KOSLIN 



ROSMINI 



811 



Solomon Semler's Impartial Collections for the History 

 of the Rosicrucians (Leip. 1768). De Quincey's Jtosicru- 

 cians and Freemasons is brilliant but misleading. A 

 review of the whole controversy, with the documents 

 that concern it, is contained in The Real History of the 

 Rosicruciam (Loud. 1887), by A. E. Waite, the author 

 of the present article. A MS. Treatise of Rosie Crucian 

 Secrets, attributed to Dr John Dee, and preserved among 

 the Harleian M.SS. in the British Museum, is a forgery 

 of the 18th century. 



Roslin, a Midlothian village, near the wooded 

 glen of the North Esk, 6J miles S. of Edinburgh. 

 Its castle, dating from the 14th century, was the 

 seat of the St Claire, Earls of Orkney from 1379 to 

 1471, and afterwards of Caithness, and hereditary 

 grand -master masons of Scotland from 1455 to 

 1736. The exquisite 'chapel,' built about 1450, is 

 relly the choir of an intended collegiate church, 

 and is only 70 feet long, 35 broad, and 42 high. 

 Its beauty lies not in the outline, but in the pro- 

 fusion of stone-carving lavished on pinnacles, niches, 

 vaulted roof, and clustered columns, and especially 

 on the famous 'Prentice pillar." The building, 

 essentially Scottish, has often been wrongly ascribed 

 to Spanish, at any rate to foreign, masons. Much 

 damaged by an Edinburgh mob in 1688, it was 

 restored by the third Earl of Rosslyn at a cost of 

 5000, and lias served since 1862 as an Episcopal 

 church. On Roslin Moor the Scots are said to 

 have twice defeated the English in one day, 24th 

 February 1303. Pop. 730. See articles by A. Kerr 

 in Procs. Soc. Ants. Scot, for 1876-78. 



Rosmini. ANTONIO ROSMINI-SERBATI, one of 

 the most original philosophers of the 19th century, 

 was born of noble family at Roveredo in the Italian 

 Tyrol, 25th March 1797. He grew up a pure and 

 beautiful child, and after a stainless youth of 

 devotion and study decided for the priesthood 

 against his parents' wishes, and began the course at 

 Padua in 1817. Three years later his father's 

 death jjave him an ample estate. He was ordained 

 priest in 1821, and devoted the next five years at 

 home witli a serene but profound enthusiasm to 

 study, meditation, and prayer. He read widely 

 in philosophy alike ancient and modern, and 

 already revolved within his mind a comprehensive 

 and coherent system to serve as a basis for the 

 truths of revelation, while on the practical side he 

 planned a new institution for the training of 

 teachers and priests in wisdom and holiness, f rom 

 1826 to 1828 he lived mostly in Milan, next thought 

 out the rule of his new Order in a period of retire- 

 ment and severe mortification at Domodossola in 

 the Piedmontese Alps, visited Rome, gained the 

 approval of Pius VIII. both for his special studies 

 and for the institution of his Order, and published 

 his New Essay on the Origin of Ideas (4 vols. 

 1830), which at once carried his name over the 

 Catholic world. After a few years of labour at 

 Trent, hampered by tne jealousy of the Austrian 

 government, which feared his Italian patriotism 

 and his papal sympathies, he settled in 1837 at 

 Stresa on the western shore of Lago Maggiore, anil 

 two years later received from Gregory XVI. the 

 formal approval of his Institute. The next few 

 years were the happiest and most fruitful of his 

 life. Surrounded by loving and devoted friends, lie 

 *ent volume after volume to the press ; overpowered 

 by his logic noble opponents to his philosophy 

 like Vincenzo Gioberti and Count Mamiani, as 

 well as no less able writers from the rationalistic 

 and anti-Catholic side ; and foiled the restless 

 intrigues of Jesuit enemies, who saw in his enter- 

 prise possible dangers to the supremacy of their 

 Order. His dream in politics, as expressed in his 

 Constitution according to Social Justice ( 1848), was 

 a confederation of the states of Italy under the pope 

 a> perpetual president ; but his heart sank within 



him when the pope declared his intention to take 

 no part in the war of liberation against Austria. 



For a brief period he basked in the papal favour, 

 ami was promised by Pius IX. a cardinal's hat ; 

 while for seven weeks he served as the envoy of 

 Piedmont at the papal court, and it was lie whom 

 the Romans asked for as their Liberal minister in 

 the period between the murder of Rossi and the 

 pope s flight to Gaeta. He followed the pope, but 

 now found his mind poisoned against him oy the 

 malign suspicions of Antonelli and the reactionary 

 party, and never afterwards regained his confidence. 

 His Constitution and The Fire Wounds of Holy 

 Church (Eng. trans, ed. by Canon Liddon, 1883) 

 were next prohibited by an irregular meeting of 

 the Congregation of the Index called at Naples. 

 Rosmini submitted without a word of protest, and 

 returned to Stresa to spend the remaining seven 

 years of his life in even more absolute devotion 

 than before to his Institute and to the composition 

 of works intended to complete and consolidate his 

 system of philosophy. His enemies still continued 

 to pursue him with wicked calumnies and charges 

 of heresy in doctrine and unfaithfulness to the Holy 

 See. But their malignity overshot its mark, and at 

 length the pope, his eyes opened to see how he had 

 wronged Rosmini by his haste, granted him a fair 

 hearing, first enjoining silence on his traducers, 

 and next subjected his whole published works to a 

 careful scrutiny, in relation to the more than three 

 hundred charges brought against them. The pro- 

 cess lasted nearly four years ( 1851-54), but at its 

 close the Congregation of the Index, the pope pre- 

 siding, declared Rosmini's writings to be entirely 

 free from censure, and enjoined perpetual silence on 

 all his accusers. But he did not long survive a 

 triumph for which he had waited with saintly 

 patience, dying at Stresa, not without suspicion 

 of poison, 1st July 1855. It was only in 1888 

 that Rosmini's restless traducers succeeded in get- 

 ting forty propositions from his posthumous works 

 condemned by the Holy Ottice. 



The 'Institute of the Brethren of Charity' 

 survived its founder, and among the Rosininian 

 Fathers, who are mostly Italians or Englishmen, 

 are to be found at the present day some of the 

 ablest and most devoted sons of the Roman Church. 

 Its fundamental idea is the principle of passivity, 

 its aim holiness or the moral perfection of the soul. 

 Moral perfection consists in justice or the practical 

 recognition of each being, seen in the idea, accord- 

 ing to the beingness that is in it. The elective or 

 contemplative part of the discipline prepares for 

 the assumptive or active part, whose constant aim 

 is the well-being of others. The brethren, who 

 include both clerical and lay members, undergo a 

 two years' novitiate and take the three ordinary 

 vows, but wear no distinctive dress and conform to 

 the laws of the country in which they happen to 

 be. The Institute of Charity was a large-minded 

 attempt to adapt the monastic system and Catholic 

 Christianity generally to the needs of the present 

 day, and its comparative lack of success is only due 

 to the enormous force of interested opposition 

 brought to bear against it by the obscurantist 

 party in the church, whose chief end is despotic 

 power for itself and blind obedience from the people. 

 In England it has foundations at Ratcliffe, Lough- 

 borough, Cardiff, Wadhurst, Rugby, and estab- 

 lished in 1876 its central House at St Etheldreda's, 

 Holhorn, once the domestic chapel of the palace of 

 the Bishops of Ely. 



The foundation of Rosmini's philosophy is being 

 considered as the form of the intelligence an ele- 

 mental intuition of which is implanted by Nature 

 herself. He begins by pointing out, as an essential 

 characteristic of cognition, a distinction between 

 the impersonal object known and the personal 



