Fabiola : or, The church of the catacombs - Digital Repository Services

struck him, no ra.itter how nnjnst the blow might be, for the
hand that inflicted tin 1
punishment was the baud of his country,
and although, perchance, tears were mingled with the kiss, it
was, nevertheless, the kiss of love. Exile could not banish
from his heart the image that his love had enshrined there, and
in sorrow he prayed that happier days might dawn upon the
land he loved so well, and that he might no longer be a stranger
in his father's halls. He loved her much with the love of re-
gret for the days gone by ;
he loved her, 'most of all, with the
love of desire for the days to come. In the heart of the English
Catholic the present and the future are inseparably wound up
with the past, for, when our minds wander back through the
long vista of 1800 years to the days of Peter, and when we place
modern events side by side with the foundation of Catholicity,
it seems indeed but yesterday, and England, through all her
length and breadth, was bright and blazing with the light of the
brave old faith. Her cathedrals and her minsters had their altars
and the presence of their God ; and her rich lands were richer
still, and her teeming fields were still more fertile, when the
seed that was cast into them had been blessed by the hands of
her monks. It seems indeed but yesterday, and the abbeys
that are now in ruins, or the habitations of the beasts of the
field, were alive with holy men and as the ; gentle evening
sun would sink to rest, the notes of their vesper hymn would
steal along the smiling valley, and whisper to the weary husbandman
of heaven and of rest and the ; brawny hand was
none the less manly because, as those sweet sounds would fall
upon his ear, it was raised to sign himself with the sign of
faith. In those good old times, if old age found the poor old
man unprovided for, or if poverty surprised him, there were
asylums where he might find refuge and rest, and those asylums
were not parish workhouses. If sickness had laid him
low, he was not thrown upon the tender mercies of a parish
doctor ; but his languid eye would fall upon the soft and gen-
the cross before him, and the vested priest followed on behind,
and the dirge was sung, and the Mass was said, and they laid
him in the ground with a careful and reverent hand, and they
planted the cross above the place of his rest ; and though he
was but a poor man, they remembered his soul for many a
day as that of a brother who had gone
seems, indeed, but yesterday, and England had saints for her
THE TWO VICTORIES.
before them. Oh ! it
kings, saints for her bishops, saints in every grade
of her society; and the heart of the English Catho-
lic warms within him as he thinks of the days
gone by as he remembers the glories of St. Edward the Confessor
and St. Edmund the Martyr as he murmurs the name
of St. Thomas of Canterbury. St. Wilfred of York, and St.
John of Beverley as he thinks with pride of St. Ansehn, St.
Dunstan, St. Edmund Bich, the Venerable Bede, and the hosts
of saints whom England has given to heaven. He thinks of
the good old times when England was in truth "merrie England,"
and he weeps for the days when she could support her
poor without consigning them to a workhouse without tearing
in twain those whom God had made one. He weeps for
the days when " Westminster Abbey would fill without a coronation
;" for the days when countless thousands knelt to
worship God in York Minster ; for the days when every village
had its church, every church its altar, and every
altar was
blessed by the presence of its God. He thinks of these things,
and he cannot but- weep that they should have passed away ;
for, alas ! pass away they did. Tyranny and '
lust were seated on the throne of Edward the
Confessor ; and because their vices and Catholicity could not be
reconciled, they strove their best to smother the faith of ages.
They scattered the relics of St. Thomas of Canterbury to the
winds of heaven, and placed apostates and renegades in his
arcniepiscopal chair. They did then what they would do now,
if thev dared : they-drove the monk from the monastery, and
sent the pure nnd oonsearnted virgin of Christ forth into *
world that she had solemnly foresworn. They throw down the
altar, and put out the lamp of the sanctuary. They desecrated
the temples that had been built for the worship of the one true
God, and the mighty piles which had so often echoed the hymn
of praise were left mere material fabrics bodies without a soul.
The grand old temples of our fathers were left, with nothing of
a church about them but the name and ; now-a-days, as the
gaping sight-seer wanders into them, he inquires in astonishment
for what end they were built. He sees not what their
use can be. He sees St. Wilfred of York and St. John of Bev-
erley looking down upon him from the grand old stained-glass
windows of York Minster ; and he knows very well that they
were not of his "persuasion," and that he or they are intruders.
He cannot conceal from himself the fact that they were
looking down from the very same spot hundreds of years before
his religion was invented, and that, therefore, the presumption
of right is in their favor, to say nothing of possession. For
many a year the rack, the knife, and the gibbet were the lot of
those who clung to the faith of their fathers in England. There
were times when the very existence of Catholicity in England
appeared to depend on some one individual, some sainted
bishop, or some hunted, persecuted priest, and then all the
efforts of her enemies would be concentrated upon his capture.
With fiendish jibes and hardened hearts they would lead him
to the scaffold, thinking to quench in his blood the last spark
of the faith, but forgetting, in the blindness of their hearts,
that the blood of the martyrs has ever been the fruitful seed of
the Church, and as they spilt his blood, it fell, indeed, upon the
feeble flickering flame of the faith, but it fell not to extinguish
it. No ; as the martyr's blood trickled drop by drop from the
executioner's knife, it fed, with its heaven-born fuel, that
flickering flame, and again it blazed forth ; again, phoenix-like,
it sprang into a new existence from its own ashes, and the faith
tle nun flitting round his bed of pain like some sweet spirit
from a better land. If perchance his course was run, he went
his way right cheerfully. In those days there was a heaven
for poor Englishmen as well as for rich ones, and they did not
throw him into the grave like some dead of Peter and of Eome laughed its enemies to scorn. For three
dog, but they bore
hundred long years, sufferings, penal laws, disabilities, and
every persecution that heresy and religious rancor could devise,
were heaped upon the English Catholics. But these
things have now begun to pass away too. The cloud that
has so long enveloped the mountain's top is breaking at last.
Within the last thirty years a wonderful movement has taken
place in the English Church a movement calculated to
fill every Catholic heart with feelings of gratitude for
the past and joyous anticipations for the future. Many of the
best, purest, and most learned of the Protestant establishment
have left, and are daily leaving, the wreck upon which they
were sailing, and are scrambling, as best they may, on board
the bark of Peter, but too glad to escape with the loss of every-
thing else. These conversions come before us as a great fact,
and, perhaps, we think no more about them. Did each one
come before us in its own individual bearings, we should, probably
find a romance, that is, a romance of real life, attached
to almost every one of them. The story of Edwin Stanhope,
which we have told you in this little work, is the story iu a
higher or lower degree, according to different circumstances,
of almost every conversion which happened in these countries.
We would fain hope that few are to be found so harsh and un-
forgiving as Mr. Stanhope was ; and you yourself, dear read-
er, perhaps, know many whose sufferings have been scarcely
inferior to those of poor Edwin. If you do not, we could tell
you many such a tale. We could teU you of young and delicate
girls driven from their homes, and exposed to all the dangers
of the world, for daring to do as poor Edwin did. We
could take you into places where, perhaps, yon are seldom
wont to go, and engaged in low, ay, even in menial offices in
offices far below their merit or their educational capacities, we
could point out to you men who have sacrificed station, prospects,
and everything which the world could offer them, and
are obliged to earn their very daily bread in drudgery and toil
such as you little conceive. Yes, we could tell you many such
tides, and in our own simple way we have endeavored i
you one of them. Yet simple, unromantic, matter-of-fact
though it be, we would fain persuade ourselves that our storv