upon the same subject. Mgr. Dupanloup has lately published a work upon education, which has elicited universal admiration for its sound principles and attic elegance of taste, whilst another clergyman has also come forth with a very spirited brochure, in which he offers to the public his Ideas upon Education, ideas which are the result of longearned experience. On the other hand, popular instruction is not forgotten. Several laymen of talent, among whom figures M. Michel, an old friend of the celebrated Father Girard, of Friburg, in Switzerland, have undertaken to publish a monthly periodical, for the instruction of the country schoolmasters. The seven first numbers are full of excellent advice on primary tuition in every direction, and throughout the whole there breathes a genuine Catholic spirit. The Education-such is the title of this review-seems destined to do great service to the cause, for one may say with truth, that not one single periodical of the kind existed in France. All other journals belonging to this class are merely the speculations of booksellers, more or less dependant on the university. Besides, the price of subscription is so low, as to place it at the disposal of all schoolmasters if they please.

We are, therefore, justified in repeating that the new law has generally answered the expectations of those who proposed and defended it. Notwithstanding all its deficiencies, it has put an end to many prejudices in regard to religion; it has taken advantage of the favourable impressions of the day; it has overthrown a great portion of that despotic sway which had hitherto proved so baneful to France; it has enabled new and free establishments to arise, that would otherwise have been utterly impossible; it has given birth to a system destined henceforth to grow and prosper, if the French Catholics take care of themselves; it has finally called forth a spirit of competition with the university, that no one could now extinguish, and thus prepared for another generation a ground upon which it may take a firm stand and achieve still greater, still better things. All this is certainly something substantial, something practical, and gratitude is due to those who have done so much for their country, with such insignificant means in their hands, nay, with such a warm opposition against them. That they may be rewarded with gratitude, ought to be the wish of every true Catholic, and is certainly the sincere desire of the present writer.

ART. V.-Cases of Conscience, or Lessons of Morality. For the use of the Laity; extracted from the Moral Theology of the Romish Church. BY PASCAL THE YOUNGER. London: Bosworth, 1851.

THIS miserable production, miserable alike in tendency,

in spirit, and in execution, has, at any rate, the advantage, in the eyes of a Catholic, that it carries its refutation in its very title. Its title, in fact, is a faithful representation of its argument, and that argument, besides the many incidental flaws by which it is vitiated, is from beginning to end a fallacy; the common fallacy, we will add, of all writers who have attempted to implicate in the charge of laxity, the moral theology of the great Jesuit school. And before entering upon the exposure of the present work in detail, we shall endeavour, with as little of theological technicality as possible, to give our readers an idea of this πρῶτον ψευδος, this elementary false assumption which runs through all the popular attacks upon the Confessional, and of which even Catholics themselves, especially those of the Gallican opinions, have not been always careful to keep themselves clear.

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It appears, then, to be taken for granted by these objectors, that Cases of Conscience" and "Lessons of Morality," are one and the same thing. They confound, that is, the moral theology of the Church, which is altogether remedial of sin already committed, with her moral teaching, which is directed to the formation of character. It is indeed wonderful, (unless the explanation of the fact be sought in wilful oversight,) that they should so entirely forget the frequency with which our ordinary spiritual writers, as well as our theologians, describe a confessor under the name of a "physician. It is equally strange, that men professing a reverence for the text of Scripture, should wholly ignore the words of our Blessed Lord Himself: "They that are sound need not a physician, but they that are sick: I came not to call the just, but sinners to penance. Our readers will better understand the distinction we mean to express, if we put a couple of parallel cases, drawn from the practice of the world.

Our first analogy shall be derived from the quarter to which both the Gospel and the Church direct us to look for the illustration of the priests' office-we mean the department of medical science and practice. A physician, in the words of our Lord Himself just quoted, is not for the sound but for the sick and the sickly. A healthy man indeed may go to his doctor for direction, but this is a distinct and special department of a physician's duty. Medical treatises are but incidentally concerned with it; their object is to suggest methods, not for the preservation of health, but for the alleviation of disease. It is just the same in the case of our moral theology, the end of which is, the restoration of the penitent from the state of sin into which he has unhappily fallen, to the state of grace which he has forfeited. Sin, (in the language again of Holy Scripture,) is the "disease," the state of grace is the condition of spiritual health, and the sacrament of penance is the ordained means of recovery. The Confessor, like the physician, is bound by the obligations of his office to get his patient out of trouble as well as he can; and treatises of inoral theology are his guides as to the most approved method of doing his work. But as the physician has bodily health for the subject matter of his profession, so a priest has spiritual health for that of his vocation, (so far as men are the objects of it,) and as the physician, therefore, is at times a counsellor of the sound, to prevent their becoming ill, a confessor is also a director of the spiritually healthy, so that they may be secured from a fall. Now the treatises which he consults, in his character of confessor, and which, it seems, have found their way into the hands of persons, (like our author,) for whom they were never intended, are mainly occupied with the circumstances of disease; cases" as they are rightly called. Where they touch upon the condition of the healthy, it is in the way of a digression, or rather, a special notice. Thus, St. Alphonso, for example, has his practical instructions for directors of souls, in a form quite distinct from his moral theology; they belong, in fact, to a different branch of the science, called the "ascetic;" and it is as ridiculous to mix up the two lines of study as it would be to confound a book of culinary recipes with one of medical prescriptions. We are serious when we say, that if a gentleman in a good state of health were to propose sustaining himself upon beef tea and barley water, instead

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of roast mutton and port wine, he would not make a greater mistake than would the Catholic who should seek for spiritual direction in the pages of Busembaum, or any other work of the kind.

To dwell a moment longer upon this same comparison. The great principle upon which the spiritual, like the bodily physician has to shape his course, is that of accommodation to circumstances. He has his particular patient to prescribe for, and he will prescribe accordingly; but that patient has this in common with all patients, that he requires a cautious as well as a gentle and considerate treatment. Besides his specific symptoms, he has the characteristic of all sick people as such, that he is delicate and sensitive. Hence his physician must provide, not for what he himself might desire, but for what his patient can bear. But his object, above all, must be that of hindering despondency. In the pursuit of this object, he will practice a prudent reserve in speaking to his patient; he will make the best even of serious disease, not from any love of dissembling, still less any habitual untruthfulness, but simply in pursuit of his object, which is to lighten, not to aggravate, to heal and not to wound. A pretty kind of doctor would he be, who should go about frightening his patients in their first respite after danger, and ere they were well out of it, by telling them in their feeble state, all which he would say of their maladies to their friends in health, or to themselves when recovered! When he sees them too easily elated, ready to presume upon a momentary amendment, or to calculate upon years when he knows their days, and perhaps their hours, to be numbered, then cautiously indeed, and kindly, but still firmly, he advises them of their danger, or at least moderates their too sanguine hopes. But in a case where calmness and confidence are the very conditions of recovery, to speak to a sick man of his disease, after the fact, in the same terms in which you would speak to a sound man of the same disease before it, would be a course of action for which worldly men would very soon find a suitable, and that no very complimentary description, were it to be practised in regard to themselves and their families.

The penitent, moreover, has a claim upon his confessor for tenderness, which is peculiar to himself. A sick man does no violence to his natural feelings in having recourse to his physician; on the contrary, he acts in obedience to

them. He feels his malady, which all sinners unhappily do not. And even when sinners are moved by the promptings of divine grace, to go to a Confessor, and disburden their consciences, what a victory must they not gain over their self-love! They may, if they please, keep their secret to themselves, so that even their best friends shall not know of it. Unlike the man attacked with illness, they have neither natural inclination within, nor kind friends without, to force them on using remedies. They may stay away from confession if they please, but they actually prefer, for their souls' health, to do a thing most repulsive to their natural self-love. Are such the persons for a sinner like themselves to frighten and discourage? Is it for him to exaggerate, or even to exhibit in formal shape, the sin which, as it is, appals them by its hideous appearance? Does not human kindliness, as well as sacerdotal duty, suggest to a confessor the course of gentleness and moderation? And has not his Lord warned him against bruising the broken reed and quenching the smouldering flax? We repeat, it is one thing to warn from mortal sin as a danger, quite another to deal with it as a fact; and it would be just as unchristian to use in the confessional the language of the pulpit, as to tell men whom we wish to maintain in innocence, of all the excuses which might be made for them if unhappily they should fall into sin.

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It may be said, indeed, that a sin is as much a sin at one time as at another, and that the course we are now advocating is favourable to hypocrisy and falsehood. But how different is the fact! The preacher, or spiritual director, speaks of sin in the abstract, as hateful to God and destructive of the soul. The confessor, on the contrary, who deals with sin as a fact, has to view it in connexion with all its circumstances in the ticular case; such as the amount of knowledge or deliberation with which it was committed, and the degree of completeness to which it was carried; its place in the series of which it is one; its relation to the temperament and situation of the penitent, &c. It will be hard, indeed, if there be no extenuating circumstances in the particular instance; one fact to move compassion and suggest tenderness there must always be-the fact of the confession itself. A penitent always deserves mercy, but a hearer does not even claim it.

Hence it is that so great a part of moral theology con