value for the common people. The Cistertians had not yet become corrupt by ease and riches; they were in the purity and vigour of their prime; but we need only look on the secluded valleys in which they established the monasteries which still adorn them by their picturesque remains, to be convinced that their object was to shun and not to reform the world. The ascetic Carthusian was too much occupied with the maceration of his body amidst deserts and mountains, to have leisure to preach the Gospel in villages and towns. The military orders rivalled the feudal aristocracy in wealth, in pride and the disposition to oppress the feeble. The secular clergy were too few to undertake the spiritual charge of that increasing population which was springing up in the seats of commerce and manufactures. Nor was this all. There were evident symptoms that among the lower classes of society a spirit was abroad, hostile to the authority of the Church. Repugnance to the religion of their superiors is one of the forms in which their consciousness of misery and resentment of oppression and neglect finds a vent. Great religious movements originate with the classes who are ill at ease. The age in which the Mendicant orders were established was distinguished by the prevalence, in distant parts of Europe, of heresies in which levelling and socialist doctrines were joined with the boldest notions of Christian equality and the rejection of sacerdotal authority. These made the Poor Men of Lyons, the Waldenses and Albigenses, and others of similar principles but more obscure names, so odious in the eyes of the Church, and prompted the bloody and merciless persecutions which have branded the name of Innocent III. The wealth of the ecclesiastical orders was especially the object of reprobation with these early reformers; if the poor were to be brought again into the fold of the Gospel, it must be preached to them, as of old, by the poor. He who is to gain their confidence, to inspire them with faith and patience and engage their spiritual obedience, must descend near to their level. He must not be clad in purple and fine linen and fare sumptuously every day; he must be "in weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness;" he must be rude in speech, if not in knowledge; if he be "wise in this world, he must become as a fool, that he may be wise to win souls." In instituting his order of Poverty, St. Francis shewed that he understood the want of his age and the means of supplying it. The Pope, who was at first startled at the strange alliance offered to the Church, perceived upon reflection all the advantage which it promised, and incorporated the Mendicants with the ecclesiastical system. When we read the accounts of the life of St. Francis, it seems scarcely credible that in the same character should meet such extravagance and such sagacity. But the examples of Ignatius, of Cromwell, of the Quakers, and of Wesley, are sufficient to shew, that men who in regard to religion appear to resign themselves wholly to fancy and feeling, can plan and execute with the greatest acuteness and consistency where the affairs of this world are concerned. The intensity of the faith in things invisible or unreal in Francis of Assisi is well described by Sir James Stephen.

"There are some to whom every cherished idea of their minds gives assurance of a corresponding objective reality; these are the mystics and enthusiasts-men of an amphibious existence-inhabitants alternately of the world

of shadows and of the world of solidities-their dreams passing into action, their activity subsiding into dreams-a by-word to the sensual and the worldly, an enigma to the practical, a study to the poet, and not rarely ending as fellowprisoners with the insane.

"To this small section of the human family belonged Francis of Assisi; a mere self-contradiction to those who beheld him incuriously; in one aspect a playful child, in the next a gloomy Anchorite; an arch smile of drollery stealing at times across features habitually sacred to sorrow and devotion; passing from dark forebodings into more than human ecstacies; a passionate lover of nature, yet living by choice in crowds and cities; at once an erotic worshiper, and a proficient in the practical business of the religious state; outstripping in his transcendental raptures the pursuit of criticism and conjecture, and yet drawing up codes and canons with all the precision of a notary.

"The reconcilement of all this was not, however, hard to find. Francis was an absolute prodigy of faith; and especially of faith in himself. Whatever he saw in the camera lucida of his own mind, he received implicitly as the genuine reflection of some external reality. Every metaphor with which he dallied, became to him an actual personage, to be loved or to be hated. It was scarcely as a fiction that he wooed Poverty as his wife. Each living thing was a brother or a sister to him, in a sense which almost ceased to be figurative. To all inanimate beings he ascribed a personality and a sentient nature, in something more than a sport of fancy. At every step of his progress, celestial visitants hovered round him, announcing their presence sometimes in visible forms, sometimes in audible voices. The Virgin Mother was the lady of his heart; her attendant angels but so many knights companions in his spiritual chivalry; the Church a bride in glorious apparel; and her celestial Spouse the object of a passion which acknowledged no restraint either in the vehemence of spirit with which it was cherished, or in the fondness of the language in which it was expressed. It was inevitable that the inhabitant of such a world as this, should have manifested himself to the vulgar denizens of earth in ceaseless contrasts and seeming incongruities; so essential were the differences between the ever-varying impulses on which he soared, and the unvarying motives in the strength of which they plodded.”—I. 139–141.

The next hero of these Biographical Essays closely resembled Francis of Assisi in this feature of his mind, and surpassed him in practical sagacity; but the condition of the Church had widely changed when Ignatius Loyola and his associates founded the order of the Jesuits. The attempt to keep the multitude in subjection by the influence of the Mendicant orders had failed, partly from their own corruption, partly from the selfish abuse which the Popes had made of their authority; and their own arms had been turned against them. A mutinous Augustinian had first successfully raised the standard of revolt. The Reformation had been popular in its origin; but its result had been to revive the study of the original languages of Scripture, to open discussions respecting the genuineness of ecclesiastical documents and the antiquities of the Church. Science had revived as well as learning, and was evidently destined to be the foe of the established religion, unless it could be made its ally. The future fortunes of the Roman Catholic faith might depend on the interests and the passions of sovereigns. England might be recovered or France lost by skilful or unskilful management of their rulers. Navigation had opened readier channels to the East and a new world in the West; the losses of the Church in Europe might be repaired in India, in China or America. She needed men who could be at once divines, scholars and philosophers, courtiers and missionaries; and all these she found in the order of the Jesuits.

Ignatius was by profession a soldier, and had learnt in the camp and the garrison the power of early training in forming the habit of prompt and unreasoning obedience, and generating an esprit de corps which masters social sympathy and moral feeling. He transferred this discipline to the Seminary, and offered to the Head of the Church a soldiery devoted to its service, and prepared in all climates with all sacrifices to do his bidding. This was the first and hardest work: when once complete control was obtained over the youthful mind, the direction of its energies to whatever purpose the master pleased, was easy; the clay once made ductile, could be moulded to any form or use. To have established this mastery and to have organized his community so that from the General of the order to the humblest and remotest member of it there should be a succession of blind but willing instruments, was the peculiar merit of Loyola. To his associate and coadjutor Laynez, belongs that of having devised for them a theology better adapted to the wants of the age than the system of the schoolmen; and each of the early successors of Ignatius added something to the institutions of the order, by which it was rendered perfect in its work-of good or evil, according as Catholic or Protestant is the judge.

The first and most illustrious of the missionaries of Jesuitism was Francis Xavier, the Apostle of the East; and a large portion of the 140 pages which the Founders of Jesuitism occupy in the first volume of these Essays is devoted to him. The idle tales of miracles wrought by him in his apostleship-tales which Dryden after his conversion did not disdain to translate, but which find no authority in his own voluminous letters-have raised a prejudice against him in the minds of Protestants. Yet it is impossible to read the record of his labours in India, in Malacca, above all in Japan, without reverence for the force of conviction and benevolence of purpose which carried him on through ten years of unintermitted toil and suffering.

"No man, however abject his condition, disgusting his maladies, or hateful his crimes, ever turned to Xavier without learning that there was at least one human heart on which he might repose with all the confidence of a brother's love. To his eye the meanest and the lowest reflected the image of Him whom he followed and adored; nor did he suppose that he could ever serve the Saviour of mankind so acceptably as by ministering to their sorrows, and recalling them into the way of peace. It is easy to smile at his visions, to detect his errors, to ridicule the extravagant austerities of his life, and even to shew how much his misguided zeal eventually counteracted his own designs. But with our philosophy, our luxuries, and our wider experience, it is not easy for us to estimate or to comprehend the career of such a man. Between his thoughts and our thoughts there is but little in common. Of our wisdom he knew nothing, and would have despised it if he had. Philanthropy was his passion; reckless daring his delight; and faith glowing in meridian splendour, the sunshine in which he walked. He judged or felt (and who shall say that he judged or felt erroneously?) that the Church demanded an illustrious sacrifice, and that he was to be the victim; that a voice which had been dumb for fifteen centuries must at length be raised again, and that to him that voice had been imparted; that a new apostle must go forth to break up the incrustations of man's long-hardened heart, and that to him that apostolate had been committed. So judging, or so feeling, he obeyed the summons of him whom he regarded as Christ's vicar on earth, and the echoes, from no sublunary region, which that summons seemed to awaken in his bosom. In holding up to reverential admiration such self-sacrifices as his, slight, indeed, is the danger

of stimulating an enthusiastic imitation. Enthusiasm! our pulpits distil their bland rhetoric against it, but where is it to be found? Do not our sharemarkets, thronged even by the devout, overlay it-and our rich benefices extinguish it-and our Pentecosts, in the dazzling month of May, dissipate it-and our stipendiary missions, and our mitres, decked even in heathen lands with jewels and with lordly titles-do they not, as so many lightning conductors, effectually divert it? There is, indeed, the lackadaisical enthusiasm of devotional experiences, and the sentimental enthusiasm of religious bazaars, and the oratorical enthusiasm of charitable platforms, and the tractarian enthusiasm of certain well-beneficed ascetics; but in what, except the name, do they resemble the God-in-us' enthusiasm of Francis Xavier ?"-I. 243, 244.

From the Jesuits, thus seen in the days of their enthusiasm and selfdenial, it is a melancholy but natural transition to their victims, the pious, simple, austere inmates of Port-Royal, whose fate is the subject of the last Essay in Sir James Stephen's first volume. The title of the work which is the groundwork of it well expresses the relation in which they stood to the Catholic Church Reuchlin's "History of Port-Royal, or the Struggle of the Reformed and the Jesuitical Catholicism.' Its leaders, St. Cyran, Nicole, Arnauld, Pascal, would have shrunk with horror from the thought of disputing the infallibility of the Church or even of its Head. They professed their profound and, as it seems to us, abject submission to his authority; if the propositions condemned in the book of Jansenius were to be found there, they were ready to renounce them as heretical; the utmost limit of their freedom of thought was to question if it really contained them in the sense which the Jesuits imputed to his words. But they were truly Reformers; and could they have emancipated themselves from the idea of the Unity of the Church and the tradition of infallible authority in the successor of St. Peter, they would have separated themselves from the body in which the principles of the Jesuits had become predominant, and carried out their own more rigid and spiritual system in the character of a sect. They wanted to restore the ancient purity of the Church, by erecting a strict standard of religious qualification for communion; they had adopted Lutheran, Calvinistic, or, in the modern sense, Evangelical opinions respecting Grace, Free-will and Justification; and they indignantly rejected the glosses and refinements by which the Jesuits had lowered the morality of the Gospel to the standard of the world. In regard to the last point, every right-minded person must side with the author of the Lettres Provinciales against Escobar and his school. But there was something more than mere selfish and worldly wisdom in the condemnation by the Pope and the Jesuits of their doctrine respecting the conditions of salvation and communion. A small religious body may guard its own purity by strict tests and rigid discipline, and feel its dignity and spiritual eminence enhanced by the belief that there are few that shall be saved; but a comprehensive Church must be tolerant to the verge of laxity, and she can better spare the few who complain of her indulgence than the multitudes who would be repelled by her rigour. Yet she can never be free from such struggles and attempts at reaction as that of the PortRoyalists, because her own doctrine and practice are at variance. The doctrine must be taken from the high, uncompromising standard of Scripture; the practice must be conformed to the temper of the world. In what is now passing in our own Church respecting Baptismal Rege

neration, the power of the clergy to exclude ill livers from the communion, and refuse other Christian ordinances to those whom they believe to be either immoral in life or unsound in doctrine, we see the effect of the same scruples as disturbed the Port-Royalists. And the disinclination of our Bishops and Ministers of State to countenance such scruples, and the apparent determination to make an outward Churchmanship a valid claim to all Church privileges, is justified, if it be not produced, by the same motives which influenced the Pope and the Jesuits. A few weeks will decide whether a similar condemnation awaits the Evangelical clergy of England as befel the Port-Royalists. Should they submit to the decision which galls their consciences, and determine still to remain in the Church, they can hardly hope that their acquiescence will be as favourably interpreted as the submission which Arnauld and his friends made to the authority of the Holy See. They will unprotestantize themselves, if they allow the sentence of a Bishop or a Privy Council to outweigh their own convictions of the sense of Scripture.

The establishment of Port-Royal was once delivered from the destruction which seemed to be impending over it, by a seasonable miracle. The niece of Pascal had laboured for three years and a half under fistula lachrymalis, for which all the remedies of art had been tried in vain, when it was cured instantaneously by the touch of a thorn, once a part of the sacred crown. The queen-mother commanded the king's surgeon to investigate the matter; he confirmed the narrative, and the execution of the sentence was delayed. Sir James Stephen, as a sound Protestant, disbelieves the miracle, but is at a loss to give any other reason for his disbelief than his Protestant incredulity. He says of the miracles of the Romish Church, that "if compelled to believe them to be true, we should not be compelled to believe them of divine original. The moral laws of God are violated every instant by rebel man, why not his physical laws by rebel angels? Moses and Paul and that divine Teacher to whom Pascal and Arnauld bowed their hearts, and desired to bow their understandings, all assure us that this is no impossible supposition." (I. 481.) This notion of miracles performed by rebel angels we scarcely expected to see reproduced by a reflecting man at the present day; and we think the perusal of Mr. Farmer's Essay would convince our author that neither Moses, nor Jesus, nor Paul, teach any such doctrine. There is surely some criterion of miracles independent of our religious opinions, or we may as well abandon them at once, as arguments only to those who are already convinced. That the fistula was healed after the application of the Holy Thorn, and that the surgeon found the actual cautery unnecessary, we cannot doubt; we do not for a moment suspect the simple-minded Port-Royalists of a deception; but the records of medical practice, to say nothing of those of enthusiasm and imposture, afford so many examples of sudden cures from unknown causes, aided by a strong belief that a cure is to be wrought, that we cannot admit on the authority of this history either that the thorn was a portion of the true crown, or that the Jansenist's is a true doctrine.

Elsewhere we find Sir James Stephen (II. 439) quoting Scripture in the same way, not according to its own words, but to human comments: "The Bible teaches us, that Christ came into the world to bruise the serpent's head." Where?