in peace to the grave, and that in the lengthened period of my life I never knew that I was a subject, except from the grateful sentiment of respect with which, while I dwelt in Venice, the presence of the august senate or the honored magistracy inspired me. For the rest, not a fear, not an inquietude, not a grievance did I experience at any time."

"O better, far better, if having already led long enough a useless life, I had slept on the dust of my ancestors, than that this liberty which is risen up should have spread before my eyes, in eight single days, a series of horrors which sixteen lustres had never shown me. But since Heaven has willed to reserve this punishment for my age, I am thankful that at least I have heard numerous followers of this mad delusion themselves confess their delusion, in words accompanied by actions which could not be mistaken. For as they descended, locked together and half naked, from our Alps,* to swell the armies of the seditious, I heard them cry out to any that lagged behind, 'Behold our liberty,' and showed Oratheir rags, Behold our liberty,' and shook their chains." zione al Popolo Veronese, &c. Squarci di Eloquenza raccolti da' Fratelli Cavanis, Vol. 11. 16mo. Livorno. 1823.

The Lent discourses of Pellegrini have also been published. They contain fine passages, but are full of fanaticism as regards the saints of the Romish Calendar.

ADEODATO TURCHI, Bishop of Parma, and Placenza, was originally a Capuchin Friar, who solely by the fame of his eloquence attracted the attention of the Duke of Parma, Ferdinand, Infant of Spain, who made him tutor to his sons, the eldest of whom, Louis, was afterwards King of Etruria, and promoted his tutor to the bishoprick of Parma in 1788. Here, during the French revolutionary period, he was the determined and powerful opponent of the "new philosophy." It was probably through his influence, that in the Dutchy, which coincided with his diocese, the convents were spared during this whole period, and enjoyed their lands and all their privileges to the last. His attacks are often unfair, his representations of the dangers to society from the principles he opposes somewhat exaggerated, and his imperious objurgatory tone cannot be approved in a follower of a meek and lowly master. But he is often not only powerful and eloquent, but persuasive. The following is a favorable specimen, though not free from objection.

HOMILY ADdressed tO THE PEOPLE OF PARMA, AT THE FEAST OF PENTECOST, 1796, BUT WHICH COULD NOT be delivered

ON ACCOUNT OF THE ARRIVAL OF THE FRENCH.

"The world is full of books which exalt the century

* This is no exaggeration of the zealous Abbé. The French conscripts in Italy were chained together on their road to join the army.

in which we live as the age of illumination. Our descendants will take it for granted on their testimony. Who can tell, however, whether this homily of mine being discovered in a dusty corner of a wretched library, some one may not read it and be undeceived? The theme is worthy of your religion and my exalted ministry. It will be a great blessing if my discourse can excite in your minds abhorrence and contempt for this age. We must be just. It can-▾ not be denied that our age has made great discoveries, rapid and wonderful progress in sciences and arts. All has been collected together into one work,* which is proclaimed as a compendium of wonders, an immortal monument to the glory of the age in which we live. But with respect to the sciences, allow me one short observation. Thousands of years before our time, the greatest geniuses studied nature, made systems, had those who praised and followed them. In our age of illumination some extraordinary men have arisen who have overturned these systems, have formed a new world, and have found those who constructed the old one to have been all ignorant blockheads. But who can assure us that these very individuals shall not, after the lapse of some period of time, be treated as ignoramuses like their predecessors? Who knows but our grandchildren may look back with pity on their fathers for having with too eager facility adopted systems whose sole merit was their being new? But enough: Let the recent discoveries be immutable truths. Are we any happier for them? They are truths, for the most part, which remain in the minds of the scientific and the learned, rather to satisfy their vanity than to fill the void of their hearts. What influence have they upon the common good of the whole society? What advantage arises from this immense collection, this undigested and unapplied mass of philosophical knowledge? In the midst of all that is yet to be known, I fear that it has no better tendency than to introduce Atheism, and to propagate impiety. Ah, my children, in order to be happy, men have need, not to know the exact number of the stars, nor the precise revolutions of the planets, nor how to calculate infinite space. Shall I tell you what they want? They want a wise government, good morals, and a holy religion. And, upon these subjects, what an immensely illuminated age is this of ours! Fix your eyes upon these lights, unawed by the fear of being dazzled, and let us speak to you as brethren, with our usual apostolic freedom.

"What brilliant lights have been cast upon us, to extend our commerce, to perfect arts, to introduce manufactures, to cultivate sciences! Never had such been beheld in our horizon. But what shall I say! We have had lights on the one hand to extend commerce, and lights on the other to show the way to chain and oppress it with so many burdens as to reduce it almost to nothing: without saying any thing of those lights which have been directed to corrupt and annihilate good faith, the animating soul of com

*We presume the Bishop means the French Encyclopédie Méthodique.

merce. All arts and all manufactures were to be established in all places, as if to show the inutility of that beautiful provision of Providence, which has divided and apportioned among the various nations, wants and industry, in order that, by a mutual necessity and reciprocity of interests, men might be indissolubly bound to each other. It was pretended that every nation must be made sufficient to itself, and all were wretched. What a truly philosophical radiance; what a light of humanity shone in those innumerable laws and edicts, which when examined proved to have begun with "human happiness" and to have ended in human misery! There is not an university which has not its chair of jurisprudence, from which the great torch of public rights has been brandished to instruct both sovereigns and people in their reciprocal duties. But this torch wanted the sacred fire of Nehemiah, and what was the consequence? Princes saw nothing by its light but the duties of subjects, nor subjects but the duties of princes, and every one began to think about reforming the people. Hence arose mutual rancor and hatred, a perpetual struggle between the rival parties, which in some places inundated the land with crimes and slaughter. The philosophers, the illuminators of the world, were not sovereigns and for this reason sovereignty became the subject of their attacks and the theme of their paradoxes. All governments were found out to be bad, and the Iroquois and the Hurons were pronounced to be the best constituted people on the earth, who know no happiness but that of pursuing wild beasts in the chace, and men in war. Yet still in our societies, as actually constituted, some kind of government was found to be necessary. And what form of it think you was pointed out by the beneficent lights of the present age? That which of all others is the most perilous, unstable, and mischievous. If for my part I had to reply to all those magnificent eulogiums which we hear every day dealt out on this glorious democracy, it should be in these few words: 'If the democratic is superior to all other forms of government, if it is the

most suitable, honorable, and useful to man, let the heads of fami'lies begin by setting up a democracy in their own houses.' A social contract has been imagined, which never had any existence, by virtue of which the people were pronounced to be sovereigns, and the sovereigns to be subject to the people. This was letting loose lions and tigers to devour their keepers first, and then one another. No matter. Of all mankind so many kings were made, and all unexpectedly started up with the imperial diadem on their heads, like those crowned locusts which you read of in the Apocalypse.* Dazzled with all this light, the multitude was misled, and, with enthusiasm, rose up against authority and laws, and, driven

* Rev. ix. 7. "And the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses prepared to battle, and on their heads were as it were crowns like gold, and their faces were as the faces of men." 10. "And their power was to hurt men five months."

forward in confusion, committed without remorse all the atrocities to which its leaders directed, and all those greater atrocities which the leaders themselves would have prevented if they could. They wrote to one another, and they cried out when they met,' We are all 'brethren,' and by way of closely knitting together these bonds of fraternity they cut one another's throats! We are all equal' — and to verify their words they fell upon the goods of all who possessed any. 'We are all free' and to prove this they yielded themselves to as many tyrants as there were enlightened philosophers. In those ages which ours calls dark and ignorant, it was otherwise held. Public order was respected, and, to save society from greater evils, princes were tolerated even although libertines or tyrants. If they commanded things contrary to the laws of God, the maxim of our fathers was, 'Disobey and die.' But they deemed it horrible sacrilege to put forth their hands upon the Lord's anointed. Governments during this time were preserved in security and society in peace.

"If in the concerns of government these new lights have proved such malignant planets, have they been more propitious in regard to morals? It seems somehow the destiny of the human race that when the duties of morality are most talked and written about, they should be the least practised, as he who has perpetually in his mouth maxims and lectures of economy is generally a shameless squanderer of his property, and talks about saving till he ends in bankruptcy. Never was there an age in which so much was written upon morals as the present. Volumes without number have been sent into the world upon the nature of man, upon the passions and sentiments of the human heart, upon virtues and vices, and duties and properties. And what have we gained? An infinity of systems, a mass of definitions altogether inapplicable to the conduct of life. Ah! my brethren! good morals are not the fruit of metaphysical subtleties. They are established by training men to the practice of them, and by interesting their most powerful feelings in their favor. Religion, which is the sole and regulating spirit of good morals, has been dissevered from them. The ancient virtues have been represented as vices, and what were once vices have been turned into so many virtues. The new light tells man that he owes every thing to himself, and comprehends every thing in himself. Oh, light! Oh, age! Oh, philosophy of ours!.... And women too, they cry out, 'Why are not we capable of acquir'ing the sciences? And why cannot we become instructresses to 'our children in the current philosophy?' Alternately seduced and seducers, while they badly studied Des Cartes and Newton, they despised the catechism, and with it, domestic economy, fidelity, and modesty. Under the guidance of these lights, wives became the implacable enemies of their husbands, indifferent to their offspring, the pest and ruin of the families into which they settled.

"In the concerns of religion these (pretended) lights of the present age first gleamed upon our eyes from the very bosom of the

Catholic Church itself.* They crowded thickly upon us, and it was pretended, for the first time, to prove to us that in order that our religion should be pure, it was necessary to strip it of all external worship; that in order to make it flourish, the first thing was to persecute its ministers, and reduce it to the most abject state; that the revenues consecrated to the service of God were no longer God's, but the people's, to dispose of at its pleasure-(a doctrine never broached even by Pagans), that the Christian was not free to choose for himself a state of evangelical perfection, and that vows, if made only to God, were of no obligation. But at length the age threw off its mask, and openly proclaimed that all religions are indifferent, and that the best of all was to have none; that the time was come when religion was no longer suited to men of genius, to men of literature and science, and that it was an act of humanity to take it away from the weak, superstitious, and ignorant vulgar, and God was spoken of as Lucian once spoke of the heathen divinities.

"We have been inveighing hitherto against the age in which we live. But what is an age, my children? It is a period of years, one succeeding another, in themselves neither good nor bad. It is we who by our conduct and our maxims render these years either the one or the other. An age, if measured by à virtuous generation, is called good; if by a perverse one, it is called bad. We live in an age of ill-omened light: but from what star did it proceed? Who diffused, who propagated this light? The philosophers of the eighteenth century have been men, for the most part, of vigorous minds, well versed in human sciences, capable of conferring the greatest good on humanity, had they not abused their powers. How then did they fall into so much weakness and impiety as to make it an age of confusion, disorder, and crime? Ah! my children! never, in any age of the world, were they great talents which advanced the happiness of man when destitute of religion. They have been men of real worth, often of the most moderate talents, who have effected this. Sometimes indeed great geniuses, but always animated by religion. Our philosophers knew every thing except that which it is of most importance to know, the weakness of man, and the greatness of God. They ascended like Moses into the mount, but they disdained to enter into the cloud from whence divine revelation issues. . . This is the true

source of illumination. Run to this fountain of light: there you will discern the economy of human salvation; the invariable rule by which our judgments should be guided; the surest direction for the reformation of our manners. If doubts arise, let us not combat them with reason, nor enter into controversy with them, but decide

*The admission that in the last century Atheism and Deism sprung from the very bosom of a corrupted church (for such it is allowed by Catholics to have been, at least with respect to discipline), affords matter for serious reflection to the members of that body.