discuss, but affirms, which not only says, | but sings," he bursts out into the profession of his own faith in the exact words of the Nicene Creed. He has gone back-that is to say, not only from the Council of 1870 to that of 1864-from that to the Council of 1563; but he has gone back, for the substance and the symbol of his belief, from the sixteenth to the fourth century-from mediævalism to primitive Christianity-from Trent to Nicæa. Loyson's theological position is very likely to be misunderstood. "Neither a Protestant to Protestants, nor a (Roman) Catholic to (Roman) Catholics," one writes, "he is continually disappointing some people's expectations." And the writer by no means claims that in all points the Church of England, or its daughter in America, accepts or adopts the Père's views. But we are learning the larger lesson of intercommunion, that insists upon unity only in essentials. And it is true, on the one hand, that the Père only teaches, "as necessary to salvation," what we believe to be the ancient faith of the Creeds, as proved by holy Scripture; and on the other, that he repudiates not only the doctrines of modern Rome-Papal Infallibility, the Immaculate Conception, and the Tridentine additions to the ancient Creeds, but that he insists upon disciplinary reform; in the unenforced rarity of private confession; the circulation of the holy Scriptures; the saying of the service in the tongue understood by the people; the liberty of the clergy to marry; communion in both kinds, etc., etc.

Loyson's marriage is a significant fact and feature of his life, the more so because its signification has been grossly and utterly misunderstood. Believing, as the writer does, that his power and prominence as a reformer would have been enormously enhanced had he remained unmarried, yet the insinuation that a desire for marriage controlled and shaped his separation from the Roman priesthood and from his conventual order, is the most gratuitous lie. The jeu d'esprit of the multitude of Frenchmen who "disbelieve in God, but do believe in the celibacy of the clergy," may be true; but Loyson does not represent the other extreme of belief in the marriage of the priesthood before his faith in God. It was years after he had been driven out of the Carmelite order that he married-years after his excommunication by Rome. Dissolved from all privileges or recognition as priest or monk by the act of the Church which expelled him, he felt himself discharged alike

from the conventual and the priestly vow; and it was, beyond peradventure, in the judgment of all who knew Loyson, a deliberate and distinct decision of the man, that he could better illustrate his conviction of the danger and the injury of an unmarried priesthood, if he himself married. To him, apart from the historical fact of the accompa nying and inevitable corruptions of enforced celibacy, a married priesthood is a necessity to a reunion and identification of the church with the state, and of the clergy with society -a necessity to do away with that separate caste which has undomesticated religion. And there are, perhaps, no finer passages of outbreaking fervor in his addresses than those in which he deals with this question.

And yet this is to be insisted on. Hyacinthe Loyson felt, most intensely of all, the corruption of the faith, and while, in matters of discipline, he has urged and argued and introduced reforms, a married priesthood is not the only one. The freedom and infrequency of private confession, the distribution of the holy Scriptures in the tongue of the people, the translation of public offices into the vernacular, the giving of the cup to the laity, the election of bishops by the clergy-these are among the disciplinary reforms. Behind them and beneath them lies the restoration of the ancient faith. As Loyson writes, in his programme of Catholic reform: "The Catholic religion is essentially beneficent because it is divinely true. The errors which have stolen into its teaching, the abuses which have marred its practice, have not altered its divine elements. We have nothing to add to nor to take away from the authentic symbols which express the faith-the Creed of the Apostles and the Creed of Nicæa."

Loyson's nature is a rare combination of affection and principle. His is "the charity that rejoices in the truth." The one-sided and small folk, who cannot hold much love with much truth, and if they have a little truth have no love, or if they have a little love have no truth, misunderstand such a man entirely. While he was still in the Roman communion, he held and advocated views about the separated bodies of Protestants which hardly found favor at court The following passages from a sermon 2: the reception of a Protestant lady into the Roman Church attest this:

"There is a fundamental distinction, without which it is not possible to deal justly by the com munions separated from the Catholic Church, an the members of those communions. Every relig

ious system contains within itself two opposite elements: the negative element, which makes it a

schism, and most commonly a heresy; and the positive element, which preserves for it a greater or less share in the ancient heritage of Christianity. Not only distinct but hostile, they are very near to each other, even in their conflicts; darkness and light, life and death, mingle without being confounded, and there results from it all what I would call the deep and intricate mystery of the life of error. For my part, I do not render to error the undeserved honor of supposing it able to live of its own life, breathe by its own breath, and nourish with its own substance souls which are not without virtues, and nations not without greatness! Protestantism, as such, is that negative element which you have renounced, and to which, with the Catholic Church, you have said, Anathema. But Protestantism has not been the only thing in your past religious life; by the side of the side of its negations have been its affirmations, and, like a savory fruit inclosed in a bitter husk, you have been in possession of Christianity from your cradle. fore coming to us, you were a Christian by baptism, validly received, and when the hand of the minister sprinkled the water on your brow with those words of eternal life, I baptize thee in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,' it was Jesus Christ himself who baptized you. The hand is nothing,' says Saint Augustine; 'be it Peter's or Paul's, the hand is nothing-it is Christ that baptizes.' It was Christ who betrothed you, who received your faith and pledged to you His own. depth of your moral nature, that sacred part of noble souls which instinctively shrinks from error, the Word has consecrated to Himself, that He might present it to Himself as a chaste virgin,' reserving it for heaven.

#

Be

The

"The free exercise of private judgment, under the spirit of which you have grown up, is doubtless the source of numberless errors; but-thank God again for this-besides the Protestant principle, there is also the Christian principle among Protestants; besides private judgment there is the action of the supernatural grace received in baptism, and of that mysterious influence of which Saint Paul speaks when he says: We have the mind of Christ,' and of which Saint John said: 'Ye have an unction from the Holy One, and ye know all things.'

With all this, he held strongly to the distinction, even to the separating points and principles, of church order and authority. In his latest Conférence, he says:

"Whatever may be the ties which bind me to many Protestants,-and these ties are close,-whatever may be my esteem for that which truly evangelical Protestantism has of Christianity, of freedom, and of fruitfulness, I am not, I never shall be, Protestant. I think I may add, without being a prophet, that if our country has not become so within the last three hundred years, neither religious effort nor political calculations will ever bring back this possibility, vanished without hope of return. France will be Catholic-reformed Catholic, in the sense of the gospel and of liberty, but she will always be Catholic, or she will cease to be."

He shared and shares most strongly the conviction of the first Protestant minister in Paris, M. de Pressense, as to the necessity of the historic Church to reform and rule

the religion of France.* Prelacy and the primacy are as clearly scriptural and primitive to Loyson, as the Papacy is modern, and false, and fatal.

What we have quoted from Loyson has the double disadvantage, first, that he speaks to eye and not to ear, with the loss of that rise and fall of power in his tones, like the west wind blowing over the strings of the responsive harp; and secondly, that even to the eye he speaks through the distorting medium of a translation. But even so he is great, for he is not merely an orator. In voice, in articulation, in choice of words in his own incomparable language, and in every natural grace, he has the gift of oratory; but his sermons and conferences are not born from the end of his tongue amid the stir of popular assemblies; they are not merely conceived of the fancy and begotten by the emotions; they pass through the wondrously fertile chambers of his imagination, and over the warm surface of his kindled heart, and out of the portal of a "golden mouth." But behind all this, they are mighty achievements of study and thought and toil. No man can read them and not realize that the fire of their burning and illuminating words, lighted almost by inspiration, is fed and furnished by an amount of material gathered from remote and various store-houses-as well the collected coal of burned-out systems of philosophy and the old heathen poets, as the fuel found in the still green and living forests of contemporaneous thought. Plato, Confucius, Socrates, Voltaire, and Kant; the Dictionary of Philosophy, and the decisions of the Lambeth Conference, find their place among the references of his lectures. select from his latest publication a specimen of the line of the Père's thought and teaching, and of the power and purity of his style. In the first Conférence on Christianity and Natural Religion he says:

I

"These two so widely different states of natural religion, the French tongue expresses by two words, separated, the one from the other, in language by a consonant, in thought by an abyss-deism and the

*He quotes as sustaining his own opinion the words of the pastor E. de Pressensé, whom he calls one of the most distinguished spirits of Protestantism: "I am convinced that France will not receive the gospel, under the form of mere Protestantism. Protestantism may help to hasten a reform, greater and more effective, but it will never accomplish it alone. At every cost that must be born and developed in the bosom of Catholicism, on condition that Catholicism transform itself, and break with idolatrous and unbridled ultramontanism."

ism. To avoid the possible confusion of these two words, so nearly alike in pronunciation, we shall speak of deism and monotheism. Deism and monotheism are both religions of the twilight, if I may so say, with the difference which there is between the two twilights. If the evening twilight has certain characteristics in common with the twilight of the coming dawn, it has others that mark the difference between them. The eye sees on the hori zon, like a band of gold, or like draperies of purple, the light of a hearth-fire, not yet visible or just disappearing from sight; and yet what a difference! At dawn it is the trembling of all nature, with the unutterable élan of creation toward the visible source of life. A breeze passes over the earth, which carries to the east all its perfumes, all its songs. At sunset, on the contrary, a wearied wind touches the sun, and seems to fold its wings; the flowers droop upon their stems, the songs die out upon the nests. In the one case it is the sun which rises; it is the day which is coming; in the other it is the light which dies-it is the night that advances.

# *

*

"All idols are not cut out of stone, nor made of gold or of wood; there are others that are fashioned each day in the thoughts of men. These are spiritual idols-the most criminal, the most dangerous. The God of deism is of this class. "He has eyes and he sees not," as the Psalmist says. He wears, like a thick bandage over His reason, those general laws of the world to which He submits, thoughtless and inactive, and through which He distinguishes neither particular beings nor their individual acts. He is not like the God of the gospel, who feeds the birds of the air, who clothes with glory the lilies of the field, who knows the number of the hairs in our heads, and of the tears from our eyes, even as of the stars in the firmament; and who watches us with His clear-seeing justice to reward or to punish us. He has ears and heareth not. Voice of prayer and of love, joyous song of adoration, movement of the wings of ecstasy, tears falling one by one in night and silence, sound of choking sobs, piercing cry of

* Bound.

The

remorse or of grief, you have not mounted, you can never mount, to His ear! The deists have defined prayer as 'a soliloquy of the soul with itself. soul speaks and listens to itself, and in this illusory division of itself it finds at last the comfort and the strength which is wanting in its natural oneness, and which it would ask in vain of the grand deafness and dumbness of the Infinite. He has ears and hears not; He has a mouth and speaks not.' No, He has never replied to man within himself by one of those inarticulate, yet living, words, which, when once heard, can never be forgotten. All these are mystical illusions. God does not interfere by His grace in the secret and tremendous drama of the conscience, nor by the writers of His revelation and His prophecy in the ordinary life of mankind. Above all, He has no bowels of compassion or of tenderness, by which we used to believe the morning star has visited us from above.' How should He love us since He knows us not? How should He be father, since He is the All-Powerful? What

we must have is a God easily found, a God very simple, and, above all, very loving, a God who, without ceasing to be grand, and therefore mysterious, nevertheless humbled Himself even to us, and, having glorified poverty by being born in a stable, has made suffering divine by dying upon the cross."

Only God knows what shall be the issue of this man's life and work. But it cannot in the end be fruitless. His teaching, as his own striking figure has it, must be like the grain of wheat in the hand of the mummy: "When it has been sown in souls prepared to receive it, this grain of God will lift itself and grow, at once new and old; it will grow like the forest of Libanus; and the future and feed upon its fruit." shall sit, in joy and peace, under its shadow,

THAT in many parts of the South (and notably the State of Georgia) the labor-relations of the two races are adjusting themselves and working out a solution of the dreaded "negro problem" in a practical way, has been known to all observant residents or visitors. The confident prophecies of the croakers that Southern plantations would go to waste, and that nothing but ruin lay before us, have proved the merest bosh. The enormous increase in the cotton crop of the South alone shows that the colored people, as free laborers, have done well, for it is not to be disputed that they form very nearly the same proportion of the laborers in the cotton fields that they did when they were slaves. I do not wish to be understood as stating a proportion in

which free labor is to slave labor as the cotton crop since the war is to the cotton crop before the war. This is not true; the yield of cotton has been increased by other causes. But I do say that under no circumstances could worthless labor have produced the enormous increase in this crop.

In Georgia, the negro has adapted himself to his new circumstances, and freedom fits him as if it had been cut out and made for him. It is not true that the negroes have formed a restless, troublesome popalation, nor is it true that they are like a lot of huddled sheep, frightened at the approach of strange white men, in dread of the terrible Ku-klux. As far as I know, our philosophers have presented them in one or the other t

these phases, according as the writer wished to show the dread which is felt by the country of the negro, or the terror which his surroundings inspire in him. Nothing can be further from either of these ideas than the facts of the case; and when we come to look at these, we find the solution to the whole difficulty at our very doors.

To make this plain, I shall endeavor to give some idea of the home life of our colored people as it really exists, and shall, for my purpose, take a Middle Georgia plantation, and tell what the negroes are doing on it, and how they live. I shall confine myself to the colored man as a farmer, for the reason that the mass of colored people of whom little is known are farmers.

In most cases there has been an entire change in the plan upon which our Georgia lands are worked, the change being entirely in favor of "local self-government as opposed to centralization of power." It is true that in some rare instances large plantations are still worked under the direction of overseers, with labor hired for yearly, monthly, and daily wages, but, generally speaking, a tenant system prevails.

One of the first planters in Middle Georgia to divide his plantations into farms was Mr. Barrow, of Oglethorpe. The plantation upon which he now lives is the one which I wish to present as a fair exponent of negro tenant life in Georgia. This place contains about two thousand acres of land, and with the exception of a single acre, which Mr. Barrow has given to his tenants for church and school purposes, is the same size it was before the war. Here, however, the similarity ceases. Before the war everything on the place was under the absolute rule of an overseer (Mr. Barrow living then on another place). He it was who directed the laborers each day as to their work, and to him the owner looked for the well-being of everything on the place. Under him, and subject to his direction, the most intelligent and authoritative negroes were selected, whose duty it was to see that the overseer's orders were carried into effect. These head men, with us, were called foremen, and not drivers; in fact, though I was raised here in Georgia, my first acquaintance with the word driver, and the character which it presents in this connection, was had from one of Mayne Reid's tales. As will be seen by looking at the plot of the plantation, "as it was," all the negro houses were close together, forming "the quarter." The house in which the overseer lived was

close to the quarter, lying between the quarter and the stables. This was always distinguished as "the house," and I have so marked it on the plot. It will appear that this arrangement of the buildings was the best that could be made, giving, as it did, the overseer the best opportunity for overlooking the property under his control. This has all been so changed that the place would now hardly be recognized by one who had not seen it during the past sixteen years.

The transformation has been so gradual that almost imperceptibly a radical change has been effected. For several years after the war, the force on the plantation was divided into two squads, the arrangement and method of working of each being about the same as they had always been used to. Each of these squads was under the control of a foreman, who was in the nature of a general of volunteers. The plantation was divided into two equal parts, and by offering a reward for the most successful planting, and thus exciting a spirit of emulation, good work was done, and the yield was about as great as it had ever been.

Then, too, the

laborers were paid a portion of the crop as their wages, which did much toward making them feel interested in it. There was no overseer, in the old sense of the word, and in his place a young man lived on the plantation, who kept the accounts and exercised a protecting influence over his employer's property, but was not expected to direct the hands in their work. The negroes used to call him "supertender," in order to express their sense of the change.

This was the first change made, and for several years it produced good results. After a while, however, even the liberal control of the foremen grew irksome, each man feeling the very natural desire to be his own "boss," and to farm to himself. As a consequence of this feeling, the two squads split up into smaller and then still smaller squads, still working for part of the crop, and using the owner's teams, until this method of farming came to involve great trouble and loss. The mules were ill-treated, the crop was frequently badly worked, and in many cases was divided in a way that did not accord with the contract. I have been told an amusing incident which occurred on a neighboring plantation: A tenant worked a piece of land, for which he was to pay onefourth of the corn produced. When he gathered his crop, he hauled three loads to his own house, thereby exhausting the sup

colored men, who farm on a small scale, only two of them having more than one mule. Indeed, the first trouble in the way of dividing up the plantation into farms was to provide the new-made tenants with mules. Up to this time their contracts had been such that they plowed with mules belonging to Mr. Barrow, and very few had bought mules of their own. This trouble was met by selling them mules on credit, and though the experiment looked risky at the time, the mules were paid for in almost every case. After this, the location of the houses caused considerable inconvenience, and so it was determined to scatter them. When the hands all worked together, it was desirable to have all of the houses in a central location, but after the division into farms, some of them had to walk more than a mile to reach their work; then, too, they began to "want more elbow-room," and so, one by one, they moved their houses on to their farms. I have made a plot of the place "as it is," showing how the houses are distributed. Wherever there is a spring, there they settle, generally two or three near together, who have farms hard by. When no spring is convenient, they dig wells, though they greatly prefer the spring. A little bit of a darky, not much taller than the vessel he is carrying, will surprise you by the amount of water he can tote on his head. I have seen a mother and three or four children pulling along uphill from the spring, their vessels diminishing in size as the children do, until the last little fellow would carry hardly more than two or three cupfuls.

"Yes, sah; but hit never made no fourth; dere wasn't but dess my three loads made." Now, of course, this was an honest mistake, and while many equally honest and vexatious constantly occurred, I am constrained to say the tendency to divide on the same plan was frequent when there was no mistake. These and other troubles led to the present arrangement, which, while it had difficulties in the way of its inception, has been found to work thoroughly well. Under it our colored farmers are tenants, who are responsible only for damage to the farm they work and for the prompt payment of their rent. On the plantation about which I am writing, all of the tenants are

I suppose nothing like one of these settlements is to be found elsewhere than in Georgia. The dwelling-house is an ordinary log-cabin, twenty feet square, the chimney built of sticks and dabbed over with mud; then there is a separate kitchen, which, in architectural design, is a miniature of the house,-in size approaches a chicken-coop,-and is really ridiculous in its pretentiousness. Off to one side are the out-houses, consisting of a diminutive stable, barely large enough to pack a small mule in, and a corn-crib and fodder-house, equally imposing. Every tenant has a cow-most of them several; and there is one old man-Lem Bryant

who is quite a Job in this respect. There is no law requiring stock to be kept