it." That these were not idle threats was proved by his line of march being marked by burning or smouldering houses and villages which were destroyed on fixed principles of art, and by troops set apart for that special purpose.

Such were Mansfeld and Christian as the leaders of armies. Their private life was equally edifying. The former always had a harem in his camp, and the latter made a public boast of his bad treatment of women. Such were the men who for ten years supported what later historians have called the Protestant cause in the Thirty Years' War.

Ναυηγόν δέ θάλασσα κατέσπασε, καὶ παρὰ τύμβον
Αἴαντος νηκτὴν ὥρμισεν, οὐκ Ιθάκη.

Καὶ κρίσιν ̔Ελλήνων στυγερὴν ἀπέδειξε θάλασσα,
Καὶ Σαλαμὶς ἀπέχει κῦδος ὀφειλόμενον.

The Shield which great Achilles bore
When Hector's life-blood flow'd,

The false Ulysses won and wore,
By Grecian votes bestow'd:

But winds and waves, in man's despite,
Have set that wrongful judgment right.

"To Ithaca !"-To Ithaca ?
His galley is a wreck.

The rescued trophy floats afar
Its lawful home to deck,
And rests where mighty Ajax lies,
Upon the shore of Salamis.

7•

The Rise of a New Sanctuary.

A BEAUTIFUL book might be written on Catholic pilgrimages. We do not mean a mere history of the shrines which have from time to time attracted to themselves universal or local devotion, interesting as such a history would be, and plentifully as it would teem with anecdotes relating the most noble triumphs of divine grace and the most romantic incidents of Christian life. Beyond and behind the historical facts, which it would require much industry to collect and great judgment to sift, we might find traces of a sort of system, if we may venture so to speak of what is the creation of Him Who breatheth where He wills-a system analogous to the providential arrangement of the appearance of great Saints of peculiar characters on the horizon of the Church at the moment when their presence is most needed and most opportune; or again, to the successive developments even of doctrine, and much more of great devotions, or of the changes which seem to distinguish the favourite religious practices of a particular generation from those of the periods which precede and follow its birth. In the case of some of the more famous Christian pilgrimages, there seems an unexpectedness which has at all events to some extent explained itself by its results. Why should the body of St. James the Great lie in the northern corner of Spain, those of the three Kings at Cologne, or that of St. Mary Magdalene in the south-east of France? We can understand St. Peter and St. Paul at Rome, and no Christian heart can fail to throb at the thought of Bethlehem, or of the Holy Sepulchre; but why the wondrous tale of Loreto, the house of Nazareth placed down far away from the other great "relics" which are clustered together at Rome, within reach of a hasty dash from some Tunisian corsair who might be sailing up the blue Adriatic in search of plunder or of slaves? Yet these great pilgrimages, and a hundred others scattered over Christian Europe, did a

great work, centuries ago, in helping to weld it together,. in the same way as, in a less degree, did the Crusades ; and St. James, even to the philosophical historian, may well seem to have entrenched himself in an inaccessible fortress from whence strength and courage might flow forth in perennial streams to fortify the fainting hearts of the Spaniards, the one Christian nation which had for centuries to wage a hand to hand fight for bare life against the Mahometan power planted in permanence upon its own soil. Perhaps the peculiar sweetness, the delicate fragrance, the tender penetrating charm which has come home to. those who have knelt long in the Santa Casa, might not have flourished so much in a crowded city, amidst the bustle of the government of the Christian world, and with other scarcely less great shrines to divert the attention.

And, again, what countless secret histories of grace would have to be unfolded, if the story of any one of these great sanctuaries could be written from end to end! In company with them, we must mention the thousand shrines of our Blessed Lady scattered over the world-not the old world of Europe merely, but even to some extent the new-in one sense the fruit, in another sense the parents, of the most universal of Christian devotions after those which address themselves directly to God and our Lord, but witnessing most truly, not only to the universality of the devotion to Mary, but to her tender, motherly care over every portion of the kingdom of her Son, as if it were not to be thought of that there should be anywhere a Catholic community which did not possess some visible and local token of her graciousness, some trophy of her power, some holy spot where she had placed her foot or left her name behind her. And as we find her everywhere as to place, so it is no wonder that she should also have no bounds as to time. It is a part of the ever fresh and perpetual life of the Church, that, with all due exceptions as to what is really exceptional, no one generation or century should, as it were, have a monopoly of the graces and marvels that are wrought for the help of her children. Each Christian century has its Saints, its miracles, its devotions, as well as its dangers and its enemies. The devices of evil put on

new shapes, and repeat themselves in various guise. The contrivances of mercy, the interferences of the Saints in glory for the deliverance of their brethren on earth, the boons and inexhaustible bounties of the Queen of Heaven, are fresh, time after time, as the morning dew. So we may well expect it to be as long as the world lasts, and as the light of Catholic truth and the presence of the Church spread from one country now pagan or Protestant to another, we may expect to hear of fresh and fresh manifestations of the endless charity and compassion of the courtiers of Heaven connected with places yet unknown, whose names shall sound strangely beside those of ancient shrines in the catalogue of the Church.

Though it cannot be doubted that the Catholic Church is ever ready to receive with grateful acknowledgments the new fountain-springs, as it were, of grace and healing which may burst forth from time to time for the advantage of her children, it would be a serious mistake to suppose that she is over eager to welcome any phenomena that may claim this character, or that she fails to submit them, when they occur, to the severest and most cautious scrutiny. What we acknowledge is the possibility of such manifestations of mercy in general, and not to acknowledge this would be inconsistent with the Catholic spirit. As for particular cases, the Church forces them, as it were, to prove themselves. She watches them with a jealous eye, and scems, at least negatively, to discourage them, until the facts have forced themselves into such prominence as to require investigation on the part of the legitimate authority. The inquiry which ensues has its strict and exacting laws, and, when these have been properly observed, it is far more certain that a good deal of probably good evidence has been rejected, than that a single tittle of insufficient evidence has been allowed. Even then, the devotion which has sprung up is simply tolerated, while at the same time this toleration brings it under strict regulation and supervision. The sanction of the Church, as far as it is formally given, extends to what we may call the substance rather than the accidents of the history. Thus, suppose, what is most highly improbable,

that the story connected with a received sanctuary or place of pilgrimage were to turn out a mistake, and that where an Angel had, as it was said, appeared, or where it was supposed that our Blessed Lady had been seen and had intimated her desire that a church should be built, nothing of the kind had taken place. The Church would not have sanctioned the details of the story, or of the message, but she would have allowed the erection of a new church, and encouraged the visiting of the church by the Faithful as a means of obtaining bodily or spiritual benefits through the intercession of our Lady or the Angel. What had been done would have been absolutely and wholly good in its kind, even though there might have been some mistake in the evidence on which the authorities had acted. Nor again, does the Church bind up the devotion to which her sanction may be given with the character, the antecedents, or the subsequent career, of the persons who may have been the original channels of the communication by reason of which she has acted in sanctioning that devotion. Every step that she takes is marked by the most jealous and most cautious reverence, and we have in this one of the surest of incidental guarantees for the immense probability of the truth of all, at least, that is substantial in the story on which the new devotion may be founded. The care taken as to the evidence, and the cautious delay in watching the progress of the movement to which the facts may give rise, are far more than enough to secure certainty in the case of any class of phenomena which are not in themselves impossible or improbable. But we start, in our reasonings on these subjects, from the principle that it is neither impossible nor improbable that fresh miracles and new supernatural interferences may be vouchsafed from time to time to stimulate the piety of the Faithful, or for some other similar end in the good providence of God.

The last most remarkable instance of facts of the kind to which we are referring is the rise and progress of the devotion to Notre Dame de Lourdes. It is now rather more than eleven years since the first beginning of this remarkable pilgrimage, and already a magnificent church has been nearly finished on the rocks which surmount the