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literati of China, than those of the Pope. I was informed by a high clerical Protestant authority, that out of the mass of Protestant converts hitherto made, there were only five whom he really believed to be sincere; and there is no reason to believe that the proportion should be greater among the more intelligent of the Roman Catholics."-p. 254, vol. i.

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Is not this, in its contemptuous setting aside of acknowledged facts, and its unfounded assumptions, a specimen of Protestant argument? Our Saviour said, "Go and teach all nations," &c., we suppose the masses. Is not then that Church which is "popular with the masses" the one to whom the mandate has been given, by whom it has been obeyed? And if this trust and power have been confided to her, why should she not succeed, even although others (unauthorized and ungifted) may have failed, as by their own admission they have done, both with the masses" and the literati? Now everywherefrom Mr. Oliphant to the Editor of the Times-it is the fashion to concede to us the "ignorant population,' masses," &c. Thankfully do we accept them! It would be an endless labour, (and needless to all but the wilfully blind, with whom it would avail us nothing,) to make out our array of names of the great, the learned, and the illustrious. It is more in consonance with our present subject to remark how many of these have been foremost in the ranks of martyrdom, as is shewn in these New Glories," no less than in all former records. Mr. Oliphant admits, in the passage which is found in one of our extracts, the influence of the Catholic missionaries in "high places," and that acts of charity and kindness are often received by them from the mandarins; and he ascribes this influence to their learning;-what kind of learning we are not told, yet that makes a difference. There is but one learning which leads to such acts, or to such lives and deaths as are now placed on record. Let it not be said that we build too much upon the superficial observations of a traveller. Let but our Protestant contemporaries apply this sort of criticism to the statements made by their overgrown converting societies of all descriptions, and they will be themselves astonished at the result. Oh! that they would do so; that they would ask themselves where are the marks of the true Church. We will describe them in the eloquent words of the Cardinal

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Archbishop, and with them we will conclude our notice of this volume.

"Coming from the sacred hands of the holy Father, this most touching and stirring volume speaks to us with the voice of an apostolic warning, summoning the faithful to fidelity in the conflicts in these latter days, and to constancy even unto death. It shows us that to this hour the Church is the same, and the world is the same, antagonist, and irreconcilable for the world will not change and the Church cannot. There is the same conflict, the same enmity, the same issue. The world martyrs the Church, the Church subdues the world. The words of our Divine Lord are always verified, 'I came not to send peace upon earth, but a sword.' The age of martyrs as of miracles never ceases. Martyrdom is a perpetual note upon the mystical body. It has the Stigmata of Jesus ever fresh upon it. We speak, indeed, of the ten persecutions of antiquity as if it were ten distinct and isolated assaults of the world. They were but ten more vehement bursts of a storm which was ever hovering overhead, wheeling about the horizon, and descending with a sudden stroke, first in one and then another region, but making perpetual havoc, to and fro, throughout the whole Catholic unity. So in every successive age. There have, indeed, been lulls and returns of the storm: it has died down, but it has never died out. The world, whether Jewish or heathen, heretical or schismatical, secular or nominally Catholic, Latitudinarian or infidel, has always persecuted the Church of God. Its instincts tell it that either it or the Church must die. Three centuries ago and England was the field of martyrdom; then it fell upon the islands of the Indian seas; then upon Poland; then France; then in our own day upon Rome, and now, for half a century, it is upon the far East. In sending out, therefore, this volume to the faithful, and in inscribing upon it the title The New Glories of the Catholic Church,' the Vicar of Jesus Christ has sent, as was the custom of Israel among its tribes, the warning and the invitation to arm for an impending strife. And certainly the Pontiff who has upon his brow the glory of defining the Immaculate Conception of the second Eve, ought to be the special object of the enmity of the seed of the serpent upon earth. He bids us, then, to revive our consciousness of the great laws and prerogatives, the sacred truths and instincts of the Church of God; of the glorious passion and splendid crowns of our Fathers; of the immutable sameness of the warfare; of the possible impending of the same conflicts, which we not only read in Martyrologies, but see bofore us at this day. The voice of the Father of the Faithful calls us to a closer and more loving attachment to our pastors, the leaders and cross-bearers in this great warfare, to more docile and intimate union with the mind and will of the Holy Roman Church; to a fearless constancy for even so much as a shadow of the faith, and to a confidence that the same Almighty grace and loving pre

VOL. XLVIII.-No. XCV.

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sence of the King of Martyrs can make even of us, weak and unused to danger, shrinking and soft to pain, confessors as inflexible, and martyrs as glorious, as they who won their crowns in the Flavian amphitheatre or the sunless prisons of Corea. He speaks to us as with the voice of the great martyr of Africa, -'O beatam Ecclesiam nostram, quam sic honor divinæ dignationis illuminat, quam temporibus nostris gloriosus martyrum sanguis illustrat. Erat ante in operibus fratrum candida. Nunc facta est in martyrum cruore purpurea. Floribus ejus nec lilia nec rosæ desunt. In cœlestibus castris et pax et acies habent flores suos; quibus miles Christi ob gloriam coronetur. Opto vos, fortissimi et beatissimi fratres, semper in Domino bene valere, et nostri meminisse.'-Valete."-Pref. pp. xiv., xv., xvi.

ART III. On the Origin of Species, by means of Natural Selection; or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. By Charles Darwin, Fellow of the Royal, Geological, Linnæan, &c., Societies, author of " Journal of Researches during H.M.S. Beagle's Voyage round the World." London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1859.

WHERE is that story to be found which delighted us

in our boyish days, of the tiger that sprang at a man, and as he fell affrighted, bounded over him into the open jaws of a crocodile? We Catholics not unfrequently experience somewhat similar escapes. We are reminded of Mr. Squeers's new boy, whom a violent blow on his left ear would have sent flying off the stool on which he was perched, if an equally violent cuff on the right had not restored the equilibrium. What wonder if at times we are tempted to resort to the process of a Cambridge man, whom a friend of ours one day visited when he should have been reading hard for his degree, and whom he found with a savage looking equation lying uneliminated on his table, but himself comfortably ensconced in his arm chair, reading Punch. "But, my dear fellow, how on earth can you take the world so easily?" "Hush, hush! don't you see?" was the reply, "they are cancelling one another on the table."

If the voice of science were always such as that which

spoke by Sir Roderick Murchison when, even before the treasures of California had been discovered, he pointed to the gold fields of Australia as the El Dorado of the future; or if it were as that which showed where the telescope should be pointed that the planet might be seen, which, though human eye had not yet rested on it, had been even accurately weighed; then indeed it would be a tremendous thing to hear it said that Science was in contradiction to the Revelation of which the Church is the depository. But soi-disant Science is too often of another character for us to be much moved whenever it pleases to raise a cry of" Lo, here!" or "Lo, there!" That which one school accepts is looked on as thoroughly fallacious by another; and what is regarded as demonstrated by one generation of men who have made profession of philosophy is exploded by another, perhaps its immediate successor. Well, then, for us that our faith is from above, resting on supernatural evidences of a Revelation, and that it is not at the mercy of every fresh theorist in the mysteries of creation. If we but remain tranquil such enemies devour one another; and thus we are sometimes supposed to be indifferent to the progress of science, because we are quietly waiting for opposing theories to cancel one another on the table." It is not so very long since we were most learnedly told, with great ingenuity of argument and apparently a goodly basis of anatomical knowledge, that the variations of the human frame amongst the different members of our race are so important and radical, that it is impossible that the Mosaic narrative can be true, or that we can all be descended from a single pair. Τόνδ' ἀπομειβόμενος, Mr. Darwin makes reply and says, that not only is there no difficulty in believing that an Ojibbeway, a Hottentot, and an Australian, have descended from a common parent with a Chinese and au Englishman, but that "he believes that animals have descended from at most only four or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or lesser number:" and, much further still, that he would "infer from analogy that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed," or in other words, "that all animals and plants have descended from some one prototype." (p. 484.) Truly the oscillations of Science are somewhat alarming.

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We should, however, be extremely sorry to leave the impression that we consider Mr. Darwin's book as empirical or unscientific. He has the misfortune not to believe in Adam and Eve, and he has filled up the gap thus left in his mind by substituting in their place some prototype of far more venerable antiquity, though it must be confessed, of rather a humiliating character to one who would fain believe himself as coming directly from the Hand of God" a little lower than the angels ;" and he looks back through a bewildering number of years to his simple progenitor, a worm perhaps, or a bit of sponge, or some animated cellule. He would say with Job, but in a sense that would have surprised the Patriarch, Putredini dixi, pater meus est; mater mea et soror mea, vermibus. But his book is not occupied with this. It is introduced into a few lines at the close of the volume, and if it were not for a paragraph which it will be necessary for us subsequently to quote, we should not have thought that the idea was in the writer's mind while the main topics of his book were under discussion. The work itself, in the main, we will say frankly, seems to us so valuable, and approves itself to us individually as so genuinely scientific; the basis of facts is so unusually broad and comprehensive, the reasoning is so dispassionate, and the writer shows himself throughout so keen-sighted to every objection, that we cannot say how grieved we are that the book should be marred by the introduction of so gratuitous and so repulsive an idea, or that the theory should be carried to such unreasonable lengths. The present work is but an abstract of a much larger undertaking, on which Mr. Darwin has been engaged for many years. We most sincerely trust that when this great book shall appear, for which we shall look as anxiously as any, we shall find that he has withdrawn this preposterous conclusion, which, if it were but a true deduction from his previous positions, would be a most arrant reductio ad absurdum.

We will commence our account of the theory maintained in this remarkable book by a case which is dismissed by Mr. Darwin in a single line. (p. 30.) In 1791,* one of the ewes on the farm of Seth Wright, a grazier in

* Phil. Trans, 1813, p. 164. Brit. and For. Med. Rev. Apr. 1839, p. 377.

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