were dispensed from their vows as Redemptorists, and left at entire liberty to act in future as God in his providence should point out the way. In July of the same year four of the five were organized as a community styled the Missionary Priests of St. Paul the Apostle-a title since popularized into Paulists. A system of rules and an appropriate costume were also devised, and received the pope's approval. Ground was purchased on Ninth Avenue and Fiftieth Street for suitable community buildings, including convent and church, which were duly erected. In this and in other churches the Paulist fathers, reinforced by two additional recruits from the Protestant Episcopal Church, officiated as revivalists. All, and particularly Hecker, were "absolutely individualized," lovers of civil and political freedom, and adapted methods of work to the peculiarities of their fields of labor. They were intensely spiritual, markedly ethical, and outspokenly moral to an extent that would not be offensive to their superiors, who knew that Christ's kingdom is not of this world, and deported themselves accordingly. Thus the Methodist leaven, pure and impure, was introduced into the popular Roman Catholic meal. Yet Hecker was very fallible, and never more so than when he affirmed to Pius IX, "Your decision, Most Holy Father, is God's decision; and, whatever it may be, willingly and humbly will I submit to it." Notwithstanding all his sincerity in protestations of unquestioning obedience, his principles of private judgment and utter submission to the unerring guidance of the Holy Spirit were certain to bring him, sooner or later, into official disfavor. Rome is a stern mistress. "The external authority of the Church," said Hecker, "without a proper understanding of the nature and work of the Holy Spirit in the soul, would render the practice of religion formal, obedience servile, and the Church sterile." And he was right. History is full of startling and terrible examples in his adopted section of the Christian Church. He was right also in his contention that what he called the natural virtues of honesty, temperance, truthfulness, kindliness, courage, and manliness were and are essential to holiness and to communion with God. He was no less right in his tolerance. "Don't try to get anybody to agree with you," was one of his advices; and for the reason that "No two noses are alike, much less souls. God never repeats.' 99 "It is never to be forgotten that one man can never be a guide to another, except as leading him to his only divine Guide." This is Methodistic, but not Romanistic. Men like Isaac Hecker always bring important things to pass. The Paulist spirit and energy have wrought out beneficent results. Their antagonism to the baleful liquor traffic in all its forms has been and is helpful to social reformers, to morals, cleanliness, and order. The religion-Christian, not papaltaught by them, does "elevate man far above his highest natural force into union with the Deity-intimate, conscious, political." Hecker courted controversy, delighted in it, and gratulated himself on success in conducting it. His Apostolate of the Press wrought mightily in the diffusion of his ideas. The Catholic World, which he started in 1865, and the Young Catholic, begun in 1870, brought many of the best and ablest minds on both sides the Atlantic into contact with inquiring minds on this. This militant priest, whatever the seeming, was not a prime favorite at the Vatican. True, in 1869 he stated to a friend that Pius IX had written him "the tallest kind of a letter, indorsing every good work in which I am engaged," and giving them his blessing. This was all the more remarkable because many of the ideas and teachings thus patronized are manifestly incompatible with the pretensions and practices of the papacy to which the Syllabus Errarum and the Vatican Decrees were about to impart the finishing touches. Rome might smile upon, but none the less thoughtfully would she smite the insuppressible reformer. To her he would be simply impudent and punishable for the unasked-for advice he sent to the pope. "Tell the holy father," said he to a bishop on his way to Rome, "that there are three things which will greatly advance religion: First, to place the whole Church in a missionary attitude -make the Propaganda the right arm of the Church. Second, Choose the cardinals from the Catholics of all nations, so that they shall be a senate representing all Christendom. Third, Make full use of modern appliances and methods for transacting the business of the holy see." Whatever Pio Nono may have thought of this gratuitous counsel there are signs unerring that many of the papal court thought that the ex-baker and founder of a new order had better attend to his own peculiar business, in which Romish statesmanship was not embraced. Terrible spiritual sufferings, not unrelieved by divine grace, characterized the last years of Isaac Thomas Hecker. He died December 22, 1880, crowned by Catholic enthusiasts in France as "the prophet of the future-the one who has blazed the way to the best progress in religious matters." The real animus of the papacy toward Hecker's "Americanism" waited patiently for expression until the publication of the official letter of Pope Leo XIII to Cardinal Gibbons, of Baltimore, on January 22, 1899. The pontiff avows his great good will to the American people, and his greater love to the Roman Catholic Church among them. His letter "is intended to suppress certain contentions which have arisen lately among you to the detriment of the peace of many souls. The origin of these contentions, he says, is in the Life of Isaac Thomas Hecker, in which are voiced "certain opinions concerning the way of leading a Christian life;" such as the harmonizing of teachings with the spirit of the age, some concessions to new opinions not only in regard to views of living, but to doctrines which belong to the deposit of the faith. The falsity of these ideas is apparent in the light of the principle that no Church interpretation of the sacred dogmas is ever to be departed from under pretense of a deeper comprehension of them. The Roman Catholic bishops of the province of New York are less guarded and more explicit than the pope in condemnation of this "Americanism." In their address to him they say, "The bishops receive and accept such letter [that of Leo XIII to Cardinal Gibbons] word for word, sentence for sentence, and in the sense intended by the holy father, which is no other than the sense of the universal Church of all ages. Henceforth we will regard these questions as settled. Thanks to his holiness, the hybrid theories to which the name of Americanism has been given, died almost at their birth." In the avowal of these sentiments the Paulist Fathers have distinctly concurred. The Methodist leaven in the Roman Catholic meal is still working with singular liveliness, quickening and sanctifying faithful souls in the New and in the Old World; is embodying itself in future Luthers, Calvins, Tyndales, and Wesleys. Of these the Abbé Victor Charbonnel is a brilliant example. The dogma of papal infallibility has not suppressed free inquiry. Cardinal Gibbons and Archbishops Ireland and Keane are reputedly friends to the exercise of the right of private judgment. Roman Catholicism sent delegates to the Parliament of Religions in Chicago to aid in the "social utilization of faiths." Their religious ideal seems to have been Father Hecker, of whom Charbonnel said in The Outlook of March, 1899, "He remained a Protestant by his homage to his own conscience, and a mystic by his faith in an interior Spirit. No doubt his Methodist descent and his early intercourse with the most mystical Methodist societies permitted these two states of mind and soul to seem quite natural to him." "In the ranks of [French] Americanism are the imposing figures of men of action, intellectual and moral authority, vigor, enthusiasm, and youth." The same remark is more or less true of American Roman Catholics. To Cardinal Satolli, well and not too favorably known in the United States, "Americanism" is "that baneful plague whose contagion is spreading over both worlds." This is sincere acknowledgment of a free spiritual movement that may produce another separation from the Roman Catholic Church. TREES AND MEN. A TREE is somewhat more than potential lumber. Human interest in it is not merely commercial. The relation between it and man is an obscure and fascinating mystery. Can any wise man make even a beginning toward explaining the relation between a pine tree and a soul? Yet the one speaks to and affects the other. Make it into a violin, and, in the hands of Paganini or Ole Bull, a cry comes out of it which is little short of human, thrilling spirit as well as nerves with inevitable emotion. Although the spell cast by trees evades analysis, no one can regard it as a fiction of the fancy of a few mooning, hysterical hyper-æsthetics. It belongs among universals and perennials, and casts its subtle witchery wherever leafy branches cast their shade. It was because of the appeal which they make to universal man that Rousseau, the French artist, liked to paint trees, and said, "The tree which rustles is for me a grand history; if I speak with its language, I shall have spoken the language of all times." A drop of Druid blood shows in most men's veins. Browning was not indulging in poetic pretense but testifying on the witness stand when he wrote in "Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Savior of Society," Many a thrill Of kinship I confess to with the powers Called nature; animate, inanimate, In parts or in the whole, there's something there 40-FIFTH SERIES, VOL. XV. Manlike, that, somehow, meets the man in me. O' the Persian, that old Xerxes, when he stayed I' the desert, for the sake of one superb Plane tree which queened it there in solitude. In that last line there is the sense of something regal in a gigantic tree, the sense which made it impossible for Dr. O. W. Holmes, who had a lifelong enthusiasm for great trees and carried a measuring tape for taking the girth of the biggest he could find, to pass a certain grand old oak at Beverly, Mass., without a bow and a genuflexion, and which made him say to Mr. Morse, on whose land it stood, "Ah, John, you think you own that tree, but you don't; it owns you!" This ascendency is as mild and beneficent as it is lordly. Ineffably grateful to man and beast is the benign shade of verdurous summer branches. Thereunder dumb cattle love to huddle, and man, primeval or end-of-this-century, seeks instinctively the selfsame shelter for his rest or his work. Kipling writes, "Under the Deodars;" Dr. Cuyler, "Under the Catalpa ;" Mrs. Claflin, "Under the Old Elms," and Arlo Bates, "Under the Beech Tree." Mary Russell Mitford said, in a friendly letter, "I am writing under a beautiful acacia tree with as many snowy tassels as leaves. It is waving its world of fragrance over my head, gratifying that love of sweet smells which in me amounts almost to a passion." The author of Ben Hur, telling how he wrote it, says: "The greater part of my work was done at home, my favorite writing place being in the garden beneath an old beech tree. I have a peculiar affection for that tree. Often, when its thick foliage has protected me with its cooling shadow, it has been the only witness of my mental struggles. The soft twittering of birds in its branches and the hum of bees near by helped to make the spot sweet and dear." The cordial trees everywhere extend a sympathetic invitation to take refuge with them, as do the wild goats with the high hills and the conies with the rocks. Russell Lowell advises that every man should sometimes retreat into the heart of the woods and closet himself in a rustling privacy of leaves, where one may find a peaceful pleasure and respite from nagging necessi ties, throwing the pack of pestering plagues which pursue him off his scent by taking to the many-scented woods. Escape |