LE PERE HYACINTHE DANS L'EGLISE ROMAINE, 1827-1869.*
THE subject of this memoir was a well-known figure in the French Church under the Second Empire. He was, if not a great, certainly a famous, preacher : he filled Notre-Dame as no one before or since has filled it ; " it n'est pas eloquent," it was said of him, " c'est l'eloquence meme." But he iva# a, man rather of impressions than of thought, who left no lasting mark upon his generation. He had little balance or stability ; when he broke with the Church, Merimee wrote : " Le Pere Hyacinthe veut faire le Luther ; mais it n'a pas la taille qu'il faut pour ce role." He was a man of sincere, though mystical rather than rational, piety ; but he was out of place in a religious order, and in the Church. His son describes him as " a deist tinged with Christianity " ; he was a more self-conscious Vicaire Savoyard. His attempt to found a Gallican Church cannot be taken seriously; "le temps n'est plus aux grands schismes " ; and when he died (1912), the interest which attached to him had long been historical ; he was the depository of the memories of a past age. It is in this sense that M. Houtin's work is important ; the selection and editing of the material could not have been committed to more competent hands than those of the author of " La Question Biblique," and the " Histoire du Modernisme Catholique." " My one wish is to be of service to those who desire to know what Catholicism really is," he says. The conspiracy of silence with eihich the book has been received in France shows how great a pressure the Church can still bring to bear on journalism, and its unwillingness to allow facts which it cannot deny or question to be known.
Charles Loyson entered Saint-Sulpice as Renan left it. Readers of the idealized account of this great seminary in "Souvenirs d'Ethance et de Jeunesse" will find it describedmore prosaically as a school of mediocrity, respectable, but devoid of ideas. It was, however, decorous and dignified, which is more than can be said of the Dominican novitiate to which the future orator transferred himself, where the penalty for a trifling
• Le Pere Hyacinthe dans rEglise Romaine. 1827-1809. Par Albert Uoutta. Paris: E. Nourry. [9 franca]
infraction of the rule -was that the friars assembled in chapter spat in -.the face of the .offender :- " un jour un visage degouttant . de crochets lands avec une verve qui traltissait une intention vindicative ; et .ce spectacle l'ecoeura."
It is satisfactory to learn that the .superior responsible for these,proeeedings was subsequeutlyremovecl the,mere suitable atmosphere-of a lunatic asylum, and -M. the children of .Laccirda,ire to the newly restored Discalced Carmelites. Here the outstanding Agures were Pere Hermann Cohen, .a converted Jew, whom be .describes as " an adventurer," and Pere Bernard Bauer, afterwards a prelate _and chaplain to ,the Empress, who in the .end abandoned his orders and the Church. The Carmelite friars are described as coarse and, gross, greatly inferior even to the expectorating Dominicans. " You have gone into an order which is a disorder and without a government," said an. Arch- bishop to Hyacinthe, as he was called. in religion ; and, another.: " You are too honest a man for the habit you wear." M. Routin's description of the extent to which the esprit de corps encouraged in the Congregations overrides the most elementary moral. principles, and of the insufficient knowledge of the Order possessed by novices at the time of their profession, are instruc- tive, and should be taken to heart by not a few well-intentioned but ignorant persons in our awn Church.
The outspoken criticism of the Papacy and .in general of the Roman authorities on the part of eminent ecclesiastics will come as a surprise to Anglican Romanizers. " The younger clergy are heretics," said an old-fashioned :bishop, speaking of the then rising school of Ultramontanes ; and another : " They want to govern the Church like a shop : it is enough to make one lose faith." " God will sweep them away," writes 4gr. Landriot ; and Mgr. Dupanloup : " Propaganda would like to drive the bishops like a herd of swine." " The times are great, the men small," said Cardinal Grasselini.; Mgr. Tizzani : "The destruction of Jesuitism is the one remedy " ; and Mgr. Darboy, the martyr of the Commune, whom Pius IL thought better suited for an Ambassador .than for the Arch- bishopric of Paris " The Popes have had the education, the politics, and the lortunes of „Europe :their hands ; _and see to what they have brought us ! Our best wisdom is to -do nothing, and just to _endure." Mgr. Isoard, then Auditor of the Rota, writes from Rome (1869).: " .Thie eytitem- of. rigorism d outran:cc cannot be permanent. Discontent and disgust are universal ; with a new pontificate a reaction must come." It came with the death of Pius IX. (1878) ; .but the change was one of men, not of spirit or temper. A saying of the venerable P011inger is recorded (p. 292) : "History shows that the state of things which has come about in the Church since the separa- tion of the. Eastern and Western Churches is not of God." We need not go far afield to be convinced of this. The present Pope is personally a wise, a moderate, and a religious man. Yet, even under such a, Pontiff, Rome:which:refuses to condemn assassination in Ireland, last week condemned . emphatically- riaum teneatis 1—the Y.M.C.A.
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