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par la prière et l'abstinence, à la composition de ces immortels chefs-d'œuvre de la liturgie catholique méconnus, mutilés, parodiés ou proscrits par le goût barbare des liturgistes modernes, mais où la vraie science n'hésite plus à reconnaître une finesse d'expression ineffable, un je ne sais quoi d'admirable et d'inimitable, de pathétique et d'irrésistible, de limpide et de profond, une vertu suave et pénétrante, et, pour tout dire, une beauté toujours naturelle, toujours fraîche, toujours pure, qui ne s'affadit jamais et jamais ne vieillit'. Jusqu'à leur dernier jour, fidèles à leur ancienne gloire, les églises monastiques conservèrent les plus doux trésors de cette divine mélodie qui, selon la parole d'un moine, ne se taisait qu'après avoir rempli les cœurs chrétiens de paix et de joie 2.

1 << Un non so che di ammirabile ed inimitabile, una finezza di espressione indicibile, un patetico che tocca, una naturalezza fluidissima; sempre fresco, sempre nuovo, sempre verde, sempre bello, mai non apascisse, mai non invecchia... » Baïni (maître de la chapelle pontificale du Vatican), Memorie storiche sulla vita di Palestrina, t. II, c. 3, p. 81, apud Jouve, Essai sur le chant ccclésiastique, dans les Annales archéologiques de Didron, t. V, p. 74. Cfer Janssens, Vrais principes du chant grégorien, p. 187. Ce savant écrivain (Baïni) ajoute avec trop de raison que les mélodies que la liturgie moderne a substituées à ces anciens chefs-d'œuvre sont stupides, lourdes, insignifiantes, discordantes, froides et fastidieuses, « stupide, insignificanti, fastidiose, absone, rugose. » Ibid.

2

<< Dulcis cantilena divini cultus, quæ corda fidelium mitigat ac lætificat, conticuit. » Order. Vit., t. XIII, p. 908.

XVII

A LETTER'

ADDRESSED TO A REVEREND MEMBER OF THE CAMDEN SOCIETY

ON THE ARCHITECTURAL, ARTISTICAL, AND ARCHEOLOGICAL MOVEMENTS
OF THE PUSEYITES.

Funchal (Madeira), February 20th, 1844.

TO THE REV. MASON NEALE, Member of the Cambridge Camden Society.

The Camden Society having done me the unsolicited and unmerited honour of placing my name among its honorary members, I feel not only authorized, but conscientiously obliged to speak out what I inwardly think of its efforts and object and I am happy to be able to do so, in addressing myself, not only to one of its most influential members, but to one for whom I feel a most lively sympathy, on account of his talent, science, courage, and indeed, of every thing except what the Church, which I believe to be infallible, reproves in him.

'Cette lettre a été écrite en anglais, et ne se rapporte qu'à des sujets intimement liés à la vie religieuse et pour ainsi dire domestique de l'Angleterre elle ne saurait intéresser que les personnes très au courant de la langue et des mœurs anglaises. On a douc cru inutile de la traduire.

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I first thought that the Camden Society was merely a scientific body, pursuing an object which, like all branches of history, is of the utmost importance to religion, and with which all religious minds could associate, but like the French Comité historique, not setting up the flag of any special ecclesiastical denomination. On a nearer study of your publications, I have perceived that they are carried on, with the professed intention of blending together the interests of Catholic art and of the Church of England, and of identifying the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages in England with the Anglican schism begun by Henry VIII and Cranmer, and professed at present by all those who agree to the Thirty-nine Articles. Against this intention, I, as an honorary member of the said society, beg to enter my most earrest and most Catholic protest.

First, and principally, I protest against the most unwarranted and most unjustifiable assumption of the name of Catholic by people and things belonging to the actual Church of England. It is easy to take up a name, but it is not so easy to get it recognized by the world and by competent authority. Any man, for example, may come out to Madeira and call himself a Montmorency or a Howard, and even enjoy the honour and consideration belonging to such a name, till the real Montmorencys or Howards hear about it, and denounce him; and then such a man would be justly scouted from society, and fall down much lower than the lowliness from which he had attempted to rise. The attempt to steal away from us and appropriate to the use of a fraction of the Church of England the glorious title of Catholic, is proved to be an usurpation by every monument of the past and present; by the coronation oath of your sovereigns, by all the laws that have established your Church, even by the recent answer of

your own university of Oxford to the lay address against Dr. Pusey, etc., where the Church of England is justly styled the Reformed Protestant Church. The name itself is spurned at with indignation by the greater half, at least, of those who belong to the Church of England, just as the Church of England itself is rejected with scorn and detestation by the greater half of the inhabitants of the United Kingdom. The judgment of the whole indifferent world, the common sense of humanity, agrees with the judgment of the Church of Rome, and with the sense of her 150 millons of children, to dispossesss you of this name. The Church of England, who has denied her mother, is rightly without a sister. She has chosen to break the bonds of unity and obedience. Let her, therefore, stand alone before the judgmentseat of God and of man. Even the debased Russian Church, that Church where lay despotism has closed the priest's mouth and turned him into a slave, disdains to recognize the Anglicans as Catholics. Even the Eastern heretics, although so sweetly courted by Puseyite missionaries, sneer at this new and fictitious Catholicism. It is repudiated even by your own hero, Laud, whose dying words on the scaffold, according to the uncontradicted version of contemporary history, were:IDIE in the Protestant Faith, as by LAW ESTABLISHED (a pretty epitaph, by-the-bye, for the life of the future St. William of Canterbury! 1) Consistent Protestants and rationalists are more Catholic, in the etymological sense of the word, than the Anglicans; for they at least can look upon themselves as belonging to the same communion as those who, in every country, deny the existence of Church authority, or of revealed religion; they have at least a negative bond to link them one with another. But that the so called Anglo-Catho› See Hierologus.

lics, whose very name betrays their usurpation and their contradiction, whose doctrinal articles, whose liturgy, whose whole history, are such as to disconnect them from all mankind, except those who are born English and speak English; that they should pretend, on the strength of their private judgment alone, to be what the rest of mankind deny them to be, will assuredly be ranked amongst the first of the follies of the 19th century. That such an attempt, however, should succeed, is, thank God, not to be expected, unless it should please the Almighty to reverse all the laws that have hitherto directed the course of human events. You may turn aside for three hundred years to come, as you have done for three hundred years past, from the torrent of living waters; but to dig out a small channel of your own, for your own private insular use, wherein the living truth will run apart from its ever docile and ever obedient children,— that will no more be granted to you, than it has been to the Arians, the Nestorians, the Donatists, or any other triumphant heresy.

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I therefore protest, first, against the usurpation of a sacred name by the Camden Society, as iniquitous; and I next protest against the object of this society, and all such efforts in the Anglican Church, as absurd. When the clergy and Catholic laymen in France and Germany, when Mr. Pugin and the Romanists of England, labour with all their might to save and restore the monuments of their faith, thily set aside by the influence of that fatal spirit which broke out with the so-called Reformation, and concluded with the French revolution,—they know that they are labouring at the same time to strengthen, in an indirect manner, their own faith and practice, which are exactly and identically the same as those followed by the constructors of those glo

Œuvres. VI. - Art et Littérature.

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