The Suppression of the Society of Jesus in the Portuguese Dominions. By the Rev. ALFRED WELD, of the Society of Jesus. Burns & Oates. 1877.

HE fathers of the Society of Jesus have so often been accused of an

well to remark that the twenty-second volume of the "Quarterly Series" issued under their direction has been reached before the momentous subject of their suppression has been opened. It is true, as F. Weld says in his admirable introduction to this, the first instalment of the shameful tale, "that it is a subject on which a member of the order would for many reasons wish to be silent"; for those who possess the most complete knowledge of its details are bound to present them the most dispassionately to the world, while it is yet a story so full of cruelty, of craft, of malignant hatred to the Church, and we are bound to add of guilt and weakness in its dignitaries, that it is difficult to restrain the overwhelming feelings of indignation which it excites. It has been well done to entrust the telling of this story to F. Weld, and his readers will not fail to appreciate the painstaking research and clear unravelling of thread after thread of the vast conspiracy, which is laid bare to view in its fulness, though with the dignity of historic calm. F. Weld does not either affect to shrink from bringing forward full evidence of the true causes of the hatred borne to the order, which chiefly lay in its being from its earliest beginning a sword against heresy and a bulwark to the Church. He instances the well-known words of Pope Clement XIII. in 1762 to the King of France. "We come once more, Sire, to implore the powerful protection of your Majesty, but it is no longer in favour of the religious of the Society of Jesus alone, or in their interest, that we implore your powerful protection, it is for the sake of religion itself whose cause is intimately bound up with theirs." From the very beginning to its temporary destruction the Society has enjoyed this great testimony, that the destroyers of religion have hated it, and sought its removal as the most vexatious obstacle to their plans. They could neither win it nor overcome; therefore the weapons whetted against its Lord and Head must be fleshed first upon His faithful body-guard. Its fruitfulness, again, F. Weld observes, was another source of the hatred borne to the Society. Wonderful to say, in 1599, the French fathers were able to declare to Henri Quatre that they had educated four hundred thousand boys whose faith and conduct were a living witness to the Church in a very corrupt age. But bad as was that age, there were still worse evils to come, and when Jansenism had spread itself throughout France as the network of tares will spread its roots over a springing field of grain, the Society was sold to the Jansenists by Madame de Pompadour. About the time when this infamous alliance between profligacy and religious error was sealed, the vital blow was given to the order in Portugal by the notorious minister the Marquis de Pombal. Of this remarkable man, Sebastian Joseph Carvalho, no pleasant picture is drawn even by those who conspired with him for their own ends. Gigantic in height, singularly handsome, yet repulsive and coarse in his manners, his associates

found him a rude if not a brutal comrade, overbearing and presumptuous in council, and irrationally violent and headstrong if opposed. When his secret cruelties came to light after his fall, it was found that he had put to death or condemned to cruel imprisonment above nine thousand persons, of whom more than a third part were wholly innocent of crime. Yet for twenty years this violent and vindictive minister, by his boundless audacity and seeming zeal for justice, had been able to give the law to Europe, and to bend even men like the French minister, Choiseul, to his will. The ever-memorable story of the destruction of the Jesuits' work in Paraguay by Pombal's craft is well unfolded in this volume; and it seems impossible that Portugal should not suffer heavily for the wanton cruelties then exercised on those faithful Christian populations, who were driven from their peaceful villages and life of Paradise through the vilest spirit of greed. The representations of the Jesuits at that time, and their imploring petitions for their innocent and defenceless flocks, were of course, largely made use of by Pombal as weapons for the destruction of the Society. Branded as seditious exciters of rebellion to the Portuguese governors, absurdly accused of entering into unhallowed and forbidden commerce, of amassing wealth by the plunder of their flocks, while inciting those flocks to the lowest vices,-even the extraordinary holiness and self-sacrifice of the Jesuits' lives failed to bear them harmless at the Por

tuguese court. It might be thought that the very absurdity of such charges should have sheltered them from condemnation at Rome; but unhappily there also the jealousy of other orders, and the threats and vast professions of zeal of Pombal, either blinded or terrified those appointed to examine the matter. Pombal finally succeeded in obtaining the appointment of Cardinal Saldanha as Cardinal-Patriarch of Lisbon; when, having forced him into the league against the Jesuits, their colleges were closed, their classes broken up, and house after house was forcibly entered, and the inmates driven into exile. The record of the brutal cruelty accompanying this wholesale expulsion of grey-haired men, worn and aged by their devoted service in foreign missions, is excellently summed up by F. Weld in his clear, unvarnished, but most touching narrative, which should surely move even the enemies of the Society to tears. After enduring a storm of persecution and sufferings in a Catholic country, and from cardinals and prelates of the Church, which could scarcely be surpassed if they had been undergone for the Faith in a pagan land, the Portuguese Jesuit Fathers received their fitting reward. When the disgraced minister, Pombal, had been finally unmasked, dismissed, and, after his death deprived, by some strange chance, of burial for fifty years, the first act of the restored Society in Portugal was to celebrate Mass for the soul of their deadly persecutor and enemy. For, by one of those cycles of events which touch us so marvellously in the history of the Church, Pombal was the first place in which the Jesuits were received again after the Society had been driven from Portugal. It has been well done, therefore, to prefix to this most instructive record these words, "Maledicimur et benedicimus, persecutionem patimur et sustinemus, blasphemamur et obsecramus."

Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus. Historic Facts illustrative of the Labours and Sufferings of its Members in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. By HENRY FOLEY, S. J. Burns & Oates. 1877.

HE two bulky volumes forming the first, second, third, and fourth

Jesuits' press at Roehampton, with all the care and accuracy of detail for which Mr. Foley is known. The division of series follows the division of the English Province of the Society into "Colleges," as the various Jesuit districts are termed ; thus the Colleges of St. Ignatius, St. Aloysius, St. Chad, the Immaculate Conception, the Holy Apostles, and St. Dominic or St. Hugh, represent the London, Lancashire, Staffordshire, Derbyshire, Suffolk, and Lincolnshire districts, in all of which the Jesuit Fathers have faithfully toiled and and suffered, and which they have hallowed with their blood. At first sight of these two somewhat ponderous and unwieldy volumes, the reader might perhaps feel inclined to think it a needless labour to follow the record of so many lives which must necessarily have a great sameness, and in many cases the same poverty of detail. But in going through the roll, drawn up with such unwearied and loving patience by B. Foley, of these Colleges, especially where the dearth of Catholics is now most lamentable, and where there are whole districts in which scarcely a single altar is raised for the sacrifice of the Mass, we cannot but be struck with wonder at the number of missions opened and served by the Jesuits in the midst of peril, as well as at their persistent courage and dauntless labours in keeping them up. In the Suffolk college, for iustance, we read the names of forty missions or stations under their care, in some of which, as has been over and over again their lot, others have entered into their harvest. Thus, among others, Cossey, Ingatestone, Kelvedon, Sawston, and Thorndon still bear the fruits springing from the seed sown and cherished in the 16th and 17th centuries by the Fathers. The first volume and series of these records contains several very interesting lives; such as those of F. Southwell, F. Morse, and F. Page. The letters of F. Rivers, and the account of F. Campian's seizure at the curious old manor-house of Lyford in Berkshire, part of which is still remaining, must not be passed over, and both these ample volumes lend their clear undoubted testimony to the "cloud of witnesses" who thus, in the Society alone, hallowed their calling by the most laborious apostleship under every circumstance of ignominy and death. We rejoice to find, among the abundant memorials of the English Jesuits, a full account of the death of F. Arrowsmith, and some of the miracles worked by the "Holy Hand." Those who have ever lived in the neighbourhood of Garswood can bear full witness to the numberless cures which the hand of F. Arrowsmith, and the linen which touches it, work from year to year.

Life of Saint Willibrord, Archbishop of Utrecht, and Apostle of Holland. London Burns & Oates. 1877.

THE

HE story of the life of the Saxon Saint is founded upon the accounts given by Bede and Alcuin. Willibrord was still living in the time of Bede, and Alcuin wrote only fifty years after the death of the saint, whom he describes as frank and kindly, with a "beaming countenance and a merry heart." During his fifty years of missionary labour, he preached the faith, establishing monasteries, and baptizing the heathen of the fierce northern race, over almost all the wide district of country between the Mäes, the Moselle, and the Rhine. He also passed into "further Friesland, Oldenburg, Hanover, and Holstein, visiting the isle of Heligoland, and perhaps Denmark proper." He came immediately before the time of St. Boniface, and partly contemporary with his labours; and before leaving England he had been brought up from his early boyhood at Ripon, where the great Saint Wilfred was building his new monastery of hewn stone. All this is beautifully told in the narrative before us. It abounds in little graphic life-touches, which make it very pleasant reading. For instance, the incident of Räthbod's unfinished baptism enlightens us more than many words as to the nature of the men with whom Willibrord had to deal. It was at a late period of his ministry that he entered the dominions of Räthbod; but before he had set out on his labours, another apostle, Wülfram, had once almost won over to Christianity the fierce monarch of the Frisons.. Already the king had placed one foot in the water, when, stopping suddenly, he asked, "Where, O stranger, do you say that the greater part of my chiefs, my free and noble Frisons are, in the heaven which as a Christian you promise me, or in the hell to which you say all the unchristened must go?" Wülfram, not concealing the truth, answered that "none but christened men were in heaven" "; then said the wild king in anger and scorn, "I would rather, if it be so, go and live for ever with my Frison nobles in hell, than go to heaven in company with a few outcast strangers."

The life of St. Willibrord is followed by a life of St. Lioba or Love, a kinswoman of St. Boniface, who after spending the first years of her life in the nunnery of Wimburn, in Dorsetshire, was called by him to come with some of the sisters and aid him in his labours in Germany. The picture given here of the history of the Saxon virgin is detailed and replete with life, nothwithstanding the great distance the world has rolled on since her time. Here we see her, simple and guileless, a nun almost from her childbood, fascinating all who came across her bright path, by the kindliness of her loving nature, and winning unsought admiration by her wisdom and learning. There is a great charm about the glimpse of the convent of Wimburn, ruled by the Abbess Tetta, and sheltering no less than five hundred maidens consecrated to God, many of them being princesses and daughters of Danes. It is not surprising to learn that their time was divided between labour, manuscript copying, psalmody, and prayer; but it will surprise some to hear that Lioba learned there the rules of verse, read unceasingly, and composed Latin poetry.

This little volume was written thirty-three years ago, and is only now published with its original frontispiece, a beautiful design of medieval character by Welby Pugin. All through the book there is easy-flowing pleasant reading, because of the appropriate, simple, Saxon English.

Life-sketch of Sister Clare Boylan, Superior of the Sisters of Charity in Drogheda. Dublin: M. H. Gill & Son. 1877.

A

NEAR view of a noble character-the briefly given sketch of a life of arduous lahour and great holiness, which closed only so lately as the summer of 1876. Sister Clare Boylan was not only distinguished by those hidden merits which proved her a true daughter of St. Vincent; but also by qualities which caused her to be appreciated, even from a worldly point of view, wherever she went. Strength of mind, untiring energy, prudence and tact, were hers in no ordinary degree; and thus she was well fitted for her place in an order whose work compels it constantly to mingle with the world. Her labours were not in one but in many lands, but everywhere she was the same, whole-hearted in her work, winning universal love and respect, and succeeding in every undertaking, as if some special blessing attended her steps. During the Crimean War she was in the hospitals of Constantinople. Then, at the age of twentyfour, she was placed in charge of a convent at Smyrna. Next we find her in England, first in the London house at Carlisle-place, where she was engaged in the difficult mission of visiting the poor in their own homes, and inducing them to return to the practice of religion. Only she and another sister were employed in this branch of zealous charity. After two years, Sister Clare was removed to Little Crosby, near Liverpool, a quiet Lancashire village that never let go its faith, and that holds it still, while it lies outside the stir of the world, a Catholic community, with its church, its old stone wayside cross, and its "great house." From thence, despite the protests and pleadings of priest and people, Sister Clare Boylan was removed to a more active scene, that stood more in need of such help as hers; and, once again in her own country, she became Superior of the convent at Drogheda, where in the midst of her labours she was suddenly called to her rest.

In the sketch of her work during the Crimean war, we are told that about two hundred Sisters of Charity assisted in ambulance and hospital duties, working when the fearful scourge of the cholera came, from four o'clock in the morning till nine at night. In the case of about one-sixth of these heroines of charity, life itself was sacrificed. At Scutari, at Gallipoli, Athens, and Varna, their chief labours went on. Besides the work in the hospitals, they were accustomed to meet the boats coming in from the Crimea with a "dismal freight of sick and wounded." Many a soldier's life was rescued by their timely aid, when, the moment a vessel was moored, they "precipitated themselves into the scene of misery below," where many had already expired during the voyage.