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Fire and the falling of tears,
And a measure of sliding sand
From under the feet of the years.

In his heart is a blind desire,
In his eyes foreknowledge of death:

He weaves and is clothed with derision,

He sows and he shall not reap,

His life is a watch or a vision

Between a sleep and a sleep.

Faith partially draws the veil aside and man perceives that his origin was not blind chance, his end will not be sleep.

Strong Son of God, Immortal Love,

Whom we that have not seen Thy face,
By faith, and faith alone, embrace,
Believing where we cannot prove-
Thou wilt not leave us in the dust;

Thou madest man, he knows not why:
He thinks he was not born to die,

And Thou hast made him; Thou art just.

Those who lift the blasphemous cry of a helpless, hopeless revolt, have thrown away divine faith, the one key of the world's great enigma; keeping their human passions quick and strong, they take away the supernatural from creation. What wonder if they are dissatisfied with the dregs that remain behind? For "the sum of man's misery is even this, that he feel himself crushed. under the wheels of Juggernaut, and know that Juggernaut is no divinity, but a dead mechanical idol." It is scarcely necessary in the face of this blighting creed to raise the supernatural vision of eternity, of love in reality stronger than death, of the shortness of this cold twilight, and the brightness of a better day, when human nature, losing no human tenderness, no sympathetic thought, no mutual joy of kindred souls that made it beautiful on earth, shall have all these made impassible, immortal, inexhaustible. There is no need to dwell on the hideous skeleton which pessimistic philosophy or poetry may confront us with. No matter how loudly it may be cried in his ears that all of him will die, man will hold in his innermost consciousness to immortality in some form. For from creation's dawn to its end, from the savage to the sophist, the united voice of man is the same forever-" Non omnis moriar, multaque pars mei vitabit libitinam."

If indeed it were not so,

then

Might we find, ere yet the morn

Breaks hither over Indian seas,

Death's shadow waiting with the keys

To shroud us from our proper scorn.

1 Carlyle's Characteristics.

Assuredly there is something in this state of existence that baffles all merely human inquiry. There are a thousand discords everywhere, the fragments of countless broken lives; a vast weight of suffering indiscriminately dealt by chance and change, or heaped by men upon each other; an unknown force called life, which science fails to analyze, which can be blotted out in a moment, which cannot be restored, and death which, as far as mortal sight can penetrate, is the end of everything. Doubtless without the supernatural this world would be, "from pole to pole, a very lazarhouse of woe." Here are four lines of the Coryphæus of English faithless poets, which, if mankind believed them and one realized them, might well make them declare that life was not worth its striving and pain, and would render impregnable the position of the pessimist.

We are baffled and caught in the current, and bruised upon edges of shoals:
As weeds or as reeds in the torrent of things are the wind-shaken souls.
Spirit by spirit goes under, a foam-bell's bubble of breath,

That blows and opens in sunder, and blurs not the mirror of death.

Against this dismal view of life the supernatural appeals to us through our reason and through the innate instincts of the heart. Tennyson has given beautiful expression to the persuasiveness of the appeal and the unconquerable yearnings of the soul for immortality. This is the heart's answer to the melancholy lines just quoted.

My own dim life should teach me this,
That life shall live forevermore;

Else earth is darkness at the core

And dust and ashes all that is.

'Twere best at once to sink to peace

Like birds the charming serpent draws,
To drop head foremost in the jaws
Of vacant darkness and to cease.

Were it not so, says the poet of the heart's instinct, man would be a monster, a " dragon's of primeval slime were mellow music matched with him." And so we find the most thoroughgoing materialistic school has found it necessary to provide something for man's spiritual nature, and has made a shadowy divinity out of the abstract being of humanity, and a shadowy immortality of the soul out of a figment that the soul's good deeds do live. George Eliot, "in sad, perplexéd minors," voices this agnostic yearning:

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Her far-reaching intellect clearly perceived that the most exquisite art cannot make of life deprived of immortality other than a "tale full of sound and fury signifying nothing." And her own great fame, paradoxical as it may seem, is a reward of her loyalty to early teachings that were distinctly religious. Her soul, turned though it was to atheism, kept some memories, a fading reminiscence, a running glimpse of the truth.

It is impossible to calculate the influence which the supernatural has had upon poetry. Love itself, that seems to furnish endless poetical capital, has not, on the whole, been so powerful an incentive to song as religion. The perfections of the Divine Being, and of those mortals who seemed to partake most largely of those perfections, have been the rapturous and constant theme in verse, not only of the chosen people to whom a special revelation was made, but of the most ancient of heathen writers. "Agnostic poetry is a studied attempt on the part of an unbelieving modern sect to reverse the order of things existing from the beginning of the world," and, notwithstanding their boasting, endless and inane pretence of culture and enlightenment, a persistent effort to turn the face of man earthwards, to teach him to growl in morbid lamentation over fancied evils, to revel in an amorphous, black, and barbarous melancholy, to indulge in blasphemy, and to set up in the literary mart a premium on the pessimistic pagan insanity. Under pretence of exalting man, of refining and elevating his intellect, it dishonors and reduces him to the level of the brute creation, stripping him of all moral responsibility, emancipating him from all divine law. "The Christian poet," to quote the words of a recent writer, "can be as subjective and as objective as any agnostic; and it will be long before a singer, thinking scorn of Christianity, will lay bare the secrets of the human heart like Dante, or dwell upon and depict the charms of external nature, which is the art of God, with the power or sweetness of Wordsworth." Under the pressure of the sorrow that no human life escapes, the verse of the unbeliever is the lifting of a puny, but wrathful, arm against the God in whom it believes not, and whom it names only to blaspheme; the poetry of the soul that rests in the supernatural is the upraising of prayerful hands, and the setting heavenwards of a face that has known tears, alas! but knows also and better far the joy of thanksgiving and the peace of an assured hope.

T

A NATIONAL CATHOLIC LIBRARY.

"O one who walks through the library of the Xavier Union, in New York, there arises a feeling of grateful interest, considering the brief period in which that organization has, by its zeal and energy, been enabled to collect a library of upwards of fifteen thousand volumes. That the selection of books is a creditable one is attested by many critical judges, and Monsignor Capel publicly testified his indebtedness to it for the use of important Catholic works, which he could find nowhere else, even in the great city of New York.

The Carroll Institute, in Washington, our national capital, has a similar library of excellent books, well managed and receiving constant accessions. Catholic libraries exist in other parts of the country, showing that a right spirit has been awakened among our young men especially, to form collections of books, with a view mainly to those by Catholic authors and bearing on the Church in its various relations.

Where many persons thus combine to form libraries for general use, there must necessarily arise the taste which will lead to the formation by individuals of private libraries. Hitherto there have been very few Catholics known in this country as book collectors or bibliophiles. Dr. E. B. O'Callaghan and Rev. J. M. Finotti were collectors in their day, and it is by no means creditable to the Catholic body that both their libraries were allowed to be scattered in the auction-room. The library of Dr. Emmet is extremely rich and valuable; Charles C. Moreau, of New York, was one of the members of the Bradford Club, which gave several important works, and did much to cultivate good taste. The Honorable John Kelly, of New York, has a large and well-selected library, and enjoys his books, as does John T. Doyle, of San Francisco. Extensive as the writer's acquaintance is with publishers and book-dealers, few names occur to him, amid a host of bookbuyers known to him, who can be classed as Catholics.

What constitutes the libraries of wealthier Catholic families, it is not easy to tell. Most, we fear, have but a few books, picked up at random, without any settled plan, and with no view to the general instruction of the household. Few, we believe, could show any series of books adapted to give the younger members a higher knowledge and appreciation of their faith and the unapproachable superiority of the Church in every essential point. Yet, if the

home library does not possess them, ignorance must prevail for the associate libraries, such as we have noticed, and our steadilygrowing College libraries can benefit but a select few. Where, then, are our young Catholics of leisure to acquire such knowledge as they want when they feel the need of information in regard to any Catholic topic often misunderstood or misrepresented?

It is in vain for any Catholic thus situated to enter our great public libraries, like the Astor, the New York Society, the Public Library, or Atheneum, at Boston, the Philadelphia Library, or any similar one. There are congresses of librarians, and manuals for librarians, but, when we examine them, we can only wonder at the stupendous ignorance of librarians and library managers as to everything Catholic, and their utter lack of comprehending what standard books they ought to have.

A kind of Library Guide, by Perkins, if memory does not play false, was once consulted, just to see what the gentleman's ideas of a Catholic department might be. A more ludicrous exhibition of imbecility certainly never astonished us. There was not a single standard work in any department: what he proposed was a mere random collection of rubbish. Yet, one would think that any librarian, with ordinary common sense, could lay out a plan, and ascertain what was the best book in each branch. To treat of any religion, the instinctive division would be, Dogma, Worship, Government, History. Each would have its subdivisions. Dogma would embrace Biblical,-a Catholic Bible and Commentary, such as Migne's "Cursus Scripturæ Sacræ," Calmet's" Dictionary ;" Patristic,―a set of the Fathers; Scholastic,-the works of St. Thomas Aquinas, and some recent work like "Perrone;" Moral Theology, represented by St. Alphonsus Lignori. Worship, by the Roman "Missal" and the "Breviary," in Latin and English, and by some minor English works, like Rock's "Hierurgia," Cochin or O'Brien on the Mass, Wiseman on the Ceremonies of Holy Week; Gavantus, The Ceremonial of the Church, the "Rituale Romanum;" works on the minor devotions of the Church, and devotions among the people. Government, by one of the great collections. of the Councils, supplemented by the "Collectio Lacensis," the "Bullarium Magnum," Kenrick's "Primacy of the Apostolic See," some standard work on the Priesthood. History, a work like "Natalis Alexander," the more recent "Rohrbacher," or, in English, "Alzog," or "Darras." To these could, of course, be added, if opportunity afforded, Helyot's "Religious Orders," or the special histories of great orders by Wadding, Orlandinus, etc., or histories of the Church in special countries; the "Bollandists " for the department of Biography, with "Alban Butler" as an English compend, adding separate lives of most eminent saints and person

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