Free Thought is not essentially anti-religious. Although, we are informed, it occasionally has had "fits of fury against churches, dogmas, and rites, still its authoritative representatives aim to recover the feeling which created religious institutions." He admits that the plain soldiers, and even the non-commissioned officers of Free Thought, often declare their intention of extirpating all religion, but maintains that its leaders desire for science "not only a limitless freedom, but wish its efforts inspired with an ardor, a patience, a heroism which are nothing else than faith. They do not think of destroying faith, but, on the contrary, of giving it a better knowledge of itself!"

In his chapter on Contemporary Philosophy, he shows that the present generation leans to the thought of Bergson, Boutroux, and William James, because they answer the need which presentday France manifests in every quarter "to see the living reality;" whereas the superficial, exaggerated and pessimistic tendencies of Nietzsche have undergone a complete eclipse. "Neitzsche failed to answer the real, better and deeper needs of France for a more intense and more devoted common life."

It would require a volume to point out all the inaccuracies of fact and of philosophical statement with which this book teems. On every page we realize how utterly out of sympathy the author is with the true ethos and spirit of Catholicism.

COLUMBUS AND HIS PREDECESSORS. A Study in the Beginnings of American History. By Charles H. McCarthy, Ph.D. Philadelphia: John Joseph McVey. 50 cents net. Professor McCarthy has written a brief but careful sketch of the maritime achievements which culminated in the discovery of the American continent. The main facts which are contained in countless monographs and volumes are here collected and arranged, so that the reader may easily acquire a firm grasp of the beginnings of American history.

We have often come across the assertion that: "It was not jewels but Jews" that furnished the funds for the equipment of Columbus. This witticism suggests two errors, which Professor McCarthy successfully combats. In the first place, Isabella did not pledge her jewels to provide for the expedition for Columbus, though in Spain there is a legend that, as early as 1489, they were pledged to certain money lenders for the prosecution of the war against the Moors. It is clear from the account books of the

Santa Hermanadad that Luis de Santangel, its treasurer, loaned for the equipment of Columbus one million one hundred and forty thousand maravedis, which were repaid with interest during the years 1492 and 1493.

The historian Fiske in his Discovery of America seems to be ignorant of this fact. Columbus himself contributed one-eighth of the expense of the expedition, on the express condition that he was to receive one-eighth of the profits. There is no evidence whatever that Aragon contributed so much as a single maravedi toward the enterprise, despite the proud boasting of some Aragonese historians.

The author confutes at some length the popular opinion of some superficial school histories, which pretend that Columbus was merely interested in traffic with the Indies, and in the discovery of a safer route thither. On the contrary, he looked ultimately to nothing less than the conversion to Christianity of the millions of pagans dwelling in the countries of the East, and to the discovery of islands and mainlands lying in the Ocean-Sea. In a word, he was both a missionary and an explorer. Columbus' own Journal states his purpose clearly.

This scholarly volume is dedicated to the Knights of Columbus, whose Supreme Knight, Mr. Flaherty, has written an excellent preface.

LIFE AND CHARACTERISTICS OF RIGHT REV. ALFRED A. CURTIS, D.D. Second Bishop of Wilmington. Compiled by the Sisters of the Visitation, Wilmington, Delaware. New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons. $2.50; postpaid $2.70.

Cardinal Gibbons in his preface to this life of Bishop Curtis, tells us that his characteristic virtues were his sterling honesty, his hatred of sham, his practices of mortification, and his sense of duty. His sterling honesty and hatred of sham drove him perforce out of the Episcopalian Church. Bishop Whittingham was one day holding communion service at Mount Calvary Church in Baltimore, and the Rector, Mr. Curtis, while assisting him, made profound reverence to the elements of bread and wine. This was observed by the Bishop, who, after the service was ended, privately took Mr. Curtis to task, assuring him that if he acted similarly on a future occasion, he would feel himself constrained to reprove him openly before the assembly in church. Christ," said the Bishop, "is there to be communicated and not to be adored." This

struck Mr. Curtis as shifty and dishonest; for as he wrote to the Bishop, November 14, 1871, commenting on his Pastoral condemning the adoration of the Eucharist: "I cannot at all see how Christ can be received as Christ without adoration. To say that He is present but is not to be adored, is to me only a certain way of saying that He is not veritably present at all."

Mr. Curtis was finally received into the Church by Newman in 1872. He thanked God for having attained peace in the one fold of the True Shepherd. He writes of

that secure feeling of having found the reality. You feel not only as if a child again in ignorance, but a child also in truth and simplicity. It is a hard battle to put to death totally selfwill, but when you have conquered and you have finally submitted, and are quite sure that nothing could ever make you undo your submission, there comes so great a calm and so great a joy, such certainty, such blessed and incredible faith, that you don't know your own self.

Bishop Curtis was always remarkable for his austere life, his utter forgetfulness of self, and his indefatigable zeal for souls. He dressed so poorly that more than once, on his confirmation tours, he was mistaken for a beggar by the pastor's servant who opened the door to him. Often instead of going to a hotel in one of the country towns of Delaware, he would roll up his old cassock for a pillow and sleep all night in church at the foot of the altar. He was often known to sweep the church himself, and light the lamps in church, standing on a board which he placed across the back of the pews. He did a great deal of his traveling to his far-away missions upon his bicycle, thinking nothing of sixty or seventy miles a day. He thought he could not afford the luxury of a horse. He never took any breakfast during Lent, not even the small cup of black coffee which his friends urged upon him. He died gloriously poor. All that he left behind were a rosary, his breviary and ordo, a gun-metal watch, one suit of clothes, a few changes of underwear, some fishing tackle, and about three dollars in money.

The second part of the volume contains a few letters, sermons and spiritual counsels which he gave during his retreats to the Visitation nuns. They are rather commonplace, and of value only as evidencing the piety and devotion of the saintly bishop. We think they might be omitted with profit in the next edition of his life.

MODERNISM AND MODERN THOUGHT. By Father Bampton,

S.J. St. Louis: B. Herder. 60 cents net.

Father Bampton has published the seven lectures on Modernism which he delivered in London last spring. As he himself says, "they make no pretense of any profound or exhaustive treatment of the subject. They were addressed to a popular audience, and the subject was, therefore, handled in popular fashion." He traces its origin to Kant, who taught that we could not know with intellectual knowledge God and the supernatural. For Kant's Practical Reason as the means of reaching God, the modernists substitute the Religious Sentiment or Religious Experience. They declare revelation wholely internal, a mere psychological experience, and faith the soul's response to it. God, apprehended by the religious sentiment, is vitally immanent in the soul, and not apprehended by any external teaching. Dogma consists of of " tentative and provisional formulas," which express vaguely man's religious experience. By communicating these dogmas to his neighbors, man associates his individual conscience with the consciences of others, thus forming the collective conscience. People so united in thought form themselves into a society, or the Church. Jesus Christ is God not in fact, but in the belief of Christians. The Gospels are true, not historically speaking, but merely as a sign or symbol of truth; they do not possess a fact value, but a moral or spiritual value. As a pragmatist, the Modernist asserts that dogmas like the resurrection of Christ, are true only with practical or instrumental truth.

Father Bampton takes up all these false theses in turn, and briefly compares them with the teaching of the Church. He concludes with a brief sketch of the history of Modernism. It is an excellent little volume to put in the hands of the tyro in philosophy or theology.

LIFE OF THE VISCOUNTESS DE BONNAULT D'HOUET. Foundress of the Society of the Faithful Companions of Jesus (1781-1858). By Rev. Father Stanislaus, F. M. Capuchin. Translated from the French by one of her daughters. New York: Longmans, Green & Co. $2.50 net.

Madame d'Houet was born in 1781 at Châteauroux in France, a town in the Department of Indre. Her father suffered imprisonment during the Reign of Terror, and owing to the disturbed state of France during the Revolution, his daughter Victoire did not re

ceive a regular course of school training. She made up for this lack of methodical instruction by reading and private study; and being gifted with a receptive and retentive memory and a sound judgment, she became thoroughly well informed. At twenty-three she married the Viscount de Bonnault d'Houet, an exceptionally pious Catholic. Their short married life of ten months reminds us very much of St. Jane Frances de Chantal and her husband. In the first stages of her widowhood, though eminently fervent and ardent in her devotion, she felt no attraction towards the life of a religious; but gradually through the influence of her director, the Jesuit Father Varin, she felt called upon to establish a new Institute, the members of which should be pledged to serve our Savior on the model of the holy women who ministered to Him during His earthly ministry. The constitutions of the Jesuits suggested to her the main principles upon which her society-The Faithful Companions of Jesus— should be governed.

After many trials, during which she never lost courage for a moment, she established her first novitiate at Amiens in 1823. The purpose of her Institute, as set forth in the Brief of Praise of Pope Leo XII., was "to teach and to bring up in Christian morality young girls, especially those born of poor parents." Another development of her work, evidenced by her second foundation at Châteauroux, was the training and education of children of the better class. Before her death in 1858 she had founded twentyeight houses in France, Switzerland, Italy, England, and Ireland, although for one reason or other nine of these foundations were not permanent.

Like all founders of religious communities, she met with a great deal of opposition from her ecclesiastical superiors. She and her companions were denounced as heretics and schismatics, as restless, intriguing and scheming persons, who were obstinately determined to have their own will no matter what happened. Her opponents succeeded in prejudicing both the Archbishop of Bourges and the Bishop of Langres against her. Many of her closest friends not only deserted her, but declared themselves her enemies. She was forced to suppress many of her houses, and Holy Communion was once publicly refused her community. She persevered, until finally her Institute was approved by Gregory XVI., August 5, 1837. Madame d'Houet had for her motto the words courage and confidence, and although, humanly speaking, her Institute from the first seemed doomed to extinction, her trust in God never wavered.

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