tion of his measures to the conclusion of our article.

In 1809, it became known in Brittany that Napoleon had confiscated the patrimony of St. Peter, and had been excommunicated by the Pope; from that moment the Bretons showed a disposition to resist him. They refused to serve in the armies of a man, whom the Church had put under her ban; "Who," they said, "could guarantee a Christian conscript that he should not be ordered to bear part in an expedition shameful as that of the ditch of Vincennes, or the Quirinal hill," from which the holy Father had been brutally dragged by the imperial soldiers? The villages were deserted, and men quitted their homes and fled for refuge to the darkest recesses of the wild forests of the country, rather than serve in the imperial armies. There does not seem, however, to have been any general outbreak, till Bonaparte had been once expelled and returned from Elba, for the famous hundred days. One of his last acts in the midst of his disasters had been to endeavor to force the chapters of Troyes, Tournay, and Gand, to receive bishops of his nomination, though the sees were not vacant; their legitimate pastors he had imprisoned and driven into exile, and he now inflicted the same vengeance on those who remained faithful to them. The very youths of the seminary of Gand he forced into his armies or shut up in prisons, where forty-eight of them perished by disease. His first acts on his return corresponded with his exit; by a decree issued April 8th, 1815, he ordered all the public functionaries, not excepting the clergy, to transfer to him the oaths which they had first sworn to Louis XVIII; on their refusal he commenced a persecution. This filled up the cup of his infidelity in the eyes of the Bretons; on his attempt to force the conscription upon them, they refused to fight for the enemy of the Church. The cause then which drove the province into resistance was one which reminds us of the times of Innocent III; in M. Rio's words, the question was, whether the emperor was to be above the priesthood, and the authority of the préfet above that of the Church.

It was in this insurrection that the students of Vannes took part, and it is around them that the poetry of the expedition concentres. There is a depth of devout feeling in these poor youths who quitted their home to fight for their religion and their king, which is irresistibly charming. With all their heroism they are still mere boys; they wept bitterly on leaving their mothers and sisters, and one of them cries like a child when wounded in battle, though he had distinguished himself by his determined bravery. At the same time they display in their relations to their masters at college all the petulance of their age; this M. Rio does not attempt to disguise, and he has done well, for it gives a reality to exploits which would otherwise appear disproportioned and untrue. Scraps of school-boy Latin, and quotations from Tacitus and Livy mixed up with the Maccabees, and the magnificent Latin of the Breviary, occur every now and then to complete the motley impression produced by the whole. The narrative would sometimes appear comic, if the religious courage of the young heroes did not give it a coloring of romance, which carries the reader back to the crusades. The college seems to have been a place where all the traditions of the wars of La Vendée and Brittany concentred; it numbered amongst its inmates, old candidates for the priesthood, who had formerly quitted the all but monastic stillness of the seminary to serve in these wars, and now, after ten years spent in toil and bloodshed, humbly took their places on the benches of the college beside boys of half their age, in order to resume the studies which had been so strangely interrupted. The purity of their lives, and the zeal with which they afterwards discharged their holy functions, left their young companions no doubt of the sincerity with which they had embarked in this just quarrel. All therefore combined to kindle the enthusiasm of these young heroes in favor of what they considered to be a sacred war. The state in which they found the villages on going home in 1815 for their vacation, was well calculated to add fuel to the flame.

Just before Easter an order came to pull

down their beloved white banner from the church steeples, where it had always floated beneath the cross, and to substitute the hateful tricolor. This was a prelude to the conscription, so that that year the hallelujah of Easter was sung almost in the tone of a funeral chant. The students fully participated in these feelings which animated the province in its resistance, but the immediate causes which led to their final outbreak have a mixture of boyhood, as well as of religion about them, which is eminently characteristic. Before the revolution the head boy in each class wore as the badge of his dignity a small dove, the symbol of the Blessed Spirit, to remind him perpetually of the example of purity which he was bound to hold out to his school-fellows. The imperial university had profanely substituted an eagle for the dove; this again had at the first restoration given place to a silver cross, enchased with fleur-de-lys. On Bonaparte's return from Elba, an order came to reinstate the eagle in its honors; this was too much for the boys; their devotion for the Holy Ghost was ever kept alive by the chanting of the hymn "Veni Sancte Spiritus," at the opening of their daily studies. Some of them had heretofore preferred this sacred badge even to the cross and the fleur-de-lys; and now that the hateful eagle was to be substituted for the old lily of France, their indignation knew no bounds, and they flatly refused to stain their bosoms, as they termed it, with this new decoration, which they looked upon as an emblem of apostacy. Another grievance of a similar nature had annually recurred to fan the flame of their discontent; Napoleon had taken a fancy to compare himself to Charlemagne, and amongst other acts of ecclesiastical supremacy he had ordered the church of Aix-laChapelle to keep the feast of Charlemagne. He also sent an order to the colleges connected with the university to observe the day of this novel saint as a holiday. The boys of Vannes, who strongly suspected the quarter from which this order emanated, could not discover the name of Saint Charlemagne in the litanies of the saints, and at once put him down for some usurper, whom the emperor had canonized of his own auVOL. II.-No. 1.

thority. What aggravated the insult was that not only was this new festival introduced, but the feasts of Saint Nicholas and Saint Catherine, which had been kept ever since there was a university in France, were at the same time abolished. Saint Nicholas, from the well-known legend of his raising two school-boys to life, had been from time immemorial the protector of children; Saint Catherine was the special patron of all students in philosophy; she is said to have been a virgin of Alexandria, who so ably confuted the most celebrated heathen philosophers in a dispute held before the emperor Maximin, that they all joyfully confessed Christ and were immediately hurried to the stake. Whoever she was (for her acts are uncertain) she sunk deep into the devotion of Christians; on many painted windows she appears with her joyful palm and her well-known wheel, and angels are said to have conveyed her body to Mount Sinai with songs of triumph. In commemoration of her victory over the wisdom of this world, she has always been invoked by students in heathen philosophy; so that notwithstanding the imperial prohibition, St. Catherine's day was still kept by the upper class at Vannes, and St. Charlemagne's proportionably neglected.

A more serious grievance was soon added to these somewhat school-boy affronts; three of the boys one day returned from a ramble in the fields, with chaplets of white flowers in their hats; it appears that from time immemorial those most faithful guardians of tradition, the boys of Brittany, had thus decked themselves out in the early spring. Some of the revolutionary mob of Vannes however took offence at the hawthorn flowers, white having been ever the color of the French flag before the revolution; they fiercely attacked the three boys, one of whom defended himself manfully, and was at length carried off by a party of gens-d'armes as a disturber of the public peace. Without a vestige of a trial he was brutally kicked and beaten by the soldiers, till the blood gushed from his mouth; soon after he was expelled from the college, and sent to his native village. Here at least he hoped to be at peace; his heart leaped for joy on seeing

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the belfry of the village church, and he hastened to greet his friends. An edict of the préfet had however preceded him, and all turned their backs upon him. The priest of the place who had taken the constitutional oath in the revolution, preached at him from the pulpit, and a few days after a party of gens-d'armes made their appearance at his father's door to carry him off as a conscript; he only escaped by rushing into the neighboring forest. This was too much for his school-fellows, and when shortly afterwards news was brought to them that the chief amongst them were to be forced into the ranks of the imperial army by a decree of the préfet of the department, they at once resolved on joining the Bretons, who were everywhere on the point of rising against Napoleon's government. One thing, however, was necessary before they rushed on this perilous expedition, and that was the permission of the Church, for whose cause they took up arms. This portion of the narrative we give in M. Rio's own words.

"If our enemies had been in the habit of going to church they would have seen enough to make them suspect that it could be no common matter which was thus stirring up these youthful consciences. The confessionals were thronged as at the approach of a first communion; but the features of the boys did not wear that angelic serenity, that look of transfiguration which on that day sheds a kind of beauty over the plainest visages. On this occasion, the penitents had a dogged and anxious air, which betrayed distracting thoughts foreign to the object which brought them there. The most scrupulous among them thought themselves obliged to impart to their confessors the plot which was hatching, and the active part which they meant to take in its development. The clergy, to our great surprise, I had almost said our great scandal, were nearly unanimous in condemning it. Without adopting the words of the imperial catechism, which threatened eternal damnation to all who refused obedience to his majesty the emperor, and without interpreting the epistle of St. Paul to the Romans in the sense of a purely passive submission, they bade us render to Cæsar the things which are

Cæsar's, as long as Cæsar did not prevent our rendering to God the things which are God's. They then feelingly reminded us that we had not recognized the authority of our parents in the matter, that all the consequences of our insurrection must be dis-. astrous for ourselves, who might be cut off to a man; for our families, who should be persecuted; and, above all, for the diocess, which should be left without resources fromwhich it could draw recruits to succeed that generation of martyr-priests which was fast failing. In reality, this last was the consideration which had most weight with our spiritual fathers. They feared above all lest the vineyard of the Saviour, which had long lain fallow, and then had been cultivated by a small number of weakly workmen, should now also lose the fruit of their labor; to avert this evil for which no victory bought by our blood could in their eyes compensate, they made use of all the arguments which their reason or their feelings could suggest. Several heart-rending scenes occurred between the chaplain of the little convent and his penitents. He was the confessor of more than half the scholars of the college, and for each, but above all for the poor, he was a counsellor, a protector, and a father. It was he who had excited our heads and set our hearts on fire by enthusiastic tales about Spain and the Spaniards. Against a power at open war with religion he would have preached, nay marched with a crucifix in his hand; but so long as the Ark of God was respected, his wish was to remain at peace even with the Philistines. Not that he placed an insurrection against any power whatever under the category of mortal sins; on the contrary, he left us free to go or to stay, and when he had spent all his paternal remonstrances, the only means which he employed to withhold us, were the tears which accompanied his parting benediction."

The good priest, from the determined tone in which the secret had been confided to him, probably dreaded lest the matter had gone too far to allow even his authoritative interposition to be availing. The consciences of the youthful casuists were however set at rest, and they now seriously set forward

The Priesthood in the Church, set forth in two discourses, &c. By William Rollinson Whittingham, bishop of Maryland. Baltimore: Knight & Colburn. The Protestant Episcopal Pastor teaching the people committed to his charge to keep and observe the doctrines, and sacraments, and discipline of Christ, &c. By Rev. Henry V. D. Johns. Baltimore: N. Hickman. A letter to the Rev. Henry V. D. Johns, occasioned by the publication of his sermon, entitled "The Protestant Episcopal Pastor." By a Layman. Baltimore: Knight & Colburn.

Emmanuel in the Eucharist; a sermon by William Rollinson Whittingham, bishop of Maryland. Baltimore: Knight & Colburn.

ERE we to consider only the sub

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stance of the pamphlets which we have here mentioned, they would scarcely furnish a sufficient pretext for the critical examination of their contents. The reader who peruses them will perceive that they contain nothing more than a statement, by individuals who profess the same creed, of conflicting opinions in reference to certain doctrines of the Christian religion, particularly the eucharistic institution; and if he is acquainted with the fact that every true Protestant is his own supreme judge in matters of faith, he will not wonder at the discovery, in the above cited publications, of the dissonant views which their authors have expressed. These erroneous opinions, moreover, have been repeatedly refuted by Catholic controvertists, and were there no peculiar circumstances connected with the recent avowal of them, we should forbear the present investigation of the subject, permitting the evil to work its own cure, or to find a remedy in the many excellent vindications of Catholic truth which are in circulation. But the discussion that has given birth to the publications mentioned at the

head of this article, exhibits an extraordinary aspect in our latitude, and owes its origin to a still more extraordinary occurrence. One of the discourses of Bishop Whittingham on the "Priesthood in the Church," was delivered by him at the installation of the Rev. Henry V. D. Johns, as rector of Christ church in the city of Baltimore. The tone of the sermon was far from being acceptable to Mr. Johns, and in the evening of the very day on which he was invested with the parochial charge, he preached in substance the discourse entitled, "The Protestant Episcopal Pastor," containing views in reference to the Church, and more especially in relation to the eucharist, very different from those which his bishop had expressed. Such a collision between the two gentlemen is not very remarkable when we consider the natural and inevitable tendency of Protestantism, whose grand characteristic feature and peculiar distinction has ever been the power of producing division and separation, the necessary consequence of the fatal liberty which it grants to every individual of asserting the supremacy of his own judgment in matters of faith. Unity of belief cannot possibly exist where there is a setting up, as A Layman expresses it, of "a private judgment, under the guidance of individual reason, as an antagonist to the teaching of the Church." The discordant opinions, therefore, of the bishop and the minister are not a subject of wonderment so much as the novelty of the circumstances under which they were manifested. The occasion, also, derives a considerable degree of interest from the important inquiries which it suggests, and from the alarm which has been sounded at the innovations which a transatlantic movement is attempting to introduce into the creed and language of the Protestant Episcopal Church.

*Letter to Rev. Mr. Johns, p. 13.