gation. If he denied having the money, and was subsequently called into courtwhat then? He could never swear to the denial. No, no! The thought was beyond the bounds of morals. He was thinking; he was puzzled. Cassierre repeated, "Do you accept the condition?"

Pere Lamereaux told him what he thought and what his position would be in such an event.

"It will not be like that," he said. "No one knows of our revived friendship, if you'll pardon the expression," he said. "It won't even be suspected, I'm sure."

"But," said Pere Lamereaux, "if you should die you would want a Christian burial, and that in itself would create suspicion."

"A Christian burial is beautiful and salutary," said the rich man, looking. away through the trees, "but is it necessary for salvation ?”

He looked at the Jesuit as he said this. "Let the infidels claim me, if they will; let them preside with their cold forms and colder philosophy; let them place me where they will and I care not, providing you can say a private Mass for me. No, it will never be known that I made you my executor. But," he continued, "if it should come to be known, then you may explain our relations and my gift. And if it should so come to pass, I hope the character of a good priest will stand you well, that my money may be allowed to flow in those channels already designated."

At this Cassierre rose, went to a safe that was built into the wall, but which was more like a bank vault than a mere office accommodation, opened its massive door, and displayed tiers of uniform, iron-bound boxes. Among all those boxes was an old-fashioned leather bag. This, too, was heavy with gold. He drew it forth and placed it on the table.

"We'll begin now," he said, "and fin

"What if I live?" inquired Cassierre. "Yes, I may live and so may you. I'll be your ward," he said, laughing. Then he abruptly remarked, "It's time to go."

His tone was a tone of warning. Altogether, it sounded strange for a host to say so, but these men could speak with the familiarity of brothers. Pere Lamereaux, too, took in the situation. His ordinary call had developed an extraordinary meaning. His visit was to be unknown. He got up and turned to the door.

"You're forgetting something," said Cassierre, lifting the bag of gold from the table, and handing it to the priest. The Cure hesitatingly took it, and with an awkwardness altogether foreign to the man, departed. Soon after his departure a dray was standing at Cassierre's dark door and iron-bound boxes were being loaded on it; and soon after that the largest private fortune of France was being rolled without suspicion through the streets of Paris, following the Jesuit to his parsonage. It was stored in a deep, strong cellar,-in a part that almost seemed made especially for it. When the last box was placed in position the door was locked and Pere Lamereaux went out. He was nervous and wanted the air. It seemed like a dream that day. It seemed too good to be true. But it was no less real for all this seeming. But if he was joyed, he was troubled. He had all the rich man's money-and under such peculiar circumstances. It was certainly an unheard of proceeding and he naturally wondered how it would end.

(To be continued.)

N

V

O account is here made of the assiduous care and work required in the promotion of Catholic education and works of charity by the erection of parochial schools, academies, seminaries, colleges, hospitals, orphan asylums, convents, protectories, homes for the aged, etc.

In the cause of which he was ever the consistent, uncompromising champion, he allowed no sacrifice, however great, no labor, however exacting, to deter him from its persistent prosecution with all the time and resources at his disposal. Next to the erection of churches, or rather in intimate connection therewith, he insisted on the establishment of parochial schools whenever the opportunities and means of the parish permitted; and in particular cases in which he was satisfied the means were not available for the erection of both church and school, he advised that the school building should be first erected and temporarily used as a place of Catholic worship. A notable example of his policy in this respect was presented in the case of St. Gabriel's parish in East Thirty-seventh Street, which enjoyed and still enjoys a foremost place among the parochial schools of the metropolis.

To him the Catholic school was the nursery of the Church, the best security for the perpetuity of the parish; and in his prescience of the future of Catholicity in the country he foresaw the inevitable consequences to the very existence of the various and ever-varying Protestant denominations, of the divorce of religion from education. In one of his most vigorous and telling speeches on the school question, he said: "I ap

pear here to help raise up the poor and uneducated from the degradation to which a powerful and selfish body would consign them, unless they would consent to sacrifice their conscientious convictions. In their defence I have taken my stand and no taunts shall deter me-not even the omnipotent press can drive me from it. I shall abide by it to the last, so long as I can raise my voice and assist in making the truth heard and known on the great and vital principle for which we are contending."

Not only the wisdom but the paramount importance of his attitude on the question of education is now acknowledged by thoughtful and fair-minded men of all denominations who have the true interests of the country and the welfare of society at heart, while the disastrous effects on all forms of religious worship outside of the Catholic Church have been, as proved by the census statistics of the country, pregnant with the most alarming social evils and general demoralization.

It is now painfully apparent that the great majority of the population are without any form of worship whatever. A few years ago Governor Rollins of New Hampshire, in a fast day proclamation, startled the whole country when he declared that "the decline of Protestantism in our rural counties is a marked feature of the times. There are." said he, "towns where no church bell sounds forth its solemn call from January to January; there are villages where the children grow to manhood unchristened; there are communities where the dead are laid away without the benison of the name of Christ, and where marriages are solemnized by justices of the peace."

According to the New England Sabbath Protective League's annual reports, from fifty to ninety per cent of the population of New England are non-churchgoers, and many of them open Sabbath desecrators and scoffers. "Over one thousand churches have been closed on the Lord's Day in New England, and the rural population is in many instances almost without a Sabbath."

When Rev. Gardiner Spring, at the meeting on the Public School Question in the Board of Aldermen, defiantly announced his choice between Catholicity and Infidelity in favor of the latter, he little thought that the day would come in which, if not the infidelity of a Voltaire, "a God-forgetting secularism" would fall like a blight upon Puritan New England. It is such a condition as the great prelate, in his battle for a system of education which does not exclude God from its knowledge, so forcibly stigmatized as Nothingarianism, between which and Voltairism there was little left for a choice, especially as it included the modern imitators of Voltaire in the "open Sabbath desecrators and scoffers."

Of the Archbishop's devotion and loyalty to his adopted country it can be truly said that not even the most ardent native-born patriot surpassed him in his fidelity to the Union, and this despite the vindictive and intolerant feelings entertained towards him and his flock by too many even outside of the secret . organizations, which had the effrontery to assume to themselves the exclusive title of "Native Americans." From the beginning to the close of the Civil War, while entertaining only the most friendly feelings towards the Southern people, he was among the foremost and staunchest supporters of the Government, and when earnestly requested by President Lincoln and Secretary Seward, who was one of his warmest and most esteemed friends, to undertake a mission to France of the utmost importance, during the gravest crisis of the contest, he

not only accepted the position but by his admirable tact and diplomacy succeeded in averting the threatened interference. of France by a recognition of the Southern Confederacy. His interview with Napoleon III, as he wrote Mr. Seward, was "entirely satisfactory and encouraging. I have no idea," he added, "that France will unite with England in an assault upon the United States. Neither do I believe that she will interfere in the quarrel with the South, especially if the purpose of the Government when I left Washington be carried out. I have had every day, more or less, an opportunity of explaining our whole situation. of affairs to gentlemen the most intimately acquainted with and most nearly related to the administration of this Government."

The manner in which the interview with Napoleon was obtained was SO characteristic of the man as to be particularly deserving of notice. "I owe my introduction to the Emperor," he wrote Mr. Seward, "not to any kind encouragement or patronage of our people on this side, but to a determination that even their 'cold shoulder' should not prevent me from a purpose which I had entertained; so I wrote him as one man would write another in a polite and brief note to the effect that I wished to have the honor of a conversation with you.'

A profound impression was produced by the Archbishop on the foreign officials with whom he conversed on the causes of the war, the relative strength of the two sections, the great resources at the command of the North and the determination of the Government, if assailed by Great Britain, "to employ every means that God and Nature shall have put within its reach to defend it against foreign and unjust assailants, whether they be England, France, or both combined; and that even now, if England should adopt a course so much at variance with the interests of commerce, of communities and of nations

that have no ground for mutual hostilities, the Government at Washington will not be taken by surprise, nor will it shrink in the least from the ordeal through which it will have to pass."

As to his feelings towards the South during the war, they are best described in his own words in a letter to Cardinal Barnabo, Prefect of the Sacred Congregation of the Propaganda, on his arrival in Liverpool, explaining the purpose of his mission as one of peace between France and England on the one side and the United States on the other. "I made known to the President," he wrote, “that if I should come to Europe it would not be as a partisan of the North more than of the South; that I should represent the interests of the South as well as of the North-in short, the interests of all the United States just the same as if they had never been distracted by the present civil war. The people of the South know that I am not opposed to their interest." Throughout the whole controversy this was, in fact, the spirit manifested by the Archbishop, which found no less friendly expression in a letter to Secretary Seward, dated October 15, 1861, in which he advised that, in the effort to bring back the Southern States to their condition before the war, the policy should be, as much as possible, one of patience and consideration towards the State authorities of "this so-called Southern Confederacy." Conquest, he urged, was not "altogether by the sword. Statesmanship, and especially in Our circumstances, has much to do with it."

Unfortunately, however, such was not the policy adopted either during or at the close of the war, when, under the system of "Reconstruction," as it was termed, a horde of political varapires was let loose to prey upon the prostrate, defenseless and devastated South, which was subjected not only to the most rigid and galling military rule, but its State Governments, so-called, placed under

the control of some of the most corrupt and unscrupulous politicians of the dominant party, who, with their organs, did their utmost to retard the restoration of the Southern States to their former position as integral parts of a reunited country, with their rights guaranteed under the Supreme Law of the Republic.

His own position with regard to the controversy between the sections and his obligations as a citizen were so tersely and forcibly stated in a letter dated August 23, 1861, to his esteemed friend, Bishop Lynch of Charleston, that it furnishes the argument in justification of his attitude in maintaining the rights and authority of the Federal Government in the prosecution of the war for the Union.

was

"There is no one," he wrote to the Bishop, "who desires more ardently than I do the advent of that bright day on which we shall all be reunited in one great and prosperous country. I am an advocate for the sovereignty of every State in the Union within the limits recognized by its own representative authority when when the Constitution agreed upon. As a consequence, I hold that South Carolina has no State right to interfere with the internal affairs of Massachusetts; and, as a further consequence, that Massachusetts has no right to interfere with South Carolina or its domestic and civil affairs as one of the sovereign States of this now threatened Union. But the Constitution having been formed by common consent of the sovereign parties engaged in the framework and approval thereof, I maintain that no State has the right to secede except in the manner provided for in the document itself."

Of his love for his native land, a conspicuous proof was given during the so-called uprising of 1848. A large mass meeting in sympathy with the movement was held at the old Vauxhall Gardens in the Bowery. Many leading citizens who were members of the Irish

Directory, which had been organized to aid the cause of Irish independence, attended the meeting, the Bishop being the principal speaker. He came, he said, "not as an advocate of war. It would ill accord with my profession. My office is properly to be a peacemaker, when it is possible. But I come in the name of sacred humanity, not, if you will, to put arms into the hands of men by which they may destroy the lives of others, but to give my voice and my mite to shield the unprotected bosoms of the sons of Ireland. It is not for me to say anything calculated to excite your feelings when, as you perceive, I can scarcely repress my own. My object in coming here was to show you that in my conscience I have no scruples in aiding the cause in every way worthy of a patriot and a Christian. My contribution. shall be for a shield, not for a sword."

On leaving the meeting he presented. his check for five hundred dollars, "to purchase," as he expressed it, "a shield. to interpose between the oppressor and his victim."

There were certain self-constituted critics and censors who insisted that in this instance he was lacking in his usual prudence and judgment, but it was an act in heartfelt sympathy with the just aspirations of a long-oppressed people; it was the impulse of a noble and generous nature, of a free citizen of a free country, earnestly desiring the extension of the civil and political freedom which he enjoyed in the land of his adoption to the land of his birth. As to his censors, the Bishop did not deign to reply; it was enough for him that in his own conscience he felt justified in what he had done. "This," said he, "I have never regretted; this I do not now regret."

When the news reached this country of the failure of the Irish insurrection the Bishop felt intensely mortified, and at his request the contribution was transferred to the Sisters of Mercy "for

the purchase," as he said in his letter to Judge Robert Emmet, the President of the Irish Directory, "of a shield to protect the purity and innocence of the virtuous and destitute daughters of Ireland arriving in this city, towards whom, as far as their means will allow, the Sisters will fulfil the office of guiding and guardian angels in every respect."

Of the Archbishop's learning and abilities as a controversialist, so conspicuously displayed in his discussion with Reverend Mr. Breckinridge on the public platform and in the press, his sermons, particularly those on doctrinal points, afforded the most conclusive evidence. So forcible, so clear, so convincing and so admirably adapted by their elucidation of doctrinal questions to carry conviction to the minds of the Protestant portion of his audience that they were most fruitful in conversions. This was particularly the case during his pastoral labors in Philadelphia, where he was beloved and respected not only by his own flock but by a large number of the better portion of other denominations. So highly, indeed, was he esteemed and appreciated, and so favorable was the impression he made on the honorable and broad-minded Protestants of that city that, as a mark of their respect and admiration, he was elected a member of several of their literary societies and was always an honored and welcome guest in the best intellectual and social circles. And yet on the eve of his departure for his new and more extended field of duty, he found time to pass a few hours with an humble friend whom he had known in days when he was compelled by the labor of his hands. to acquire at least a portion of the means by which he secured the opportunity for the cultivation of his great intellectual gifts, and finally attained the high reputation so freely accorded to him as one of the most distinguished prelates of the Church and one of the first statesmen of the Republic.