all the ancient modes of combat, machines, vestments of peace and war." Collections of prints might be shown, which would put the pupils in relation with the manners and institutions of the past, and stimulate attention by interesting their senses.

There is nothing very original to be pointed out in the reflections of P. Lamy upon the study of languages. He thinks that "absolutely speaking, one might do without grammar," and learn Latin by using it as Montaigne did; but he acknowledges that this system is less practicable than attractive, and he justly remarks that by means of a well-made grammar one may learn in a month what one would discover for one's self only after a study of several years. He wishes the beginning to be made by translation, and he would desire, besides, that the first translations should be lists of chosen and distributed words, as is the case in the Janua linguarum of Comenius. He does not believe in the utility of foreign languages, but recommends the study of Hebrew. He recommends in the beginning interlinear translations. He regrets the time lost in Latin verse. The authors he chooses in Roman literature are Terence (which P. Condren reproved), Cæsar, Sallust, Cicero, Virgil, and Horace. In Greek he does not discard Aristophanes, "who can be read with benefit," more liberal upon this point than Thomassin, who said: "the Plutus of Aristophanes is good, but all the rest are worth nothing."

What is much more remarkable is that the greatest novelty in P. Lamy's book is his ideas upon the teaching of philosophy. To tell the truth, he is the first man in whom we meet upon this point a plan of organization, broadly and intelligently conceived. What must be first noted is his severe condemnation of the scholastic method. Is it a man of the seventeenth or the nineteenth century who has made this somewhat ironical judgment of the theologians of the middle ages? "He who reads one reads them all at the same time. They say only the same thing, with this difference, that what is given in some as a proof is given in others as an objection. It would be folly to wish to read them all. Read one, and prefer the shortest." Let the scholastic authors be laid aside then, and put in their places the ancients, Aristotle and Plato, and the moderns, Descartes and Malebranche. Let the history of philosophy be learned either in the writings of Diogenes, of Laertius and Plutarch, or in the recent treatises of Lipseus for the stoics, of Gassendi for Epicurus, of Lamotte Levayer for the skeptics. P. Lamy attaches great importance to the history of philosophy. "Why not instruct young people in

the sentiments of the illustrious philosophers? It is useful to know what great men have thought. If their thoughts are not the truth, at least they make us pay attention to it."

Père Lamy blames severely a usage which has become general in the classes of philosophy, that of dictating lectures composed by the professors. In the first place, it is a loss of time to the pupils; but still worse, the doctrines of these dictated lessons were most frequently "opinions ill conceived, badly digested, badly explained, written in bad Latin." "Of ten thousand professors of philosophy in Europe, there are not perhaps ten who are capable of doing it as it should be done." For these dictations of bad philosophy P. Lamy would wish to substitute printed books, either the very texts of the great philosophers, for instance the logic of Aristotle, or elementary works expressly written for the use of colleges. Perhaps our author distrusts a little too much the free initiative of the masters whom he stigmatizes as being only commentators; "instead of assuming the personage of masters, they should content themselves with that of interpreters." He chains them to a fixed and uniform doctrine; he does not leave them enough liberty of speech; he seems to ignore what the personal exposition of the truth, as they conceive it is worth, in order to open young minds with their fertile earnestness and their communicative conviction. But we can only agree with him on the chapter of the dictations, which have always been abused in the classes, and which are less suitable in philosophical studies than elsewhere. He reminds us that in the old universities of Paris they contented themselves with reading Aristotle. The habit of giving them dictations was only introduced by slow degrees. But these writings were not long in extending beyond measure, and from 1355 "the professors of the university were forbidden to use the time of the lessons in making their pupils write. A hundred years after the Cardinal d'Estouteville obliged the professors of that university to make their scholars read the ancient philosophers, and to explain them.” But in spite of these prohibitions, the evil only increased, and when P. Lamy wrote of it, it was at its height; for the true and great philosophers were substituted in the classes the verbal and undigested lectures of unknown and worthless professors.

So much for the form of the teaching; as to the substance the protests and wishes of P. Lamy are not less just. He complains that the thorny questions about which they dispute, the chicanery of the arguments, hateful quarrels and verbal discussions have

taken the place of all that logic, physics, and morals contain of solid and incontestable verities. We will let P. Lamy himself explain the programme of a course of philosophy, such as he would have wished to see applied everywhere, such as he had doubtless used himself, before he was a butt to the persecutions of the enemies of philosophy. "There is nothing so beautiful as the knowledge of God, of minds and of bodies. What fruit the young people would carry away from the colleges if they left them with the knowledge of God and his attributes, of the grandeur of their own souls, their immortality, the end for which they were created, the use they should make of their faculties"; and science not then separating itself from philosophy, P. Lamy adds "if they had but there learned anatomy and whatever can be known of heaven, and of all nature in general,—there are so many things in philosophy which can be treated solidly and quietly. What can be better than that a professor shall cause to be publicly read a history of the most considerable experiments which have been made in this age by chemists, anatomists, and physicians?" And this beautiful programme, in which psychol ogy alone is a little forgotten, ends as it should, with a eulogy of moral philosophy. "It is entirely neglected," says P. Lamy, "because the present manner of teaching obliges a professor to speak only of disputed questions, which takes from him the time necessary to treat things which are beyond dispute, but which are of use in life."

11. All Education Christian in Aim and Spirit.

The end which was never lost sight of at the Oratoire in an education, which above all things wished to be a Christian one, was the interest of religion. That profane letters may be the auxiliary of Christianity is what they were always affirming in every possible tone. "There is scarcely a Greek or Latin author," says Lamy, "who has not served my purpose in explaining some obscurities of holy scripture." This is what P. Thomassin also thought, whom the Oratorians call an "incomparable theologian," whom P. Gratry placed in such a high rank among philosophers, and who is in our eyes a specially indefatigable compiler and distinguished erudite. He developed this point of view in a series of works of not less than eight volumes of six or seven hundred pages each.

Père Thomassin had foreseen the objection which the positive minds of our time have raised against the alliance of profane

studies and Christian education. The abbe Gaume and his imitators condemn as irreligious and corrupting the literature of' the Greeks and Romans. In pronouncing these anathemas they only reproduced, through their Christian fanaticism, the interdiction which the emperor Julian had proclaimed in the fourth century, through pagan fanaticism, against the Christian schools in which they studied the poets and orators of Athens and of Rome. We cannot deny that there is, at least apparently, some contradiction in presenting to the world a religion which is to make all things new, which condemns to eternal fire all those who have not known it, and to choose for this instruction the works of those very pagans who have been reproved and are hostile or at least strangers to Christianity. Julian expressed it forcibly and somewhat harshly when he said: Quisquis aliud sentit, aliud suos discipulos docet, is tantum videtur a sapientia quantum a probitate abesse. In welcoming ancient letters, as it does in spite of some isolated exceptions, the Christian church has involuntarily given one of the most remarkable proofs offered by history, of the necessary law that binds the future to the past, and which in spite of the revolutions accomplished on the surface, in spite of the insults and maledictions upon the lips, constrains the new generations to live upon the traditions and nourish themselves upon the labor of past generations!

The question put itself in another way to P. Thomassin. With what naivetté the good father pretended to find even in the poets of antiquity traces and elements of the Christian religion. He doubtless resigned himself, to acknowledge that the devil had sown in profane works the bad seed of impiety and immorality; but he maintains that the good seed was found there also, transmitted by tradition, collected by the sages in their journeys to the East, or simply brought into souls by natural light. "It is from the holy scripture that all human letters have issued." The truths of the Bible can be laid hold of again, although disfigured and counterfeited under the fables and fictions of Greek and Roman poetry. Homer becomes a theologian who speaks a little less clearly than Moses, but in the same sense, "of God and his angels, of the creation and the end of the world." P. Thomassin finds the history of Noah in the fable of Bacchus, that of Joshua in the fable of Hercules; with St. Augustine he discovers the announcement of the advent of the Messiah in the Eclogues of Virgil, and a verse in Lucian appears to him to be the manifest incarnation of God in the womb of the Virgin. It is impossible not to smile

when P. Thomassin declares to us that "there is a wonderful agreement between Homer and Moses"; or that we may remark the most important truths of the Christian religion in the tragedies of Eschylus and Sophocles. With his vast erudition, P. Thomassin failed as a critic; he canonizes, and I may say, he theologizes everything.

Let us not complain too much that there is some excess in the sincere, thoughtful admiration which a religious man shows for profane literature. We are too much unaccustomed in our day to hear the wisdom and morality of the ancients praised, not to be touched by hearing him say that among the Greek poets there was a natural morality "pure and exact." It is with real joy that he collects from the history of the church all the testimony favorable to the study of the ancient authors. He recalls to us that St. Paul in some sort adopted the poets of Greece by making quotations from them; that St. Gregory of Nazianze proposed the Odyssey as a school of frugality, patience, prudence, and, in short, of every virtue. He goes back to Moses to prove that, before becoming the confidential friend of the God of Sinai, the Hebrew prophet had instructed himself in all the sciences of Egypt. In a word, and without wishing to go into detail, with abundant prolixity, with a monotony disencouraging to the reader, P. Thomassin wrote more than four thousand pages to establish by quotations that the poets, philosophers, and historians of Greece and Rome may, and ought to figure in Christian education, that there is a possible accord between the fathers of religion and the "patricians of human thought."

With a mind more methodical than inventive, P. Thomassin hardly introduced any new ideas into the Oratoire. One point that deserves to be noticed is the importance he gives in the study of the languages to the science of etymology. Nothing is more worthy of our research," he says, "than to examine the terms we have in our mouths every day, and to discover where they come from." Does not this comparison of words with one another. this interest in their origin and history, or, in other words, this introduction of the linguistic and philological element into the classic study of Greek and Latin, conform to the desire recently expressed, in some remarkable essays on public instruction, by M. Michel Breál, an eminent philologist, much occupied with fortifying and reanimating the literary teaching of the dead languages by mingling some scientific notions with it? Is it necessary to add that P. Thomassin made very false applications