ticipated from its object, and has not even the merit of ability to recommend it.

35. Christ Our Life. The Scriptural Argument for Immortality through Christ Alone. By C. F. HUDSON, Author of "Debt and Grace, as Related to the Doctrine of a Future Life." Boston: John P. Jewett & Company. 1860. 12mo. PP. 160.

36. A General View of the Rise, Progress, and Corruptions of Christianity. By the Most Rev. RICHARD WHATELY, Archbishop of Dublin. With a Sketch of the Life of the Author, and a Catalogue of his Writings. New York: William Gowans. 1860. 12mo. Pp. 288.

37. The Holy Week: Containing the Offices of Holy Week, from the Roman Breviary and Missal, with the Chants in Modern Notation. With the approbation of the Most Reverend the Archbishop of Baltimore. Baltimore: John Murphy and Co. 1861. 12mo.

pp. 182.

THIS book contains the office for Holy Week, with the music in a form more convenient than has generally been used. Mr. Murphy has also, we believe, published an edition of this book with the Gregorian notation, or square notes, for those who are more accustomed to them.

38. A Manual of the Catholic Religion, for Catechists, Teachers, and Self-Instruction. By the Rev. Father F. X. WENINGER, D.D,, Missionary of the Society of Jesus. New York: D. & J. Sadlier & Co. 1861. 12mo. pp. 410.

39. Delicias de la Piedad. Tratado sobre el culto de la Santísima Virgen, por el M. R. P. VENTURA DE RAULICA. Traducido por R. A. O. Habana. 1860 16mo. pp. 186.

BROWNSON'S

QUARTERLY REVIEW.

JULY, 1861.

ART. I.-Della Filosofia della Rivelazione di VINCENZO GIOBERTI. Pubblicata per Cura di GIUSEPPE MASSARI. Turin and Paris. 1856.

THE work the title of which we cite above, is the Second Volume of the Posthumous Works of the late Abbate Gioberti, collected and published under the editorial care of his friend and disciple, Joseph Massari. It has been placed in our hands by a venerable Italian priest, who has been for years a professor of philosophy and theology, and who to a certain extent at least accepts Gioberti's philosophical views. He has placed it in our hands with the remark, that as we seem to have made some advances toward the philosophical and theological system of which it gives the principles and method, we probably should find pleasure in reading it. Whether he gave it to us with a wish that it should be to us a guide or a beacon we are unable to say. We have a high opinion of the genius, the learning, and philosophical ability of its author, and we have accepted and defended some parts of his philosophy; but neither in philosophy nor in theology are we disposed to take him for our master or our guide. We think he had opinions that we do not hold, and purposes with which, as we at present understand them, we do not sympathize. We set up in our youth and inexperience to be a reformer, and to recast the world in our own image; we met with no great or marked success, and we think it is well that we did not, for we have no reason to believe that the world recast in VOL. II.-No. III.

19

We did

our image would be any better than it is now. not come into the Catholic Church to turn Catholic reformer, to reform Catholic faith, Catholic theology, or Catholic discipline; we try to learn and hold Catholic faith as the Church believes and teaches it, and to make the best use of reason in our power in defending it against the various classes of adversaries it at present encounters. Further than this no man and no set of men can count on us.

The work now before us is unfinished, and in fact is little more than notes jotted down to be afterward worked up, or bald statement of principles to be afterward developed and applied. It does no credit to the author as a writer, but it does credit to him as a varied, profound, and fertile thinker. It is only the outlines of a treatise, a rude sketch, but it could have been the production only of philosophical and theological genius of the first order. Signor Massari says it is scrupulously orthodox, which no doubt is much, but would be more, if we were assured that his own orthodoxy is above suspicion. But whether really orthodox or not, the work, which the editor rightly calls Fragments, is one, like Dr. Newman's Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, the principle of which it adopts and defends, that will be variously judged according to the taste, the temper, the understanding, or the prejudices of the reader. It is not a work to be judged by sciolists, favorably or unfavorably. The work is a serious work, an earnest work, we doubt not an honest work, and on subjects of the highest and to all thinking men of the most pressing interest, and only those who are familiar with the higher branches of thought, and have done something more than hastily run through Bouvier's Philosophy and Theology, or even studied St. Thomas or Duns Scotus are competent to pass judgment on its merits. It can be brought within none of the approved formulas of the schools, and tested by none of the rules ordinarily adopted by schoolmen, for it rises above all those formulas and rules, and seeks either to make way with them or to elevate and expand them by showing the higher reason in which they are founded.

There is, even in the case of those who by their natural genius and studies are not wholly incompetent to judge of works of this sort, an evident difficulty in appreciating these Fragments of an unfinished work in which the author was engaged when death overtook him, in the fact that the author cannot be looked upon as free from suspicion. All

his works, published during his lifetime, are on the Index, and though it may be that they were placed there for political reasons, or for various other reasons than philosophical or theological unsoundness, yet the fact itself can hardly fail to excite in loyal Catholic hearts some degree of distrust. He refused, if we have not been misinformed, to follow the example of Rosmini and Padre Ventura, and make the retraction required by the Holy See, and he died suddenly at Paris, as our Parisian friends say, without being visibly reconciled to the Church. He openly departs from the theology of the scholastics, and makes war to the knife on the Jesuits, and contends that the theology taught by them since the General Aquaviva is unchristian. Indeed, he accuses them of introducing another Gospel than that of our Lord, and he holds that the definitions of popes and councils are to be taken only as true in general, but not in particular. He shows in his writings hardly ever any sympathy with the great doctors, writers, and saints of the Church, at least since the earliest ages, and reserves his esteem and affection for the Arnoldis, Rienzis, Machiavellis, Alfieris, and Leopardis, who have done their best to repaganize Italy, and through Italy Christendom; and although some of these things may possibly admit an explanation, they have a tendency to create in honest Catholic minds a prejudice against him.

We are by no means disposed to defend the analytic method of the scholastics, nor are we disposed to maintain that our modern theologians have always been St. Augustines, St. Basils, or able to compete successfully with the great Fathers of the early ages. We do not always sympathize with the meticulous orthodoxy of our age, or hold ourselves bound as a Catholic to defend through thick and thin even the administration of ecclesiastical affairs in our own or in any other country, much less the secular politics of all Catholics, whether priests or laymen. In matters of simple human prudence we believe Catholic laymen, Catholic priests and bishops, even popes and cardinals may make mistakes, and commit great blunders from which religion and society suffer. We have shown time and again what we dare in relation to the scholastic philosophy and that generally taught in Catholic schools at the present day. We have proved that we respect liberty in all its forms, are not afraid on all proper occasions to assert the rights of the temporal, as well as of the spiritual. We are

even now suffering much opprobrium because we have fearlessly vindicated the province of reason, and in the name of religion herself protested against the doctrine that we must demolish reason to make way for faith, or surrender our manhood in order to be faithful and acceptable servants of God. But, if we were required to believe that the scholastics have essentially erred in their theology, and that the Jesuits for two hundred and fifty years have introduced a false theology, nay, another Gospel, and have been unchristian in their teaching, we should cease to profess ourselves Catholics, and should look upon the Church as having failed as the teacher of truth. The Church teaches through her doctors, and if these have failed, as failed they have, if the scholastics and Jesuits have introduced a false and corrupt theology, she has failed in her mission to teach. The Jesuits are the last men in the Church Gioberti should complain of, for from the origin of the Society it has been their study to show the harmonious relations between reason and faith, nature and grace, liberty and authority, the very thing he himself professes to be aiming to effect, and he knows perfectly well, that the great standing charge against them is that they have yielded too much to reason, nature, and human liberty; and if he had descended for a moment from his synthetic altitude and analyzed his objections, he would have found that he was really objecting to them only what he was himself professing to do. His attacks upon them strike us as at least ungrateful, and such as we should expect from no man not deeply imbued with Lutheran and Jansenistic heresy. We are not the special apologists of the Jesuits, but we have seldom, if ever, found them as a body strongly opposed to a man whose Catholic loyalty or orthodoxy there were no good reasons for suspecting.

We have not become an old gray-headed man without knowing that a man may be unjustly suspected, that no man can do boldly and energetically the precise work demanded in his day and generation in church or state without making many enemies, without offending the honest. people who get great gain by making shrines for the goddess Diana, raising a clamor against him, and perhaps going to the grave with his motives misconceived, and his words and deeds misconstrued. Even great and good men may and often do misinterpret and do no little wrong to great and good men. Did not the chief priests, the scribes, and the pharisees conspire to raise up the mob