moving personages are seen no more-the capitol vanishes into empty air, and returning vision is fixed upon the line that gave birth to its evagations! Yes, the verse of the poet has survived the superstition which it almost ennobled, more immortal than that upon which it leaned for immortality. Where stood the capitol is now the Ara Coeli. That which was consecrated to the monthly sacrifice of ignorance to deified vice, has now become exalted to the dignity of a temple of the living God, THE ALTAR OF HEAVEN, upon which is daily offered up that VICTIM, whose blood was shed for the redemption of the world! 0. LETTERS ON THE SCIENCE AND LITERATURE OF THE MIDDLE AGES. By a Gentleman, a late Member of the University of Cambridge. SIR, To the Editor of the Catholic Miscellany. AFTER a lapse of near three hundred years, the sense of all Europe seems on the verge of being awakened to the real merits and demerits of the pretended Reformation in religion. And we find, at length, that writers of almost every description, not only Catholics, but Protestants, infidels, philosophers, and mere historians, unbiassed by any particular creed whatever, are bearing concurrent testimony to the excellence of the Catholic faith. One writer points out the loss of old English hospitality with the change of religion, and deduces the want of kind manners among the British, to a spirit of natural hostility engendered by the many discordant heresies which sprung up in millions at the sound of the clarion of disunion which Discord blew at the Reformation. Another author proves the antiquity and catholicity of the doctrines of the Romish church; a third shews the uniform attention of the Catholic priests to their duties, and their peculiar attention to the poor: in short, writers of all descriptions and classes seem to be starting up, after this long period of darkness and despair, like light breaking out in various places after a clouded day, to enlighten the path of the bewildered pilgrim, and point out the way to true glory. Meanwhile, proselytism has been going on, though unperceived by the multitude, on a grand scale, not so much from the mere numbers of proselytes, as from the high intellectual character of many of them. I am one of those, who, without having any previous religious bias, have ever been wonderfully struck with the great consistency of Catholicism, and I was an admirer of the Church of Rome, before more serious considerations attached me to her interests. I viewed this church as an institution coeval with Christianity, whose faith was one, whose preachers were apostolical, and whose various institutions and rites were of all others the best calculated to render men wise, virtuous, and happy, because they were best fitted for man as he really exists, and which appearing to be adapted to the wants of human nature as it is, and not as it may be chimerically feigned to be by theorists, seemed to be an institution planted by the hand of man's Creator, rather than by the caprice of an hypothetical philosophy. The Reformation, by weakening the faith of the people, had produced one extraordinary effect, which the most sagacious writers seem to have overlooked it caused an immense host of grovelling and unnatural superstitions to prevail in the reformed countries. In England at no period were stories of ghosts, and the apparition of departed persons, besides other phantoms of a disordered mind, more generally believed than at the close of the Reformation, and during the reign of the unhappy Charles I. The old Gothic halls, the ruined monasteries, and dismantled houses of the Catholics, were all said to be inhabited by spectres, or infested with devils, and other creatures of an irregular imagination. The fact was, that the natural faculties of veneration, of faith, and of supernaturality, which Catholic education and discipline had hitherto directed to their legitimate objects, were now perverted by the ignorant people in such a manner as to induce all kinds of superstition. It is the nature of man's mind to have hope, faith, and veneration; these powerful faculties, resulting from our organization, are implanted in us for wise purposes by the Creator, and will find an object to engage their activity whenever, therefore, men cease to hope in heaven, to trust in God, and to venerate the blessed Virgin and the Angels, these faculties will, in the course of nature, be directed to false and unworthy objects, and it is for this reason that the shock which true faith, hope, and charity received at the Reformation, was followed by superstition, and that species of worldly idolatry of which Lord Bacon has given us such a masterly illustration in his Essay on the Idols of the Human Understanding. The theorist and hypothetical philosopher may invent what new modes of faith he pleases, and adapt them to his own ideal notions of what human nature ought to be, but I assert that for human nature as it is, the Catholic religion is the best of any, of : : which the history of the world has recorded any memorial. And Ì shall conclude these observations for the present with the testimony in its favour, directly or indirectly borne by those who have made the nature of man their especial study. In this detail, however, I shall pass over of course all the ancient fathers and professed Catholic writers, whose history and spiritual labours are already universally known I allude merely to the profane writers of our own times, whose works may not be so well known to the general reader. Gall and Spurzheim, the renowned anatomists of Vienna, laying aside their peculiar doctrines respecting the brain, are admitted by all Europe to possess an extensive and profound knowledge of the human mind. These philosophers, particularly the latter, have, in their philosophical writings, borne the most ample testimony to the superexcellence of the Catholic fathers of the church, from whose writings they have quoted immensely, declaring that after wading through all the paltry trash of modern French physiology and Scottish philosophy, they found the only useful observations on the human mind in the works of the ancient Catholics of the middle ages. Rejecting the verbose and unmeaning writings of Hobbes, Des Cartes, Locke, Stewart, and other metaphysical writers, they have interspersed their works with quotations from St. Cyprian, St. Augustin, St. Athanasius, St. Basil, St. Jerome, and other luminaries of the early ages of Catholicism. And I could now enumerate fifty other philosophers of celebrity who in various ways have testified to the excellence of the holy Catholic church, many of whom have illustrated her history, more have defended her practices, and some have entered her communion. I speak of this circumstance as a remarkable feature in our age, and contemplate it with wonder, as if it were prophetic of the eventual prosperity and regenerated greatness of a church, apparently destined to survive the revolutions of other modes of faith, and to flourish to the end of time. But though this age abounds with defenders of the Catholic faith, there are also others who have laboured to heap on Catholics volumes of abuse and calumny; among the principal vices imputed to them, is the pretended wilful ignorance of the Catholic priests and mo→ nastic orders. To this charge it is my intention to reply; since an unbiassed investigation of history shews, that to the early saints, the priests and the chief promoters of the Catholic religion in general, mankind have been as much indebted for the knowledge of the sciences, and of literature, as they have for religious instruction, and the few examples usually brought forward by Protestants, (such, for instance, as the imprisonment of Galileo), which originated in the ignorance of the age, and not in the bigotry of Catholics, will not prevail against the proofs I can adduce of the science, learning, and genius of those very monks and priests of the middle ages, against whom the Protestants have always uttered so much empty and groundless abuse. In wise and humane institutions of charity, what people have ever exceeded the Catholics? But these I pass over, as they belong properly to their faith, and are necessarily connected with their religion. In architecture, are we not indebted to the Catholics for all those sublime ecclesiastical buildings, of which all Christendom seems proud. Thousands of grand and inspiring cathedrals, besides thousands more of decaying but venerable abbeys and religious edifices, though now mouldering away, the neglected monuments of past genius, bear ample testimony to the talents and labours of the Catholics, and illustrate the energy which their faith gave to the human arts connected with their religion, for, as an ancient prophecy seems to say, the stone crieth out of the wall. Are we In astronomy, have not the Jesuits, that persecuted and misrepresented people, done more than any other set of men? not indebted to them for the most valuable observations made on the celestial bodies in distant latitudes ? Did they not first observe and note the zenith passage of the Pleiades over China; and did they not first illustrate the astronomy of the southern hemisphere of our globe? Take geography.-Who were distinguished from all other people by their perseverance in penetrating foreign climes, and bringing to Europe an account of their produce, manners, and language?—I say it was the Jesuits. In literature.-Who illustrated the ancient Roman and Greek authors with the first and best notes, and castigating their text, first fitted them for the classical education of youth?—The Jesuits. Who preserved literature in general from the ravages of Gothic barbarity in the middle ages; if it were not the monks and friars in the sacred and inviolable asylum of their religious houses? To whom are botany, agriculture, and natural history more indebted, than to the monastic orders. It is indeed a curious fact, and one which I shall endeavour to illustrate hereafter in another letter, that all our common names for plants, as well as their being still found in most abundance about the ruins of abbeys, shew, incontestably, that the monks were the first botanists in modern Europe. Finally, let me appeal once more to the candour of the historian, and ask, what people first carried civilization abroad? who first penetrated the forests of America, traversed the deserts of Africa, or encountered the animosity of Asiatic superstition, in order to propagate the religion of peace, and moralize the people? Who placed the standard of the cross peaceably, and by persuasion alone, in regions which the devoted disciples of the crescent could not conquer by the sword? Who substituted the worship of God and his angels for that of the idols of Negroland and Guinea? Who gave the christian law to the followers of Vishnu and of Seva? Who alone succeeded in converting Mahometans to christianity, and thus substi tuted a religion of morality for one of lust, and made the fear of God reign dominant over the wild sallies of oriental cupidity? Was it not the early Catholics that did these things? Was it not principally the Jesuits and missionaries of the church of Rome? And finally, have not hundreds of martyrs, all strict and genuine Catholics, sealed their doctrine with their blood, and evinced at once the sincerity of their faith, their love of mankind, and their unshaken perseverance in the cause of heaven. With all these things before me, which no sophistry can efface, so long as a page of history lies open, shall the lazy Protestant rise from the bed of down, and, in this age of luxury and of indolence, sit by his fire-side and write unanswered and unrefuted, against the Catholic people? Let the puny dwarf in intellect, who shall so write, first shew the same proofs of the genuineness of his own creed, that the Catholic can appeal to for his; and let him remember, that independent of all other proofs, one enlightened Catholic martyr will avail more for the cause of truth for which he resigns his life, than fifty volumes of cant written by those who live at ease,-the pampered creatures of a luxuriant and frivolous age. I shall close this paper for the present, with what has been said before in a modern physiological publication of last year, respecting ancient days: "All those who dwell in countries unenlightened by the Catholic religion, and who are accustomed to hear and to credit the libellous and false aspersions of Protestant writers on what they ignorantly term the dark ages, will probably be surprised at the assertion I am prepared to maintain; that those middle ages of the church above alluded to, so far from meriting the appellation of dark, were dis |