present Government choked it up, and will probably soon absorb the trickling rill that still yields its few drops of life.

Another great abbey, Farfa, now a mere name, and so lost out of the world that Mr. Hare had the greatest difficulty in even learning where it stood, was at length satisfactorily visited by him. It lies in the depths of the Sabine country, "the ideal Italy," in a region of woods carpeted with flowers, deep shady valleys, rich with figs and vines and olives, and watered by the crystal, rushing Farfarus. Truly a very idyll of the poet's spring, never so fully realized as in Italy. Farfa is reached through Poggio, Mirteto, and Montopoli, and has been a "holy place" since A.D. 550, when the Syrian hermit Lorenzo settled there, and built a hermitage. The hermitage gradually swelled to a Benedictine monastery, and finally became the second in magnificence in Italy. It became also a centre of learning, "and the Chronicle of Farfa,' compiled from its already decaying charters and records by Thomas the Presbyter, about 1092, and now preserved amongst the most valuable MSS. of the Vatican, has ever since been one of the most important works of reference for Church history."

The Abbot and a few monks only now remain, full of courtesy and kindness to any stranger that may be fortunate enough to visit the great monastery and fresco-covered church, with its rich carvings and opus-alexandrinum pavement, and the vast dome over the western door. Its choir-books, plated with gold and silver; its jewelled vestments, and priceless ciboriums have all been plundered. The chief part of the monastery is used as farm buildings, and Farfa will soon become a mere name stranded in the stream of past years. One more picture must be given from the Italian mountain monasteries, and then-though reluctantly, for not half our story is told-we must conclude.

Every one who has made even the most surface-visit to Rome, "doing" it with a Cook's ticket at so many churches and palaces a day, suburbs included, will cherish a life-long remembrance of the curling "long-swept wave" of Soracte, where that most majestic mountain "hangs pausing" before it descends to the rich green plain. If-best of all-seen capped with snow, from the Pamfili gardens, still less could it ever be forgotten. Formerly it was the great resort of the country round to the goddess Feronia, the Sabine Persephone, whose shrine Hannibal turned aside to plunder; but its interest to us is far rather as the site of several monasteries, and finally S. Silvestro, to be reached through the little town of S. Oreste, and much subsequent climbing. Sta. Lucia, Sta. Romana, and Sta. Maria delle Grazie, mostly now in ruins, stand first on the road.

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There are only thirteen 'monks now at Sta. Maria delle Grazie, who live an active life of charity, and whose advice and instruction are widely sought by the country people round. There is little fear of their suppression, as they have scarcely any finances, and their humble dwellings on the bare crag, far from all human habitations, could not be sold for anything, and would be useless to the present Government. Those we saw were a grand group, an old venerable man of eighty-six, who had passed his life in these solitudes, a life so evidently given up to prayer, that his spirit seemed only half to belong to earth. We spoke to him of the change which was coming over the monastic life, but he did not murmur. "È la volontà di Dio"; only when he talked of the great poverty of the people from the present taxation, and of their reduced means of helping them, he lamented a little. He said the people came to him every day and asked why they had such sufferings to bear, that they had been quite happy before, and had never wished or sought for any change; and that he urged them to patience and prayer, and to the faith that though outward events might change and earthly comforts be swept away, God, who led His children by mysterious teaching which we could not fathom, was Himself always the same (vol. ii. p. 47).

Exactly on the dizzy peak of the rock-piled summit, and on the site of the old Temple of Apollo, stands the deserted convent of S. Silvestro, just over the cell to which the Emperor Constantine came to seek the hermit Sylvester, and took him away, walking himself before his mule, to be raised to the Pontifical throne. The monastery was built round the cell and oratory of S. Sylvester by Carloman, the son of Charles Martel and uncle of Charlemagne, and much of it still remains within the buildings of 1500. The beautiful and touching frescoes, so religious in tone, are fading now, and have been much injured by the goat-herds who have taken shelter from the storms. The cell and bed of S. Sylvester are beneath the tribune cut out of the mountain itself, and the whole place is full of the deepest religious and historical interest. Looking down from these sheer precipices into the green Sabine gorges, and marking the whole scene, mapped out, as it were, to the eye, of the early Roman power, the lofty peak of Soracte seems to stand up as a boundary-point between the old world and the new, the past and the present time, the shadowed reign of an ever-present pagan worship of Nature, and the foundation of the visible kingdom of Christ in the West, by the settlement of His Vicars at Rome. Taking in at a rapid glance this wide range of mental prospect, though we deeply deplore the destruction of good, and especially the desolation of the "common people," who, whether in the mountain-villages of Italy or on the hill-sides of Galilee, ever "heard Christ gladly," yet we may surely stir up our faith to say, with the the old monk of

Sta. Maria, "It is God's will"; and to believe, with him, that through all the cruel phases of outward brutality in modern Italy, God is still watching the years, and in His own time will hear the prayers of His little ones and His poor, for the glorious, despoiled land of saints in which they dwell.

ART. VIII.-MR. GLADSTONE AND HIS CATHOLIC CRITICS.

The Vatican Decrees in their Bearing on Civil Allegiance. By HENRY EDWARD ARCHBISHOP OF WESTMINSTER. London: Longman.

Mr. Gladstone's Expostulation Unravelled. By BISHOP ULLATHORNE. London Burns & Oates.

A Letter to the Duke of Norfolk. By JOHN HENRY NEWMAN, D.D., of the Oratory. London: Pickering.

Vaticanism: An Answer to Replies and Reproofs. By Right Hon. W. E. GLADSTONE, M.P. London: Murray.

Postscript on Mr. Gladstone's Vaticanism. By JOHN HENRY NEWMAN, D.D., of the Oratory. London: Pickering.

IN a taste of the quality" of the

N January we expressed our hope of placing before our

three principal Catholic champions, whom Mr. Gladstone's Expostulation" had brought into the field. To the amazement of all however, Mr. Gladstone appears in arms again, not only before we have had an opportunity of fulfilling our intention, but in time enough for us to give the best review we can of his new treatise. Our present concern therefore must be primarily with him; though, of course one of our principal objects will be to show, how completely he has failed to answer his three chief Catholic critics.

Those, we need not say, are Cardinal Manning, the Bishop of Birmingham, and F. Newman. As regards the last-named great writer indeed, we must frankly say that there are two or three passages of his pamphlet, containing statements with which we cannot concur; and two or three passages (the same or other) in which we cannot altogether sympathize with his tone but no one of the three has spoken more nobly in behalf of the highest Catholic truths and interests, nor

grappled more closely and more successfully hand to hand with the common enemy. And there is one remark on his letter, which we are especially desirous of making at once. He rebukes us (p. 112) for our use in past time of the term "minimizers." Now this expression was only one feature in a controversy we were then carrying on, concerning the extent of the Church's infallibility; and we explained last July (pp. 9, 10) both the reasons which impelled us at the time. to engage in that controversy, and also the reasons why there seems to us now no motive for actively pursuing it. We stated indeed our own impression that, thanks chiefly to the Definition of 1870 and its consequences, "well-meaning Catholics have seldom been more united with each other than at this moment, in a common intellectual subjection to the authority of the Holy See." But what we are now wishing to point out is, that we should never have dreamed of giving the name "minimistic" to such a treatise as F. Newman's. Nothing can be more alien from its spirit, than any tendency to deal grudgingly with the question whether this or that given Pontifical Act be ex cathedrâ. On one or two particulars indeed of comparatively small practical importance, we venture to be at issue with F. Newman under this head ;* but we have hardly ever read a work, with which we felt generally more in sympathy on the point to which we here refer. And, looking as a whole at the three replies which we have named at the head of our article, we must say that Catholics

*On the Syllabus, for instance: but F. Newman holds that the various Acts from which it was compiled are doctrinally definitive; and this comes practically to much the same. In our article on Mgr. Fessler we have explained how it is, that we have not been converted by F. Newman to his view of the Syllabus.

On the Tridentine Capitula (p. 116) we should ourselves say that Tourneley and Amort have been guilty of a very serious oversight, in not observing that the Council itself expresses repeatedly and most distinctly the definitive authority of the Capitula. But F. Newman holds that "they are what is sometimes called by a catachresis 'proximum fidei,'" and he would not therefore think of withholding from them his interior assent.

As to doctrinal minor censures, we think that we have nowhere seen what seems to us the exact truth on the matter so well hit off as by F. Newman. We italicize one or two clauses. These are his words:

"As to the condemnation of propositions all she tells us is, that the thesis condemned, when taken as a whole, or again when viewed in its context, is heretical, or blasphemous, or impious, or whatever other epithet she affixes to it. We have only to trust her so far as to allow ourselves to be warned against the thesis, or the work containing it. Theologians employ themselves in determining what precisely it is that is condemned in that thesis or treatise; and doubtless in most cases they do so with success; but that deter mination is not de fide; all that is of faith is that there is in that thesis itsel' which is noted, heresy or error, or other peccant matter, as the case may be, such

have on this occasion every reason to be proud of their chief representatives.

In his "Expostulation" (p. 9) Mr. Gladstone announced that "with theology as such he had nothing whatever to do"; but on the present occasion at all events he has entered largely on the theological domain. We are very glad that he has done this; because it is simply impossible for the questions he had raised to be satisfactorily discussed, except in close connection with theology. In proportion as a Protestant will take pains to master what may be called the Catholic theology "de Ecclesia"-in that proportion he will arrive at two conclusions. The first is, that no tendency to ambition or love of power need be postulated as exciting Popes, in order to account for their constant and unremitting action throughout so many centuries in matters primarily temporal. second is, that the very same principles and habits, which led such Pontiffs as S. Gregory VII. or Boniface VIII. to assume a position of superiority over kings and civil potentates during the ages of faith-those same principles and habits (we say) would lead Popes "in this most unhappy age" to pursue a most different course. The very same principles which animated the Holy See then, animate her equally now but under the totally changed circumstances of the time, they lead her now to abstain from all political intervention in her own behalf, and to throw her whole weight into the scale of legitimate civil authority.

The

that the censure is a peremptory command to theologians, preachers, students, and all other whom it concerns, to keep clear of it. But so light is this obligation, that instances frequently occur, when it it successfully maintained by some new writer, that the Pope's Act does not imply what it has seemed to imply, and questions which seemed to be closed, are after a course of years re-opened. In discussions such as these, there is a real exercise of private judgment, and an allowable one; the act of faith, which cannot be superseded or trifled with, being, I repeat, the unreserved acceptance that the thesis in question is heretical, or erroneous in faith, &c., as the Pope or the Church has spoken of it." (p. 121.)

In this paragraph, when F. Newman mentions an "act of faith," it should be remembered that there is a "fides mediata" no less than "fides immediata," to use F. Franzelin's expression. (See the remarks of that theologian in our number for July, 1871, pp. 263, 4.

On the other hand, we may take this occasion for saying, that we cannot follow F. Newman in all which he lays down about "a wise and gentle minimizing." The question is of such urgent practical importance to a Catholic writer, that we hope in an early number to treat it in detail with direct reference to F. Newman's remarks.

On no other question of the day do we find ourselves so irreconcilably at issue with F. Newman, as on his view of the Döllingerites (p. 104). But it would be ungracious if we made this our opportunity for speaking our full mind on the subject.