"Whose genius was such

That no one could praise it or blame it too much."

It is, therefore, exceedingly useful for the student who desires to get a more faithful picture to take up one of the homelier sketches of Burke's own day, such as Bisset's, wherein sentences are not constructed with a view to antithetical effect, but rather a desire to the recording of bare facts, leaving the reader to deduce their meaning or moral according to his fancy or his judicial temperament. Here, too, we get some knowledge of Burke's real environment, and find a clue to many things which modern biographies render enigmatical or misleading. We are enabled, for instance, to judge of the intensity of the virus of religious hatred which raged in the days of Burke, and the enormous courage it required in any public man in England to advocate justice for the despised and detested Catholics. One of the most insidious things against which he had to contend was the secret whisper that was sent around that he was, in reality, a Catholic and had been educated at St. Omer's. Bisset is at great pains to show that such was not the case, and gives many interesting minutiæ regarding his school-days at Abraham Shackleton's seminary at Ballitore, in County Carlow. Mr. Shackleton was a Quaker, and, we may perhaps assume, as liberal in his religious belief as most members of that respectable body usually were; but we cannot accept Mr. Morley's conclusion that it was from him Edmund Burke derived that magnanimity and kindliness of character which marked him all through life. These qualities are natural and need no preceptor, though they may be cultivated and increased by practical example and judicious direction. The more rational explanation of Burke's liberality is to be found, it might be suggested, in his early training at home. His mother was a devout Catholic, and his father, though a Protestant, a man of very liberal principles. We know how large a share the mother's teaching and example have in moulding a man's disposition and belief, and we may be perfectly sure that it was the knowledge of the influence for virtue of the Catholic religion which was before Burke's eyes constantly for the first twelve years of his life that turned his sympathies toward Catholicism and made him resent the injustice of the interdicts and restrictions placed upon it. His manly indignation, furthermore, was stirred by the systematic policy of calumny and mendacity adopted toward the Catholic people of Ireland. One of the most common forms of misrepresentation was the description of the rising of 1641 as a religious movement having the massacre of Protestants as its main object. This transparent misrepresentation was embodied in Hume's His

tory of England, and when Burke met the infidel author he challenged him upon the subject, and defended the Irish very warmly against the baseless charge.

But, leaving speculation aside, if we desire to find reasons for Burke's partiality toward the Catholics, we have only to consider his own marked mental and moral attributes. His sense of justice revolted against the oppression of any one individual, not to say of any one class, by another. He rarely, in all his letters or speeches on the subject, pleaded for a relaxation of the penal laws on the ground of mere policy or expediency; he argued for it on the highest moral and constitutional considerations. Especially happy was he in the argument he drew from the case of Canada and the Catholic Church established there by the French. "All our English Protestant countries revolted," he pointed out. "They joined themselves to France, and it so happened that Popish Canada was the only place which preserved its fidelity, the only place in which France got no footing, the only peopled colony which now remains to Great Britain. Vain are all the prognostics taken from ideas and passions which survive the state of things which give rise to them. . . . We had no dread for the Protestant Church which we settled there, because we permitted the French Catholics, in the fullest latitude of the description, to be free subjects. They are good subjects, I have no doubt; but I will not allow that any Canadian Catholics are better men or better citizens than the Irish of the same communion."

These sentences are particularly appropriate and applicable, after the lapse of a century, and in a condition of things that had no existence when they were penned. They have an undeniable bearing on the discussions of our own day, and more especially in the United States, where groundless misstatements about the loyalty of Catholics, under certain political conditions, have been sedulously disseminated. If the Canadian Catholics had been ostracized and wronged as the Irish were, their loyalty might not have been proof against the temptation to shake off the oppressor; and this is where we find the true criterion of a valid authority as between the ruling power and the people. The binding principle between the two is that of justice and the sanctity of public law,

and when these are trampled underfoot systematically and deliberately for a lengthened period, the principle of resistance becomes a moral duty in the interests of all mankind.

If we sometimes find Burke using arguments that seem to appeal more to principles of expediency than equity, in favor of fair treatment for Catholics, we must remember that his logic was addressed to the enemies of the toleration for which he pleaded. Thus he is found strongly insisting that the preservation of Catholicity is

essential to the well-being of Europe, on the ground of its being one of the four great religious divisions of the world, and the evil effects which any disturbance of it as an instrument for orderly habit must have upon the remainder of society. If he had been at liberty to declare his sentiments more frankly, we might, perhaps, have heard a different line of argument from his lips; for it can hardly be that one who was so keenly sensible of the interior virtue of great things did not fully perceive the wonderful moral beauty of the spiritual side of the Catholic Church as well as the grandeur of its long career as a moulder of the varied civilizations of the old world. He was appealing to an audience upon whose ears such rhetoric must have fallen flat. His chapters on the training of the Catholic priesthood show that he had a clear perception of the higher rôle of a celibate clergy than that of his own church; but he did not put his thought into direct words. He sought, rather, to effect his purpose indirectly by pointing out the great difference between the Latin priesthood and that of the Greek rite, in which the clergy, being occupied with marital cares, occupy so much lower a plane in the eyes of the people. The full force of this contrast can be easily felt even without any attempt to read between the lines.

As Burke abhorred atheism, so he has left the English Church, by implication, a legacy of disapproval by his strong declarations on the subject of its recognition of divorce. He is unstinted in his praise of the Roman Catholic Church for its law and practice on this vital subject; and the fact that the Anglican bishops form an important element in the legislative machinery which moulded the divorce court into a permanent English institution is proof that his frequently expressed admiration for the Anglican Church as a great moral and Christianizing agency was one of his grand mistakes.

If the measure of true genius be the admiration of the few higher-minded, undiminished by lapse of time or mutation in theories of philosophy, then Edmund Burke stands at the head of our modern thinkers. But if the practical acceptance or rejection of his maxims and counsels be the criterion, he must be regarded as one crying in the wilderness. His denunciations of the frightful misrule of India met with no effective response until the horrors of the Indian mutiny in 1857 put an end to the oppression of the East India Company; while the awful recurring famines which desolate that gorgeous but unhappy land prove that the change substantially means nothing more than a shifting of responsibility. The only difference is that torture as an agency for the collection of taxes is abandoned by the ruling power; but the condition of the plundered millions is one long agony, with periodical wholeVOL. XXII.-34

sale slaughter from hunger as an intermission from the slower method. His pleadings for the enfranchisement of Irish Catholics awoke no response until the Catholics, under O'Connell, rose in their might and thundered at the gates of the English Parliament. And how ineffective his advocacy of the methods of wise conciliation for the American colonists was when perversity and injustice ruled both Cabinet and Parliament in England, we need not pause to wonder at. In all these things he was a failure, but the failures have been so splendid in their impressiveness, as great lessons for all time, that we do not regret that he was a man before his age, and a moralist too lofty for the selfish and mercantile understanding of the audience to which his monitions were addressed.

Edmund Burke cannot be regarded as what is called a typical Celt; but he must be taken as an example of the richness of variety which the generous soil of Ireland is capable of producing. His intellect and imagination were of the deep sea, rather than the rushing river, and the living products of it as infinite and diversified as the multitudinous genera of the ocean. In his philosophic mind he resembled Berkeley in some degree; while in the warmth and tenderness of his sympathies he was hardly the inferior of that disinterested but rather eccentric genius. A man whom one great modern authority declares fit to rank with Shakespeare, and a still greater one of a past age believed to be the superior of Cicero, is a figure which certainly sheds lustre on the country of his nativity. The purity and nobility of his private life lifted him, too, head and shoulders above the herd of prominent men in the still rough and not too squeamish age in which he flourished. In this he was truly typical of his country.

JOHN J. O'SHEA.

DR. F. H. BRADLEY'S APPEARANCE AND REALITY -PRIMARY AND SECONDARY QUALITIES.

D

R. BRADLEY is a metaphysician of so much distinction that his views demand careful consideration from Catholics. They do so no less on account of the truths which he defends than on account of the errors into which he has been led in common with so many other worthy men of the English Schools of Metaphysics. But most of all do his tenets and his teachings need careful consideration and criticism from Englishspeaking Catholics, because, in the absence of such criticism, and of every sign of esteem and appreciation on our part, we run the risk of being denied any hearing for whatever we may wish to advance on the ground of our apparent ignorance of a writer whose following, if not very numerous, is certainly a choice and distinguished following.

His last published and remarkable volume, the title of which heads this article, would demand at least as large a volume as his own, for its adequate criticism.

Our only purpose here is the very modest one of criticising his three initial chapters. Therein he at once takes up such a position that, if he cannot defend it against an assailant, will enable opponents of his who have once captured it, to disperse Dr. Bradley's metaphysical forces and put them to utter rout.

The object of his book is to show that ordinary modes of regarding the Universe-that of Catholic philosophy among the number-are delusions. He declares that the world, so understood, contradicts itself, and is therefore appearance only, and not reality-non-self-contradiction being his test of reality. His first chapter affirms that the primary qualities of objects are as much mere appearance as, in his opinion, are their secondary qualities.

His first words are:

"The fact of illusion and error is in various ways forced early upon the mind; and the ideas, by which we try to understand the Universe, may be considered as attempts to set right our failure. In this division of my work I shall criticise some of these, and shall endeavor to show that they have not reached their object. I shall point out that the world, as so understood, contradicts itself, and is therefore appearance, and not reality."

He begins (as we have said) by criticising the proposal to make things intelligible by the distinction between primary and second