BOOKS.

FATHER LACORD AIRE.* Tnrs great reviver of the Dominican Order in the most modern nation of modern times,—the nation to whom "the new era" confessedly owes its birth and its regulative ideas,—said, with that

careless pungency of 'phrase in which the French eloquence so far• surpasses the English, "The rule of St. Dominic has nothing

ancient about it but its history ; and we do not see any necessity of torturing our minds for the simple pleasure of dating from yesterday." Yet that, certainly, will not be the feeling with which Englishmen in general will lay down this remarkable book. Here, indeed, is a Frenchman who but fifteen years ago was amongst us, when the first great Glass Palace was still standing in Hyde Park, listening to the irritated feelings of English Catholics chafed by the battle of the Churches and Lord John Russell's Durham Letter ; who not seven years ago was taking his seat in the French Academy for his services to modern literature, and piously hoping that this spontaneous homage of French intellect to a mendicant friar might prove some com- pensation for the victory of Cavour and Cialdini over Antonelli and Lamoriciere; whose eloquence is undoubtedly saturated with the political ideas of modern France, and whose ortho- doxy even was called in question because he sympathized so strongly, in spite of himself, with that anti-Erastiau tendency which is now bewildering us in England, and threatening the Papal See with an end to that Temporal Power for which it has fought so tenaciously to the very last ; —but who, nevertheless, in spite of his modern intellectual tone, and the few modern political ideas in which his mind was steeped, would excite in most of the English readers of this biography, even though they were already intimately acquainted with our English Catholic literature, a disposition to rub their eyes, and ask themselves whether they had been dreaming of the thirteenth century, or reading of the nineteenth. The life of Lacordaire reads certainly much more like the life of St. Dominic, than it reads, so far as most Englishmen know them, like the life of Dr. Newman or Cardinal Wiseman. Though, as we have shown, there would be exaggeration in saying that it has nothing modern about it except its date,—that is much nearer the impression actually made upon us than the impression which Father Lacordaire himself entertained, that he held the true key of modern progress. St. Paul reads like a modern compared either with St. Dominic or Lacordaire. The apostle's struggles against authority, his vin- dication of the moral and intellectual freedom of Christian liberty, are centuries nearer to our modern tone than the great French Dominican's letters -to his friends. But we will strive to place Lacordaire before our readers as he appears in this interesting and though rather diffuse, still most fascinating life, and afterwards point out what it is which seems to divide him by such a vast chasm from the life of to-day.

Lacordaire was born in 1802,. educated at Dijon, where he ceased for a time to be a Christian, to the sorrow of his widowed mother, who was herself a devout Catholic, and was brought up for the Bar. At the age of twenty, under the Bourbon regime, he went to Paris, where his eloquence in Court obtained him some notice from M. Seguier, the first president,' who said prophetically of him, "Gentlemen, this is not Patru ; it is Bossuet." M. Seguier meant probably that the style of his eloquence was not that of Courts of Justice, but marked by that austere, ethical intensity which belongs to the imagination of theologians, rather than to the imagination of the bustling world ; that the fire burnt its way inward, instead of

* The Inner Life of the Very Reverend Pere Lacordaire, of the Order of Preachers. Translated' from the French of the Rev. Phre Chocarno, OP., with the Author's Permission, by a Religions of the same Order, with Preface by the Very Rev. Father Aylward, Prior Provincial of England. Dublin: Kelly. London: Simpkin, Marshall, and Co.; and Burns and Oates. playing with lambent vivacity round outward signs and tokens. Bossuet's was a mind far more disposed to live in the gorgeous scenery of grand intellectual forms and dogmas than Lacordaire's. Indeed, it was always the mark of M. Lacordaire's character, that all his deepest feelings, like moral caustic, burnt inward, so that he complained from the beginning of life to the end that even the deepest friendships he knew led him not into society, but into solitude, and were brightest and clearest only when he was not in direct intercourse with those who were the object of them. His friends accused him of reserve, coldness, and silence, such as "no one carried to so audacious an excess as himself." And he himself explained this later in life, in the following characteristic passage :— " Solitude draws us together as much as a crowd separates us. This is why there is so little real intimacy in tho world, whereas men who are accustomed to live in solitude dig their affections deep. I have never lived with people of the world, and it is with difficulty that I can put any faith in those who live in a sea where one wave presses against another without any of them acquiring consistency. The best of mon are losers by this continual friction, which, while it rubs off the asperi- ties of the soul, at the same time destroys its power of forming any strong attachment. I believe solitude is as necessary to friendship as it is to sanctity, to genius as to virtue."

Before his ' conversion ' and his entrance into the seminary of St. Sulpice to study for the priesthood, Lacordaire seems to have passed the only really unhappy part of his life. His imagination was of a kind which sapped the brilliancy of the world, instead of enhancing it. "I. am satiated with every- thing," he wrote, "without having known anything." He described this kind of early melancholy later on in life in words singularly beautiful and characteristic of his tempera- ment. " Hardly have eighteen summers," he said, "shed their light upon our lives, when we begin to suffer from desires which have for their object neither love, nor the senses, nor glory, nor anything with a form or a name The young man feels himself oppressed by aspirations which have no aims ; he escapes from the realities of life as from a prison where his heart is stifled, and he asks from all that is vague and visionary, from the evening clouds, from the autumn winds, from the falling leaves of the forest, for some feeling which, while it wounds, may also satisfy the heart. But it is in vain ; the clouds pass, the winds are hushed, the leaves fade and wither, without telling him why he suffers, and without satisfying his soul any more than his mother's tears and his sister's tenderness have done." Lacordaire began first to find peace when be gave way to this lonely passion of the solitary for finding the key to everything in God, —underatandiug, of course, by God, not the wide and varied life of creative energy, but the spiritual breath which consumes the soul with a longing for uncreated beauty and for a purity whose touch is fire. A month or two before he entered the seminary where he was to be prepared for the priesthood he wrote, " Yes, I believe! bow is it that my friends do not understand me ? How is it that they still doubt and ridicule my religious conversion ? Can I be the only man who is in earnest ? for nobody understands me." And he had to repeat the complaint after he entered the Church as often as before. At St. Sulpice the priests did not understand him. They saw nothing of the good, prosy, moralizing clergy- man about him, and mistook the wild flights of spirits which were the counterpoise of his consuming enthusiasm for levity of disposition. On his first arrival at the seminary his gaiety and joyousness of manner was so marked that his companion, a young barrister, who was troubled at Lacordaire's change of life, was mistaken for the candidate for the priesthood, and he himself put down as the man of the world. Then, as a theologi- cal student, he waged war against the square cap of the college, and once tossed some of them into the fire. The worthy old sacerdotal dons were shocked at such ebullitions of vivacity, and when he began to preach college sermons out of the intensity of his own imaginative life, instead of according to the stereotyped formulas, they took alarm, and delayed his ordination much beyond the usual time. Still, he was happier at St. Sulpice than ever he had been at the Bar, because he had given way to the natural genius of his nature, and was turning towards the true focus of his life, in- stead of away from it. His mind seems to have made but one spring from his former sceptical state to the infallibility of the Catholic Church. There is little trace that Lacordaire ever discriminated for a moment between the supernatural revelation of Christ, and the supernatural organization to which he supposed that revelation to have been committed. In truth, as he himself tells us, he always approached the truth of Christianity from the social aide. What he craved and looked for in it, was a regenerative power for human society ; and in the Catholic Church, he saw a force at once so stately, and so ancient, and so penetrated, in its highest form, by the

burning spirit of self-immolation which he had taught himself to consider the essence of the Gospel, that it never seems even to have occurred to him to believe in Christ and doubt the Church. He never sought for 'the religion of common life.' From the first he held that the Church should exhibit in her priesthood something infi- nitely deeper than the religion of common life,—by the overflow and superabundance of which common life might be leavened and kept within moral and Christian bounds. The life of the priesthood, as being nearer to the vital flame of the divine sacrifice, appeared to him as much better than the life of Christian laymen, as he afterwards seemed to hold that the life of the regular religious orders,—the monastic life,—was (for him at least) better than that of the secular clergy. Ile always spoke of himself as entirely unfitted by nature for the ties of parochial duty. There was something not so much humble,—for Lacordaire, like many of the old founders of religious Orders, was, we think genuinely, but at all events almost insatiably and ferociously humble,—but humdrum, in the duties of a village cure, which did not satisfy the burning passion of his religious ardour. The monastic religious orders have always, since the first ages of the Catholic Church, supplied (in more senses than one) the flame to the zeal of the secular clergy, just as the secular clergy have supplied it again to the "dim, common populations." Lacordaire, in his ardent longing for the inmost intensity of the life of divine self-sacrifice, passed through the Catholic priesthood as a mere stage in the journey towards the ascetic zeal and divine poverty' of the life of the Dominican friars. "You ask me what I am doing," he wrote once to a friend, in the first year of his ordination ; "I dream, think, read, and pray ; I laugh two or three times a week, and once or twice, perhaps, I weep. From time to time I get in a passion with the University [in which he was assistant- chaplain], which is certainly the most insufferable daughter of royalty that I know." One could almost predict from that sen- tence that Lacordaire. would, either by heretical paths, like his first master, De la Mennais, or by the appointed outlet for Catholic enthusiasm, the monastic orders, burst through the ordinary routine of the hierarchical life, into something intenser and more personal. He was offered soon after leaving the seminary the office of Auditor of the Rota at the Court of Rome, an office at once conferring the title of Monsignore, and which is always a step to the episcopate, and often to a Cardinal's hat. Lacordaire declined it peremptorily and without a moment's consideration. The worldly and political side of the Church repelled the consuming religious pas- sion of his nature. Even at that early period he replied, "I shall probably become a religious," as in fact he did. And the first public era of his life, that of his co-operation with M. de la Men mds in the conduct of L'Avenir,—the newspaper which advocated the Free- Church doctrine, the repudiation at once of State protection and State aid, —was in fact only the ebullition of his passionate horror of worldly compromises in religious life. Lacordaire was never really so magnificent in eloquence as he was in the pages of this vivid and proud sacerdotal paper. The intensity of scorn with which he described the doling out by the State of the old Church revenues to the Church at the price of all her self-respect and independence, has been rarely equalled by any living orator. He had at this time no respect at all for the State,—regarding the Church as the true root of all order, both temporal and spiritual. He could not endure the humiliating attitude of pensioner which the Church, receiving only a part of what he believed to be her own property, assumed. "Just imagine a debtor," he said, "who, meeting his creditor, should fling a few coins into the mud, saying, Go and work, you idle rascal, go and work.' Yet this is how our enemies treat us, and it is now thirty years and four months since we have been contented to stoop down and pick up the money :"— " ' Catholic priests ! the question is of your blood, a thing we cannot despise. We are as poor as you; our only salary is our independence. We know nothing more of to-morrow than this, that Providence will rise much earlier than the sun. How, indeed, could we treat the blood of our brethren with indifference ? Their people is our people, their God our God, their life is ours, and more to us than our own. But we deeply feel your state of servitude, and we believe that poverty is a hundred times more honourable than the insults of a prefect or the ruin of the Church. Have men ever been treated with greater contempt? They ridicule your prayers, and then order you to sing them. If you do not obey, you are seditious men to whom, of course, the treasury is closed ; and if you do obey, you become so vile in their eyes that lan- guage has no terms to express what they think of you. And yet all the while the only relation in which they stand to the Church is that of her debtors !—Catholic priests ! we, for our part, protest against this martyr- dom of disgrace. So long as we have breath we shall call heaven and earth to witness that we are pare from the blood which they are draw- ing drop by drop from your veins. Some among you may hate us if they will, they may accuse us of drawing down misery on their heads. Some day, perhaps, we shall go forth into the World with their maledie- tior, a little foreign earth will cover our despised ashes, but at the hour of Lwakening we trust that God will find in our bones that love for you that will never have been extinguished.'"

That was the kind of teaching which alarmed the Papal See, and ultimately brought down upon De la Mennais, Montalembert, and Lacordaire the condemnation of Rome. Lacordaire's bond _rule retractation of course drew upon him not only estrangement from his master, whose intellectual philosophy he had never really adopted, and whose retractatiou was never more than formal, but the reproach of worldliness. It was due in reality, however, to a precisely opposite cause. His heart was identified with the cause of the Church, and only his intellect with the Free-Church theory. "Do not let us chain our hearts to our ideas," he said quite earnestly : and he evidently felt the delight in submission- which always accompanies a sacrifice of self for something one thinks higher and better than self. He thought he had detected a pride of systematic philosophy in the views of his master, De is Mennais, and this had, he said, often galled and fretted him. He believed that the Church in condemning De la Mennais and his school had delivered him (Lacordaire) "front the most terrible of all oppressions, that of the human intellect,"— and henceforth, though tender and respectful to his master in the adversity of Papal disfavour, he really loved the Church the better for having humbled himself before her decision, just as be would have loved God better for having bowed his own self-will to thee divine volition. The Church, he held, was higher than his in- tellect. His spirit, he fancied, had gained in vital power by humbling his own intellect before the mind of the Church.

And from this time forward, Lacordaire's "inner life" is a story of the inward progress of his self-humiliations—self-crucifixions, as he called them—measuring them by the standard of our Lord's sufferings. In the midst of his oratorical success as a great preacher at Notre Dame, he suddenly broke off his " conferences " in 1836, and hurried away to Rome, fearing his own popularity, believing, as he afterwards said, that he was not yet ripe for the task, and anxious "to be alone with his own weakness and with God." It was at this. time, in his thirty-fifth year, that he first seriously entertained the

idea of restoring some one religious order in France, and that his thoughts turned towards that of the Domiuican friar-preachers, He believed that in the complete self-sacrifice of the monk, in the absolute life in God to which he gave himself up, was the true source of a new life for human society. If Christ's self- sacrifice was the source of human redemption, the Orders which

set forth that self-sacrifice most perfectly to the world contained the true life-blood of the world, and henceforth his life and that of his followers became one long passion of self-immolation, in which the spirit was trained by the sharpest voluntary penances to regulate every inward movement by the ideal of Christian humility or humiliation. What Lacordaire's biographer reverently calls "holy follies" were of daily occurrence. 'Will you,' he said one day on the Campagna to his disciple, Pere Besson, 'suffer something for the sake of Him who has suffered so much for us?' and showing him a thorn bush, they both at once pre- cipitated themselves into it, and came out covered with blood Howthis was suffering for Christ's sake' Lacordaire does not explain. But he seems to have thought that all suffering, needless or needful, voluntary or involuntary, was a lesson in love for Christ. "All his mysticism," says his biographer, "reduced itself to this one principle, to suffer ; to suffer in order to expiate justice, and in order to prove love." And henceforth his life as a monk was a burning fire of religious passion and penance, all intended to teach him, as he thought, to enter more deeply into crucified love :—

"His thanksgiving after mass was generally short ; in snaking it be most often experienced very ardent emotions of love to God, which be went to appease in the cell of one of his religious. He would enter with his countenance still radiant with the holy joy kindled at the altar ; then humbly kneeling before the religious, and kissing his feet, be would beg him to do him the charity of chastising him for the love of God. Then he would uncover his shoulders, and whether willing or unwilling, the brother was obliged to give him a severe discipline. He would rise all bruised from his knees, and remaining for a long time with his lips pressed to the feet of him who had scourged him, would give utterance to his gratitude in the most lively terms, and then withdraw with joy on his brow and in his heart. At other times, after receiving the discipline, he would beg the religious to sit down again at his table, and prostrating on the ground under his feet, he would remain there for a quarter of an hour, or half an hour, finishing his prayer in silence, and delighting himself in God, as be felt his head under the foot that humbled him. These penances were very often renewed, and those who were chosen to execute them did not resign themselves to the office without difficulty, it was a real penance to them, especially at first ; they would willingly have changed places with him. But gradu- ally they became used to it and the Father took occasion of this to require more, and to make them treat him according to his wishes. Then they were obliged to strike him, to spit in his face, to speak to him as a slave. Go and clean my shoes ; bring me such a thing ; away with you, wretch!' and they had to drive him from them like a dog. The religious whom he selected to render him these services were those who were most at their ease with him ; and he returned by

yteference to such as spared him the least. His thirst for penances of this description appears the more extraordinary, from the fact that his exceedingly delicate and sensitive temperament rendered them insup- portably painful to him."

To us this sounds like the rehearsal of an unreal moral tragedy, a rehearsal which must have done far more to bewilder the minds of those who were guilty of these artificial, cruel, and unmeaning in- sults to one they loved and revered, than to deepen his own love for his Lord. But in scenes like these were fostered the roots of his life as a Dominican friar, and as he treated himself, so he treated his penitents. This was his policy with a young layman whom he be- lieved to be called to the life of a monk, but who had not had the strength to put the fascinations of the world behind him :— " He [Lacordaire] paused, then with still greater animation he continued, "Would you know what God demands of you? Would you know what that religious life to which He calls you really is ? It was for this that I sent for you here; tell me, do you desire this ?'—' Yes, my father, I do ilesire it!'—' Well, then, in the name of Jesus Christ, my child, on your knees !'

On my knees, my father-?' replied the young man' in consternation, unable to guess how this strange scene was going to end.—' Yes ; on your knees ! prepare yourself to suffer for the salvation of your soul, and for the sake of God !' So saying, he took in his hand a discipline of leathern thongs, and coming up to the poor victim who knelt there amazed and trembling, he began to strike without pity on his bare shoulders. His pride was vanquished, the flesh was mastered, and the will set at 'liberty ; and the youth who, a moment before at the *first touch of the scourge, felt ready to rise with wrath and shame on his brow, now humbled under what he acknowledged to be the Hand of God, gave thanks with tears in his eyes, and blessed his benefactor, and after- wards declared that this hour had been the most sacred in his whole life, inasmuch as it had decided his vocation and triumphed over his weakness. Never,' he himself protested, had I felt before such con- trition for my sins, never had I seen more clearly what God demanded of me, or felt more courage to embrace it.'" Throughout his life, as we said at the commencement of our article, we see the spirit less of a modern Catholic thinker, than of a medim- val monk. Lacordaire was a solitary by nature. His eloquence grew out of solitude. His spiritual passion for perfection was nursed in solitude. All there was of nobleness and all there was of weak- ness in him was due to this intense inward turning of his spirit towards lonely communion with the Lord of suffering. Like the finest minds of the twelfth and thirteenth century, Lacordaire's life seemed given up to sounding his deepest self, and fortifying that self against the world. The monastic and scholastic ages did this in every department of life ; in thought they were metaphysical, with a -view to sounding the true springs of intellectual life in man ; in morals they were austere, ascetic, and self-renouncing, with the view of asserting the divine supremacy of the moral principle over all outward circumstances ; in religion they were mystic, con- templative, ecstatic, asserting the supernatural glory given to this renunciation over all human enjoyment. And all this was neces- sary in order that man should find himself truly before losing himself again in'the forest of the inductive sciences and the rich material resources and intellectual complexities of the new age. In the monastic ages Europe first found its soul, and knew, as we may say, nothing but its soul, by way of prepara- tion for ages in which the life of intellectual and moral self- communing would become nearly impossible, and the highest minds would be ranging most widely over the various fields of external interest. And here it is that Father Lacordaire differs so widely from even such English Catholics as Newman, Manning, or Wiseman. Perhaps, indeed, his was altogether a finer and less worldly nature than the last. But there was little in him of the tendency which the two former show, in spite of their sym- pathy with the past, to survey every tendency of modern thought, and bring it, if possible, into harmony with the ideas of the Church. Look at Dr. Newman's essay on "Development,"—how full it is of the scientific ideas derived from the conceptions of physiological growth and organization. Lacordaire's mind had little of this spontaneous tendency to study and explain all the characteristic veins of modern intellect. As a politician he was always bewildered. Ele could not interest himself in the detail of political conflict. He lost his head when he tried to turn his mind from the focus of his whole nature,—the luminous centre of the universe,—Christ,—to the business of political struggle. He sat for a few weeks in the Republican Assembly of 1848, but he confessed that the strife of wills and interests made him giddy. He even lost one great opportunity of pleading for the abso- lute freedom of the Church. He felt like a monk out of his cloister, as he eat in his white friar's robe on those noisy benches, and he soon resigned his seat, as entailing upon him duties for which he was quite incompetent. He had strong ideas of liberty, believing both that the Church alone could make popular liberty tolerable, and that popular liberty was the condition of greatest success for the Church. But he was no politician. He had no eye for quickly measuring the meaning and value of political

forces. As he said after the unfortunate experiment of 1848, "1 found out that I was nothing but a poor little friar, and in no way a Richelieu." And he was, no doubt, perfectly simple and frank when he wrote, "It costa me less to descend [i.e., resign his seat and all political ambition] than it does some, because I have always lived so much alone, drawing my life from my intercourse with God."

It is possible, that, in France, where the highest minds are apt to find themselves only in society, and almost to forget the solitary life of the soul altogether, there still may be room for a sincere re- action towards the monastic ideal of the Middle Ages which there is not in England, where society has never pressed so closely on the individual life. But, at all events, Lacordaire seems to us to repre- sent a thoroughly siucere reaction towards monastic ideals—noble after their kind—but utterly unreal to us who, so far as we are worth anything, are trying to reconcile the life in nature with the life in God. Lacordaire represents the medireval attempt to find a life out of nature which is higher than any life in nature,— out of nature intellectually, morally, spiritually ;

for he all but neglected all the rich intellectual suggestions of the new sciences ;—morally, for his ideal was purely ascetic;—. spiritually, for life with God meant to him a life divided from the world by an

"Unplumbed, salt, estranging sea."

Yet the truth, simplicity, and beauty of his mind is shown in spite of the false direction which, as we believe, it tcok, by some of those exquisitely noble and simple sayings which show how real his communion with God was. Let us conclude with two which are really but one in different forma,—yet such as we should hardly expect from the feverish ecstasy of a monk's reveries :— "God, who is Excellence itself,—the Supreme Excellence, has no pride. He sees Himself such as He is, but without despising any- thing which is not He; He is Himself simply and naturally." (p. 362). And again :—" Do nothing to injure your health or over-excite your imagination. No one is really calm and simple except God. Imitate Him in this." The man who could write this could scarcely have been radically injured by rehearsing those curious little moral theatricals in which he got his best friends to call him "wretch," and spit at him. Lacordaire's mind was naturally one of grand, simple, passionate spiritual reserve,—cold outside and ardent within, rich with a sort of suppressed colour, like a wintry sky just before the flush of sunset. Ilia greatest eloquence consisted in the wealth of feeling suggested, but not poured out,—that of a monk restrained by exquisite social tact and delicacy from telling the ardours which possessed him. "I held my tongue and spake nothing, I kept silence even from good words, but it was pain and grief to me," might have been the motto to explain the strange fascination he had for France. The consuming melancholy and kindling, brooding, severely-bridled hope, of those wonderful words seem to delineate exactly the mood of Lacordaire's long monastic dream. Whatever its deficiencies, it was no ignoble dream. Still Lacordaire and his disciples have effected an episodi- cal digression in the history of modern Europe rather than a new development. Like the apparent retrogreseions of the planets, they seem to those who cannot study and explain them from the true centre of the universe, to be seeking in a restoration of the thirteenth century a refuge from the manifold weaknesses and dis- tractions of their own day.