The £6 13s. 4d. for serving the cure. There are in that parish sixteen Protestant families. Shane Lishawe and Walter Fitzgerald, both Mass-priests, frequent that parish and say Mass there. Leixlipe. The church and chauncel are ruinous. tithes are impropriate, worth ... per annum. Mr. Gerrott Whyte is farmer; Thomas Keatinge, clerk, is curate. For serving the cure he hath £4 per annum. All the parishioners, except one or two families, are recusants. 66 Confie. The church and chauncel are in good repair. The tithes, being worth ... per annum, are impropriate, held by Mr. Fagan of Feltrim. The said Keatinge is curate; for serving the cure he hath £4 per annum. All the parishioners are recusants. "Donacamper. The church and chauncel are in reasonable good repair. The tithes are impropriate, worth per annum, held by Mr. Allen, of St. Wolston's; the said Keatinge is curate. "Trisledillon. [No returns.] 66 Straffan. The body of the church is ruinous; the chauncel is well covered, but wants glazing and necessary ornaments. The tithes, being worth £36 per annum, are impropriate, belonging to Mr. James Duffe of Dublin, merchant. Edward Pierse, clerk, is vicar there, whose vicarage there is worth £12 per annum. There are not above ten persons that frequent divine service in that parish. "Teagtoe. No returns.] 66 Laraghbrine. The church is in good repair, but the roof of the chauncel is uncovered, The tithes are worth £100 per annum, belonging to Mr. John Parker, prebend of Mynothe; the foresaid Thomas Keatinge is vicar there, the same being worth £10 per annum. All the parishioners are recusants. "Kildroght. [No returns.] "Killadowan. [No returns.] 66 Kinneigh. The church and chauncel are altogether ruinous. The great tithes, being worth £18 per annum, belong to the Lord Bishop of Kildare and the Vicars Choral of St. Patrick's. All the parishioners are recusants. James Kean, clerk, is vicar there, his vicarage being worth £9 per annum; John Walshe, clerk, serves the cure for him, for which he hath £4 per annum. "LAUNCELOT DUBLIN". 86 THE SECOND EVE. A CYNICAL philosopher might ask the self-evolving hierophants are be, by the way, but a legitimate conclusion from their own first premiss, that "incredulity is the beginning of wisdom". Our imaginary philosopher himself would be the last person to expect a more satisfactory parry to his cruel hit. His question answered itself; between Catholicity and pyrrhonism there is no medium. Mid the darkness, then, that covers the earth, and the mist the people, we look around for a suitable oasis whereon to rest while we apply our principles. The star of Jacob has arisen to guide our path; the Catholic world is all astir; "ipse dies pulchro distinguitur ordine rerum"; and we are compelled to follow in the wake of Melchior, Gaspar, and Balthassar, over the dreary desert, on to the Cave of Bethlehem! Here at once is recognized the second great epoch in the theological history (so to speak) of man. The old order is reversed; the "first-born of every creature comes to new-create man's first creation, and the mercy of the second seasons the justice of the first. This is no prosopopoeia; we are in presence of the Second Adam; and we see thus early the force of the doctrinal truth of St. Paul's antitheses in his epistle to the Romans and his first epistle to the Corinthians. But does not this fact immediately force upon our observation another one, not inconsequential, because necessarily correlative? Another syncresis is presented in the person of the second Eve,-" They found the Child with Mary". On reading the 15th verse of Genes. iii. with this simple sentence, the inseparable connection of the two contrasts, alluded to, becomes evident. We assert then, in the first place, that there is no doctrinal point more strongly affirmed by Tradition than the antithesis between the first and the second Eve. This will lend additional interest to a further consideration as to the natural consequences of such antithesis. As to the bibliolaters to whom, in the beginning of this article, we adverted, we merely say here" tua res agitur paries cum proximus ardet". But to men of " High Church" tastes we might say: Give up at present the thought of reviving the dreams of Usher; do not declare Rome the intruder, and Augustine, sent from thence, a schismatic; feel your way; instead of basing your apostolical foundations merely upon a vague text of St. Paul, or an epigram of Martial, let us appeal to those of whom we all boast as the parent stock-let us call up the spirits of the mighty dead who witnessed for Christianity in the first two or three centuries; we may all become syncretists for the nonce, and hear what they have to say, and see how far we are their kinsmen in the matter. If we take the patristic literature of the prae-Nicene period, the predominant, substantive idea of the Blessed Virgin is universally this: she is the Second Eve. In one of the latest flowers of his own golden anthology, Dr. Newman justly calls this the 10 the "rudimental teaching of antiquity"; and indeed, for didactical Eve. And this is simply and solely the Immaculate Conception. 66 In referring to the Fathers, we select passages to be reckoned non numero sed pondere"; and will but indicate the substantive sense in each, referring our readers to the originals. St. Justin M. (A.D. 120—165), Tryph. 100; Irenaeus (120200), adv. haer. iii. 22, 34; Tertullian (160-240), De Carn. Christ. 17. These three fathers represent respectively Palestine, Asia Minor and Gaul, Africa and Rome. Justin speaks of the Virgin as the means whereby the work of the serpent was undone. Irenaeus, the disciple of Polycarp, who was the intimate associate of St. John, says that the Virgin was "to the whole human race the cause of salvation". The testimony of Tertullian is to the same effect,—that Mary "blotted out" Eve's fault, etc. As Dr. Newman, in his answer to the "Eirenicon", points out, these fathers speak of the Virgin not as a mere physical instrument, but as an active agent and responsible cause, co-operating in the privileges of her personal sanctity, as well as in the privileges of her dignity as Mother of God. In Justin and Tertullian we have witnesses of the received doctrine in the East and West. That this doctrine should be found by them extended over so extensive an area before the year 200, so similar in all its parts, so complete in its unity, is an evidence of its apostolical origin. In matter of Tradition, the earlier the testimony, the more valuable and weighty it is; and in the whole range of prae-Nicene literature there is nothing that can be brought to impinge on the testimony of these fathers, but everything to corroborate it. St. Cyril of Jerusalem (315-386) says that life came from the Virgin as death came through Eve. (Cat. xii.) St. Ephrem, the Syrian, gives testimony to the same effect (Op. Syr. ii. p. 317-8), and also describes (Op. iii. p. 607) Mary as the agency whereby we are "translated from death to life". St. Epiphanius is witness for Palestine and Egyt for the fourth century. Commenting on the antitheses in the title and office of the first and the second Eve, this great Father does not hesitate to say: "Eve became a cause of death to man,...and Mary a cause of life" (Haer. 78). St. Jerome, too, witnesses for the fourth and beginning of the fifth centuries. There is hardly one of his didactical works bearing ever so remotely on our subject, that will not be found replete with such sayings as: "Death by Eve, life by Mary"; "by one woman death, by one woman life", etc.; so that the reader could almost fancy himself in the midst of St. Paul's fifth chapter to the Romans. This testimony of St. Jerome is cosmo |