question of the religious rights of their inmates of different creeds. In this Kirkdale school, however, there is provision made for a Protestant chaplain out of the rates; none at all for a Catholic chaplain, though the majority of the children profess the Catholic religion. A chaplain is, however, paid by the Catholics themselves, and he has the religious instruction of his children unmolested.

The little work which Mr. Gibson has begun to publish is the result of the experience of many years, during which he has had to teach these children. Such experience has, of course, led him to aim at the utmost simplicity and plainness. We may say further, that it seems to us to have enabled him to attain these qualities. The present volume contains instructions on the first three chapters of the ordinary Catechism. Each instruction is enriched by an appropriate story.

We must confine ourselves for the present to an acknowledgment of the receipt of several works that we may take an early opportunity of noticing, especially Canon Oakeley's Lyra Liturgica; and Catholic Missions in Southern India, the joint work of the Rev. W. Strickland and Mr. T. W. M. Marshall.

Thoughts on St. Gertrude.

BY AUBREY DE VERE.

WHEN a voice from the thirteenth century comes to us, amid the din of the nineteenth, it is difficult for those interested in the cause of human progress not to feel their attention strongly challenged. Such a voice appeals to us in a work which has now first appeared in an English version.* We owe it to a Religious of the Order of Poor Clares; a daughter of St. Francis thus paying to St. Benedict a portion of that debt which all the religious orders of the West owe to their great patriarch. The book possesses a profound interest, and that of a character wholly apart from polemics. The thirteenth century, the noblest of those included in the "Ages of Faith," was a troubled time; but high as the contentions of rival princes and feudal chiefs swelled, we have here a proof that

"Birds of calm sat brooding on the charmed wave."

Not less quieting is the influence of such records in our own time. They make their way-music being more penetrating than mere sound -amid the storm of industrialism and its million wheels. Controversialists may here forget their strifes, and listen to the annals of that interior and spiritual life which is built up in peace and without the sound of the builder's hammer, much less of sword or axe. There is here no necessary or direct contest between rival forms of belief. Monasteries have been pulled down and sold in Catholic as well as in Protestant countries; and in the latter also are to be found men whose highest aspiration is to rebuild them, and restore the calm strength and sacred labours which they once protected. Such books are not so much a protest against any age as the assertion of those great and universal principles of truth and peace which can alone enable each successive age to correct its errors, supply its defects, and turn its special opportunities to account. It is not in a literary point of view that they interest us chiefly, although they include not a little which reminds us of Dante, and reveal to us one of the chief sources from which the great Christian poet drew his inspiration.

The Life and Revelations of St. Gertrude, Virgin and Abbess. By a Religious of the Order of Poor Clares.

VOL. III. SEPTEMBER 1865.

Their interest is mainly human. They show us what the human being can reach, and by what personal influences, never more potent than when their touch is softest, society, in its rougher no less than in its milder periods, is capable of being moulded.

The Revelations of St. Gertrude were first translated into Latin, as is affirmed, by Lamberto Luscorino in 1390. This work was, however, apparently never published; and the first Latin version, by which they became generally known, was that put forth under the name of Insinuationes Divina Pietatis, by Lanspergius, who wrote at the close of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century. The work has appeared in several of the modern languages; but the French translation, by which it has hitherto been chiefly known among us, has many inaccuracies. The present English translation has been carefully made from the Latin of Lanspergius, and the original is frequently quoted in the foot-notes. The Insinuationes consist of five books. Of these the second only came from the hand of the Saint, the rest being compiled by a religious of her monastery, partly from personal knowledge, and partly from the papers of St. Gertrude. Two works by the Saint, her Prayers and her Exercises, have lately appeared in an English version.

St. Gertrude was born at Eisleben in the county of Mansfield, on the 6th of January 1263, just sixty-nine years after the birth of St. Clare, the great Italian saint, from whose convent at Assisi so many others had already sprung in all parts of Europe, and whose name had already become a great living power in Germany and Poland, as well as in the sunny South.* St. Gertrude was descended from an illustrious house, that of the Counts of Lackenborn. When but five years old she exchanged her paternal home for the Benedictine Abbey of Rodersdorf, where she was soon after joined by her sister, afterwards the far-famed St. Mechtilde. When about twenty-six she first began to be visited by those visions which never afterwards ceased for any considerable time. At thirty she was chosen abbess; and for forty years she ruled a sisterhood whom she loved as her children. The year after she became abbess she removed with her charge to another, but neighbouring convent, that of Heldelfs. No other change took place in her outward lot. Her life lay within. As her present biographer remarks, “she lived at home with her Spouse."

The visions of St. Gertrude are an endless parable of spiritual truths, as well as a record of wonderful graces. From the days when

* An interesting life of this Saint and of her earlier companions has lately been published in English: St. Clare, St. Colette, and the Poor Clares; by a Religious of the Order of Poor Clares. J. F. Fowler, Dublin.

our Divine Lord Himself taught from the hill-side and the anchored ship, it has been largely through parable that divine lore has been communicated to man. Religious and symbolic art is a parable of truths that can only be expressed in types. The legends through which the earlier ages continue to swell the feebler veins of later times with the pure freshness of the Church's youth are for the most part facts which buried themselves deep in human sympathies and recollections, because in them the particular shadowed forth the universal. It is the same thing in philosophy itself; and that Philosophia Prima which, as Bacon tells us, discerns a common law in things as remote as sounds are from colours, and thus traces the same footsteps of nature" in the most widely-separated regions of her domain, finds constantly in the visible and familiar a parable of the invisible and unknown. The very essence of poetry also consists in this, that, not only in its metaphors and figures, but in its whole spirit, it is a parable, imparting to material objects at once their most beautiful expression and that one which reveals their spiritual meaning. So long as the imagination is a part of human intellect, it must have a place in all that interprets between the natural and the spiritual worlds.

The following characteristic passage, while it shows that St. Gertrude made no confusion between allegory and vision, yet suggests to us that so poetical a mind might, under peculiar circumstances, be more easily favoured with visions than another.

"Whilst Thou didst act so lovingly towards me, and didst not cease to draw my soul from vanity to Thyself, it happened on a certain day, between the Festival of the Resurrection and the Ascension, that I went into the court before Prime, and seated myself near the fountain; and I began to consider the beauty of the place, which charmed me on account of the clear and flowing stream, the verdure of the trees which surrounded it, and the flights of the birds, and particularly of the doves,-above all, the sweet calm,-apart from all, and considering within myself what would make this place most useful to me, I thought that it would be the friendship of a wise and intimate companion, who would sweeten my solitude, or render it useful to others; when Thou, my Lord and my God, who art a torrent of inestimable pleasures, after having inspired me with the first impulse of this desire, Thou didst will also to be the end of it; inspiring me with the thought, that if by my continual gratitude I return Thy graces to Thee, as a stream returns to its source; if, increasing in the love of virtue, I put forth, like the trees, the flowers of good works; furthermore, if, despising the things of earth, I fly upwards freely, like the birds, and thus free my senses from the

distraction of exterior things, my soul would then be empty, and my heart would be an agreeable abode for Thee" (p. 76).

If in this passage we see how the natural yearning for sympathy and companionship may rise into the heavenly aspirations from which mere nature would divert the heart, we find in the following one a type of that compensation which is made to unreserved loyalty. The religion of the Incarnation gives back, in a human as well as a Divine form, all that human instincts had renounced. "It was on that most sacred night in which the sweet dew of Divine grace fell on all the world, and the heavens dropped sweetness, that my soul, exposed like a mystic fleece in the court of the sanctuary, having received in meditation this celestial rain, was prepared to assist at this Divine Birth, in which a Virgin brought forth a Son, true God and Man, even as a star produces its ray. In this night, I say, my soul beheld before it suddenly a delicate child, but just born, in whom were concealed the greatest gifts of perfection. I imagined that I received this precious deposit in my bosom" (p. 85).

One of the chief tests as to the Divine origin of visions consists in their tending towards humility; for those which come from a human, or worse than human source, tend to pride. The humility of St. Gertrude was profound as the purity of which humility is the guardian was spotless. "One day, after I had washed my hands, and was standing at the table with the community, perplexed in mind, considering the brightness of the sun, which was in its full strength, I said within myself, 'If the Lord, who has created the sun, and whose beauty is said to be the admiration of the sun and moon; if He who is a consuming fire is as truly in me as He shows Himself frequently before me, how is it possible that my heart continues like ice, and that I lead so evil a life?'" (p. 106.)

There can be no stronger argument in favour of the supernatural origin of St. Gertrude's visions than their subjects. The highest of her flights, far from carrying her beyond the limits of sound belief, or substituting the fanciful for the fruitful, but bears her deeper into the heart of the great Christian Verities. She soars to heaven to find there, in a resplendent form, the simplest of those truths which are our food upon earth. As the glorified bodies of the blessed will be the same bodies which they wore during their earthly pilgrimage, so the doctrines, "sun-clad," in her Revelations are still but the primary articles of the Creed. Her special gift was that of realisation: what others admitted, she believed; what others believed, she saw. It was thus that she felt the copresence of the supernatural with the natural, the kingdom of spirit not to her being a future world, but a wider circle clasping a smaller