(that is of youths under twenty) has quadrupled in the last ten years. Crime of every description has increased, and sentimental crimes, even of the most atrocious character, are condoned and unpunished by sympathising juries. With these facts before us it is impossible to doubt that the moral sense of a portion of the population has been perverted and degraded. Liberty has degenerated into license, and infidelity into crime.

The same causes tell upon the growth of the population, which scarcely increases at all. The excess of births over deaths was 108,220 in 1881, but only as 56,536 to 52,616 in 1886. The number of marriages decreased by 4,182. The number of divorces rose from 2,950 to 3,636 (Chaudordy, p. 57). In the last years of the reign of Louis XVI. the population was rapidly increasing.

All these causes, it is admitted by the writers before us, tend materially to diminish the relative strength of France as compared with that of other nations. They are symptoms of decadence, and they are manifestly the result of the unsettled condition of the country for the last hundred years, and of revolutions which ought, if beneficial, to have produced exactly the opposite effect.

No doubt there have been several intervals during the last hundred years in which France has been governed with energy and wisdom, and has put forth as much strength and intelligence as at any period of her history. Napoleon raised her to the summit of military glory. The Restoration witnessed a burst of eloquence and of progress in science, in literature, in the arts. The reign of Louis Philippe replaced France at the head of the liberal States of the Continent. The Second Empire, by artificial means, caused a rapid developement of the resources of the country. These things happened because in these intervals France had a government. But to every one of those governments the undying spirit of the Revolution was fiercely opposed. Every one of these had to fight for its existence. Louis Philippe called his reign'une lutte ténace contre l'anarchie.' And in the course of years every one of these governments was defeated, and the democratic spirit of the Revolution prevailed. It would be rash to predict that any conceivable government can be established, whether monarchical, military, or constitutional, which could permanently resist the action of the democratic principles of the Revolution-capable, like the waves of the ocean, of destroying everything that controls them, incapable, like those waves, of affording any solid

basis to the State. For, to continue the metaphor, each time that the spring-tide of democracy has swept over the country, it has overthrown the greater part of the structure raised by authority and intelligence. At the present moment all the writers we have quoted agree that, in the last resort, France has made no progress since 1789 towards the establishment of a free and stable government, supported by the union of the nation and the confidence of the people. M. Renan declares, in the passage we have cited, that if the problem is not solved in ten or twenty years it is insoluble. Meanwhile the social decomposition is going on, and we see no reason to suppose that the next ten or twenty years will turn the current of events.

The present rulers of France have resolved to celebrate the centenary of the Revolution by national festivities, and we believe that July 14, the anniversary of the capture of the Bastille, is to be solemnised with peculiar splendour, although that event is now described by a popular writer as 'cette grande fumisterie parisienne, déshonorée par des actes 'de véritable cannibalisme.' It is not unnatural that they should celebrate a Revolution which has ended by bringing them into power. But we are curious to know how many Frenchmen, being well acquainted with the series of events which we have endeavoured very briefly to summarise, and with the present condition and prospects of the nation, look back with triumphant exultation to that date. Still less reason is there for the other nations of Europe to look back with satisfaction on a convulsion which inflicted on them the scourge of twenty years' war. It was not the cause of liberty, but of democracy, that triumphed-of a democracy incapable of establishing a government of law and order on the solid basis of freedom, or of giving peace to the world. We believe that the opinions we have expressed are those of the most enlightened classes in France, however painful these opinions may be to their patriotism and their pride. They look with regret at the past, with humiliation at the present, with anxiety to the future, but they trust that the experience of many evils will bring back the people to reason and rectitude, and the sacrifices made by a great nation for a hundred years will not have been made in vain.

ART. X.-La Chaire Française au Moyen Age, spécialement au XIIIme Siècle, d'après les manuscrits contemporains. Par A. LECOY DE LA MARCHE. Paris: 1868.

M.

LECOY DE LA MARCHE has not merely added a new

chapter to ecclesiastical history, but has done good service to civil history also by the publication of the present work. He has given to the world in a compact form, and with the terseness so commendable in the French prose writers of our time, the result of the wide and deep researches which he has made in the homiletic literature of the Middle Ages. The original matter contained in his book is derived from the perusal of a vast number of sermons, mostly preached in France in the thirteenth century, and now preserved in manuscript in the great national and provincial libraries of that country. From this rich and hitherto unwrought mine he has extracted with singular judgement and -sagacity whatever might seem to illustrate the contemporary state of religion, manners, and society in France.

The features of the age on which he has bestowed this attention were strongly marked. The Papal system was

still in full force. The dawn of the Reformation had not yet commenced. The institutions of feudalism and chivalry, if partially undermined, were outwardly unimpaired. But that which specially commends the thirteenth century to our interest is the fresh spirit of inquiry which was everywhere abroad. The popular mind throughout Christendom,' says Milman, 'seemed at that time to demand instruction. 'There was a wide and vague wakening and yearning of the human intellect. An insatiate thirst of curiosity, of inquiry, at least for mental spiritual excitement, seemed almost suddenly to have pervaded society.' This yearning after knowledge called forth great missionary enterprises, first on the part of the heretics and afterwards on a far grander scale on the part of the Church. The slumbering eloquence of the pulpit was rekindled; and there was a corresponding revival of faith and charity among the people, owing in a great measure to the fervid zeal and the astonishing selfdenial of the Dominican and Franciscan orders.

The work of M. Lecoy de la Marche obtained the prize proposed by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in 1867 for the best essay treating of the sermons preached or composed in France in the thirteenth century, and

deducing from them such information as they might yield touching the manners of the time, the national character, the use of the vulgar tongue, and generally illustrative of religious and civil history. The president of the Academy bestowed high encomiums on the successful essay for the erudition and literary sagacity which it displayed, and for the new light which it shed on the subject proposed for investigation.

The first part of the book treats of the preachers of the period, the second of the sermons, the third of the state of society, so far as it may be collected from the sermons. Though our attention will be chiefly directed to the third of these divisions, there are many points of interest in the former two which cannot be altogether overlooked.

In order to ascertain the primitive type of the sermon, our author goes back to the first ages of the Church, and shows from ancient authorities (which he has chiefly derived from the 'Origines Ecclesiastica' of our own Bingham) that, besides the exhortations and expositions of Gospel truth which were addressed to the heathen, regular pastoral instruction was also given to the faithful, and that this duty was in the primitive Church reserved to the bishops, as representatives and successors of the Apostles. This kind of instruction was communicated not in a set discourse, nor with impassioned appeals to the conscience, but in a familiar conference or dialogue, and hence came to be called homilia, a word at first represented in Latin (as St. Augustine says) by the term tractatus popularis, and afterwards by sermo. The word oratio, which might have implied that those catechetical discourses had a rhetorical character, was never applied to them, but, in strict accordance with its proper sense, a pleading, was confined by the Church to the office of prayer. A few of these primitive homilies, delivered in the third century by St. Hippolytus, the disciple of St. Irenæus, were committed to writing, and were extant in the time of St. Jerome, and two centuries later were referred to in the decrees of the Lateran Council of A.D. 649.

In the reign of Constantine the profane arts were invoked to the aid of religion; and then began the golden age (as it is commonly regarded) of sacred eloquence. The homiletic works of St. Basil, St. Gregory, St. Chrysostom, St. Jerome, St. Augustine, have never ceased to exercise an elevating influence on the preaching of the Church, even though they may at all times, and especially in the Middle Ages, have been followed more closely in their faults than in their excel

lences, and may have given rise to many vapid imitations and puerile conceits.

From the sixth century Christian eloquence in some measure declined, being involved in the general downfall of arts and literature which was consequent on the dissolution of the Roman Empire. The decline, however, was in elegance rather than in force; and a great and lasting impression was made by the energetic preaching of St. Remigius, St. Augustine, and St. Boniface on the Franks of Gaul, on the Saxons of Britain, and on the Teutonic tribes of Germany; while St. Cæsarius of Arles and St. Avitus of Vienne con. tended not unsuccessfully against the refined subtleties of the Arians in the south. This activity in the preaching office of the Church is to be attributed mainly to the impulse given to missionary efforts by the zeal of Charlemagne. After the eighth century, however, preaching languished and almost fell into desuetude, and there was no recovery till the eleventh century, which produced that great luminary of Christendom St. Bernard. His impassioned eloquence was the primum mobile of the second Crusade; but none of those fiery appeals were committed to writing by which he wrought up the enthusiasm of the multitudes to a perfect frenzy, and induced men of all classes to take up the cross and at the sacrifice of every earthly joy and comfort to set forth against the infidel. All the sermons of this epoch which are now extant have a studied and learned style, more redolent of the school and the cloister than of the marketplace. They seem to have been addressed to clerks and monks, not to the common people. There was a general dearth of popular instruction; for the clergy were luxurious and lazy, and their supineness afforded a powerful weapon to those who were propagating the tenets of the growing sect of the Waldenses. The heretical preachers also had this great advantage, that they were poor; they had sprung from the lower classes of the people, they felt for the people, they spoke the language of the people; and they made their spiritual teaching more acceptable by blending with it the most unmeasured vituperation of the clergy, some of whom were generally odious for their wealth, their pride, and their immorality, while the rest, if giving no cause of offence on any of these grounds, were despised for their lack of activity, ability, and zeal. At length the emulation of the Church was aroused, and a new impulse given to her energies, by the devoted labours and the success of her adversaries.

In the year 1205 it is related that a Spanish canon, with