were proven fact and chance had no side-alley for escape. And when it comes to matrimony, the whole thing is renewed under another name; for surely was there never the girl born who was a fit wife for the son of such a mother, while the finest man extant makes but a poor kind of care-taker for her daughter! So she perverts the great gift of love and the divine glory of maternity into a scourge and not a blessing, and weeps behind her mantle of self-made mourning because she has not the courage to believe nor the common sense to hope. She takes the hypothetical for the actual, and that which might possibly happen for that which is certain to come.

One of these timid people in an illness or a financial crisis is a sight to make the very gods weep out of pity for the miserable creatures they have made. The first faint symptoms of indisposition are the deadly forerunners of a fatal disease, and a more serious turn of the screw is the pinch from which is no escape. Just now a temporary discomfort in the throat is confirmed cancer in the belief of all timid possessors of a delicate larynx. They already feel the great bat's wings folding round them and smell the deadly scent of poppies and the fatal mandragora. So is it with all diseases; and it would be an interesting bit of statistics, could it be drawn up, which should show how many poor creatures have died of an epidemic and how many of fright, giving themselves the disease through the very fear of taking it. Is there not an Eastern apologue which tells how the Angel of Pestilence was questioned as to the ten thousand victims he had slain? And did he not answer, "Nay, Lord, I took but a thousand; the rest were slain by my friend Panic"? How many, too, have sunk into the deep waters of the Black River and been floated on to the ocean of eternity, for very paralysis of hope when the evil hour was upon them and they had just wetted their feet on the brink! They could, and they would, have stepped back to the solid shore; but they had no courage for the attempt, no energy to strike out to the land. waters closed over their bowed head, and they sobbed away their breath in the very supineness of terror, the very lethargy of hopeless fear. Death is like everything else—a foe to be fought, a wild beast to be kept at bay. They who contend with

The

most spirit live the greater number of days. The will to live and the determination not to die, make the most efficacious antidote against the poison of the "lethal dart." The hopelessness of fear is that poison itself.

So is it with the torment of fear during a financial crisis. There are men, and women too, God bless them! who, when the wolf prowls round the house door, open that door wide, issue boldly forth, and do battle with the hungry beast of poverty with any weapon that lies handy. If they cannot do this bit of work, they do that. If gold is not to be shoveled in by the scoopful, they manfully set themselves to pick up silver, nay, even copper, by the piece. If their cloth does not allow of a luxurious cloak, they content themselves with a skimped jacket. Come what may they have "a heart for every fate," and will not own themselves conquered. And these always succeed in the long-run. The pluck that braves danger and the energy that overcomes difficulties are the two pots of gold on which the rainbow rests. But the hysterical despair which folds its hands and weeps when a crash comes and the wolf howls near and ever nearer, which takes to its bed with the fever born of anxiety, with the softened fiber, the paralyzed nerves, also born of anxiety-what can you do with it? What can you say of it? Contempt is perforce mitigated by compassion; but what illimitable contempt you have for the weakness which cannot accept the consequences of, may be, a deliberate act of folly and miscalculation! The carter who drove his wagon into the rut, then shouted out to Hercules to come and help him to pry it out, is the prototype of these fainéants who ruin themselves by their carelessness or their folly, then tumble into a helpless mass like so many limp rags, and have to be upborne by their friends, who are unwilling to see them die. The world is full of these wretched apologies for men; and scarce a family exists which does not own, at the least, one among its members who is always coming to grief and falling back, like the stone of Sisyphus, from any safe ledge where he may have been lodged. Nothing can be done with him. By the united strength of the company a post has been found where flows a sufficiency of milk and honey for the remainder of his life. By some inexcusable act

of folly this post is lost, when the miserable being takes to his bed and lies there till he is lifted up by main force and set on his shaky legs again. Fear wraps him round as in a Nessus garment, and he can do nothing of himself against its fatal influence. But within a stone's throw lives a cheery, self-respecting little woman, who struggles and does not cry out; who masks her essential poverty with flimsy coverings of brave device; who confesses to no fear and submits to no vicarious torment; and who does not add to the smart of the thorns wherewith she is undeniably scratched the fear of asps and adders which are not to be seen, which may not exist at all, and which, if even they are there, are best met by courage, not by cowardice.

Fear and Hope-there they stand, the two presiding deities over men's minds. To the pessimist the former straddles all across the highway of life, formidable as Apollyon when he met, assaulted, and sought to destroy Christian; to the optimist Fear sinks into a dusky shadow of non-terrifying aspect, while Hope sings like a lark and shines like a star above his head. The pessimist, standing stock-still in his own past, sees naught but evil in every change of public feeling or private custom that has taken place since Plancus was his consul; the optimist forgets himself and looks both before and after, and before because he looks after. He sees where humanity stands to-day, and where it stood when the paleolithic man chipped his fints and learned to keep himself upright. He contrasts the times of the great Pharaoh, when slaves were held as machines, and not treated with so much humanity as we treat our beasts of burden, and says: "The term has not been reached. What has been will be, and those dead selves ever lie as stepping stones for higher things." The pessimist gives up all as lost when society seeks to readjust old conditions in accordance with new developments. He sees a reign of terror in every association of discontented have-nots, planning how to lift themselves into the charmed circle of the haves. Maddened with terror he calls aloud for staves and grapeshot as the best quietuses he knows; and when the optimist says: "Let be; let the discontented speak out and the wounded show their hurts," he accuses him of complicity with treason or of blindness to

danger, and predicts the armed and bloody revolution as a certainty like to-morrow's sun. Whenever fear reigns just judgment abdicates. No eyes see straight looking through these distorted lenses; and no rose is red, no grass is green, when viewed through smoked glass which shears his very rays from off the sun. We may be sure of this: fear is the arch enemy of truth, of happiness, of success. It is the lingering inheritance of the jungle and the plain, of savagery and social chaos, before law was evolved out of the dawning consciousness of justice, and the world was given up to the tyranny of might. Fear is not the attribute of a free man nor of a philosopher; it belongs to the slave and the child, the weakling who is forced to confess his own impotence in the presence of superior strength, and who has naught but craven submission to oppose to brutality. "While we live let us live," says the old Latin proverb. Good. But we do not live while we fear. We exist in a state of constant deliquescence; and when our heart fails us and our knees smite together we are practically only half alive, and by our own cowardice turn danger into death and fear into destruction.

E. LYNN LINTON.

TEMPORAL POWER AND THE PAPACY.

THE recent events at Rome, and the sympathy so generally shown toward Pope Leo XIII. on the occasion of his priestly Jubilee, have again called attention to the question of the temporal power of the pope, which by many had been judged a thing of the past. Emilio Castelar, in his article on the subject, published not long since in the "Fortnightly Review," may be taken as the exponent of this class of persons, and very fairly. He has a facile pen and ready speech, but this is not enough to guarantee a writer from going wide of the mark. Were Emilio Castelar not a Spaniard, that is, born and bred in the midst of a Catholic atmosphere, where he could or ought to have known better, little fault could be found with his taking the views he does. But nearly every line betrays the partisan of ideas which cannot but be condemned by the church, in the bosom of which he is supposed to have been baptized in his first days of existence. He moreover makes evident his want of knowledge of Catholic principles in his observations on the encyclical, Immortale Dei, which is no new departure, but the affirmation of the old teachings of the church. He is superficial, too, in his criticism of Pope Leo XIII.'s course with Italy and with Germany. He has lost his bearings, and misjudges, in consequence, the action of the pontiff, who is bound by every reason to seek the welfare of the church, which absolutely calls for the very steps he has taken in both countries; steps which in Germany have already produced such useful results, and have made the German Chancellor declare that the papacy is not a foreign institution in the German Empire. Señor Castelar, instead of looking on "the abrogation of the laws of May" as a triumph of papal diplomacy, holds it up as a proof of the fact that there still exists in Germany hostility to the papal "tiara," and opposition to the pope's spiritual jurisdiction, because this abrogation has only "just" taken place.