ductions to the indulgence of your readers. Frenchman and Catholic as I am, I present them, through your hands, to that great American republic of which you are a citizen, to those numerous and flourishing Protestant churches of which you are a minister. I am proud of my France, but I deem it one of its most solid glories to have contributed to the independence of this noble country, which it has never ceased to love, and which it shall some day learn to imitate;-a people with which liberty is something else than a barren theory or a bloody practice; with which the cause of labor is never confounded with that of revolution, and never divorced from that of religion; and which, rearing under all forms and denominations its houses of prayer amid its houses of commerce and finance, crowns its noisy and productive week with the sweetness and majesty of its Lord's Day. "And on the seventh day it ends the work which it has made, and rests the seventh day from all its work which it has made." I remain faithful to my Church; and if I have lifted up my protest against the excesses which dishonor it and seem bent upon its ruin, you may measure the intensity of my love for it by the bitterness of my lamentation. When He who is in all things our Master and our Example armed himself with the scourge against the profaners of the Temple, his disciples remembered that it was written, "The zeal of thy house hath eaten * Genesis, ii. 2. me up." I remain faithful to my Church; but I am none the less sensible of the interest which will be taken in other churches in what I may say or do within the pale of Catholicism. And on the other hand, I have never deemed that the Christian communions separated from Rome were disinherited of the Holy Ghost, and without a part in the immense work of the preparation of the kingdom of God. In my intercourse with some of the most pious and learned of their members, I have experienced, in those depths of the soul where- illusion is impossible, the unutterable blessing of the communion of saints. Whatever divides us externally in space and time, vanishes like a dream before that which unites us within, the grace of the same God, the blood of the same Christ, the hopes of the same eternity. Whatever our prejudices, our alienations, or our irritations, under the eye of God, who seeth what we cannot see,-under his hand, which leadeth us whither we would not go,—we are all laboring in common for the upbuilding of that Church of the Future which shall be the Church of the Past in its original purity and beauty; but shall have gathered to itself, besides, the depth of its analyses, the breadth of its syntheses, the experience of its toils, its struggles, and its griefs through all these centuries. In the sad days of schism and captivity, the word of the Lord came to the prophet Ezekiel, saying, "Thou son of man, take thee one stick, and write upon it, 'For Judah, and for the children of Israel his companions;' then take another stick, and write upon it, 'For Joseph, the stick of Ephraim, and all the house of Israel his companions; and join them one to another into one. stick, and they shall become one in thy hand." To me, likewise, who am the least of Christians, in those spiritual visions which are ever vouchsafed to longing souls, the Lord hath spoken. He hath placed in my hand these two sundered and withered branchesRome and the children of Israel who follow her; the churches of the Reformation and the nations that are with them. I have pressed them together on my heart, and under the outpouring of my tears and prayers I have so joined them that henceforth they might make but one tree. But men have laughed to scorn my effort, seemingly so mad, and have asked of me, as of that ancient seer, "Wilt thou not show us what thou meanest by these things?" And while I gaze upon that trunk so bare and mutilated, even now I seem to see the brilliant blossom and the savory fruit. "One God, one faith, one baptism." "And there shall be one flock and one shepherd." BROTHER HYACINTHE. HIGHLAND FALLS, ALL-SOULS Day, Nov. 2, 1869. Ezekiel, xxxvii. 16, 17. + Ibid., 18. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. WITHIN a very few years, we have been hearing, from time to time, of the fame of a great preacher of the Gospel that had risen up in France. Clad in the rough garb of a Carmelite friar, he has seemed (we were told) to be filled with "the spirit and power of Elijah." The sins of rulers and of people alike, the infidelity of philosophers, and the pharisaism of priests, he has denounced with equal and intrepid severity; and speaking in gentler tones to the families of his people, he has sought, like the predicted Elijah, to "turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the hearts of the children to the fathers, lest the Lord should come and smite the land with a curse." The accounts of him have been as various, in some respects, as the strangely diverse channels through which they have come to us. In the innumerable crowds that have gathered within the sound of his voice about the pulpit of the venerable cathedral of Notre Dame, the most opposite classes have thronged each other, having no thought nor sentiment in common, save their eagerness to hear the great preacher. The bitter infidels of French liberalism, who listened to no other minister of any religion, gave respectful audience to him, as to a friend of the common people. The strangers and novelty-hunters of Paris sought at Notre Dame the revival of the palmiest days of French eloquence. Protestants of the austerest schools listened in that unwonted presence to discourses which, after every abatement of prejudice and of contrary conviction, they acknowledged to be the sincere and faithful preaching of Jesus Christ. And Roman Catholics of liberal sentiments justly gloried in the eloquence of their great preacher, and pointed him out as the living proof of the compatibility between Catholicism and the best spirit of the age. One party alone refused to join the general applause—it was the party of absolutism in State and Church; the Jesuitism that was resolved on crushing out the rising spirit of freedom among the earnest Catholics of France, under the heel of the Roman Court and Pontiff. But even those who hated the great preacher confessed his greatness. Those who hated, and those who admired, alike conceded the magnificence of his oratory, the earnestness of his convictions, and the heroic courage with which, in a land where it costs something to be thus courageous, he avowed them without fear or favor. Even those who had small appreciation of the distinctively Christian virtues could recognize in this poor monk more than the realization of the ideal of the heathen poet: "Justum et tenacem propositi virum, Non civium ardor prava jubentium, Mente quatit solida." Suddenly, on the 20th of September, 1869, this foremost preacher of the whole Roman Catholic communion, declaring that he could no longer suffer with a good conscience the constraint which it was attempted to put upon him as a preacher of the gospel, retired from the cathedral pulpit, forsook the convent of his order, and in a letter which must ever be accounted among the memorable documents of ecclesiastical history; appealed from the authority of his monastic superior to the Ecumenical Council about to sit at Rome, and gave notice of his intention to carry the case, if need were, to a court of higher judicatory still-to the tribunal of Jesus Christ himself. We are still too close to this great event, to estimate it in all its relations. Some of its consequences are so nigh at hand, and events are crowding so fast upon each other, that the boldest prophet might well hesitate to make predictions. The issue now on trial in the person of the Carmelite preacher is this-whether there is room and freedom in the Roman Catholic Church for a faithful preacher of Jesus Christ, who is also a docile student of |