when he was residing in Paris, expresses the father's anxieties for the faith, the morals, and the temporal prospects of the brilliant youth, with a force quite painful to read. "You have plenty of good sense, if you will but use it," is the idea which pervades this and others of his letters. "Never fear, I fully trust myself," is the pervading idea of the replies. The best possible feeling seems to have always existed between them; and there can be little doubt that the death of the father, though the son was then thirty-two years old, was too soon for the permanent happiness of a character so brilliant and volatile, so susceptible and pliant.

Short Notices.

MISCELLANEOUS LITERATURE.

66

Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa. By David Livingstone. (London, Murray.) The words 'mission' and 'missionary' are used in several senses, among which the commercial now preponderates. Mr. Livingstone may have the ultimate view of Christianising Africa; but his means, the things to which here and now he directs his energies,—are commercial relations, opening up new roads, and finding new markets for British produce. Though we cannot look at him as a model of the Christian missionary, we must concede that he is a very remarkable man, who makes less fuss about a sixteen years' residence in the interior of Africa than many a dandy tourist makes of a single camel-journey across the desert. He is one of those Scotchmen of humble origin who by force of character have raised themselves to fame; and he fully deserves it. He is of a Highland family. "Our ancestors," he says, were Roman Catholics; they were made Protestants by the laird coming round with a man having a yellow staff, which would seem to have attracted more attention than his teaching; for the new religion went long afterwards--perhaps it does so still-by the name of the religion of the yellow-stick."" In his youth he was a literary factory-boy; his favourite books were those on science, to the disgust of his father, who wanted him to read The Cloud of Witnesses, or Boston's Fourfold State. "Our difference of opinion reached the point of open rebellion on my part; and his last application of the rod was on my refusal to peruse Wilberforce's Practical Christianity." The young man then became a surgeon, with the intention of qualifying himself as a Chinese explorer; but falling in with the London Missionary Society, he was employed by it in Africa, to the advantage of commerce certainly, if not of religion. His African experiences are most interesting, and told with vigour if not with refinement. He is very modest about his style: he owns himself to be perfectly inexperienced, and would have employed some one to compile the book from his notes if he had found it possible. He has increased his respect for literary men by enrolling himself among their number: "Those who have never carried a book through the press, can form no idea of the amount of toil it involves. The process has increased my respect for authors and authoresses a thousandfold."

Essays on the Early Period of the French Revolution. By the late Rt. Hon. J. W. Croker; reprinted, with additions, from the Quarterly Review. (London, Murray.) These are very important and able essays: the first intended to demolish M. Thiers' credit as a historian; the second, a good picture of the private life of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette; the fifth, a history of the captivity of the royal family in the Temple; and the three last on Robespierre, the revolutionary tribunals, and the guillotine. Mr. Croker's sympathies were with the right persons; and he writes about these matters in an infinitely better spirit than any Whig or Radical could have done. The volume is well worth reading.

FOREIGN LITERATURE.

"The

Le libre Examen de la Vérité de la Foi.-Liberty of examining the Truth of the Faith: Conversations on the Catholic Demonstration of the Christian Revelation. By V. Deschamps, C.S.S.R. (Tournay and Paris, Casterman.) The idea of this remarkable and elaborate work is extremely simple: in this it is a true work of art; it is but the development of a thought which the author had previously expressed, and which he says was first suggested by some passages in a letter of Fenelon's. The idea is this; in the demonstration of Catholicity, the Church is an axiom that has not to be proved, but to be seen. If we must prove the Church by arguments, we get into the same impossibility as that which nullifies Protestantism; for it is as bad to prove the Church out of the Scriptures and fathers, as to prove the individual doctrines of the Church from them,-the same gate is opened to all quibblings, doubts, and dishonesties in one case as in the other. This dialectic method is all very well in the reflex sense: after we have recognised the Church and obeyed her, then we may trace her back in history and in documents; but in herself she is set on a hill-she is visible not in history, to the eye of the student only, but in the world, to the eye of every man that passes along the roadway of life. ignorant man," says Fenelon," has no need either of reading or reasoning to find the true Church; without opening his eyes, he knows with certainty that all those sects which would make him their judge are false, and that the only one that can be true is the one which commands him to believe humbly. Instead of books and arguments, all he wants is the consciousness of his own impotence and of God's goodness; and he will never be seduced by the flatteries of those who make him the judge of religion. . . . So in the case of the learned; . . . let him reject a discussion visibly impossible, and a presumption evidently ridiculous (namely, that he is the supreme judge of revelation), and he is a Catholic." For all Catholic countries, and for many that we call Protestant, this argument is most true. "How can people call Holland a Protestant country?" observed a very distinguished member of the bar who had spent his vacation there with his family; "the only religion that is visible there is the Catholic." Protestantism shows itself negatively streets like Oxford Street, a mile and a half long, without a place of worship from one end to the other; closed doors where there is a church; and a general and evident absence of all the means of grace, -such is the visible presence of Protestantism; a visibility that consists in being invisible. Catholicity in these countries is the only positive religion that comes before men's eyes.

This consideration leads us to doubt whether F. Deschamps' book is exactly what is wanted for England. Here our poor countrymen are

deceived by a sham. They have, each in his own place, the country church and churchyard, where the ashes of their ancestors rest; tombs of crusaders are around them as they worship; they congregate after service under the same yew-tree whence their fathers cut the bows they carried at the battle of Cressy. The inside of the church may be damp and mouldy; but there is the old clergyman with his surplice, with the same sleepy old sermon that they heard thirty years ago. It is a dull, but it is a visible religion. As soon as men can widen their horizon beyond the boundaries of their parish, the prestige of the thing begins to fail, and the Church of England to split up into as many churches as there are congregations; but we can easily fancy the oldfashioned, anti-locomotive Englishman living in perfect good faith under the shadow of his steeple, and believing it to be the Catholic Church which he weekly confesses in the Creed.

Correspondence.

CATHOLICITY IN INDIA.

To the Editor of the Rambler.

DEAR MR. EDITOR,-At p. 389 of the last Rambler, a statement is made that the Christians of Tinnevelly were left so destitute of the means of grace that they threw themselves at the feet of the VicarsApostolic, and said, "Give us missionaries, or we turn Protestants;" and that 40,000 of them fulfilled the threat.

But

On reading this, one cannot help speculating a little, by the way, on the funny state of mind the people must have been in to make and execute such a threat. That there are, however, funny and most unphilosophical states of mind in the world, is beyond controversy. the fact here quoted is, I think, very doubtful; and as it is not to the credit either of the Christians of Tinnevelly or their ecclesiastical superiors, I am unwilling that it should pass as true if it is not so.

All I know of the matter is this, that about the year 1845, or earlier, a great fuss was made amongst missionary societies in England because it was said that not forty, but seventy, thousand Tinnevellians were ready to embrace "gospel truth;" and the late Bishop of London busied himself in sending out some missionaries who might gather in the ripe harvest that was awaiting their hands.

With one of these missionaries I travelled a part of the way out there; he was very full of the great things that were going to be done at Tinnevelly. But two or three months' residence there dispelled the illusion; and when I met him again shortly after, he told me that the whole thing was a humbug so palpable that he could not stand it; and that the only foundation for the report was that there had been a quarrel between the head men of some tribes or villages, and that one of them had, out of spite, threatened to make all his people turn Protestants. Does this refer to something different, or is the writer of the article on Catholicity misinformed?—I remain, dear Mr. Editor,

14th December 1857.

Yours faithfully,

W.

[We are glad to receive this contradiction. The author of the first part of the article composed it abroad, and on such evidence as he could get; and very likely gave credit to the published statistics of some Protestant society.-ED.]

London: Levey, Robson, and Franklyn, Great New Street and Fetter Lane, E.C.

VOL. IX. New Series. FEBRUARY 1858.

PART L.

A RETROSPECT.

It is often said that it is extremely difficult to know the past in history; but it may be questioned whether it is not even more difficult to comprehend the present. The past is a puzzle because we possess so limited a knowledge of its facts. The river of time is a capricious stream, and brings down upon its current the most heterogeneous collection of waifs and strays conceivable. The more precious materials often sink to the bottom, and are lost for ever; while a heap of almost worthless rubbish contrives to float quietly on, and escapes every peril. Of the thousand details which are necessary to enable us to form a perfectly accurate conception of the men and the events of past times, we have only here a few and there a few; so that when the whole are put together with the utmost possible skill, the result is but a patchwork and a guesswork, which but very partially satisfies any man who knows of what materials it was compounded. The most plausible, brilliant, and life-like histories are for the most part only like one of those ingenious fabrications, made up of fragments of old painted glass, which the ingenuity of the artistantiquarian fashions out of a basket full of shattered ancient windows. The hues are endless in variety and often undimmed by decay, and the skill of the workman has produced a striking and, at a distance, a beautiful mosaic: but the wiser eye of the critic detects a host of incongruities; and the nearer he carries his investigation, the wider he perceives to be the difference between the complete originals and the venerable-looking compilations before him.

In the case of a present age, the sources of difficulty are, on the whole, of another kind. No doubt each man's knowledge of the bare facts of his own time is extremely limited,

VOL. IX.-NEW SERIES.

G

and it is only by comparison with his knowledge of the past that it can be complimented with the terms "satisfactory" and "extensive." It is quite hard enough to get at the real circumstances of any event, until it is brought into the light of an open court of justice, and there sifted by accomplished advocates whose actual earnest object it is, one on one side and the other on the other, to drag every thing that can be known into the light of day. Yet this is not the chief obstacle which stands in our way when we wish to form a just estimate of the events of our own time. There is a twofold source of error, from the influence of which no man can thoroughly free himself, and from which few men, practically, even attempt to free themselves.

One of these two consists in our close personal proximity to the objects which we wish to estimate, so that it is almost impossible to judge them as parts of a vast whole. Like a child that holds up its hand before its eyes, and then imagines it to be bigger than the moon, so the simple circumstance that the present has a peculiar living interest to us obscures our vision of every thing not near at hand, whether in time or place; and we form judgments absolutely ridiculous as to the relative importance and truth of what is close before our eyes, as compared with those events or opinions in which we have no personal concern.

The other element of difficulty to which we allude is the fact, that every one of us himself constitutes a personal portion of the mighty aggregate of opinion and feeling which makes up the character of a people or an epoch. We cannot separate ourselves absolutely from our contemporaries, so as to keep our judgments free from all prepossessions, whether against our times or in their favour. We may throw ourselves heartily into the crowd, or we may shoulder and kick every body in it that meets us; but we must feel and submit to its temper and its presence. The saying of the old Roman dramatist is true to an extent which few will admit in their own case: "Homo sum, humani à me nil alienum puto." The passions, the panics, the tastes, the views, which belong to our era, as an era, modify the characters of each individual in the multitude. According to our varying characters, our temperaments, our principles, our past habits, we may acquiesce more or less readily in the views of our time; we may extract from them gall or honey, ignorance or knowledge, folly or wisdom; we may oppose them, or denounce them, or ridicule them, or boast of them: but so surely as we individually form one of the human race, so surely is our daily life, and the whole cast of our religious, social, and