the greater part of her fellow-sufferers, she died with no priestly absolution, and was consigned to an unhallowed grave. They died the martyrs of sincerity; strong in the faith that a lie must ever be hateful in the sight of God, though infallible popes should exact it, or an infallible church, as represented by cardinals and confessors, should persuade it.

Unsatiated by the calamities of the nuns, the vengeance of the enemies of Port-Royal was directed against the buildings where they had dwelt, the sacred edifice where they had worshipped, and the tombs in which their dead had been interred. The monastery and the adjacent church were overthrown from their foundations. Workmen, prepared by hard drinking for their task, broke open the graves in which the nuns and recluses of former times had been interred. With obscene ribaldry, and outrages too disgusting to be detailed, they piled up a loathsome heap of bones and corpses, on which the dogs were permitted to feed. What remained was thrown into a pit, prepared for the purpose, near the neighbour ing church-yard of St. Lambert.

After exhausting all the resources of legal de- | power of man to take away. In common with fence, those helpless and apparently feeble women disputed every inch of ground by protests, remonstrances, and petitions, which, for the moment at least, held their assailants in check, and which yet remain a wondrous monument of their perseverance and capacity, and of the absolute self-control which, amidst the outpourings of their griefs, and the exposure of their wrongs, restrained every expression of asperity or resentment. Never was the genius of the family of Arnauld exhibited with greater lustre, and never with less effect. In a gray autumnal morning, a long file of armed horsemen, under the command of D'Argenson, was seen to issue from the woods which overhung the ill-fated monastery. In the name of Louis he demanded and obtained admission into that sacred enclosure. Seated on the abbatial throne, he summoned the nuns into his presence. They appeared before him veiled, silent, and submissive. Their papers, their title-deeds, and their property were then seized, and proclamation made of a royal decree which directed their immediate exile. It was instantly carried into effect. Far and wide, along the summits of the neighbouring hills, might be seen a thronging multitude of the peasants whom they had instructed, and of the poor whom they had relieved. Bitter cries of indignation and of grief, joined with fervent prayers, arose from these helpless people, as, one after another, the nuns entered the carriages drawn up for their reception. Each pursued her solitary journey to the prison destined for her. Of these venerable women, some had passed their eightieth year, and the youngest was far advanced in life. Labouring under paralysis and other infirmities of old age, several of them reached at once their prisons and their graves. Others died under the distress and fatigues of their journey. Some possessed energies which no sufferings could subdue. Madame de Remicourt, for example, was kept for two years in solitary confinement; in a cell lighted and ventilated only through the chimney; without fire, society, or books. "You may persecute, but you will never change Madame de Remicourt," said the archbishop; "for" (such was his profound view of the phenomenon) "she has a square head, and people with square heads are always obstinate." Last in the number of exiles appeared at the gates of the abbey, the prioress Louise de St. Anastasie Mesnil de Courtiaux. She had seen her aged sisters one by one quit for ever the abode, the associates, and the employments of their lives. To each she had given her parting benediction. She shed no tear, she breathed no murmur, nor for a moment betrayed the dignity of her office, or the constancy of her mind. "Be faithful to the end," were the last words which she addressed to the last companion of her sorrows. And nobly did she fulfil her own counsels. She was conducted to a convent, where, under a close guard, she was compelled to endure the utmost rigours of a jail. Deprived of all those religious comforts which it is in the power of man to minister, she enjoyed a solace, and found a strength, which it was not in the

A wooden cross, crected by the villagers, marked the spot where many a pilgrim resorted to pray for the souls of the departed, and for his own. At length no trace remained of the fortress of Jansenism to offend the eye of the Jesuits, or to perpetuate the memory of the illustrious dead with whom they had so long contended. The solitary Gothic arch, the water-mill, and the dovecot, rising from the banks of the pool, with the decayed towers and the farmhouse on the slopes of the valley, are all that now attest that it was once the crowded abode of the wise, the learned, and the good. In that spot, however, may still be seen the winding brook, the verdant hills, and the quiet meadows, nature's indestructible monuments to the devout men and holy women who nurtured there affections which made them lovely in their lives, and hopes which rendered them‍ triumphant in death. Nor in her long roll of martyrs has history to record the names of any who suffered with greater constancy, or in a nobler cause; for their conflict was with the very church they most profoundly revered, and their cause was that of devotedness to sincerity and the abhorrence of falsehood.

Amongst the interpreters of the counsels of Divine Providence in that age, there were not wanting many who found, in the calamities which overwhelmed the declining years of Louis, the retribution of an avenging Deity for the wrongs inflicted on Port-Royal. If it were given to man to decipher the mysterious characters engraven on the scroll of this world's history, it might not be difficult to find, in the annals of his reign, other and yet more weighty reasons for the awakening of Nemesis in France at the commencement of the eighteenth century. But of the mere chronological fact, there is no doubt. The details of the three Dauphins, and the victories of Eugene and Marlborough, followed hard on the dispersion of the nuns. With his dying breath, Louis cast the responsibility on the Jesuits who stood round his bed. "If, indeed, you

have misled and deceived me"-such was his | compromise, the indications have been the last address to his confessors-"you are deeply same-a worshipper of pomp and ceremonial, guilty, for in truth I acted in good faith. I a spiritual despotism exercised by a sacerdotal sincerely sought the peace of the church." caste, bodily penances and costly expiations, The humiliation of his spiritual advisers and the constant intervention of man, and of quickly followed. It was preceded by the re- the works of man, between the worshipper tirement and death of Madame de Maintenon, and the supreme object of his worship. So who had both provoked and derided the suffer- long as human nature shall continue what it ings of the Port-Royalists. The very type of is, the religion of human nature will be unmediocrity out of place, she is to our mind changed. The Church of Rome will be the least winning of all the ladies of equivocal eternal, if man, such as he now is, is himself or desperate reputation who in modern times eternal. have stood on the steps of European thrones. Her power was sustained by the feebleness of the mind she had subdued, and by the craftiness of those who had subjugated her own. Her prudery and her religiousness, such as it was, served but to deepen the aversion which her intriguing, selfish, narrow-minded, and bigoted spirit excite and justify; although, in her own view of the matter, she probably hoped to propitiate the favour of Heaven and the applause of the world, by directing against the unoffending women of Port-Royal the deadly wrath of the worn-out debauchee, whose jaded spirits and unquiet conscience it was her daily task to sustain and flatter. De Noailles, the instrument of her cruelty, lived to bewail his guilt with such strange agonies of remorse as to rescue his memory from all feelings of hatred, although it is difficult to contemplate without some failure of respect, the exhibition of emotions, which, however just in themselves, deprived their victim of all powers of self-control, and of every semblance of decorous composure. His howlings are described by the witness of them, to have been more like those of a wild beast or a maniac, than of a reasonable man.

If these slight notices of the heroes and heroines of Port-Royal, (slight indeed, when compared with the original materials from which they have been drawn,) should be ascribed by any one to a pen plighted to do suit and service to the cause of Rome, no surmise could be wider of the mark. No Protestant can read the writings of the Port-Royalists themselves, without gratitude for his deliver ance from the superstitions of a church which calls herself Catholic, and boasts that she is eternal. That the Church of Rome may flourish as long as the race of man shall endure, is indeed a conclusion which may reasonably be adopted by him who divines the future only from the past. For where is the land, or what the historical period, in which a conspicuous place has not been held by phenomena essentially the same, however circumstantially different? In what age has man not been a worshipper of the visible? In what country has imagination-the sensuous property of the mind-failed to triumph over those mental powers which are purely contemplative? Who can discover a period in which religion has not more or less assumed the form of a compromise between the self-dependence and the self-distrust of her votaries-between their abasement to human authority and their conviction of its worthlessness-between their awe of the divine power and their habitual revolt against the divine will? Of every such

But for every labour under the sun, says the Wise Man, there is a time. There is a time for bearing testimony against the errors of Rome, why not also a time for testifying to the sublime virtues with which those errors have been so often associated? Are we for ever to admit and never to practise the duties of kindness and mutual forbearance? Does Christianity consist in a vivid perception of the faults, and an obtuse blindness to the merits of those who differ from us? Is charity a virtue only when we ourselves are the objects of it? Is there not a church as pure and more catholic than those of Oxford or Rome-a church comprehending within its limits every human being who, according to the measure of the knowledge placed within his reach, strives habitually to be conformed to the will of the common Father of us all? To indulge hope beyond the pale of some narrow communion, has, by each Christian society in its turn, been denounced as a daring presumption. Yet the hope has come to all, and with her faith and charity, her inseparable companions. Amidst the shock of contending creeds, and the uproar of anathemas, they who have ears to hear, and hearts to understand, have listened to gentler and more kindly sounds. Good men may debate as polemics, but they will feel as Christians. On the universal mind of Christendom is indelibly engraven one image, towards which the eyes of all are more or less earnestly directed. Whoever has himself caught any resemblance, however faint and imperfect, to that divine and benignant Original, has in his measure learned to recognise a brother wherever he can discern the same resemblance.*

There is an essential unity in that kingdom which is not of this world. But within the provinces of that mighty state there is room for endless varieties of administration, and for local laws and customs widely differing from each other. The unity consists in the one object of worship—the one object of affiancethe one source of virtue-the one cementing principle of mutual love, which pervade and animate the whole. The diversities are, and must be, as numerous and intractable as are the essential distinctions which nature, habit, and circumstances have created amongst men. Uniformity of creeds, of discipline, of ritual, and of ceremonies, in such a world as ours!—

* See on this subject a book entitled "Catholic Chrisnow a minister of the Church of Scotland in Ceylon. tianity," the anonymous work of the Rev. E. M'Vicar, Why such a book should not have attained an extensive celebrity, or why such a writer should have been which we fear no satisfactory answer could be given permitted to quit his native land, are questions to by the dispensers of fame or of church preferment,

a world where no two men are not as distin- Our minds are steeped in imagery; and where guishable in their mental as in their physical the visible form is not, the impalpable spirit aspect; where every petty community has its escapes the notice of the unreflecting multiseparate system of civil government; where tude. In common hands, analysis stops at the all that meets the eye, and all that arrests the species or the genus, and cannot rise to the ear, has the stamp of boundless and infinite order or the class. To distinguish birds from variety! What are the harmonies of tone, of fishes, beasts from insects, limits the efforts of colour, and of form, but the result of contrasts the vulgar observer of the face of nature. But -of contrasts held in subordination to one Cuvier could trace the sublime unity, the unipervading principle, which reconciles without versal type, the fontal Idea existing in the confounding the component elements of the creative intelligence, which connects as one music, the painting, or the structure? In the the mammoth and the snail. So, common obphysical works of God, beauty could have no servers can distinguish from each other the existence without endless diversities. Why different varieties of religious society, and can assume that in religious society-a work not rise no higher. Where one assembly worships less surely to be ascribed to the supreme with harmonies of music, fumes of incense, author of all things-this law is absolutely ancient liturgies, and a gorgeous ceremonial, reversed? Were it possible to subdue that and another listens to the unaided voice of a innate tendency of the human mind, which single pastor, they can perceive and record compels men to differ in religious opinions the differences; but the hidden ties which and observances, at least as widely as on all unite them both escape such observation. All other subjects, what would be the results of appears as contrast, and all ministers to antisuch a triumph? Where would then be the pathy and discord. It is our belief that these free comparison, and the continual enlarge- things may be rightly viewed in a different ment of thought; where the self-distrusts which aspect, and yet with the most severe conforare the springs of humility, or the mutual de- mity to the divine will, whether as intimated pendencies which are the bonds of love? He by natural religion, or as revealed in boly who made us with this infinite variety in our scripture. We believe that, in the judgment intellectual and physical constitution, must of an enlightened charity, many Christian sohave foreseen, and foreseeing, must have in- cieties, who are accustomed to denounce each tended, a corresponding dissimilarity in the other's errors, will at length come to be reopinions of his creatures on all questions sub-garded as members in common of the one mitted to their judgment, and proposed for their acceptance. For truth is his law; and if all will profess to think alike, all must live in the habitual violation of it.

great and comprehensive church, in which diversities of forms are harmonized by an allpervading unity of spirit. For ourselves, at least, we should deeply regret to conclude that Zeal for uniformity attests the latent dis- we were aliens from that great Christian comtrusts, not the firm convictions of the zealot. monwealth of which the nuns and recluses In proportion to the strength of our self-reli- of the valley of Port-Royal were members, ance, is our indifference to the multiplication and members assuredly of no common excelof suffrages in favour of our own judgment.lence.

IGNATIUS LOYOLA AND HIS ASSOCIATES.*

[EDINBURGH REVIEW, 1842.]

On the dawn of the day which, in the year martyrdom. With a stately though halting 1534, the Church of Rome celebrated the feast of the Assumption of Our Blessed Lady, a little company of men, whose vestments bespoke their religious character, emerged in solemn procession from the deep shadows cast by the towers of Notre Dame over the silent city below them. In a silence not less profound, except when broken by the chant of the matins appropriate to that sacred season, they climbed the hill of martyrs, and descended into the crypt, which then ascertained the spot where the apostle of France had won the crown of

* Exercitia Spiritualla S. P. Ignatii Loyola, cum Versione literali ex Autographo Hispanico præmittuntur R. P. JOANNIS ROOTHMEN, prepositi Generalis Societatis, Jesu, Litere Encycliæ ad Patres et Fratres ejusdem Societatis, de Spiritualium Exercitiorum S. P. N, Studio et Usu. Londini, typis C. Richards. 1837.

gait, as one accustomed to military command, marched at their head a man of swarthy complexion, bald-headed and of middle stature, who had passed the meridian of life: his deepset eyes glowing as with a perennial fire, from beneath brows, which, had phrenology then been born, she might have portrayed in her loftiest style, but which, without her aid, announced a commission from on high to subjugate and to rule mankind. So majestic, indeed, was the aspect of Ignatius Loyola, that, during the sixteenth century few, if any of the books of his order appeared without the impress of that imperial countenance. Beside him in the chapel of St. Denys knelt another worshipper, whose manly bearing, buoyant step, clear blue eye, and finely-chiseled features, contrasted strangely with the solemnities in which he was

engaged. Then in early manhood, Francis | at her shrine his secular weapons, performed Xavier united in his person the dignity befit- there his nocturnal vigils, and with returning ting his birth as a grandee of Spain, and the day retired to consecrate his future life to the grace which should adorn a page of the queen glory of the Virgo Deipara. of Castile and Arragon. Not less incongruous with the scene in which they bore their parts, were the slight forms of the boy Alphonso Salmeron and of his bosom friend Jaygo Laynez, the destined successor of Ignatius in his spiritual dynasty. With them Nicholas Alphonso Bobadilla, and Simon Rodriguez-the first a teacher, the second a student of philosophyprostrated themselves before the altar, where ministered Peter Faber, once a shepherd in the mountains of Savoy, but now a priest in holy orders. By his hands was distributed to his associates the seeming bread, over which he had uttered words of more than miraculous efficacy; and then were lifted up their united voices, uttering, in low but distinct articulation, an oath, at the deep significance of which the nations might have trembled or rejoiced. Never did human lips pronounce a vow more religiously observed, or pregnant with results

more momentous.

To these erotic dreams succeeded stern realities; convulsive agonies of prayer, wailings of remorse, and self-inflicted bodily torments. Exchanging dresses with a beggar, he lined his gaberdine with prickly thorns, fasted to the verge of starvation, assumed the demeanour of an idiot, became too loathsome for human contact, and then, plunging into a gloomy cavern, surrendered himself up to such wrestlings with the evil spirit, and to such vicissitudes of rapture and despair, that in the storm of turbid passions his reason had nearly given way. Friendly hands dragged him from his hiding-place; and hands, in intention at least, not less friendly, recorded his feverish ravings. At one time he conversed with voices audible to no ear but his; at another, he sought to propitiate him before whom he trembled, by expiations which would have been more fitly offered to Moloch. Spiritual doctors ministered to his relief, but they prescribed in vain. Too simple for their subtilized perception was the simple truth, that in revealing himself to mankind in the character of a father, that awful Being has claimed as peculiarly his own the gentlest, the kindest, and the most confiding affections of our nature.

At the verge of madness Ignatius paused. That noble intellect was not to be whelmed beneath the tempests in which so many have sunk, nor was his deliverance to be accomplished by any vulgar methods. Standing on the steps of a Dominican church he recited the office of Our Lady, when suddenly heaven itself was laid open to the eye of the worshipper. That ineffable mystery, which the author of the Athanasian creed has laboured to enunciate in words, was disclosed to him as an object not of faith but of actual sight. The past ages of the world were rolled back in his presence, and he beheld the material fabric of things rising into being, and perceived the motives which had prompted the exercise of the creative energy. To his spiritualized sense was disclosed the actual process by which the host is transubstantiated; and the other Christian verities which it is permitted to common men to receive but as exercises of their belief, now became to him the objects of immediate inspection and of direct consciousness. For eight successive days his body reposed in an unbroken trance; while his spirit thus imbibed disclosures for which the tongues of men have no appropriate language. In a volume of fourscore leaves he attempted indeed to impart them; but, dark with excess of light, his words held the learned and the ignorant alike in speechless wonder.

Descended from an illustrious family, Ignatius had in his youth been a courtier and a cavalier, and if not a poet at least a cultivator of poetry. At the siege of Pampeluna his leg was broken, and, after the failure of mere vulgar leeches, was set by a touch from the hand of the prince of apostles. Yet St. Peter's therapeutic skill was less perfect than might have been expected from so exalted a chirurgeon; for a splinter still protruded through the skin, and the limb was shrunk and shortened. To regain his fair proportions, Ignatius had himself literally stretched on the rack; and expiated, by a long confinement to his couch, this singular experiment to reduce his refractory bones and sinews. Books of knighterrantry relieved the lassitude of sickness, and, when these were exhausted, he betook himself to a series of still more marvellous romances. In the legends of the Saints the disabled soldier discovered a new field of emulation and of glory. Compared with their self-conquests and their high rewards, the achievements and the renown of Roland and of Amadis waxed dim. Compared with the peerless damsels for whose smiles Paladins had fought and died, how transcendently glorious the image of feminine loveliness and angelic purity which had irradiated the hermit's cell and the path of the wayworn pilgrims! Far as the heavens are above the earth would be the plighted fealty of the knight of the Virgin mother beyond the noblest devotion of mere human chivalry. In her service he would cast his shield over the church which ascribed to her more than celestial dignities; and bathe in the blood of her enemies the sword once desecrated to the mean ends of Ignatius returned to this sublunary scene worldly ambition. Nor were these vows un- with a mission not unmeet for an envoy from heeded by her to whom they were addressed. the empyrean world, of which he had thus beEnvironed in light, and clasping her infant to come a temporary denizen. He returned to her bosom, she revealed herself to the adoring establish on earth a theocracy, of which he gaze of her champion. At that heavenly should himself be the first administrator, and vision, all fantasies of worldly and sensual to which every tribe and kindred of men should delight, like exorcised demons, fled from his be subject. He returned no longer a sordid soul into an eternal exile. He rose, suspended | half-distracted anchorite, but, strange to tell, a

man distinguished not more by the gigantic | but enhance the wonder. To transmute promagnitude of his designs, than by the clear fligates into converts, by a process of which, good sense, the profound sagacity, the calm during any one of her revolutions round our perseverance, and the flexible address with planet, the moon is to witness the commencewhich he was to pursue them. History affords ment and the close, might perhaps seem like a no more perfect illustration how readily deliri- plagiarism from the academies of Laputa. ous enthusiasm and the shrewdness of the ex- But in his great, and indeed his only extant change may combine and harmonize in minds work, Ignatius Loyola is no dreamer. By of the heroic order. A Swedenborg-Franklin, | force of an instinct with which such minds as reconciling in himself these antagonist propensities, is no monster of the fancy.

his alone are gifted, he could assume the character to which the shrewd, the practical, and the worldly-wise aspire, even when abandoning himself to ecstasies which they are alike unable to comprehend or to endure. His mind resembled the body of his great disciple, Francis Xavier, which, as he preached or baptized, rose majestically towards the skies, while his feet (the pious curiosity of his hearers ascertained the fact,) retained their firm hold on the earth below. If the spiritual exercises were designed to excite, they were not less intended to control and to regulate, religious sensibilities. To exalt the spirit above terrestrial objects was scarcely more his aim, than to disenchant mankind of the self-deceits by which that exaltation is usually attempted. The book, it is true, indicates a tone of feeling utterly removed from that which animates the gay and the busy scenes of life; but it could not have been written except by one accustomed to observe those scenes with the keenest scrutiny, and to study the actors in them with the most profound discernment. To this commendation must be added the praise (to borrow terms but too familiar) of evangelical orthodoxy. A Protestant synod might indeed have extracted from the pages of Ignatius many propositions to anathematize; but they could also have drawn from them much to confirm the doctrines to which their confessions had given such emphatic prominency. If he yielded to the demigods of Rome what we must regard as an idolatrous homage, it would be mere prejudice to deny that his su preme adoration was reserved for that awful Being to whom alone it was due. If he as

On his restoration to human society, Ignatius reappeared in the garb, and addressed himself to the occupations of other religious men. The first fruits of his labours was the book of which we have transcribed the title-page. It was originally written in Spanish, and appeared in an inaccurate Latin version. By the order of the present pope, Loyola's manuscript, still remaining in the Vatican, has been again translated. In this new form the book is commended to the devout study of the faithful by a bull of Pope Paul III., and by an encyclical epistle from the present general of the order of Jesus. To so august a sanction, slight indeed is the aid which can be given by the suffrage of northern heretics. Yet on this subject the chair of Knox, if now filled by himself, would not be very widely at variance with the throne of St. Peter. The "Spiritual Exercises" form a manual of what may be called "the act of conversion." It proposes a scheme of selfdiscipline by which, in the course of four weeks, that mighty work is to be accomplished. In the first, the penitent is conducted through a series of dark retrospects to abase, and of gloomy prospects to alarm him. These ends obtained, he is during the next seven days to enrol himself-such is the military style of the book-in the army of the faithful, studying the sacred biography of the Divine Leader of that elect host, and choosing with extreme caution the plan of life, religious or secular, in which he may be best able to tread in his steps, and to bear the standard emblematic at once of suffering and of conquest. To sustain the soldier of the cross in this protracted war-cribed to merely ritual expiations a value of fare, his spiritual eye is, during the third of his solitary weeks, to be fixed in a reverential scrutiny into that unfathomable abyss of wo, into which a descent was once made to rescue the race of Adam from the grasp of their mortal enemies; and then seven suns are to rise and set while the still secluded but now disenthralled spirit is to chant triumphant hallelujahs, elevating her desires heavenward, contemplating glories hitherto unimaginable, and mysteries never before revealed; till the sacred exercises close with an absolute surrender of all the joys and interests of this sublunary state, as a holocaust, to be consumed by the undying flame of divine love on the altar of the regenerate heart.

He must have been deeply read in the nature of man, who should have predicted such first fruits as these from the restored health of the distracted visionary, who had alternately sounded the base strings of humility on earth, and the living chords which vibrate with spontaneous harmonies along the seventh heavens. A closer survey of the book will

which we believe them to be altogether destitute, yet were all his mighty powers held in the most earnest and submissive affiance in the divine nature, as revealed under the veil of human infirmity and of more than human suffering. After the lapse of two centuries, Philip Doddridge, than whom no man ever breathed more freely on earth the atmosphere of heaven, produced a work of which the Spiritual Exercises might have afforded the model-so many are still the points of contact between those who, ranging themselves round the great object of Christianity as their common centre, occupy the most opposite positions in that expanded circle.

From the publication of the "Spiritual Exercises" to the Vow of Montmartre, nine years elapsed. They wore away in pilgrimages, in feats of asceticism, in the working of miracles, and in escapes all but miraculous, from dangers which the martial spirit of the saint, no less than his piety, impelled him to incur. In the caverns of Monreza he had vowed to scale the heights of perfection' and it therefore be