with even greater kindness than before. The work went steadily forward. Before Serra died in 1784 he had founded nine separate missions; two years later there were more than five thousand Christian Indians in Upper California. In 1823 there were twenty-one missions with more than twenty thousand Christians, no longer savages, but busily engaged in agriculture, weaving, and metal work. There were handsome stone churches, surrounded by schoolrooms, workshops, and enormous tracts of land in a high state of cultivation. Almost the whole of this fine achievement has been annihilated. In 1834, after Mexico had become independent, the property of the missions was secularized and the fathers and the Indians alike were reduced to abject poverty. Among the pitiful stories of the time is that of the mission of Soledad, where Father Sarria, who had laboured there for thirty years, shared every morsel of his food with the Indians until while saying Mass one Sunday morning he fainted from starvation and fell dead in the arms of his people. In 1846 the American flag was raised in Monterey and the business of destruction still continued for about ten years when the churches and some fragments of property were returned to the Roman Catholic authorities. Thousands of Indians, beggared, homeless, unshepherded, were left to live as best they might on the confines of the new immigration, and the half-ruined churches remain to tell us that the first civilization of California, and perhaps the best, was built upon the love which a Spanish schoolboy had for Jesus Christ.1

In Great Britain during the eighteenth century Roman Catholicism passed through a period of deep depression. In London it was kept alive by the six chapels attached to the foreign embassies. It was still strong in Lancashire,

'Father Junipero and his Work', The Century Magazine, May and June, 1883 (The Century Co., New York; F. Warne, London).

in parts of Yorkshire, and in the western Highlands. Violent persecution had ceased, but the penal laws were harsh and adherents steadily declined in number. In Scotland they, like the Episcopalians, suffered from the fury of the Duke of Cumberland's soldiers, even the remote and humble seminary at Scalan being discovered and looted. In England, when the cause of the Stuarts was seen to be hopeless, one wealthy family after another conformed to the Church of England, and their retainers gradually followed their example. As for their religious belief there is evidence to show that there was a decided tendency to Jansenism in Scotland, derived not from Presbyterianism but from influences at work in Paris.

The English College at Douai fell under suspicion of fostering the same opinions, and in 1711 the Dean of the cathedral of Mechlin, who had written against Jansenism, was sent to examine the college' from the President downwards'. The dean was no extremist, acted very justly, and entirely acquitted the college of any charge of heresy. Among the schoolboys who were then at Douai was Richard Challoner, the son of a rigid Dissenter', afterwards a Roman Catholic priest in London, then Bishop of Debra and Vicar Apostolic of the London district.1 From the day of his consecration as bishop in 1740 in a sequestered convent in Hammersmith we have abundant records of his character and work. Throughout his life he rose at six and spent the time in prayer and meditation until he celebrated the holy mysteries at eight. He allowed himself sufficient time for his meals and for a walk in the afternoon, but gave every possible moment to spiritual reading, writing, and

1 See Edwin H. Burton, The Life and Times of Bishop Challoner (Longmans, London, 1909). The first of the two volumes contains a good reproduction of a well-known plate of the good bishop in cope and mitre. Under the cope he wears a long linen rochet of the type usual among English Roman Catholic bishops before the introduction of Italian rochets and cottas in the nineteenth century.

receiving the persons who came to seek his help, paying also short visits to the members of his flock in the evening. He never had a house of his own and he gave to the relief of the poor every penny that he could spare. For forty years he worked in garrets, in cellars, in workhouses, and in prisons, making excursions to visit his flock scattered over several English counties. His care extended to the British colonies in America, and it is a singular fact that for some years the only Englishman who continued to exercise any authority in the United States was this now frail and aged bishop.

His death was hastened by the Gordon riots of 1780, when Roman Catholic chapels and houses were systematically wrecked, and the bishop just escaped from the clutches of a fanatic mob through the energy of a priest who with great difficulty persuaded him to leave his rooms near the Sardinian embassy. He died in London on January the 12th, 1781. The last word which he was heard to utter was the word 'charity'.

Of his numerous writings two at least should be mentioned. His Meditations for Every Day in the Year form a book of strict and sober piety which raises the author to the first rank of English devotional writers, and his Garden of the Soul is a little guide for Christians 'living in the world'. Since the death of Challoner the Garden of the Soul has been mutilated, expanded, and even deliberately falsified.1 But in its original form it is still the proof, as it was once the model, of what was called 'the old religion'. The generations which it trained were separated by deep differences from the paths afterwards favoured by Cardinal Wiseman and Cardinal Manning. And we can judge of

1 Among the latest editions is that published by the Anglican 'Society of SS. Peter and Paul'. In this edition there is added to the Litany of our Lady of Loretto the words 'Queen conceived without original sin' and 'Queen of the most holy Rosary', neither of which clauses appears even in the last edition, the tenth, issued by Bishop Challoner.

these old English Roman Catholics not only by the prayers which they recited but by the fact that all their bishops in their official Protestation to the Government in 1789 added their signatures to the words 'We acknowledge no infallibility in the Pope '.1 What wonder is it that in the subsequent onrush of Ultramontanism the hereditary Roman Catholics of England were regarded as unprogressive, anti-Roman, and anti-Papal ? 2

It was into this quiet backwater of ancient piety that there came great ripples from the wreck in France.

At the outbreak of the Revolution the Church of France was in a condition of belated feudalism. The bishops numbered one hundred and thirty, not counting the five bishops of Corsica. Their blood was of the bluest, and their names were historic. They united elegance with dignity, and they moved in universities, in parliaments, and in embassies. Many of them were benevolent and very few appear to have been bad. But they had no new Bossuet, or Pascal, or Fénelon. The whole of Christianity was insolently challenged, and all these bishops could not produce a David to defend it. And the monks, especially the ancient orders, were smitten with spiritual paralysis. The Benedictines of St. Maur had indeed continued their literary work; but as a rule the monasteries had kept the wealth and abandoned the industry of better days. And clinging to the Church, feeding on the Church, were the holders of simple benefices', sinecures, abbots, priors, chaplains, prebendaries, parasites who did nothing but

1 For a fuller quotation from this remarkable 'Protestation', see app. note 16, p. 268.

2 E. S. Purcell, Life of Cardinal Manning, vol. ii, p. 88 (Macmillan & Co., London, 1895).

A luminous account of the state of the French Church immediately before and during this time of crisis is given by W. H. Jervis, The Gallican Church and the Revolution (Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., London, 1892).

amuse themselves. The scandals of the court of Louis XV and the luxury of noblemen and prelates made the Church a prey to the gibes of Voltaire, the hallucinations of Rousseau, and the contempt of the people. It is a striking proof of the goodness of many of the parochial clergy that in the next generation there remained so many Frenchmen who had not bowed the knee to Baal.

Blow after blow was aimed at the Church. In 1789 the Assembly began by confiscating all ecclesiastical property and reducing all the bishops and clergy to the position of ill-paid salaried servants of the State, and we imagine the thrill which passed through the ranks of these baronial prelates when the word fell from the lips of Mirabeau. Then in 1790 the religious orders were suppressed, and under the pretext of restoring the primitive Church the 'Civil Constitution of the Clergy' was made law. The number of bishops was reduced to eighty-three, the number of new departments in France, all chapters were suppressed, and the boundaries of parishes were altered. And that the Church might be absorbed by the State, the bishops and parish priests were henceforth to be elected by the people, not simply the faithful laity, but the persons of any religion or no religion who elected the civil officials. Incumbents were to be canonically instituted by their bishop, the bishop by his metropolitan, and the Pope's jurisdiction quietly eliminated. The law overstepped itself. All the bishops, except four, and the majority of the clergy, rallied to the side of the Pope and refused to take the required oath of obedience to the civil Constitution.1

1 The most notable of the Constitutional bishops was Henri Grégoire, Bishop of Blois, who ruled his diocese with exemplary zeal from 1791 to 1801. He was a convinced Republican. His book, Les Ruines de PortRoyal-des-Champs, contains an interesting chapter dealing with the severe morality of the Dutch Jansenists and the laxity of their opponents in giving absolution to 'immondes créatures livrées au libertinage'. He was a man of fearless courage. During the Terror he not only said Mass daily but wore his episcopal dress in the streets.