him to be a true servant of God. The chief minister of Geneva said: "If we honoured any man as a saint I know none more worthy than this man since the days of the Apostles.' Miracles began at once to be worked by his intercession. In 1626 a commission was appointed, which took the evidence of 5,000 witnesses to his heroic virtues and his miracles. His cause was immediately introduced at Rome, but various obstacles intervened, and it was not till 1661 that he was beatified by Alexander VII., a devoted follower of his teaching. He was canonized by the same Pope in 1665. Our own day has had the happiness of seeing him declared Doctor of the Church by Pius IX. in 1877.

St. Francis lives still in the Church on earth by his continual direct assistances and by the instruction and encouragement afforded by the example of his life. He lives in the fruits of the lives of the seventy thousand heretics whom he converted, of the sinners whom he brought back to virtue, and of the just whom he made perfect. He lives in his writings, suited for all conditions and all needs of life; in his two great works in defence of the Church-" The Catholic Controversy " and "The Standard of the Cross"-and chiefly in his works for forming and nourishing piety-"The Introduction," "The Love of God," his 1,200 letters, his many discourses. His special title is "Doctor of Devotion."

He lives also in the Orders which he originated or reformed. The Visitation is his own creation and his glory: his spirit still lives therein. The Sisters of St. Joseph, though founded thirty years after his death, owe their existence to his inspiration, and represent his first ideas of the Visitation. In these latter times we have amongst orders of men the "Missioners of St. Francis de Sales" (1836), the "Oblates of St Francis de Sales" (1875), and Don Bosco's Salesian Fathers; amongst orders of women, the "Sisters Servants of the Sacred Heart" (1866), and the "Daughters of Marie Auxiliatrice" founded under his patronage and on his principles. Under the same patronage we have also the great public association the "Euvre de St. Francois de Sales," which in France counts its members by

hundreds of thousands, and the Third Order of St. Francis de Sales, founded also by Don Bosco and approved by Pius IX. in 1874.*

One moral we draw in conclusion, as this little work is intended to further the spread of the Catholic faith. All the glories of St. Francis are to the advantage of this faith. His saintly life authoritatively confirms the truth of the faith he lived by and the sources from which he drew. It sprang from a Catholic root, drew its sap from means and practices exclusively Catholic, manifested itself in Catholic forms. He was a godlike man because he "conversed in the Church of the living God;" he was full of divine love because he drank at the fountains of the only true faith.

We find in him the first Catholic principle, viz.,that the Catholic and Roman Church is the one source or channel of truth. We have just seen him asserting this on his deathbed, and it was the guiding principle of his life. His devotion and submission to the Church and to the Pope amounted to a passion. To the Pope he writes: "I gladly and jubilantly venerate in you the supreme splendour of the Apostolic dignity, and most humbly revere (colo, worship) it, with my face prostrate on the ground to kiss your feet." He considered the doctrine of Infallibility as practically a defined truth. Corresponding with his love of the Church was his hatred of heresy, which also we have just seen to have been "his ruling passion, strong in death." His sweetness was at once changed into fierceness at the touch of heresy: "I have never looked at it," he says, "save to spit in its face." He said he desired to die by a cruel public death, innocent but condemned, "but not for heresy, on account of the scandal." To reconcile heretics was the very meaning of great part of his life. What does he think, in particular, of our England-" that beautiful island, once the land of saints, now the domain of error ?"

* See Don Bosco and his Work.'-Catholic Truth Society, id.

His sanctity grew on Catholic means and showed itself in Catholic ways. Confession and Communionspiritual reading-devotion to the Blessed Sacrament, the Passion, the Sacred Heart, Mary and the Angels and the Saints-pilgrimages and relics-the cross and holy water-there is no practice distinctively Catholic which is not shown in him with all its fulness and effectiveness, in theory and in practice.

Is then all his light darkness, or is the Protestant idea ignorance and delusion? Is it he who is misguided, or they who reject the Church? Let the question be seriously asked and pondered by those who read the history of his life and the doctrines he teaches, and let them draw the just conclusion that only in the Catholic Church are to be found truth and assurance of salvation.

Lectures

ON THE

PRESENT POSITION OF CATHOLICS

IN ENGLAND:

Addressed to the Brothers of the Birmingham Oratory in 1851

BY

JOHN HENRY NEWMAN, D.D.

I. Protestant View of the Catholic Church. THERE is a well-known fable, of which it is to my purpose to remind you, my Brothers of the Oratory, by way of introducing to you the subject of the Lectures which I am proposing to deliver. I am going to inquire why it is, that, in this intelligent nation, and in this rational nineteenth century, we Catholics are so despised and hated by our own countrymen, with whom we have lived all our lives, that they are prompt to believe any story, however extravagant, that is told to our disadvantage; as if beyond a doubt we were, every one of us, either brutishly deluded or preternaturally hypocritical, and they, themselves, on the contrary, were in comparison of us absolute specimens of sagacity, wisdom, uprightness, manly virtue, and enlightened Christianity. I am not inquiring why they are not Catholics themselves, but why they are so angry with those who are. Protestants differ amongst themselves, without calling each other fools or knaves. Nor, again, am I proposing to prove to you, or to myself, that knaves and fools we are not, not idolaters, not blasphemers, not men of blood, not profligates, not steeped in sin and seared in conscience; for we know each other and our

selves. No, my Catholic friends whom I am addressing, I am neither attacking another's belief just now, nor defending myself: I am not engaging in controversy, though controversy is good in its place: I do but propose to investigate how Catholics come to be so trodden under foot, and spurned by a people which is endowed by nature with many great qualities, moral and intellectual; how it is that we are cried out against by the very stones, and bricks, and tiles, and chimney-pots of a populous busy place, such as this town which we inhabit. The clearer sense we have of our own honesty, of the singleness of our motives, and the purity of our aims of the truth, the beauty, the power of our religion, its exhaustless fund of consolation for the weary, and its especial correspondence to the needs of the weak-so much the greater may well be our perplexity to find that its advocates for the most part do not even gain a hearing in this country; that facts, and logic, and justice, and good sense, and right, and virtue, are all supposed to lie in the opposite scale; and that it is bid be thankful and contented, if it is allowed to exist, if it is barely tolerated, in a free people. Such a state of things is not only a trial to flesh and blood, but a discomfort to the reason and imagination : it is a riddle which frets the mind from the difficulty of solving it.

1..

Now then for my fable, which is not the worse because it is old. The Man once invited the Lion to be his guest, and received him with princely hospitality. The Lion had the run of a magnificent palace, in which there were a vast many things to admire. There were large saloons and long corridors, richly furnished and decorated, and filled with a profusion of fine specimens of sculpture and painting, the works of the first masters in either art. The subjects represented were various; but the most prominent of them had an especial interest for the noble animal who stalked by them. It was that of he Lion himself; and as the owner of the mansion led