what is passing in the whole religious world of to-day is but the harbinger of a great approaching change; of the dissolution of that system of medieval theocracy, which has exercised for a thousand years so great a power over the minds and consciences of men and the fate of nations. Many of the most enlightened minds of this age are filled with a presentiment of an approaching storm; and though we are unable at present to foresee the results of a great ecclesiastical revolution (of which the fall of the temporal power of the Papacy would probably be the signal), yet it is impossible for the most sanguine or the most indifferent to ignore that in every European country a strong religious movement is taking place. It occurs in Protestant kingdoms as well under Catholic rule, and it assumes different shapes according to the complexion of the estab lished faiths, the temper of parties, and the attitude which the hierarchy assumes toward the educated laity. In Italy, the impetus is at once religious and political. In Belgium, politics rather than controversies seem to deepen a feeling which is directed less against creeds and dogmas than against measures and men. Not only was the priestly party defeated in the late elections, but it is believed that no cabinet, formed on an Ultramontane basis, could at this moment command the confidence of the nation. In England, the situation is not complicated with any political bias whatever, and the present phase of religious thought appears as a reaction from the two last movements in the Anglican Church against the Evangelical and Tractarian schools. In Scotland, the Established Church, placed between the great Seceding party of 1843 and the Scottish Episcopal body, must consider her interests, and is awakening to the necessity of a liturgical reform. In short, the controversy is world-wide, though it is in Italy chiefly that men see the day approaching. Thus it is that the praise or blame of originality in his views cannot be awarded to the author of Le Maudit. If M. Michelet has for years been the terror of the Jesuits, who wince under that fierce and well-applied lash, the anti-papal movement in Italy has assumed great proportions, and the names of Passaglia and of Liverani are as unwelcome to ecclesiastical ears as the author of the Maudit could ever wish to become. In that mass of Italian reäctionary literature, priestly pens are mostly employed. Mongini is in orders, Monsignore Tiboni pleads for the secularization of the Bible, Reali is a canon, and the disclosures as well as the sentiments of these men are all inimical to priestcraft, if not actually to the priests. This Free Church party has its newspapers, the Colonna di Fuoco, edited by Don L. Zuccaro, which might vie with the imaginary journal of Julio, and they have their cheaper publications, which, in the shape of pamphlets and almanacs, command an enormous sale. The Almanacco Populare is most vigorous against the Jesuits, and, though it is a contraband article in pious families, eighty thousand copies of this book alone were sold in the year 1862. Having thrown in his lot with the thinkers and politicians of this school, the Abbé *** has the satisfaction of feeling that in his work of reformation in the Gallican Church he is not without examples or without sympathizers. While an angry camarilla classes him with Renan, men of cool judgment see that his place is with Cavour and with Azeglio, with Passaglia, if not with the earlier reformers. But, as the Free Church of Italy has refused to sympathize with the Waldensian communities, so the Abbé *** shows no leaning to any Protestant Church, and, indeed, he seems inclined to do Protestantism less than justice where he says: "The Reformation has been barren of religious results. By it old Catholicism was overthrown, but it has not made one Christian the more; and in the Reformed churches, quite as much as in the lands of prelates and monks, life is dying out in that state of atonic skepticism which has become the complaint of souls disgusted with the old forms in which the gospel was wrapped during the middle ages." ance with the shape which religious controversy has assumed in our country would, we think, induce the Abbé * * * to alter this sentence, which, however much or little it may apply to the Protestant schools of Germany, is wholly in appropriate to the freedom of inquiry and earnestness of thought which will make this epoch memorable in our own church. There is no doubt but that the long-ex A better acquaint isting antagonism between the Church | virtue, and it is among them that the new of Rome and the Reformed bodies, as church must find her apostles. well as the narrow peculiarities which sectarians exhibit in every country, have indisposed men like this unknown abbé to claim religious kinship with Protestants, however much they may be satisfied with the intellectual results of our Reformation. ors. A review of the books before us would be incomplete unless we gave our readers a precise account of the direction which this movement has taken in France, and of the hopes and dreams of its directWe give the author's own words, where he describes his ideal church of the future, prepared for no separation and no schism, but desiring the work to be begun and carried out by every hearth, as loyally and as effectually as in the temples and by the altar. He has spoken of the contradictions and sufferings experienced by enlightened Catholics, of Lacordaire, of M. de Lammenais, of the brothers Allignol, of the curate Dagomer, and others who have combated the Ultramontane and perverse tyranny of the day (contradictions which are not wholly unknown, we may believe, to such men as Count Montalembert, the Prince de Broglie, and Sir John Acton), and yet he encourages Catholics of this calibre to hope: "The salvation of the church must come "To separate ourselves plainly and openly from the fanatical Ultramontane sect; to unbreak formally with these Pharisees of the mask its dangerous, anti-evangelical spirit; to latter days, who are the curse of. Christian society, because they discredit Christianity, and render it odious to simple people who are not hostile, but indifferent to the grand doctrines of the gospel. "To stigmatize these hypocrites of the new Law, to show them, like their fathers of the and pursuing with implacable hatred the true old Law, paying their tithe of mint and cumin, worshippers of God-whited sepulchres wearing their rosaries to be seen of men, and to pass for saints. "This is the new work. It is great and bold, but it is lawful. isolation, and a loss of strength. isolation, and a loss of strength. "We will have no schism; for schism is be combated is the substitution of man for "No heresies; . . . the one which has to God; when we exaggerate the rights granted by Christ to the head of his church. "To remain invincible in the orthodox Cath olic faith; there lies our strength, and we will dogmatize in nothing. . . . We must be impassible and patient. "We must disabuse the minds of women. . . Let them know that religion is great, but that the systems of the men who direct them are narrow and dangerous. Let them be saved from a mysticism which is their death, from puerile practices which take up their time, and from the servile submission which tortures their conscience. Much harm has been unwittingly done in the church by women, and they ought to repair it." Such is the programme of the Abbé from this party, which, being moderate and These are the peaceful initiators of a new order. "But these are the hard conditions of their apostleship: To remain in the visible church; to belong to her soul, to the best part of her, to her real life. To accept of her worship as it is at present (since worship is transformable in its nature, and may be modified by time, till it return to the simplicity of primitive ages). "Never to break with Rome or with episcopacy. This is the capital point. Popes and bishops sit in the chair of Peter, as the princes among priests sat in the days of the synagogue in the chair of Moses. They must be loved and respected; for an immense number of these men of the old church are men of Is it practicable? and if practicable, what would be its results? Assuredly the influence of such reforms would not be religious only. Were such a transformation to become general, it would make a great political movement again imminent in France. The first be to convince every French man and effect of such teaching and belief would woman that he and she are responsible agents; and the first claim of every responsible being is liberty. The French nation has gone through such singular and repeated changes, and has alternated impossible to say whether, in appreciatso between tyranny and license, that it is ing this first truth, it would also lay hold of the greater truth by which it is followed; namely, that a sense of collective responsibility is the surest guarantee of order and support of the laws. Our author has observed a more than marked | fourth form, who was always blubbering reticence on this head, as if the political liberties of his country were wholly out of his thoughts. He is discreet, but we cannot believe him to be indifferent or ignorant of the civil and social result if his religious hopes should be realized. To what extent he is ever to be gratified is a grave as well as a curious question, and being himself without data, he must be content to wait for the answer. That is hid, he says, and "is the secret of God," -"but this," he adds, "is no secret that the human mind will conquer, for it will not let itself be taken in the webs of theocracy; and that caste must give way which is now so powerful, and which, with a cunning long unperceived by the masses, has interwoven its personal interests with those of religion. It must perish, but this shall endure, even the truth as revealed in the gospel, which fadeth not away." London Society Magazine. THE MODEL'S STORY. I DON'T know what it was that first induced me to become a painter. Every one was against it. My father thought it was madness. My mother said she was dreadfully disappointed at my foolish choice. My sisters wondered that I did not prefer the army, the bar, a public office, anything, rather than such a profession. As for Dr. Dactyl (then headmaster of Muzzington School, where I was pursuing my curriculum), he privately informed me in his library that any young man who would wilfully abandon the study of the classic authors at my age, and thus forego the inestimable advantages of a university career, must be in a bad way. The truth is, the doctor and I had not been on the best of terms. Long before I began to draw in an orthodox way from the "antique," at Mr. Mastic's atelier in Berners-street, I had had an idle knack of scribbling; and, in my school hours, this youthful taste frequently developed itself in the form of caricature. I believe I might have filled a portfolio with sketches of my schoolfellows. Podgkins, the stout boy, in his short trousers; Dullaway, the tall dunce in the over his syntax; Mother Banbury, who came to us regularly on Wednesdays and Saturdays with a tremendous basket of pastry, and with whom we used to run up a monthly "tick;"-all these characters, I recollect, were depicted with great fidelity on the fly-leaves of my Gradus and Lexicon. Nor did the doctor himself escape. His portly form, clothed in the picturesque costume of trencher-cap and flowing robe, was too magnificent a subject to forego; and many were the sheets of theme-paper which I devoted to this purpose. One unlucky cartoon which I had imprudently left about somewhere, found its way into the doctor's awful desk, where it was recognized weeks afterwards by Simkins, a third-form boy, who had been sent to fetch the birch from that awful repository; and whose information to me fully explained how it came to pass that I had lost at one and the same time my favorite sketch and the doctor's affections. I need scarcely say that I made no endeavor to reclaim this lost property when I took my final congé. The doctor gave me a cold and flabby hand-remarked, with peculiar emphasis, that if I persisted in my wish to become an artist, he only hoped I should devote my energies. in the right direction, and not degrade my pencil by. I guessed pretty well what he was going to say; but as we saw the Muzzington coach draw up at that moment outside his study window, he was obliged to stop short in his lecture. I had just time to get my traps. together, to give the doctor's niece, Mary Wyllford (a dear little soul of fourteen, who had brought me a paper of sandwiches), a parting salute behind the dining-room door, shake hands with my schoolfellows all round, jump on the "Tantivy " coach beside the driver, and roll out of the town. Of all the various fingerposts which Time sets up along the road of life, there are few, I think, which we remember better than that one we leave behind us on the last day at school. The long anticipated emancipation from a discipline which in our youthful dreams we think can never be surpassed for strictness afterwards that rose-colored delusion which leads us to look forward to the rest of life as one great holiday; are not these associated for ever with the final "breaking up?" What student of the Latin grammar ever drew a moral from his lessons? "O fortunatos nimium sua si boni norint." There is the text staring him in the face, and yet he refuses to listen to it. The golden age, in his opinion, has begun, instead of ended. All care, he thinks, is thrown aside with that old volume of Euripides. At last he is to join a world in which the paradigms of Greek verbs are not important; where no one will question him about the nature of Agrarian laws. Ah, gaudeamus igitur! Have we not all experienced this pleasure? on account of its frequent apppearance on a small scale in the chemists' shops, bedecked with galvanic chains and elastic bandages for feeble joints and varicose veins. And there was the Venus of Milo, whose clothes seemed falling off for want of arms to hold them up; and chaste Diana, striding along by the side of her fawn; and Eve, contemplating herself in an imaginary fountain, or examining the apple in a graceful attitude. With all these ladies and gentlemen in due time I made acquaintance, learned to admire their exquisite proportions, and derive from them and the study of Mr. Mastic's diagrams that knowledge of artistic anatomy which I have since found so eminently useful to me in my professional career. Rumor asserts that Mastic had himself dissected for years at Guy's Hospital, and had thus acquired great proficiency in this branch of his art; which, indeed, he seemed to value beyond all others. He knew the names of all the muscles by heart, their attachments, origin, insertion I had purchased some cigars at Mr. Blowring's, in the High street (his best medium flavored, at fivepence apiece), with the audacious notion of lighting one up at the school door; but when the time arrived, I confess my courage failed me. I waited until we were clear of the town to produce my cigar-case, and pres--what not? Frequently I have known. ently had the mortification of turning very pale before the coachman. A month or so after that eventful day, I was established as an art student in Berners-street, London. I had a hundred a year, which, my father assured me, was an ample allowance, to live upon, and the entrée to Mr. Mastic's academy, hard by. The expenses of my tuition at that establishment were defrayed out of the parental purse; and when I state that fifteen shillings a month was the sum charged for admission, it will be observed that the outset of my career was not attended by much investment of capital. Mr. Mastic had formed a fine collection of casts from the antique, which were ranged around his gallery for the benefit of his pupils. There was the Fighting Gladiator stretching his brawny limbs half across the room; and the Discobolus, with something like the end of an oyster-barrel balanced in one hand; and the Apollo, a very elegant young man in a cloak, who was supposed just to have shot at some one with an invisible bow and arrow, and seemed very much surprised at the result; and the Medici Venus, whom one of our fellows always would call the medical Venus the honest fellow remove his cravat to show us the action of the sterno-cleidomastoid; and he was never so happy as when he was demonstrating, as he called it, in some fashion, the wondrous beauties of the human form. Mastic never exhibited his pictures. The rejection of some of his early works by the Royal Academy had inflicted a deep wound upon the painter's sensibilities, which time could never heal. He talked with bitter scorn of the establishment in Trafalgar Square; hung the walls of his atelier with acres of canvas, and was often heard to remark that if the public wanted to see what he could do, they might come there and judge of his merits. I regret to add that few availed themselves of this golden opportunity. It might be that his art was of too lofty a character to suit the age; or, perhaps -as neglected genius is wont to dohe slightly overrated his own abilities. Certain it is, that as year after year he devoted his talents to the illustration of history, or the realization of the poet's dreams, these efforts of his brush, whether in the field of fact or fiction, remained unheeded in his studio, lost to all eyes except our own; and even we, his faithful pupils, did not perhaps appreciate them to the extent which they deserved. | As we profited by his experience, we improved our judgment, and by-and-by began to find faults where we had once seen nothing but perfection. I became a student of the Royal Academy, was admitted to paint in the "Life School," and soon grew ambitious enough to treat subjects of my own. The Pre-Raphaelite school had just arisen. Men were beginning to feel that modern art had too long been looked upon as an end rather than a means, and preferred returning to an earlier and less sophisticated style of painting. They said, let us have truth first, and beauty afterwards if we can get it, but truth at any rate. And the young disciples in this new doctrine of esthetics suffered endless ignominy and bitter sneers from old professors and fellow-students; but they did not care. They went on in the road they had chosen painting life as they saw it. They represented humanity in the forms of men and women, and did not attempt to idealize it into a bad imitation of the Greek notion of gods and goddesses. When they sat down before a landscape, their first object was to copy nature honestly, without remodelling her form and color to suit a composition." And, as time went on, they had their reward. Yes; magna est veritas et prevalebit. At last their labors were appreciated; and I am proud to think that my first efforts were stimulated by the example of such men as Millais and Holman Hunt. My father's allowance to me was, as I have said, only a hundred a year; and I soon began to feel the necessity of earning money. To a young artist without patronage that is perhaps an easier matter in these days than it was some forty or fifty years ago. Unless a man was "taken up," as the phrase went, by some wealthy patron-a Sir George Beaumont or a Duke of Devonshire-he could not then hope to make a living by his profession at its outset. But in these days of cheap illustrated literature, fair average ability may often find a field for work in drawing on the wood. I was lucky enough to become connected with a popular periodical, and managed to eke out my income by using my pencil in its service. There is something very delightful in handling the first money that one has earned. To know that you are under no obligation for it, that it is yours by the strictest law of justice, that you have actually turned your brains or fingers to some account at last; that your service in the world is acknowledged substantially in those few glittering coins or that crisp, pleasant-looking slip of paper; there is a charm, I say, about the first fee or honorarium which we never experience again. Hundreds may be paid into our bankers when we are famous. Our great-aunts may shuffle off this mortal coil, and leave us untold treasures in the Three per Cents; but we shall never look upon a guinea or a five-pound note with the same degree of interest which we felt in pocketing the price of our earliest labor. I took care not to let this employment interfere with my ordinary studies. My object was to be a painter, not a draughtsman; and it was perhaps fortunate that I did not get more magazine work than sufficed to keep me out of want, just then, or I might have neglected my palette altogether. One of the earliest commissions which I obtained was through the influence of a little lady whose name I have already mentioned - Mary Wyllford. Within two years after I had left the doctor's establishment he had received a colonial appointment; and when he left his native country, deeply beloved and regretted by his old pupils (whose pious tribute to his worth finally took the form of a silver inkstand), Mary came up to town to live with her mother, a young and still handsome widow of eight-andthirty, who had just returned from the Continent. I had often felt some surprise that Mrs. Wyllford should have voluntarily separated herself for so long a time from her child; but Mary now made no secret of the fact that her mother had been in very poor circumstances, and that, as her uncle the doctor had kindly offered to take charge of her, Mrs. Wyllford, unwilling to become a further burden on her brother-in-law, had accepted the situation of companion to a lady who was travelling abroad. The unexpected death, however, of a distant relative, had not only placed them henceforth beyond the reach of want, but actually would insure for Miss 17 |