knowledge learned in youth by college training, under a professor, both from the class treatise, and from different sorts of sermons, composed and delivered by the pupils themselves?-By diminishing the difficulty, would not this course increase the number of sermons, and enable the young priest to ascend the pulpit with as much humble confidence as he enters the confessional? Are there in Ireland leisure and opportunities abundant to complete on the mission an education in sacred eloquence? Should it be said, on the contrary, that Ireland is very unlike France, that faith lives amongst us; that there is little necessity of sounding the dispositions, or of carefully guaging the degrees of hostility or indifference to the faith in our chapels; that the old instruction in sacred eloquence, which was good enough for France before Voltaire and the revolution, is good enough for us? Certainly there is a very great difference between Ireland and large portions of France; and under a clergy as effective as the present, Ireland will never have either her Voltaire, or Voltaire's revolution. Yet, it must be said manifestly, there has been a great advance within the last twenty years in the education of the Irish Catholics generally; language, if not learning, has improved even in secluded rural districts; and in the large towns, or wherever bad books circulate extensively, the arms to which the French priest is now trained, would not perhaps be altogether unnecessary. It might be most useful, in a word, for the young priest to have the collected experience of a country like France, that has been tried so severely, and has combated so gloriously. If Ireland has kept the faith firmly, she should neglect no means of keeping it for ever.

Having now given a general view of M. Hamon's book, we cannot proceed to M. Van Hemel, without noticing what appears to us a serious defect, not in the work itself, but in the place which it is to hold in the college course. As we collect from the preface, it is intended exclusively for theological students. Except the ordinary rhetoric course, conducted, it is true, by ecclesiastics, and

"Aujourd'hui l'action du Prêtre rencontre dans plusieurs une masse de préjugés, de prétentions, de doute et d'indifférence, accumulés par les long efforts de l'irreligion dans le temps qui nous ont précédés."-Lettre Pastorale de Mons. Affre, 1841.

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receiving from them an ecclesiastical tendency, there is no special instruction on sacred eloquence, or any branch of it, until the student commences his theology. If this be

is it the best? In a new scheme of oratorical studies for clerics, are Demosthenes and Cicero, Aristotle and Quintilian, to reign sole models and arbiters of eloquence, during the most susceptible period of the student's life? Wisely the general practice of seminaries has retained these great masters of the "speech divine;" but would it not be well to give them colleagues; to illustrate their principles in another sphere; to show the young student that Mount Sion and St. Peter's give wider range and nobler flights than the forum or the acropolis; and that to acquire the " grave yet brilliant style of oratory,

recom

mended by His Holiness Pope Pius IX., he has competent masters and models in the Church? Something of this kind, would seem desirable, the mode and particulars to be determined by circumstances. It is a remarkable part in the plan of M. Van Hemel's instructions, of which we are now to give a brief notice.

M.Van Hemel has had charge, during the last thirty-two years, of this branch of instruction in the seminary of Mechlin. Last summer he published his treatise. It would have appeared, he tells us, long before, had it not been for a controversy of some standing, viz. whether a course of sacred eloquence, for the philosophers was sufficient, or whether it should be continued for the divines. This controversy, His Eminence, the Cardinal Archbishop of Mechlin decided by the statutes of his seminary. There are now two classes; the matter being apportioned to each according to its standing and acquirements. During the two years of philosophy, there is an elementary course of sacred eloquence, which includes the theory of the art, the general principles of eloquence applied to preaching, some exercises on recitation and delivery, and a few original sacred compositions. This course occupies two lectures per week, an hour each; there being during the first two

"Ministri recte tractantes verbum veritatis, et non seipsos sed Christum crucifixum prædicantes sanctissimæ nostræ religionis dogmata et præcepta, juxta Catholicæ Ecclesiæ et Patrum doctrinam gravi et splendido orationis genere clare aperteque annuntient."— Eucyc. SS. P. Pii IX. Nov. 9, 1846.

months of each year, a preliminary revision of the same treatise of rhetoric, which the students had read before they commenced philosophy.

"To prevent this preliminary exercise from becoming too abstract or uninteresting, I always accompany it with an explanation of one of the most remarkable and most regular productions of the French pulpit. I point out the exemplification of all the precepts that we have been revising, and I descend to even the minutest details of æsthetics. I even refresh their memories in the rules of grammar as well as of rhetoric, with all the patient accuracy of a professor explaining to his pupils an oratorical chef-d'œuvre of Demosthenes or of Cicero."-Introduction, p. 9.

An admirable programme, if the students know French, as well as they generally, indeed, always know Latin or Greek, before they are introduced to Cicero or Demosthenes. If the first difficulties of the French language are surmounted, and the pupil is prepared in some way to appreciate the beauties of a foreign style and expression, there could be no better system of elementary instruction in sacred eloquence, wherever French is learned, than a few sermons of Bourdaloue or Massillon studied on the plan of M. Van Hemel. But if the sublimity and grace of their oratory are shackled with all the points of elementary grammar, they can no more teach, we fear, the precepts, or infuse the spirit of eloquence, than the great traveller could stretch his limbs when he first awoke in Lilliput.

The remainder of the two philosophy years is so employed by M. Van Hemel that his whole work is studied. It consists of three parts, the two first being in general matter and order the same as M. Hamon's; the third is a history of sacred eloqence, including a dissertation on the eloquence of the scriptures. We should have stated that during the first year, he also gives private instruction on delivery during recreation time, three hours a week, to batches of his pupils, ten or twelve at a time. This completes the first course of sacred eloquence taught to the philosophers.

The second course for the divines consists "of the practical part, and all that regards immediate preparation for preaching; the composition of whole sermons: the application or more developed exposition of the precepts of eloquence; and the theory and practice of catechetical in

struction both of children and of adults." Thus the seminary of Mechlin keeps up a course of instruction on preaching from the time the boy leaves the rhetoric form until the priest receives his mission.

It is a delicate thing to offer an opinion on the studies of a college with which one is not intimately acquainted. This system at Mechlin appears complete; still would it not admit of improvement? The whole work is intended, it seems, (p. 9) for the philosophy students; now, does it not appear extremely doubtful whether such a treatise could be best learned by them? In substance it is the same as M. Hamon's, but rather more developed and comprehensive. Look over the summary of M. Hamon's given above. Granted that there is nothing in the first part of it too advanced for the diligence of the young philosopher, can he profit much by the second, which descends to theological details of which he is supposed not to know much more than the catechism; on which certainly he has received no professional instruction? We should prefer a system in which, at least, the second and third parts of M. Van Hemel's treatise are reserved for theological students; being convinced that, if a few questions which they had already heard discussed in the searching style of Catholic school divinity, were afterwards proposed in a popular discourse by the most accomplished among themselves, far greater benefit would be conferred on the whole class, and a more clear and certain mode of dispensing their acquisitions, and of combining knowledge and eloquence, would be opened, than by almost any amount of rhetorical instruction given to the philosophy students.

Our two authors, like all their predecessors on the same subject, admit that here precept avails little without practice. M. Hamon recommends and enforces five sorts of exercise: the delivery of portions of sacred eloquence selected from the great orators; discourses, or parts of discourses, composed by the students themselves during their vacation or other leisure hours: a discourse on some historical subject in the Scriptures or the Lives of the Saints,proposed only the evening before; catechetical instruction according to the practical method of Devie, bishop of Belley; or, in fine, the announcing of festivals, or the giving of admonitions-the former from the Ritual of the diocese, the latter from the Méthode de Besançon.

One practice is omitted, or at least has escaped our no

tice in reading these works-the delivery of sermons by all the students more as a religious than as a class exercise Where this custom prevails, the sermon is preached, on Sunday, before some hundred students, many of them not the preacher's classfellows, in the prayer-hall, from the pulpit, in presence of superiors who are known to regard it, not as a literary recreation, but rather as a function which may sometimes decide their opinion on the preacher's fitness for the ecclesiastical state: there may be some abuses, but none so great as not to leave this custom, all due deduction being made, still far the best that could be established as the common collegiate exercise. In a large community it carries out, in a great measure, for all the students the object of that statute of the Seminario Pio, which provides, that" some theological students, qualified for the duty, shall explain the holy Gospels at Mass, from the pulpit on Sundays We never knew a respectable student, preaching in the circumstances above described, who was not anxious to exert all his powers, nor any student who was not afraid not to acquit himself decently. Whatever system might, therefore, be adopted for philosophers or for theologians, or for both, the public Sunday sermons, preached by all the senior theologians, are undoubtedly the most suitable and the most useful conclusion of the common collegiate education in sacred eloquence.

Reviewing then the French and the Belgian plans, it would seem to us that the principle of the latter, sanctioned by the Cardinal Archbishop of Mechlin-namely, the division of the course of sacred eloquence into two parts-is in the main desirable. But we doubt whether M. Van Hemel does not expect too much from students in philosophy; or at least whether what he expects from them could not be more speedily and more efficiently learned in a more advanced period of their course. Nothing can be farther from our minds than to find fault with the practical course of either M. Hamon or Van Hemel. On the contrary, we are convinced that each is best suited to the college in which it is established. If we have questioned them at all, it is rather in the abstract, or with reference to their introduction into other colleges.

Let us suppose, then (had we the management of concerns so important), a class instructed in the ordinary course of classics, especially in the orators and in the rhetorical works, whether of Cicero, of Quintilian, or of Aris