Manahan's Triumph of the Church

MANAHAN'S TRIUMPH OF THE CHURCH

  The first volume, completing the first section of the long promised work by Dr.Manahan, on the Triumph of the Church, now for some months been before the public,

and has been received in a manner which must be highly gratifying to its learned and eloquent author.  Some portions of the volume will be recognized by many as having

been previously given to the public in the highly successful course of lectures which the author gave a few years since in the city, and we believe in one or two other places; but the form of lectures has not been preserved, and the whole has been recast and much new and important matter added. The present volume opens with a masterly sketch of the ancient gentile civilization in its material greatness and splendor, and its moral aberrations and defects, showing what men without Christianity may accomplish in the material order, and the errors, vices, crimes, into which they run; the moral and religious degradation to which they fall, without its guiding and succoring hand, or when abandoned to their disordered nature, and the arts and influences of the great enemy of souls.  It shows what was the world the church had to battle with when the apostles when fourth from Jerusalem to proclaim the glad tidings of a Redeemer. It then sketches the founding of all or nearly all the sees represented in the Council of Nice, the labors, struggles, and victories of the church in the first three centuries, or the church at war with and triumphing over paganism, backed by all the material greatness of the old world, and all the political majesty and physical power of the Graeco-Roman empire. A second volume is promised as presenting the triumphs of the church in the middle ages, and a third presenting her in her struggles with heresy, especially with the heresies introduced or developed by Protestantism.  Completed, the three volumes will probably present the best indication, historical, philosophical, and theological, of the church, especially against those who object to her on the score of civilization, that has yet appeared.

The best vindication of the church is her history, especially in her relation with the world that preceded the establishment of the chair of Peter at Rome, and the world outside of her since.  He who has studied carefully the world she found, and in the midst of which she was placed, and the world that has since remained outside of her influenced, and contrasted it with what we call Christendom, can have no hesitation in pronouncing her a divine institution, dispensing divine light and strength.  Certainly not in this way can he attain to the conception of the Christian supernatural order, or to the conviction of the church as the mystic body of Christ, as it were a visible continuation of the Incarnation on earth; but he can, on the plainest and soundest principles of inductive reasoning, conclude that she is more

than human, that God specially manifests himself in her for the good of mankind, and, therefore, that she is worthy of our full confidence, and, of course, must be what she professes to be.  Her superhuman and divine light and strength, which come out from her history, establish her authority to teach, or accredit her to human reason, and make it reasonable to believe what she teaches and do what she commands, in like manner as miracles wrought in attestation of the divine mission of the miracle-worker, accredit him as commissioned by God.  The divine commission once established, we believe the teacher on his word; that is to say, on the authority of God who gives it; and it is sufficient for all maters covered by it.  The church, after her divine

commission or character is established, is sufficient authority as to what is the real Christian order, or what are the real Christian mysteries.  Dr. Manahan's work is not purely historical, but the historical element predominates in it, and though he does not expressly present the two that the real contrast between them in the moral order, comes out to the reader in a more or less striking light on almost every page.

The aim of the author, we take it, has been first, to show how far and in what respects Giddon's estimate of the Graeco-Roman civilization is correct, and haw far and under what relations it must be rejected; and secondly, to refute indirectly, but conclusively, those Protestant writers in our day, who object to the church that material civilization is less advanced in Catholic than in non-Catholic states, by

showing that the peculiar truth and excellence of Christianity do not lie in the material order, as they seem to assume, and that the Protestant argument against the church proves if any thing, too much, and becomes an argument in favor of gentilism; for, under the relation of simple material civilization, the most advanced non-Catholic nation falls short of the more renowned heathen nation of the ancient world. 

Gibbon wrote his history of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to destroy the holds of the Christian religion on the world, by insinuating that under it civilization has deteriorated, and that the political and social well-being of mankind under gentilism was far superior to what it is under Christianity.  Confining our views solely to the material order, to matters of wealth and luxury, to the material   

greatness, splendor, and refinement of nations, Dr. Manahan joins no issue with Gibbon, but concedes all, and indeed more than he asks.  But he goes into the interior of that civilization, and shows that under its dazzling and brilliant exterior, there is nothing but rottenness, cold-hearted barbarity, inhumanity, licentiousness, and cruelty; that in the moral order, in humanity, in respect for human life, in enderness and compassion, in love, in benevolence, in sympathy with the unfortunate, the poor and afflicted, in provisions or institutions for the relief of want, sickness, distress, in succors for the weak and feeble, in all that which makes the moral glory of civilization, or of human nature itself, it was utterly deficient, and can stand on comparison at all with the civilization that obtains in Christendom.  In the whole ancient gentile world, he maintains, that there was not a single institution benevolence, not a single hospital for the infirm or the orphan, not a single foundation for the poor and destitute.  Love, in the sense of philanthropy, was unknown before He came who said: "By this shall all men know that ye are disciples, if ye love one another."  Taking, then, the ancient civilization as a whole and especially under its moral and humane aspects, it is not, as Gibbon would has us believe, far superior, but far inferior, to modern; and the comparison of the two will show that the world, even without looking to another life, owes an immense debt to the Catholic Church.

Were we to hazard a criticism, it would be to ask, if the learned and brilliant author does not make his charge against the inhumanity of the gentile world a little too sweeping?  Certainly its inhumanity was great; certainly we do not find in that world the workings of that Christian charity, which loves God with all the heart and soul, mind and strength, and our neighbor as ourselves in God, or for the sake of God, for the heathen retained only faint reminiscences of the primitive revealed religion; and it is true also, that we find few or no institutions of beneficence, properly so called; but we can hardly persuade ourselves that, as far gone as the gentiles were, they retained no natural benevolence, no natural kindness, no sympathy with suffering, and performed no acts in relief of the poor and afflicted.  Human nature existed then as well now, and the natural virtues were within their reach, by means of that natural grace, or grace of God as distinguished from the grace of Christ, which is given to all men; and we see not how any society absolutely destitute of natural affection could have held together or subsisted for a day.  There must have been then, as in non-Catholic nations now, many who occasionally at least, practiced the greater part of the natural virtues; there must have been mutual friendships, mutual attachments, mutual confidence between man and man; and acts for kindness and benevolence towards the poor and afflicted, the sick and infirm, if not sometimes even towards slaves.  We find indications of it in all ancient literature; and in Rome the proletarii were so called from being regarded as the proles, or offspring of the city, and were fed by her bounty.  Besides, the love which is the

distinguishing mark of the disciples of Jesus Christ, is not philanthropy, benevolence, or the simple sentiment of humanity, but charity, a supernatural affection, which loves God supremely for his own sake, and man in him.  The gentile world never lost all trace of the primitive religion, and were never wholly abandoned to disordered nature. Yet there can be no doubt that the gentile civilization was marked by extreme cruelty and inhumanity, of which it is hard for us to form a conception on our day, and which it is now easy to exaggerate, especially in the laws, institutions, and religions, or superstitions, and we agree with out author in the conviction he expresses, that the gentiles not seldom reach a depth of cruelty, and of moral degradation, of which even our unregenerate nature is incapable by itself alone, and which it reaches only under satanic influences.

The popular method just now the Protestants of attacking the church, is to assert that the nation who adhere to her are less advanced in civilization than those that have emancipated themselves from her authority, and adopted the reformation.  Against this method of attacking  the church, and drawing an inference in favor of Protestantism, the lamented Balmes wrote his popular work, comparing the influence of Catholicity with that of Protestantism on European civilization.  The excellent author endeavors to prove that under the influence of Catholicity, civilization had been constantly advancing from the sixth to the sixteenth century; and would, if permitted to continue its course, long ere this have reached a degree of perfection far beyond what it has now attained to in either Catholic or Protestant nation.  He looks upon Luther's movement as an interruption of the progress of civilization, and maintains that Protestantism, so far from advancing, has really retarded, and greatly retarded it.  Dr. Manahan says, in substance, suppose Protestant nation do not equal the great gentile nation of antiquity; and if the Protestant are superior to the gentile nation in the moral elements of civilization, it proves nothing in their favor, for they owe those elements to the Catholic Church, who was the first to introduce them, and whose active presence in the world, sustains and fecundates them among nations, originally trained by her, now outside of her communion. Moreover, as our Lord did not found his religion to promote mere material civilization, you can conclude nothing against that religion from the fact, if it be a fact, that your material civilization surpasses that of Catholic nations; and as the distinguishing badge of that religion is love manifesting itself in zeal for the moral well being of man, in beneficent acts or institutions fir the relief of the multifarious forms of human suffering, you cannot conclude any thing from her discredit, unless you can show these things you surpass Catholic states,--which you do not, and will not even pretend,--nor indeed even then; for all those things you have you owe to the influence of the church, to the habits formed when you were in her communion, or to the light which shines now even to you, as the light shines from the city set on a hill penetrates and relieves the darkness even beyond its walls.

The Protestant argument certainly proves too much for those Protestants who really mean to be Christians; for there is no doubt in mind of any man who has seriously studied the subject, that in the purely material order, the more renowned nations of antiquity surpassed any modern Protestant nation.  Neither Great Britain with all her colonial and other dependencies, and her immense naval and commercial marines, nor the United States with all their industrial activity, and all their vast extent of trade and commerce, can really match, in physical force and material greatness and splendor, ancient Rome, to the vast Asiatic empires that preceded the Roman; and neither has the science of agriculture, or the industrial arts by which it can maintain on the same extent of territory, with so little derived for their subsistence from abroad, so vast a population as that of modern China or Japan.  IF we may believe the glowing accounts of Japan, published by some of English who visited the capital with Lord Elgin, that empire is better policed than Great Britain, and the people more prosperous, better off, more contented and happy than the people of the United Kingdom, the first Protestant kingdom in the world.  The facts in the case, then, if the question is to turn on purely material civilization, prove Christianity false, and authorize us to conclude in favor either of ancient gentilism or of comparatively modern Buddhism.

It is remarkable how forgetful are our modern Protestants, especially of Great Britain and the United States.  What they find true of their respective countries to-day, what imagine has always been true of them.  If either has projected a good thing, they treat it as already adopted, and abuse all other nations who have  it not as laggards, as behind the age, as degraded and besotted by popery.  Great Britain speaks of the slave trade to-day, as if has never fought with Spain for the privilege of supplying, her colonies with slaves from Africa, and if slavery, as of she had never been a slaveholder, and as if she had not herself forced slavery upon our own country during our colonial dependence on the British crown,--of liberty, as if she had both enjoyed and upheld it, --of the administration of justice, as if she had never had a Scroggs or a Jeffreys, --of cruel laws and punishment, as if she had not had the worst criminal code in Europe, and had not been remarked among civilized nations for the wretched condition of her prisons, and the severity of her punishment.  One would think, to hear Englishmen talk, that England had always respected religious liberty, and had never subjected any man to civil pains and penalties for his religious belief, while even yet her statute-books are disgraced with penal laws against Catholics, which she refuses to repeal.  She is fierce for oppressed nationalities, --in Italy and Hungary, --but forgets that she holds subject to her sway more oppressed nationalities than any other European power; that she formed one of the league that prepared the way for the partition and suppression of Poland; that she has for a century and a half, been leagued with Austria is sustaining the miserable Ottoman empire in holding the oppressed Christian nationalities of the East in subjection.  Does she not hold Ireland, Malta, the Ionia Isles, or Septinsular Republic, in subjection, and yet has the effrontery to complain of Austria for holding Venice by virtue of a treaty to which she has herself a party.  All this she forgets.  She complains of the temporal government of the pope, and forgets that she was foremost among the powers that restored to him his temporal estates on the down fall for the first Napoleon.  We, in our way, are just as forgetful.  We forgot that we are but of yesterday, and that we owe our prosperity to the advantages of our position, and our freedom from the incumbrances of the Old World. We talk of liberty, and yet hold four millions out of thirty in slavery, and though declaring the slave trade piracy, and extensively engages in it; we boast of education, our free school, in which we are behind Prussia France, and Austria; we are great sticklers for universal education, and yet keep some four million in ignorance, forbid them by law to be taught even to read.  We are loud in our censure upon all Catholic states that do not place the sects on an equal footing with the church, and yet some of our states do not yet place the church on an equal footing with the sects before the law, and it is only since the formation of the federal government, that there has been any general recognition of religious liberty in the country.  We forget, too, that our experiment of a free government, if it has not failed, has, nevertheless, not yet fully succeeded.  It is still a doubtful experiment, and no man can study carefully the political evils of the country, and the manner in which we seek to remedy them, without seeing a strong probability, that here, as else-where, extreme democracy, by involving anarchy, must lead at no distant day to military despotism as the only practicable remedy.  We can no longer elect a first-class man to any important office; we can elect only the Polks, the Taylors, the Pierces, and Buchanans for president, and it would seem that at each successive election, we must descent yet lower and lower in the scale.  The government as a job, and even the material prosperity of the country does not correspond, and never has corresponded to the extraordinary advantages received from the hand of Providence.

We do not deny that with all its drawbacks, we hold the British and American political system the best in the world; but this system holds in its elements from the old Germanic system, which once prevailed over the greater part of Europe, and in its present form and developments in hardly a hundred years old.  We grant that at present the leading industrial and commercial nations of the world are Great Britain and the United States; but how long have they been so?  How long will they continue so?  Great Britain can date her preeminence only from 1763, and the United States only from 1848, the peace of Guadelupe-Hidalgo, at the conclusion of the Mexican war, by which we acquired New Mexico and California.  Before the peace of 1763, the superiority, even in material civilization, was on the side of Catholic Europe, as it may be again during the lifetime of some now living.  Austria is preparing to become a great maritime power; Italy and Greece are in a fair way of regaining their former commercial importance; Spain shows a wonderful recuperative energy, and is rapidly recovering her industerial and coercail importance; and should Great Britain in the next maritime war lose her naval supremacy, which France is even now in a position to dispute, she would lose her industrial and commercial supremacy.  We say not that it will be so; we say not that we even wish it to be so; but we do say stranger things have happened, and may happen again.  We have great confidence in the energy, in the strength, and the pluck of the English people; but no man can say the present position of Great Britain is not more or less precarious, and that she has not to struggle with formidable enemies, if not formidable odds to maintain it.  She may fall, as Tyre and Carthage, as fell Venice and Genoa, Spain and Portugal, Holland and Sweden, and if she does, what becomes of the Protestant argument?  An argument which has only a few years' support in the past, very little in the present, and may have none to-morrow, cannot have much weight with thinking men, or be urged with confidence in its conclusiveness.

If abstraction be made of all that directly or indirectly pertains to the moral order, we cannot be indisposed to award the superiority at the present moment to the non-Catholic nations of what is called Christendom.  We are willing to concede, also, that Catholicity does tend more than Protestantism in those who embrace it, to moderate devotion to the world, and the desire for mere material greatness and prosperity, and in out judgment it would not be worthy of the slightest respect, if it did not.  It would ill-deserve the love and veneration in which we hold it, if it placed no check on the ambition of princes, imposed no restraint upon the fraud and cupidity of traders, and did nothing to make Catholic populations fell that there is something besides this world worth living for, and that, after all, it is far more important to be rich in the virtues which eternal life than this world's goods.  "Blessed are the poor in spirit," and our Lord, and, "How hardly shall they who have riches be saved?  Verily, I say unto you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven."  It would be sad to think that words have no effect on Catholics, who believe them to be words spoken by God himself.  We should expect to find a Catholic population more engrossed with spiritual than with temporal things, and more anxious to make sure of heaven than of earth.  Nevertheless, in the purely material order, we are not prepared to say that Protestant nations owe  what superiority they have to their religion, save in so far as it leaves them free from all regard for heaven, and from all sense of moral obligation.  It is to the fate of wars, to the disasters of internal revolutions, and to the discovery of new routes of commerce, and other changes to which all nations are more or less liable, that we should ascribe it.

Not only had Dr. Manahan sought to give a briefer and more conclusive answer to the Protestant argument drawn from the comparison of civilization in Catholic, with that in Protestant nations, than the one given Balmes in his great work, but he has endeavored to account for the existence in Protestant states of that regard for the poor, the infirm, he afflicted, that you never find in gentile, or even Mahometan nations.  The mass of the Protestant world, no doubt, as regards the world to come, are very much in the condition of the ancient gentile nation.  They cannot be assumed to live in Christ, and to have the promise of the supernatural reward promised to the true Christian who perseveres to the end; they have, we must fear, forfeited, even in case they have been baptized, their birthright; or, like Esau, sold it for a mess of pottage.  But they retain their nature, as did the ancient gentiles, and are capable of the natural virtue, as all men are, or else we could not call them natural virtues.  Now in these Protestant nations we find a spirit of humanity, a generous sympathy with the unfortunate, a tenderness for the afflicted, a sentiment of justice, a respect for the rights of men and of nations, --if far below what they should be, --that we find in no accuse them of insincerity, of hypocrisy, or of acting by calculation from mere selfish motives?  Not at all.  We need  not suppose he English are wholly insincere in their opposition to slavery and the slave trade, although we need just as little suppose no pride or selfishness mingle much real disinterestedness in their efforts to improve legislation, to reform prison discipline, to diffuse generous sentiment, and defend the cause of popular freedom.  We may say as much of our own non-Catholic countrymen.  Alms-houses, public hospitals, houses for reformation, homes for friendless, societies for the relief of the poor, and the thousands and one other associations wisely or unwisely directed, effecting or not effecting these ends, founded and supported by our non-Catholic countrymen, are not mere calculations of interest; and they are, to a great extent, the offspring of disinterested tenderness, of genuine humanity.  True they are not, strictly speaking, Christian, and are no more than men can do, is they choose, by their own natural light and strength.  How happens it, that we find none of these things among the ancient gentiles?  Simply, our author maintains, because they are, though in the natural order, the effect to the education the modern nation have received from the church; modern civilization lies in the natural order, it is true, but even in non-Catholic nations within its pale, it is Catholic, in the sense that it has been developed and grown up under Catholic influences.  It has not indeed, been baptized and taken up into the supernatural order, but it has been fostered by the church, and moulded to a certain extent after her image, so that what in these nations themselves place them really in advance of the ancient gentiles, they owe to the church, and are most ungrateful when they boast it against her.  The argument is a good one.  Nature is the same in both, and if the modern Protestant surpasses the ancient gentile in, the nature moral order, as he undoubtedly does, he owes it, forhe can owe it to nothing else, to the changes in civilization effected by the church, to the new principles of love, tenderness, and humanity, developed by Catholicity even in human nature itself. 

On the other hand, the Catholics need not make war on the principle of these various philanthropic movements outside of the Catholic body, or any way oppose them, unless they take a direction hostile to rights and interests of Catholicity.  As the learned author has said elsewhere, "Nature is not good for nothing."  It is good for nothing by itself alone, without the grace of Christ, in reference to salvation, for in no sense can we by any natural virtue merit the grace of conversion.  The man who remains in the state of nature, unborn by the grace of regeneration into the supernatural order, has no more title to heaven if he keep than if he break every precept to the decalogue; and we cannot say that he is any more or less likely to receive that grace in the one case than in the other.  There is sometimes a disposition in now and than a Catholic, to regard those who have been brought by conversion into the church, in matute life, as having been in some way better to less sinful than those with whom they were brought up.  It may sometimes be so; and no one can regard his conversion in any sense as due ti his nature merit; yet a man who keeps in the main the whole law of nature, deserves less punishment than he who breaks it; and even if he die unconverted with suffer less, her he who has fewer actual sins to be punished for.  But in the order of nature, non-Catholics may perform works which, though they do not merit heaven, are good in that order, and ought never to be slighted by the Catholic.  More especially is this the case when, though they have rejected her authority, they have been under the tuition of the church, and are still more or less influenced by her example and he memory of her lessons.  In this fact, since nature, through below, is not, unless by abnormal development, against Catholicity, there is a basis of community of action between Catholics and non-Catholics, and so long as non-Catholics do nothing against the Catholics religion,  --that is to say, against the Christian supernatural order, --Catholics can cooperate with them in politics, in benevolent enterprises, and in works of philanthropy, if they see proper.  The benevolent association in our cities, for the relief of the poor, to supply food, clothing, and vice, if they respect the religion of Catholics, and do not seek to detach them from their faith; or, in case of children, do not aim to withdraw them from Catholic influences, and bring them up in a non-Catholic religion, --or in no religion at all, --may receive, without any violation of Catholic principle, that support of Catholics.  Unhappily we find, for the most part, in these associations more Protestant zeal than natural benevolence; or at least a feeling that it is necessary for their worldly respectability and well-being in this life to withdraw our children who need assistance from Catholic influences, and to prevent them from being brought  up in the religion of their parents.  This compels us often to assume towards them an attitude of hostility, when otherwise we would heartily join in them.

Still in nations that have once been Catholic, though now far gone in heresy, we find always a benevolence, a regard for human life, a tenderness towards the sick and infirm, a respect for the rights of the poorer and more numerous classes, that we find in no purely gentile nation, ancient or modern.  It is true we find as those nations remain longer outside of the Catholic community, and plunge deeper and deeper into heresy, they fall back nearer and nearer to the moral condition of the ancient gentile vices and crimes.  The old gentile leaven has never been entirely cast out of any Christian nation, for it has its source in our fallen nature, and is retained by our study of ancient learning, and our own profane literature; and in proportion as the counteracting influence of the church is withdrawn, it begins to ferment anew, and to produce the results we deplore in the ancient gentile world.  Still no nation, once Christian, has ever lost all tracer of the new order of civilization developed under the fostering care and influences of the church.  The immense superiority of the Christian population of the Ottoman empire to the Turks is apparent to the most careless traveller, and nothing deserves more the utter condemnation of all Christendom, than the policy of Great Britain and Austria, not to say France, of preventing them from liberating themselves from their infidel masters.  The worst nominally Christian sect is worth far more than the best pegan or Mahometan people--except in the eye of such statesmen as Lord Palmerston, and Lord John Russell.

It is not easy for us to give a complete analysis of Dr. Manahan's splendid volume, for the argument of the book and the lessons it inculcates are suggested rather than formally drawn out, and its great merit is in several pictures, sketches, aphoristic statements, elucidations of particular points in history, taken by themselves --in the variety of its views and suggestions, and in the influence it had on the mind and heart of the reader, rather than in regards as a whole, and as a work intended to maintain a single uniform thesis.  It is not, perhaps, so compact and well-jointed as it might be, in some respect, apparently fragmentary, its several parts will be found to produce a unity of effect, that of a deep and grateful sense of the world's indebtedness to Catholicity, even aside from the considerations of the world to come.  No man can read the work without feeling the profoundest gratitude to Almighty God for giving us the church, or without having quickened in him deep veneration for the holy and indefatigable men, who in all the early ages, led on by Peter, labored and struggled even unto death to secure her triumph over the barbarism, the cruelty, the licentiousness, the impurity, and the fearful and degrading superstition, combined with high literary and artistic culture, with rare military prowess, political majesty, and social refinement of the ancient Graeco-Roman empire; because, being the triumph of the Son of God incarnate over Satan, it was the triumph of humanity.  Its diligent reader will also find it manifest that all errors and heresies against the church, all the ancient and modern sects, are only so many attempts in one form to another of ignorant, conceited, or uneasy men, to return to gentilism and undo the work of Jesus Christ.  The part of the volume whence this comes out is to us the most original and striking part of the work.  The Catholic reilgion in substance is only the continuation, under other conditions of the patriarchal religion, save the patriarchal religion was a religion founded on the promise of things to be consummated and necessary to the perfection of the faith of the patriarchs, and Catholicity is a religion founded on fulfillment, on the actual consummation of the things promised in the patriarchal religion to be consummated.

As gentilism was departure or apostasy from the patriarchal, so is heresy a departure or apostay from the Catholic religion, and, therefore, the two are necessarily one in the same in essence. Let the heresy extend to the whole of Catholicity, what we call complete apostasy, and the non-Catholic world lapses into complete gentlism; and as ancient world descends with perfect rapidity not only from the supernatural to natural, but from the natural to the supernatural, or daemoniacal, so we see it doing  now in modern spiritism or daemon worship.  Catholicity is not a collection of separate and independent doctrines, but is an order, with its own unity and central life, and must necessarily be accepted or rejected as a whole.  He who rejects holy water denies the part of matter, therefore, of the body the flesh of our Lord in the work salvation, and, consequently, the whole principle and office of the humanity,  --indeed the very principle of mediation, on which Christianity itself rests.  Hence the reason why heresy, even in the slightest degree, if formal, has always been regarded by the Catholic with so much horror.  It involves, to whatever point it may attach itself logically, the rejection of the whole Catholic order, and the lapse of the world once more into gentilism.  Hersey is a sin against God; it is also a crime against humanity; and it is not the least among the proofs of the wide departure of this age from the Christian order of thought, that it sees in heresy, really such, only a harmless exercise of our natural reason, and holds that one of the strongest, objection to the church is, that she has branded it as a sin, and suffered the state to punish it as a crime against society.  Hence, too, the heroic efforts of Catholic saints, apostles, missionaries, and martyrs in every age to spread the true Catholic faith, to regain the heretic, and to convert the heathen, --efforts which fulfil, in the highest degree, the great law of charity; for in laboring for the conversion of a soul to the church, we show, in the most perfect manner possible, our love both God and to our neighbor.  Not a sight thing is heresy before God, for it gives him the lie, scorns his bounty, and forfeits heaven; not a slight thing is heresy before humanity, for it sends men back once more under gentile civilization, to a groan anew under all its horrors, its cruelties, its vises, and crimes, in which man falls wholly into the power of the evil one, and becomes the most miserable slave of Satan.

From the several points we have touched upon, and which are treated at greater or less length in the volume before us, our readers will at once perceive that the work is one of rare  interest, and full of important bearings on the principal controversies of the day, as we have endeavored to the state and describe them from the time  to time in the Review; but nothing we can possibly say will give the reader an adequate conception of the wealth of thought and learning of the volume itself, or of the fresh and original manner in which the author treats questions with which most of us had considered ourselves previously familiar.  The author's style is original, rich, and splendid, and in passages highly ornate and finished; and, under any point of view we can consider it, his book is the most important and valuable work, in what we hold to be the right direction, that any American Catholic writers has yet produced.  It does not do all that needs to be done, but it does one portion of the work that remained for the Catholic American scholar, and does it well.  It cannot fail to have a wide and salutary influence on our literature.   It directs thought and investigation into the right channel, and without being itself a controversial work, will do much to prepare out young athletae for the living controversies in which they will have to take their part, and wrestle for God and humanity, for truth and virtue, for liberty and order, for time and eternity.  It cannot fail to breathe into our literature a new spirit, to give it a modern air, and to prepare it to act in the world that is, on the present and the future, not merely on a past that is no more.  Literature should always be up to the age, be adapted to its wants, and fitted to exert a salutary influence in conformity with the church that never changes, any more than the invisible and immutable God, whose representative on earth she is.

We are that this volume has met with a very favorable reception from the Catholic public.  We are glad to hear it, not only because it deserves it for its own sake, but because it augurs well for our future literature.  Our Catholic population, as our booksellers can tell us, have not been remarkable for their readiness to encourage general literature produced by Catholics.  Purely devotional and ascetic worked meet, we believe, a ready sale, which speaks well for the piety of our people; but works to general literature, written by Catholics, and breathing a Catholic spirit, have treated with great indifference, much to the discouragement of Catholic authors and publishers.  A work by a Catholic author, not precisely devotional or ascetic, and appealing specially to no national sentiment, can reach in its sales, on an average, only about two thousand to twenty-five hundred copies in a Catholic population of two or three million.  Even Cardinal Wiseman's exquisite popular volume, Fabiola, with all his Eminence's reputation, and all its intrinsic, merits, has had a sale, we are informed, in this country, of not much over ten thousand copies, many of which must have been bought by non-Catholic.  Explanations of the fact, some creditable and some not creditable, to Catholics, may no doubt to given; but it us, nevertheless, a fact the our Catholic population do not feel, as we think they should, their obligations to encourage Catholic scholars and literary men to labor for the creation of a literature of our own, worthy of us and worthy of the country.  We have a population large enough, rich enough, and educated enough to sustain a national literature complete in all its parts, notwithstanding that a considerable number are not English-speaking Catholics.

We fear our Catholic population do not see and feel as they should, in a time and country like ours, the value of a Catholic literature, by which we mean a general literature produced by Catholic, and conforming, in tone and spirit, to Catholic truth and morality.  We Catholic are placed here by divine Providence, not merely to preserve and enjoy our own faith and worship for ourselves and our children; and indeed, if we think only of doing that, we shall not succeed in doing even so much.  The church, in all ages, is essentially propagandist, and whenever in any particular country she ceases to make converts, if there remain any convert, she ordinarily declines, and fails to keep even her numbers good.  In England and Wales, at the opening of the eighteenth century, more than one-third of the population still held the ancient faith; but before its close the Catholics were estimated at less than a hundred thousand.  The English people never became thoroughly Protestant, till the last century.  The church has a better status in England not that she had in 1745, but she counts by no means as meny English among her faithful children.  We have not, in this country, made any thing like the real advances we sometimes boast, and it is extremely doubtful is there are as many Catholics in the country as have migrated to it from Ireland, Great Britain, and the Continent.  We are building churches, many of them large, and highly creditable under the relation of arts; but if immigration, which is rapidly diminishing, should ceaee altogether, and nothing more be effected in the way of conversions than heretothere, men are now living who may see of them lack of congregations.  The most fatal sign of what a want of true Catholic life in any Catholic population is the little effort it makes for the conversion of non-Catholic.  This sign we show to this country.  Providence had placed us here to be a missionary people, and to make the Catholic country, and we shall have to account to him for its remaining in heresy.  It will not do for us of the laity to say to ourselves the conversion of the country is the work of our bishops and priests, and we have nothing to do it, for that is not true.  We have somtehing to do with it.  We must sustain our venerable bishops and priests, and cooperate with them.  We must second their charity and zeal, and aid them in the way they require.

Now, the great difficulty in the way of the clergy is, that they are too few, are overworked in taking care of those already Catholic, and have little strength and less to devote to the conversion of others.  Even if they had the time and strength, to labor directly for the conversion of the erring countrymen, how are they to do it?  How are they to approach them?  They cannot do it to any great extent from the pulpit, for few non-Catholic attend our churches, and little can they do by social intercourse, beyond, perhaps, softening a few prejudices.  The only way that the clergy, or any body else, car reach the mass of them, is through the press; and we can do it even through the press only on condition that our publications are of that high intellectual, scientific, literary, and moral character, that non-Catholics must read them, or remain behind the most advanced intelligence of the age.  In a foregoing article, we have argued the necessity of Catholic giving a cordial support to such controversial works as are adapted to the wants of the time; now we argue the necessity of their doing the same for works pertaining to science and general literature.  We must conquer the country, or dwindle into insignificance; and we can conquer the country only by mastering it on the side of intelligence.  We must humble its pride of intellect by proving that we are it intellectual superior, and we can prove this only by producing works intellectually superior to any Catholic can produce.  

Do not let us turn away from this question.  Is it no matter what our are present number, or what is the perfection of our organization; we cannot depend on migration from abroad to keep up our congregation and if we do not advance by conversion from the non-Catholic population, we shall, in a few years, begin to go back, and settle into a position, something like that of the Guebres among their Manhometan countrymen.  We must, on this point, give way to illusion.  If we have not life enough to act on the mind of countrymen, it may well be feared that we have not life enough to hold our own.  We have already neglected more than one golden opportunity and lost many of the advantages we had gained.  Instead of increasing, our moral influence is declining. In the calculations of politicians, and the policy of the country, and Trish and the Germans count for much; Catholics, as such, counts for nothing.  The deep interest felt a few years ago in our religion by intelligent non-Catholic Americans throughout the Union, appears to be felt no longer, and the American mind seems to have come to the conclusion, that the church, after all, is very much on a par with one of the sects, and hat Catholics are not much better or more to be relied on than Protestants, and we think there can be little question that we hold in public estimation so high a place as we did five or six years ago.  We state what we believe to be the fact.  We do no judge persons, or presume to offer any opinion as to the cause of this fact.  Much, certainly, may be said the fact remains still the same, and if there come on change for the better soon, we have only a gloomy outlook for the future; we have not a little to do to regain the advantage we have lost.  

Yet we are no means dishearted, and are very far from despairing of the future of Catholicity in this country.  But we must understand, and never forget, that we are here for a missionary people, and be always ready and prompt to avail ourselves of all lawful means to act on the mind, the intelligence of the American people.  We know as well as others, that conversion is the work of grace, and the human will cooperating therewith; we know that prayer is more effectual than argument, and preaching than writing; but we have a preparatory work to perform, that of removing prejudices, and exciting interest in the Catholic question.  We must now satisfy the world outside that our church is here and now a moral power, and the only living and productive moral power of the Union.  It is our duty, certainly, to trust to Providence and pray,but it will not be amiss, at the same time, as Cromwell said to his soldiers, to keep our powder dry. In this age kings and queens do not help on the work of conversion, and in this country the conversion of distinguished by it will not be amiss, at the same time, as Cromwell said to his soldiers, to keep our powder dry.  In this age kings and queens do not help on the work of conversion, and in this country the conversion of distinguished individuals does not secure that of the people. We can here, in the preparatory work we speak of, operate only by intelligence on intelligence, and by surpassing in their own sciences and on their own ground or non-Catholic countrymen. We must not run away with the notion that a Catholic priest must never try his hand at polite literature, or that a Catholic layman must never do anything but place on the table a rehash of the controversial tracts of a prior age.  We must feel that we are a people, a Catholic nation, and labor to supply real national literature that will live, and compete with any of the great nation literature of ancient or modern times.  Not that literature is our only want, or, indeed, our most urgent want; but it is one of our wants, and a much more urgent want at present than it was formerly, when the mass of the people relied on oral instruction, not on reading.  

The demand in literature, as in every thing else, creates a supply, and every Catholic who has the means, it seems to us, should make it a point to place a copy of every work is not repugnant to faith and morals, and has the least literary merit.  If this were so, we should find that we have no lack of mental activity, literary genius, or true scholarship.  Now little is produced because there is little demand, and literary labor brings the author little or no remuneration.  Many a book if vast utility would be written, were it not that, if written, it could find no publisher, or, if published find few purchaser.  Ever man must live by his profession or his trade, and if he cannot he must abandon it.  Light trashy works, supplying the place of solid meritorious works, except in one or two departments, if written and published, would lie on the bookseller's shelves or go to the trunk makers.  No doubt, the newspaper is in the way; no doubt the popular and corrupting non-Catholic literature of the day supplies, to some extent, the market that should be reserved to the Catholic author; but still the great obstacles is in the carelessness and indifference of the great body or our Catholic population, nowhere more marked than in this same city of New York, where literature is at heavy discount alike with Catholics and non-Catholic, and little is read but morning paper.  The Catholic population of this city alone ought to absorb six or seven thousand copies of any respectable Catholic publication, while they, in fact, absorb rarely as many hundreds of the most popular Catholic works.

We speak plainly, perhaps some will say impudently, but Catholics have a conscience, and can bear to be told their faults by one who they know loves and respects them.  Their neglect in respect of Catholic literature, is with them chiefly a matter of oversight, and it is only necessary to call attention to it, for them to remedy it.  There is always one comfort in dealing with Catholic population, that we never have in dealing with non-Catholic population.  They may on a variety of matters entertain wrong notions, and fail in doing the right thing at the right time; but we find them generally acting from good motives, and amenable to reason.  They do many things, which, in our judgment, are not for the best interests of religion; but convince them that it really is so, and they will at once labor to correct their error.  In no country in the world do Catholics love thier religion more than in the Uhited States, and nowhere are they prepared to make greater sacrifices, --pecuniary sacrifices at least, --for it.  To a great extent strangers in this country, they may not once understand, or properly adjust themselves to their new position, or comprehend what their religion here requires of them; but let them clearly understand that what you say to them is prompted by zeal for religion, and what you ask is really demanded by interests of Catholicity, and their ears listen, and their hearts open to you, and your cause is won.  There are other great claims on them than literature, but we have endeavored to show that literature, however, has claims, and that it interest is one of the pressing interest we should without neglecting other and more pressing interests, seek to promote,  We have no fears that they will not give the subject the attention it deserves. With a few more church publications as the one before us, there will be no further occasion to refer to the subject.  There will spring up a taste for reading, a demand for literary excellence, and our authors will find as audience not only "fit," but large.  Such works, too, will tend much to promote harmony among us, mould us into a homogeneous people, and to put an end to the petty disputes and frivolous controversies, and personal altercation and denunciations in which we have been prone to indulge.  We thank the author for his book, and the Catholic public for cordial reception they have given, and will continue to give it.  May we have many more equally worthy.  

MANAHAN'S TRIUMPH OF THE CHURCH

  The first volume, completing the first section of the long promised work by Dr.Manahan, on the Triumph of the Church, now for some months been before the public,

and has been received in a manner which must be highly gratifying to its learned and eloquent author.  Some portions of the volume will be recognized by many as having

been previously given to the public in the highly successful course of lectures which the author gave a few years since in the city, and we believe in one or two other places; but the form of lectures has not been preserved, and the whole has been recast and much new and important matter added. The present volume opens with a masterly sketch of the ancient gentile civilization in its material greatness and splendor, and its moral aberrations and defects, showing what men without Christianity may accomplish in the material order, and the errors, vices, crimes, into which they run; the moral and religious degradation to which they fall, without its guiding and succoring hand, or when abandoned to their disordered nature, and the arts and influences of the great enemy of souls.  It shows what was the world the church had to battle with when the apostles when fourth from Jerusalem to proclaim the glad tidings of a Redeemer. It then sketches the founding of all or nearly all the sees represented in the Council of Nice, the labors, struggles, and victories of the church in the first three centuries, or the church at war with and triumphing over paganism, backed by all the material greatness of the old world, and all the political majesty and physical power of the Graeco-Roman empire. A second volume is promised as presenting the triumphs of the church in the middle ages, and a third presenting her in her struggles with heresy, especially with the heresies introduced or developed by Protestantism.  Completed, the three volumes will probably present the best indication, historical, philosophical, and theological, of the church, especially against those who object to her on the score of civilization, that has yet appeared.

The best vindication of the church is her history, especially in her relation with the world that preceded the establishment of the chair of Peter at Rome, and the world outside of her since.  He who has studied carefully the world she found, and in the midst of which she was placed, and the world that has since remained outside of her influenced, and contrasted it with what we call Christendom, can have no hesitation in pronouncing her a divine institution, dispensing divine light and strength.  Certainly not in this way can he attain to the conception of the Christian supernatural order, or to the conviction of the church as the mystic body of Christ, as it were a visible continuation of the Incarnation on earth; but he can, on the plainest and soundest principles of inductive reasoning, conclude that she is more

than human, that God specially manifests himself in her for the good of mankind, and, therefore, that she is worthy of our full confidence, and, of course, must be what she professes to be.  Her superhuman and divine light and strength, which come out from her history, establish her authority to teach, or accredit her to human reason, and make it reasonable to believe what she teaches and do what she commands, in like manner as miracles wrought in attestation of the divine mission of the miracle-worker, accredit him as commissioned by God.  The divine commission once established, we believe the teacher on his word; that is to say, on the authority of God who gives it; and it is sufficient for all maters covered by it.  The church, after her divine

commission or character is established, is sufficient authority as to what is the real Christian order, or what are the real Christian mysteries.  Dr. Manahan's work is not purely historical, but the historical element predominates in it, and though he does not expressly present the two that the real contrast between them in the moral order, comes out to the reader in a more or less striking light on almost every page.

The aim of the author, we take it, has been first, to show how far and in what respects Giddon's estimate of the Graeco-Roman civilization is correct, and haw far and under what relations it must be rejected; and secondly, to refute indirectly, but conclusively, those Protestant writers in our day, who object to the church that material civilization is less advanced in Catholic than in non-Catholic states, by

showing that the peculiar truth and excellence of Christianity do not lie in the material order, as they seem to assume, and that the Protestant argument against the church proves if any thing, too much, and becomes an argument in favor of gentilism; for, under the relation of simple material civilization, the most advanced non-Catholic nation falls short of the more renowned heathen nation of the ancient world. 

Gibbon wrote his history of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to destroy the holds of the Christian religion on the world, by insinuating that under it civilization has deteriorated, and that the political and social well-being of mankind under gentilism was far superior to what it is under Christianity.  Confining our views solely to the material order, to matters of wealth and luxury, to the material   

greatness, splendor, and refinement of nations, Dr. Manahan joins no issue with Gibbon, but concedes all, and indeed more than he asks.  But he goes into the interior of that civilization, and shows that under its dazzling and brilliant exterior, there is nothing but rottenness, cold-hearted barbarity, inhumanity, licentiousness, and cruelty; that in the moral order, in humanity, in respect for human life, in enderness and compassion, in love, in benevolence, in sympathy with the unfortunate, the poor and afflicted, in provisions or institutions for the relief of want, sickness, distress, in succors for the weak and feeble, in all that which makes the moral glory of civilization, or of human nature itself, it was utterly deficient, and can stand on comparison at all with the civilization that obtains in Christendom.  In the whole ancient gentile world, he maintains, that there was not a single institution benevolence, not a single hospital for the infirm or the orphan, not a single foundation for the poor and destitute.  Love, in the sense of philanthropy, was unknown before He came who said: "By this shall all men know that ye are disciples, if ye love one another."  Taking, then, the ancient civilization as a whole and especially under its moral and humane aspects, it is not, as Gibbon would has us believe, far superior, but far inferior, to modern; and the comparison of the two will show that the world, even without looking to another life, owes an immense debt to the Catholic Church.

Were we to hazard a criticism, it would be to ask, if the learned and brilliant author does not make his charge against the inhumanity of the gentile world a little too sweeping?  Certainly its inhumanity was great; certainly we do not find in that world the workings of that Christian charity, which loves God with all the heart and soul, mind and strength, and our neighbor as ourselves in God, or for the sake of God, for the heathen retained only faint reminiscences of the primitive revealed religion; and it is true also, that we find few or no institutions of beneficence, properly so called; but we can hardly persuade ourselves that, as far gone as the gentiles were, they retained no natural benevolence, no natural kindness, no sympathy with suffering, and performed no acts in relief of the poor and afflicted.  Human nature existed then as well now, and the natural virtues were within their reach, by means of that natural grace, or grace of God as distinguished from the grace of Christ, which is given to all men; and we see not how any society absolutely destitute of natural affection could have held together or subsisted for a day.  There must have been then, as in non-Catholic nations now, many who occasionally at least, practiced the greater part of the natural virtues; there must have been mutual friendships, mutual attachments, mutual confidence between man and man; and acts for kindness and benevolence towards the poor and afflicted, the sick and infirm, if not sometimes even towards slaves.  We find indications of it in all ancient literature; and in Rome the proletarii were so called from being regarded as the proles, or offspring of the city, and were fed by her bounty.  Besides, the love which is the

distinguishing mark of the disciples of Jesus Christ, is not philanthropy, benevolence, or the simple sentiment of humanity, but charity, a supernatural affection, which loves God supremely for his own sake, and man in him.  The gentile world never lost all trace of the primitive religion, and were never wholly abandoned to disordered nature. Yet there can be no doubt that the gentile civilization was marked by extreme cruelty and inhumanity, of which it is hard for us to form a conception on our day, and which it is now easy to exaggerate, especially in the laws, institutions, and religions, or superstitions, and we agree with out author in the conviction he expresses, that the gentiles not seldom reach a depth of cruelty, and of moral degradation, of which even our unregenerate nature is incapable by itself alone, and which it reaches only under satanic influences.

The popular method just now the Protestants of attacking the church, is to assert that the nation who adhere to her are less advanced in civilization than those that have emancipated themselves from her authority, and adopted the reformation.  Against this method of attacking  the church, and drawing an inference in favor of Protestantism, the lamented Balmes wrote his popular work, comparing the influence of Catholicity with that of Protestantism on European civilization.  The excellent author endeavors to prove that under the influence of Catholicity, civilization had been constantly advancing from the sixth to the sixteenth century; and would, if permitted to continue its course, long ere this have reached a degree of perfection far beyond what it has now attained to in either Catholic or Protestant nation.  He looks upon Luther's movement as an interruption of the progress of civilization, and maintains that Protestantism, so far from advancing, has really retarded, and greatly retarded it.  Dr. Manahan says, in substance, suppose Protestant nation do not equal the great gentile nation of antiquity; and if the Protestant are superior to the gentile nation in the moral elements of civilization, it proves nothing in their favor, for they owe those elements to the Catholic Church, who was the first to introduce them, and whose active presence in the world, sustains and fecundates them among nations, originally trained by her, now outside of her communion. Moreover, as our Lord did not found his religion to promote mere material civilization, you can conclude nothing against that religion from the fact, if it be a fact, that your material civilization surpasses that of Catholic nations; and as the distinguishing badge of that religion is love manifesting itself in zeal for the moral well being of man, in beneficent acts or institutions fir the relief of the multifarious forms of human suffering, you cannot conclude any thing from her discredit, unless you can show these things you surpass Catholic states,--which you do not, and will not even pretend,--nor indeed even then; for all those things you have you owe to the influence of the church, to the habits formed when you were in her communion, or to the light which shines now even to you, as the light shines from the city set on a hill penetrates and relieves the darkness even beyond its walls.

The Protestant argument certainly proves too much for those Protestants who really mean to be Christians; for there is no doubt in mind of any man who has seriously studied the subject, that in the purely material order, the more renowned nations of antiquity surpassed any modern Protestant nation.  Neither Great Britain with all her colonial and other dependencies, and her immense naval and commercial marines, nor the United States with all their industrial activity, and all their vast extent of trade and commerce, can really match, in physical force and material greatness and splendor, ancient Rome, to the vast Asiatic empires that preceded the Roman; and neither has the science of agriculture, or the industrial arts by which it can maintain on the same extent of territory, with so little derived for their subsistence from abroad, so vast a population as that of modern China or Japan.  IF we may believe the glowing accounts of Japan, published by some of English who visited the capital with Lord Elgin, that empire is better policed than Great Britain, and the people more prosperous, better off, more contented and happy than the people of the United Kingdom, the first Protestant kingdom in the world.  The facts in the case, then, if the question is to turn on purely material civilization, prove Christianity false, and authorize us to conclude in favor either of ancient gentilism or of comparatively modern Buddhism.

It is remarkable how forgetful are our modern Protestants, especially of Great Britain and the United States.  What they find true of their respective countries to-day, what imagine has always been true of them.  If either has projected a good thing, they treat it as already adopted, and abuse all other nations who have  it not as laggards, as behind the age, as degraded and besotted by popery.  Great Britain speaks of the slave trade to-day, as if has never fought with Spain for the privilege of supplying, her colonies with slaves from Africa, and if slavery, as of she had never been a slaveholder, and as if she had not herself forced slavery upon our own country during our colonial dependence on the British crown,--of liberty, as if she had both enjoyed and upheld it, --of the administration of justice, as if she had never had a Scroggs or a Jeffreys, --of cruel laws and punishment, as if she had not had the worst criminal code in Europe, and had not been remarked among civilized nations for the wretched condition of her prisons, and the severity of her punishment.  One would think, to hear Englishmen talk, that England had always respected religious liberty, and had never subjected any man to civil pains and penalties for his religious belief, while even yet her statute-books are disgraced with penal laws against Catholics, which she refuses to repeal.  She is fierce for oppressed nationalities, --in Italy and Hungary, --but forgets that she holds subject to her sway more oppressed nationalities than any other European power; that she formed one of the league that prepared the way for the partition and suppression of Poland; that she has for a century and a half, been leagued with Austria is sustaining the miserable Ottoman empire in holding the oppressed Christian nationalities of the East in subjection.  Does she not hold Ireland, Malta, the Ionia Isles, or Septinsular Republic, in subjection, and yet has the effrontery to complain of Austria for holding Venice by virtue of a treaty to which she has herself a party.  All this she forgets.  She complains of the temporal government of the pope, and forgets that she was foremost among the powers that restored to him his temporal estates on the down fall for the first Napoleon.  We, in our way, are just as forgetful.  We forgot that we are but of yesterday, and that we owe our prosperity to the advantages of our position, and our freedom from the incumbrances of the Old World. We talk of liberty, and yet hold four millions out of thirty in slavery, and though declaring the slave trade piracy, and extensively engages in it; we boast of education, our free school, in which we are behind Prussia France, and Austria; we are great sticklers for universal education, and yet keep some four million in ignorance, forbid them by law to be taught even to read.  We are loud in our censure upon all Catholic states that do not place the sects on an equal footing with the church, and yet some of our states do not yet place the church on an equal footing with the sects before the law, and it is only since the formation of the federal government, that there has been any general recognition of religious liberty in the country.  We forget, too, that our experiment of a free government, if it has not failed, has, nevertheless, not yet fully succeeded.  It is still a doubtful experiment, and no man can study carefully the political evils of the country, and the manner in which we seek to remedy them, without seeing a strong probability, that here, as else-where, extreme democracy, by involving anarchy, must lead at no distant day to military despotism as the only practicable remedy.  We can no longer elect a first-class man to any important office; we can elect only the Polks, the Taylors, the Pierces, and Buchanans for president, and it would seem that at each successive election, we must descent yet lower and lower in the scale.  The government as a job, and even the material prosperity of the country does not correspond, and never has corresponded to the extraordinary advantages received from the hand of Providence.

We do not deny that with all its drawbacks, we hold the British and American political system the best in the world; but this system holds in its elements from the old Germanic system, which once prevailed over the greater part of Europe, and in its present form and developments in hardly a hundred years old.  We grant that at present the leading industrial and commercial nations of the world are Great Britain and the United States; but how long have they been so?  How long will they continue so?  Great Britain can date her preeminence only from 1763, and the United States only from 1848, the peace of Guadelupe-Hidalgo, at the conclusion of the Mexican war, by which we acquired New Mexico and California.  Before the peace of 1763, the superiority, even in material civilization, was on the side of Catholic Europe, as it may be again during the lifetime of some now living.  Austria is preparing to become a great maritime power; Italy and Greece are in a fair way of regaining their former commercial importance; Spain shows a wonderful recuperative energy, and is rapidly recovering her industerial and coercail importance; and should Great Britain in the next maritime war lose her naval supremacy, which France is even now in a position to dispute, she would lose her industrial and commercial supremacy.  We say not that it will be so; we say not that we even wish it to be so; but we do say stranger things have happened, and may happen again.  We have great confidence in the energy, in the strength, and the pluck of the English people; but no man can say the present position of Great Britain is not more or less precarious, and that she has not to struggle with formidable enemies, if not formidable odds to maintain it.  She may fall, as Tyre and Carthage, as fell Venice and Genoa, Spain and Portugal, Holland and Sweden, and if she does, what becomes of the Protestant argument?  An argument which has only a few years' support in the past, very little in the present, and may have none to-morrow, cannot have much weight with thinking men, or be urged with confidence in its conclusiveness.

If abstraction be made of all that directly or indirectly pertains to the moral order, we cannot be indisposed to award the superiority at the present moment to the non-Catholic nations of what is called Christendom.  We are willing to concede, also, that Catholicity does tend more than Protestantism in those who embrace it, to moderate devotion to the world, and the desire for mere material greatness and prosperity, and in out judgment it would not be worthy of the slightest respect, if it did not.  It would ill-deserve the love and veneration in which we hold it, if it placed no check on the ambition of princes, imposed no restraint upon the fraud and cupidity of traders, and did nothing to make Catholic populations fell that there is something besides this world worth living for, and that, after all, it is far more important to be rich in the virtues which eternal life than this world's goods.  "Blessed are the poor in spirit," and our Lord, and, "How hardly shall they who have riches be saved?  Verily, I say unto you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven."  It would be sad to think that words have no effect on Catholics, who believe them to be words spoken by God himself.  We should expect to find a Catholic population more engrossed with spiritual than with temporal things, and more anxious to make sure of heaven than of earth.  Nevertheless, in the purely material order, we are not prepared to say that Protestant nations owe  what superiority they have to their religion, save in so far as it leaves them free from all regard for heaven, and from all sense of moral obligation.  It is to the fate of wars, to the disasters of internal revolutions, and to the discovery of new routes of commerce, and other changes to which all nations are more or less liable, that we should ascribe it.

Not only had Dr. Manahan sought to give a briefer and more conclusive answer to the Protestant argument drawn from the comparison of civilization in Catholic, with that in Protestant nations, than the one given Balmes in his great work, but he has endeavored to account for the existence in Protestant states of that regard for the poor, the infirm, he afflicted, that you never find in gentile, or even Mahometan nations.  The mass of the Protestant world, no doubt, as regards the world to come, are very much in the condition of the ancient gentile nation.  They cannot be assumed to live in Christ, and to have the promise of the supernatural reward promised to the true Christian who perseveres to the end; they have, we must fear, forfeited, even in case they have been baptized, their birthright; or, like Esau, sold it for a mess of pottage.  But they retain their nature, as did the ancient gentiles, and are capable of the natural virtue, as all men are, or else we could not call them natural virtues.  Now in these Protestant nations we find a spirit of humanity, a generous sympathy with the unfortunate, a tenderness for the afflicted, a sentiment of justice, a respect for the rights of men and of nations, --if far below what they should be, --that we find in no accuse them of insincerity, of hypocrisy, or of acting by calculation from mere selfish motives?  Not at all.  We need  not suppose he English are wholly insincere in their opposition to slavery and the slave trade, although we need just as little suppose no pride or selfishness mingle much real disinterestedness in their efforts to improve legislation, to reform prison discipline, to diffuse generous sentiment, and defend the cause of popular freedom.  We may say as much of our own non-Catholic countrymen.  Alms-houses, public hospitals, houses for reformation, homes for friendless, societies for the relief of the poor, and the thousands and one other associations wisely or unwisely directed, effecting or not effecting these ends, founded and supported by our non-Catholic countrymen, are not mere calculations of interest; and they are, to a great extent, the offspring of disinterested tenderness, of genuine humanity.  True they are not, strictly speaking, Christian, and are no more than men can do, is they choose, by their own natural light and strength.  How happens it, that we find none of these things among the ancient gentiles?  Simply, our author maintains, because they are, though in the natural order, the effect to the education the modern nation have received from the church; modern civilization lies in the natural order, it is true, but even in non-Catholic nations within its pale, it is Catholic, in the sense that it has been developed and grown up under Catholic influences.  It has not indeed, been baptized and taken up into the supernatural order, but it has been fostered by the church, and moulded to a certain extent after her image, so that what in these nations themselves place them really in advance of the ancient gentiles, they owe to the church, and are most ungrateful when they boast it against her.  The argument is a good one.  Nature is the same in both, and if the modern Protestant surpasses the ancient gentile in, the nature moral order, as he undoubtedly does, he owes it, forhe can owe it to nothing else, to the changes in civilization effected by the church, to the new principles of love, tenderness, and humanity, developed by Catholicity even in human nature itself. 

On the other hand, the Catholics need not make war on the principle of these various philanthropic movements outside of the Catholic body, or any way oppose them, unless they take a direction hostile to rights and interests of Catholicity.  As the learned author has said elsewhere, "Nature is not good for nothing."  It is good for nothing by itself alone, without the grace of Christ, in reference to salvation, for in no sense can we by any natural virtue merit the grace of conversion.  The man who remains in the state of nature, unborn by the grace of regeneration into the supernatural order, has no more title to heaven if he keep than if he break every precept to the decalogue; and we cannot say that he is any more or less likely to receive that grace in the one case than in the other.  There is sometimes a disposition in now and than a Catholic, to regard those who have been brought by conversion into the church, in matute life, as having been in some way better to less sinful than those with whom they were brought up.  It may sometimes be so; and no one can regard his conversion in any sense as due ti his nature merit; yet a man who keeps in the main the whole law of nature, deserves less punishment than he who breaks it; and even if he die unconverted with suffer less, her he who has fewer actual sins to be punished for.  But in the order of nature, non-Catholics may perform works which, though they do not merit heaven, are good in that order, and ought never to be slighted by the Catholic.  More especially is this the case when, though they have rejected her authority, they have been under the tuition of the church, and are still more or less influenced by her example and he memory of her lessons.  In this fact, since nature, through below, is not, unless by abnormal development, against Catholicity, there is a basis of community of action between Catholics and non-Catholics, and so long as non-Catholics do nothing against the Catholics religion,  --that is to say, against the Christian supernatural order, --Catholics can cooperate with them in politics, in benevolent enterprises, and in works of philanthropy, if they see proper.  The benevolent association in our cities, for the relief of the poor, to supply food, clothing, and vice, if they respect the religion of Catholics, and do not seek to detach them from their faith; or, in case of children, do not aim to withdraw them from Catholic influences, and bring them up in a non-Catholic religion, --or in no religion at all, --may receive, without any violation of Catholic principle, that support of Catholics.  Unhappily we find, for the most part, in these associations more Protestant zeal than natural benevolence; or at least a feeling that it is necessary for their worldly respectability and well-being in this life to withdraw our children who need assistance from Catholic influences, and to prevent them from being brought  up in the religion of their parents.  This compels us often to assume towards them an attitude of hostility, when otherwise we would heartily join in them.

Still in nations that have once been Catholic, though now far gone in heresy, we find always a benevolence, a regard for human life, a tenderness towards the sick and infirm, a respect for the rights of the poorer and more numerous classes, that we find in no purely gentile nation, ancient or modern.  It is true we find as those nations remain longer outside of the Catholic community, and plunge deeper and deeper into heresy, they fall back nearer and nearer to the moral condition of the ancient gentile vices and crimes.  The old gentile leaven has never been entirely cast out of any Christian nation, for it has its source in our fallen nature, and is retained by our study of ancient learning, and our own profane literature; and in proportion as the counteracting influence of the church is withdrawn, it begins to ferment anew, and to produce the results we deplore in the ancient gentile world.  Still no nation, once Christian, has ever lost all tracer of the new order of civilization developed under the fostering care and influences of the church.  The immense superiority of the Christian population of the Ottoman empire to the Turks is apparent to the most careless traveller, and nothing deserves more the utter condemnation of all Christendom, than the policy of Great Britain and Austria, not to say France, of preventing them from liberating themselves from their infidel masters.  The worst nominally Christian sect is worth far more than the best pegan or Mahometan people--except in the eye of such statesmen as Lord Palmerston, and Lord John Russell.

It is not easy for us to give a complete analysis of Dr. Manahan's splendid volume, for the argument of the book and the lessons it inculcates are suggested rather than formally drawn out, and its great merit is in several pictures, sketches, aphoristic statements, elucidations of particular points in history, taken by themselves --in the variety of its views and suggestions, and in the influence it had on the mind and heart of the reader, rather than in regards as a whole, and as a work intended to maintain a single uniform thesis.  It is not, perhaps, so compact and well-jointed as it might be, in some respect, apparently fragmentary, its several parts will be found to produce a unity of effect, that of a deep and grateful sense of the world's indebtedness to Catholicity, even aside from the considerations of the world to come.  No man can read the work without feeling the profoundest gratitude to Almighty God for giving us the church, or without having quickened in him deep veneration for the holy and indefatigable men, who in all the early ages, led on by Peter, labored and struggled even unto death to secure her triumph over the barbarism, the cruelty, the licentiousness, the impurity, and the fearful and degrading superstition, combined with high literary and artistic culture, with rare military prowess, political majesty, and social refinement of the ancient Graeco-Roman empire; because, being the triumph of the Son of God incarnate over Satan, it was the triumph of humanity.  Its diligent reader will also find it manifest that all errors and heresies against the church, all the ancient and modern sects, are only so many attempts in one form to another of ignorant, conceited, or uneasy men, to return to gentilism and undo the work of Jesus Christ.  The part of the volume whence this comes out is to us the most original and striking part of the work.  The Catholic reilgion in substance is only the continuation, under other conditions of the patriarchal religion, save the patriarchal religion was a religion founded on the promise of things to be consummated and necessary to the perfection of the faith of the patriarchs, and Catholicity is a religion founded on fulfillment, on the actual consummation of the things promised in the patriarchal religion to be consummated.

As gentilism was departure or apostasy from the patriarchal, so is heresy a departure or apostay from the Catholic religion, and, therefore, the two are necessarily one in the same in essence. Let the heresy extend to the whole of Catholicity, what we call complete apostasy, and the non-Catholic world lapses into complete gentlism; and as ancient world descends with perfect rapidity not only from the supernatural to natural, but from the natural to the supernatural, or daemoniacal, so we see it doing  now in modern spiritism or daemon worship.  Catholicity is not a collection of separate and independent doctrines, but is an order, with its own unity and central life, and must necessarily be accepted or rejected as a whole.  He who rejects holy water denies the part of matter, therefore, of the body the flesh of our Lord in the work salvation, and, consequently, the whole principle and office of the humanity,  --indeed the very principle of mediation, on which Christianity itself rests.  Hence the reason why heresy, even in the slightest degree, if formal, has always been regarded by the Catholic with so much horror.  It involves, to whatever point it may attach itself logically, the rejection of the whole Catholic order, and the lapse of the world once more into gentilism.  Hersey is a sin against God; it is also a crime against humanity; and it is not the least among the proofs of the wide departure of this age from the Christian order of thought, that it sees in heresy, really such, only a harmless exercise of our natural reason, and holds that one of the strongest, objection to the church is, that she has branded it as a sin, and suffered the state to punish it as a crime against society.  Hence, too, the heroic efforts of Catholic saints, apostles, missionaries, and martyrs in every age to spread the true Catholic faith, to regain the heretic, and to convert the heathen, --efforts which fulfil, in the highest degree, the great law of charity; for in laboring for the conversion of a soul to the church, we show, in the most perfect manner possible, our love both God and to our neighbor.  Not a sight thing is heresy before God, for it gives him the lie, scorns his bounty, and forfeits heaven; not a slight thing is heresy before humanity, for it sends men back once more under gentile civilization, to a groan anew under all its horrors, its cruelties, its vises, and crimes, in which man falls wholly into the power of the evil one, and becomes the most miserable slave of Satan.

From the several points we have touched upon, and which are treated at greater or less length in the volume before us, our readers will at once perceive that the work is one of rare  interest, and full of important bearings on the principal controversies of the day, as we have endeavored to the state and describe them from the time  to time in the Review; but nothing we can possibly say will give the reader an adequate conception of the wealth of thought and learning of the volume itself, or of the fresh and original manner in which the author treats questions with which most of us had considered ourselves previously familiar.  The author's style is original, rich, and splendid, and in passages highly ornate and finished; and, under any point of view we can consider it, his book is the most important and valuable work, in what we hold to be the right direction, that any American Catholic writers has yet produced.  It does not do all that needs to be done, but it does one portion of the work that remained for the Catholic American scholar, and does it well.  It cannot fail to have a wide and salutary influence on our literature.   It directs thought and investigation into the right channel, and without being itself a controversial work, will do much to prepare out young athletae for the living controversies in which they will have to take their part, and wrestle for God and humanity, for truth and virtue, for liberty and order, for time and eternity.  It cannot fail to breathe into our literature a new spirit, to give it a modern air, and to prepare it to act in the world that is, on the present and the future, not merely on a past that is no more.  Literature should always be up to the age, be adapted to its wants, and fitted to exert a salutary influence in conformity with the church that never changes, any more than the invisible and immutable God, whose representative on earth she is.

We are that this volume has met with a very favorable reception from the Catholic public.  We are glad to hear it, not only because it deserves it for its own sake, but because it augurs well for our future literature.  Our Catholic population, as our booksellers can tell us, have not been remarkable for their readiness to encourage general literature produced by Catholics.  Purely devotional and ascetic worked meet, we believe, a ready sale, which speaks well for the piety of our people; but works to general literature, written by Catholics, and breathing a Catholic spirit, have treated with great indifference, much to the discouragement of Catholic authors and publishers.  A work by a Catholic author, not precisely devotional or ascetic, and appealing specially to no national sentiment, can reach in its sales, on an average, only about two thousand to twenty-five hundred copies in a Catholic population of two or three million.  Even Cardinal Wiseman's exquisite popular volume, Fabiola, with all his Eminence's reputation, and all its intrinsic, merits, has had a sale, we are informed, in this country, of not much over ten thousand copies, many of which must have been bought by non-Catholic.  Explanations of the fact, some creditable and some not creditable, to Catholics, may no doubt to given; but it us, nevertheless, a fact the our Catholic population do not feel, as we think they should, their obligations to encourage Catholic scholars and literary men to labor for the creation of a literature of our own, worthy of us and worthy of the country.  We have a population large enough, rich enough, and educated enough to sustain a national literature complete in all its parts, notwithstanding that a considerable number are not English-speaking Catholics.

We fear our Catholic population do not see and feel as they should, in a time and country like ours, the value of a Catholic literature, by which we mean a general literature produced by Catholic, and conforming, in tone and spirit, to Catholic truth and morality.  We Catholic are placed here by divine Providence, not merely to preserve and enjoy our own faith and worship for ourselves and our children; and indeed, if we think only of doing that, we shall not succeed in doing even so much.  The church, in all ages, is essentially propagandist, and whenever in any particular country she ceases to make converts, if there remain any convert, she ordinarily declines, and fails to keep even her numbers good.  In England and Wales, at the opening of the eighteenth century, more than one-third of the population still held the ancient faith; but before its close the Catholics were estimated at less than a hundred thousand.  The English people never became thoroughly Protestant, till the last century.  The church has a better status in England not that she had in 1745, but she counts by no means as meny English among her faithful children.  We have not, in this country, made any thing like the real advances we sometimes boast, and it is extremely doubtful is there are as many Catholics in the country as have migrated to it from Ireland, Great Britain, and the Continent.  We are building churches, many of them large, and highly creditable under the relation of arts; but if immigration, which is rapidly diminishing, should ceaee altogether, and nothing more be effected in the way of conversions than heretothere, men are now living who may see of them lack of congregations.  The most fatal sign of what a want of true Catholic life in any Catholic population is the little effort it makes for the conversion of non-Catholic.  This sign we show to this country.  Providence had placed us here to be a missionary people, and to make the Catholic country, and we shall have to account to him for its remaining in heresy.  It will not do for us of the laity to say to ourselves the conversion of the country is the work of our bishops and priests, and we have nothing to do it, for that is not true.  We have somtehing to do with it.  We must sustain our venerable bishops and priests, and cooperate with them.  We must second their charity and zeal, and aid them in the way they require.

Now, the great difficulty in the way of the clergy is, that they are too few, are overworked in taking care of those already Catholic, and have little strength and less to devote to the conversion of others.  Even if they had the time and strength, to labor directly for the conversion of the erring countrymen, how are they to do it?  How are they to approach them?  They cannot do it to any great extent from the pulpit, for few non-Catholic attend our churches, and little can they do by social intercourse, beyond, perhaps, softening a few prejudices.  The only way that the clergy, or any body else, car reach the mass of them, is through the press; and we can do it even through the press only on condition that our publications are of that high intellectual, scientific, literary, and moral character, that non-Catholics must read them, or remain behind the most advanced intelligence of the age.  In a foregoing article, we have argued the necessity of Catholic giving a cordial support to such controversial works as are adapted to the wants of the time; now we argue the necessity of their doing the same for works pertaining to science and general literature.  We must conquer the country, or dwindle into insignificance; and we can conquer the country only by mastering it on the side of intelligence.  We must humble its pride of intellect by proving that we are it intellectual superior, and we can prove this only by producing works intellectually superior to any Catholic can produce.  

Do not let us turn away from this question.  Is it no matter what our are present number, or what is the perfection of our organization; we cannot depend on migration from abroad to keep up our congregation and if we do not advance by conversion from the non-Catholic population, we shall, in a few years, begin to go back, and settle into a position, something like that of the Guebres among their Manhometan countrymen.  We must, on this point, give way to illusion.  If we have not life enough to act on the mind of countrymen, it may well be feared that we have not life enough to hold our own.  We have already neglected more than one golden opportunity and lost many of the advantages we had gained.  Instead of increasing, our moral influence is declining. In the calculations of politicians, and the policy of the country, and Trish and the Germans count for much; Catholics, as such, counts for nothing.  The deep interest felt a few years ago in our religion by intelligent non-Catholic Americans throughout the Union, appears to be felt no longer, and the American mind seems to have come to the conclusion, that the church, after all, is very much on a par with one of the sects, and hat Catholics are not much better or more to be relied on than Protestants, and we think there can be little question that we hold in public estimation so high a place as we did five or six years ago.  We state what we believe to be the fact.  We do no judge persons, or presume to offer any opinion as to the cause of this fact.  Much, certainly, may be said the fact remains still the same, and if there come on change for the better soon, we have only a gloomy outlook for the future; we have not a little to do to regain the advantage we have lost.  

Yet we are no means dishearted, and are very far from despairing of the future of Catholicity in this country.  But we must understand, and never forget, that we are here for a missionary people, and be always ready and prompt to avail ourselves of all lawful means to act on the mind, the intelligence of the American people.  We know as well as others, that conversion is the work of grace, and the human will cooperating therewith; we know that prayer is more effectual than argument, and preaching than writing; but we have a preparatory work to perform, that of removing prejudices, and exciting interest in the Catholic question.  We must now satisfy the world outside that our church is here and now a moral power, and the only living and productive moral power of the Union.  It is our duty, certainly, to trust to Providence and pray,but it will not be amiss, at the same time, as Cromwell said to his soldiers, to keep our powder dry. In this age kings and queens do not help on the work of conversion, and in this country the conversion of distinguished by it will not be amiss, at the same time, as Cromwell said to his soldiers, to keep our powder dry.  In this age kings and queens do not help on the work of conversion, and in this country the conversion of distinguished individuals does not secure that of the people. We can here, in the preparatory work we speak of, operate only by intelligence on intelligence, and by surpassing in their own sciences and on their own ground or non-Catholic countrymen. We must not run away with the notion that a Catholic priest must never try his hand at polite literature, or that a Catholic layman must never do anything but place on the table a rehash of the controversial tracts of a prior age.  We must feel that we are a people, a Catholic nation, and labor to supply real national literature that will live, and compete with any of the great nation literature of ancient or modern times.  Not that literature is our only want, or, indeed, our most urgent want; but it is one of our wants, and a much more urgent want at present than it was formerly, when the mass of the people relied on oral instruction, not on reading.  

The demand in literature, as in every thing else, creates a supply, and every Catholic who has the means, it seems to us, should make it a point to place a copy of every work is not repugnant to faith and morals, and has the least literary merit.  If this were so, we should find that we have no lack of mental activity, literary genius, or true scholarship.  Now little is produced because there is little demand, and literary labor brings the author little or no remuneration.  Many a book if vast utility would be written, were it not that, if written, it could find no publisher, or, if published find few purchaser.  Ever man must live by his profession or his trade, and if he cannot he must abandon it.  Light trashy works, supplying the place of solid meritorious works, except in one or two departments, if written and published, would lie on the bookseller's shelves or go to the trunk makers.  No doubt, the newspaper is in the way; no doubt the popular and corrupting non-Catholic literature of the day supplies, to some extent, the market that should be reserved to the Catholic author; but still the great obstacles is in the carelessness and indifference of the great body or our Catholic population, nowhere more marked than in this same city of New York, where literature is at heavy discount alike with Catholics and non-Catholic, and little is read but morning paper.  The Catholic population of this city alone ought to absorb six or seven thousand copies of any respectable Catholic publication, while they, in fact, absorb rarely as many hundreds of the most popular Catholic works.

We speak plainly, perhaps some will say impudently, but Catholics have a conscience, and can bear to be told their faults by one who they know loves and respects them.  Their neglect in respect of Catholic literature, is with them chiefly a matter of oversight, and it is only necessary to call attention to it, for them to remedy it.  There is always one comfort in dealing with Catholic population, that we never have in dealing with non-Catholic population.  They may on a variety of matters entertain wrong notions, and fail in doing the right thing at the right time; but we find them generally acting from good motives, and amenable to reason.  They do many things, which, in our judgment, are not for the best interests of religion; but convince them that it really is so, and they will at once labor to correct their error.  In no country in the world do Catholics love thier religion more than in the Uhited States, and nowhere are they prepared to make greater sacrifices, --pecuniary sacrifices at least, --for it.  To a great extent strangers in this country, they may not once understand, or properly adjust themselves to their new position, or comprehend what their religion here requires of them; but let them clearly understand that what you say to them is prompted by zeal for religion, and what you ask is really demanded by interests of Catholicity, and their ears listen, and their hearts open to you, and your cause is won.  There are other great claims on them than literature, but we have endeavored to show that literature, however, has claims, and that it interest is one of the pressing interest we should without neglecting other and more pressing interests, seek to promote,  We have no fears that they will not give the subject the attention it deserves. With a few more church publications as the one before us, there will be no further occasion to refer to the subject.  There will spring up a taste for reading, a demand for literary excellence, and our authors will find as audience not only "fit," but large.  Such works, too, will tend much to promote harmony among us, mould us into a homogeneous people, and to put an end to the petty disputes and frivolous controversies, and personal altercation and denunciations in which we have been prone to indulge.  We thank the author for his book, and the Catholic public for cordial reception they have given, and will continue to give it.  May we have many more equally worthy.