in English, the Tablet-declares that he thinks us wholly in the right. Such hasty and ill-willing assumptions against the good success of Protestant missions, he remarks, are not only contrary to charity and justice, but betray a very imperfect acquaintance with Catholic principles. Every Catholic, he declares, is bound to believe that where there are good faith and sincerity, which may usually be assumed, God will bless his truth, so far as it is spoken by Protestants, allowing, of course, for the abatement made by errors. Nay, he goes on to say, if the Jews still had missions God would bless his truth so far as spoken by them. Marshall's passionate glorification of Catholic and passionate disparagement of Protestant missions, he says, render his book odious. Indeed, he gives the gratifying information that he does not know a cultivated English Catholic who does not detest it. For himself, he declares, he has never been able to read more than a page here and a page there of so ill-tempered and reckless a thing. Yet this is the book which our Roman Catholic journals are continually citing to the discredit of Protestant missions.

The worst thing in the temper of Roman Catholic writers on Protestant missions is the positive refusal of so many of them to assume "sincerity and good faith," as the Jesuit above mentioned rightly says that they are bound to do. Take, for instance, the recent work of Alfred Young, the Paulist, turning on differences between Protestant and Catholic countries. This has many cogent facts, though very little cogency of reasoning. It contains a great deal to make us blush for our superficial glorifications of Protestant countries and our superficial vilifications of Catholic. When he comes to missions, however, he loses all moderation, all justice and charity, and forgets even Catholic orthodoxy. Rome condemns, without reservation, the statement, "Grace is not given out of the Church." Every restriction of the condemnation is, as was remarked by the Rev. E. S. Ffoulkes while still a Roman Catholic, an invasion, and, in fact, an infraction of it. When, for instance, the Jesuit, Sylvester Hunter, owns that there is among Protestants a great deal of common grace and goodness,

sufficient for salvation, but not any heroic grace and goodness, adequate to great Christian achievements, he makes a limitation really forbidden by the bull Unigenitus, a bull procured by his own order. Any Catholic, of course, may say, "There is incomparably more grace among us than among you." Hunter may say, if he will, "Heroic grace with us is to heroic grace among you as a hundred to one." To declare, however, that this or that kind or degree of grace does not exist among Protestants appears inconsistent with the Unigenitus.

Young, however, is much worse than Hunter. He holds and maintains, even in public disputations, the possibility that a Protestant may make acts of justifying faith. Yet, when it comes to missions, he reverses all this, and not only suspects but imputes unworthy motives to the whole body of missionaries. This cannot possibly be interpreted as consistent with moral uprightness in this particular, for it is against all common sense. Make what abatements one will of love of romance, adventurousness, love of notoriety, or even commoner motives still, it remains true that missions in heathen and Mohammedan countries are, as a whole, the greatest wrench to the natural love of home and friends and to the natural disposition to use the relations and conditions already familiar as a means of advancement, rather than to go out among unknown conditions and liabilities. It is, in the very nature of things, principally souls disinterestedly concerned for the kingdom of God that offer themselves for service abroad. This is so absolutely self-evident that Alfred Young's utter refusal to acknowledge it, and his imputation of vulgar and selfish motives as essentially characteristic of Protestant missions, would become a vulgar nature, but strikes us as strange in a Paulist father. In this we are not speaking as Protestants, but, as the reader has seen, are merely reechoing the words of an eminent Jesuit.

Charles b. Starbuck

ART. IX. THE DEATH SONG OF THE POETS.

WE treasure the last words of a great man. If he has influenced many people, we prize his final sayings the more. If they have come from those we love, their value is measureless. When a poet has sung, and we have learned to understand his strain, his dying song is ever cherished. The Indian brave of less civilized times chanted, as he died, the story of his victories. The poet of our times with a mind permeated and influenced by Christianity sings a song burdened with the truths of resurrection and immortality. Let us listen as we hear these death songs anew.

Charles Wesley, the hero-poet, who could sing in the triumph of faith amid the shouts of a howling mob, gave the world more and better hymns than any other lyric poet. In his last days he called his wife to his bedside and dictated to her his last verses-an embodiment of the teaching of all his life:

In age and feebleness extreme,

Who shall a helpless worm redeem?
Jesus, my only hope thou art,

Strength of my failing flesh and heart:
O could I catch one smile from thee,
And drop into eternity!

Many to whom these words have become dear from their associations have used the last two lines to express their own wishes in their closing days.

A good man much beloved by the people to whom he ministered was dying by inches from the dread disease consumption. On September 4, 1847, Henry Francis Lyte, to whom we owe our greatest hymn of Church union, preached for the last time and administered the sacrament. Later in the day he penned that beautiful hymn, "Abide with me," which expresses again for us the thought of Charles Wesley:

Hold thou thy cross before my closing eyes;

Shine through the gloom and point me to the skies;

Heaven's morning breaks, and earth's vain shadows flee;

In life, in death, O Lord, abide with me!

As a theme in music appears now in "Home, sweet home" and again in the imperial grand march composed for the occasion of the reentry of the victorious German emperor into his capital, so through all these wondrous death songs runs the same theme. Again we hear it in the last poetical effort of that brilliant son of genius, Henry Kirke White. While dying, at the age of twenty-one, he writes "The Christian: a Divine Poem," the last two stanzas being:

Thus far have I pursued my solemn theme
With self-rewarding toil, thus far have sung
Of godlike deeds, far loftier than beseem
The lyre which I in early days have strung;
And now my spirits faint, and I have hung
The shell, that solaced me in saddest hours,

On the dark cypress! and the strings which rung

With Jesus' praise, their harpings now are o'er,

Or, when the breeze comes by, moan, and are heard no more.

And must the harp of Judah sleep again?

Shall I no more reanimate the lay?

O, thou who visitest the sons of men,

Thou who dost listen when the humble pray,

One little space prolong my mournful day,

One little lapse suspend thy last decree.

I am a youthful traveler in the way,

And this slight boon would consecrate to thee,

Ere I with death shake hands, and smile that I am free.

Pathetic yet triumphantly do these stanzas of the youthful poet ring with Christian hope.

Beside the grave of Elizabeth Barrett Browning at Florence lies another poet, Arthur Hugh Clough,* who died in November, 1861. Entangled in doubt through the controversies of the Oxford movement, he nearly lost his faith; but in his last production the light gleams forth as he sings:

* Some years ago, in the Gentleman's Magazine of London, Alexander Small made a brief collection of these death songs, occupying not quite two pages of that periodical. For suggestions concerning some of those that follow the author is indebted to him.

Say not, the struggle naught availeth,
The labor and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth,

And as things have been they remain.

If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
It may be, in yon smoke concealed
Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers,
And, but for you, possess the field.

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.

And not by eastern windows only,

When daylight comes, comes in the light;
In front, the sun climbs slow, how slowly,
But westward, look! the land is bright.

The last production of Byron is in contrast to this. It is the moan of a heart without hope:

The hope, the fear, the jealous care,

The exalted portion of the pain
And power of love, I cannot share,
But wear the chain.

Our beloved Longfellow wrote his last poem, "The Bells of San Blas," March 15, 1882. In this he strikes the same note that Clough sounds:

O, bring us back once more

The vanished days of yore,

When the world with faith was filled;

Bring back the fervid zeal,

The hearts of fire and steel,

The hands that believe and build.

O bells of San Blas, in vain

Ye call back the past again!

The past is deaf to your prayer;

Out of the shadows of night

The world rolls into light;

It is daybreak everywhere.

But Whittier sings another song, more like the closing words of Wesley than the words of Clough or Longfellow.