There are men, if indeed we should not rather call them angels, in whose life the history of a whole epoch is resumed, but the effect of whose actions extends far beyond it, and will be felt to the end of time. They have not led armies to the field, nor sat in the councils of nations, but neither warrior nor statesman has ever done, or could have done, for the glory of God and the highest interests of humanity, what they did. Heroes and rulers of men have had their own gifts, but they were of a lower order, and employed in the prosecution of lower aims. These aims were always limited to temporal concerns, and generally to the furtherance of personal ambition, and therefore they were contracted within the span of a single life, and were as ephemeral in their influence as they were puny in their conception. The mightiest achievements of such men left no permanent mark on the moral face of the world. It remained what it was before they were born, as if they had never existed. A few cities were called by their name, a few monuments were raised to their memory. But their career had not enriched the world with a single truth, nor aided it to acquire a single virtue. It was too purely human. As a rule, their work died with them, and no one was found to perpetuate its unprofitable grandeur. When Alexander fell, his empire was a burden too heavy for a single heir, and lasted for a brief space only by being divided among many. It had no principle of life, because it was void of the supernatural. Great Rome of the Caesars is only great at this hour because, as S. Columban said, "it is the Rome of the Popes and the Chair of Peter." Whatever does not proceed from nor tend to God hurries to swift oblivion. It is far otherwise with the works of those who were truly great because they did His work, and scorned to employ their incomparable gifts in any meaner toil. They had genius, but used it only to His glory and the manifestation of the highest truth; learning, but deemed only that knowledge precious which leads to Christ; valour and fortitude surpassing all human courage, but displayed it in accepting sacrifice and braving death. Of each of them it may be said, as S. Bernard said of one of his brethren whom he presented to Pope Eugenius, "Be sure, Holy Father, that whatever he is, he is full of the Holy Ghost." Called by the loving election of the Most High to do His work and not their own, they received the gifts which He imparts only to such chosen ministers of His will. What they say is but the echo of His creative voice; what they do, the creature's nearest approach to the perfections of the Creator. Their special mission is to bear witness to those eternal truths which God has revealed, and without which the soul of man cannot live, and most of all to those which the world refuses to learn. In one age it was the sacred mystery of the Incarnation, in another the Duality of Natures in the Person of the GodMan, in a third the true doctrine of the Sacraments, in a fourth the divine authority of the Church. Whatever dogma of the faith is denied, it is their sublime mission to proclaim. In later times the two truths which such men have been inspired by the Holy Ghost to announce, in spite of the clamour of the gainsayer and the prevaricator, have been the unity of the Church and the majesty of the Holy See. None have been more furiously assailed by the enemy, because none are dearer to God or more salutary to man. And therefore His omnipotent grace has fashioned in modern ages apostles and evangelists, prodigies of wisdom and sanctity, true heir3 of S. Cyril, S. Chrysostom, and S. Athanasius, whose special office it should be to witness in life and death to the supreme authority of the Apostolic Throne and the imperishable unity of the Catholic Church. Such a man, glorious in virtue and most dear to the Heart of Jesus, was S. Josaphat, Archbishop of Polock, who was slain by barbarous schismatics on the 12th of November, 1623, because he never ceased to admonish them, by the grace of God, of those two primary doctrines of the Christian religion, the necessity of communion with the Roman Church, and the sacred supremacy of the Roman Pontiff.

It is one of the glories of the Pontificate of Pius IX. to have presented this great servant of God to the veneration of the faithful. Beatified by Urban VIII., after the usual searching process, his Feast was kept for the first time on the 16th of May, 1643; but the prayers of his contemporaries, and the earnest supplications of the Church of Poland, were not finally accomplished till the 29th of June, 1867, when the Saint was canonized by the Pontiff now seated in the Chair of Peter. But why, it may be asked, does a learned member of the great Benedictine order, with immense labour and research, and aided by the indispensable cooperation of eminent Slavonic scholars, offer to the Church at this date the life of one whose career ended two hundred and fifty years ago? and why do we invite the attention of our readers to his narrative? The Benedictine would probably reply that, besides the intrinsic value of a life in which all the marvels of divine grace were visibly displayed, it was well to show to such a generation as ours what manner of men the Greek schism has formed, and what sublime combatants the Holy Spirit has summoned to oppose it. Our own reply to the same question is this. The story of S. Josaphat contains a lesson for all times, and especially for our own. In his day, as in ours, the world was divided into two camps,—the tents of unity, which are God's, on the one side, and the tents of division, which are Satan's, on the other. No man can read the life of S. Josaphat without seeing the condemnation of God upon the Greek schism. This was so well understood even by the Russian Government of our day, that its agents, as we shall notice more fully hereafter, vainly solicited Pius IX. not to issue the decree which numbered him with the saints, and gave to Poland a new advocate in the court of heaven, a now defender against the horrors of Muscovite despotism. The Russians understood that S. Josaphat was as formidable a witness against their pretended orthodoxy and their impious nationalism, as S. Ignatius of Constantinople, whom they still profess to revere, was against the founder of their schism. It is by the mouth of saints, echoes on earth of truths proclaimed in heaven, that the judgments of God on schism have often been promulgated. When S. Catherine of Bologna, who walked with God as Adam did in paradise, and heard, like S. Paul, sounds which rarely fall on human ears, lifted up her supplication against the advancing Ottoman hosts, she was admonished by our Divine Lord that they were the appointed ministers of His vengeance against Greek perfidy and revolt, and that her petition, which traversed His judicial decree, could not be heard. "She foresaw," we read in the life of this admirable virgin, "the ruin and destruction of the Eastern Empire, and the taking of the city of Constantinople, for the which, while she prayed that the Christian Empire might not fall under the power of the Turk, she was admonished by God to leave her prayer for that end, and that for the sins and impieties of the Greeks that empire should be cut off from the Christian body; and the success of the Turks did manifestly declare that her prophecy was true." It was the appointed mission of S. Josaphat to announce the judgment of the Most High upon the same schismatics in a northern land, who have fallen under a despot more savage than the Turk, and a more unscrupulous oppressor of the Spouse of Christ. How he discharged that mission we shall now consider, until the hour when, like Isaias and Jeremias, he fell under the blows of the barbarians, to thousands of whom his life had not preached in vain, while his very murderers were finally converted by his death, with the blood of the martyr still dripping from their hands.

"Almost from the beginning," observes the Benedictine biographer of the saint, "there was a diversity between the churches of the East and the West in respect of rites, discipline, and the language of the divine office. In the East the Greek prevailed, in the West the Latin alone was employed; but this difference had no effect whatever on the unity of the Church. The East, like the West, confessed that the Bishop of Rome was the sole head of the Church,"—even Photius confessed it by soliciting from the Roman Pontiff the confirmation of his usurped dignity,--"and that this incommunicable privilege came to him immediately from Jesus Christ through S. Peter, of whom he was the successor." All the Oriental Councils proclaimed it, and the habitual form in which the Greek and Oriental patriarchs expressed the authority of the Apostolic Throne was the constantly--recurring phrase, "by the sentence of the Lord." "At Alexandria for Egypt" continues Dom Guepin, "at Antioch for the East properly so called, at Ephesus, Heraclea, and Caesarea, in Cappadocia for Asia, Thrace, and Pontus, sat Bishops placed above their brethren as representatives of S. Peter, and delegates of his power. . . . This organization of the Greek Churches dated from the time of the Apostles, and was recognized by the (Ecumenical Council of Nicaea. No one had dared to dispute it before Constantine transferred the seat of empire to Byzantium; but from that moment the bishop of that city, a mere suffragan of Heraclea, aspired to the honours of the patriarchate." For centuries this ambitious project, though supported by the whole influence of the Byzantine emperor, of the senate, and of many Oriental bishops, was crushed by the reiterated censures of the heirs of Peter, to whose judgment Greek emperors and prelates submitted themselves; and as late as the time of S. Gregory the Great that Pontiff could say that, in spite of the increasing worldliness and sycophancy of the bishops of Byzantium, his apostolic authority was everywhere obeyed, and that "my brother of Constantinople admits it every day." But the decay of faith and virtue in the East, the multiplication of heresies, the growth of an antichristian nationalism, and the restless jealousy and hatred of the Latin world, finally carried the East into formal schism, of which the Turk has been God's avenger in the South, and the more brutal autocracy of the Tsar in the North. In both the Greek schism has been punished by that abject slavery, of soul and body, which is all the compensation the evil one has to give to those whom he persuades to renounce the Christian liberty to which obedience is the only title, and of which communion with the Chair of Peter is the eternal condition.

The lot of S. Josaphat was cast in a land to which the emissaries of the Greek schism had found their way. Muscovy and the Ukraine, both inhabited by lawless brigands, were already the home of fierce and cruel sectaries, whose nominal religion only furnished a new motive to their passions, and gave a keener edge to their ferocity. These savages had the same fanatical preference for what they had been taught to call "orthodoxy" as they now display, under the modern name of Russians, for its later equivalent, "tsarodoxy." In dealing with these ignorant barbarians, as with their more crafty but more corrupt teachers, S. Josaphat refuted them, not only by the supernatural majesty of his life, but by arguments drawn from the history of religion in their own land, and by the formal teaching of their own liturgical books. The testimony of both was decisive. When Charlemagne had completed the conversion of Germany, a path was opened to the evangelists who sought an entrance into Slavonic lands. They were Latin missionaries who led the way. With the arrival of the monks Cyril and Methodius, both devout subjects of the Holy See, in the province of Moravia, began a new era for the Slavs. They composed an alphabet capable of rendering Slavonic sounds, translated the Scriptures, and even offered the Holy Mysteries in an idiom hitherto reputed barbarous. Returning to Rome to receive the blessing of the heir of Peter, Cyril died in that city, but Methodius was consecrated bishop by Adrian II., and the two brothers are at this day honoured as their apostles even by the very populations who have fallen into schism; while the only Slavonic provinces which were preserved from it—Croatia, Dalmatia, Moravia, and Bohemia—are also the only regions which have retained Christian liberty, and are subject neither to the Tsar nor the Sultan, but to God alone and His Vicar.

During the whole of the eleventh century the metropolitan of Kieff was in communion with the Roman Pontiffs, and it was not till the thirteenth that the dependence of that Russian see on the Chair of Peter was finally closed, the Ruthenian Church being at that date effectually depraved by the demoralizing influence of Byzantine emissaries, and the new forms of vice and corruption which those degenerate Greeks brought with them. Chastised by Mongol invasions, they owed their deliverance to the Christian chivalry of Catholic Poland, as in the decisive battle of Liegnitza, where Duke Henry the Pious, the son of S. Hedwig, died in the moment of victory. In the sixteenth century a new evil arose for the Ruthenian Church in the invasion of the Protestant heresy. The schismatical Greek clergy had neither the learning nor piety by which alone it could be resisted, and the higher classes, immersed in ignorance, and weary of professing a faith which they did not understand, and belonging to a church which they could not respect, fell away in such numbers that, by the end of the century, the celebrated Jesuit Skarga calculated that, in the palatinate of Novogrodek, there were only sixteen out of six hundred noble families of the Greek rite who had not embraced Protestantism. The peasants alone persevered in the profession of a religion which, for them as for others, consisted mainly in the observance of fasts, and of purely external forms, from which faith derived no nutriment and virtue no support. Even in the monasteries, as John Rutski, afterwards the Catholic metropolitan of Ruthenia and the illustrious colleague of S. Josaphat, reported, learning and piety were unknown. In all ranks and orders, under the fatal influence of the Greek schism, true spiritual life was extinct. It was to reform this dead church, by re--uniting it with the Chair of Peter, and restore it to membership with the household of God, that His Providence raised up the apostle of whose life and death, under the guidance of the Benedictine author, we shall now attempt to offer a condensed narrative. The Ruthenian Church was dead, but the saint at whose voice it was to rise from the grave was now at hand.

Born at Wlodomir in 1580, under the reign of Stephen Batory, of devout parents, once noble, but who had been reduced by reverses to a humble estate, John Kuncewicz was baptized in the church of the martyr S. Praxede, in which he was to receive, while yet a child, one of those marks of divine favour by which it has so often pleased God to announce the future destiny of His elect ministers. It was from his own lips that one of his companions in the Basilian monastery of Wilna received the report. Observing an image of the crucified Saviour, he asked his mother who it was. He had hardly received the reply, "when I felt," said Josaphat to me, "as it were a spark of fire fall on my heart" ; and from that moment the flame of divine charity, of zeal for the Church and for souls, was kindled in it. Separating himself thenceforth from his youthful companions and the amusements of his age, his whole delight was "to dwell at the foot of the altar, to hear the cry of praise, and sing the marvels of the Lord." His days were spent in prayer, and when his parents missed him, they were sure to find the child in the church, pouring out his soul, like Samuel, to Him by whose grace it was already inundated. At school, where he was instructed in the elements of the Slavonic and Polish languages, his favourite study was the liturgical books of the Ruthenian Church. Having learned the whole of the divine office by heart, he never failed to recite it every day, to the praise and glory of God, and was already proposed by other parents to their children as a model of piety. Yet, as his biographer remarks, he was so entirely without qualified instructors, that, "a son of the Catholic Church, he did not know his mother." It was at Wilna, the capital of Lithuania, that God was to reveal her to him. In that city almost every form of heresy had its temple, and it was a common thing in families for the father to be of one religion, the mother of another, and the children of a third. Already the Fathers of the Society of Jesus had restored many of the nobles to the faith, but the future apostle of Ruthenia had not yet profited by their teaching. The sophisms of heresy reached his ears, but he was not beguiled. The enemies of the Ruthenian Union, the Greek Catholic rite, seemed to triumph, but the youth cried to God to show him the way of truth, and his prayer was answered. "From that moment," ho said, "I was filled with such an abhorrence of schism, that every moment I was constrained to repeat the word of the prophet,' I have hated the congregation of the wicked.'" A Greek priest eminent for learning, Peter Arcudius, whom the Catholic Archbishop of Wilna had brought from Rome to teach in the Greek college of that city, became his guide, and soon after his decision was formed to forsake the world, and become a monk of the order of S. Basil. In 1604 he received from the Metropolitan, Ilypatius Pocicy, the monastic habit, and from that moment began the marvellous apostolate of which every effort was inspired by the grace of God, and every action dedicated to His glory.

"At the beginning," says John Rutski, who knew him so well, and was led by his example to aspire to perfection, "ho had no master in the spiritual life; but the Holy Spirit became his guide, and in a little while he made such progress in the perfection of the monastic life that he was capable of teaching and directing others." "Night and day," says Susza, his earliest biographer, "he was absorbed in prayer "; and even in his sleep, as his companions attested, his lips still repeated the fervent supplications which he had uttered when awake. His austerities, which he continued to the day of his martyrdom, can only be compared with those of the Fathers of the Desert. In the middle of winter, heedless of ice and snow, he would prepare for saying Mass by hours of meditation in the cemetery attached to the church of the Holy Trinity, and a temperature which most men would have found insupportable did not even disturb his tranquil meditation. But with him, as with all saints, the most severe mortifications were only a means to an end, not, as with the darkened schismatics whom he was destined to convert, a superstitious substitute for more difficult and more profitable virtues. To continual prayer and self-discipline he added the daily study of the liturgical books of his Church, in which he found not only the evidences of Ruthenian faith and piety, but decisive proofs of Catholic truth, and the most effective refutation of schism and heresy. It was by this process that he was led by the Holy Spirit to a profound comprehension of the true place in the Divine counsels of those two fundamental Christian truths, the unity of the Church and the authority of the Holy See. He collected all the passages which he found in the liturgies and other Slavonic books attesting the primacy of S. Peter; and in order to illustrate the most important question in the controversies of his day, the fact that the Ruthenian was a daughter of the Roman Church, he composed a work entitled "The Baptism of S. Vladimir." In preparing him for the apostolic mission upon which he was about to enter, and enriching him with the highest gifts of wisdom and sanctity, God planted in his soul the jealous love of dogmatic truth and vehement detestation of heresy which S. Basil, S. Cyril, and S. Athanasius, and all the lights of the Eastern Church, had displayed before him. If in the middle of the night, as Susza relates, amid the rigours of a Lithuanian winter, he secretly left his cell, clothed only in a hair shirt, and with naked feet planted in the deep snow, scourged himself to blood, it was only that he might bring his body "into subjection," and offer with greater efficacy the prayer which came from the depths of his heart: "Lord God, destroy schism, and give us unity." Alone in the monastery of the Holy Trinity, like S. John the Baptist in the desert, he had as yet neither human teacher nor human associate. The hour of his public ministry, for which he was being formed in secret by the hand of God, had not yet arrived. The first intruder upon his solitude was the celebrated John Rutski, attracted by his reputation for sanctity, and destined to enter the Basilian order, and be the companion of his spiritual toils and head of the Ruthenian Church. To restore that church to its primitive glory was their common aspiration, and the subject of their daily conferences. Ravaged by schism, to which the leading citizens of Wilna were devoted, every attempt to restore unity only awakened a fiercer opposition. The Archimandrite Samuel, of the church of the Holy Trinity, was himself a schismatic, whose violence at length brought him in conflict with the officers of the Crown, and led to his deposition. By order of the King, Sigismund III., a commission was appointed, of which the Chancellor Sapieha was the president, to examine the cause and restore the rightful authority of the Metropolitan Pociey. The sectaries replied by a pretended excommunication of Pociey for having "taken an oath of obedience to the Roman Pontiff," and Tupeka, one of the leading magistrates of the city, attempted to assassinate him in the open street. Severely wounded, the preservation of his life was attributed to a special intervention of Providence, and Tupeka, glorying in his crime, and only lamenting its incomplete execution, was condemned to death. It was this incident which furnished to Josaphat, who had recently been ordained priest, the first public occasion of manifesting his true character, and of proving that hatred of schism did not exclude a tender charity for the schismatic. While the Catholics of Wilna were singing a Te Deum in the cathedral, he hastened to the prison, and pleading with irresistible force and sweetness the sacred truths to which his own martyrdom was to be the final testimony, brought to repentance the malignant assassin, whose guilt only served to discredit the evil cause which he had attempted to promote. Samuel fled from Wilna, the schismatics were reduced to silence and inaction, and from that hour peace began to reign in Ruthenia.

Rutski was now, by the joint authority of the King and the Metropolitan, the Archimandrite of the Church of the Holy Trinity, and his first effort was to restore, with the aid of Josaphat, the true observance of the Basilian rule, and to kindle in the clergy, enfeebled by ignorance and the cares of a family, a new zeal and fervour in the discharge of their sacred office. Both comprehended that nothing could be done for the advancement of religion and the restoration of unity by a priesthood uninstructed in theology, and more absorbed by domestic duties than by zeal for souls. The eloquence of Josaphat as a preacher, and the power with which he treated all the points controverted between the Uniats and the schismatics,—facts afterwards presented to Urban VIII. as a motive for his canonization, since they proved that God alone had been his teacher,—diminished almost daily the number of the schismatics. Nor could they deny the presence of God with His servant, manifested by signs and prodigies. One day when he was saying Mass, "the God--Man was seen, in the radiant form of a child, to issue from the chalice which he held in his hands, while an angel, clothed in the habit of a deacon, stood by his side. This apparition was renewed on many subsequent occasions, attested by innumerable witnesses, and after his martyrdom it was the custom in Ruthenia to represent him in sacerdotal vestments, holding a chalice from which the child Jesus came forth, and the angel in a deacon's dalmatic standing by his side." Susza relates that whenever he said to a schismatic "You will be a Uniat," his conversion always followed. His constant practice was to expound to them the texts of the Greek liturgy and the ancient Slavonic writers, a method of controversy which he may be said to have created, and which was always effective with a people attached even to obstinacy to the customs and traditions of their fathers. The Catholics called him " the scourge of schism," while his impenitent adversaries confessed his apostolic victories by styling him "the ravisher of souls." Like the Pharisees, as Dom Guepin observes, they said of him, as the Jews said of our Divine Lord, " this man is a perverter of our nation." It was another point of resemblance between the saint and the Master whom he served.

Meanwhile, prodigies of every kind proclaimed his inseparable union with God. One evening some religious passing the door of his cell, saw it enveloped in flames. He was taking the discipline, absorbed in prayer, and evidently unconscious of the conflagration. As they were about to force open the door, the flames disappeared; they saw Josaphat with his face on the floor and his arms stretched in the form of a cross, and understood that what they had supposed to be an earthly light was an indication of the presence of God. By such communion with the Most High, he was daily advancing in the spiritual might which was to overcome the enemies of the Holy See and of Catholic unity. In April, 1610, while Sigismund was besieging the city of Smolensk, Ignatius, the patriarch of Moscow, arrived in his camp. He was a schismatic, but grace had already touched his heart, and he became one of the companions of Josaphat in the monastery of the Holy Trinity at Wilna. This conversion, which fortified the hopes of the Uniats, was a heavy discouragement to their adversaries. When, in 1565, the Muscovites took possession of Wilna, their first care was to seize the bodies of Ignatius and Rutski, buried side by side, and both were found to be flexible and without corruption. They dared not profane these venerable remains, which they are said to have removed to Moscow, and which Lithuania, now the victim of Russian despotism, has never recovered. With Ignatius came a young Greek, Emanuel Cantacuzene, of the imperial family of Constantinople, and of great wealth. He became a disciple of Josaphat, followed him to Polock when he became archbishop of that see, and bore a part in all his labours and trials till the supreme hour of his martyrdom. But if the year 1610 brought to the saint new consolations and precious fellow workers, it saw also the arrival in Ruthenia of his most inveterate enemy, by whose arts he was to be delivered to death,—the worldly and ambitious Smotrycki, the restless champion of schism, and the pupil of Cyril Lucaris, the schismatical patriarch of Constantinople. Between this man, eager only for his own personal interests, and the saint, occupied only with those of God, arose a conflict, in which the strife between the Church of God and the sect of Satan is typified, and of which we may so far anticipate the conclusion as to say that, having at length compassed the death of Josaphat, Smotrycki was himself converted by the intercession of the martyr, who purchased with his blood the soul to which the sanctity of his life had appealed in vain. The history of this mortal combat is full of instruction for the men of our own generation. On the one side they will see all the most deplorable infirmities of human nature,—vice, intrigue, ambition, and cruelty; on the other, all the choicest gifts of grace,—purity, meekness, contempt of self, and heroic sanctity. If the presence of God is most surely denoted by the abundance of His gifts, there is very seldom opening for doubt, to whatever period in the long conflict between the Church and the sects he may apply this crucial test, on which side the Most High is to be found. There was not more difference between Moses and the troop of Core, between Elias and the priests of Baal, than has been manifested in almost every age between the devout servants of the Holy See and of Catholic unity, and the impure adversaries of both. The contrast is God's own testimony to His Church. It has been renewed again and again. The combatants reveal themselves, on the one side as soldiers of God, clothed in the panoply of grace; on the other, as mercenaries of Satan, with the " mark of the beast" on their brow. To S. Athanasius are opposed the savage and blasphemous Arians; to S. Cyril, the false and impious Nestorians; to S. Augustine, the sanguinary and hateful Donatists; to S. Ignatius of Constantinople, the depraved adventurer Photius; to the treason and lubricity of the so--called reformers, the purity and holiness of a Fisher, and the " good confession" of Sir Thomas More, of whom Sir James Mackintosh says that he displayed "that union of perfect simplicity with moral grandeur, which perhaps no other human being has so uniformly reached "; and of whom Sir James adds that "he was the martyr of veracity, and perished only because he was sincere." The same contrast may be traced between the apostles of Catholic unity in Russia and the savage and licentious champions of the Greek schism, for whom murder and sacrilege were the only virtues, and whose warfare is summarized, in all its characteristic features, in the history which we shall now relate of the memorable conflict between S. Josaphat, the martyr of Jesus Christ, and Maximus Smotrycki, the enemy of God, and the chief agent of the Photian conspiracy against the unity of His Church.

The theatre of the combat between these two men was the Ruthenian church, which the one wished to vivify, by bringing it into communion with the Vicar of Christ, and the other to paralyze, by retaining it in subjection to the sordid patriarch of Constantinople. The Church of Byzantium was itself a slave, and could only beget slaves. "At Constantinople," said Kreuza Rzewuski, who wrote under the dictation of S. Josaphat, "there is only one emperor, and in Muscovy only one grand duke; but in our land, every noble who retains a pope rules him as he pleases, makes him labour in the fields whenever he chooses, and sometimes pushes his insolence so far as to chastise him when the pope fails to obey." It was useless to appeal to the bishop, who was himself a simoniacal adventurer, like most Greek bishops of the present day, busy only in making his fortune, and seizing from the popes, who could hardly feed their families, the sums which the lord of the city or province had exacted from himself. There was no justice for the pope, and no tribunal to defend his rights. For him the priesthood was only a trade, which he had received from his father, and was to transmit to his son. His religion consisted in the observance of outward forms, and in an implacable hatred of Latins and the Latin Church. He hated them as a Jew hates a Christian, and for the same reason. Groveling in poverty, ignorance, and abasement, the only active emotion of his soul was love of schism, which had ruined his fortunes in this world without doing anything to repair them in the next. It was of such a clergy that Smotrycki, specious, artful, and ambitious, with all the worst qualities of a Greek of the Lower Empire, and with a conscience wholly seared by his Byzantine training, became the leader, not for their profit but for his own. His theology had been acquired partly from Photian documents and partly in the schools of Germany, and was a compound of both; but among the schismatics dogma was of little value compared with undying hostility to the Catholic Church. Smotrycki had sucked in this venom with his mother's milk, and his contact with Lutherans had aggravated its intensity. He saw, as soon as he arrived at Wilna, that either he must conquer S. Josaphat, or accept inevitable defeat; and from that hour he concentrated all the resources of his mind, all the passions of his heart, and all the secular influences which he could command, in one scheme and purpose—the destruction of the apostle to whom God had committed the restoration of the Ruthenian Church.

In the first book which he published against the Uniats, entitled the "Lamentation of the Ruthenian Church," were doctrines utterly at variance with the teaching and practice of the very church which he pretended to defend; but such was the blindness and ignorance of the schismatics, that they did not even perceive it. He was for them "the saviour of orthodoxy," even while denying its formal doctrines. He reduced the seven sacraments of his church to two, in imitation of the Lutherans, rejected implicitly the value of good works, and especially of works of penance, which the Greek Church has always professed to hold in the highest houour. At a later day, when the prayers and the blood of S. Josaphat had won from the Divine bounty the miraculous conversion of this depraved soul, Smotrycki thus described this very book. "Its foundation was hate, its walls lies, and its roof calumnies: The author had done better to weep over himself and his brethren than over the Catholic Church." It was answered, to the confusion of the writer, by the illustrious Jesuit Peter Skarga, and by Morochowski, the bishop of Wlodomir, who had no difficulty in showing that it was rather a refutation of the Slavonic liturgical books used by the schismatical church than of the Latin doctrines against which it was professedly aimed. To Smotrvcki were joined in an eager alliance, not only all the Greek schismatics, but all the Protestants of Lithuania and Poland, who perceived that his cause was theirs, and who conspired with him against the restoration of Catholic unity, by the same arts and intrigues, and by deeds of violence, including pillage and assassination, against which S. Josaphat and his companion Rutski, who was now invested with the episcopal government of Kieff, and the office of Archimandrite of the Basilian monastery of Wilna, contended only by prayer, mortification, and confidence in the succour of God. The lists were opened, the combatants have taken their places, and the future of the Ruthenian Church depends on the issue of the combat.

The first care of the servants of God was to reform the Basilian institute, since little was to be expected in the apostolate to which they were called from the co--operation of the secular and married clergy. Poverty, chastity, and obedience, rendered easy by an ardent love of God and souls, soon flourished in the monasteries of the order, and an angelic life was the prelude to a triumphant death. No dangers arrested these dauntless soldiers of the Cross, no menaces disturbed their supernatural peace. One example in the life of S. Josaphat deserves special notice, and teaches us by luminous evidence how he fought and how he conquered. In the neighborhood of Kieff was the great monastery of the Crypts, to which pilgrims flocked to venerate the remains of SS. Antony and Theodosius, and other Catholic athletes, whom the schismatics affected to regard as glories of their sect. To enter this monastery was to brave the enemies of the Church in their own fortress, and expose his life to their assaults. Even the courageous Rutski tried to dissuade S. Josaphat from an enterprise which he had too much reason to anticipate would prove fatal. But peril had only attractions for one already aspiring to martyrdom. Arrived at a short distance from the monastery, he met one of the so--called monks, who, with a train of dogs and valets, was engaged in hunting, and who inquired his name. An explosion of insults and invectives, to which was added the threat to fling him into the river, followed the announcement. "I have no evil design," was the soft answer of the saint, "against my brethren the monks of the Crypts, and if I had, how could I execute it? But it is a matter of surprise to me that I have never read in the Rule of S. Basil that it was permitted to a monk to hunt." His interlocutor was silenced, and retired with the seed of conversion in his heart. Entering the gate of the monastery, the man of God gave his name, and desired to see the superior. The first act of the latter was to cause the bell to be rung, to summon all the monks to the refectory. "The seducer of souls is here," was his address to them; "at length you will see him." More than a hundred had answered his call. All that hate and fanaticism could inspire was uttered with furious cries, which covered the voice of Josaphat, and the only sound which could be heard amid the tumult of execrations, was this: "Fling the traitor, the wretch, the destroyer of orthodoxy, into the Dnieper." Calm and unmoved, Josaphat contemplated these raging sectaries, and begged the superior to obtain a moment's silence. With gentle words and a persuasive charity which subdued even these darkened souls, he announced to them that the only object of his visit was to venerate so famous a sanctuary, salute them as brethren, and learn from them anything which they could teach him of the way of truth, the light of the Scriptures, and the teaching of the holy Fathers and ecclesiastical writers. Captivated by his meekness and charity, silence succeeds to uproar. They beg him to be seated, and offer him food, which ho declines. He asks them to show him their books, and now his object is attained. From those books he will convince them that they are false to the primitive traditions of their own church, and will preach the doctrine of Christian unity to its mortal adversaries. With the Slavonic writings in his hands, he plies them with irresistible arguments in favour of the dogmas professed by the Roman Church, and especially the sacred authority of the Apostolic See, so often proclaimed by Greeks and Orientals, and the indefectible unity of the true Church. His hearers are amazed to find in the liturgical prayers which they repeat every day, the condemnation of their own errors. Their [ surprise redoubles when he proves to them, by reciting the annals of the Ruthenian Church, how the long succession of Metropolitans of Kieffhad been joyfully subject to the Roman Pontiff. Their intellect is convinced, but not their will. They honour the apostle, but reject his teaching. "Truly he merits the name of seducer of souls," they said one to another, "for what man ever attracted them by such gentle words?" They accompany him in a body to the city, with every mark of reverence, and, as his biographer observes, "he re--enters Kieff with all the symbols of a triumph, carrying in his train, so to speak, the schism which he has vanquished."

But if the supreme grace of conversion was not then granted to these monks, the visit of the saint was fruitful to others, even in this stronghold of schism. The chief magistrate of Kieff, Batilia, and two secular priests, entered the Catholic Church, and proved at a later period, by their zeal and fortitude, that they had become "Israelites indeed." The return of Josaphat to the capital of Lithuania, where he was received with enthusiasm, was the signal for a long train of conversions in the city of Wilna. Visiting a lady devoted to schism, he exhorted her to seek unity, without which it is impossible to find God; and when she outraged charity and decency by striking him, he replied with a smile, "I would not have come to see you, madam, if I had thought that I should give you the occasion of offending God by yielding to anger." He had hardly departed when grace touched her heart, and hurrying to the monastery, she cast herself at his feet; and Susza relates that, after her own conversion, she was successful in bringing many other women, and especially schismatical nuns, to the unity of the Church. His next conquests were the noble palatines of Polock and Novogrodek, the latter the chief of one of the most powerful houses of Lithuania, devotedly attached to the Oriental rite, of which Josaphat was himself, in accordance with the earnest mandates of the Holy See, the most faithful observer. A great number of the nobility and friends of these magnates followed their example. One of the sons of the aged Tyszkiewicz, the palatine of Novogrodek, became a zealous priest of the Latin rite, and finally Bishop of Samogitia, and one of the glories of the Polish episcopate. It was to the omnipotence of Divine grace that the saint looked for the continuance of such spiritual victories, but he was too wise a steward of the house of God to neglect human means. Of these, preaching was not the least efficacious. He announced to the city that the monks of the Holy Trinity would deliver conferences, in which they would demonstrate the orthodoxy of the Uniat Church by citing the primitive Ruthenian traditions to which it alone was faithful. All the notables of the city responded to the invitation, without distinction of creed, and the schismatics were once more confounded by arguments derived exclusively from their own liturgical books. The main question, to which all others were subordinate, and to the elucidation of which the Holy Spirit had bidden this man devote his life, was the supremacy of the Apostolic See. Like all the saints of the Oriental Church, it was the most profound conviction of his soul, that in that supremacy alone, by an imperishable decree of our Divine Lord, was contained the secret both of the unfailing purity of Christian doctrine and of the maintenance for all time of Christian unity. Neither could exist without it. Truth torn to fragments, and the horrible multiplication of schisms, were the notes, in every age, of every community alien from the Roman Church. "Qui odit fratrem suum,'' said the beloved disciple, "in tenebris est, et in tenebris ambulat, et nescit quo eat"; and S. Cyprian, who saw that this hate was the ruling passion of formal schismatics, as it is at this hour, denounced the fatal crime of separation from the centre of unity when he bequeathed this lesson to all who should come after him: "Ab arbore frange ramum, fractus germinare non poterit." The apostle of the Ruthenian Church was penetrated with these fundamental truths, of which every new sect, in every land, furnishes a fresh proof; and for this reason he was inspired to dwell without ceasing on that sacred authority of the Chair of Peter to which the will of God has inseparably attached the perpetuity of His Church, the unalterable purity of His revelation, and one prominent test of the loyalty and obedience of His creatures.

It is not within the compass of human resources to amend the designs of God, and every substitute which man has framed for the Catholic Church has only let loose the torrent of maledictions against which that Church was founded as the sole impregnable bulwark,—hate, discord, heresy, and self-will. These are the fruits of schism, with which charity, truth, and unity cannot coexist. In the church of the Holy Trinity at Wilna, this doctrine was delivered with so much power, and especially the declaration of S. Jerome, "whoever is outside the Roman Church prof amis est," that while many schismatics were converted, others requested that what had been said might be reduced to writing, that so they might ponder it at their leisure. To meet this demand S. Josaphat composed in 1617, and published, the work entitled "Defense of the Unity of the Church, in which it is demonstrated that the Greek ought to be united to the Latin Church." To this book the schismatics did not so much as attempt to make any reply, since to do so was impossible without denying the traditions of the Eastern Church.

On the 12th of November, 1617, amid the indescribable joy of the Ruthenian Catholics, Josaphat was consecrated Archbishop of Polock. His most dangerous adversary Smotrycki had been raised to the same nominal rank by Theophanes, the schismatical patriarch of Jerusalem, who had paid a visit to Muscovy, in order to collect money from the fanatical barbarians of the region and their savage neighbours the Cossacks of the Ukraine. Enriched beyond his expectation by their gifts, he concerted with Smotrycki, whose capacity was not unknown to him, a project for combating the Ruthenian Union, by instruments and measures which only such men could employ. Pillage, intrigue, and assassination were the arms which they used. Josaphat, who had accepted his new dignity with profound regret, and only in obedience to an authority which his convictions forbade him to resist, said of his rival: "If Maximus Smotrycki is willing to be converted, I will immediately resign my place to him, for he at least possesses the learning necessary for a bishop." Probably he knew that Smotrycki, in whom the voice of conscience was not wholly dumb, had secret misgivings, and was only detained in schism by pride and ambition. He had already, convinced by the arguments which refuted that work, published a retraction of the heresies contained in his "Lamentation," but he addressed it privately to the schismatical monks of Derman, by whom it was immediately burned. For years he was destined to vacillate between truth and error, between crime and remorse, and it was not till he had done an act which seemed to make his salvation impossible, that the martyr whom he had delivered to death obtained it for him. Disgusted with the ignorance and brutality of the uneducated and licentious clergy whose leader he was, he knew how to admire the wisdom and purity of a Josaphat and a Rutski, and their devout companions, but, incapable of embracing the truth to which he already aspired, he vainly tried to soothe the anguish of his soul by penances which might have brought peace to another, but not to him. He even instructed others, by a monstrous contradiction, in the Catholic faith which ho hesitated to profess himself. Relying only on the secular arm, and content to see his sect oppressed by the domination of the schismatical nobles, he was not insensible to the contrast between himself and S. Josaphat, who never ceased to resist the encroachments of the civil power by admonishing every petty Caesar, that " as the Ruthenian Church was united to the Holy See, it had the same right to liberty as the Latin Church." In every point, except the natural gifts of reason and perspicacity, the contrast between these two men, as between their respective followers, was as wide as that which exists between the precepts of the Creator and the passions of the creature. While Smotrycki, the champion of schism, was vainly solicited by Divine grace to an efficacious repentance, and tormented with doubts and fears, Josaphat, the apostle of unity, was daily advancing to greater heights of perfection, and honoured by marks of divine favour as stupendous as any recorded in the mystical annals of hagiology. Often he was« seen enveloped in a celestial light, and raised in the air in the moments of ecstasy which anticipated for him, as for so many saints, the future life of glory. His only ambition when elevated to the dignity of the Episcopate, was to redouble his austerities, and keep with more exactness than ever the Basilian Rule. Gennadius, who was his confessor, and kept the keys of the palace and the cathedral, relates that long before dawn the saint would enter his room, take the keys, and go forth in the dark to spend hours in prayer and terrible mortifications, and that out of humility he would himself ring the bells, which summoned the congregation to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, and the monks to the recitation of the Divine Office. The archdeacon Dorotheus surprised him one day, kneeling in the snow, naked to the waist, and scourging himself till the blood flowed from him in streams. "Ah! my father," cried Dorotheus, unable to restrain his emotion, "spare a life so useful to the Church." "Leave me,” was the calm reply, "and say nothing of what you have seen." Even the most obstinate schismatics spoke of him as "the Saint," and commonly said to one another; "If he belonged to us, we would drink the water with which he washes his feet."

In the spring of 1621, Poland being threatened by an' invasion of the Turks, the schismatics, both Greek and Protestant, equally insensible to religion and patriotism, entered into negotiations with them; and Smotrycki, who had recently been condemned by a royal decree for incivism, made overtures to the barbarous Cossacks, to whom the Greek schism was as dear as rapine and murder, for which it gave them a new relish. All the schismatical bishops were compromised in these maneuvers, in which Sigismund III. saw a menace to the safety of Poland, and a motive for active support to the loyal Catholics of the Greek rite. The Sultan, who led an army of 300,000 men, brought to the schismatics the letters and injunctions of the patriarch Cyril Lucaris; but the projects of both were doomed to failure, and the campaign speedily terminated in favour of Poland. It had only furnished a new proof of the malignity of the schismatics. Already they were openly discussing a plan for the murder of S. Josaphat, of which many presages indicated the approach. On the day of Pentecost, 1622, as the Archbishop advanced in procession to the church of the Holy Ghost at Witepsk, Wasilewski, a leader of the schismatics, posted himself with a band of soldiers in his path, and threatened him with death if he did not retire. A little later this miscreant died himself of a shameful malady. It was always the same: on the one side violence, impurity, and sedition; on the other, meekness, virtue, and resignation. Churches were sacked, houses pillaged, innocent victims slain for the profit of schism, of which cruelty and sacrilege were then, as now, the most powerful allies. It was not against S. Josaphat, as his biographer observes, that these agents of the evil one raged, but only against the apostle of unity. "He is a saint," they said, "and we will venerate him as an angel from the day in which he shall renounce the Union." They told him to his face that if he would recognize the depraved patriarch of Constantinople, they would all accept his spiritual authority. "Let the patriarch recognize the Pope," was his answer, "and I will immediately recognize the patriarch "; and when they offered to pay the costs of his journey to Constantinople, and to give him unalterable obedience on his return, "I will not go," replied the man of God, "but will die, if necessary, for the holy Union, and for obedience to the Roman Pontiff." A little later, having preached on the Procession of the Holy Ghost, and the supremacy of the Apostolic See, he burst into tears, and with a voice stifled by emotion exclaimed: "Yes, this is the true faith, for which I will give my life, and joyfully accept death.'' Many schismatics were converted by this discourse, and when they warned the Archbishop to be on his guard against his enemies,—"I know," he said, "that they desire to kill me; but I know also that the holy Fathers gladly died for the faith."

We have already observed that, imposing and majestic as was the life of this great servant of God, it was by his death that he was destined to vanquish the serpent of schism, and by the prodigies which accompanied that death that he was to reveal the judgments of God upon all who are guilty of that crime. Our space does not permit us to dwell further on the incidents of his apostolic life, for which we refer our readers to the volumes of Dom Guepin, which are among the most instructive and fascinating contributions to Christian literature that our age has produced. It would be a mere indiscretion to say that every act in the life of the saint was like the separate notes of a ravishing harmony, in which, as his contemporaries, friends and enemies, concurred in proclaiming, an echo of the songs of heaven fell on human ears. The Jews slew the very man whom they reluctantly venerated as S. James the Just, because their hatred of truth was greater than their admiration of the apostle who preached it to them. "He is a saint," said the Greek schismatics of S. Josaphat; " let us hill him." Who can doubt under what inspiration they acted? Who can fail to see the presence of God with the apostle of unity; the malice of demons in the agents of schism ?" You hate me unto death," he was accustomed to say to them, "and you wish to take away my life; yet I bear you in my heart, and would gladly die for your good." He knew that "the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep," and the hour was now at hand in which the life of the apostle was to be closed by the death of the martyr. Abundant consolations, of the only kind which he valued, had made easy to him the via dolorosa upon which he was about to enter. In July, 1623, four months before he received the crown of martyrdom, being on a visit at Ruta to the Metropolitan for a general chapter of the Basilians, he hears that a Calvinist nobleman in the neighborhood is at the point of death. His charity understands that there is a soul to be saved; the dying man abjures his heresy, receives the last sacraments from the hands of the holy Archbishop, and expires with the words of S. Peter in his mouth: "Of a truth I know now that the Lord hath sent His angel to me." Returning home, he asks the hospitality of Joroka, another Calvinist of high rank. Unfolding to him and his three daughters the truths of faith with the persuasive power of a saint, the latter cast themselves at his feet, receive absolution, and implore their father also to seek reconciliation with the Church of God. He replies by driving the messenger of peace from his house with curses, and bidding his servants let loose a troop of dogs against him. He departs without a sign of emotion. The daughters remonstrate with their father on his brutality to such a guest with so much force, that he presently mounts his horse to offer the apology due from one gentleman to another. "You have done me no harm," was the soft reply, "and I only ask you to leave your daughters at liberty to profess the Catholic faith." Moved to tears by this unexpected gentleness, and touched by divine grace, the father entreats the Archbishop to return to his house and receive his abjuration. Other duties made this delay impossible, but the next moment the saint is seated on a stone by the wayside, the penitent on his knees before him, and the heretic goes back to his home a Catholic. Such was the life of the man of God to his last hour; and now let us speak of his death.

The city of Kieff, the stronghold of schism, had fallen into the hands of the Cossacks, then, as now, the ferocious instruments of the hate which schism inspires towards the Holy See and Catholic unity. Batilia and the two priests who had been converted by S. Josaphat, refusing to apostatize, were slain by these barbarians, as at this day, in obedience to the Russian Tsar, the same savages murder the Catholics of Poland. Josaphat had no need to go to Kieff, as he wished to do when the report of these martyrdoms reached him, to find the destroyers of his own life. The ignorant popes, and the meaner class of citizens, whose malice Smotrycki had skilfully stimulated, were thirsting for the blood of him whom they called "the ravisher of souls." At Witepsk they openly announced their intention of destroying at one blow the Archbishop and the Ruthenian Union. Entreated by the Catholic nobles and people of Polock not to enter Witepsk, as he had announced his intention to do, the Archbishop replied: "I fear not death. God grant that I may be happy enough to merit the crown of martyrdom." Perceiving that it was impossible to prevent his departure, the nobles proposed at least to accompany him, with an escort sufficiently large to overawe the schismatics. "I desire no human assistance," he replied, "God alone will be my defense. My only attendants will be the singers who accompany me in the Holy Sacrifice. I have need of no one. It would be to me a great joy to die for the faith. This grace I hope from God as the greatest which I can receive on earth." To his weeping priests and servants he said: "Take courage, my children; if any evil happens at Witepsk, it will be to me only. No one but myself will perish." On the journey from Polock he frequently observed to his companions: "What better death could I desire than martyrdom for the Sovereign Pontiff?" During the two weeks which he spent at Witepsk he reconciled enemies and abounded in other works of charity. Nahum Wolk, one of the chief magistrates, refusing to pardon an enemy, the saint said to him: "Beware I if you do not repent, you will perish soon, and by a violent death." A few weeks later, Wolk, who assisted in killing Josaphat, was executed by order of the king. The month of November had arrived. Already the attendants of the Archbishop could not appear in public without being insulted and menaced, while his own name was vociferated by the populace with a chorus of imprecations. On the morning of the 11th, returning to the palace from the cathedral, he is surrounded by a great multitude, whose shouts of "Death!" "Kill him!" announce that the end is near. Calm and unmoved he advances slowly through the raging crowd. Astonishment at his tranquility, and perhaps a last feeling of respect for the double majesty of his sacred office and his well-known sanctity, arrest the hands of the murderers, and he enters his house uninjured. At dawn on the 12th the assault on the palace commenced. The doors are wrenched from their hinges, the savage cohort of sectaries, encouraged by the magistrates and exhorted by the popes, rush in. The archdeacon Dorotheus, Emmanuel Cantacuzene, and Gregory Kszacki, faithful to the last, offer their bodies as the sole rampart and defense of their beloved father and master. The next moment they are lying on the ground, mutilated by frightful wounds, from which they all miraculously recover, that the promise of the saint might be fulfilled. And now he comes forth from his chamber, whore he had been offering his life to God. He presents himself with a cheerful air to the assassins. "God be with you, my children," he says; "why do you strike my servants? What harm have they done you? If you have anything against me, here I am! Leave my people in peace, and do not slay them." At sight of their Archbishop the raging multitude recoil with awe. "One would have said," was the sworn deposition of Cantacuzene in the process of canonization, "that a mighty wind drove them back to the door: there was a moment of hesitation." Two men rush in from an adjoining chamber, and cry aloud: "Strike! kill this Latin, this Papist.'' One of them beats him with one blow to the earth, and the other, armed with a hatchet, buries it in his forehead. A third discharges a musket at his ear, and the deed is done. They drag his body into the street, and when a dog which had belonged to the palace attempted to defend him, they cut the animal in pieces, and mingle his blood, by a final outrage, with that of the martyr. From murder the sectaries proceed to pillage; everything in the episcopal residence,—gold, silver, vestments, furniture, and even the kitchen utensils, are appropriated by these ministers of "orthodoxy," and then they descend to the cellars, and in a few minutes are all buried in intoxication. Returning once more to the street, men, women, and children in the delirium of drunkenness, they use his mutilated body as a table on which they eat and drink. Then, lifting him by the feet, these adversaries of Christian unity cry to him: "Pastor! it is Sunday. Preach, then, preach. The people are waiting to hear you."

The martyr is crowned; but if no sound of complaint or reproach had issued from his own lips, the terrible wrath of the King of martyrs found a voice, and carried terror into the hearts of the murderous enemies of His Holy Church. It was said by S. Paulinus, as the Benedictine biographer of S. Josaphat remarks: "He who implored pardon for His own murderers could not tolerate the injury done to His confessor. He who would not exact vengeance for His own Passion, required prompt satisfaction for the wrongs done to His martyr." The prodigies which accompanied and followed the death of the Martyr of Unity, attested in every case by the schismatics themselves, were a manifestation of Divine power and judgment, in presence of which even these cruel reprobates fell on their faces and cried aloud for mercy. Rarely has the Most High glorified His saints by signs so many and wonderful as those which illumined the firmament at the coronation of S. Josaphat. Similar tokens of His acceptance were granted to some of the English martyrs, butchered by Anglican schismatics in the sixteenth century; but in the case of the Ruthenian saint, it may be said without exaggeration, that the fires of Divine vengeance blazed in the sight of angels and men, while they formed a robe of glory for him who asked from God, in the hour of his triumph, only the conversion of his enemies, and obtained what he asked. We can only relate a few examples. A woman who had plucked the beard of the martyr was instantly smitten with blindness. When the commission arrived at Polock to investigate the miracles attributed to the saint, this woman presented herself before them, declaring with joy that though she had lost [the sight of the body, she had recovered, by his intercession, the light of the soul. She was still blind, but she had obtained the grace of conversion. At the moment of his death a dark cloud arose from the river Widzba, and hung motionless over the court of the palace. From its centre a ray of dazzling light came forth, and rested on the sacred remains of the servant of God. Many came from places remote from the city to examine the nature of this prodigy, but a satanical fury still blinded the assassins. They fastened cords to the feet of the martyr, and dragged him through the streets. His head was dashed against a wall, and when the impure herd of sectaries had passed on, the features of the martyr were found to be imprinted on it. It was impossible to efface this portrait painted with his own blood, and as late as 1838 the Princess Zenaide Wolkouska testified that she had often seen it. They dragged the body to the top of a hill which was above the cathedral, and at the foot of which the Dwina flows. Filling his hair shirt with stones, they tied it round his neck, and when his body had reached the bank of the river, after falling from rock to rock, not a bone was broken. Embarking with it in a boat, they carried it up the river to the distance of a mile from Witepsk, and having attached to it a great stone, flung it into a deep gulf, known in the country by the name of the sacred well. Only then they deemed their work finished. But at this moment a column of light fell on the spot, the body of the Archbishop rose from the flood, and to their horror the assassins saw it follow them down the river. "Already," says his biographer, "they begin to tremble. The hand of God is about to touch them; but thanks to the prayers and the blood of Josaphat, they will not be chastised but converted. Even those whom human justice will not spare"—many of the murderers were executed by order of the king—" will not forfeit divine mercy, and the assassins of the martyr will obtain through him, after his death, the grace and the pardon which he vainly offered them in his life." Twenty--four expiated their crime on the scaffold, including Nahum Wolk, but all, with one exception, "penetrated with contrition, asked to be reconciled before dying with the Catholic Church. The martyr had conquered his murderers, and opened to them, as if by force, the gate of salvation." Witepsk, the stronghold of schism, was converted; and at Polock, as Dziahilewicz testified fourteen years later, "we were all converted to the Union, and there was here, as at Witepsk, one fold under one shepherd."

Of the innumerable miracles of every kind worked at a later period by the martyr, who was seen one day by the terrified schismatics, whom the apparition converted, vested in his pontifical robes, and standing in the air above his own cathedral,—our limited space does not permit us to speak. We refer our readers to his life. But what had become of his rival Smotrycki, by whose arts and inflammatory discourses he had been brought to death? Fearing the sentence which he had merited, he fled to the East; but the martyr went with him, and brought even this criminal to repentance and conversion. Disgusted by the venality and immorality of the schismatical prelates, and finding that the Patriarch of Constantinople was in heart a Calvinist, he went to Jerusalem, but only to fall from one deception to another. Conversing with Theophanes, the false patriarch of that see, by whom he had been himself ordained, he learned from him the secret of the pretended miracle of the "holy fire," an imposture which the present representatives of the Greek schism still repeat every year on Holy Saturday, to the great satisfaction of their fanatical dupes. Theophanes confessed to him, in the freedom of private intercourse, that he lighted with his own hand the fire which he afterwards presented to the sectaries as miraculous.t Grief and pain possessed his soul, and, by his own confession, a voice, which was never silent day or night, appalled him with this incessant question, "Why persecutest thou Me? Consider what thou hast done. All thy writings have outraged the Roman Pontiff, the Catholic Faith, the Latin Church. Thou hast cast into hell thousands of souls. What shall be thy own lot? "% From that hour Smotrycki understood that " the only means of salvation for the Greek Church, as for himself, was reconciliation with the Church of Rome." He returned to Poland, was received into the Church, and spent the rest of his life, by order of the Sovereign Pontiff, in the monastery of Deiman, in Volhynia, where he endeavored to atone, by writings in defense of Christian unity and the authority of the Holy See, and by unceasing austerities, for the offences of his life. He died with the Brief of Urban VIII., which released him from all ecclesiastical censures, in his hand, having requested that he might be buried, "with this proof of his reconciliation with the Roman Church." It was reported to the Metropolitan Rutski that it was found impossible to remove the Brief from his grasp. "If this is a sign from heaven," said the illustrious colleague of S. Josaphat to himself, "he will obey the command of him who represents in Ruthenia the Catholic Church and the Vicar of Christ." At the word of the prelate the hand of the dead penitent opened, and gave up the Pontifical Letter. This scene occurred in the presence of many witnesses, and when the document was replaced, the dead hand closed over it once more. "Even in death," says his biographer, "Smotrycki manifested his filial submission to the Holy Apostolic See."

The life of S. Josaphat is a lesson for all time. The two truths which he was charged by our Divine Lord to proclaim, and which he was to seal with his blood,--the supremacy of the Roman Pontiff and the unity of the Church,— are denied in our own day by the same sectaries, and all who maintain them assailed by the same fiendish cruelty. Russia has done in Ruthenia, and is doing at this hour, exactly what the Most High God condemned by such terrible judgments in the day of His servant S. Josaphat. When in 1636 the schismatics obtained a church in Mohylew, and went in procession on the Dnieper in boats to celebrate their triumph, a tempest arose, every bark was sunk, and more than a thousand persons buried in the flood. "Five hundred corpses were recovered, but the divers dared not continue their attempt. They said, though schismatics themselves, that they saw frightful monsters who guarded the dead as their prey." In our own day, the agents of Russian orthodoxy, still ferocious barbarians, to whom a national religion is only an incentive to malignant hatred of the Holy See and the Catholic Church, and who every week torture and slay, in obedience to their despotic ruler, the disciples of Jesus Christ, are exactly what they were whom S. Josaphat converted by his death. He is still for Russians "the ravisher of souls." When Pius IX. was preparing to issue the edict of canonization, the Russian journals were filled with execrations against the martyr, whom they represented as a monster, "whose cruelties scandalized even his co-religionists!" At the same time the Russian diplomatic agents at Rome were instructed to solicit from the Holy Father the abandonment of his design. With this object they quoted a letter from the famous Chancellor Sapieha, in which he had replied rudely and indiscreetly to some observations of the saint. It was quite true. But these Russian sectaries forget to add that he bitterly repented his fault, and caused an inscription to be engraved in the great hall of his own castle, by which he dedicated himself and his race for ever "to the patronage and protection of S. Josaphat." The petition of the Poles to Pius IX., in which they implored the canonization of the martyr, bore the name of a Sapieha, as well as of Czartoryski, Sanguszko, Zamoyski, Rzewuski, and other illustrations of Catholic Poland, and contained these words: "We are, Holy Father, interpreters to you of the thoughts of thousands of persecuted Catholics, of every age, sex, and condition, who groan in the prisons of Russia and Poland, or are exiled to the frozen regions of Siberia. If they consented to be enrolled among the members of the pretended orthodox church, or even to hide their faith, they would recover immediately their liberty, their homes, and their property. They would be permitted to be Poles if they ceased to be Catholics. The canonization of the blessed Josaphat will augment their courage, and will be accepted by them as the recompense of their fidelity. In the midst of our calamities, Holy Father, while the enemies of the Church combine all their forces to rob us of our faith, on whichever side we turn we see no hope of human succour; but if your Holiness assures us the powerful protection in heaven which we ask, it will fortify the bond of faith which unites the population of Poland, and will procure the most efficacious of all consolations to souls crushed by sorrow."

We presume to offer no reflections upon a narrative of which we have offered to our readers only a weak and meagre sketch. Where God has spoken so plainly, there is no need of human comments. He has told us what is His judgment of schism. He has shown us what manner of apostles He creates to combat that monster. He has filled us with admiration of the gifts by which He adorns them. He has taught us that submission to the Holy See is a condition of salvation. If we should induce any of our readers to study for themselves the life of which these lines present only a faint outline, and to have recourse, in the conflict now raging between the Church and the sects, to the powerful intercession of S. Josaphat, our object will be attained. If we might dare to hope that words so feeble, and so unworthy of the saint whom we desire to honour, could contribute anything to a more ardent zeal for the unity so dear to God, and a more fervent and sustained prayer for the overthrow of all the enemies of His Holy Church, our dearest wish would be accomplished. May the incessant supplication of the martyr of unity, now reigning with God, be henceforth in every heart and on every tongue throughout the Catholic universe, and be echoed by those who are still outside the Church to their own salvation: "Domine Deus, tolle schismata, da Unionem!"