people, and is obliged to yield to the dissolving influence of American life. He is an exotic that cannot long flourish in our soil or under our heavens. There is an agency at work in American minds and hearts that transforms him against his will, against his knowledge, - an agency that resists silently and mysteriously all sects with formal doctrines, and that will for ever prevent them from being naturalized or nationalized among us. They all feel the workings of this silent, secret agency, and many of them very unnecessarily suppose that it is the secret influence of Rome, the result of a concealed "Jesuitism," or "of a Popish conspiracy." It is no such thing. The same agency is at work among Catholics, and would transform Catholicity in the same way, were it not divine truth, protected by the hand of God himself. In ascertaining or estimating the real American character, we must look beyond all the sects, to those who have thrown them off, and that, too, without lapsing into cold materialism, or losing their natural religiosity and uprightness. These are already more numerous than is commonly imagined, and their number is every day rapidly increasing. In these is our hope, for he who can speak to the minds and hearts of these speaks to the real American mind and heart.

We doubt if any man, without extraordinary grace, can do this effectually, unless he is one who knows them by his own personal experience. Catholics who have lived long in the country, nay, who have been born and brought up in the country, do not readily enter into their state of mind, and rarely succeed in making themselves thoroughly intelligible to them; for they live not the same life, and speak not the same language. But yet it is through this class Catholicity is to be presented to the American heart and the country converted. In regard to individuals we may find, indeed, a point of support in the Catholic dogmas retained by most of the sects, but not for the conversion of any considerable number of the American people. Our best and firmest reliance is not on these Catholic dogmas which Protestantism still professes, for Protestants, speaking generally, hold them too loosely, but on the innate cravings of the soul, finding itself abandoned to simple nature, on that inward need which all men feel even by nature for truth and goodness. We shall, with the grace of God, find our account in proportion as we address.

the heart, and the intellect through the heart. The fulcrum for our lever is in the natural craving of the heart for beatitude, to love and to be loved. We shall do well not to slight the mystic element of the soul, an element perhaps stronger than any other in our American nature.

Hitherto our Catholic authors, very naturally and very properly, have confined themselves, when addressing those without, either to the defence of Catholicity against the objections of Protestants, or to the refutation of the errors of non-Catholics. We have confined ourselves personally, in our discussions, mostly to the latter object, for it suited best our peculiar temperament. But, after all, we in this way present Catholicity mainly on its negative side, and silence the logic rather than win the hearts of non-Catholics. We show them in this way our religion under its least amiable and most repulsive aspect. There is another way of presenting it, which we have as yet hardly tried, that of presenting it in its purely affirmative or positive character, as the adequate object of the heart, which Tertullian says is naturally Christian, frankly recognizing its natural wants and activities, and showing it that Catholicity is that unknown good that it craves, the ideal to which it aspires, the true life it would live, and that superhuman help which it feels that it needs and which it has hitherto sought in vain, and must in vain seek elsewhere than in the Church. Now this is what our author has attempted, and, as far as we can judge, with complete success, in the volume before us. He makes no apologetic defence of Catholicity, and no polemical assault on Protestantism, although his work really contains a masterly refutation of the latter, and a triumphant defence of the former; but he presents Catholicity as the answer to the Questions of the Soul. He lets the people whom he addresses state these questions in their own way, and give him their own list of the wants of the heart, and tells them that they need not despair of finding an answer to these questions, or full satisfaction of these wants. He does not reproach them for raising these questions, or for feeling these wants, for he owns them to be natural, and regards them as indicative of the dignity and noble capacities of man's nature. He accepts them, and shows that Catholicity is that which adequately answers them all. In this consist the originality and peculiar merit of his method. It is not controversial, it is not speculative, it is not dog

matic, but a simple statement of facts to the heart, which instructs and satisfies the understanding. It assumes nothing, but simply relates what those whom he addresses experience, and shows them affectionately what it is they want, and where and how they may find it. It is frank, confiding, hopeful, overflowing with tenderness and goodwill towards those who have not yet found what the author has found. The author addresses himself more especially to the persons known amongst us as Transcendentalists, and he finds something true and beautiful in many of those choice souls, who, however mistaken in their practical endeavors, sought earnestly for a time to live a higher life, and deserved something better than the sneers and scoffs they received from an unsympathizing world. He may not reach them all, but he must reach many of them, and even those he fails to convince will find his book surprising and attracting them. He has presented Catholicity in its true light to their understandings, and they must wish to accept it even when they fail to do so.

It is no easy matter to make selections that will give our readers a passable idea of this remarkable book. It is what every book should be, a genuine whole, and to give an idea of it we should need to extract it all. It is a genuine work of art in the highest sense of the term, as beautiful as true, and as true as beautiful. Any extract we can make will be weakened by being detached either from what precedes or follows it. We must, however, give a few specimens of the author's style and manner. gin with the first chapter, Has Man a Destiny?

"But what am I?

An infant in the night;

An infant crying for the light,

And with no language but a cry.' - TENNYSON.

We be

"Every man that is born into life has for his task to find his destiny, or to make one. This he must accomplish, or be condemned to the greatest of all miseries, the misery of being 'conscious of capacities without the proper objects to satisfy them.'

"The question that agitates the mind of man, as soon as the eye of reason opens, is that of his destiny. The idea of God, himself, and the world around him, strikes him at that moment, as separate and independent facts. The charm that surrounded his innocent childhood is broken; he enters upon a new sphere with feelings of surprise, he asks: Who am I?' come?' Whither do I tend?'

'Who is God?'

of life; and, "Whence did I 'What are my

relations to God? to man? to the world around me?' destiny? a work to do? What is it? And where ? ruled by Fate? or left to what men call Chance? '

'No When, - no Where, no How, but that we are,
And naught besides !' *

'Have I a

Or is all

"These, and similar questions, are the first to spring up, at the dawn of reason, in the mind of those who have no fixed notions of religion. Alas! this is the condition, deny it who may, of the great mass of American youth.

"A shrewd observer of men, one who ranks high among our poets, has stated this fact in his quaint way in the following lines:

"These questions we cannot set aside if we would; and, unanswered, they fasten upon the mind and consume the life of the heart, like the vultures that fed upon the vitals of the rock-bound Prometheus. Moreover, we would not set them aside if we had the power, for the highest prerogative of man's reason is, to know his destiny; and his noble energies were not given to be wasted or misspent, but to be directed to the fulfilment of it.

"First of all, then, the question of our destiny must be met and settled, and that, too, satisfactorily to the intellect and heart. Till this is done, it is idle and nonsensical to tell man to act. You tell him to act, and he will reply: 'But how can we act, when we see no purpose in our actions? How can we act, when we see no end worth acting for? Rather than act for such ends as men commonly do, we would let our shoulders fall from their sockets, and our arms with their bones be broken! For

"We were not born

To sink our finer feelings in the dust;
And better to the grave with feelings torn,
So in our steps stride truth and honest trust

In the great love of things, than to be slaves

To forms, whose ringing sides each stroke we give
Stamps with a hollower want. Yes, to our graves
Hurry, before we in the heaven's look live,
Strangers to our best thoughts, and fearing men,
And fearing death, and to be born again."

* Milnes.

† Emerson.

W. E. Channing.

"If you cannot act, then love. But how can we love, when a deeper insight tells us, that to love is only to be deceived? To love till the inmost want of the soul is stilled, is but an act of selfdeception, ending in greater pain and bitterer want. Mock us no longer by telling us to love. Can two voids make a fulness? two wants give bliss? Can two deficiencies make a whole and perfect result? Madly and in vain do two hearts beat to mingle and be a whole.'

Can

"We would love, yes, this is precisely what we would do, but love what will answer to our whole nature, not merely to a part, and that part by no means the most noble. For he

"Who drinks of Cupid's nectar-cup,
Loveth downwards, and not up."

And rather than this, our soul chooseth hanging and our bones death.'

"Oh! is it not a subject of despair for the soul, when we cannot find in ourselves, nor in any other, nor in all society, the light we need to solve life's mystery, the Destiny of Man! If death could give us any clew, who would not make the venture, and say:

'Lay thy loving wings

In death upon me, if that way alone

Thy great Creation-thought thou will'st to me make known.' †

Such is the utterance of the soul when it is moved by some unknown influence from the centre and basis of common life, and is seeking for another and a higher one, to rest upon.

"But what is this that torments the soul? Has man no task to accomplish?

"Are we

Has life no purpose?

But eddies of the dust,
Uplifted by the blast and whirled
Along the highway of the world
A moment only, then to fall

Back to a common level all,

At the subsiding of the gust?'‡

Is all around us chaos as it seems, and are we brought forth from darkness into reason's light, only to doubt and perchance despair?

'And is this all that man can claim?

Is this our longing's final aim?

To be like all things round, -no more

Than pebbles cast on time's great shore?' §

Not always does doubt spring from deficiency; in earnest hearts, it is but another form of faith and prayer. Listen to one who has