to have been almost unexampled (p. xxvii.). It is evident at once, then, that "the second collision of England with the Catholic Church, in 1688, produced a far more violent recoil, and a far wider departure from the Faith than the first in 1562." The Archbishop mentions this "for the purpose of showing that the tendencies of faith and unbelief at this time give reason to fear that another collision may come hereafter, of which the result would be a still greater recoil from faith, and a wider departure from Christianity " (p. xxix.).

This downward progress lasted till about the year 1750. But "from that time until now there has been a gradual and steady re-ascending towards Christian faith. Men returned to the belief that Christianity is reasonable; then, that it is true; then, that the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation are Christian doctrines; then, to belief in the operations of grace, of the Redemption by atonement and sacrifice; then, of the institution, grace, and obligation of Sacraments" (pp. xxx. xxxi.). Moreover, this salutary reaction proceeded during at least a period of one hundred years, up to 1850. By this time the Catholic Church was far more prominent in England, than it had been at any previous period since the Reformation. And now the hierarchy was restored; and the Church "began to act as a body by its corporate presence and influence upon public opinion, and upon every class of the English people." She is at this hour in contact with the intelligence and the consciousness of the people of England as she has never been since the last Requiem was sung in Westminster Abbey (pp. xxxv. xxxvi.).

But in company with these two bright features of our time -the unprecedented prominence of Catholicism, and the greatly-improved character of English piety in general,-there is a third feature, gloomy in the present, and very far more gloomy in our anticipations of the future. There has arisen a vastly more fundamental and subversive rationalism than was ever to be found before. But every sign alikewhether good or evil-points to two inevitable consummations: (1) The union of all good men under the shadow of S. Peter, and in communion with the Catholic Church; and (2) a violent and internecine conflict, between the Church on the one hand and the combined forces of rationalism and

impiety on the other. Our one hope of success in this conflict depends, under God, on the unswerving faithfulness of individuals to every true Catholic principle. There can be no greater madness-there can be in effect (however unintentionally) no more ruinous treachery-than the giving up one

particle of full Catholic belief, one single doctrine which the Church really teaches, in the interest of compromise and spurious liberality.

This is the great lesson which Archbishop Manning has consistently taught. Among the various champions of the Church in England who have come forth at this critical period of her history, he will ever have a place in Catholic memory peculiar to himself. His mind is singularly well balanced, and he unites characteristics apparently opposite in a truly surprising harmony. No one exceeds him in his love for England; yet that love is ever held in most absolute subordination to his reverence for Rome. He yearns with a passionate desire for the reunion of Christendom; but that desire has never led him for one moment to veil so much as one of the Church's characteristic doctrines, or concede one jot or tittle to the shallow liberalism of the day.

ART. VI.-S. JANE FRANCES DE CHANTAL.

Histoire de Sainte Chantal, et des Origines de la Visitation. Par M. l'Abbé Eм. BOUGAUD, Vicaire-Général d'Orléans. Troisième édition. Paris Librarie Ve. Poussielgue et Fils, Rue Cassette 27. 1865.

Na letter from the Bishop of Orleans, prefixed by the Abbé Bougaud to his life of S. Jane Frances de Chautal, the following qualifications are laid down as essential to the successful accomplishment of the biography of a saint:First, and chiefly, a real and hearty love, with a true conception and full appreciation of his character; secondly, an attentive study of his interior and exterior life, implying a laborious and mature examination of contemporary documents; thirdly, a life-like portrait of the saint, with its characteristic features, both in the order of nature and of grace, and a skilful and artistic grouping of historical facts and persons, so that the central figure may neither stand alone, with nothing to mark his age, position, or relations with his fellow-men, nor be buried under a mass of antiquarian and archæological details. We believe that the readers of M. Bougaud's work will agree with the opinion of Mgr. Doupanloup, that it admirably combines all these requisites. He had lived from his childhood at Dijon, the native city of Jeanne Françoise Frémyot. Love and reverence for her who may be accounted its patroness were the

habitual feelings of his boyhood, and strengthened with the development of his spiritual life as a man and a priest. The thought of writing her life first arose from his becoming accidentally acquainted with some precious manuscripts written during her lifetime, which were preserved in the convent of the Visitation at Dijon. He was at once struck and fascinated by the character of the saint, which, from various causes, had never been adequately set forth in any of her published memoirs; and he set himself, as a labour of love, to trace her through all the scenes of her varied history. He visited Bourbilly, which witnessed her bright and brief period of earthly happiness; the château of Monthélon, where the early years of her widowhood, uncheered by any human consolation, were spent in a continual heroic exercise of patience, humility, and tender charity to the poor; and, lastly, the little town of Annecy, in Savoy, the first home of her religious life, and the cradle of the Order of the Visitation. There he was allowed to examine the invaluable collection of manuscripts treasured in the archives of the convent.

I perused successively (he says) the magnificent collection of the autograph letters of S. Francis of Sales and S. Chantal; the first full of erasures and corrections, the second written with a firmer hand, but in amost strange orthography. A great number of these are still unpublished, and the rest have been most unfaithfully edited.

He saw the autograph manuscript of the memoirs of the Mère de Chaugy, written in a large, bold hand, without a correction, and more than twenty volumes, still in manuscript, and unknown beyond the cloisters of the Visitation, containing the histories of the principal foundations of the Order in all parts of the world. More than all, the six folio volumes were placed in his hands, containing the process of the canonization of S. Jane Frances, stamped with the highest degree of certainty and authenticity by the seals of the Notaries Apostolic. These seals had been placed upon the volumes after all the depositions had been collected, pain of excommunication being pronounced against any who should open them before the publication of the Bull of Canonization. That publication was delayed until the year 1767, and the convent of Annecy having been destroyed in the French Revolution, these volumes remained unknown and forgotten in the archives of the See, until Mgr. Rendu determined to break the seals, just before M. Bougaud's pilgrimage to Annecy. He is therefore the first historian of S. Jane Frances who ever saw these precious and still unpublished pages. He also

not yet finished, the first pages of which were written by S. Francis of Sales, and where the history of the foundation of the convent of Annecy is written by the hand of S. Chantal herself, whose signature is also attached to the minutes of the chapters over which she presided. S. Francis of Sales having written on the first page of this book the prayer that the names inscribed on these perishable leaves may be for ever written in the Book of Life, not only had the religious ever accounted it a great honour to have their names written there, but kings, queens, cardinals, bishops, and nobles of all countries have for more than two centuries eagerly sought permission to sign their names beneath those of the two saints.

The distinguishing feature in the character of S. Jane Frances was fortitude. "I have found," said S. Francis of Sales, after his first interview with her, " Mulierem fortem, la femme forte at Dijon ;" and the Church commemorates this especial gift in the Collect for her feast :

Omnipotens et misericors Deus, qui beatam Joannam Franciscam tuo amore succensam admirabile spiritus fortitudine per omnes vitæ semitas in via perfectiones donasti.

She was to be, says the Abbé Bougaud, in a century shadowed by great ́apostacies and shameful falls, a glorious revelation of the spirit of fortitude. What age of the Church, he adds, had ever greater deed of such a manifestation than our own? When had faint hearts and low aims more urgent need of the invigorating power of great example?

The early training of the saint tended in no slight degree to foster her natural strength of character.

She had no memory of her mother, who died when she was only eighteen months old, leaving behind her a character for piety and charity befitting one in whose veins ran, we are told, "some drops of the blood of S. Bernard." The portrait of the noble-minded father who watched over her infancy is thus sketched by Abbé Bougaud :

The President Frémyot possessed, in fact, in a high degree all the qualities necessary for that difficult office. God, who destined our saint to do such great things for Him, seems to have deprived her of a mother's caresses in order to give her the training of a man. He entrusted her infancy to one able to train her to that life of faith, generosity, and self-sacrifice of which she was to set so glorious an example of the seventeenth century. The President Frémyot was distinguished among his compeers of the Parliament for his strong sense, the rectitude of his judgments, and the promptness and energy of his will. Better still, he was remarkable for the purity of his faith, his ardent devotion to the Church, and his inflexibility of conscience. He was one of those men with whom the sense of duty was the ruling power, who cannot conceive the possibility of a moment's hesitation in obeying it,

though at the cost of a thousand lives, and who only want an occasion to call them forth to be recognised as heroes. These occasions were not wanting in the troubled life of the President, and more than once we see him rise to heroism, so simply and so naturally as to be unconscious of it himself.

M. Frémyot had joined the League in the days when it embodied one of the purest acts of faith ever elicited from a Christian nation. Its object was to preserve the Catholic Kingdom of France from the dangers apprehended from a Protestant heir presumptive. It had been blessed by Pope Gregory XIII., headed by King Henry III., encouraged by the clergy, enthusiastically hailed by the nation at large. But the passions and the weaknesses of men soon lowered and sullied a cause once so holy, and the sword which had been drawn to preserve the throne from a Protestant successor was turned against the Catholic king. The crimes of Henry III. formed no justification, in the eyes of the President Frémyot, of what he accounted an act of rebellion. He withdrew therefore from the parliament of Burgundy, which adhered almost unanimously to the League, and retired to the country; thus separating himself from the first President Bruslard, and others of his kindred and friends who headed the movement. Without a moment's hesitation he gathered together those magistrates who still preserved their allegiance to the last of the house of Valois, and declared in the name of Henry III. that the parliament of Burgundy is transferred from Dijon to Flavigny. In their indignation the Leaguers confiscated all the property of their opponents, and having in vain endeavoured to win over M. Frémyot, whom they knew to be the soul of the king's party, they had recourse to the savage expedient of sending him word that unless the royalist parliament were immediately dissolved, they would send him the head of his son, who had fallen into their hands. "Better," replied the Christian hero, "that the child should die innocent, than that the father should live guilty." And he wrote a letter of remonstrance, the pathos and the eloquence of which shamed the most furious of his adversaries out of their evil purpose. They contented themselves with keeping the boy in prison, and holding the sword suspended over his head, in the hope that the long trial might at last sap the fidelity which they had failed to carry by storm.

In the meantime, says M. Bougaud, terrible tidings resounded from one end of France to the other. Henry III. had been assassinated, 2nd of August, 1789. The ancient race of Valois was extinct, the throne of S. Louis