These pitying angels of flesh and blood lift their hands and pray, beside the bed of the dying; but they also use their hands to smooth the pillow for the head of the dying, and to pour out the draught for his parched lips; they stay with him through the sleepless nightwatches, rejoice with those who love him, if God is pleased to restore him to health; and if God takes him, while those who love him weep, they pray. Nay, not to the soul only, or even to the soul's tenement of clay is their inexhaustible devotedness confined; but it follows the poor body when parted from the soul for a time, assisting in the last charitable offices the members of the stricken household to whom death is a less familiar friend than to the Sœurs du Bon Secours.

This brief and very incomplete sketch of a most heroic Institute was at first suggested to the writer by his grateful remembrance of such services rendered by members of the Sisterhood to the dearest of friends, when dying and when dead-a grateful remembrance which shall never fade from his mind till he himself comes to need similar services, or rather till he has ceased to need them, even the last of them all-nor even then.

She hath colours, green and golden,
That she decks herself withal,
And soft wooings that embolden
Ships, to make themselves her thrall;
As the fresh-launched vessel rushes
Eager to her soft embrace,
See the dimples, and the blushes
Playing on her lovely face.

Calm she lieth in the morning,
Calm, and still, and breathing low;
Nought around her giveth warning
Of the deeds that she can do.
Dove-like gray with silver streaking
Drapes her form, serene and calm,
And her beauty passeth speaking,
And her presence seems a balm.

Shading garb for day she useth,

Weft and woof of different hue; Oft each shade in each it loseth, Emerald drowning sapphire blue. Crimson is her sweetest robing, Girded with a belt of gold Clasped around a full heart, throbbing With a hidden thought untold.

Death lies 'neath that glowing water,
Death is folded in her waves-
Death, destruction, wildest slaughter:
All her dimples are but graves.
Lamia, serpent maiden, coiling,
Creeping near, too near our feet-
Thy vast beauty is our spoiling,
Thy vast promise a deceit.

A PLEA FOR FAITH.*

No, I have not forgotten, my dear friend, that happy Christmas you

allude to and the long talks that you and I had with Lallier, when, young and eager for the truth, we discussed the eternal things. Even then we perceived with regret that doubts were creeping into your thoughts; but we knew your heart to be so sincere and your character so elevated, that we were sure that your soul one day or other would return to the tranquillity of faith. Who knows if the moment has not now come? You have sought, in the sincerity of your heart, to settle your difficulties, and you have not succeeded. But, my dear friend, the difficulties of religion are like those of science: there are always some of them. It is a great thing to clear up certain difficulties, but no life would be sufficient to exhaust them. To solve all the questions which may be raised about Holy Scripture, one should know, among other things, the oriental languages. To answer all the objections of Protestants, one should be able to study minutely the history of the Church or rather all modern history, and many other things. You will never then be able, occupied as you are, to reply to all the doubts which your active and ingenious imagination will continually rake up to torture your heart and mind. Happily for us, God has not set upon religious certitude such a price as this. What are we then to do? We are to do with regard to religion what people do with regard to science; we must assure ourselves of a certain number of well-ascertained truths, and then leave objections to those who make these matters their special study. I believe firmly that the earth turns round; I know that this doctrine has its difficulties, but astronomers explain them, or, if they do not explain all, the future will do the rest. Just so with the Bible: it bristles with difficult questions, but some of them were solved long ago, others in our own day. Many remain, but God permits them in order to exercise and humble the human mind.

No, God does not require that religious truth, that is to say, the necessary nourishment of all souls, should be the fruit of long researches, impossible to a great number of ignorant persons, difficult even to the learned: Truth ought to be within the reach of the poor and humble, and religion ought to rest on proofs accessible to all men. For me, after many doubts, after having many a time wet my pillow

* We translate (with some omissions) a letter of Frederick Ozanam to his friend H. The study of the life, works, and letters of this gifted and holy layman would be useful for many Catholics at home, although circumstanced less dangerously than a young Frenchman of the day. Much fuller "Reasons for my Faith," by Gerald Griffin, were for the first time published in the IRISH MONTHLY, vol. vi., page 148.

with tears of despondency, I have set my faith on a course of reasoning that can be proposed to a mason or a coal-heaver. I say to myself that, all nations and peoples having some religion, good or bad, religion must be a universal, perpetual, and legitimate want of mankind. God, who has given us this need, has thus bound Himself to satisfy it. There is, then, a true religion. Now, amongst the religions which divide the world amongst them, without requiring long study or discussion of facts, who can doubt that Christianity is sovereignly preferable and that it alone conducts man to his moral destination? But in Christianity there are three divisions-the Protestant, the Greek, the Catholic Church, that is to say, anarchy, despotism, order. The choice is not hard, and Catholicity has need of no other demonstration. You at least will not hesitate which of the three to choose.

Here, my friend, is the short reasoning that opens for me the gates of faith. But once within the gates, I am enlightened with a new brightness and far more profoundly convinced by the interior proofs of Christianity. I appeal to my daily experience which lets me find in the faith of my childhood all the strength and light of my mature years, all the sanctification of my domestic joys, all the consolation of my pains. Though all the earth should have abjured Christ, there is in the inexpressible sweetness of one fervent Communion and in the tears that it makes us shed a strength of conviction that would still enable me to embrace the Cross and to defy the incredulity of all the world. But I am very far from being exposed to such a trial; on the contrary, how powerfully is this faith, which impious fools represent as extinguished-how powerfully is it at work amongst mankind! Perhaps you are not sufficiently aware, my dear friend, how much the Redeemer of the world is still loved, what virtues and what devotedness He still inspires, equalling the first ages of the Church. I will only mention the young priests that I see setting out from the Seminary of the Foreign Missions to go and die in Tonquin, as St. Cyprian and St. Irenæus died-and these convert Anglican clergymen who abandon rich benefices and come here to Paris to support their wives and children by giving lessons in English. No, Catholicism is not destitute of heroism in the time of Monseigneur Affre, nor of eloquence in the time of Lacordaire, nor of distinction and authority in an age which has witnessed the Christian death of Napoleon, Royer Collard, Chateaubriand.

Independently of this interior evidence, I have for the last ten years been studying the history of Christianity, and each step that I take in this study strengthens my convictions. I read the Fathers, and I am charmed with the moral beauties and philosophical truths with which they dazzle me. I bury myself in the Dark Ages, and I see there the wisdom of the Church and her magnanimity. I do not shut my eyes to the disorders of those centuries, but I see clearly that Catholic truth

then struggled alone against evil, and drew from this chaos the prodigies of virtue and genius which we admire. I am an enthusiast for the legitimate conquests of modern intelligence; I love liberty and I have served her; but I believe that we owe to the Church liberty, equality, fraternity. On these different points I have had the leisure and the means of studying my difficulties, and they have all cleared away before my eyes. But this was not necessary for me, and if other duties had interdicted for me these historical studies in which I have taken so keen an interest, I should then have reasoned about them, as I do now about the scriptural researches which are for me impossible. I believe in the truth of Christianity; and so, if there are objections, I believe they have been solved or will be solved sooner or later; though some, indeed, may never be solved for us, for Christianity treats of the relations between the finite and the Infinite, and we shall never comprehend the Infinite. All that my reason can require is that I do not force it to believe in the absurd. Now, there can be no philosophical absurdity in a religion which has satisfied the intellect of Descartes and of Bossuet, no moral absurdity in a belief which has sanctified a Vincent de Paul, and no philological absurdity in an interpretation of Scripture which has commended itself to the critical judgment of a Sylvester de Sacy.* Some now-a-days cannot endure the doctrine of the eternity of hell which they call inhuman. But do they think that they love humanity more, that they have a stricter sense of justice and injustice, than St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Francis of Assisi, and St. Francis de Sales? It is not that they love mankind more but that they have a less vivid feeling of the horribleness of sin and of the sanctity and justice of God.

Ah! my friend, let us not lose ourselves in endless discussions. We have not two lives, one to search for the truth, the other to practise it. It is for this reason that Jesus Christ does not condemn you to a long search but shows Himself living in this Christian society which surrounds you; He is before you, He presses you closely. You will soon be forty years old. It is time to make up your mind. Give in to this Redeemer who is yearning for you. Embrace his faith as your friends have embraced it, and you will find peace. Your doubts will be scattered as mine were scattered. So little is wanting to make you an excellent Christian-nothing but an act of the will: croire c'est

Each of us may substitute or add the names of those, among the living and the dead, whose faith is a confirmation of our faith; and, as the modern revolt attacks more and more boldly not the Catholic Church alone, nor even Christ alone, but the Eternal God, we may invoke here the authority of all Christians, of all the great and good who have obeyed the religious instincts of the human heart. Any Catholic who reads the life and the letters of the man who writes the above privately to a friend will be inclined to say: "Thank God, I believe in the same Faith as Frederick

Ozanam."-ED. I. M.