ought to prevail: "oportet unum facere et aliud non omittere."

There is no work of Catholic duty, no enterprize of Catholic charity, more important than that of training proper subjects for the priesthood; and it is the constant cry of bishops, priests, and laymen, that the priests in the United States are too few for the work that ought to be done. Men of Catholic parentage are found, especially in our Atlantic cities, who have risen to affluence and distinction, as lawyers, physicians, editors, engineers, merchants, public-officers, &c., &c. They rose generally from humble origin, for their parents were, in many instances, Irish emigrants, or the children of Irish emigrants, possessing but little indeed of this world's goods. Why is this gifted and energetic class of Americans so thinly represented in the ranks of the Catholic priesthood of the country? In their young days they were ready to our hand, and young lads, such as they were, are ready and willing now to be trained and fitted for the ministry of the Church. Who will hold out to them a helping hand, and give them all they want, a fair opportunity? Do we desire any better subjects than such as these to make priests of? We dare to say that Europe can furnish us with nothing better, either in the way of the raw material or the ready made article.

Much more might be said on the important subject which we have treated, we fear, in a very imperfect manner. We close with the wish that every one may read our remarks with the same freedom from prejudice and the same purity of intention with which it has been the author's desire to write them.

J. W. C.

ART. V.-LITERARY NOTICES AND CRITICISMS.

1. The History of the Reformation in Germany, Switzerland, England, Ireland, Scotland, the Netherlands, France, and Northern Europe, in a Series of Essays, reviewing D'Aubigné, Menzel, Hallam, Bishop Short, Prescott, Ranke, Fryxell, and others. By M. J., SPALDING, D. D., Bishop of Louisville. Louisville: Webb & Levering. 1860. 2 vols. 8vo.

THE Right Reverend author, in these two volumes, the appearance of which we greet with great pleasure, has not given us an absolutely new publication, but a new, revised, and much enlarged edition of Essays and Reviews which he had previously published. They are not properly speaking a History of the Reformation, but a series of Essays on the history of that great and disastrous movement, designed to correct the principal errors and misrepresentations of some of our more popular Protestant historians concerning it. They are written in the free, popular, and earnest style which has made the productions of its author general favorites with our reading Catholic public, and can hardly fail to be extensively read. The author writes as a reviewer and controversialist, as the Catholic scholar and bishop against the traducers of his Church, and has produced a popular and very much needed antidote to the widely-circulated and rather cleverly-written romance, The History of the Great Reformation, by Mr. Merle, improperly called D'Aubigné, for which we feel much indebted to

him

The distinguished Prelate has not produced, and we presume has not aimed to produce, a very original or a very profound work on the Protestant Reformation. No library in the country, nor all our American libraries combined, would enable one to write from original sources a new and complete history of the Reformation. The best of us have to rely, to a great extent, on European scholarship, and to take much at second and even third hand. Bishop Spalding has availed himself of the labors of several eminent recent authors, and as far as we are able to judge, may be relied on in his statement of facts; but many of his facts very possibly would admit a different appreciation. But he writes for the people, and does not attempt to give the deeper philosophy of the movement he treats. He writes, of course, from the theological point of view, the point of view of the Catholic bishop, and proves the movement was a very wicked movement, and the chief actors in it were very bad men and worse Christians, who made use of means as wicked as the end they sought to attain. All this is very well, and all, perhaps, that is required or can be received by the mass of the faithful. Still it does not meet a class of wants which history, in our age, attempts to meet; that of tracing the deeper causes of events as they operate according to the laws of human nature, and the natural providence of God. Too many of our Catholic historians seem to us to forego, in writing history, not a few of the peculiar advantages which they as Catholics possess, and to place themselves on a level with sectarian and partisan writers. Our religion is true and catholic. It embraces all truth; and being true, there is no truth and no fact that can make against it, or which our historians need fear to disclose. We are not

obliged to deny all truth to those who are in heresy, or to labor to prove that they are all examples of total depravity, or diabolical wickedness. We can always compatibly with our own faith allow them no inconsiderable share of Christian truth, and a high degree of natural virtue. We do not refute the doctrines of the Reformation by proving the Reformers were wicked men, for Protestants have very generally long since ceased to regard them as saints; and the Church does not consist of the just or the elect alone; and very bad men, men of very depraved lives, may espouse a very good cause, and fight manfully for truths they will not live. James II. of England lost his crown for his faith; but he never practiced Catholic morality, unless it was after he became too old or too dispirited to sin. We cannot infer that Protestantism is false, because the Reformers and the princes who sustained them were bad men, for if we consult the history of the times we shall find there were men and princes on the Catholic side not one whit better. Francis I. of France was not surpassed, if equalled, in dissoluteness and real depravity by any German prince who sustained Luther or Calvin. It is never wise to insist on an argument that may be retorted with effect, and it is always better to rely on rational conviction than on prejudice to preserve the faithful from adopting Protestant errors. The author will therefore permit us, we hope, to observe, with profound respect, that in our judgment he has labored harder than was necessary to prove that the Reformers, and their aiders and abettors, were in every country that became Protestanized, men of utter immorality, men utterly depraved, and moved only by utterly base and corrupt motives. We do not deny the fact, and have no objection to its being stated, if a fact; but we want it understood that the vindication of the Catholic cause does not require us to make out that it is a fact. Our cause could be sustained just as well, if it should turn out not to be a fact, or any thing like a fact, at all.

The objection that weighs most with serious and well-disposed Protestants, in our day, is one that our controversialists rarely deign to consider. This objection is not, that the Reformers and they who sustained them were great and good men, and therefore Protestantism must be true; but having been all without exception baptized and brought up in the Catholic Church, how, if the Church is what she claims to be, could they become in her communion such bad men as they evidently were? Thus the more wicked we prove them, the more weighty do we render their objection. This objection was urged by a Protestant lady, since become a Catholic, to whom we loaned the first volume of the work before us, when it first appeared some years ago, and it is no breach of confidence to say that it was the first objection urged in a personal interview we had with him, against the Church, by a man no less distinguished, learned, and welldisposed than Dr. John W. Nevin, many of whose articles in the Mercersburg Review have been read with great interest by Catholics. The objection goes not to the dogmatic teaching, but to the moral and spiritual efficacy of the Sacraments of the Church. The argument appears light and trifling to the Catholic, because he knows that the Sacraments may be unworthily received, and that grace neither takes away free will nor the power of sinning; but it must weigh with Protestants, when we tell them the Sacraments confer grace, for they have been brought up in the error that grace is irresistible and inamissible. Indeed, we cannot help thinking that the question of the Protestant Reformation has been treated by both Catholic and Protestant historians, if we except some German

authors, quite too loosely and too superficially. Our old Catholic explanation of the movement, that ascribed it in Germany to the rivalry of the Augustinians and Dominicans, and to the rapacity of princes and nobles bent on grasping the temporalities of the Church, and in England to the refusal of the Pope to grant Henry VIII. a divorce from his wife, Katharine of Aragon, is obviously inadequate, and at best merely takes the occasional for the efficient cause. It can by no means be considered an adequate explanation of the striking fact that a very large portion of the faithful in all Europe, except Ireland and the Spanish Peninsula, simultaneously rose in insurrection against the Church in which their fathers had died, and they had been reared, and were ready to accept the doctrine of the Gospellers, and aid the political and civil power in nearly one third of Europe in putting down the old religion by penal laws, fire and sword, fines, imprisonment, exile and the gibbet. The fact is no ordinary fact, and must have had some cause or causes deeper and, we dare say, less discreditable to human nature than those usually assigned.

We have ourselves developed in several articles the political character of the movement, but we have never wished it to be understood that the movement was exclusively political, any more than that it was exclusively or even chiefly theological. The causes were various, and not the same in every locality, but in most places, and with the great majority, were, we suspect, only accidentally anti-Catholic. That is, we believe there were honest and well-disposed men among those who followed or sustained the Protestant movement, who, for the most part, were moved by worldly considerations and interests which individuals and nations may be moved by without necessarily ceasing to be Catholics. In the complication of matters brought about by political and social changes always going on in society, the Church, or rather churchmen, in their temporal interests were found united to and upholding an order of things as necessary to religion which however good it might have been in its day, social progress and the wants of the times required to be modified, and which with proper understanding and moderation on both sides, might have been modified without abandoning any thing really Catholic, or assuming a really anti-Catholic position. It is a doctrine of our philosophy, that no great movement that is wholly unreal, founded wholly on a falsehood, and sustained by sheer depravity, can ever acquire force enough to carry away large bodies of people. All real effective power is in truth, in reality, and the devil is powerful only by virtue of the truth and goodness he misinterprets, misapplies, or perverts. Falsehood derives all its strength from truth, for as pure falsehood it is pure negation, has no bottom, is nothing, and therefore can effect nothing. We explain really no movement by setting forth what in it is false and evil; we have not explained it till we have shown what it contains that is true and good.

Our Catholic authors have presented the Protestant movement in the respect that it is false and wicked; but, if we except Moehler, in its doctrinal relations, they have, so far as we know, taken very little pains to analyze it, and tell us what it was seeking that, when separated from the false and the wicked, is true and good, and therefore included in Catholicity. They have for the most part written as partisans, just as have the Protestant authors themselves; just as do the greater part of the writers, whether Catholic or Liberal, who treat the present Italian movement. The Italian movement is, as we have elsewhere shown, only accidentally anti-Catholic or anti-papal, and the Liberals might obtain all they

ask for Italy without making war on any thing really Catholic, and Catholics might support it, if they and the Liberals would come to a mutual understanding without abandoning any thing Catholic, or in any respect failing in their loyalty to the Sovereign Pontiff. The difficulty lies in the false and the evil mixed up with the true and the good, and which neither party distinguishes. There are in Italy important civil and political changes really necessary, become so in consequence of changes which have been going on everywhere else; but these might be, if there were a proper understanding of the case on both sides, effected without attacking a single article, dogma, or proposition of Catholic faith, or disobedience to a single precept or canon of the Church. The Church is never in the way, when any thing true or good or useful is to be obtained. The obstacle is in churchmen and others whose worldly interest are, or are supposed to be, in upholding the existing state of things, and the false assumption of the Liberals that it is the Church herself that is in the way of the changes they see and feel to be necessary, and therefore that in order to obtain them, they must make war on the Church, especially on her Sovereign Pontiff.

It was, we suspect, very much the same with the Protestant movement in the sixteenth century. Reforms not in faith, not in theology, but in administration, in politics, if we may so speak, had become necessary. Arrangements and methods, perfectly wise and good when adopted, had in consequence of changes which had taken place in the organization of states, in the political, economical, and social life of the world, become, in practice, injurious alike to the interests of religion and of society, and needed to be altered or modified to meet the new state of things which had been brought about. The men of routine could not see it; the men, cleric or laic, who profited by the old arrangements, would not see it, or resolved not to forego their present advantages, and supported them in the name and on the authority of the Church. Hence the party in favor of reforms, of changes, most of which were desirable, and perhaps all of which, as at first demanded, were admissible, taking the same view, became exasperated at the Church and shook off her authority. Having so done, they made the best defense of their indefensible conduct they could.

It is as far from our thought to defend the Protestant movement, or in any sense to justify it, as it is from the thought of Bishop Spalding. Long before we were received into the communion of the Catholic Church, we had looked upon the Protestant movement as a blunder, and we certainly have not come to look any more favorably upon it since. We do not ask any one to justify it; we only ask our Catholic historians to explain it, and tell us what there was in the movement, or underlying it, that justified it in the eyes of the serious, honest, and not intentionally irreligious men who supported it, and gave it respectability. Such men, and in large numbers, there must have been, otherwise we must bring a severer reproach against the Church than any the Reformers brought, and ascribe to a handful of able but unscrupulous men a power which we cannot do without arraigning the moral government of God. There must have been an aspect of the case under which the movement in relation to evils then existing can be considered, that is both true and good; and what we contend is, that without showing it under that aspect, we do not explain it. We need not fear to do it, for the Church includes all good in the natural order, and teaches all truth in the supernatural or Chris