Various

“ Are not the countless phases of the many-sided weather as noble, as beautiful, as profitable, and as harmless topics of conversation as ninety-nine out of a hundred things which people do talk about? Is a dull or a wicked speech, a dull or a wicked book, a fashion, a horse, your neighbor's character, a caucus, a candidate, even a song, or a bit of weather on canvas, a finer topic?
Ah, the weather!—skies of infinite changes, inexhaustible palette in which the painter's imagination dips its brush; calms, nature holding her breath; winds, the nearest to spirit of any created thing ”

“ We are all one nation, too, for there is but one Head, one Lord, one Christ; and in the history of the saints we learn the history of the church, our state, our country, our kingdom. And among our great men, whom no wheel of fortune but the divine decree of Providence has lifted to pre-eminence among us, and with whom, for the most part, holiness and humility take the place of genius—is it strange we should single out some of whom, having known them, we willingly speak and hear little details told, and treasure them up, and weave them into heart-poems for our children's children? ”

“ It is necessary to look boldly in the face the monster which for ages has made the earth a battle-field, to defy him openly and in the light of day. We shall therefore be true to the programme of civilization, in the name of which the world has applauded the liberation of Rome from the Pope, and we call upon all who love the moral independence of the family, prostituted and enslaved by the priest, upon all who wish a country great and respected, upon all who believe in human perfectibility, to unite with us under the banner of science and justice. ”

“ SOCIALISM.
A new era is dawning. Not a mere political period, but a complete social change, for the actual order of things is disorder, a compound of injustice and abuses. We must have fraternity and equality. Away with the nobles; away with the wealthy classes; away with property; all things must be in common. The happiness of Europe will never be realized until socialism reigns supreme. Such is the socialistic theory. But does not every one see that its realization is impossible, and brings us back to barbarism? The right of property is essential to society. ”

“ One more virgin heart is given up to the Crucified—one more victory won over nature and the kingdom of this world. One more life is being lived away to God in the silence of the sanctuary. Who heeds it? Who sees the great things that are coming of it?—the graces obtained, the blessings granted, the temptations conquered, the miracle of compassion won for some life-long sinner, at whose death-bed, cut off from priest or sacrament, the midnight watcher before the tabernacle has been wrestling in spirit, miles away, with mountains and seas between them. ”

“ His fame and achievements belong to all America, indeed, more truly, to all Christendom. Saint, hero, and martyr as he was, his merits are a part of the heritage of the universal church; and while his relics are venerated on earth, and even the enemies of our religion accord to him the most exalted praise, Catholics may, with the eye of faith, behold him in that glorious and noble band of martyrs in heaven, decked in resplendent garments of red, dyed in their own blood, passing and repassing eternally, in adoration and thanksgiving, before the throne of him who was the Prince of Martyrs. ”

“ Every effort is used to take away from the community its common belief and to plunge individuals into the vortex of incredulity; a black cloud of practical errors, moving over the nations, abolishing the restraint of conscience, rendering the populace the slaves of the vilest and most truculent passions; the basis of all authority, human and divine, sapped; the most powerful governments crumbling to dust, and threatening to fall a prey either to perpetual anarchy or brutal tyranny. ”

“ Saints of our timid generation, saints of our half-hearted century, saints of our hitherto barren civilization, start up, and fill the plains and the valleys of all lands, fill the offices of the city and the homes of the citizens, fill the church, the courts, the universities, fill the lowly serried ranks of the poor, fill the more burdened and more responsible phalanx of the noble and the rich! ”

“ When sorrow crushes a man, turning his heart bitter and his wine sour, we find it hard to believe that so much gall can yield any honey, so much dark let in any light. We cannot see—oh! how it would startle us if we did—how many acts of kindness, how many thoughts and deeds of love, are evoked by the sight of his distress. They may not be addressed to him, and he may never know of them, though he has called them into life; they may all be spent upon other men, strangers perhaps, to whom he has brought comfort because of the kindliness his sorrow had stirred in many hearts. ”

“ If we look at the properties of the firmament, what more assimilates to the miraculous constancy of Mary, whom neither those steeped in original sin could make fall, nor the combats of temptation make stumble! But still, amid the torrents and tempests of human miseries, between the troubles of her life, and the painful passion and death of her most holy Son and our most beloved Saviour; amid the waves of incredulity in the doubts of his disciples; among the hidden rocks of the perfidy of Judas, and the uncertainty of so many timid souls—ever was her constancy preserved. ”

“ We see a wicked man or a miserable man, and we are filled with horror or with pity. We think the world irretrievably darkened and saddened by the sin and the misery that we see, forgetting the counterpart that we do not see—the sanctity and the beauty born of repentance and compassion. We see the bad publican flaunting his evil ways in the face of heaven, brawling in the streets and the market-place; we do not see the good publican who goes up to the temple striking his breast, and standing afar off, and sobbing out the prayer that justifies. ”

“ Rising from this lower order of civilization, the industries of every kind, to what is far nobler, that of science, we observe the same aspirations, perhaps more universally diffused and more passionate in degree toward liberty and union. Freedom of thought, freedom of education, freedom of speech and of the press, seem to be the idols of the day; for, strange to say, freedom of the intellectual life is deemed by very many not as the dowry of science, but the fundamental principle of all human instruction. There exists, also, with this desire for intellectual freedom, a craving after union. ”

“ How true it is that in a multitude of reasons one finds no reason at all; that the rank overgrowth of knowledge does not bear the best fruit; that genius, allied with base substance, grows brighter, by a kind of self-consuming; that wisdom can sometimes find refuge in ignorance! No one, be his fame what it may, has stated a grand and touching truth with better force than appears in Sor Juana's grave misgiving with regard to the genius "which seeks a throne in fire, and finds a sepulchre in tears." ”

“ But the love of nature is implanted too deeply in the heart of man to be ever entirely eradicated; and the sentiment finds for itself an expression coextensive with its existence in the universal love of flowers. They have a charm for the eye and soul welling from a deeper source than those graceful forms and brilliant colors, for they are a portion of the great universe. ”

“ To-day, when the traveller, weary from a day spent in the galleries of Rome, setting forth from the city towards sunset, wanders pensively down the long Appian Way, while he contemplates with emotion the outlines of the aqueducts with their broken arches, the Sabine mountains gilded by the light, and all that celebrated landscape of the environs of Rome, majestic and melancholy as a fallen queen, he finds upon his right, rising like a great tower, the tomb of Cæcilia Metella. ”

“ It was known that Bernadette was to visit the grotto daily for a fortnight. The whole land is astir. Streams of people flow to the place of apparition. They await, with religious impatience, the solemn hour. And when the girl appears, rapt and absorbed in the object of her ecstasy, the witnesses of this prodigy, moved and softened, are melted in a sentiment of admiration and prayer. The apparitions have now ceased, but the throng continues. Pilgrims come from distant lands. Every age and rank and condition is to be seen kneeling before the grotto. ”

“ Eugénie de Guérin, faithful mirror in which is so constantly reflected the twofold affection that filled her life—the love of God and her tenderness for her brother, sweet lesson and touching example of that ardent, lively, and resigned faith which, in the midst of the sorrows of this world, only finds consolation in looking toward heaven, where those whom we love here below, separated from us in an instant by death, are united again never more to be parted. ”

“ Let our American sympathizers with Victor Emmanuel and the unity of Italy look at modern society as it is, and they can hardly fail to see that everything is unsettled, unmoored, and floating; that men's minds are everywhere shaken, agitated by doubt and uncertainty; that no principle, no institution, is too venerable or too sacred to be attacked, no truth is too well established to be questioned, and no government or authority too legitimate or too beneficent to be conspired against. ”

“ As the country rises, it covers itself with olive groves, as if it would shelter white and ancient Arcos in the pride with which she preserves her title of city, her venerable privileges, and her state parchments, in spite of decline, or, better said, in spite of her still life, in the midst of the progress that waits upon the march of time—a progress at once gentle, deliberate, and spontaneous. ”

“ Had they been born as the Blessed Virgin, immaculate in the very initial moment of existence, they would not have been the saints they are, the imitable, human, weakling beings we yearn over and love with a natural and sympathetic love.
Nature, whatever people may say of her, is not contrary to grace: not in this sense at least, that she is the field, and grace the plough. The plough does not alter the earth it furrows; it only prepares it, stirs it, turns its better surface uppermost, and displays its richest loam to receive the grain. ”

“ And religion stands this day as our divine Lord stood centuries ago in the Garden of Gethsemani, with lukewarm and timid disciples in numbers, and with a Judas striving with honeyed words to betray her. The sword she may not use, nor any earthly weapon; for, if God would have it so, could he not send her twelve legions of angels? But no; she stands as he stood, unarmed; and when she preached with the voice of princes and commanded through the mouth of statesmen, no one attacked her, even as the Jews did not apprehend Jesus when he taught openly in the synagogue. ”

“ Now, these two vices, atheism and pantheism, the leading errors of the day, have changed the universal movement toward liberty and union into matter for the deepest and keenest sorrow. In the midst of the immense riches that our age has been accumulating through its free and associated industries, there seems to be nothing that man touches that can cheer or console him in the solitude of his heart, and, free lord as he is of matter, yet he feels himself its slave, because he has made it the grave of his noblest aspirations. ”

“ How much of all this may have perished or vanished beneath the storms of the last fifty miserable years of Mexican life, overridden by swaggering pronouncers, stolen by intervening robbers, the torch of genius extinguished in the dust raised by defiant nobodies. Yet Cabrera survives, as few artists can, a veritable wreck of matter. Happily for him, it may be, his only biography is in his works; and they are full of life, and of life better than his own, yet in some respects received into it—lives of saints, apostles, angels, the Blessed Virgin, and the Divine Redeemer. ”

“ Hidden saints are like to these little inclosed gardens of faith; their hearts are valleys sequestered from the glare of the world's unbelief and the world's selfishness; their souls are as rock-bound creeks where lilies grow and wavelets ripple over golden sands; with them, too, the sunset of life is ever the most glorious hour, as it is with Ischia's myrtle-clad rocks and vine-crowned cottages. ”

“ Some miser has been touched in hearing the tale of his distress, and straightway opened his purse to help the Lazarus at his own door. A selfish woman of the world has foregone some bauble of vanity and given the price to a charity to silence the twinge that pursued her after witnessing his patient courage in adversity. There is no end to the small change that one golden coin of love, one act of heroic faith, one chastened attitude of Christian sorrow, will send current through the world. It would be easier to number the stars than to count it all up. ”

“ There is no forcing the spiritual life; it grows out of the natural life, and is only the natural life, shorn of self and self-love, supernaturalized.
Life is a battle; we all have to fight it, but even in a material combat, what general would arm all his soldiers alike? Are there not cavalry and infantry, lancers and riflemen? Do not some wield the sword, others man the guns? So in the combat whose promised land is paradise; we fight each with diverse weapons, and our one thought should be, not to envy others their arms, but do effectual service with our own. Men fight one way, women another. ”

“ The church can never change, never reform her faith, never retract her decisions, never dispense her children from an obligation she has once imposed on them of receiving a definition as the true expression of a dogma contained in the divine revelation. To do so, would be to destroy herself, and fall down to the level of the sects. The idle talk of writers for the secular press, whether they pretend to call themselves Catholics or not, about the church conforming herself to liberal principles and the spirit of the age is simply worthy of laughter and derision. ”

“ If the reformation, by drawing off men's attention and affections from the spiritual order, and fixing them on the material order, has promoted a marvellous progress in mechanical inventions and the applications of science to the industrial and productive arts, it has at the same time undermined the whole political order, shaken every civil government to its foundation, and, in fact, revolutionized nearly every modern state. It has loosened the bonds of society, destroyed the Christian family, erected disobedience into a principle, a virtue even, and reduced authority to an empty name. ”

“ How, then, can any one fail to admire the economy of divine Providence? At the end of the year 1854, the immortal Pius IX. proclaimed the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. The whole earth re-echoed the words of its supreme pastor; Catholic hearts trembled with joy, and everywhere the glorious privilege of Mary was celebrated by fêtes, which will ever remain graven in the memory of those who witnessed them. And, behold, three years afterward, the Blessed Virgin appears to one of our children, and says: I am the Immaculate Conception: here will I have a chapel built in my honor. ”

“ The air is very pure, yet warm and balmy, and, when the storm visits the island, even the lightning must make itself more softly beautiful than elsewhere, for it is often seen in rose and violet colored flashes, making the heavens like to a vault of opal. The myrtle grows on the mountain-side, and the oleander blooms lower down, the vines climb from the water's edge to the roofs of the few rustic hotels the island boasts, and among all these beauties are hidden springs of medicinal water and hot sea-sands, all of them much used by Italians chiefly in the shape of baths. ”