There are sometimes ideas which can occupy the imagination for hours with a vague delight, which scarcely resolves itself into separate or tangible thoughts. So I felt with a childish weakness when my dream was realized. I was looking upon the Mediterranean it was the first time those haunted waters had met my gaze. I pondered on the name -the Mediterranean-as if the very letters had folded in their little characters the secret of my joy. My inner eye roved in and out along the coasts of religious Spain, the land of an eternal crusade, where alone, and for that reason, the true religiousness of knighthood was ever realized; it overleaped the Straits, and followed the outline of St. Augustine's land, where Carthage was and rich Cyrene, and where now, by God's blessings, which are truly renewed every morning, a solitary Christian bishop sits upon the chair of Algiers, the germ, let us pray earnestly, of a second Catholic Africa; onward it went to "old hushed Egypt," the symbol of spiritual darkness, and the mystical house of bondage; from thence to Jaffa, from Jaffa to Beirout; the birthplace of the Morning, the land of the world's pilgrimage, where the Tomb is, lay stretched out like a line of light, and the nets were drying on the rocks of Tyre; onward still, along that large projection of Asia, the field ploughed and sown by apostolic husbandmen-there is corn growing still, but detached and feeble; then came a rapid glance upon the little Ægean islands, and upwards through the

St.

Hellespont, and over the sea of Marmara. Sophia's minaret sparkled like a star; the sea-surges were faint in the myriad bays of Greece, and that other peninsula, twice the throne of the world's masters, was beautiful in her peculiar twilight; and the eye rested again upon the stormy bay of Marseilles. It was a dream. Has history been much more?

Of the old Phocæan colony little need be said. Marseilles belongs to statistical books. But what would bales of merchandise do to our companion of the Middle Ages? He would imagine himself at Nuremberg. Which way shall we go? To the right or to the left? There is a peninsula on both sides: Spain or Italy? It must be eastward. But we cannot bid France farewell just yet.

We cannot have come across the country without some opportunities of making theological notes, although those opportunities have been both fewer and poorer than were to be expected. It is to be feared, there is little religion at all among the bulk of the people, especially in the northern departments. Among the clergy themselves the old Gallicanism seems to have declined very much indeed; and the most abiding result of all that the Abbé de la Mennais and his friends have done has been the increase of strong Ultra-montane views and feelings. The Abbé seems to have been a kind of theological O'Connell; and was, if honest, anxious to help the Church by grafting her system upon democracy; or,

I

if dishonest, to help democracy by making it popular among the priests. Of course it was easy by a perverted representation of the many high and noble ways, in which the Church was the friend of the people in the Middle Ages, to make it appear that she was also the friend of the people in the modern and French sense of the expression; especially when Guizot had vindicated, and was vindicating with no chary justice, the claims of the Church to the endless gratitude of modern civilization. It was clear that Gallicanism was far too scholastic a system,-it may be added, too monarchical also, and had historically been too little realized, too little impersonated, save by fits and starts and in peculiar pressures, to serve his purpose. Besides, after all, what highhearted man can sympathize with Gallicanism, or indeed any other national Church system? Consequently he took up with Ultra-montane views; and it certainly says much for him, that Montalembert and Chateaubriand were his co-operators. There are now a considerable body of Gallican clergy, of great earnestness and real self-devotion, but, I think, strong Ultra-montanes, who are trying to create anew ecclesiastical feeling in France. Montalembert's famous Preface to his Life of St. Elizabeth of Hungary is turning many minds; and the Lives of St. Dominick and St. François d'Assises are being much looked to. St. Dominick! What a rush of feelings comes with that word! The name of a single monk sounding up from the thirteenth cen

tury, what horror and almost disgust does it breed on one side; and on the other, what love and veneration! What words, then, can one use, which shall unite the feelings of both parties? We may say, and truly, that the life of St. Dominick, from the influence his order has had upon the Church, is very interesting and good to be studied. The good hopes with which the twelfth century had so auspiciously opened for the Church had all been clouded over before that same century came to a conclusion; and the magnificent idea of a real living unity and actual external communion of all Christendom, east and west, to a very splendid monarchical form of which the mind of Gregory VII. had given birth, was made impossible, perhaps for ever. This was sad enough. But further, the corruption of the western clergy was extreme. We know from St. Bernard that it was scarcely capable of being exaggerated: and the reform which St. Bernard failed to effect in and for the Church, Peter Waldo, a citizen of Lyons, attempted in the latter half of this century, out of and apart from the Church. The south of France and the plains of Lombardy were alike deeply infected

Many things, because of their being useful in controversy, are taken for granted in history. If men would go to contemporary writings, and not to modern books shaped to a modern end, they would find that St. Dominick not only was not connected with De Montfort's persecution, but even that he bitterly lamented it, strongly condemned it, and retired into Italy partly on that account.

with heresy. Nor were the schools, universities, and professorial chairs in a very healthy state. The Aristotelian philosophy, however singularly it falls in with the rationale of Christian practice, does not seem, so far as the Church has had experience of it, to be favourable to theology, or the temper of faith proper to the study of the Christian mysteries: and that philosophy was then dangerously predominant. There were three ways of thinking in the universities at that day. Either men sacrificed Aristotle to the faith, or they sacrificed the faith to Aristotle; or, which was, perhaps, the least respectable line of thought, they imagined two sorts of truth, the truth of reason and the truth of faith, in such a way as that what was true in the one might be false in the other, and the reverse. Thus between schism, heresy, the corruption of the clergy, and the excessive taste for the heathen sciences, the Church found herself at the close of the twelfth century in a very infelicitous condition. In this state of things the eye of the student of Church history rests on those two extraordinary men, St. Dominick and St. François d'Assises, and the curious revival of religion which took place in the thirteenth century. An excited attention, therefore, to the lives and characters of these two Saints among religious persons in France may certainly be put down as a symptom of earnest

ness.

There has been a recent life of St. Dominick by M. Lacordaire, which is very interesting. There is