the lessons of the professor and the political and social order under which his pupils are to live. The state of society, under the point of view of liberty, revealed by the ancient classics, as they will be understood in the schools, is in bold contrast to that which the student encounters the moment he goes forth from the university into the world. The study of the classics in Great Britain and the United States has almost invariably a conservative, and rarely an antichristian tendency; but on the Continent it has as invariably a revolutionary, and not unfrequently an infidel, tendency. It renders youth dissatisfied with the order of things they see established, plants in their minds the germs of revolt, and fills them at a very early age with the spirit of rebellion. Whence this difference?

The answer is not difficult. In Great Britain and the United States there is already established and enjoyed a political and social order far more favorable to liberty than that which is revealed by the ancient classics, and no Englishman or American, under the point of view of freedom, can really envy pagan Greece or Rome. He has already a larger liberty than the subjects of either ever possessed; and hence he is struck in the ancient classics only by their exquisite art, their unrivalled beauty, and their conservative principles. The case is entirely different in most Continen. tal states. The Continental student is most struck by the decided anti-monarchical tone of the classics, by their manifest republican spirit, and their lofty declamations against tyranny and in favor of liberty. These declamations seem to him strictly applicable to his own condition. He feels that monarchy is tyranny, that his princes are tyrants, usurpers, and oppressors, and he burns to be an Harmodius, an Aristogiton, or a Brutus. The fact is, that the classics are republican, and continental Europe is monarchical, and therefore the youth who are trained in them are imbued with principles hostile to the social order under which they live; and, when they become men, must, if they take an active part in society, either be rebels, revolutionists, or else must turn their backs on their childhood's political faith, stifle all their young dreams of liberty, and in most cases enter into public life by an act of insincerity, and become the cold, selfish, and unscrupulous instruments of power. If they remain aloof from public life, and retain their uni versity convictions, having no field for their talents and activity, they waste their lives in dilettantism, become friv.

olous, or mere devotees of pleasure. Finding, as they imagine, the church, in her exterior action, on the side of the monarchical order, they lose their respect for her, lose their piety and their faith, and become pure Epicureans, saying, "Come, let us eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die."

The cause of all this, after the corruption of human nature, must be looked for in the profound political and social revolution which has been going on in Europe during the last four hundred years. Greek and Roman antiquity, though republican, had little respect for individual freedom. It asserted the majesty of the state, and also its despotism. The city was supreme, and the citizen belonged entirely to her; and never did the political order actually established recognize a natural limit to the power of the state in the natural and indefeasible right of the individual, placed under the guaranty of the divine sovereignty. This unlimited authority of the state, when the republican order was exchanged for the royal or the imperial order, was transferred to the prince, who was in consequence held to be the living law, as expressed by Ulpian, the old Roman jurist, Quod placuit principi, id legis habet vigorem, which is the fundamental maxim of cæsarism. While, therefore, the young and ingenuous drew from the study of the ancient classics republican inspirations, and found in them a nourishment for their love of popular liberty, the lawyers, courtiers, and princes drew from the study of the civil law, transmitted by the same antiquity, lessons wholly in favor of arbitrary power, or cæsarism,-what is termed more generally, in our days, absolutism.

Cæsarism passed from the old pagan emperors of Rome to the Christian emperors of Byzantium, and from these to the German emperors of the West, and finally to nearly all the European courts, not excepting the Plantagenets, Tudors, and Stuarts, of England. The church struggled successfully against it till the great schism of the West, and with some effect till the end of the fourteenth century. Down to that time cæsarism had not been able to establish itself anywhere in western Europe, and there was, under the point of view of republicanism, no striking discrepancy between the ancient classics and modern ideas and practices. The scholars of the middle ages enjoyed a greater freedom than was enjoyed in classical antiquity. The hereditary principle, as now understood and acted upon, was not then

recognized; and though the son might, and as a general thing did, succeed to his father, the crown remained, nevertheless, elective, and he could lawfully succeed to it only by the election or assent of the estates of the kingdom. The nation, through its estates, the nobility, the clergy, and the people, or the municipalities, held, under God, the supreme authority, and could and did intervene effectively in the action of the government. The rights of all parties were clearly defined, and placed under the protection of the sovereign pontiff, as the vicar of Jesus Christ and the father of Christendom. These rights the popes struggled with all the powers they possessed to protect against every invasion, let it come from what quarter it might But when the great schism of the West, introduced and sustained by French ambition and national pride, deprived the papacy of much of the respect that had hitherto been yielded it, stripped it of much of its authority over temporals, and gave currency to the anti-papal maxims of Gerson and others, the popes were no longer able successfully to resist the ambition of monarchs, and preserve for the European nations the free and effective voice in the administration they had hitherto enjoyed. The pragmatic sanction of Charles VII., falsely carried back by some unscrupulous historians in several of its provisions to the reign of St. Louis, struck a blow at the papal authority, and therefore at the church, in France, from which it has never yet recovered in that so-called "most Christian" country. Then followed the war of the nobles against the commons, and then of the monarchs against the nobles, and the medieval society was found in its agony. Afterwards came Protestantism to break the unity of Germany, and to favor the usurpation of princes, and the establishment of absolute cæsarism. From the ministry of Richelieu in France, and the accession of Philip III. in Spain, there has remained scarcely a vestige of mediæval freedom on the continent of Europe. Cæsarism has been everywhere victorious, and almost everywhere triumphant. Hence everywhere we find on the Continent a discrepancy between the actual European world and the republican world of the classics.

Superficial and disingenuous non-Catholic writers ascribe the establishment of this modern cæsarism to the church, and pretend that the freedom enjoyed by Englishmen and Americans is due to Protestantism. But nothing either historically or philosophically is further from the truth. If

the church favors cæsarisin, why, when she was so powerful, did she oppose it in the emperors of Germany, in the kings of France and the Plantagenets of England? Why did she struggle with all her power to sustain the political and social order it has supplanted? And why is it that it succeeded only in proportion as she was weakened by the western schism, and subsequently by the Protestant defection, only one of the consequences of that schism? If Protestantism introduces freedom, why has it not done so in Russia, in Sweden, in Denmark, in Prussia, and in the smaller Protestant German states? The simple truth is, that cæsarism has been introduced and established in modern Europe in spite of the church, and against the true Catholic spirit; and she has suffered no less than the state, than the temporal order itself, from it. But the mission of the church is the salvation of souls, and she seeks to fulfil that mission. Whatever the political order that may obtain in this or that nation, she resigns herself to it when she cannot change it, as she resigned herself to the persecution of the old pagan Cæsars. She does not preach revolution, she does not stir up sedition, nor encourage her children to resist the order that is established, although she herself groans under the weight of its oppression. She teaches resignation, peace, order, and calls upon her children to raise their affections from this transitory world to a higher and better world,-to seek the kingdom of God, which they can find under a monarchy, providing it leaves her to exercise her spiritual ministry in freedom, as easily as under a republic. Hence ardent young men and silly old men conclude that she is allied with the sovereigns, that she favors cæsarism and is the determined enemy of republican freedom. Hence, too, modern students in Europe of the Greek and Roman classics find themselves equally opposed to the existing political order and to the religious, at once antimonarchical and anti-Catholic.

Here, we apprehend, is the source of that great evil which the Abbé Gaume ascribes to the use of the Greek and Roman classics as text-books in our colleges and universities. It is the revolution effected in modern European institutions and society in favor of cæsarism, which has destroyed ancient European freedom, and deprived the people of that effective part in the administration of national affairs which they originally possessed, and ought to possess. We say and ought to possess, for however silent we might deem it pru

dent to be on that point when all Europe was in a state of red-republican insurrection, which struck at all authority, and threatened the very existence of society, we are free now, since the reaction has commenced and the danger to be apprehended for Europe is cæsarism, not liberalism,— and even bound, to assert the rights of the nation, or, as we say in this country, of the people. The impression, so widely entertained, that the church opposes the revolutionists because they seek liberty, is wholly erroneous. She did not oppose the old French revolution, as we have elsewhere said, till it transcended the temporal order, and encroached on the province of the spiritual. As long as it was simply a movement in behalf of political and civil freedom, she suffered it to go on, made no opposition to it, and censured it only when it transferred the principle of cæsarism to the people, struck at the rights of property, and trampled on the freedom of conscience. The difficulty is, that both the sovereigns and the liberals embrace cæsarism, and are agreed in asserting the absolutism of the state. But let the party clamoring throughout Europe for liberty be really a party in favor of freedom,-let it assert, on the one hand, legitimate authority, and recognize and protect, on the other. the inherent and indefeasible rights of the individual,—and the church will favor instead of opposing it.

However, the evil signalized by the Abbé Gaume remains, and, what is worse, cannot be removed by ceasing to use the Greek and Roman classics as text-books. There is and always will be, do the best we can, a discrepancy between Catholicity and the world; but the particular discrepancy now signalized under the relation of political freedom, between modern society and the order revealed by the classics, we do not believe incapable of being removed, or that we must identify it with that which must always exist between the world and the church. But it is not removable, in our judgment, by any education we can give our children; for whatever the lessons of the school-room, the character of the man is not determined by them, but by the various and complex action of society. It is one of the errors of our age to attribute too much to education. It is strong when supported by the innate instincts and tendencies of human nature, but powerless against them. may exclude the classics, you may exclude every thing but the most rigid orthodoxy and the most unexceptionable piety, but you can never train a Catholic people, a Catholic nation,

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