but only think my own thought of Him, I cannot pretend to demonstrate His existence; if, again, when I reason I am only affirming a law of my mind, and not an objective necessity, I cannot pretend to demonstrate His existence. Conceptualism at best can only approach to hypothetical Realism; but hypothetical Realism, as Sir William Hamilton wisely remarks, has no advantage over absolute scepticism*—that is, in a philosophical point of view; for certainly the man who believes unreasonably is morally in better case than he who disbelieves.

And now we pass to a subject of the most vital importance. The theoretical reason, it is argued by the school of Kant, is impotent to establish the existence of a Supreme Being, which privilege is made over to the practical reason. But how if the latter shall be shown to stand or fall with the former? "I shall be rewarded or punished," says the practical reason," in another life, just as I may have been virtuous or vicious in this; for either I am immortal, and there is a God who will reward and punish, who will satisfy my aspirations after happiness, or my whole moral nature is a delusion. But if one half of my nature be already a delusion,† is there any difficulty in supposing the other half a delusion likewise? I shall be judged; but what is justice but a conception of my mind? He who will be my Judge, will His ideas be conformable with mine, so that I may infallibly know upon what principles I am to be judged? How can I know ? for what is justice, what wisdom, what virtue, but ideas? How can I know that these ideas will be the order of things in the world whither I am hastening? Nay, this Being who created me (we put the difficulty with all reverence), how if He have deceived me? How if truth, justice, virtue, order, harmony, exist for me no more when this life is finished? Has philosophy any test by which I may know that God Himself cannot deceive me?" This is indeed a bold question; but it is a question to which conceptualism has no answer. The Catechism tells us that God cannot deceive us, "because He is the very truth, which cannot deceive nor be deceived;" and this answer is perfectly satisfactory to the realist, who regards truth as a reality wholly independent of the mind which thinks it, and of its very nature necessary, eternal, unchangeable : but to the conceptualist, who regards truth as subjective, as a mere law of the mind, it is a mere sophism, it is trifling with him to tell him that God is the very Truth; for the very

* Philosophical Discussions, Philosophy of Perception.

†The tendency in mankind to objectify the axioms of reason is called a delusion. See Critique passim.

Truth, that which is in itself true, he does not know; he only knows subjective truth,—that which is true to him in the actual state of his faculties, and in the present order of things: beyond those faculties, and in another order of things, he cannot tell whether two and two be four or five, and whother the part be not greater than the whole. What boots it to tell him that God is the very Truth?

Truth, then, is God, since God is truth. "Signasti super nos lumen vultûs tui, Domine."* To deny that the human mind knows the absolute, the necessary, the eternal truth, what is it but the despair of metaphysics? But how are the tables turned, now that we Catholics are called upon to become the champions of reason,-we who were supposed to be afraid of reason, to shrink from looking truth in the face, because we felt that howsoever divine the gift, yet men were liable to error in their use and application of it as of the other gifts of God! Truly there is nothing new under the sun; the very phase in philosophy which we are now witnessing,the protest of realism against scepticism,-is only the recurrence of what happened in early Greece. What was the doctrine of Heraclitus, that we can know nothing because all things are in a state of flux or motion, but the very doctrine of Sir William Hamilton, that we only know the contingent? It was then that the realism of Plato saved the civilised world from the blank of scepticism. He showed that there was an element in human knowledge which is eternal and immutable, and that science is consequently possible: whereas Heraclitus had taught that science was impossible, because nothing was stable,—all was in a perpetual flux and change. But science, properly speaking, is of principles which must be absolute and unchangeable. The same vice in modern times wants the same remedy. Scepticism cannot be defeated by conceptualism, for conceptualism affirms nothing but subjective ideas; but man wants a philosophy which will destroy doubt, which will satisfy him that all is not a dream and a delusion; and that philosophy is the one which affirms that his ideas are reality beyond himself. We may conclude, then, in the words of our poet:

"Great God! I thank Thy Majesty supreme,

Whose all-creative grace

Not in the sentient faculties alone

Has laid my reason's base;

Not in abstractions thin, by slow degrees

From grosser forms refined;

*Psalm iv.

Not in tradition, nor the broad consent
Of conscious humankind ;-

But in th' essential Presence of Thyself
Within the soul's abyss;
Thyself, alike of her intelligence
The fount, as of her bliss;

Thyself by nurture, meditation, grace,
Reflexively revealed;

Yet ever acting on the springs of thought,
E'en when from thought concealed."*

HOW DOTH THE LITTLE BUSY BEE !+

We have no patience with eclecticism in religion; with that dandy, squeamish, dainty epicurism, which, neglecting all the force of unity, all the teachings and warnings of history, thinks to set up a new and faultless system by merely culling the roses of the past, and leaving the thorns behind. Dr. Newman has well typified it in Loss and Gain, by the female who solicited Reding to be head of the new Church, to whose creed each sweet sister contributed one doctrine. It is a young-lady-like piece of work, the results of which are generally as flimsy and as frail as the gewgaws and crinoline of female millinery. Therefore we cannot open our mouths and cry "a sign," when we see Evangelicalism of the whitehandkerchief school looking up old hymns, and sipping some of the cream skimmed from the food of the strong. Such a luncheon does not prevent the same school from attending open-air meetings, and dining upon very solid abuse of the Sacrament of Confession, and misrepresentation of all that is vigorous, manful, and sharp in Christian discipline.

These considerations prevent us from entering with much hope on the examination of the valetudinarian state of the little busy Evangelical bee that has been improving its shining hours by flitting from flower to flower of the Christian poets, and sipping the wee morsel of honey that its capacity allowed it to suck from each; and the very first page confirms our prejudices. "We are sure," says the author, "that since the Prince of Life arose from the tomb, the life of Christianity has never been altogether buried again; and

*Father Caswall.

The Voice of Christian Life in Song; or, Hymns and Hymn-writers of many Lands and Ages. By the Author of "Tales and Sketches of Christian Life." London: Nisbet.

to watch for it, and rejoice in it when found, seem the only objects for which Church history is worth being studied." Fancy the whole business of Church historians being, as it were, to sit in a churchyard watching for such portions of "the life of Christianity" as the shovel of the sexton has failed to cover, and carefully to gather up and rejoice over the members they can find, like Isis over the fragments of Osiris !

But seriously, consider what this little sentence implies. A nimminy-pimminy miss, strong in the infallibility of her own judgment, passing in review before her all the heroes of Christianity, all the mighty men of old, men of renown, and pronouncing of them as they go by-here is life-here is death-here, alas, is idolatry-here, under all the corruption, is a spark of saving faith-but here is blank blasphemy! More hopeful is the state of mind of the homily writers, who, strong in the confidence of a novel system, and brave in dealing damnation to every body outside of it, feared not its remotest consequences, but denounced also their own fathers for not knowing what their sons were to discover. For a thousand years, they said, the whole Church has been sunk in damnable idolatry. If not true, this is at least bold, and may be honest. The new eclecticism is neither true, bold, nor honest. Eclecticism generally adheres to a body which it dislikes for its vulgarity, but whose fundamental principles it admires. It constitutes, as it were, the dandydom, the fine-ladydom, the ornamental portion of the denomination to which it belongs; the ribbons, and false flowers, and tinsel, and spangles, and gimcracks of the old lady's cap.

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Idolaters though we were, our busy bee does not like us to keep to ourselves the whole of our idolatrous ritual. " Why should the devil have all the best tunes ?" said the Rev. Rowland Hill, when he arranged the Easter hymn to the tune of Pretty, pretty Polly Hopkins." Why should Popery keep all its hymns to itself? why not put in your thumb and pull out a plum, and cry, What a brave adapter am I! Did not Meyerbeer act on the principle when he transplanted that beautiful Church chant into Robert the Devil? Why not do the same for Evangelical drawing-rooms and pious madrigalparties? You may sing Gregorians without going to confession; you may even wear purple copes without bowing down to the Lady who sits on the Seven Hills. And thus it is that, in spite of the text which the Oxford obscurantists alleged against the Tractarians," If I build again the things which I destroyed, I make myself a transgressor," -the various sections of Protestants are making themselves transgressors by re

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storing all which they made it once a matter of conscience to destroy-all except religion and truth. Painted glass, images, crosses, vestments, steeple-houses,-every thing that was to their fathers as "the gilded puddle a horse would cough at," the sons drink up like wine. Thus they build the sepulchres of the prophets, whom their fathers put to death. Alas, temporal death is but a joke to what they would inflict on the sons of those prophets, if their anathemas were registered above, and what they bound on earth was also bound in heaven! This strong language perhaps is scarcely applicable to the present volume. In itself there is not much harm in it; the ancient hymns which the author gives are magnificent and sublime; her commentaries and elucidations, if not very clever, are generally innocent. Thus she gives the original Latin of the Te Deum, "with the suggestion whether the expression martyrum candidatus exercitus' may not refer to the white robes made white in the Blood of the Lamb;" a discovery that does her credit, though it has been made before. But by referring the "æternum Patrem" of the second verse to our Lord, with a reference to the prophecy of Isaias where he is called Everlasting Father, she shows that she does not comprehend the structure of the hymn, as an address first to the Unity of the Trinity, then to the Trinity in each Person, then to the Incarnate Son. This is a specimen of her weakness; single details she may appreciate, the structure of the whole she cannot comprehend. To argue with such a reasoner, is like breaking a butterfly upon the wheel. But as she shows a kind of sympathy with some phases of Catholic life, we will try to make her understand why she is foolish in objecting to those to which she has an antipathy.

Talking about the "Mariolatry" of the middle ages, she comes to the Stabat Mater, of which she gives a prose translation, and to which she appends the following remarks:

"There is something so touching in the thought of standing with the Mother of Jesus beside His cross, that at first sight it might not strike us how deep the idolatry of this hymn is; how perverted the devotion must be, which even beside the cross of the Redeemer, in the hour of His dying agony for us, could turn aside from Him to any created being, and be content to look at Him who gave Himself for us only through the pierced heart of the mournful mother.

The deepest depth of this Mariolatry seems, however, to be reached when psalms and hymns written in honour of God are actually transferred to Mary. This was unhappily done with some of the psalms, and in more than one version with the Te Deum. One of these parodies may be translated."