THE LIFE OF BISHOP DUPANLOUP.*

THE son of the Annecy bourgeois who was to become Bishop of the fairest See in France, thus describes his first confession at St. Sulpice "When I saw M. de Keravenant come into the confessional

my heart beat so fast that I thought I should never have the courage to go in. But I did, and knelt in my place. He was most kind and fatherly so that I went away as happy as a king. I remember so well that day the joy I felt when I went to my usual game at the Luxembourg. Never had I been so light and active or so successful in my runs ; my companions little knew the secret of my success. Everything went well with me after that."

Sixteen years later, in 1831, Gregory XVI. received the Abbe Dupanloup at Rome with the words," Tu es apostolus juventutis." The fervour of the boy foreshadowed the sustained, but never strained, enthusiasm of the man, and in the kindly address of the Pope was struck the key-note of his active life. At the age of twenty-one, he was the head catechist at St. Sulpice, the foremost seminary in France, where Boniver, Petetol, the future founder of the Oratory, and Lacordaire were among his fellow- teachers, and to the day of his death he continued to be, by temperament and preference, an instructor of his kind, before all things an infinitely patient and loving guide and preceptor of youth. With sacerdotalism he was never in very cordial sympathy; no monastic asceticism withdrew him from the work

• The Life of Monseigneur Dupanloup, Bishop of Orleans. By the A.bb6 Lagrange. Translated by Lady Herbert. 2 vols. London: Chapman and Hall.

of the world or the society of men ; and he viewed religion as a part of daily life, as its most important part, inseparable from it without destroying its true humanity. His biography reads like a panegyric; nor could it be otherwise, for the Bishop of Orleans was, with some differences impressed by the circum- stances of the age, the Fenolon of the ninteenth century.

In 1837 he was entrusted with the direction of the Little Seminary of St. Nicholas, and the eight years during which he occupied that position were probably the happiest, as they were the most fruitful, of his life. Education was to him no mere routine task, it was a labour of love for which his extraordinary sympathy with the young peculiarly fitted him. No mere schoolmaster or professor could have exercised the tender care described in the following extract, quoted by his biographer from the Bishop's Recollections :—

" I remember that it was always at the beginning of new year, when the fresh boys came in for their first term, that these thoughts [that he ought to be father and mother to them] engrossed me. Daring those first days, when their hearts were full of recollections of home, the sadness of our old house, the four walls which surrounded our great court, even the solitude of the garden, where they found neither father, nor mother, nor brothers, nor sisters, nor any familiar face,—all this strangeness and exterior appearance of captivity made them insensible to any expressions of affection, and even to all the little pleasures I tried to procure for them. They liked to remain alone, even during recreation ; they did not care to talk either to their masters or their companions ; and heavy sighs burst from their lips from time to time, with something very like a sob. These poor children used to fill me with an intense pity, which I cannot express. I longed to be both father and mother to them. Very often I did not dare to speak to them myself, but sent them to play with the best and nicest of our children, some of whom were called the angels of the new-comers.' Do schoolmasters ever reflect upon the keen pain endured by boys in hours like these ?"

Very few, we fear, must be the answer to the closing query. M. Renan, in his recent Recollections—he was a pupil of the Abbe's at St. Nicholas, thus writes of him :—" The truth is, he was an incomparable rouser of all our faculties ; no one equalled him for eliciting from every one of the students the summunt that was in him." His method was to train the character and the intellect concurrently and equally,—not simply, as his biographer well puts it, to instruct the boy, but to educate him. Authority was not so exercised as to become constraint, but so as to awaken respect and devotion "As long as I have anything to say to education," he wrote, "I will respect human liberty in the smallest child what a teacher does by himself is little ; what he induces his pupil to do freely is everything." No wonder there was nothing dismal about St. Nicholas, as M. Renan tells us.

The Abbe Dupanloup himself was never tired of recalling the gaiety that reigned in his seminary,—not usually a place associated with light-hearted frolicsomeness. "I never saw any set of young fellows," he wrote long afterwards, "more gay, joyous, and happy than our students at the Little Seminary nor in better health."

This genial and ample humanity, this respect for the rights of others, this delicate and tender abstention from every kind of moral or intellectual tyranny or dogmatic harshness, this preference of persuasion to mere logic, coupled with his untiring industry, his unwearied activity, his eloquence and practical wisdom, and his ready and resourceful intellect, made him as loved and revered and successful a leader of men in his later life as he had been an educator of youth in his earlier days. In the larger sphere opened to his energies by his elevation to the See of Orleans in 1850, he displayed precisely the same qualities that had made the name of the Vicar of St. Roeh, the Director of St. Nicholas, and the Canon of Notre Dame the most famous on the roll of the Galliean Church—to which, in truth, he belonged in the stricter sense of the expression—of the nineteenth century. Averse from all bigotry and violence, he incurred, of course, the wrath of bigots and extremists, who, however, could invent no charge against him worse than that of latitudinarianism, of which, after all, he was not in the least guilty. For the subtleties of theology he had little taste, and could never, therefore, be driven into vindictive polemics. The doctrines of his Church he held without a shadow of doubt ever having crossed his mind, and though they were to him the only possible foundation of a complete and good life, he took neither a bitter nor a desponding view of the attitude and con- dition of his non-Catholic fellow-men. What he held as truth was so clearly such to him, that if men did not accept it, it was simply because they had not been led to think it out for them- selves,—it needed neither demonstration nor illustration. The turn of his mind, indeed, was not analytic ; he depicted and described, rather than explained, and drew his hearers to his side not by arguments, but by clear, forcible, and picturesque exposi- tions of his opinions.

One rather singular feature of his episcopal work was the business-like way in which he went about it. He was a man of the world in the best sense of the expression,—that is, he never shirked his humanity ; be recognised to the full his kinship with men, as did the Chremes of Terence, and despised no method of accomplishing the task he had accepted merely because it was of a mundane character. A good scholar, he had recognised the value of the classics as a means of training the mind, and done his best to restore in the seminaries the long-neglected study of Greek. As a Bishop, he soon saw that to make his work effectual, it was necessary that he should know and be kept informed of the exact spiritual condition of his diocese. To this end, he enjoined his clergy to collect the spiritual statistics of their parishes, and every cure' was required to fill up a plated form, called, in canonical language, statics aainzarunt, which was to contain the name, age, &c., of each parishioner, his religious history, and the religious history of the parish. The clergy responded with an alacrity that testifies to his influence over them. In one parish, the cure wrote down with his own band the particulars and history of each of his two to three thousand parishioners, a prodigious labour, which caused the Bishop to exclaim, "0 my Lord, thou also must have written in thy book, which is the book of life, the name of this zealous pastor !"

Bishop Dupanloup was no politician. He was a Legitimist, or, rather, a Fusionist ; but there was too strong a vein of Liberalism in him to permit of his being a very ardent supporter of either Henry V. or the Comte de Paris. The Pope and his temporal power he defended with vigour, but 'without acrimony. Without being uncharitable, one may suspect that his defence, at all events of the temporalities of the Papacy, was in great measure official. The doctrine of infallibility he no doubt dis- liked. It is true be always averred that he opposed not the doctrine itself, but the opportuneness of the time chosen for its erection into a dogma. The distinction, however, is more apparent than real, and a dogma of such a rank must be independent of times and seasons, persons and places. It was as an educationist that he took part interest in politics. To him, education without religion was not education at all, but merely instruction. Here he got hold of, and held fast to, a great truth. Whatever may be the importance of a knowledge of the

composition of the atmosphere, the resolution of forces, the circulation of the blood, or the conjugation of verbs in Izt, the feeling of duty is an infinitely more important element in the building-up of the mind, soul, or character. And an the Bishop knew—or, rather, perceived—only one religion, the Catholic faith, he necessarily made it the foundation of all real education. He was therefore opposed to secular educe- tion,—not to secular instruction ; on the contrary, he advo- cated it warmly even in the seminaries, and was on that account a persona ingratissinta to the Ultramontanes. The Jesuits he distrusted, while his connection with the Ultra- montanes was mainly, as we have said, official ; and his respect for the individual made him equally the opponent of compulsory education. He preferred on almost all ques- tions persuasion to compulsion, even compulsion by logic. His theory was that the child should be got to respect and love his teacher, and thus willingly accept his authority and follow his direction. And he would have had the grown man in like manner accept the Church, and be obedient to its teach- ing. The theory was justifiable in his case, since he believed the Catholic Church, and the Catholic Church alone, to be possessed of the truth in relation to dogma which is above reason, and therefore in relation to morals, with which dogma is inextricably bound up. Among his opponents, including Jules Simon himself, who has become as strong an advocate of religions teaching as the Bishop of Orleans ever was, the only arguments that could possess validity were such as the Secularists found to combat his dogma with, and such as the Jesuits were able to direct against his humanity. His main premisses granted, the Bishop was consistent and impregnable on the whole in his logic.

The one episode in his life that we cannot admire was the share he took in the celebrated death-bed conversion of Talley- rand. The story is related in great detail in these volumes, and does not, in our opinion, redound to the credit of any one concerned. 'Monseigneur Affie and the Bishop Dapanloup

appear to have been influenced rather by a desire of winning a triumph over Voltaireanism, than by that of saving a mere human soul. To compass this victory, methods were used which, if not disingenuous, were far too worldly, to say the least, to serve so solemn and sacred a purpose as that of rescuing a soul on the brink of perdition from its impending doom. We doubt whether Catholics consider a repentance valid into which the sinner is alarmed or inveigled. The ci-devant Prince-Bishop, the revolutionary trimmer, the Imperial courtier, and the Royalist Minister, faithful to no party, creed, or code, whose whole life had been spent in the pursuit of self-aggrandisement and pleasure, undirected by any principle and undisturbed by any scruple, was not only a sinner of a peculiarly heinous kind in the eyes of the Church, but a very contemptible personage into the bargain. In addition, his repentance bore every mark of insincerity. He required the act of repentance to be drawn up in writing, and was as particular about its phraseology as if he had been dealing with a mortgage-deed. He would not sign, though repeatedly pressed to do so, until the very last moment. He kept it by him, although he knew he had but a few hours to live, till he could hardly hold a pen. Then he signed it, his ante-chambers crowded as at a levee, fell into a lethargy, from which he rallied once or twice, and expired. Nor does the document read like an act of repentance, but rather as a vindication of his political conduct relative to the Catholic Church. In fact, it was a diplomatic despatch addressed to posterity.

The private character of Bishop Dupanloup was wholly admirable. His life was perfectly free from all stain of pride, bigotry, or self-seeking. He cared nothing for pomp or luxury. His love of children, his tender benevolence, his unbounded charity, would have excused a thousand faults. But his enemies could find in him no faults, they could only wage war with his opinions. He was not exactly humble, but he was modest. Montalembert and Lacordaire loved him. M. Renan never mentions his name without enthusiasm. He had every priestly virtue and no sacerdotal vice. His culture was of a kind excep- tional in France, and this, with his gaiety of disposition and frank address, gave his conversation a peculiar charm unforgettable by those who once felt it.

Defunctus ad/inc loguitur is the motto on the title-page of this biography, and in these admirably written volumes the great Bishop lives again. The task has been a labour of love for the Abbe Lagrange, who was Vicar. Generalof his diocese, and has been executed with the fidelity of a friend, the conscientiousness of a historian, and the literary faculty which seems native to a Frenchman. Long as the biography is, it cannot be said to contain a dull page. Lady Herbert, too, deserves praise for her translation. Here and there a page requires revision, but the version is free from obscurity, and smooth and animated throughout.