professional services. Sometimes a clergyman receives a wagon load of substantial comforts, such as two or three barrels of flour, a dozen bushels of apples, a barrel of cider, and a sack of coffee. Not unfrequently he is presented with a new silk gown, or even a complete suit of clerical apparel. I have known a Clergyman to receive several fees for marriage of a hundred dollars each, and similar presents at baptisms and funerals. The Missionary Bishops have been conveyed thousands of miles by steamers on the western rivers without expense to themselves. A Clergyman on his way to California was sent free of charge, and in the best style, by the owners of the steamer Crescent City, from New York to Chagres. I have myself experienced similar civilities while travelling on the Ohio Canal; and in hotels I have had the amount of my bill presented to me as a token of respect for the clerical character. Some congregations have paid the expenses of their pastor while travelling for many months in search of health. Within the last year, a congregation in Connecticut presented their respected minister with a purse of 300 guineas, to enable him to enjoy the rare gratification of an extensive tour in Europe, including a visit to the Great Exhibition. In fact, those who are conscious of spiritual advantages derived from the Christian ministry, are not generally slow to exhibit manifest tokens of their gratitude.'-Pp. 302-304.

It is impossible that we can conclude our article in more appropriate words than those with which Mr. Caswall ends his book. Expressing, therefore, our truest sympathies with the Churchmen of America, and our best thanks to Mr. Caswall for the useful office he has so nobly taken upon himself, viz. that of promoting, by personal exertions of no mean kind, the mutual intercourse of the two Churches, and their mutual acquaintance with each other, we conclude in his own words :

In times of progress not to advance is to recede. The hope of the Church is in going forwards, in "lengthening her cords and strengthening her stakes.' Let her labour to place herself right in all questions affecting truth and duty, the interests of humanity, and the promotion of the Divine Glory. Let her address herself to her great work with the help of the new race of faithful sons, now rising up, to meet the varied exigencies of the times. Let her gather up all the zeal, and activity, and learning, and piety, and reverence, and kindness, and love of truth, now existing in her scattered members. Let her seek earnestly for the gifts of strength and wisdom from above, and for the pervading inspiration of that Comforter, without whom she cannot continue in safety. Then, we may trust, that in prophetic language, she will arise and shine, the Lord shall arise upon her, and His glory shall be seen upon her. The Gentiles shall come to her light, and kings to the brightness of her rising.'-Pp. 397, 398.

364

ART. III. De Immaculato B. V. Mariæ conceptu, an dogmatico decreto definiri possit. Disquisitio Theologica JOANNIS PERRONE, e Soc. Jes. in Coll. Rom. Theol. Prof. Avenione: 1848.

LONG and strenuous had been the efforts of the Ultramontane party in the Church of Rome to obtain a formal Papal edict, which should decide that the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary is the voice of Scripture and the Church, and enforce the celebration of the festival in consequence; and numerous are the works in which the question is discussed, and such a decision recommended. Walchius, indeed, says of them, Si quis singulos adcurate recensere velit, 'facili negotio integrum volumen de illis, veluti bibliothecam 'conficere possit.' Of these, one of the most able and candid heads our present article. The author's object is to decide whether or not the doctrine in question has sufficient support in Holy Scripture and Ecclesiastical History to justify the Pope in dogmatically defining it to be an article of the Catholic faith.

6

But the obscurity and confusion in which the whole question is involved is so great as to make it well nigh hopeless to think of arriving at any clear idea of what, if any such there be, is the real doctrine of the Church of Rome on the subject; for so many minute questions have been raised, and so many subtle distinctions laid down on almost every branch of it, that her doctors have never been able to frame any one statement which should be, even to their own minds, in harmony with the teaching of Holy Scripture, and self-consistent: they are at issue among themselves as to its very first principles and most elementary questions. And hence, among other points on which an authoritative decision is called for, it will be necessary for us to inquire, first, what is the real meaning to be attached to the term Conception' itself, which, strange as it may appear, has never yet been decided, and about which there are many and grave disputes; and, secondly, what is, after all, the real object

of the festival.

1. Gonzalez of Santalla, in Spain, a Jesuit of the end of the seventeenth century, divides the act into three parts:-1. The material, which precedes the infusio animæ ;-2. The natural, when the infusio anime is superadded;-3. The spiritual, which is caused by the infusio sanctificationis, at the first instant of the animation. But Perrone, with the more modern writers, allows of two parts only, the conceptio activa, and conceptio passiva; the former, as defined by Benedict XIV., consisting merely of the 'corporis formatio, organizatio et dispositio (opere

'maritali) ad recipiendam animam rationalem a Deo infunden'dam;' the latter, of the rationalis animæ cum corpore copu'latio, quæ fit illo ipso instanti quo rationalis anima, corpori, ' omnibus membris ac suis organis constanti, unitur.' And to account for, and excuse the difference of conclusions between S. Bernard, S. Thomas Aquinas, with the whole of the mediæval Church of Rome, and themselves, it is the custom of the latter to assume that the former received the word conceptio in the partial or imperfect sense of the mere 'formatio fœtus ante animationem,' as they state it to be used in Genesis xvi. 4, and 2 Sam. xi. 5; whilst they themselves take it in its full and proper meaning. Cajetan, however, asserts, and undoubtedly with truth, that the ancients, as well as the moderns, are to be understood of the whole thing complete and perfect; and it is evidently a pure assumption on the part of the moderns, for which they offer no shadow of reason or proof, to lay down the distinction they do in the Biblical cases alluded to. But it is plain that, whilst mere assertions are allowed to stand in the place of proofs, and as long as such oppositions and contradictions exist amongst themselves, there can be no certainty to which of her contending Doctors and Popes we are to look for the final decision of the difficulties of the case; at least, the above distinction is plainly built upon a purely arbitrary assumption, supported by no word of Revelation, and by no physiological knowledge—on a subject, too, on which the Church is necessarily incompetent, from the nature of the case, to issue any authoritative decision. If, indeed, it proves anything, it proves too much; for if S. Bernard and the mediæval doctors allude to one part of the Conception, and not the other, their testimony can be of no value whatever, and it is useless for Perrone, or any one else, to appeal to it; in fact, the moderns are evidently attempting to reduce certain unknown physical phenomena within the law of an arbitrary Ecclesiastical doctrine which has gradually been constructed by themselves.

2. It has next been questioned by some of the most eminent of the Romish Doctors, whether the Church celebrates on the 8th of December, the day dedicated to this festival, the Conception itself of the Blessed Virgin Mary, or only the Sanctification, which they maintain to have been infused immediately after it. S. Thomas Aquinas, and the Church in his time, decidedly held the latter;' but this opinion, though confessed to be not only

We may be pardoned for offering to our readers a specimen of the manner in which a Romish controversialist allows himself to speak on a subject, the truth or falsehood of which being absolute, cannot possibly depend on any accidental question of time, or on the dictum of any individual Pope. Although S. Thomas, and others of the ancients who wrote before Sixtus IV., offered this explanation of the festival of the Conception, piously and praiseworthily enough, it cannot be endured

allowable, but even meritorious, before the Bull of Sixtus IV. in 1481, is condemned as utterly inexcusable, now that that 'document has laid it down, that the object of the festival is 'not the conceptio spiritualis, but naturalis;' an assertion made by Sixtus with the utmost confidence, but which it is not for us to reconcile with the fact, that a century or more after his time, the word Sanctificatio occupied in the office of the festival of the Conception the place of Conceptio, the former term having been thrust out to make room for the latter by Pope Gregory in the beginning of the seventeenth century: whilst in the ancient statutes of the Carthusians' De rebus Sacris,' made and allowed in the thirteenth century, we find these words-' In festo de Conceptione Beatæ Virginis Mariæ dicatur, loco conceptionis, sanctificationis.'-Mabillon Annal. Appendix, Vol. vi. p. 687, No. 45.

The fact is, that Sixtus IV. issued bulls, the foundation of others in after times, in favour of a doctrine clearly opposed to that, not only of the greatest Doctors of his Church, but, as we shall presently show, of more than one of his predecessors in the chair of S. Peter; it is therefore impossible, even on Perrone's own principles, that such a rule can have any real claim to the authority which he would demand for it.

3. Again, it has been doubted by Bandell, Master General of the order of Preachers in the beginning of the sixteenth century, firstly, whether the festival of the 8th of December refers to any Immaculateness at, or immediately after, the Conception, and not rather to the sanctity which was undoubtedly conferred upon the Blessed Virgin Mary after the Annunciation, and when she was overshadowed by the Holy Ghost; and, secondly, whether any. thing more is intended to be commemorated than that she was, through the birth of Christ, to be, as the office expresses it, 'the source of rejoicing to all the world,' of which, as the first fruit, her Conception was made an object of especial observance; an opinion to which even Bellarmine gives his approbation, saying, in his book 'De Cultu Sanctorum,'-' The foundation of this festival was 'not the Immaculate Conception, but merely the Conception of 'her who should be the Mother of God; for whatever were that Conception itself, in respect that it was the Conception of the Mother of God, the memory of it causes a singular rejoicing Ito the world; for then we first had a certain pledge of redemp

now that the Roman Church has openly declared that she celebrates, as holy, the formal and perfect Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, at the moment of her animation. The case, however, of those who wrote before, and after Sixtus IV. is different... for it was the endeavour of all the ancient Doctors to persuade the people that the Church, on the 8th of December, did not celebrate the carnal Conception which took place on that day, but the spiritual, when grace was infused into her, either at the first moment of her conception, or subsequently.'-Gonzalez of Santalla, sect. vii. p. 51. 4to. Dilingæ : 1690.

'tion, especially since she was conceived, not without a miracle, 'from a sterile mother. Hence, even they who hold the Blessed Virgin Mary to have been conceived in sin, celebrate this 'festival.'-Book iii. chap. 16.

The fact is, that the Church of Rome has no one doctrine of paramount authority on the subject: thus we find her at two different periods of her history holding two different fundamental doctrines, each of which has been received as the truth, and supported by Papal authority; yet as they are distinguished from one another not by any mere verbal refinements or distinctions, but by a difference of essential and germinal ideas, it is impossible in any manner to reconcile them together, and in consequence their respective maintainers cannot avoid opposing and contradicting one another. One dates from and supports itself by S. Bernard, and the other is that in favour of which Perrone has composed his disquisition. The former teaches that the Blessed Virgin Mary was freed from sin by infusion of grace after her Conception, and so that she was, as S. Bernard urges, like Jeremiah and John the Baptist, sanctificata in utero,' having been for a point of time under the bond of original sin; the latter, that she was conceived immaculate, being in fact not 'sanctificata' but 'sancta,' and therefore that there never was even a moment of time when she was not holy; in which case, as S. Thomas Aquinas urges, she could have had no need whatever of redemption.'

The Church of Spain, which, as is well known, stood foremost in the twelfth and following centuries as the champion of the cause, adopted the former theory, holding in common with all the mediævalist Doctors, after S. Bernard, much as follows: that the Blessed Virgin Mary at the first moment of her existence needed redemption, and was in some degree under the contagion of original sin, in which therefore she could rightly be said to have been conceived, as being an offspring of Adam, and naturally born of parents, themselves lying under the penalties of his first transgression. Hence for that point of time, however long or short, she stood in need, like all other merely human creatures, of sanctifying grace; but this grace was communicated to her 'in utero,' in such a degree as to free her from all taint of original sin, and to make her what cooperating Grace ever after

1 Gonzalez says that the asserters of the 'pia sententia,' or Romish doctrinethat is, as it was known in his day-affirm her not only 'debitum habuisse contrahendi maculam originalem cum fuit in lumbis parentum atque etiam in sui conceptione, sed etiam in ipso primo instante animationis.' (P. 118.) And Launoy tells us that it was the original tradition of the Church of Rome that Mary was for a brief morula' under sin, because, according to all, as soon as she could be sanctified she was sanctified, and in consequence that Christ alone was conceived without all sin.