XVI BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 



and pointed Lim out as the living proof of the compatibility 

 between Catholicism and the best spirit of the age. One party 

 aloue 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 

 Pontitf. 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 bo thus courageous, he avowed them with- 

 out fear or favor. Even those who had small appreciation of the 

 distinctively Cliristian virtues could recognize in this poor monk 

 more than the realization of the ideal of the heathen poet : 



"Justum et tenaccm propositi vinim, 

 Nou cirium ardor prava jubentiiim, 

 Xec vultas instantis tyranni, 

 Mente quatit solida.'" 



Suddenly, on the 20th of September, 1869, this foremost preachei 

 of the whole Roman Catholic communion, declaring that he could 

 no longer suffer with a good conscience the constraint wiiich 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 doc- 

 uments of ecclesiastical history, appealed from the authority of his 

 monastic superior to the Œcumenical 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. 



"VVe 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 i)erson of the Carmelite preacher is this — whether 

 there is room and freedom in the Roman Catlujlic Church for a 

 faitliful preacher of Jesus Clirist, who is also a docile student of 



