May some sweet spirit guide us through the storm that doth betide us; On the rock of our Constitution, and we fear no sad pollution, In this canvass Hilliard reached the climax of his oratorical power and success. The Whig party, to which he had given such faithful allegiance, was then being swallowed up in the vortex of the slavery agitation. The waning of its fortunes and the growing unpopularity of the Union sentiment in the South placed him and his views on the losing side in the conflict of great, momentous issues. With the crystallization of Southern sentiment towards his point of view, Yancey grew steadily thereafter with conscious strength to more gigantic proportions until he reached the zenith of his oratorical power and success in the Charleston convention of 1860. The estimates placed upon the two orators by surviving contemporaries have a remarkable unanimity. The epithets applied to them indicate their distinctive traits of character and peculiarities of style. Yancey was termed "the Demosthenes of the South," "the Patrick Henry of the Second Revolution," while his opponents called him "the Achilles of Secession." Hilliard was a Chesterfield in manners and a Chevalier Bayard in spirit. The physical make-up of each fulfilled the popular conception of the orator's personal appearance. Hilliard was courtly in bearing, graceful in movement, tall of stature, finely proportioned of body, with a clear, soft eye of blue which lighted up a benignant countenance. Yancey was of the average height, compact of body without superfluous flesh, of strong features, and had flashing black eyes which bespoke a passionate temperament. He carried himself like a lion. Hilliard devoted his early professional years to an exhaustive study of Demosthenes and Cicero, and patterned his orations after those of the renowned orators of antiquity. He familiarized himself with ancient and modern history, studied discrimi natingly and quoted felicitously the poets, and used the material garnered with consummate tact and telling effect. Furthermore, he used figures drawn from nature with great success. The grandeur and ruggedness of the mountains and the vastness and fury of the sea were often invoked to give sublimity and emphasis to his flowing periods. Yancey towered in constructive argument and in impassioned outbursts of eloquence. He was so unique and inidvidualistic that he may be said to have had no models. His orations showed an intimate knowledge of history and a wide acquaintance with classical mythology. Not being the accomplished scholar that Hilliard was, he was not addicted so much to literary anecdote and poetic quotation as his distinguished rival. It may be well to let Hilliard tell further of the abilities of his famous rival whom he survived nearly thirty years. In passages selected here and there from his book, "Politics and Pen Pictures," Hilliard says: "Of great intellect, high culture, commanding presence, great magnetism, and powerful in debate, Mr. Yancey was in every way an extraordinary man. Opening his speeches in a manner that was courteous and pleasing, exhibiting nothing of the latent passions of his nature, as he advanced in his argument he not only presented great intellectual force in the statement of his propositions, but he exhibited a vehemence unsurpassed in our country since the time of Patrick Henry. It was because he believed that the safety of the South depended upon a vigorous assertion of its rights at all hazards, involving even the subversion of the Union, that when he addressed the people, the ardor of his patriotism flamed up with volcanic energy and splendor. In reviewing my intercourse with public men, I recall no one who made a greater impression upon me than the Hon. William L. Yancey." However imperfect and unsatisfactory in the performance, my task is now done. With impartial judgment and warm sympathy I have attempted to bring before the mind's eye of the reader some idea of the tremendous influence wielded by those two distinguished representatives of the old South in the special forum of their distinctive activities and in the special exhibition of their distinctive endowments. Knoxville, Tennessee. GEORGE F. MELLEN. THE ORIGINALITY OF ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI* By PAUL SABATIER I did not intend to deliver an oratorical panegyric; nothing is further from my thought. I should like to have all of us alike get beyond the region of æsthetic and intellectual admiration, and reach the level of personal, sympathetic emotion. I want to allow St. Francis himself to speak. Of course the subject which we are discussing to-day could never possibly have presented itself to his mind. He would have been pained beyond measure if his originality had been mentioned to him, for his chief aim was to repress in himself all originality. From the first moment of his spiritual life; from the time of the famous vision at St. Damian, when kneeling before the crucifix, he heard the mysterious appeal deep down in his heart showing him the way he had to go: "Francis, go and repair My House, for thou seest it falleth in ruins"- from then on to the day, when stretched naked on the bare earth of Portioncula, he returned to God, while the brethren chanted psalms, and the nightingales sang their songs—always, it can be said, that every instant he was striving for depersonalization. The Imitation of Jesus Christ was his constant preoccupation. But is it not plain that when one reaches these depths of personality the Christ with which we are dealing is no longer the Jesus of history, but rather the ideal figure whom St. Paul called the second Adam—an expression marvellous for its laconic brevity? There are two men in us - not two men in constant struggle, as is frequently represented - one the truth, the other a lie; one good, the other evil; one God Himself, the other the devil. It may be these points of view can explain what takes place in us in those solemn moments when our conscience stands hesitating at the parting of the ways, one road before us ascending, the other leading downward. But there are normal circumstances when this comparison fails to answer to facts. Speaking in a *From the text of a lecture delivered at Turin, April 30, 1908, and printed in Il Rinnovamente of July, 1908. natural sense, there is only one man is us, in biblical language, the old Adam. The whole effort of religion is the creation in us of the new Adam. Here is the mystery of the new birth. He who has come to understand this, not only intellectually, but in his heart and will, is the new creature. It makes little difference at which stage he may be, he is progressing. Conscience in this way must come to be master of itself; if it is Christian, it must make this effort in Christ; that is to say it evokes first His historic persona and communes with Him in spirit. It often fails to recognize that in seeking Christ, it finds itself and creates its better self. Here, it may be said, is just the point where St. Francis is original. His effort to imitate Christ brought him to realize in a perfect degree his own personality without his being at all conscious that he had found himself. But it would be impossible for us to keep on such an elevation as this. Poetry and music alone are able to unveil these secrets of the soul. Let it be enough to indicate the idea I have in mind, and let us try to study, not the originality of St. Francis from this isolated point of view, but under its most striking aspect. Will you allow me, gentlemen, to confess to you that I have a rather ungenerous idea in my mind? I think I can perceive from the movement of your lips, from the expression in your eyes, that you are asking yourselves a question. Perhaps some of you regret that I have not answered it already for you. Am I mistaken in thinking that when this lecture was announced, or perhaps even when I began, you asked yourselves, "Whom or what is he going to attack?" It is true at the present day we have got into the habit of seeing our contemporaries arrange themselves according to their hatreds rather than according to their predilections. The necessity of being in opposition to some one or something is, perhaps, the most unpleasant tendency of the day. You will find nothing of this kind in what I propose to say. We will try to get inspiration from the example of St. Francis, who is essentially a peacemaker. Having peace in himself, he took it with him everywhere. Yet we should make a mistake if we thought of him as going about redressing wrongs like a kind of judge, rather more enlightened than the rest, a man who upheld the good and condemned the bad. Legends present him as going to towns and villages and re-establishing public peace. Do not make the mistake of thinking that he had the parties brought before him, that he spent time hearing their complaints, that he took much trouble apportioning to each one his deserts. Do not imagine, too, that by a sort of miracle his decision came to him by inspiration. No! there is nothing true in such suppositions. At the sight of him, his hearers forgot their quarrels. In an instant, they were drawn into that serene and salutary region where the air is so pure and so life-giving that they felt new strength given them, where they saw that there was so much to do that the idea of losing time in miserable and petty squabbles did not even enter their minds. I wish this were so to-day. We should go calmly along our way, greeting those we meet on the right hand and on the left; we should go into the fields, too, along the road to shake hands with hardy laborers at work there; perhaps we would guide their plow for a moment so that they could rest awhile. If some one barred our path we would try to pass on in humility, even asking pardon. Francis of Assisi used to ask pardon even of robbers; he even thought that if the Wolf of Gubbio made a habit of devouring people and cattle, that was no reason to treat it discourteously. The great originality of St. Francis was his Catholicism. But what in St. Francis' case constitutes originality, is that he was a Catholic of a type never seen before his time, and of which there are very few specimens after his time, at least among the men whose history we know. Do not be alarmed, do not think that I am going to try to say that the Poverello's Catholicism was original, individual and peculiar. A Catholicism which was leaning towards schism or heresy is quite contrary to my thought. It was a Catholicism very different from the kind we commonly know; but not because it took a direction different from that of the strictest orthodoxy, but because it went so far in this direction that we are hardly able with our sight to follow its course. |