saints. It has been remarked of the holiest men, that they shrink from the assertion of that miraculous power in themselves which their friends and historians have agreed to ascribe to them. S. Ambrose, S. Gregory, S. Bernard, for example, are silent as to their own miracles. Francis Xavier, we know, expressly disclaimed the possession of such power. Succeeding ages are less scrupulous. So is it with S. Cuthbert. Doubtfully, and in one instance, he himself narrates a miracle: a careful and painstaking historian sees Divine power at work in a few of his actions; a picturesque legend-writer, four centuries afterwards, presents him to us as an unceasing wonder-worker in life and death.

It will at least be obvious that his sanctity was so great, and the contrast he presents to our own times so complete, as to make him worthy of attentive study. It may widen our experience, kindle emulation, and enlarge charity. It is useful now and then to leave the present time and meditate upon another. It may be profitable to quit for a moment the strife and clamour, the pretence and insincerity which surround us now, for communion with the old devout and simple-minded Bishop who served God, and did what he believed His pleasure all his life long, night and day, winter and summer, in sickness or in health, with an untroubled conscience, a tranquil reason, a purified heart, and an undivided will. The austere realities of his life are a good subject of contemplation for an unreal age, which yet, if it ever thinks, must needs confess that faith like his will alone remain clear and firm when the day breaks and the shadows flee away.

89

ART. V.-1. Histoire Universelle de l'Eglise Catholique. Par L'ABBÉ ROHRBACHER. Tom. XXV.-XXVIII. (From 1605-1848.) Paris: Gaume Frères. 1847, &c.

2. A History of Jansenism. By S. C. TREGELLES, LL.D. London: Bagster. 1851.

3. Déclaration des Eréques de Hollande, addressée à toute l'Eglise Catholique. (Par JEAN VAN SANTEN, Archevêque d'Utrecht.) Paris, 1827.

OUGHT a history of the Church to be a history of Christianity, or not? Ought it to embrace the annals of heretics, as well as those of Catholics? Much may be said on either side the question. On the one hand, it may be urged that, to give it the wider extent, is to falsify the very title; that the squabbles or successes of those who are not of the Church have little to interest or to profit those who are; that the field is in itself so vast, as to render any increase tedious and unadvisable. On the other hand, how, it may be asked, are we to understand the bearing of Church teaching, or the successes and reverses of the true Faith, unless we know somewhat of the machinations and politics of those by whom it is most dangerously opposed? Is it not deep matter of regret that we have so few records of the Arians, because the want of them obscures the annals of those by whom Arianism was put to shame? Again: in the present state of circumstances, no two histories of the Church, if confined to the stricter sense, will mean the same thing. A Roman writer will ignore the East and England; an Eastern historian will give no account of Latinism; a Protestant will well-nigh leap from Nicæa to Luther, or will endeavour to trace the Catholic and Apostolic Church in Turlupins, Bogomili, Goodmen, Albigenses, Wickliffites, and the various Manicheans of the middle ages.

M. Rohrbacher, in the History of the Church which, contained in twenty-eight octavo volumes, he has now completed, has a very clear and defined idea of the work in hand. A thorough Ultramontane, he turns neither to the right side nor to the left, from tracing the fortunes of Rome. Sympathy for thePhotian Churches' he has none. At Anglican orders he scoffs. A brief sketch, or rather caricature, of events extraneous to his own Church, he gives; but written with such vehemence of party-spirit, such a predetermination to see only one side of the question, such intolerable flippancy towards the earnest-minded men of other communions, as we have never

seen equalled in any partisan history except Burnet. While he has Fleury to guide him, (whose translations from the Fathers in the earlier centuries he confessedly borrows,) he keeps the thread of his story pretty clear. But in his later volumes, it is indeed inextricable confusion.. You are referred backwards and forwards, you skip from facts to dissertations, from biography to polemic theology, in a puzzle-headed way of which no description can give an idea. A reader, previously acquainted with the controversies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, may find them in the volumes which we have placed at the head of this article; but, if ignorant of at least the principal historical events of the time, he will in vain turn to M. Rohrbacher's pages for enlightenment.

As a history of the Roman Church, during the period we propose to review, the work is tolerably complete, The Popedom, of course, France, and Western Germany, have their full space. The Churches of Japan, of Corea, Cochin China, and, on the other side, South America, are satisfactorily treated. Roman Catholic England and Ireland receive a good deal of notice. But of Spain, Portugal, Poland, [South Italy, and Catholic Prussia, we hear but little. The biographies of the saints and principal writers of the Latin Communion are, however, distinctly and concisely given, and form the most interesting part of each volume.

It may well be imagined that Jansenism and Gallicanism are the two heresies' which excite M. Rohrbacher's indignation to the highest pitch. For Jansenism, in particular, he has a choice store of epithets. It is Satanic-infernal-diabolical; the worst heresy ever invented by the devil. Better no God than the God of Jansenius. Jansenism caused the French Revolution. Jansenism gave birth to the blasphemies of Voltaire. Jansenism paved the way for the cruelties of Robespierre. And it is to be noticed, that M. Rohrbacher brands as Jansenists, not only men cut off from the Roman Church, but men who died in her communion:-men like De Neercassel and De Caylus ;nay, men whose only fault was that they taught the doctrine of the Council of Constance and of Gerson. Is it not intolerable that a private ecclesiastic should brand such men with forging the 'devil's masterpiece?'-that an unauthorized writer is to affix the stigma of heresy on every one whose doctrine is not as ultramontane as his own; while, on the other hand, he warns us against condemning the system of Molina, because the Holy See has never condemned it;-i.e. because Paul V. was afraid to publish his bull of condemnation ?

With respect to politics, the Abbé is a Frenchman of the modern school-that is, of the school that was modern till the

events of this current December, 1851. All power comes from the people. They may depose kings for a breach of the 'original contract.' They, as far as civil power is concerned, are God's vicegerents upon earth; and the French nation is the greatest and most glorious under the sun. During the heat of the Revolution, France was glorious in its martyrs, and equally glorious in its generals; in the one, because they died for the Faith; in the others, because they overthrew the potentates that were leagued in defence of that Faith. But the Frenchman sinks before the Ultramontane. The Abbé absolutely glories in what he terms the annihilation of the old Church of France, and its reconstruction under Pius VII. With an allusion which we had well-nigh called blasphemous, he thus concludes one of his volumes :

Enfin, le jour de Pâques, 18 Avril, 1802, a N. D. de Paris, la nouvelle Eglise de France, ressuscitée par la grâce de Dieu, et par l'autorité du S. Siége, célébra sa propre Resurrection avec celle du Sauveur . . . . . Et le temps fera voir que la France est vraiment ressuscitée, et cela, nous en avons la confiance, pour ne plus mourir !' 1

1

It is not our intention to detain the reader with any further criticism on a work which will certainly never become popular in England, though we see that Mr. Birwan Browne, a convert to Rome, has commenced a translation of it. Two traits of the author's character, however, we will give. In alluding, as was proper, to Fleury, among the writers of the eighteenth century, he takes the opportunity of doing what a man of taste would have carefully avoided, depreciating in his own pages those of his great rival. In his history of the nineteenth, he does what posterity, we venture to say, will not do: he gives an account of the motives which led to the composition of his own work.

We turn, however, from the work to the period of which it treats, intending to refer, from time to time, as we go along, to M. Rohrbacher and his statements. We propose to confine ourselves, however, to the great struggle between the two principles of Gallicanism and Ultramontanism, which convulsed the Roman Church during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This will oblige us to take into consideration those other disputes, which, doctrinal in themselves, became inextricably interwoven with the question already at issue, embittering and embittered by it, carried on simultaneously, and ended in the same manner.

At the Reformation, Rome found herself, almost at a stroke, shorn of half her territories. By a natural consequence, she doubled the despotism with which she ruled the remaining

1 Tom. xxvii. p. 655.

moiety. If kings would no longer bend, bishops should crouch to her. If western Christendom would no longer hear Gerson, Latin Europe should obey Bellarmine. The Great Order, with its fourth vow, sprang up as by miracle. Rome everywhere triumphed. France was confirmed, Belgium and Poland re-won, to the Holy See. Well-nigh half that had been lost in Germany was recovered. Austria, so nearly wrested from the Pope, renewed her allegiance. The counter-reformation culminated in Urban VIII. a good-natured man, an elegant scholar, a prince who protected the arts, a prelate, if of easy, at least of decent, life; a divine of sufficient learning to surround himself with the best canonists and deepest theologians; a Pope who, having attained the triple crown at a comparatively early age, consolidated his plans, and carried out his maxims for twenty-one years of an unclouded pontificate. His was the beau idéal of papal supremacy. The False Decretals were given up; but the Jesuits did as well without them. If the facts were otherwise, so much the worse for the poor facts.' The Latin Church was never more flourishing. Her missionaries evangelized the two Americas; her orders parted Asia between them as conquerors; her martyrs glorified God by hundreds in the Philippines, by tens of thousands in Japan. In Europe, Calvinism was rolled back like a torrent. The greatest saint whom the Church had seen since the age of S. BernardS. Vincent de Paul-arose in France. Beza died, adjuring his friends, for the love of Christ, to send for S. Francis de Sales. It was not of course without hopes of winning back to the tiara its brightest jewel that a Cardinal's hat was offered to the greatest of the Caroline Bishops. It seemed as if a second and more glorious empire were preparing for Rome. Her controversialists poured out innumerable volumes in her defence; and the Bibliotheca of Rocaberti shows their learning, their zeal, and their onesidedness.

But was all this real? Could a system so false in its origin as Ultramontanism promise itself stability? That is what we have to see. A tendency to return to the principles of the Council of Basle, -a wish to revert to a more primitive system of discipline,an echo of the demand made by the Spanish Bishops at Trent,Let the Pope give us what is ours, for we give him more than is his,'-manifests itself as early as the time of Paul V. Let us do a late act of justice to a much-injured man:-to one, of whom, whatever were his faults, and whatever his sufferings, we are not afraid to say, Sit anima nostra cum illo !

Late in August 1602, there came news to Rome that the See of Spalato was vacant. The Dominicans said some masses for Dominic Marcot, of good memory, late Archbishop; the