ish system; reason is decidedly exterminated from theology.

From that time there is very little of a dogmatical character, and still less of sacred history; an instruction which would be void, if ancient casuistry did not assist in filling up the vacuum with immoral subtilties.

The only part of mankind to whom they have addressed themselves for a long time, namely women, is the world of sensibility: they pretend not to ask for science; they wish for impressions, not ideas. The less they are busied about ideas, the easier it is to keep them ignorant of outward events, and make them strangers to the progress of time.

When they maintain that holiness consists in sacrificing the mind, the more material the worship, the more it serves to attain that end; the more the mind is degraded, the holier it becomes. To couple salvation with the exercise of moral virtues, would be to require the exercise of reason. But what do they want with virtue? Wear this medal: "it will blot out your iniquities.' Reason would still have a share in religion, if, as reason teaches us, it was necessary for salvation, absolutely to love God.

* The medal of the Immaculate Conception, made under the auspices of Mr. de Quélen, has already saved assassins and other wretches. See the notice written by a Lazarist, and the passages quoted by Mr. Génin, The Jesuits and the University, pp. 87-97.

Marie Alacoqué has seen that it was sufficient not to hate him; and those who are devoted to the Sacred Heart are saved unconditionally.

When the Jesuits were suppressed, they had in their hands no other religious means than this remnant of paganism, and in it they placed all their hope of coming to life again. They had engravings made to which they added the motto, "I will give them the shield of my heart."

The popes, who, at first, were uneasy about the weak point which such a materialism would offer to the attacks of the philosophers*, have found out in our time that it is very useful to them, being addressed to a class of people who seldom read the philosophers, and who, though devout, are nevertheless material. They have therefore preserved the precious equivocation of the ideal and the carnal heart, and forbidden any explanation as to whether the words "Sacred Heart" designated the love of God for man, or some bit of bleeding flesh.† By reducing the thing to the idea, the impassioned attraction in which its success consisted would be taken from it.

Even in the last century, some bishops had gone farther, declaring that flesh was here the principal

* Lambertini, De servorum Dei beatificatione, vol. iv., part ii. lib. 4. ch. 30. p. 310. We are sorry to see a man of genius and sense work hard to be only half absurd.

† Pius VI. condemned the council of Pistoia, that had tried to make a distinction; Tabaraud, ibid. p. 79.

object; and they had placed this flesh, in certain hymns, after the Trinity, as a fourth person. Priests, women, and young girls have all, since then, vied with one another in this devotion. I have before me a manual, much used in country places, in which they teach the persons of their community, who pray for one another, how they join hearts, and how these hearts, once united, "ought to desire to enter into the opening of the heart of Jesus, and be incessantly sinking into that amorous wound."

The brotherhood, in their manuals, have occasionally found it gallànt to put the heart of Mary above that of Jesus (see that of Nantz, 1769). In their engravings, she is generally younger than her Son, being, for instance, about twenty, whereas he is thirty years old, so that, at first sight, he seems to be rather her husband or lover than her Son. This very year, at Rouen, in the chapel of the Sacred Heart at Saint Ouen's, I saw, on a drawing, (which the young ladies had made with the pen, and which bears at the foot, the approbation of the ecclesiastical authority,) the representation of Jesus on his knees before the kneeling Virgin!

The most violent satire against the Jesuists is what they have made themselves their art, the pictures and statues they have inspired. They are at once characterised by the severe sentence of Poussin, whose Christ did not appear to them pretty enough: "We cannot imagine a Christ with his head on one

side, or like Father Douillet's." Yet Poussin saw the best days of the Jesuit art: what would he have said, if he had seen what followed? all that decrepid coquetry, that thinks it smiles whilst it grimaces, those ridiculous glances, dying eyes, and such like deformities. The worst is, they who think only of the flesh, know no longer how to represent it. As the thought grows more and more material and insipid, the form becomes defaced, degraded from picture to picture, ignoble, foppish, affected, heavy, dull that is to say, shapeless.*

We may judge of men by the art they admire ; and I confess it is no easy task to augur favourably of the souls of those who inspire this art, and recommend these engravings, hanging them up in their churches, and distributing them by thousands and millions. Such taste is an ominous sign. Many immoral people still possess a sentiment of elegance. But willingly to take to the ignoble and false, discovers a sad degradation of the soul.

* In 1834, being busy with Christian iconography, I looked over the collections of the portraits of Christ in the Royal Library. Those published within the last thirty years are the most humiliating I have ever seen, both for art and human nature. Every man (whether a philosopher or a believer) who retains any sentiment of religion will be disgusted with them. Every impropriety, every sensuality and low passion, is there: the childish, dandified seminarist, the licentious priest, the fat curate who looks like Maingrat, &c. The engraving is as good as the drawing-a skewer and the snuff of a tallow

candle.

An undeniable truth is here made manifest; which is, that art is the only thing inaccessible to falsehood. Being the offspring of the heart and natural inspiration, it cannot be allied to what is false, it will not be violated; it protests, and if the false triumphs, it dies. All the rest may be aped and acted. They very well managed to make a theology in the sixteenth and a morality in the seventeenth century; but never could they form an art. They can ape the holy and the just; but how can they mimic the beautiful?-Thou art ugly, poor Tartuffe, and ugly shalt thou remain : it is thy token. What! you reach the beautiful, or ever lay a finger upon it? This would be impious beyond all impiety! The beautiful is the face of God!