ST. DOMINIC AND THE DOMINICANS.

rich domains, and free from all the cares which incessantly weigh down to earth the provident soul of the father of a family. And certainly, for monastic bodies not meant for action, we can with difficulty conceive a mode of existence excluding property. But Dominic wished to make apostles, not contemplatives. He heard within him those words addressed by our Loid to his Apostles, "Carry neither gold, nor silver, nor money in your girdles, nor scrip nor purse by the way, nor two tunics, nor shoes, nor a staff, for the laborer is worthy of his hire;" and those other words," Seek first the kingdom of God, and His righteo sness, and all those things shall be added unto you;" and then, "The foxes have their holes, and the birds of the air their nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay His head;" and then of St. Paul, You know these hands are sufficient for me." For the Christian-and, indeed, for any man whose pride does not blind him-the greatest praise is that he earns his bread, that he gives in order to receive. Whoever receives without giving, is not subject to this law of love and sacrifice, by which beings are begotten, preserved, and perpetuated. On the other hand, he who gives much and receives little, like the soldier, manifestly does honor to humanity, because in this respect he more resembles God. To earn your livelihood, to earn it from day to day, to give in exchange for your daily bread the word and the example of the Gospel, daily renewed,—such was the thought that took possession of Dominic. He also discovered another advantage in depriving himself of the common right to hold property. As long as a religious order has no fixed revenue, it is in absolute dependence on public opinion. It can exist for so long only as it is useful. It is in the pay of the people, which never pays freely for anything but services. Does a convent fall in public esteem? It that moment receives a death-blow, without noise or revolution. Dominic, therefore, declared himself and his flock mendicant, in the first chapter, held in Bologna, in 1220. He relied upon the merit of his successors as well as on the justice of the Christian people, and fearlessly bequeathed to future generations this perpetual interchange of devotedness and gratitude. For two hundred and fifty years, both sides continued faithful to this spirit; on whatever side the fault lay, Pope Sixtus IV. allowed the order, toward the close of the fifteenth century, the right of property. Thus did the division of the three great branches of instruction take The bishops, with their clergy, continued place in the Catholic Church. to administer pastoral instruction, and discharge all the functions connected with it; while the religious orders became the ordinary ministers of apostolical instruction and divine science, under the jurisdiction of the bishops. To the Brothers-Preachers were added the Friars-Minor of St. Francis, and these were subsequently followed by other orders in due season.

LABORS OF DOMINICANS AS PREACHERS.

Eloquence is the daughter of passion. Create a passion in a soul, and eloquence will gush from it in torrents; eloquence is the sound that issues from an impassioned soul. Thus, during times of public agitation, when the people, swayed by strong emotions, and great interests are at stake, orators come to the surface in crowds. Whoever, in his life, passionately loved anything, has unquestionably been eloquent, were it only for once. St. Dominic, therefore, to bring to the world legions of preachers, had no occasion to establish schools of rhetoric. It was enough for him to have reached the heart of the age he lived in, and to have found or created a passion there. In the thirteenth century faith was deep-seated; and the Church still reigned over the society she had conquered for herself. Meanwhile, the reasoning faculty in Europe, slowly matured by time and Christianity, was approaching the critical stage of youth. What Innocent III. had seen in his dream, namely, the tottering condition of the Church, St. Dominic disclosed to the world; and, while the entire earth looked upon the Church as queen and mistress, he declared that nothing short of the resurrection of the primitive apostleship was requisite to save her. Dominic met the same answer as Peter the Hermit, and people became Friars-Preachers, as they formerly became Crusaders. Every university of Europe furnished its contingent of masters and scholars. Brother Jordan, of Saxony, second general of the order, admitted (himself in person) more than a thousand men to the habit of the order. Speaking of him, men have said to their neighbors, "Do not go to the sermons of Brother Jordan, for he is like a courtesan, seducing men." In a moment, or to speak literally (for in these matters the truth outdoes the figure), in two years, St. Dominic, who before the bull of Honorius had only sixteen fellowlaborers-eight French, seven Spaniards, and one Englishman-founded sixty convents, peopled with distinguished men, and a band of flourishing youth.

How could speech flow coldly from the lips of those men, whom the one idea of the ancient apostleship had agitated and brought together? How could those men of learning, who abandoned their professional chairs to enter as novices an order without fame or fortune, fail to find words in accord with their devotedness? Was the youth of the universities, which had flung itself, without a second look, into this chivalry of the Gospel, likely to lose under the cassock the ardor of its years, the impetuosity of its convictions? When once generous souls, scattered and hidden in the wilderness of an age, meet and learn to know each other, they throw into their effusion that strength which has drawn them from their repose.

Besides this merit of an impassioned soul, without which an orator never existed, they had, moreover, a great facility in acquiring the precise description of preaching that suited the time.

Truth is, doubtless, one; and in heaven her language is uniform, like herself. But here below, she speaks in different strains, according to the disposition of the mind. She has to convince. She speaks

differently to the child and to the man, to the barbarous and to the civilized, to the rationalist and to the man of faith. The better to understand the reason of this, we must be careful to observe that there are two principal situations, in one of which the understanding abandons truth; in the other it still clings to truth, however feebly. These two vary in different minds. Nevertheless, at every characteristic epoch in the life of men or nations, the intellect swerves from and approaches truth under pretty nearly the same circumstances. Men and nations are borne away by a common impulse, and have to pass through the same revolution.

The apostleship of the Friars-Preachers has two horizons. The one stretches to the confines of the old world, the other advances with the discovery of America to the utmost limits of the new. The period when the first of these vanishes and the second begins, divides their duration into two equal phases, each of full three hundred years.

During the first period, from the beginning of the thirteenth to the beginning of the sixteenth century, the great lines which bounded the arena of the Preachers' labors were as follows: To the South, their missions among the Moors and Arabs, possessors of a large portion of Spain, masters of Africa, threatening Europe with their arms, and corrupting her by the infiltration of Islamism. To the East, their missions among the Greeks, separated from the Church by a schism, not then considered hopeless; and among the Tartars, who, during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, kept Europe in alarm by the noise of their expeditions. To the East, again, we have the missions of Persia, Armenia, the shores of the Black Sea, and the Danube. To the North were the missions of Ireland, Scotland, Denmark, Sweden, Prussia, Poland, and the Russias; countries to which the true faith had been carried, but which, more or less recently converted, still retained a multitude of infidels, and a confused jumble of their former errors. Even Greenland saw the Friars-Preachers aboard the first vessels borne to her shores, and the Dutch were astonished to find there, in the beginning of the seventeenth century, a Dominican convent, the establishment of which went back to the middle ages, and whose existence Captain Nicholas Zain had already noticed in 1380. The number of missionaries maintained by the Brothers-Preachers in these various countries during the three centuries in question, goes beyond all conception.

Innocent IV. wrote to them in these terms, July 23, 1253: "To our dear sons the Brothers-Preachers, now preaching in the countries of the Saracens, Greeks, Bulgarians, Ethiopians, Cumarians, Syrians, Goths, Jacobites, Armenians, Indians, Tartars, Hungarians, and other infidel nations of the East, greeting and apostolic benediction," etc.

It was found necessary to create in the order a special congregation of "Travellers for Jesus Christ to the Infidels;" and Pope John XXII. having, in 1325, given all the brethren a general permission to make part of it, they offered themselves in such multitudes, that the Sovereign Pontiff could not command his astonishment, and was compelled, through fear of depopulating the convents of Europe, to restrict the

previously unlimited permission. It was a renewal of the spectacle presented by the general chapter held at Paris in 1222, when the blessed Jordan of Saxony, having asked his brethren which of them would be willing to proceed upon the foreign missions, they, every one, with the exception of some old men broken down by years, fell at his feet cxclaiming with tears, “Father, send me.”

You need only run through the chronicles of the order to meet every moment similar evidences of a prodigious activity and devotedness. And these apostles, sent forth to all the nations then known, were not only men of ardent faith, but men of learning, familiar with the tongues, the manners, and the religions of the nations they went to evangelize. St. Raymond of Pennafort, one of the first masters-general of the order, founded in concert with the kings of Aragon and Castile, two colleges at Murcia and Tunis, for the study of Eastern languages. St. Thomas of Aquinas, at the invitation of the same master-general, wrote his celebrated "Summa in Gentes." Brother Accoldi of Florence published a treatise on the errors of the Arabs, in their own language, and Brother Raymond Martin a special Summa against the Koran.

The transition from the cloister to the expedition, and from the expedition to the cloister, imparted to the Friar-Preacher a peculiar and wonderful characteristic. Learned, solitary, and adventurous, he bore in his entire person the stamp of a man who has seen everything that can be seen regarding God, and everything regarding man. The brother you might chance to meet any day on the highways of your own country, had already been among the tents of the Tartars beside the rivers of Upper Asia; he had lived in a convent of Armenia at the foot of Mount Ararat; had preached in the capital of Fez or Morocco, and was now going to Scandinavia, thence perhaps into Red Russia. He had many a bead to tell before his journey's end. If, like the eunuch in the Acts of the Apostles, you gave him occasion to speak to you of God, his heart, formed in solitude, would open as an abyss before you the treasury of things, old and new, to use the words of Scripture; and that certain inimitable eloquence of his coming upon your soul from his own, would make you feel that the greatest happiness man can know in this world is to meet, even once in this life, a real man of God. Rarely did these travelling brethren, as they were called, return to die in the parent convent which had received their first tears of love. Many, worn out with fatigues, slept far from their brethren; many found their end by martyrdom-for the Tartars, Arabs, and men of the North were not the most tractable disciples, and every brother before setting out made the sacrifice of his life. Even in the midst of Christendom a bloody death was often their lot, so powerful were the heresies and passions they there combated with all their might.

If we be asked the names of those preachers who filled three centuries with their eloquence, we cannot enumerate them. They exist in the tomb of chronicles, but to repeat their names is not to revive them. Such is the fate of the orator. The man who has ravished the living generation, descends to the same silence with them.

ST. DOMINIC AND THE DOMINICANS.

In vain does posterity endeavor to hear his words and those of the people who applauded him, both have vanished into time, as sound dies away into space. The orator and his audience are twins, born and dying on the same day; and you may apply to the entire destiny which connects them, the deep observation of Cicero-there exists no great orator without a multitude to hear him.

Nevertheless, I shall mention a few, whose names are best preserved from oblivion.

Among them we have St. Hyacinth, who preached Christ Jesus in Poland, Bohemia, Great and Little Russia, Livonia, Sweden, Denmark, along the shores of the Black Sea, in the islands of the Grecian Archipelago, and by the coast of Asia Minor. His progress may be traced in the convents he founded as he passed.

We see also St. Peter of Verona, who fell beneath the swords of assassins after a long apostolic career, and wrote with his blood upon the sand the first words of the Apostles' Creed, "I believe in God."

To these we shall add Henry Suso in the fourteenth century, that amiable youth of Suabia, whose preaching was so successful that Treated as an innovator, a heretic, a a price was set upon his head. visionary, a man of infamous character, when he was invited to prosecute his assailants criminally, he replied: "I should follow your advice if this ill-usage of the preacher were hurtful to his preaching."

At the same period Brother John Taulerus won applause in Cologne and all Germany; but after having shone in the pulpit many years, he suddenly retreated to his cell, leaving the people astonished at his disappearance. The fact was, an unknown man accosted him after one of his discourses, and asked permission to speak his mind regarding him. Taulerus having given it, the unknown replied: "There lives in your heart a secret pride—you rely on your great learning and your title of doctor; nor do you seek God with a pure intention, or His glory only in the study of letters-you seek yourself in the passing applause of creatures. Therefore the wine of heavenly doctrine, and the divine word though pure and excellent in themselves, lose their strength when passing through your heart, and drop without savor or grace into the breast that loves God." Taulers was magnanimous enough to listen to these words, and assuredly no one would have ventured so to address him did he not deserve them. He kept silence. The vanity of his present life was apparent to him. Withdrawn from all commerce with the world, he abstained for two years from preaching or hearing confessions, night and day an assiduous attendant at every conventual exercise, and passing the remainder of his time in his cell, deploring his sins and studying Jesus Christ. After two years Cologne learned that The entire city repaired to the Dr. Taulerus was to preach once more. church, curious to penetrate the mystery of a retirement which had been variously explained. But when he mounted the pulpit, after vain struggles to speak, tears were the only thing he could bring from his heart; he was now not merely an orator-he was a saint.

I shall add one other name, that of St. Vincent Ferrer, who evangelized Spain, France, Italy, Germany, England, Scotland, and Ireland, reaching