Various

“ It is as if a body of men had been led astray into a cavern where the direct rays of the sun never penetrated, and, after the lapse of some generations, their descendants approach its mouth, breathe the fresh air, behold the orb of light, the mountains, the rivers, and the whole earth covered with trees, flowers, and verdure. For the first time this glorious world, in all its wonderful beauty, bursts upon their view, and, in the candor of their souls, they flatter themselves that they alone are privileged with this vision, and knowledge, and enjoyment! ”

“ It is, indeed, inherent in human nature. To be self-conscious is to wish to be free and to take delight in the possession of liberty. This feeling finds a sanctuary in the heart of every boy who roams the forest, or plunges through the stream, or beholds the eagle cleave the blue heavens. It was as active in the breasts of the early Greeks and Romans as in the barbarians who rushed headlong upon a falling empire. The love of liberty was, in fact, with them a sublime passion, and yet they were unable to found free institutions because the state, absorbing the whole man, made itself absolute. ”

“ The perfect knowledge of God would be the knowledge of all things, not only of all science, but of all facts; for all are contained in him. The use of our faculties in the acquirement of knowledge or in its exercise is like the gathering up of fragments caught from the skirts of his garments as we follow slowly in his mighty footsteps; and the closer we get to him in our patient toil, the brighter is the lustre and the sweeter the perfume still left upon these shreds of the divine passage through the mazes of creation and the heaped-up centuries of time. ”

“ Its azure vaults starred with gold, its ribbed arches that bend low like the boughs of a gloomy forest, the delicacy of its carvings, its marble pavement, its windows with their jewelled panes, and above all its walls covered with mystic paintings that read like the very poetry of religion, need almost the tongue of angels to describe them. M. Taine says: “No one, till he has seen this unrivalled edifice, can have any idea of the art and genius of the middle ages. Taken in connection with Dante and the Fioretti of St. Francis, it is the masterpiece of mystic Christianity.” ”

“ Kate, where is our dear oratory in Ireland, and my place close to yours? My country, my country! Some one has said, Our country is the place where we love. The true country and fatherland of the Christian is heaven. René speaks like an angel of the love of heaven, and this, too, makes me afraid. Oh! how well I understand the saying of Eugénie de Guérin, ‘The heart so longs to immortalize what it loves’—that is to say, the heart would fain have no separation, but life or death with the object of its love. Dear Kate, to whom I owe my happiness, may this day be always blest! ”

“ Whilst the glittering world, returned from its pleasures and festivities, slumbers beneath its gilded ceilings, the world of charity has already made the angels smile, the world of poverty has already suffered, the world of industry is at work, the apostolic world embarks on the vast ocean or sets foot on unknown shores, the world of science studies and sounds the deep abyss of learning, the world of prayer, the truly Catholic world, prays to God, sings his praises, writes, speaks, teaches, lives for God! ”

“ I love solitude in the evening; the soul, disposed by the calm of nature for meditation and prayer, rises without effort to God. I do not like to shorten these moments, and willingly prolong them until it is dark. There is always a certain solemnity which attaches to things that end. If we thought of it well, how much we should be impressed by the close of a day! How many souls there are who will not see another! How many sheep have this very day quitted the green pastures of the Good Shepherd! How many tears have the angels gathered up! ”

“ Only let us learn that the Sun of Righteousness to our perceptions, as it were, sets and rises again. We are like children who think when the glorious golden disc has sunk beneath the horizon that it is utterly gone and is perhaps extinct, while on the contrary the children of another hemisphere are playing in the warmth of its beams; so we see the dark clouds of evil hiding from us the light of grace, first in one spot, then in another, and we grow downcast and impatient. We forget that “not one jot or one tittle shall pass of the law till all be fulfilled” ”

“ There was a time, not far distant, when men thought they had found in the United States of America the sovereignty of labor. It was the boast of its people that there were no American paupers. The working classes looked with something like contempt upon the condition of their fellow-laborers in Europe. Here was the land where every man’s independence rested in his own hands and his willingness to labor. No day should come when an honest day’s work would not earn, not bread alone, but a home—an American home. ”

“ Yet, strange as it may seem, we can never read these superhuman productions with any comfort. The Divine Sonnets fade, and instead we see the gloomy stage at Fotheringay, the hapless but heroic victim, the frowning earls, the gleaming axe, the fair head dabbled with gore. Let us turn to merely human geniuses.
In this time of inspiration, with all England, from prince to peasant, bursting into song and three-fourths Catholic, we find from Spenser to Cowley a scant dozen, or, counting Shakspere, at most a baker’s dozen, of Catholic poets worth naming. ”

“ I vainly seek within my soul the life and strength that have abandoned it; that energy I would wish to recover, if but for a single moment, to use it in opposing the ruin of religion, and repairing in an open and fearless manner the scandal I have given. But the time for action has passed for me. It is to your hands, young prelates, that the care of the flock is committed. Be firm; die rather than let it be decimated! The most violent persecution is about to burst upon the English Church; yes, but you will resist it, even unto death! Death is glorious when we suffer it for God! ”

“ Benediction, in the abbey church, was very beautiful. At the moment when the benediction is given a dove descends upon the altar; the sight is striking when the heart is already predisposed to heavenly emotions. When, at the conclusion, the monks stood up to chant the Te Deum, that song of the eternal Jerusalem which I never hear without a thrill of inward joy, I felt an indescribable impression of happiness and peace. Oh! how sweet it must be to serve God thus, and spend one’s life in study and in prayer.
Dearest Kate, may God bless you, may he bless us all, and may he deliver Ireland! ”

“ All the forces of society had been brought together to develop in its highest potency the passion of patriotism, which, bending to its purpose all the powers of individual life, had created mighty states, embellished them with art, crowned them with victory, made them eternal in literature that cannot die; but on the altar of all this glory man had been sacrificed. Patriotism had failed, hopelessly failed, to satisfy the unutterable longings of an immortal race. ”

“ They might know that when her Head is bowed with sorrow, all true children of the church carry the same cross, the whole body suffering with the head. There was joy tempered with much sadness in our hearts as we went from the noble basilica and wandered away to the Coliseum, fit emblem of the church in the Rome of to-day. Ruthless hands—hands of those who would make Rome like any modern city—have shorn this sacred spot of half its beauties; hard hearts have stripped it of its hallowed stations and forbidden the people to pray where the martyrs shed their blood. ”

“ Are they not tokens that he has trod that way and left the traces of his past glorious passion—past, because that blood was shed once for all, but still and for ever remaining; while the scarlet poppy takes up the theme, and in every corn-field, on barren tracks, and meeting the way-worn traveller by the road’s dusty side, reminds him that the sacrifice is renewed hour by hour the wide world over, fresh and life-giving as ever? Can the rich woodlands fail to bring before us the thought of him who gathered from the forests of his own creation the wood for his own cross? ”

“ Let the poet stand alone by the long margin of the sea on a still summer day. What but it is that profound emotion of which he is so intensely conscious as he looks out upon the immense ocean in its still unrest, which the blue heavens only seem to limit because his power of vision can reach no further, and when he hears the mellow murmur of the wavelets as, rearing themselves in graceful curves, they fall in low whispers along the yellow sands, as if depositing some message from infinitude, and then rapidly withdraw? ”

“ We do not aim to distort or subdue the intellect of our young men, but to captivate and to cultivate it by holding up for its ambition the noblest of careers—the pursuit of virtue and the study of the great truths of religion and of nature. We would make, if we could, the Catholic laymen of the next generation, each in his own sphere, leaders in a new crusade against error, not through the use of force or legal compulsion, but by the greater purity of their lives and the superiority of their genius. ”

“ Never before had the eternal and the infinite come so near to man; never before had he so felt his own immortal strength. He was lifted up into the heaven of heavens, stood face to face with the everlasting verities of God, became a dweller in the world that is, and the garments of space and time fell from his new-born soul. He was free; strong in the liberty with which Christ had clothed him, he defied all tyrannies. “As we have not placed our hope,” said Justin to the Emperor Antoninus, “on things which are seen, we fear not those who take away our lives; death being, moreover, unavoidable.” ”

“ Had he the Catholic faith, his imagination would carry him to great heights and keep him there. He might have soared nigh to Shakspere. His talent is dramatic—which is to say, his poetic gift is of the highest order; but nature has no divine suggestiveness to him, the hollow shell whispers no eternity in his dull ear; for him man has no end, events no purpose; and inasmuch as man has a definite end, and a sublime one, to which events definitely contribute, he is not able to create men and women, a destiny, or destinies, in any of which should there be a living verisimilitude. ”

“ No word that expresses a necessary fact is in itself evil; but woe to the imagination which makes it so! Purity is always dignified. But if you take the white roses of innocence to crown a wanton, white roses will fall into disrepute; and this is what we have done with language. Words no longer only mean the thing they represent. They have been made to insinuate the foul underflow of evil fancy that corruption has poured forth. How shall we cleanse the source, that we may once more use language of strength and purity? ”

“ Henry, my old foster-father, takes entire charge and control of everything. Misfortune and sorrow have made me prematurely old; I need the companionship of the aged, and not of youth. I love to hear around me the slow and faltering step of a man ready to sink into the grave; he seems to hasten the hour for me. His soul, cold and subdued, soothes and refreshes mine. He never laughs; never comes to tell me of a thousand chimerical projects, a thousand vain hopes, recalling those in which I have indulged in days past. ”

“ In the dark watches of the night, when the waves ran highest and the heavens were obscured as with a pall, he felt that he had that within his soul beckoning him on, more brilliant in its coruscations than the starry cross that illumines the southern hemisphere, as unerring in its guidance as the beacon which of old led the children of Israel through the pathless desert—implicit belief in the sublimity of his mission, and an entire reliance on the mercy of his Creator, in whose hands he felt himself an humble instrument for the accomplishment of noble ends. ”

“ Long since she learned that there is One invisible who is fairer than any child of man, and to him she gave the heart which a wealth of intellectual and earthly loveliness had failed to satisfy. She has learned that there is a nobler Blood than any that the world can boast; His place is with the nobility of an eternal kingdom, whose peculiar marks of honor are poverty, and self-renunciation, and an utter lowliness of obedience, whereby every faculty of one’s nature is brought with a glad free-will into the obedience of Christ. ”

“ The solitudes of nature were simply awful and terrific; for nature was then only a mystery to unredeemed humanity. She held deep secrets in her bosom, but the curse had set its seal upon them all, and she waited in long mournful silence for the hour when the human feet of the Creator should press her varied fields, and by his thrilling touch break the iron bars of her captivity, and teach her to tell of him in the whispered music of her thousand voices. ”

“ It is easy in the intoxication of joy, amid the false glare of vanity and of worldly dissipations, to put our trust in falsehood and array ourselves against the truth; but the day and the hour will come when she will appear clothed in dazzling robes of light, and the splendor of her irradiated countenance will strike with terror and annihilation the last one of her wretched and presumptuous enemies. ”

“ Then the holy hill is covered by the ascending pilgrims, the chapel is illuminated, the bells are rung, and group after group from different villages enter to pray and sing their pious hymns, which have a certain wild flavor that is delightful. Their varied attitudes and costumes, the rude melody of their voices, the numerous bas-reliefs and paintings on the walls, the altar of the Virgin hung with ex-votos, and the robes of the Madonna herself, overloaded with ornaments of gold and silver which sparkle in the countless tapers, make up a picture one is never weary of studying. ”

“ Addressing the people of Great Britain, this Congress says: “By another act the Dominion of Canada is to be so extended, modelled, and governed as that, by being disunited from us, detached from our interests by civil as well as religious prejudices; that by their numbers swelling with Catholic emigrants from Europe, and by their devotion to administration so friendly to their religion, they might become formidable to us, and on occasion be fit instruments in the hands of power to reduce the ancient free Protestant colonies to the same slavery with themselves.” ”

“ In matters of doctrine the Catholic faith places all human capacities upon the same level; it subjects the wise and the ignorant, the man of genius and the vulgar crowd, to the details of the same creed; it imposes the same observances upon the rich and the poor; it inflicts the same austerities upon the powerful and the weak; it enters into no compromise with mortal man, but reducing the whole human race to the same standard, it confounds all the distinctions of society at the foot of the same altar, even as they are confounded in the sight of God. ”

“ The greed of gold and of pleasure had reduced the masses of men to slavery and beggary; those who would follow God’s Son in the perfect way were to sell what they had, to give to the poor. The whole race of men was fallen, sunk in sin; the disciples of Christ were bidden to separate themselves from a world which had denied God, that, having received faith, hope, and love through union with him, they might bring to the dying peoples a new life.
The Christian religion turned the mind’s eye from the contemplation of beauty of form to the inner life of the soul ”

“ Catherine felt her blood congealed by the frightful eloquence of this expiring man—this man whom but a moment separated from death and eternity.
At the thought of the nothingness of all created humanity, she felt the hatred she had borne Wolsey entirely effaced.
“Your reasoning enlightens me!” she cried. “Who are we that we should wish to be revenged?. Weak and blind, should we precipitate ourselves into the bottomless pit? We have received an injury, and shall we inflict one in return? Who are we, and what is our duty?” ”

“ Can we assign any limits to the grace of sanctification in its continuous progression, or to the advance of love in the ever-enduring reign of the Holy Ghost? The God towards whom we are being so sweetly drawn is infinite, and though each individual must reach his own appointed measure and degree, yet who can dare put a limit even in thought to the plenitude of that future? ”