotion, and charmed by those evidences of mutual faith and disinterested tenderness which shine in young and Christian hearts

with a glory purer and more delightful than all

"

victories."

which publicly announced that, attendu que la liberté se prend et ne se donne pas, three of their members would open a school, free and gratuitous, at Paris, by way of testing the right. The school was opened on the 7th May, 1831, after due notice to the prefect of police, by three members of the society, Lacordaire, M. de Coux, and Montalembert, who succinctly relates what followed :

'The Abbé Lacordaire delivered a short and energetic inaugurative discourse. We formed each a class for twenty children. The next day a commissary came to summon us to decamp. He first addressed the children: "In the name of the law I summon you to depart." Lacordaire immediately rejoined: "In the name of your parents, whose authority I have, I order you to remain." The children cried out unanimously: "We will remain." Whereupon the police turned out pupils and masters, with the exception of Lacordaire, who protested that the school-room hired by him was his domicile, and that he would pass the night in it, unless he was dragged out by force. "Leave me," he said to us, seating himself on a mattress he had brought there, I remain here alone with the law and my right." He did not give way till the police laid hands upon him; after which the seals were affixed and a prosecution was forthwith commenced against the schoolmasters.'

Soon after the commencement of the proceedings, his father died: he succeeded to the peerage with its privileges, and the trial consequently took place before the Chamber of Peers on the 19th September, 1831, when, after a touching allusion to his great bereavement and an exposition

of the reasons which induced him to claim the judgment of his peers, he said :—

"It is sufficiently well known that the career on which I have entered is not of a nature to sa

tisfy an ambition which seeks political honors and places. The powers of the present age, both in government and in opposition, are, by the grace of Heaven, equally hostile to Catholics. There is another ambition not less devouring, perhaps not less culpable, which aspires to reputation, and which is content to buy that at any price: that, too, I dis

avow like the other. No one can be more conscious than I am of the disadvantages with which a precocious publicity surrounds youth, and none can fear them more. But there is still in the world something which is called faith-it is not dead in all minds; it is to this that I have early given my heart and my life. My life-a man's life-is always, and especially to-day, a poor thing enough; but this poor thing consecrated to a great and holy cause may grow with it; and when a man has made to such a cause the sacrifice of his future, I believe that he ought to shrink from none of its consequences, none of its dangers.

"It is in the strength of this conviction that I appear to-day for the first time in an assembly of men. I know too well that at my age one has neither antecedents nor experience; but at my

age, as at every other, one has duties and hopes. I have determined, for my part, to be faithful to both."'

The sentence was a fine of a hundred francs.

He thus, on the most solemn occasion of his life, deliberately took his stand upon the principles to which he persistently adhered to his dying day; and the nobility of thought, the moral courage, the spirit of self-sacrifice which actuated him, are beyond cavil or dispute, whatever may be thought of the prudence or wisdom of his course. He here states that the powers of the present age, both in government and in opposition, were, by the grace of Heaven, equally hostile to Catholicism. Twelve years later, he stated that the press, the public, the learned bodies, the councils of state, were against him on the same subject, in the proportion of ninety-nine to a hundred. How did this come to pass in a Catholic country? Or in what sense are such expressions to be understood? What he meant was, that the vast majority of Catholics were opposed to his description of Catholicism that they agreed with Bossuet rather than with de Maistre or de la Mennais: that they were Gallican, not Ultramontane, and were instinctively swayed by the apprehension so sensitively alive in England at this hour; namely, that what his beau idéal of a Church meant by liberty was, that she herself should be left free as air, whilst all other freedom of thought or action should be held dependent on her will. When I mention religion,' said Thwackum, I mean the Christian religion; and not only the Christian religion, but the Protestant religion; and not only the Protestant religion, but the Church of England.' Montalembert went still further, for he identified religion and Christianity with the small section of the Catholic Church which then agreed with him.

No wonder, therefore, that more lukewarm or (as we should say) more reasonable Catholics stood aloof.

He became a little more practical when he had to legislate upon the same subject, but in these Avenir days he and his clique exulted in their unpopularity. They longed to be persecuted, to be (metaphorically) stoned like St. Stephen or imprisoned like St. Paul. Then the agitation and excitement of the expeditions undertaken for the propagation of their principles, far more

any revenue or mundane advantages at its hands.

Alluding to the prefect who figured in the burial case, Lacordaire told the priests, 'You would have made him turn pale if, with your dishonored God, staff in hand and hat on head, you had carried Him to some hut built with planks of fir, vowing never to expose Him a second time to the insults of the temples of the State.' This, Montalembert remarks, was tantamount to telling the clergy bluntly that they must renounce the budget of worship, 'sole remaining wreck of their ancient and legitimate patrimony, sole guarantee of their material existence, renounce even the churches of which the State assumed to be the proprietor, to enter in full possession of the invincible forces and inexhaustible resources of modern liberty.' Language of the same tendency has recently been used by a section of the Anglican Church, because they could not force their own peculiar views upon the rest.

Nor did 'L'Avenir' stop here. It contended that no good or sound institution, sacred or profane, had anything to fear from the utmost freedom of inquiry, much less an institution like the Holy See, founded on the eternal rock of truth:

'Moreover, it is not true in any sense that the evil is stronger than the good, and that the truth fights on earth with arms the inequality of which requires to be repaired by the aid of absolute power. If it were so, the truth would be very badly off, for absolute power has never worked but for itself. Is it by the aid of absolute power that Christianity was founded? Is it by the aid of absolute power that the heresies of the Lower Empire have been surmounted? Is it by the aid of absolute power that the Arians of the West were converted? Is it by the aid of absolute power that the philosophy of the eighteenth century has crumbled into dust? Persecuted truth has triumphed everywhere over protected and powerful error. Such is history. And now we are told that, if truth is reduced to combat error with its own weapons, in the open light of day, all is lost.'

If the Pope and his advisers had been equally confident that the Church of Rome owed no more to absolute power than the primitive Church of Christ, or would rise the higher if cut free from its temporalities, they would have wished nothing better than the support of an organ like L'Avenir.' But they would have been unaccountably wanting in the sagacity for which Lord Macaulay gives them credit, had they not penetrated to the fallacy of such

arguments at a glance and drawn a widely different moral from history. They could not shut their eyes to the fact that spiritual supremacy attained its loftiest pitch in the Dark Ages, and has everywhere declined in proportion to the spread of knowledge. If it owes nothing to absolutism, does it owe anything to democracy? As well say at once that it has gained by the Reformation. The Pope Leo X., who patronised literature and the arts, simply prepared the way for Luther. Intelligent travellers have declared that in travelling through Central Germany or Switzerland, looking merely to the external aspect of the country and the people, they could tell whether any given principality, canton, or district, was Catholic or Protestant. There was no mistaking the signs of industry, enterprise, and intellectual life in the one nor the dearth of them in the other. Are Spain, Portugal, Naples, Ireland, held in subjection to Rome by liberty? Or is it possible to contend that the Catholics have been worsted in Great Britain and Northern Europe because the fair field of free discussion has been denied to them? What are the chances that a free Church in a free people (the device of L'Avenir') would necessarily remain the Catholic Church? Is the habit of passive obedience, or the habit of inquiry, best adapted to prepare the human mind for the doctrine of Infallibility?

Lacordaire and de la Mennais arrived at Rome on the last day of 1831. They were speedily rejoined by Montalembert, who had made a short stay at Florence. From our arrival,' he says, 'the reserve with which we were everywhere received made it clear that we should not obtain the desired response.

6

After having re

quired of us an explanatory memoir, which was drawn up by Lacordaire, they left us three months without a word. The Cardinal Pacca wrote M. de la Mennais that the Pope, whilst doing justice to his services and his good intentions, had been displeased at seeing us stir up controversies and opinions to say the least dangerous: that, however, he would have our doctrines examined, and that, as this examination might be long, we might return to our own country. The Pope afterwards consented to receive us: he treated us with the familiar kindness which was natural to him: he made us not the semblance of a reproach, but neither did he make the slight