two communions-the one natural, the other supernatural, but both direct-of man with God are interrupted. What then remains? Man -man of the same flesh and blood as we are, who is often full of good intentions—it is the case of the present Pope, it was the same with his predecessor, but to the goodness of intentions Leo the Thirteenth joins a wisdom relatively considerable in idea and action-a man who may be virtuous, but who also may be (history bears proof of it) reckoned among the weak, sometimes even among the wicked. And yet it is on his lips that the permanent and lying miracle of infallibility is made to dwell. This man, placed between his equals and God, will henceforth be the alpha and omega of moral and religious certitude. Has not the leader of this party, or rather sect, dared to write, 'There is only one man in the world who knows anything, and he is the Pope'?1

Such is the intellectual paganism. The moral paganism is that which also places a man between conscience and God. I do not wish to say any harm of Catholic confession; when it is freely and morally practised, when it proceeds from a conscience which opens itself in the full possession of its liberty, dignity, and modesty, and when it is received by a man of enlightened religion and disinterested devotion, who does not wish to dominate over souls, but to serve them, who does not seek to supplant God, but to prepare the ways to Him-then the confessional is a blessing, a real blessing, and I would not for my part diminish the respect or the practice of it. But this is not the Jesuitical confession. The Jesuitical confession implies the abdication of personal will, of individual responsibility. Man in the hands of a confessor must be-these are the very words of the book—' like a corpse which can be moved about in all ways, without a resistance, like a staff in the hands of an old man.' Not only obedience, but blind obedience, must be practised. This is what I call an immorality-the faculty which ought to enlighten man blinding itself, the moral agent discharging itself of its terrible but glorious responsibility on to a stranger. Even supposing this strange abdication, this monstrous substitution, took place in behalf of all virtues, it nevertheless constitutes a fundamental immorality.

There are certain things which are heavy for man to bear: among them we may class the weight of truth in his reason and the weight of justice in his conscience. It is most convenient to say, 'I will think no more, I will not even believe any more, but I will submit myself;' and it is also convenient to say, 'I will struggle no longer for justice; I will listen no more, according to the words of St. Paul, to my thoughts which accuse and defend me in turns; I will read no more with the lamp of vigilance and sometimes of anguish that written law, of which St. Paul says "Everybody is to

1 L'Illusion Libérale, by M. Lou's Veuillot.

himself his own law, everybody will be judged by the law which he bears in his heart;" and I abdicate my conscience into the hands of a confessor.'

This is paganism-man substituted for God, man intercepting with his fatal shadow the light which comes from above. It is pretended that all this is done in the name of the Church. As regards myself, I shall always distinguish the Church, not only the Catholic Church which is more vast than Rome, but the Roman Church itself in its generous elements-I shall always separate them from what M. de Montalembert called in a letter to myself 'the odious sect which dominates and traffics on the Catholicism of our days.' The sect which dominates and trades on the Catholicism of our days, the sect which has attached itself to the Church like an ivy which exhausts it, like a cancer which devours it, some think is an absolute enemy of the Republic. It is a mistake. What it is the enemy of, is political and social autonomy-the communication of the conscience of citizens and magistrates with justice and superior reason, directly, immediately, face to face, a people of God governing themselves. But if it can find anywhere-and such things have been seen in South America and elsewhere-if it can find a Republican or Cæsarean democracy, no matter which, that will consent to place above justice, above the rights of one and all, and consequently above God, the canonical Ultramontane right—that is to say, the arbitrary will of the Pope-that sect will be contented with it, it will acclaim it, it will sprinkle holy water on liberty-trees, and even, if necessary, on red Phrygian caps. All it desires of man is one thing: to abdicate direct relations, in the social order as in the moral and intellectual order, with supreme reason, with absolute justice, with God, and to place between earth and heaven a priest—that Italian priest who is called the Pope.

Such are the two paganisms which I point out to my contemporaries, and in concluding this very imperfect article I ask of them: Now, what do you desire? Will you choose between them, or will you reject them both? Will you be Ultramontane, kneeling before the Pope, or will you be sceptic, straying in the midst of your dreams, tottering in the midst of your doubts? You feel that a choice must be made, and you know not how to make it. In your hours of religious sentimentalism you incline towards Ultramontanism; in your hours of philosophical independence you incline towards negation, or at least towards doubt. You know not how to say yes or no decisively. Weak souls, powerless reasons, the majority hesitate, till on the point of death, between the affirmation of their cradle, whose echo awakens in their tomb, and the negation of their youth or the doubt of their manhood. You divide yourselves in your own conscience between two extremes which are equally impossible, without being able to discover the

luminous and pacific medium. You divide yourselves in your homes, where you place superstition and incredulity side by side. You send your wives and daughters to the school of a superstitious religion which teaches them to think no longer. You go with your sons to a school of a heartless science which renders prayer and love impossible. France will be the loser if this schism continues. Republic or Monarchy, she will descend into the byways of decadence, and perhapt into the abyss of catastrophes.

What we must do, and I continue to appeal to my dear fellowcitizens, my dear co-religionists-for, after all, we are all Christians, and when we go to the bottom of our souls we all feel Christianity there we must, amid all these errors, raise aloft the banner of the Gospel. Instead of isolating ourselves, instead of firing on one another in this civil war, in this criminal and mad war, we must unite together. We must labour in that work of which Mr. Gladstone, one of those statesmen who do not blush to be real Christians, remarked to me one day that the greatest idea of this century was Catholic reform and the unity of the Church. Above Protestantism and ts divisions, above Roman Catholicism and its oppression, above Greek Catholicism and its somnolence or isolation, let us endeavour to arouse a great organic and living Christianity, a vast superior and integral Catholicism, a free and strong federation of churches and consciences; and let us oppose to the two enemies to the one who says to man, 'Thou hast no soul or immortality, and consequently thou art only an ephemeral and suffering animal;' and to the other who says to him, 'Give me thy soul, leave to me thy conscience, I alone can save them from Satan and lead them to God '-to these two paganisms let us reply with a restored Christianity. Ah! this is what must be done. Will you do it? I am asked. Are you a St. Denis ? No, I am not a St. Denis, but I am one of his disciples. Nor am I alone, for there are legions of his disciples hidden away throughout my beloved country, hidden and timid from this long reign of terror to conscience. But when help and liberty are assured, they will come forth strong in the strength of the Lord, and we shall fight the good fight together-the peaceful battle of Christ's love. Yes, we can do this, we can and we ought. And if they do not, and if I fall and die enveloped in my solitary flag, I shall not die alone discouraged. No, because I shall have fought for the truth, believing that the future will sooner or later realise what the present is not worthy of accomplishing. No-and my friends will allow me to speak thus personally of the course in which all my life and being are engaged-no, I shall never be discouraged by the opposition or the indifference of men, by the delays of time and God. I shall not be like those who seek only immediate success. I shall not be like those who stop before duty and sacrifice, saying to themselves, 'If I

go further, I shall not be followed.' There are disciples of Christ who, alas! speak thus in our days. I shall march alone if I am to be alone. I shall say, like the poet philosopher,' I am a citizen of the centuries to come;' or rather I shall say, as the symbol of our faith I believe in the resurrection of the dead,' in the resurrection of dead consciences, till that of dead bodies shall have taken place. I believe in the rejuvenation of worn-out institutions, but which must revive because they are necessary; in the triumph of vanquished principles, of truths obscured by those who combat them, and often by those who defend them. I believe in the final victory of truth and justice, and in the reign of God for ever on this earth.

HYACINTHE LOYSON.

AN EYE-WITNESS OF JOHN KEMBLE.

IN May, 1817, Ludwig Tieck, critic, dramatist, and poet, visited England. He was then forty-four years old; his powers of mind and body at their best. Shakespeare was the one great object of his worship; and he justly regarded a personal acquaintance with the country and countrymen of the poet as indispensable for the systematic study of his works, and those of his contemporary dramatists, in which he was then engaged. Probably no Englishman, then living, was more conversant with the history of the English stage than Tieck. Of Burbage and Shakespeare's other fellow-actors, of Betterton, Booth, Quin, Macklin, Barry, Garrick, through whom its early traditions had passed, he knew all that the scanty records of our theatre had preserved; and he came to England with the natural hope that some traces of what their genius had done for the illustration of the supreme poet might be found in the great theatres with which their names were identified. It was hard—and it might well be so-for a German enthusiast for the drama to believe that the great histrionic power in the actors of his own time, on which Shakespeare had relied to interpret his works to his countrymen, unaided by the splendour of scenic appointments, should not have left its mark upon their successors. In any case he might hope to see such of the poet's works as kept their hold upon the stage treated with the sympathetic reverence, which the loudly proclaimed admiration by the English for their greatest poet led him to expect, and which he had been accustomed to see applied to the acting of Shakespeare on the stages of Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden, and Vienna.

Tieck's first inquiry on reaching London was, whether the two great theatres of Covent Garden and Drury Lane were still open. It was late in the season, but, fortunately for his purpose, he was not only in time, but had come just as John Kemble was playing a series of his Shakespearean characters at Covent Garden, previous to taking his final leave of the stage. The great actor had begun these farewell performances on the 22nd of April, and had been playing on alternate nights up to the 30th of May, when Tieck first saw him. Never a very strong man, his health for some years had been a good