Various

“ We close this imperfect sketch by echoing the sentiments that animated the saintly Père Caillau when he entered upon his duties as superior of Roc Amadour: “With what joy I ascended the mysterious stairs that lead, O Mary, to thy august sanctuary! With what fervor I celebrated the holy mysteries at thy altar! With what love and respect I kissed the sacred feet of thy statue! With what impatience I awaited the hour for returning! Happy the moments passed at thy feet! The world seemed as nothing in my eyes. What devotion, what profound silence there was in my soul! What sweet transports of joy! ”

“ It aims at setting before their eyes such admirable examples of every virtue most suited to their sex, in every age and condition of life, that they have only to open its pages in order to learn at a glance what graces and excellences render girlhood as bright and fragrant as the garden of God in its unfading bloom, and ripe womanhood as glorious and peerless in its loveliness and power as the May moon in its perfect fulness when she reigns alone over the starry heavens. ”

“ One thing is beyond dispute: if Protestantism be what so ardent an advocate as Mr. Froude says it is, it is high time for a change. It is time for some one or something to step in and dispute the devil’s absolute sovereignty. If this is the result of the Protestant mind being “left more free” than the Catholic, the sooner such freedom is curtailed the better. It is the freedom of lethargy and license which has yielded up even the little that it had of real freedom and truth to its own child, Materialism, the modern name for paganism. ”

“ Protestantism is nothing but a house divided within itself, a ship where all hands are captains with no crew at their orders, an army whose generals have no authority to command and whose soldiers have no duty to obey. Such a House cannot but crumble into dust; such a ship must founder; and such an army cannot dream of Christian victories, as it is doomed to waste its strength in perpetual riots, unless it succeeds in putting an end to its intestine troubles by self-destruction. It is evident, then, that “final philosophy” cannot be the product of Protestant thought. ”

“ He has seen the church discarded by all the powers that were once her faithful children. He has seen the sacred territory of the church invaded and torn from his grasp. He sees himself in his old age and at the close of a stormy life imprisoned in his own palace. He has seen the world and the princes of the world do their worst against the church of which he is the earthly guardian. And yet he sees the church spreading abroad, growing in numbers and in virtue, borne on the wings of commerce and carrying its message of peace and good-will to all lands. There is no faltering in the faith. ”

“ Seldom do we have an opportunity to welcome the appearance of so valuable a book as this, which is the embodiment of those sentiments, views, and convictions that distinguish the modern Irish priest. Few men loved his religion and his native land with a more intense fervor than Father Maher. This double love nourished his frame, increased his strength, stimulated his thoughts, nerved his heart, and underlay every thought and action of his life. He was a man who simply delighted in every opportunity of saying a word or doing a deed in behalf of his creed or his country. ”

“ The philosophical dream of a golden age, to be attained by progress in science, civilization, political and social reform, is still more futile. The doleful and terrible wail of the pessimist philosophers and poets of Germany, which begins to find an echo over all the civilized world, would be the outcry of a despair justified by the whole history of mankind, were it not for the light which faith casts across the gloom, and the solution of the dark enigma of life which is given by the cross on which Jesus died, exclaiming, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” ”

“ Time is a great healer and revealer of truth; and time will deal gently and justly with the memory of Pius IX. When the smoke of the long battle that has been raging in Europe, and more or less over all the world, during the last half-century, shall have finally cleared away, and men’s eyes be better prepared to regard all things honestly, truth, now obscured and hidden, will come to light, and the persistent action, misnamed reaction, of Pius IX. will appear to have been the truest wisdom and the soundest policy. ”

“ The church being abandoned as a teacher of falsehood, there is no hope of escape from constant perplexity to the Christian mind; for the Bible itself, being left to private judgment, is of course open to any interpretation that private judgment may be pleased to extract from it. And this in itself is destruction, quite apart from the assaults of hostile criticism. To make the church at all, or at any time, or by any possibility a teacher of falsehood is to strike the divinity from it and convert it into a human institution of the most monstrous assumptions and absurd pretensions. ”

“ Are we to praise and never be weary of praising the Pilgrim Fathers for abandoning their country, their homes, their friends, and their relations to come to the wilds of inhospitable New England, in order that they might worship God according to the dictates of their consciences, and must we condemn the first pioneers in the wilderness who plunged into the solitudes of Egypt for precisely the same reason, in order to fulfil the great aspiration of their souls to God—the pilgrim saints of the desert? ”

“ Certain it is that a great idol of English Protestantism, if not quite overthrown, has been very much battered and bruised of late by iconoclasts who in other days would have knelt and worshipped before it. Protestant England is built on the Protestant Reformation; but if that turns out to have been on its religious side so very bad an affair, what becomes of those who pinned their faith to it? That is a thought that is working in men’s minds, and working good. That reform was needed in the church and kingdom of England prior to the Reformation no man will dispute. ”

“ And the other voices, those that were grumbling in the interior of the furnace, swelled and puffed. The fire, that no person was blowing, kept up by itself, hot as the soul of a forge should be. The crucible became red, and the stones of the furnace were dyed a deep scarlet.
In vain did Sylvestre Ker sweep with his holly broom; between the branches, covered with sharp leaves, the spirits passed—nothing could catch them; and the heat was so great the boy was bathed in perspiration. ”

“ The Greeks furnished the intellectual human culture in philosophy, poetry, and art, of which the Christian religion availed itself, as of a precious vase in which to detain its subtle and sublime essence—an ideal atmosphere for the communication of its influence to the minds and imaginations of men in all ages and countries. Rome opened the way for diffusion and unification. Immobility in tradition, mobility in intelligence, motive power in organization, are the characters of Jewish, Greek, and Roman civilization, which were united in Christianity under a higher and controlling vital force. ”

“ No missionary of that glorious band of Jesuits who in the seventeenth century announced the faith from the Hudson Bay to the Lower Mississippi, who hallowed by their labors and life-blood so many a wild spot now occupied by the busy hives of men—none of them impresses us more, in his whole life and career, with his piety, sanctity, and absolute devotion to God, than Father Marquette. In life he seems to have been looked up to with reverence by the wildest savage, by the rude frontiersman, and by the polished officers of government. ”

“ Bodies are infinitely inferior to spirits, yet they are infinitely superior to nothing, and not only the grand bodies which express in magnitude and number an image of the immensity of God, but grains of sand and the minutest molecules, are terms of divine Omnipotence, and their being presupposes and imitates the being of God. God formed the body of the first man out of the dust of the earth before he breathed into him the living soul, and he will awaken all human bodies to an everlasting life from the dust of the universal tomb of humanity. ”

“ Having drawn these devout “consequences” for the edification of the meeting, the lecturer, with a happy stroke of audacity, asks his hearers: “Need I say anything more in commending the doctrine of evolution to you?” As if he said: “Do you expect that an infidel has anything more to say in favor of your Supreme Being? Have I not given you a sufficient proof of deference and self-abnegation by putting together a few equivocal phrases in honor of your divinity? Need I torture my brain any longer for the sake of a view which is not mine?” ”

“ Life was hopeless to the Irish people under the Penal Laws; the world a wide prison; the earth a grave. They could only lift their eyes and hearts to heaven and wait patiently for merciful death to come. This was the supreme test of faith to a noble and passionate race, as it was faith’s supremest testimony. No work of the saints, no writings of the fathers, no Heaven-illumined mind ever brought to the aid of faith stronger reason for conviction than this. ”

“ Thank God! there is one man who cannot be bought by bribes, or won by flattery, or made to stoop by fear; who dares meet face to face the foes of Christ and the enemies of mankind, open his mouth and lift up his voice, and, in answer to these hypocritical invitations, speak out in tones that ring in the ears of the whole world and can never be forgotten: “Non possumus.” ”

“ The Darwinian theory is utterly unscientific and unphilosophical. Common sense, geology, and history condemn it; logic proclaims it a fraud; and human dignity throws upon it a look of pity and dismisses it with ineffable contempt. Mr. Darwin may yet live long enough to see his theory totally eclipsed and forgotten, when he will ask himself whether it would not have been better to devote his talents, his time, and his labor to striving to elevate rather than striving to debase his kind. ”

“ How has it come to pass that a people who poured out their blood as freely as water in testimony and defence of the Catholic religion, whose history has given innumerable examples of the highest form of Christian heroism in ages past, now follows willingly, or at least submits tamely, to the dictation of leaders who are animated with hatred to the Catholic Church, and are bent on the extermination of the Christian faith, and with it of all religion? ”