double knowledge of them, an acquired knowledge in addition to the infused knowledge He had before." (Bethlehem, Soul and Body, p. 267.)

Now just as the experimental novelty of acquired knowledge could, and according to the testimony of St. Matthew, really did produce genuine wonder in our Lord, so could it produce genuine laughter. There is still another argument in our favor which we have reserved for the last, because, to our mind at least, it is a very powerful one. What brings a deeper thrill of happiness to a mother's heart than the joyous laugh of her child? Now can we suppose for a moment that our dear Lady, for whom so many sorrows were in store, was denied this poor consolation, which all other mothers enjoy? For our part we love to believe that the silver laugh of the Divine Child, ringing in sudden music through the quiet home at Nazareth, more than once brought sunshine to His mother's human heart. Even Virgil's poetic instinct would not suffer him to think otherwise; for in that almost inspired eclogue, where, by some mysterious dispensation of Providence, he rises from the level of a Pagan poet to the sublime elevation of the Christian seer, in the last most exquisite lines, he calls upon the infant Messias to greet his mother with a laugh:

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Incipe, parve puer, risu cognoscere matrem."

THE LATE ENCYCLICAL ON CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE.

N the following pages of the REVIEW will be found, in its Latin original, and in a translation somewhat more correct than the one generally current amongst our newspapers, the late Encyclical Letter of our Holy Father on Christian Marriage; for this should be its proper heading, not on Divorce, as it has been generally entitled by the press. The mistake would appear to have originated with the cable telegraph and its agents, who seem either unable or unwilling to transmit correctly any important item of Catholic, and especially of Roman, news. Their constant blundering would be simply ludicrous were it not that the malice by which it is too clearly and too often seasoned is very apt to provoke other feelings than mere laughter. And what is strangest of all, their palpable mistake, though involving little harm, has been repeated, and is yet kept up by those from whom more accuracy might have been expected.

In his Encyclical the Holy Father treats of marriage as it was originally established by the Lord and Creator of all, and as it was

re-established, so to speak, by the Divine Lawgiver in person when He walked on earth for our redemption. In other words, he treats of marriage as it is in itself, and as it should be regarded by all who aspire to the Christian name. He pointedly asserts its essential attributes of unity, holiness, and indissolubility. Going back to its first institution in the Garden of Eden, he shows that, as then designed and framed, such must it endure down to the end of time. It was the bond of one man with one woman, and in this consisted its unity. It was to be as lasting as the existence of the contracting parties; and as it is not bodies or souls merely that are given and taken in marriage, but persons, hence arises its essential character of perpetuity, inasmuch as nothing but the extinction of personality can extinguish the marriage bond. And further, how great was the holiness imparted to matrimony from the beginning by its Divine Founder is evident from this, that even then in the foresight of eternal wisdom it prefigured that most intimate union which would one day exist between redeemed humanity and its Redeemer, the bridal of the earthly Church and her heavenly Spouse. Yet even this was, in the divine counsels, nothing more than a faint shadow of another union, not only closer, but far higher and holier, the blending of the weakest with the strongest, of the finite with the Infinite, which it pleased the Deity to accomplish when He assumed our poor, fallen nature through the mystery of the Incarnation.

The Church of the New Testament received this divine institution of marriage from the Old Church, but in a more perfect form, like everything else that had come down to her from the former dispensation. The relation between those two peoples of God, as He himself deigned to call them, was the same that the bud bears to the flower in full bloom, or childhood to the ripeness of age. Their respective treasures of revealed truth stood to each other as types and shadows to reality, as dim twilight to the brightness of noonday. And this enables us better to understand the vicissitudes which this portion of divine revelation had to encounter in early times. This sacrament, for such is the name latiori sensu given it by many Fathers even in the Old Law, had been intrusted to the keeping of frail vessels; and in the lapse of ages its sacredness had been somewhat impaired. The Jews, though bearing about with them the mark of the covenant in their flesh, were but too often "uncircumcised in heart," as the Prophet bitterly complains (Jer. ix: 26). For which reason Moses, not of his own accord, but driven to it by "the hardness of their hearts," as Christ Our Lord testifies in the Gospel, had experienced the necessity of tolerating some deviations from the holy rigor which characterized the primeval institution. But the Divine Founder of the New

Law abolished those irregularities, and recalled marriage to its original type of unity and indissolubility. He enriched and ennobled it with the grace and dignity of a sacrament, and willed further that it should become thenceforth a token to mankind of the mysterious blending of the two elements, divine and human, in His new covenant with the children of men. And it was thus exalted and sanctified that Christian marriage came to the Church from the hands of Christ and of His Apostles. It would have been well for the world and for human society at this day had they adhered steadfastly to her authorized teaching of this and of other divine truths.

When Christianity, by a miracle which the most elaborate efforts of human philosophy have so far failed to explain, overran and brought into subjection the Roman world, she rooted out with unsparing hand all its falsities and abominations, that she might renew the face of the earth. At that day men had been taught from the cradle, and confirmed by their schools of learning so called, in false principles and corrupt practices. In these they prided themselves, and they dignified them with the name of civilization, as does this boastful nineteenth century of ours, which has become so blinded by pride and unbelief that it can find no better ideal of perfection than the rotten Paganism of eighteen centuries ago. the march of the Church was irresistible, for behind her was One stronger than herself; and at His bidding and by His power she overcame the world, not after the fashion of earthly conquerors, by the sharpness and terror of the sword, but, as St. Augustine says, by the healing Wood of the Cross. Domuit orbem non ferro sed ligno. To temporal authority she gave a new sanction, mitigating its iron rigor with the law of clemency that sat upon her lips. From subjection she took away the sting of shame by abolishing the element of servile fear; she chastened it with the spirit and enriched it with the merit of Christian obedience. For the hateful motives of self-love and self-interest, that had been hitherto the mainsprings that governed the relations between man and his fellows, she substituted, what was before unknown, the golden bond. of Christian charity, grounded on the brotherhood derived from a common Father in Heaven, and consolidated by the additional sacred tie of a common redemption.

Nor was her beneficent work visible only in the political or social order. She well knew that her labor in either sphere would be fruitless, unless the domestic circle were first purified. For the family is not only the origin and primal type of society and of the state, but exercises over both an unceasing and unbounded influence. The Church, therefore, began with domestic life, and sanctified it in its very origin and foundation by recalling the true

meaning and nature of marriage, as instituted by God in the case. of our first parents, and holding it up to veneration, invested as it now was, not only with the grace and beauty of a religious rite, but with the dignity and holiness of a sacrament. The change that she wrought was marvellous. Through her teachings the purity of conjugal, as well as of single, life was brought back into a world that had forgotten or remembered only, as if in a dream, this relic of primitive tradition. And this in its turn, like other Christian virtues, was a potent means of subduing the heart of Paganism, and winning it over to that Gospel doctrine which alone could meet all its necessities, and satisfy all its yearnings; for the human soul is by natural instinct thoroughly, or in great part, Christian, as Tertullian, the great Doctor of the African Church, well expresses it.' They then learned for the first time, what is after all most conformable to natural reason, that in marriage both parties are alike bound to conjugal chastity, and that, though woman be the weaker vessel, her faithlessness to duty is not more inexcusable than that of him, whom the Apostle styles her "head!" They learned, too, that the prevarication of the husband, who violates his plighted faith by sinful indulgence, is not to be measured by the higher or lower condition of those who subserve his passions, as the Pagan world of old and of our own day imagines,' but solely by the wickedness of his guilty will. The heinousness of adultery was to be estimated in future by the laws of Christ, and not of Cæsar; and all moral cases relative to the marriage state were to be decided by a reference to Paul and not to Papinian, to the inspired and divinely commissioned teacher of the converted

1 "O testimonium animæ naturaliter Christianæ !" as he exclaims in his rough African idiom. He had, perhaps, these very words of his Apology in his mind years after when, to give them a more correct philosophical or theological sense, he wrote those other words in his treatise De Testimonio Animæ, "Fieri enim (O anima), non nasci soles Christiana." The date of the latter work is not known with chronological exactness; but there is no doubt that it was written after the Apology. See amongst others Dom Remy Ceillier in his Histoire des Auteurs Eccles. under Tertullien, Prestre et Docteur de l'Eglise, ch. xxviii., art. 9.

2 Quasi culpam dignitas faciat non voluntas, indignantly exclaims St. Jerome. These words, quoted by the Encyclical, simple as they are, seem to have puzzled unaccountably more than one translator. They are from St. Jerome's Epistle to Oceanus, numbered as Ep. xxx. in the old editions, lxxxiv. in the Benedictine edition of Martianay, but Ep. lxxvii. in Vallarsi's edition, which is the best of all. It is not the dignity of the offender, but the grade or condition of his victim, that the Saint alludes to, as is clear enough from the context, which will allow of no other meaning. So, too, with the words quoted further on in the text, " eadem servitus pari conditione censetur," which have bothered the translators who examined them apart from their context. The Saint's meaning is evidently: husband and wife are alike servants and bondsmen of Christ, though bearing to each other a special relation as yoke-fellows (implied in their name conjuges); hence, they are bound alike by their quality of servants, and the one has no more right to burst his bonds and rebel than the other.

Gentile world instead of the renowned Pagan interpreters of Roman jurisprudence. The language of the great Doctor of the Church, St. Jerome, on this point is so eloquent and beautiful that we cannot withhold it from our readers, especially as some portions of it have been quoted in the Encyclical of our Holy Father. "Aliæ sunt leges Cæsarum, aliæ Christi: aliud Papinianus, aliud Paulus noster præcipit. Apud illos viris impudicitiæ fræna laxantur; et solo stupro atque adulterio condemnato passim per lupanaria et ancillulas libido permittitur, quasi culpam faciat dignitas non voluntas. Apud nos, quod non licet fœminis æque non licet viris, et eadem servitus pari conditione censetur.""

So thoroughly did the converted world acquiesce in the new teaching and legislation of the Church on matrimony, that during the early centuries, and indeed during the greater part of what is known as the Christian era, very few dared to oppose their private judgment on this point to her authority. Not a few from the very earliest days of Christianity "thought and spoke wickedness, and set their mouth against Heaven," as the Psalmist forcibly expresses it." There was no truth revealed in Scripture or handed down by tradition bearing upon the august mysteries of the Trinity or Incarnation of which their private opinion, or, as they perhaps called it, their rational philosophy, did not make a sport and plaything. But with the sacredness of the marriage contract, as re-established on earth by Our Lord, they did not presume to meddle. The whims and crazy notions of a few Gnostics and Manichees, the latter reappearing at intervals as Paulicians or Albigenses, are the solitary exception that confirms the general rule.

The Christian theory of marriage was not formally called in question, nor any well-organized attempt made to set it aside until those unhappy days when Europe, after having been convulsed for some time by the throes of the new Paganism that was struggling into existence, saw it emerge into light under more than one disguise, but notably that of Reformed Religion. Its sponsors, and those who assisted at its birth, little understood the nature of the young monster whom they had helped to usher into the world. When in after years they looked round them and saw the wickedness, corruption, bloodshed, and manifold woe that had come of their toil and trouble, they sought every pretext to elude the bitter confession of the truth. They pleaded amongst other falsities. their youth, their inexperience, lack of sufficient knowledge and

1

Ep. ad Ocean. Inter Opera Hieronymi. Venetiis, 1766, tom. i., p. 459. 'Cogitaverunt et locuti sunt nequitiam, iniquitatem in excelso locuti sunt: posuerunt in cœlum os suum."-Psalm lxxii., 8, 9.