edited, separately from other compilations, by Archbishop Manning.

Finishing this Retreat, full of confidence in the mercy of my God, I made it a law to myself to procure by all possible means the execution of what was prescribed to me by my Divine Master, in procuring the accomplishment of His desires touching the devotion which He has suggested to a person to whom He communicates Himself very confidentially (that is, Marie Alacoque, according to her biographer), and in whose behalf He has deigned to employ my weakness. I have already inspired it to many persons in England.'

The character of the devotion which he thus 'inspired' may be inferred from another passage in the same 'Retreat,' to be compared with those illustrative of the same devotion in other writers, which we have already given. And we once. more entreat similar comparison with the expressions of Goodwin.

'I make this offering in honour of that Divine Heart, which is the abode of all virtues, the source of all benediction, and the safe retreat of all holy souls. The principal virtues which I ought thus to honour are, first, the most ardent love of our Divine Lord for God His Father, together with His most profound reverence and incomparable humility; secondly, His infinite patience in suffering; His extreme sorrow and contrition for the sins which He had taken upon Himself, thus uniting the most tender filial confidence with the shame and confusion of the most grievous sinner; thirdly, His most keen compassion for our miseries, and His unbounded love for us, notwithstanding all these miseries, and notwithstanding the intensity of all these feelings. That Heart is still the same, ever burning with love to men, ever open to shed down upon them every kind of grace and benediction, ever touched by a sense of our ills, ever eager to impart to us a share of its treasures, and to give us itself; ever ready to receive us, and to be to us a shelter, a dwelling-place, a paradise even here below. In return for this, He finds nothing in the heart of men but hardness, forgetfulness, contempt, and ingratitude. He loves, and is not loved.

In reparation, Ŏ most adorable and loving Heart of my most loving Jesus, and to avoid, as far as possible, a like misfortune, I offer to Thee my heart, with every movement of which it is capable. I give myself wholly to Thee, and from this hour I protest, as I believe in all sincerity, that I desire to forget myself and all that belongs to myself, in order to remove every hindrance to my entrance into that Divine Heart, which, in Thy goodness, Thou dost open unto me, and into which I desire to enter, to live and die there with Thy most faithful servants, all inflamed and consumed with Thy love.'

Of De la Colombière's conduct during his residence of two years in England, the little we have on record is conveyed by Jesuit writers, in the usual sugared style of their professional hagiology. Though of course in almost daily communication

with the Duke of York and his household, his humility was such that he never looked the Duke or Duchess in the face,' and left the Court without acquiring an accurate knowledge of their persons. His tribulations in this land of heresy are made the most of; but it is consoling to observe that among the worst of them is noted his suffering under English cookery. "Quelque répugnance qu'il eût pour les mets dont usent les Anglais, et quoiqu'il eût à souffrir dans l'usage qu'il en 'faisait, il ne voulait jamais qu'on lui en servît d'autres!' Le pauvre homme! One accomplishment of a courtly preacher of the day he certainly possessed-that of harmonious flattery. The following is an extract from one of his sermons, preached in the Duchess's chapel, informing his hearers that the great Louis Quatorze had honoured the Blessed Virgin by condescending to wear her scapular' :

'Notre invincible monarque, qui, dès les premières années de son règne, a surpassé toutes les espérances de ses sujets, toute la gloire de ses ancêtres, qui se surpasse aujourd'hui lui-même, et qui étonne l'univers par des prodiges de conduite et de valeur, ce grand monarque s'est mis depuis longtems sous la protection de Marie en recevant son saint habit. Cette protection le fortifie au milieu de tant de fatigues, le conserve parmi des périls qui font frémir toute la France, lorsqu'ellemême, sous sa conduite, fait frémir toute l'Europe.' *

The Father continued, as we have said, for nearly two years to execute these functions in England. Then-in the autumn of 1678-the Popish Plot' burst like a thunderbolt on the nation. The populace was panic-stricken and bloodthirsty. It became necessary for those who preserved common sense and humanity to protect, as far as they could, at least the persons of those strangers who were thus imperilled. Parliament ordered the foreign priests out of the country. An exception was made for those in the service of the Crown. But this exception was not extended to the servants of the Duke of York, of which the latter, in his Memoirs, makes a great grievance.

The factious party (he says) petitioned the King to put the penal laws into execution; which they pressed with that violence as he thought it necessary to yield a little to the current, and issued out a proclamation for banishing priests, &c.; on which occasion the Duke met with a sensible mortification from a hand that he did not expect it: for when it was moved in Council that the Duchess's priests ought to

* The date of this sermon would seem pretty nearly to synchronise with that of the reconciliation between the pious monarch and Madame de Montespan, so inimitably described by Madame de Caylus: 'Bossuet 'voulait les convertir: il ne réussit qu'à les raccommoder.'

!

be excepted as well as the Queen's and those of foreign ministers, it was absolutely refused as a privilege too great for a subject; but, as an expedient, proposed inserting them in the Queen's list. But Her Majesty, though the Duke and King himself desired it, would not

consent.

The biographers of De la Colombière make the most of this incident. It is a singular weakness of Jesuit writers-having as noble an army of brave and devoted men to enrol in their annals as history can show-that they cannot be content without ascribing the honours of martyrdom or confessorship to very insignificant candidates of their fraternity.

He remained (says Father Tickell) for several months in prison, when, according to the petition of the Lords to His Majesty, he was banished out of the kingdom. Thus, a martyr only in desire, Father de la Colombière was forced, after witnessing the glorious death of his brethren, to abandon the fruits of his labour and tears. It was in the beginning of 1679 that he returned to France, his health broken by his labours, the hardships of his prison, and the sufferings he had been forced to witness.'

All this is mere rhetoric, addressed, no doubt, to congenial readers. Father Claude suffered no imprisonment and witnessed no deaths. The truth is plainly told by Lingard (November, 1678).

'At this time Luzancy (a subordinate informer, afterwards eclipsed by Titus Oates) appeared again upon the scene.. . . He had already expelled from England St. Germain, almoner to the Duchess of York; he now expelled La Colombière, successor to St. Germain. Having composed a memorial for Du Vicquier, a Frenchman, he introduced him, first to the Bishop of London, and then to the Lord Chancellor. La Colombière was immediately arrested, and committed on the 16th of November. The former accused him at the bar of the House of Lords of having said that the King was a Catholic at heart, and that the power of the Parliament would not last for ever; of having perverted Protestants, and sent missionaries to Virginia.* The Lords noted that these were matters of dangerous consequence, and on the 21st addressed the King to send Colombière out of the kingdom.'

We may reasonably infer, in the then state of men's minds, that his expulsion followed without delay: and in point of fact

This was a ticklish point just then with suspicious Protestants. Lord Baltimore, in Maryland, had conceded full liberty to Papists. Governor Berkeley, in Virginia, a highflying old Tory, if not himself a Catholic, had incurred popular hostility by his repression of the 'Bacon insurrection,' and his sanguinary executions. The old fool,' said the kind-hearted Charles II., with truth, has taken away more ' lives in that naked country than I for the murder of my father,' (Bancroft.)

he was at Paris some time before the 18th of January. The 'several months of imprisonment' are therefore simply mythical.

Soon after his arrival in France, the Father revisited Parayle-Monial, where he found things in an admirable state, but 'saw Sister Alacoque only once' in his stay of eight days: returned there once more, as soon as he could get leave of absence from certain duties to which he had been appointed at Lyons; and died at Paray on the 15th February, 1682. 'On trouva dans sa succession,' says M. Lemontey, un petit 'écrit pour l'établissement de la dévotion au Sacré Cœur, et un portrait assez bizarre du Cœur de Jésus Christ, qu'il 'avait fait peindre dans des dimensions gigantesques.'

And now that we have completed the memorial of his brief career, we return to the question raised by the assertion of M. Lemontey and his (unfortunately) unnamed English authorities, that De la Colombière, under the disguise of Alacoque, was the true importer-not producer-of the devotion of the Sacred Heart, and that he derived it from the invention' of the 'famous Goodwin.'

Certainly, if he did not, the coincidence is a strange one. We have seen that fervid, and to ordinary sense presumptuous, expressions respecting the honour and attachment due to the Heart of our Saviour had been common enough in the Church for centuries before the revelations' at Paray-le-Monial. But these never assumed so technical, anthropomorphic a shapewe use once more the word consecrated by old controversy-as they suddenly did, in the middle of the seventeenth century, in the utterances of De la Colombière; assuming, for our purpose, that the latter and Mary Alacoque are substantially the same. And whatever difference may be traced between him and Goodwin amounts to no more than this, that the Romanist-according to the genius of his faith-relies more on mere sensible objects for the illustration of his chosen Devotion than the Puritan.

Now De la Colombière's main business in England was, as he informs us himself and as his enemies declared, the conversion of heretics: specially, of course, in London and about the Court. Nothing more natural than that he should have been brought into contact with the writings, if not with the person, of the popular religious writer Goodwin, who was still alive at that time and pursuing his ministry in London. And every student of ecclesiastical history is thoroughly aware of the readiness of the Jesuits to appropriate, and adopt, any specialties of heretical, or even pagan, devotion which they

could turn to account for what they deemed a good purpose. The Father would only be adopting, in England, the practices

some call them the stratagems- for which Francis Xavier has obtained unlimited honours, and for which his Order was praised by some and reproached by others throughout the regions of their wide conquests in Asia and America.

Of course these suggestions will pass for nothing, or be received with closed ears, by the returned pilgrims from Parayle-Monial and those who sympathised with them. The Pope, by the act of beatification, has established the claim of Margaret Alacoque to have been a chosen instrument for communicating to the world a renovated, if not absolutely novel, 'devotion,' and to criticise her, as we might an ordinary enthusiast, on the ground of want of originality, is, in the eyes of her devotees, mere idle fault-finding. But there are others, not prepared to treat her narratives as absolutely within the limits of inspiration, who may nevertheless plead a shrewd objection to the theory of her connexion, through Mary of Modena's chaplain, with Oliver Cromwell's chaplain. They may point to the circumstance that, in the received accounts of her earthly career, the solemn revelations which she received, the visions which were vouchsafed to her, the conception at least of her schemes for establishing and propagating the culte' of the Sacred Heart, would seem to have preceded the mission of De la Colombière to London. We find at least no evidence though M. Lemontey seems to imagine that such is traceable—of his having been in England on any previous occasion. And it is scarcely probable that any knowledge of Goodwin's work could have reached him before his arrival there. We should be driven, therefore, on this reasoning, to the conclusion that there was a mere casual, though very strange, coincidence between the two.

But to such reasoning there is a very pregnant reply. The dates of the nun's visions, and of her intimations respecting them to others--as well as those of the corresponding development of the Devotion by Father de la Colombière himself-are in truth entirely vague and unsettled. Margaret Mary kept no diary; nor did the Father. They noted, but did not chronicle, their spiritual experiences. If those of the nun were in truth dictated to her by the Jesuit when and where he pleased, as Lemontey supposes, the objection raises, of course, no real difficulty. But even if her own, what is their value as to details of fact? Margaret Mary, we believe, left no writing at all: De la Colombière none touching his biography except incidentally. The records of the former's life and conversation were