almost the only subject of which they know absolutely nothing. Yet there are many topics, lying within their intellectual sphere, upon which they are really qualified to offer valuable contributions. They might write about the Suez Canal, or the Antiquity of Man, or the Silurian System, or even about that curious financial institution, the Crédit Foncier of England. They have indeed a good deal to say about these, and a thousand other subjects, but none of them appear fully to satisfy their literary ambition. They seem possessed by the idea that they must teach the world a new view of religion, or forfeit all claim to originality of thought. And so, in discharge of their responsibility, they proceed to teach religion.

Mr. Parkman, whose book about the Jesuit missionaries in North America is before us, impresses us favourably in many respects. He is intelligent, in which he resembles most of his countrymen, and he writes good English, in which he differs from most of them. He is evidently amiable, sincere, and truthful. It need hardly be said that he manifests the candour which, though it be sometimes only the candour of indifference, is the honourable distinction of almost all American writers. He would disdain to be the organ of dull and querulous bigotry. Yet with these various claims to our sympathy and respect, we wish that he had not thought it necessary to write about Catholic missionaries, much as he admires them. He might write excellently on many themes, but not on this. He lacks the primary qualification. A man who begins such a labour by telling you that he does not believe the supernatural, and has little esteem for those who do, is no more able to explain the phenomena of Christianity, of which the apostolic vocation is one of the most impressive, than an astronomer would be competent to construct a theory of the Cosmos who should begin by denying Kepler's Laws, and scoffing at Newton's Principia. Deride as fables the doctrines of attraction and gravitation, the sphericity of the planets, and all the truths established in our treatises on Conic Sections and Dynamics, and you will occupy about the same position towards astronomy as a man who laughs at vocation, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, the ministry of the angels, and the action of God in His own creation, occupies in relation to Christianity. If Christianity deals only with what is human, it does not proceed from God. Mr. Parkman is like the astronomer who denies even the postulates of his own science, and is therefore in a condition of radical and hopeless incapacity to discuss the subject which he has chosen. But it is time to let him speak for himself.

This American writer, who has carefully studied his

authorities, and learned to appreciate them, lauds the unfailing accuracy both of the Jesuit annalists and of their recent continuators. It is this manly truthfulness which distinguishes him from English writers of the same school. "Dr. Taché," he observes, "after a zealous and minute observation of the Huron country, extended through five years, writes to me as follows:-'I can vouch for the scrupulous exactness of our ancient writers.'" (Introd. p. xxviii.) Of the modern historian of the Canadian mission, the Abbé Faillon, he says in like manner :— "It is impossible to commend too highly the diligence, exactness, and extent of his conscientious researches." Having acquitted his own conscience as a sincere and upright critic by this unreserved statement, his Protestant nature resumes its supremacy, and he goes on thus:-"The credulity of the Abbé Faillon is enormous, and he is completely in sympathy with the supernaturalists of whom he writes; in other words, he identifies himself with his theme, and is indeed a fragment of the seventeenth century still extant in the nineteenth." This means, as he proceeds to explain, that the Abbé Faillon, who probably thinks it very natural that Christians of one century should resemble those of another, ventures to record, on the testimony of the missionaries themselves, "the visions and miracles" which accompanied their labours. The same reproach might be made against those inspired narratives of the primitive Apostolic missions, abounding also in visions and miracles, bequeathed to us by S. Luke and S. Paul. Whether Mr. Parkman rejects them also as "credulous supernaturalists," we can neither affirm nor deny. If he does not, we may congratulate him on the happy inconsistency; if he does, most people will think that he is only moderately qualified to write on Christian themes. M. Ernest Rénan is not more impatient of the supernatural, the very sound of which is intolerable to Mr. Parkman. And this determination to recognize in Christianity only its human elements, because he has detected that its Protestant preachers are manifestly not supernatural, and rashly assumes that all others are in the same unfortunate condition, obliges our intelligent author to involve himself in endless contradictions. Thus, at one moment, he speaks of the missionaries with genuine enthusiasm, as "saints and heroes," and elaborately proves, with evident satisfaction to himself, that they were indeed both; and the next, he is equally careful to prove that, although saints and heroes, they were, after all, only splendid lunatics. It is true that in one place he modestly excuses this adverse judgment by observing, "this is the view of a heretic" (p. 159); and in another, that their strange

ardour in administering baptism" is beyond heretic appreciation" (p. 65); and, finally, that "to estimate a virtue involved in conditions so anomalous,"-i.e., accompanied by the supernatural-" demands a judgment more than human" (p. 207). But this modesty was only fugitive and evanescent, since he immediately proceeds, without apparently professing to be "more than human," to pronounce a judgment than which nothing can be more decisive and peremptory. "They were surrounded," he says, "with illusions, false lights, and false shadows-breathing an atmosphere of miracle-compassed about with angels and devils-urged with stimulants most powerful, though unreal-their minds drugged, as it were, to preternatural excitement," &c., &c. (p. 207).

Mr. Parkman does not appear to have noticed, when he wrote this passage, that his somewhat rhetorical description applies, in every detail, to S. Peter and S. Paul. Or perhaps he did see it, but did not care to enforce the application. It is possible that, even in America, Protestants are not yet quite prepared to jeer at the first preachers of Christianity. Yet it is certain that the "virtue" of the Apostles was "involved" in precisely the same "anomalous conditions" as those which he reprobates in their successors. S. Peter assuredly "breathed an atmosphere of miracle." It was a small thing to him, if we may believe the New Testament, to control the elements and the forces of nature. His very shadow healed the sick, though according to scientific principles it was a very irregular proceeding, and an offence against the laws of cause and effect. As to "visions," they were almost his normal state. He might well be excused also for believing in "angels," since one of them came to take him out of prison at rather a critical moment of his life. It is quite clear that he believed no less firmly in "devils," like the missionaries in Canada and elsewhere, since he was constantly warning Christians to be on their guard against them -a caution by which Mr. Parkman does not seem to have profited. S. Paul, again, was a "supernaturalist," if ever there was one. He also had visions, healed the sick, and raised the dead. He was once, as he relates himself, "caught up to heaven;" and if any one had told him, as perhaps our American author would have done, that he was "surrounded with illusions" because he said so, we would rather have been, for our own part, at the bottom of the deepest well in Damascus or Antioch than in the position of that philosophical objector, standing face to face with S. Paul. The Apostles were meek and humble men, in spite of their superhuman gifts, but it

was not always quite safe to question those gifts, nor to trifle with those who possessed them, as Ananias and others learned to their cost.

He

Let us return to Mr. Parkman, who has nothing, we are persuaded, in common with Ananias. If we propose to notice briefly the contradictions in his interesting narrative, it is with a grave motive, which we hope will become sufficiently apparent in the course of these observations. The method pursued by our author makes the task an easy one. enumerates, one by one, the illustrious martyrs of the Canadian missions, and the more celebrated of the religious women by whom their labours were shared; not neglecting even the eminent laymen who, during the same epoch, held civil or military offices in the French colony. After recording, with apparent enthusiasm, their marvellous lives, unmatched in heroism, as he would be the first to admit, except by the career of other missionaries of the same Church, he anticipates the inevitable argument that only a supernatural vocation could inspire or sustain such lives, by boldly affirming that it is precisely the supernatural features of their lives which we ought to reject with disdain, and which cast discredit upon their whole history. And this he does, not with the malice of a heretic, but because he knows nothing of the apostolic vocation, nor of the gifts which accompany it. A heathen would have reasoned more justly; even the Mahometans cried aloud that the great S. Francis was "the friend of Allah," when they saw his manner of life. Such a life has no lesson for Protestants. We do not know to what denomination, if any, Mr. Parkman is attached; and it would perhaps be unprofit able to remind him that even the frigid writers of the school of Paley, who would have smiled at the religious enthusiasm of the disciples of Islam, and of whom it has been said that they regarded Christianity only as something which required to be constantly proved, were accustomed to argue, in a purely mathematical spirit, that the supernatural lives of the Apostles amply sufficed to demonstrate the truth of their mission. According to the theory of Mr. Parkman, however, of which we will presently give some additional illustrations, the school of Paley was too romantic and sensational; and the mere fact that the Apostles professed to see visions and to work miracles ought to be deemed fatal to their claims, and therefore, though our author does not say it, to the religion which they taught. His reasoning, if pursued consistently, would deprive the New Testament of all credit, and relegate its divine narratives to the picturesque domain of fable and fancy. Yet his book, of which this is, consciously or otherwise, the logical conclusion,

has been ardently praised by the editors of at least one Anglican journal. They do not, probably, wish to reprove the Apostles as visionaries and enthusiasts, nor to degrade Christianity to a purely human level; but Mr. Parkman helps them to believe that the pre-eminence of Catholic missionarieswhich they also have detected with uneasiness and aversionis not due to supernatural causes, but only to some peculiarity of temper and disposition; and for this they are grateful. When we see such men heartily commend a volume which reduces all sanctity and religious heroism to the category of "illusion," we gladly persuade ourselves that their gratitude is rather a blunder than a crime. If it were otherwise, we should be forced to believe that, if they love Christianity much, they hate the Church more, and would rather the first should be proved to be human, than the second admitted to be divine.

It is in such terms as the following that our author speaks of the missionaries as a body :

The Jesuits gained the confidence and good-will of the Huron population. Their patience, their kindness, their intrepidity, their manifest disinterestedness, the blamelessness of their lives, and the tact which, in the utmost fervours of their zeal, never failed them, had won the hearts of the wayward savages, and chiefs of distant villages came to urge that they would make their abode with them " (p. 70).

Again :

When we see them, in the gloomy February of 1637, and the gloomier months that followed, toiling on foot from one infected town to another (the small-pox was raging everywhere), wading through the sodden snow, under the bare and dripping forests, drenched with incessant rains, till they descried at length through the storm the clustered dwellings of some barbarous hamlet, -when we see them entering, one after another, these wretched abodes of misery and darkness, and all for one sole end, the baptism of the sick and dying, we may smile at the futility of the object, but we must needs admire the self-sacrificing zeal with which it was pursued (p. 98).

Alluding to the terrible perils which they daily encountered among other tribes, and which conducted so many of them to an appalling martyrdom, he says, "Nowhere is the power of courage, faith, and an unflinching purpose more strikingly displayed than in the record of these missions" (p. 142). Once more:-"The Jesuits had borne all that the human frame seems capable of bearing "-i. e., mutilation, tortures, famine, and the menace of death, in its most frightful forms, at every hour of the day and night-" Did their zeal flag, or their courage fail? A fervour, intense and unquenchable,