world amid the choral song of angels? Would you, then, banish music from the church of Jesus? No art has such power as music to draw the soul toward the infinite. It would seem as though the sounds of melody were the viewless spirits of heaven, calling us away from earth to our true home in the mansion of our Father. Whosoever has enjoyed the rare privilege of being present in the Sistine Chapel during Holy Week, when the melodies of Leo, Durante, and Pergolesi, on the Miserere, are sung, has felt the immense power of religious music. For a moment, at least, he has quitted this earth, and the voice of song has borne his soul in ineffable ecstasy to the very throne of God. As music develops religious sentiments, so religion gives to music its sublimest themes. To her, Haydn, Beethoven and Mozart owe their divinest inspirations.

Painting, too, asks to be received into the temple of religion. What sentiment is there that the painter cannot express? All nature is subject to his command, -the physical world and the moral world. His muse soars from earth to heaven, and contemplates all that lies between them. Above all, the human countenance, that mirror of the soul, belongs to the painter. His brush, dipped in the light of heaven, gives to virtue its own celestial hue; to vice, its inborn hideousness. He expresses every emotion of the human heart, every noble love, every lofty aspiration, every dark and baneful passion. Aristotle, the most comprehensive mind of the pagan world, affirms that painting teaches the same precepts of moral conduct as philosophy, with this advantage, that it employs a shorter method. Christian painting began in the Catacombs. In the rude pictures of that subterranean world we find the chief doctrines of Christianity reduced to the most

simple expression possible, under forms that are most touching.

Painting there represents the Phoenix rising from its ashes, emblem of the immortality of the soul and of the resurrection of the body; the good shepherd, bearing upon his shoulders the lost sheep, which teaches with touching simplicity one of the most beautiful of our Lord's parables; the three youths in the fiery furnace, signifying the providence of God over those who fear and love him; Pharao and his hosts engulfed in the Red Sea, proclaiming to the faithful that God is the avenger of those who put their trust in him. These and similar subjects were peculiarly adapted to inspire courage in the hearts of the Christians of the first ages, when to be a follower of the Cross was to be a hero.

As men of genius and learning, by their life-long labors, show us the divine beauties and perfections in the character of Jesus in new bearings, so the art of painting throws around his history an intenser light. His divinity is as manifest in the "Transfiguration" of Raphael as in the famous sermon of Massillon. His ineffable sufferings on Mount Calvary, and his Godlike power, are as vividly and feelingly portrayed on the canvas of Rubens, as in the unequalled and inimitable discourse of Bourdaloue. No one can look upon the "Last Supper" by Leonardo da Vinci without being inspired with a most sublime conception of that holiest event. Can we think of the passion and death of the Saviour without forming to ourselves a mental image corresponding to the scene? If, after all, we must have a picture, why not take that of genius rather than trust to our own tame, plebeian fancy? And then, for those who cannot read or meditate profoundly, for the poor whom Jesus loved, what master is like painting?

St. Basil declares it to be his opinion that painters accomplish as much by their pictures as orators by their eloquence.

The church as a lecture-room will interest only the cultivated few, while the church as the temple of art sanctified by religion, is the home of worship for the multitude.

Religion, if it be anything, must be popular, which science can never be, and which art always is. Then, in the name of the religion of the poor, let architecture advance to raise to God the temple of majesty and beauty, the democratic palace of the people, where the prince and the beggar sit side by side as brothers, a basilica prouder and loftier than that of the sceptred monarch.

COMPOSITION.

Write the following sentences in three ways:

(a) An invisible church is a contradiction in terms, and without a church there can be amongst men no authoritative religious teaching. (b) The mission of the church is to proclaim Jesus Christ, and him crucified and glorified, by poetry, by song, by painting, and by architecture, in a word, by every artistic creation of which genius is capable.

Write a list of Catholics, whether clergymen or laymen, who carried out this mission of announcing Jesus Christ, thus:

Three who painted magnificent pictures about our Lord's suffering. Two who composed sad and affecting music, Pope Gregory, author of Gregorian chant, being one. Four who by sculpture or architectur have left master-works that inspire respect for religion. Three who by their writings have taught love of Mary Immaculate.

WISDOM AND KNOWLEDGE.

William Cowper (1731-1800) is one of the first poets whose writings give striking evidence of the change in poetic taste which set aside the artificial style and sentiment of the school of Dryden and Pope, for themes drawn from nature and the sympathies of humanity. "The Task" and "Table Talk" are a series of social and moral reflections, interspersed with satire, descriptive of natural and domestic scenes. Of his shorter poems, the droll "John Gilpin's Ride," and the lines "On Receiving my Mother's Picture," are the best known. Cowper will always be popular, as he is essentially a domestic poet. There is a sort of a comfortable and prosaic morality in his poems, which is peculiar to all Protestant (especially Church of England) writers for the great middle class of readers. They seem to say, "Be good because it is the most convenient!" Their idea is crystallized in the natural axiom, "Honesty is the best policy." Catholic moralists are "made of sterner stuff."

K

NOWLEDGE and wisdom, far from being one,
Have ofttimes no connection. Knowledge dwells
In heads replete with thoughts of other men;
Wisdom in minds attentive to their own.
Knowledge, a rude, unprofitable mass,

The mere materials with which Wisdom builds,
Till smoothed and squared, and fitted to its place,
Does but encumber whom it seems to enrich.
Knowledge is proud that he has learned so much;
Wisdom is humble that he knows no more.

THE IDOLS OF THE AGE.

LOOK around, my brethren, and answer for yourselves. Contemplate the objects of this people's praise, survey their standards, ponder their ideas and judgments, and then tell me whether it is not most evident, from their very notion of the desirable and the excellent, that greatness and goodness, sanctity and sublimity, and truth, are unknown to them; and that they do not

only not pursue, but do not even admire those high attributes of the Divine Nature. This is what I am insisting on, not what they actually do, or what they are, but what they revere, what they adore, what their gods are. Their god is mammon. I do not mean to say that all seek to be wealthy, but that all bow down before wealth. Wealth is that to which the multitude of men pay an instinctive homage. They measure happiness by wealth, and by wealth they measure respectability. Numbers, I say, there are, who never dream that they shall be rich themselves, but who still at the sight of wealth feel an involuntary reverence and awe, just as if a rich man must be a good man.

not

They like to be noticed by some extremely rich man; they like on some occasion to have spoken to him; they like to know those who know him, to be intimate with his dependants, to have entered his house, or, to know him by sight. Not, I repeat, that it ever comes into their minds that such wealth will one day be theirs ; that they see the wealth, for the man who has it may dress, and live, and look like other men; not that they expect to gain some benefit from it: no, theirs is a disinterested homage, it is a homage resulting from an honest, genuine, hearty admiration of wealth for its own sake, such as that pure love which holy men feel for the Maker of all; it is a homage resulting from a profound faith in wealth, from the intimate sentiment of their hearts, that, however a man may look,-poor, mean, starved, decrepit, vulgar, yet if he be rich, he differs from all others; if he be rich, he has a gift, a spell, an omnipotence, that with wealth he may do all things. Wealth is one idol of the day, and notoriety is a second. I am not speaking, I repeat, of what men pursue, but what they look up to, what they revere. Men may not