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writing. But when a clergyman in Mr. Newman's position in the University, the head of a party still exercising considerable influence among the younger members of the church, comes forward as the editor of a work in which the order of Jesuits is described "the most noble and glorious company of St. Ignatius, which, next to the visible church, may perhaps be considered the greatest standing miracle in the world,"-the whole movement must be felt to assume a very serious aspect indeed.

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This is not the only passage in these works, in which the writer connects his attachment to "St. Ignatius" with a sneer at the Reformation. The words in immediate connexion with the passage just quoted from the Life of St. Adamnan, will afford another example of the same sort. The writer continues his defence of monasticism thus

History certainly bears witness to this decay; but it must not be stated in the exaggerated way usual to many. It was not till the end of the tenth century that the decline of monastic fervour began to lead to abuses and corruptions; and for at least six centuries what almost miraculous perfection, heavenly love, self-crucifying austerities, mystical union with God, and stout-hearted defence of the orthodox faith, reigned among the quietly succeeding generations of the Egyptian cenobites and solitaries? In the thirteenth century again the church interfered, and at her touch, as if with the rod of Moses, there sprung forth those copious streams which satisfied the extraordinary thirst of Christendom in those times. The revered names of St. Dominic and St. Francis may remind us of what that age did.-p. 120.

This is not exactly the manner in which any sound member of our church would write: but it is the sentences which follow, that the reader is requested to attend to.

And when was the church of Rome ever so great, ever so obviously the mother of saints, or when did she ever so wonderfully develope the hidden life within her, as in the sixteenth century? St. Ignatius, St. Francis Xavier, St. Francis Borgia, St. Francis of Sales, St. Philip Neri, St. Felix of Cantalice, and many others, sprung almost simultaneously from the bosom of a church, so utterly corrupt and anti-Christian that part of mankind deemed it necessary to fall off from her lest their souls should not be saved!—Ibid.

Of course, it may be natural enough for those who regard the church of Rome in the sixteenth century as "the Mother of Saints," in the full development of" the hidden life within her," to look with pity and contempt on the infatuation and stupidity of those who "deemed it necessary to fall off from her, lest their souls should not be saved." This is all natural enough; but the connexion of the names of St. Ignatius and his brother Jesuits with this sneer at the Reformation, is too remarkable to be passed over. Nor will any one, who knows anything of the Jesuits' notions of civil government, fail of being struck by the language which follows. The writer goes on to say :

Stated then, fairly and moderately, let the fact of monastic degeneracy be admitted, and what follows? Is it anything more than an illustration of the catholic doctrine of original sin? Is it a fit or decent subject of triumph to miserable sinners who share personally in the corrup

tion of their fellows? When such boastings are introduced into historical panegyrics of constitutions, parliaments, monarchies, republics, federacies, and the like, what is it but an à fortiori argument against such mere worldly institutions?-Ibid.

Really it is high time for people to ask, where this movement is to end; and whether its authors mean to take the state in hand, when they have completed the revolutionizing of the church?

In the same volume, in the life of St. Oswald, there is another very remarkable passage, where the author connects a scarcely covert defence of the iniquitous conduct of the Jesuits in their foreign missions, with a rather curious disclosure of the ultimate designs of the present movement:—

There is nothing which the world has so doggedly continued to misunderstand as the conduct of missionaries among barbarians and misbelievers. It is ever demanding in their conduct towards their converts a strictness which it calls gloom and bigotry when brought near to itself; and unable to comprehend the pliancy there is in Christian wisdom, and what a depth there is in the very simplicity of its policy, men cry out against what they call lax accommodations and a betraying of the truth. Yet it is not a little significant that the very persons who have been mostly accused of this have been in their treatment of themselves most self-denying and austere.-p. 56.

So far the reference seems merely to the missions of the Jesuits. But the author, without any apparent reason, immediately transfers his argument from a heathen mission to one in a country professedly Christian;-leaving an impression on the mind, as if he thought it somehow necessary to

explain the reason, why a certain policy which some of his friends may deem over-cautious and temporizing, is still pursued at home. His words are as follows:

A strict discipline is not the remedy for a long chronic disorder of laxity and remissness. It amounts to an excommunication; and destroys souls by repelling them from the very shadow of the influence under which its object is to bring them. Of course it is a difficult thing to raise the standard of holiness in a church, a see, a parish, or a monastery, without somewhat terrifying the minds of men; yet it is possible, and it is needful, to find the means of doing so without the sudden introduction of such a severe and ascetic discipline as one hopes to come to at the last. The lives of half the saints on record were spent in the successful solution of this problem: missionaries among the heathen, bishops in sees wasted with simony, priests in parishes lost in ignorant superstitions, abbots in dissolute monasteries. And it may be that this is the very problem which is to be somehow or other solved in our own days among us descendants of those very Saxons whom the zeal of Corman failed to convert, but whom the gentle rigours of St. Aidan built up as living stones into a very great and glorious church. The tender but pure system of discipline introduced into Italy by St. Alfonso,* toward the conclusion of the last century, though it met with clamour and opposition from the rigid party, has probably been one main cause of the singular revival of spirituality in that part of the church. pp. 56, 57.

How clearly indicative of the designs of the party this passage is, will probably appear before we have gone much further.

*This is Liguori, the author of that fearfully blasphemous and idolatrous work, The Glories of Mary.

CHAPTER II.

LIVES OF THE ENGLISH SAINTS: THEIR DOCTRINE OF EXPIATORY PENANCE.

IN demonstrating that the object of these Lives of the English Saints is to recommend the peculiar doctrines of the church of Rome, the abundance of proof is so great, that the chief difficulty lies in the necessity of selection, lest the patience of the reader should be wearied by multiplicity of quotations. Some of the most important passages shall now be laid before him.

For instance,-take the Romish doctrine of the expiatory nature of penance. In the fourth volume, -in the Life of St. Bartholomew the hermit,-the author (in pursuance of a notion frequently put forward in these books, that monks and hermits are the only persons likely to succeed as missionaries) says:

Who but such a confessor could have forced men like the wild border barons of the north to relax their iron grasp on the spoils of the poor, and to atone for their sins by penance ?-Hermit Saints, p. 144.

Again, in the conclusion of the Life of St. Bettelin, in the same volume, we read

And this is all that is known, and more than all,-yet nothing to what the angels know,—of the life of a servant of God, who sinned and repented, and did penance and washed out his sins, and became a saint, and reigns with Christ in heaven.-p. 72.

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