*

you go along, such a talk about the poultry, the sheep and cows, and the good man and the children! My great delight is to give a kiss to these children, and to see them run away and hide their blushing faces in their mother's gown. They are alarmed at las doumaïsélos, as at a being of another world. One of these little things said the other day to its grandmother, who was talking of coming to see us: Minino, you mustn't go to that castle; there is a black hole there. What is the reason that in all ages the noble's château has been an object of terror? Is it because of the horrors that were committed there in old times? I suppose so. This vague horror of the château, still lingering in the mind of the French peasant fifty years after he has stormed it, is indeed curious, and is one of the thousand indications how unlike aristocracy on the Continent has been to aristocracy in England. But this is one of the great matters with which Mdlle. de Guérin would not have us occupied; let us pass to the subject of Christmas in Languedoc :

"Christmas is come; the beautiful festival, the one I love most, and which gives me the same joy as it gave the shepherds of Bethlehem. In real truth, one's whole soul sings with joy at this beautiful coming of God upon earth,-a coming which here is announced on all sides of us by music and by our charming nadalet. Nothing at Paris can give you a notion of what Christmas is with us. You have not even the midnight mass. We all of us went to it, papa at our head, on the most perfect night possible. Never was there a finer sky than ours was that midnight, so fine that papa kept perpetually throwing back the hood of his cloak, that he might look up at the sky. The ground was white with hoar-frost, but we were not cold; besides, the air, as we met it, was warmed by the bundles of blazing torchwood which our servants carried in front of us to light us on our way. It was delightful, I do assure you; and I should like you to have seen us there on our road to church, in those lanes with the bushes along their banks, as white as if they were in flower. The hoar

The religious life is at bottom everywhere alike; but it is curious to note the variousness of its setting and outward circumstance. Catholicism has these so different from Protestantism! and in Catholicism these accessories have, it cannot be denied, a nobleness and amplitude which in Protestantism is often wanting to them. In Catholicism they have, from the antiquity of this form of religion, from its pretensions to universality, from its really wide-spread prevalence, from its sensuousness, something European, august, and imaginative in Protestantism they often have, from its inferiority in all these respects, something provincial, mean and prosaic. In revenge, Protestantism has a future before it, a prospect of growth in alliance with the vital movement of modern society; while Catholicism appears to be bent on widening the breach betwen itself and the modern spirit, to be fatally losing itself in the multiplication of dogmas, Mariolatry, and miracle-mongering. But the style and circumstance of actual Catholicism is grander than its present tendency, and the style and circumstance of Protestantism is meaner than its tendency. While I was reading the journal of Mdlle. de Guérin, there came into my hands the memoir and poems of a and one could not but be struck with the sinyoung Englishwoman, Miss Emma Tatham; gular contrast which the two lives in their setting rather than in their inherent quality, present. Miss Tatham had not, certainly, Mdlle. de Guérin's talent, but she had a sincere vein of poetic feeling, a genuine aptitude for composition. Both were fervent Christians, and so far, the two lives have a real resemblance; but in the setting of them, what a difference! The Frenchwoman is a Catholic in Languedoc; the Englishwoman is a Protestant at Margate-Margate, that brick-and-mortar image of English Protestantism, representing it in all its prose, all its uncomeliness,-let me add, all its salu

minute."

*The young lady.

A peculiar peal rung at Christmas-time by the

church-bells of Languedoc.

Mdlle. de Guérin's nadalet at the Languedoc Christmas-her chapel of moss at Eastertime-her daily reading of the life of a saint, carrying her to the most diverse times, places, and peoples-her quoting, when she wants to fix her mind upon the staunchness which the religious aspirant needs, the words of

Saint Macedonius to a hunter whom he met

in the mountains, "I pursue after God, as you pursue after game "—her quoting, when she wants to break a village girl of disobedience to her mother, the story of the ten disobedient children whom at Hippo St. Augustine saw palsied;-between all this and the bare, blank, narrowly English setting of Miss Tatham's Protestantism, her" union in Church-fellowship with the worshippers at Hawley-Square Chapel, Margate; her "singing with soft, sweet voice, the animating lines

'My Jesus to know, and feel his blood flow, 'Tis life everlasting, 'tis heaven below ;' her “young female teachers belonging to the Sunday school," and her "Mr. Thomas Rowe, a venerable class-leader," what a dissimilarity! In the ground of the two lives, a likeness; in all their circumstance, what unlikeness! An unlikeness, it will be said, is that which is non-essential and indifferent. Non-essential-yes; indifferent

no.

The signal want of grace and charm in English Protestantism's setting of its religious life is not an indifferent matter; it is a real weakness. This ought ye to have done, and not to have left the other undone.

I have said that the present tendency of Catholicism-the Catholicism of the main body of the Catholic clergy and laity-seems likely to exaggerate rather than to remove all that in this form of religion is most repugnant to reason; but this Catholicism was not that of Mdlle. de Guérin. The insufficiency of her Catholicism comes from a doctrine which Protestantism, too, has adopted, although Protestantism, from its inherent element of freedom, may find it easier to escape from it; a doctrine with a certain attraction for all noble natures, but, in the modern world at any rate, incurably sterile, the doctrine of the emptiness and nothingness of human life, of the superiority of renouncement to activity, of quietism to doctrine which makes effort for things on this side of the grave a folly, and joy in things on this side of the grave a sin. But her Catholicism is remarkably free from the faults which Protestants commonly think inseperable from Catholicism; the relation to the priest, the practice of confession, assume, when she speaks of them, an aspect which is not that under which Exeter Hall knows

energy;

the

ber of those who prefer regarding that by which men and nations die to regarding that by which they live-one is glad to study. "La confession," she says twice in her journal," n'est qu'une expansion du repentir dans l'amour:" and her weekly journey to the confessional in the little church of Cahuzao is her "cher pélerinage; "the little church is the place where she has "laissé tant de misères :

"This morning,' "she writes one 28th of November, "I was up before daylight, dressed quickly, said my prayers, and started with Marie for Cahuzac. When we got there the chapel was occupied, which I was not sorry for. I like not to be hurried, and to have time, before I go in, to lay bare my whole soul before God. This often takes me a long time, because my thoughts are apt to be flying about like these autumn leaves. At ten o'clock I was on my knees, listening to words the most salutary that were ever spoken; and I went away feeling myself a better being. Every burden thrown off leaves us with a laid down the load of its sins at God's feet, sense of brightness; and when the soul has it feels as if it had wings. What an admirable thing is confession! What comfort, what light, what strength is given me every time after I have said, I have sinned."

This blessing of confession is the greater, she says, "the more the heart of the priest to whom we confide our repentance is like that divine heart which has so loved us.' This is what attaches me to M. Bories." M. Bories was the curé of her parish, a man no longer young, and of whose loss, when he was about to leave them, she thus speaks :—

"What a grief for me! how much I lose in losing this faithful guide of my conscience, heart, and mind, of my whole self which God had appointed to be in his charge, and which let itself be in his charge so gladly! He knew the resolves which God had put in my heart, and I had need of his help to follow them. Our new curé cannot supply his place: he is so young! and then he seems so inexperienced, so undecided! It needs firmness to pluck a soul out of the midst of the world,. and to uphold it against the assaults of flesh. and blood. It is Saturday, my day for going to Cahuzac; I am just going there, perhaps I shall come back more tranquil. God has always given me some good thing there, in that chapel, where I have left behind me so many miseries."

fice:

"To-day I am going to do something which I dislike; but I will do it, with God's help. Do not think I am on my way to the stake; it in only that I am going to confess to a priest in whom I have not confidence, but who is the only one here. In this act of religion, the man must always be separated from the priest, and sometimes the man must be annihilated."

The same clear sense, the same freedom from superstition, shows itself in all her religious life. She tells us, to be sure, how ones, when she was a little girl, she stained a new frock, and on praying, in her alarm, to an image of the Virgin which hung in her room, saw the stains vanish: even the austerest Protestant will not judge such Mariolatry as this very harshly. But, in general, the Virgin Mary fills, in the religious parts of her journal, no prominent place; it is Jesus, not Mary. "Oh, how well has Jesus said: Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden.' It is only there, only in the bosom of God, that we can rightly weep, rightly rid ourselves of our burden." And again: "The mystery of suffering makes one grasp the belief of something to be expiated, something to be won. I see it in Jesus Christ, the Man of Sorrow. It was necessary that the Son of Man should suffer. That is all we know in the troubles and calamities of life."

And who has ever spoken of justification more impressively and piously than Mdlle. de Guérin speaks of it, when, after reckoning the number of minutes she has lived, she exclaims:

66

My God, what have we done with all these minutes of ours, which thou, too, wilt one day reckon? Will there be any of them to count for eternal life? will there be many

ter, is not enough to procure entrance into the kingdom of heaven. God demands other things besides these kindly social virtues, of him whom he means to crown with an eternity of glory."

And, with this zeal for the spirit and power of religion, what prudence in her counsels of religious practice; what discernment, what measure! She has been speaking of the charm of the Lives of the Saints, and she goes on :

"Notwithstanding this, the Lives of the Saints seem to me, for a great many people, dangerous reading. I would not recommend them to a young girl, or even to some women who are no longer young. What one reads these, even in seeking God, sometimes go has such power upon one's feelings; and astray. Alas, we have seen it in poor C.'s case. What care one ought to take with a young person; with what she reads, what she writes, her society, her prayers, all of them matters which demand a mother's tender watchfulness! I remember many things did at fourteen, which my mother, had she lived, would not have let me do. I would have done anything for God's sake; I would have cast myself into an oven, and assuredly things like that are not God's will: he is not pleased by the hurt one does to one's health through that ardent but ill-regulated piety which, while it impairs the body, often leaves many a fault flourishing. And, therefore, Saint François de Sales used to say to the nuns who asked his leave to go barefoot: Change your brains, and keep your shoes.'"'

I

Meanwhile Maurice, in a five years' absence, and amid the distractions of Paris, lost, or seemed to his sister to lose, something of his fondness for his home and its inmates; he certainly lost his early religious habits and feelings. It is on this latter loss that Mdlle. de Guérin's journal oftenest touches, with infinite delicacy, but with infinite anguish

:

And this