themselves that they are the old Church of England, though they reject the Pope's authority, may be grateful to him for help that his dialectic skill can render plausible, but he will not change the common-sense conviction of Englishmen that Cranmer and Lee, and "the reforming prelates," are the genuine fathers of the modern Church of England.

JOHN MORRIS, S.J., F.S.A.

ART. VIII. THE BALTIMORE CENTENARY.

THES

HE year just closed was memorable for the Centennial celebrations of three remarkable events, each making an epoch in the history of humanity. The first was the Proclamation on April 30 of the Constitution of the United States by the revolted colonies of Great Britain; the second, the assemblage on May 5th of the States-General at Versailles, the opening act of the lurid drama of the Revolution; the third, the creation of a Catholic hierarchy in the United States by the erection of Baltimore into an Episcopal See in the Papal Consistory of November 6th.

Nor is this close triple sequence of date the only bond of connection between events, which though widely different in character and origin, resembled each other in exercising a still greater transforming influence on human thought in the future than in the actual times in which they occurred. The first, though purely political in its results, has had the effect of re-creating the standard of civil government by the preponderating weight thrown into the scale of democracy. A still wider scope had the subsequent revolution, whose aim was to subvert not only the existing machinery of the State, but the whole range of human ideals in the social, moral, and spiritual orders as well. The second great modern revolt against supernatural authority, it effected for the Latin Races what the Reformation had done for the Teutonic, by detaching them from their allegiance to the Church, while carrying to a still further stage of development the principle of the supremacy of the human intelligence implicitly contained in the movement of Luther. The result was the partial apostacy of the Old Continent, culminating, during the present century, in the attack on the Papacy, the most venerable symbol of divine authority on earth. The revolutionary dogma

is still leavening Europe, but a century of trial has somewhat discredited its efficacy, and there are in many quarters symptoms of a wholesome reaction against its ascendancy.

But while the year 1789 was marked as fateful in both hemispheres by events of such portent for futurity, the third occurrence that signalized its course passed almost unnoticed amid the rush of action that ushered in the stormy dawn of the nineteenth century. A Papal Decree establishing a new See in a remote quarter of the globe was little likely to attract attention during the hurrying phases of violence to which the meeting of the States-General six months before had been the prelude. Only in the truer historical perspective created by the lapse of a century can the relative significance of the three-fold anniversaries of 1789 be duly appreciated. Only in the remoteness of a past epoch of time can we discern the actual proportions and relations of accomplished facts, distorted or magnified by the partial view of closer proximity.

Thus, we only begin to see to-day how the Revolution in America in one sense counterbalanced that in Europe, by providing a fresh and congenial soil for the development of the ideas it had sought to extirpate, and how the truer liberties of the New Continent fostered and sheltered the faith persecuted in the name of a false liberty in the Old. Only to-day do we see how the branch lopped off at home took fresh root on Transatlantic soil, and how the exiled Church, thriving in transplantation, developed new vigour and vitality in its second growth. The refugee clergy of France and its dependencies arrived at the very moment when religion, languishing for lack of ecclesiastical teachers, threatened to die out in many parts of the American Union, and when its extension to new regions by means of Catholic colonization was being sterilized from the same cause. Thus the exterminating decrees of the Convention were the direct agencies for securing it a firm footing in the Western Promised Land of humanity, and not alone the blood of the martyrs actually slain, but the sufferings of the confessors who survived to toil and witness anew, were, then as ever, "the seed of the Church." It is in this sense that the three events of 1789 were so closely interwoven in that complicated web of human events, the true relation between whose parts only becomes visible as we retreat to a certain distance from the point where it is being unrolled from the loom of time.

The history of the Church in the United States dates back to an earlier period than that of its second foundation a century ago. It had even a prehistoric existence there during that semimythical, but now generally accepted phase of transitory transatlantic settlement by our Scandinavian kinsfolk, the Vikings.

These daring freebooters not only planted the now desolate shores of Greenland with flourishing Christian communities, but sailing thence southward, in the opening years of the eleventh century, explored the coasts of New England, and anticipated the enterprise of Columbus. The country colonized by the Northmen, and named by them Vinland, is localized by general consent of modern writers, in the district of Newport, Rhode Island, and the southern portion of Massachusetts. The Pilgrim Fathers might thus have claimed the territory on which they landed by right of descent from these remote ancestors.

The first representation of the Cross in the New World is still extant in a very ancient inscription on what is called the Dighton Writing Rock, near Taunton, Massachusetts, on which it appears in several places. The lettering of which it forms part, is believed to commemorate an expedition of Northmen in 1007, undertaken as a sequel to an earlier one, in order to recover the remains of its leader, Thorwald, slain in a skirmish with the natives, and buried at a place called Krossaness, or the Promontory of Crosses, now identified as Point Alderton, south-east of Boston Bay. Deterioration of the climate of Greenland, hypothetically ascribed to deflection of the Gulf Stream, obliterated the nascent civilization of that hyperborean continent, and with it swept out of memory and existence the short-lived Norse-American Church of the Vikings.

To these preliminary gropings of Christianity succeeded its second period, when mankind had permanently entered into possession of the western half of its terrestrial inheritance. The missionaries who accompanied Columbus had penetrated, within a century after his first voyage, through greater part of what are now the Southern States of the Union. But, by the beginning of the seventeenth century, the colonizing energy of the Spaniard was spent, whether for religious or secular purposes, and the Church in America would have drowsed on in that semisomnolent languor which broods over the old missions on the Pacific slope, had not the fresh vitalizing spirit of Anglo-Saxon manhood been infused into it from the North.

English colonization in America has an almost unique history in having received its most powerful initial impetus from religious enthusiasm. The little band of Puritan exiles, who obtained the charter of Massachusetts Bay in 1629, in order to found a sanctuary for freedom of conscience beyond the wave, were worthy in their stern though narrow sense of duty to be the inheritors of a continent and the progenitors of a nation. A spirit of fanaticism leavened the infant colony, and was the earnest of future greatness, even in the absence of those two most indomitable spirits, the frustration of whose resolve to join its founders, made

or marred the history of two peoples. Never, surely, was there an instance in which events were more blindly guided by human volition to an unseen end, than in the arbitrary action of Laud in staying, in 1638, a party of emigrants, with whom Cromwell and Hampden were about to leave their native land for ever.

But Catholicism, too, had its Pilgrim Fathers; for English statecraft, impartial in persecution, laid its hand with equal weight on all dissidents alike. The Charter of Maryland, granted in 1632 to Cecil Calvert, second Lord Baltimore, provided a home for another class of religious refugees, and hither came, in the following year, two hundred Catholic gentlemen in two ships -the "Dove" and the "Ark." To their earliest settlement on the site of a deserted Indian village they gave the name of St. Mary's, while the whole territory assigned them was called Maryland, in honour of the Catholic Queen of Charles II. The faith thus transplanted has been handed down as the most treasured birthright of the State, whose chief city, Baltimore, received the Primacy of the American Union by being constituted its first See.

The Transatlantic Church had not in its earlier stages been endowed with what it is the fashion of the day to call local autonomy, and the several European colonies were in ecclesiastical as in civil affairs subject to the parent State. Florida was under the jurisdiction of Spain; the North-Western Settlements, of France; the priests of the Atlantic States in the North were ruled by a Vicar-Apostolic in London, and the Jesuits everywhere corresponded immediately with Rome. This state of pupilage was felt as galling when the severance of the political tie between the British the British Colonies and the Mother Country had created a sense of national independence. In 1784 the clergy of the United States, despite the smallness of their number not then exceeding 30-forwarded a petition to the Holy See requesting the appointment of a Superior or Vicar-Apostolic, who should have all the faculties of a bishop. The matter was already under discussion by the Sacred Congregation, and a favourable answer was at once returned. The Rev. John Carroll, a native of Maryland, and scion of one of the oldest settler families, originally of Irish extraction, was nominated to the new dignity. He was then about fifty years of age, and had passed the principal part of his life in Europe, having joined the Jesuit Order after an educational period divided between England and France. The famous Brief of Clement XIV. suppressing the Order, dissolved his connection with. it, and from Bruges, where he then was, he went to England, returning thence to his native land. There he found little promise for the future of religion. No central authority existed in the country, and the priests, few

and scattered, were overburdened with the charge of districts of unmanageable extent. The legislation of the Mother Country still imposed disabilities on Catholic worship even in Maryland, the refuge of the exiles for faith, and the sectarian bitterness of the New England colonies was opposed to any relaxation of the existing laws. Under these circumstances the cause of national independence was ardently espoused by the Catholic colonists, who regarded it as that of religious no less than of civil freedom. The outbreak of the War of Independence in 1776 found the exJesuit living with his mother at Rock Creek, within some ten miles of the present city of Washington, and from a little chapel on her estate ministering to the religious wants of the neighbourhood. From this retired life he was called to take an active part in passing events by his nomination as one of four Commissioners sent to Quebec to enlist the active co-operation of the Canadians with their brother colonists. The bigotry of the New England States cost them an alliance which would have revolutionized the destinies of the northern section of the continent. The Canadians, mindful of that part of the protest of their neighbours-which included among their grievances against the British Crown "the intolerable tyranny of the King of England in allowing the practice of the Popish religion in Canada"-declined their overtures for active co-operation, but were induced by the representations of Father Carroll to give assurances of neutrality. To this extent are the United States indebted to his influence for the triumph of their cause. From Quebec he returned to his mission at Rock Ferry, where he remained until called to assume the wider charge of VicarGeneral, and head of the American clergy.

He at once [says Mr. J. Russell, in an article in the New York Catholic News] entered upon the duties of his new, and in some respects unique, dignity. The church at that time was not strong, nor were its adherents of the most fervid character. The lack of priestly ministrations and counsel had resulted in many cases in causing whole settlements to become lukewarm. These Father Carroll sought to reach. The first difficulty that stood in his way was the lack of priests. This was partially obviated by the immigration of a number of priests from Europe. Pastors were at once sent to New England, the Carolinas, and Kentucky, in which State there was a Catholic population of 4000 souls. For himself, in spite of his dignity, he worked hard in the cause of religion.

The result of his labours, during the five years he filled the position of Superior of the American clergy, was a great increase

*Condensed from the Memorial Volume of the Third Plenary Council of Baltimore.