SOURCE: "Roman Catholic Fiction," in Faith in Fiction: The Emergence of Religious Literature in America, Harvard University Press, 1981, pp. 145-67.

[In the essay below, Reynolds looks at Roman Catholic fiction and its character and themes, both before 1850, when it used theological and historical polemics to persuade, and after 1850, when it began to assimilate the prevailing anti-theological secularism.]

Unlike Protestant novelists, who wished to find diverting, sentimental replacements for the rigorous theology of the Puritan past, Roman Catholics generally devoted their novels to attacking what they saw as Protestant divisiveness, theological evasion, and lack of logic. The free Biblical interpretation and privately formed faith that Protestant novels increasingly extolled were ultimate heresy for the Catholic writer, who tried to validate the authority of the historical True Church as a cure for contemporary Protestant corruption. While Protestant fiction was generally nontheoretical, much Catholic fiction before 1850 attempted to be intellectual and polemical.

This emphasis on reasoned debate was designed as both a foil to Protestant sentimentalism and a pointed reply to the growing number of Americans who dismissed Catholics as illiterate slum dwellers enslaved by the "Beast of Rome." Accordingly, most Catholic novels of the period include an account of a Protestant character who, after years of Catholic baiting and smug self-satisfaction, becomes miserably aware of Protestantism's shortcomings, often through the agency of a rational Catholic priest or lay person. And yet, despite this stress on reason and tradition, Catholic fiction made rhetorical use of sentimental devices which became progressively more prominent as time passed. Thus much of the interest of early Catholic fiction lies in the way its vaunted intellectualism was reinforced, with growing frequency, by secular props similar to those found in Protestant fiction of the time.

Protestantism, which had been called fragmented and confused by Catholics since the Reformation, was particularly vulnerable to Catholic criticism in nineteenth-century America. The right to private conscience and religious freedom guaranteed by the Constitution resulted in the proliferation of Protestant sects which were often doctrinally or politically antagonistic. In her preface to Redwood (1824) Catherine Sedgwick said that she wrote "at a period, and in a country of constant mutations, where old faiths are every year dissolving, and new ones every year forming."¹ As we have seen, the author of The Soldier's Orphan (1812) had claimed that every "free and accountable being" in America "has an equal right with his neighbour to form a creed for his own observance" (32): This democratic ethic placed renewed emphasis on private inquiry and toleration in religious matters, as external authority was seen as antithetical to individual freedom. Five new denominations of major importance would be founded by American Protestants in the nineteenth century; by 1960 the number of different Protestant sects would total more than two hundred. Thus, the century immediately following the Revolution saw a paradoxical combination of increasing theological similarities with growing sectarian schisms in American Protestantism.

The Catholic novelist capitalized on this post-Revolutionary religious ethic, converting into vices those values lauded by Protestants. The Catholic writer represented Protestant diversity as self-mocking fragmentation, private interpretation as the seedbed of religious chaos, toleration as theological relativism. Whereas Protestant authors, from writers of Oriental tales to Biblical novelists, attacked tyrannical authority on behalf of individual freedom, the Catholic novelist was quick to point out that without the guiding hand of authority, freedom can lapse into unregulated license, engendering mutually exclusive doctrines. The Catholic argument was an old one: there can be just one True Church derived from Christ, and the Catholic church is the only existing denomination that can justifiably lay claim to a link with early Christian times through a continuing tradition of ecclesiastical leaders, saints, and scholarly commentators. By definition, according to this view, Protestantism is merely an offshoot or modification of Catholicism, so that Protestant pretenses to originality are inaccurate. The corruptions Luther attributed to the Catholic church have been exceeded by those of Protestantism itself, which has created a battlefield of jarring sects each claiming to be the True Church. This familiar Catholic argument had special import in a period when the Unitarian controversy was raging, when the Plan of Union between Presbyterianism and Congregationalism was collapsing, when evangelical Calvinism was spawning many different sects.

In a sense, Protestant fiction of the period constituted a massive effort to fabricate a meeting place for schismatic religionists. Usually minimizing sectarian differences while endorsing universal religious principles, Protestant writers offered such commonly acceptable ideas as morality, goodness, and social activity to a religiously diversified nation. The Biblical novel provided, among other things, a surrogate connection to the early-Christian past that most American Protestants lacked; William Ware, for example, could imaginatively consummate his search for a Unitarian apostolic succession in his early essay by returning directly to Biblical times in his novels. To be sure, the doctrinal controversies of the period were reflected in the Protestant novel, as evidenced by such works as Charles Observator, Justina, A New England Tale, and Jotham Anderson. But most controversial Protestant novels were written before 1830, as writers of all sects tried to fabricate a unity in diversity in fiction that placed virtuous action at the center of faith.

The Catholic novel, which began to be written in America around 1830, tried to expose Protestant attempts at unity as fraudulent, ahistorical, and ephemeral. There is just one unity, the Catholic novelist stressed, the unity of the Church founded by Christ through the authority of Peter and maintained by the Holy Fathers for eighteen centuries. Protestants offer only pale copies of this grand unity and usually must resort to tricks or to false hope to do so.

The pre-1850 Catholic novelist faced a uniquely difficult task: to win the sympathy of predominantly Protestant readers who were apt to dislike not only Catholicism but authoritarian religion of any sort. To accomplish this task some writers stressed features of Catholicism that would be naturally attractive to Americans, such as the patriotism of Catholic soldiers during the Revolutionary War or the social work of groups such as the Sisters of Charity. More typically the Catholic novelist tried to defuse Protestant objections by portraying a vehement hater of Catholicism who comes to see the error of his prejudices. To oppose the common Protestant view of Catholicism as a sensuous religion of forms, the Catholic novelist deemphasized material emblems of faith. Indeed, the extensive concerete descriptions of statues and icons in such Protestant novels as William Ware's Probus and Eliza B. Lee's Parthenia were generally avoided by the Catholic writers on behalf of more expository presentation of ideas.

Yet the Catholic novelist used common fictional devices to underscore rhetorically his religious message. For instance, a narrow and hateful Protestant preacher was often compared to a learned, urbane Catholic priest. Such a contrast cleverly overturned the normal conflict in Protestant novels—gloomy bigot versus tolerant protagonist—to make a case for Catholicism. Also, the Catholic writers of the period often invoked domestic sentiment and romantic love, which were standard features of Protestant fiction. Though the Catholic's final message was that the individual cannot create his own creed, all the authors borrowed the central Protestant premise of a restless individual protagonist seeking religious truth; exactly reversing the religious journey in Protestant novels, the Catholic writers showed a character emerging from the bigotry of Protestantism into the reasonableness and secure authoritarianism of the Catholic church. Some Catholic writers used the visionary mode to sanctify this journey. Combined with the increasing reliance on secular sentiment as time passed, these features of Catholic fiction suggest that in the process of appealing to a generally hostile audience, the Catholic novelist was forced to adopt several of the fictional techniques popularized by his Protestant opponents.

Catholic fiction in America before the Civil War was principally the product of the following novelists: Charles Constantine Pise, John Boyce, John T. Roddan, Hugh Quigley, Charles James Cannon, George Henry Miles, Jedediah Vincent Huntington, Anna Hanson Dorsey, Mrs. James Sadlier (formerly Mary Anne Madden), and Orestes Brownson.² Besides the fiction writen by these authors, there were individual efforts by other Catholics, including Mary Hughs's The Two Schools (1836), the anonymous Father Oswald (1843), and John D. Bryant's Pauline Seward (1847).

We find in this early Catholic fiction further evidence of the secularizing pattern apparent in much other religious fiction of the period. The earliest important novelists—Pise, Boyce, Roddan, and Quigley—were priests whose fiction passed from primarily intellectual defenses of doctrine to largely sentimental narratives illustrating practical Catholicism. In the 1840s these priest-novelists gave way to several Catholic lay persons—Cannon, Miles, Huntington, Dorsey, Sadlier—who increasingly deemphasized logic on behalf of pathos and adventure. Like many of the Protestant scribbling women of the 1840s and 1850s, these later Catholic writers were generally professional novelists trying to make a living through writing religious fiction: Cannon and Miles were determined to gain popularity, and Dorsey and Sadlier each wrote more than thirty Catholic novels between 1845 and 1890. The best novelist of the group, Huntington, was also the most worldly; an avid reader of English and French romantic fiction, he was often praised and occasionally damned for the sensuous richness and realism of his descriptions. Much of the early Catholic fiction was reviewed by Orestes Brownson, who found several novels lacking in intellectual rigor but who nevertheless recognized the importance of fiction in promoting Catholicism. Brownson tried his hand at writing fiction, outdoing the reasoned argumentation of his Protestant Charles Elwood (1840) in his Catholic The Two Brothers; or, Why Are You a Protestant? (1847), after which he resorted to a more sensational approach in The Spirit-Rapper (1854). The general movement of popular Catholic writing was away from theology toward sentimental fiction. In the 1840s novels displaced doctrinal works as the most lucrative product of Catholic publishers, and in 1845 Edward Dunigan of New York inaugurated his Dunigan's Home Library Series of Religious and Moral Works for Popular Reading, which was composed largely of novels.

The Catholic novelist faced the delicate task of disproving Protestantism logically while appealing to the emotions in ways the American novel reader expected. More acutely than Protestant novelists, who were often willing to abandon dogma happily, Catholics felt the painful paradox of the question: How does one write an intellectual religious novel? The Catholic novelist wished to invoke the powerful scholarly tradition of his church and to contrast his own reason to the evasive tactics of his Protestant enemies. At the same time, he did not want to put his readers to sleep with dull polemics.

This tension was most explicitly expressed in Brownson's literary articles of the late 1840s. In an 1847 article on religious novels Brownson declared that the novel was "the most convenient literary form which can now be adopted."³ The age demanded entertainment with its religion, and the novel was by far the most entertaining of popular genres. But Brownson was deeply disturbed by the failure of most religious novels, which he called "literary hybrids" combining "the sentimental story, and the grave religious discussion" (144). Brownson established the general rule that "they who are seriously disposed would prefer taking the theology by itself, and those who are not so disposed will skip it. The one class will regard the light and sentimental as an impertinence; and the other, the grave and religious as a bore" (144). Noting the prevalence of religious fiction in nineteenth-century America, Brownson declared that "we respect the rigidness of our Puritan ancestors more than we do the laxity of their descendants" (178). In an essay of 1848 entitled "Novel-Writing and Novel-Reading," denouncing J. D. Bryant's defense of religious novels as the proper response to public demand, Brownson noted, "Study any age or nation, and you will find its peculiar heresy to have originated in the attempt to conform the church to its dominant ideas and sentiments, or to incorporate them into her teaching and practice" (223). Moreover, said Brownson, religious fiction is usually a literary monstrosity, since "the interest of a story is diverse from the interest excited by a logical discussion, and not compatible with it. The one demands action, movement, is impatient of delay, and hurries on to the end; the other demands quiet, repose, and suffers only the intellect to be active. It is impossible to combine them both in one and the same piece so as to produce unity of effect" (226). Religious novelists, Brownson went on, are wont to combine "profane love with an argument for religion," and "no two interests are more widely separated, or less capable of coalescing, than the interest of profane love and that of religion" (226). In the final analysis, religious novelists assume "that nature, as nature, nature without elevation or transformation by grace, may be pressed into the service of God" (230). In another essay of 1848, "Catholic Secular Literature," Brownson reiterated that religious novelists "secularize the spiritual, while we would spiritualize the secular" (299).

The fact that Brownson wrote four pieces of fiction in spite of his great reservations about religious novels points up the general problem of the Catholic novelist in nineteenth-century America. To overlook fiction altogether would be to risk losing the attention of an American public that was buying Protestant novels by the thousands. To write fiction was to risk debasing the sacrosanct tradition of Roman Catholic logic. If he tried too hard to be popular, the Catholic novelist might be dismissed as theologically flawed. If he tried to be intellectual, he might be called artistically inept. In a sense, the Catholic novelist, like the logical Calvinist of the period, was backed into a corner. He wanted to be entertaining but respectable, popular yet precise. He wanted to endorse divine grace and strong intellect through the avenues of nature and secular sentiment. The literary hybrids produced by Catholics between 1829 and 1855 reflect the plight of a logical religionist in a secular culture. By 1855 it had become apparent that the Catholic novelist had decided to conform to the culture he had been wooing for nearly three decades.

America's first important Catholic novelist, Charles Constantine Pise, wrote three novels that were pointedly reasoned and intellectual. Each of his novels is a doctrinal conversion drama mildly seasoned with domestic sentiment. The first, Father Rowland (1829), traces the conversion to Catholicism of Virginia Wolburn, a Baltimore Episcopalian who at first derides Catholics, through conversations with her parents, her sister Louisa, and particularly the refined Father Rowland. In The Indian Cottage (1830) the Unitarian Elizabeth Preston adopts Catholicism after talking with Charles Clermont and his sisters. Zenosius; or, The Pilgrim-Convert (1845) allegorizes a young man's religious pilgrimage from a chaotic country, Sectarianism, to Rome.

Pise's basic story of a bigoted Protestant who comes to be convinced of Catholicism's reasonableness through careful deliberation epitomizes the most staid, conservative type of Catholic fiction. Strongest emotion in Pise's novels is directed to doctrinal matters, as when Father Rowland exclaims that American Protestantism is "the prolific parent of a thousand creeds, each contradicting each; all disagreeing; none admitting anything like a tribunal to decide their controversies; all appealing to the Bible, the Bible, the Bible!" Protestant Bible societies, Rowland continues, merely "scatter abroad the seeds of error: each individual interprets for himself, and forms a religion for himself," so that he can "make the scripture speak any language he pleases."⁴ In each novel Pise depicts a learned authority, a priest or an educated lay person, who can explain the precepts and history of Catholicism to the searching Protestant. Pise avoids both lively adventure and romantic love in an effort to attain the quiet and repose that Brownson found essential to logical argument. Except for the allegorical Zenosius, Pise's characters are wealthy southern families who have leisure to discuss doctrinal niceties while enjoying peaceful Maryland sunsets.

But Pise, like most religious novelists, adopted fiction for rhetorical reasons, and secular sentiment often creeps into even his determinedly logical stories. Despite his pose of sobriety and equanimity, Pise discovers in fiction some anti-Protestant weapons which would be used by later Catholic novelists: appeals to American patriotism, contrasting personal descriptions of Protestants and Catholics, winning anecdotes, sorrowful deathbed scenes, and to a lesser extent, the visionary mode. By making the father of Virginia Wolburn a distinguished veteran of the Revolution, Pise plays on the democratic sympathies of Protestant readers. More significantly, by contrasting a handsome, forthright priest with an ugly, evasive Protestant minister, he plays on the average reader's sense of attraction and revulsion. While avoiding romantic love, Pise portrays the priest of his first novel as a pious young bachelor whose "unaffected gracefulness . . . could not but conciliate the prejudices of any company" (28). Rowland's history of the Catholic church is "interspersed with several amusing anecdotes," showing that the priest, "though grave, was facetious and lively, presenting a living picture of a truly pious man" (39). In contrast, his Episcopalian opponent, the Reverend Mr. Dorson, is "a tall, spare . . . person with a bald head, and a stern sanctimonious countenance" who makes certain "to allude in all his sermons to the ignorance, and superstition, and idolatry, of the Catholic worship. Rome he styled Babylon. The Pope the beast. The Church the mother of corruption" (86). While Rowland desires honest discussion, Dorson tries "to evade it most dextrously," relying on vitriolic name calling (90). Louisa Wolburn is struck by the "difference between the calm, dispassionate reasoning of Mr. Rowland, and the vapid vituperation of Doctor Dorson" (98).

Pise repeats the contrast in Indian Cottage: the Catholic Charles Clermont is "elegant in his manners, and refined by the most polished education," while the Unitarian Alton is emotionally biased.⁵ By embodying standard obloquies against Catholicism in disagreeable Protestant figures, Pise can overcome them through his appeals to the bourgeois values of his readers in his depictions of polished Catholic gentlemen.

Pise does not just use Protestant patriotism and anti-Catholic preconceptions to his own ends; he skillfully reverses common devices of Protestant fiction. This reversal is most apparent in the full title of his second novel, The Indian Cottage: A Unitarian Story. In 1830 the typical American reader might have picked up the book with expectations of another Unitarian Indian tale along the lines of Child's Hobomok or Sedgwick's Hope Leslie. The fact that the reader may have been disappointed to discover that "Indian Cottage" is simply the name of a Maryland mansion housing a Unitarian family that turns Catholic probably did not worry Pise; he at least caught the reader's eye and, perhaps, made him consider Catholicism. In his novels Pise often directs devices from Protestant fiction—deathbed sentiment, vernacular perspective, anecdotal persuasion, and even the visionary mode—to Catholic ends.

Pise masks his reversal of Protestant literary devices with conventional Catholic paeans to logic. His outlook is summed up by a priest in Zenosius: "Error should, certainly, be combated: but not with the arms of the flesh: not with impetuous abuse, not with passionate declamation against one another. If the Protestant believes one faith erroneous, let him confine himself to argument, to solid reasoning, to scriptural authority."⁶ However, as we have seen, Pise, even while establishing himself as the most logical Catholic novelist America would produce, made subtle use of arms of the flesh in his novels. It was left to later Catholic writers to exaggerate the secular devices Pise had strategically covered with the guise of sober reason.

Mary Hughs's The Two Schools (1836) leaves behind Pise's doctrinal priorities and advances a creedless Catholicism of social action and feeling. The restrained domestic affection of Pise's Wolburn and Clermont families is replaced by Hughs's emotional portrait of the Monkton family, Anglicans who leave England for Baltimore, where they discover that a poor Catholic orphan, Mary McDonald, is in fact their long-lost daughter, Aline Monkton. The basic plot of Pise's novels—Protestant conversion to Catholicism—is echoed in Hughs's account of how the Anglican Augusta Monkton and her father adopt the Catholic faith as a result of their growing disaffection with Protestantism. But the reflective stasis of Pise's novels gives way in Hughs to dramatic movement as the Monktons wander from England to Baltimore and Wilmington in search of religious truth. Moreover, Pise's logical Catholic preceptors are replaced by secular exemplars: the Sisters of Charity, whose social work the Monktons come to admire, and the angelic Mary, who retains her peaceful faith in Catholicism despite poverty and solitude. Like a number of Calvinist and liberal novelists of the mid-1830s, Hughs finds in social activity and perseverance ideal alternatives to doctrinal religion.

Catholic fiction might have continued in Hugh's quietly noncontroversial vein had it not been for the increasingly rancorous anti-Catholicism that swept America between 1835 and 1850. The influx of Irish and European Catholics in the 1830s and 1840s caused great alarm in many Protestant circles and helped give rise to such nativist groups as the Know-Nothings. Several Protestant authors wrote vicious anti-Catholic novels that represented nunneries as whorehouses run by rum-drinking priests (see ). Such Protestant criticism deserved stronger reply than staid, reasoned novels like Pise's or innocuous social-working dramas like Hughs's. At the same time, Catholics did not wish to lose their intellectual superiority by descending to the mudslinging tactics of their opponents. Therefore, they opted for fiction that combined solid Catholic argumentation with more sensational anti-Protestant devices. Catholic novelists after 1840 were more willing than Pise to take up arms of the flesh in the defense of their church.

As a result of the rising opposition to Catholicism in America, a new tone of defensive vindictiveness characterized several of the post-1840 works. Father Oswald (1843) was written, according to its preface, in reply to the anti-Catholic "Father Clement and many similar productions" since 1835. Presented as "an antidote to the baneful production of Father Clement," the book promises to answer all charges made in the anti-Catholic novel, "although they have been previously refuted a hundred times."⁷ In his preface to Harry Layden (1842) Charles Cannon explains that the book "has been written—but with no controversial spirit—for the purpose of saying something in favour of that portion of the Christian family which every dabbler in literature feels himself at liberty to abuse."⁸ Likewise, Hugh Quigley's The Cross and the Shamrock (1853) is prefaced by the assertion: "The corruption of the cheap trash literature, that is now ordinarily supplied for the amusement and instruction of the American people . . . calls for some antidote, some remedy."⁹

In keeping with such aims, post-1840 Catholic novelists gave new satiric point to their attacks on Protestantism. Unlike Pise, who had selected Episcopalian or Unitarian characters to outreason, the later writers often coupled their attacks on such mild characters with sharp caricature of more sensational Protestants—evangelical revivalists, Millerites, and so forth. In Father Oswald the dying William Smith is converted to Catholicism partly as result of the callous inattention of his Methodist pastor, Ebenezer, whose religion seems harsh and narrow. After Smith's death his antievangelical sentiments are repeated by a Catholic character who notes the "frightful spectacle" of "so many swarms of new sects, that rise up daily around us. In every village new meeting-houses are erected, and every illiterate fanatic quits the loom or the anvil, and, with all self-sufficiency, mounts to the pulpit to explain to the stupid crowd the deep mysteries of revelation." Such evangelism places the Bible in the hands of "every unlearned and unstable mechanic" who wishes to address "the gulled and gaping multitude."¹⁰

Charles Cannon similarly capitalizes on evangelical excesses. In Harry Layden he mocks the "great scandal" of Methodist camp meetings, where "the Christian heaven is described in the glowing colors of a Mahometan paradise; the praises of the 'Lamb' are sung with the frenzied ardor of Bacchanals; and even the Holy Name is mouthed with the most impious familiarity, to the horror of every right thinking man or woman present."¹¹ Cannon continues the attack in Mora Carmody (1844) and Father Felix (1845). Cannon's Mora is shocked by "the miserable jargon" of an itinerant who denounces the Pope as "the Son of Perdition, the Man of Sin, the Anti-Christ, foretold by the prophet."¹² In Father Felix a Millerite revival brings about the derangement of Julia Baldwin, whose former placidity is replaced by frenzied ravings which lead to her death.

Thus after 1840 Catholic novelists raised their voices in response to the clamorous vituperation that was coming from the Protestant press. The lascivious priest of the anti-Catholic novel was parodied by the ignorant, wild revivalist of the Catholic novel. But the Catholics did not wish to give themselves over to sheer emotionalism, for to do so would be to sacrifice their most dependable ally, logic. Thus, they presented their novels as reasoned refutations of unreasonable Protestant slander. Cannon, for example, denounced "those flagitious attacks upon the professors of the Catholic faith, with which the American press has lately teemed, that make up in abuse what they lack in argument."¹³ Nearly every Catholic novel before 1850 contains a priest who defends such doctrines as transubstantiation, the Virgin Birth, and apostolic succession with cool wisdom. The priest normally stresses that Protestantism is hopelessly fragmented and that the final destination for the Protestant is either bewilderment or atheism.

And yet the Catholic novelist was fully aware that these were old arguments that might without sentimental refurbishment bore American readers. Accordingly, those secular arms of the flesh Pise had subtly used came to be utilized more explicitly and frequently by the post-1840 writers. Priests were not only learned but also well dressed and handsome, in contrast to their slovenly Protestant opponents. The domestic emotion Pise had tried to restrain became the key to conversion in several of the novels, and romantic love was a common theme. The Protestant couple of Father Oswald, for instance, separates when the wife adopts Catholicism and reunites when her husband follows her into the True Church. Cannon's orphaned Harry Layden wins love and wealth along with religion. The Protestant narrator of Mora Carmody, at first dismayed that Mora is a Catholic, is eventually won over as much by her winning demeanor as by her logic. In Father Felix Cannon connects Protestantism to seduction, madness, and murder while linking Catholicism to social advancement. A similarly sentimental scheme informs Bryant's Pauline Seward and nearly all the novels of Anna Dorsey. In many of the novels, deathbed scenes enforce the need for salvation in the Catholic Church. In short, the Catholic novelist after 1840 was using sentimental devices that had been standard features of Protestant fiction since the 1820s.

In addition, this later Catholic fiction, while always more doctrinal than its Protestant counterpart, relied increasingly on anecdotes and illustrations of religious truth. The priest figure was usually a good storyteller as well as a careful logician. Father Felix contains several interpolated religious legends, ranging from a story of medieval knighthood to a visionary tale, which dramatically accent the intellectual disquisitions of the main characters. In some novels an effort is made to reduce doctrinal references while extolling secular illustration. In the interest of "supplying the younger portion of the Catholic community with a source of mental recreation," Anna Dorsey emphasizes that she has merely "touched lightly on a few doctrinal points."¹⁴ Indeed, her novels, which resemble those of the Calvinist Joseph Alden written during the same period, concentrate more on the tears of orphans than on the talk of priests. Likewise, in Harry Layden, Charles Cannon is willing to sidestep a key doctrinal discussion in the interest of getting on with the story:

We are not writing a treatise on education, nor a volume of controversial divinity and will therefore, neither trace step by step, the progress of Harry in the path of learning, nor go over all the arguments made use of by Redmond in his conversations with Agneta, to prove that Catholicism—the religion of some of the wisest and best men the world has ever known—might have some claim to be considered Christianity. Nor will we describe the struggles of the ingenuous Agneta with herself, when obliged to abandon, one by one, the prejudices she had cherished as truths, until she was forced to admit, that notwithstanding all she had heretofore heard and read, all that is essential to salvation may be found in the Church of Rome [35].

Evasion of doctrinal exposition had always been common in Protestant fiction in America; even relatively cerebral works such as Jotham Anderson and A New England Tale contain several passages that, like Cannon's, relegate vast intellectual inquiries to a vague sentence or two. But such circumvention was new to the Catholic novelist of the 1840s, who was now eager to avoid the appearance of writing a volume' of controversial divinity.

After 1850 this movement to the sentimental and anecdotal was accelerated and was underscored by a minimizing of tedious argumentation that might alienate Protestant readers. Jedediah Vincent Huntington, an Anglican who was converted to Roman Catholicism in 1849, voiced the sentiments of many later novelists when in the mid-1850s he distinguished between "controversial" and "poetic" Catholic fiction. Echoing Brownson, Huntington wrote, "The modern controversial Catholic novel .. . is liable to the fatal objection of mixing things in themselves heterogeneous and incompatible." Dismissing the controversial novel as "essentially inartistic," Huntington declared that Catholic fiction should aim "to create the beautiful imitation of real human life, not to convince, not to refute even the most real and the most lamentable errors."¹⁵ Huntington's interest in real human life was reflected in his five novels, which were more notable for their vivid realism and romantic adventure than for otherworldly contemplation or doctrinal subtlety. This secular emphasis sometimes angered Huntington's reviewers. In 1850 the North American Review found in his Lady Alice an "irreverent flippancy with which things sacred and things secular are constantly intermingled."¹⁶ The Review lamented Huntington's "thoroughly licentious" and "voluptuous" accounts of concubinage, nude art models, and mixed public bathing, voicing its "solemn protest against the intrusion upon English literature, under the garb of religious purism, of the vilest forms and worst features of modern French fiction" (237).

In response to such criticism, Huntington tried to tame his impulse to graphic sensuous description, though it did surface in each of his four Catholic novels of the 1850s. For example, Huntington was condemned by several critics for allowing the heroine of The Forest (1852) to camp for a time with her lover in the North woods. Each of his Catholic novels made courtship prerequisite to conversion. Rosemary (1860), which dealt with such lively topics as clandestine marriages and reanimated corpses, was explained by the author as follows: "This is not a prayer-book, but a story written expressly to win the attention of those who will read nothing but stories, and sensational ones at that."¹⁷ Mirroring this anecdotal propensity, Huntington's novels contain several storytelling characters and interpolated narratives. Alban of Alban (1853) and The Forest "can repeat whole novels from beginning to end."¹⁸ In The Forest the Catholic heroine's long sentimental tale of the placidity of convent life effects the conversion of a Protestant girl, while Alban's intellectual cerebrations during a monastic retreat are dismissed with Huntington's statement that "it is not our intention to follow our hero through the course of this celebrated discipline" (277).

Other Catholic novelists after 1850 manifested this antitheological secularism in different ways. Such works as Anna Dorsey's Woodreve Manor (1852) and Charles Cannon's Tighe Lyfford (1859) have little Catholic content. Mrs. James Sadlier, adopting the favorite formula of Protestant domestic novelists, wrote numerous novels of displaced Irish orphans enduring Protestant obloquy and gaining money and marriage through firm adherence to simple Catholic principles. George Henry Miles's Loretto (1851) was "severely handled" by critics because it contained "no good solid arguments in it, extracted from standard theological works."¹⁹ The heroine of Miles's The Governess (1851) brings about the conversion of a Protestant family not by argument but rather "by the force of example," giving rise to another evasion-of-exposition passage: "The winter passed in religious controversy, which we do not mean to repeat: there are so many better reasoners than Mary, that it is quite unnecessary to record her instructions."²⁰ Similarly, the Irish priest of Hugh Quigley's The Cross and the Shamrock (1853) shows "reluctance to enter into a theological discussion" with a Protestant character.²¹ Quigley's sensational interests are reflected in this book, The Cross and the Shamrock, which associates camp meetings with sexual promiscuity and Protestantism in general with dissolution and suicide, as well as in his Prophet of the Ruined Abbey (1855) and Profit and Loss (1873), in which farcical anti-Protestant satire and stirring Irish legends predominate over logic.

This growing resistance to intellectual doctrine is most clearly illustrated in John Boyce's Mary Lee (1860). Boyce's special target is Orestes Brownson, who appears in the novel as Dr. Horseman-Henshaw, a recent convert to Catholicism whose ponderous logic contrasts with the simple emotional piety of the Irish heroine and a fun-loving priest. Like several other Catholic novelists of the day, Boyce had reason to be upset with Brownson. Although Brownson had lauded Boyce's Shandy M'Guire (1848), he had qualified his praise by stating, "We object to novels in general, because they are sentimental, and make the interest of their readers centre in a story of the rise, progress, and termination of the affection or passion of love."²² Brownson had blasted Boyce's second book, The Spaewife (1853), calling it "too grave for fiction, and too light for history.²³ Boyce responded with his caricature of Henshaw, who "as a polemic and logician . . . has very few equals" but who is coldly distant from practical, human Catholicism.²⁴ One of Boyce's Irish Catholics complains that Henshaw "wields theology like a sledge-hammer, and sends all Protestants to misery everlasting" (182). Another, noting that Henshaw "reviews every book he can lay his hands on—stories, novels, poetry, every thing," declares: "I think so little of his literary criticisms I don't care to read them" (165). In contrast to Henshaw, who believes that "intellectual men need intellectual treatment," Mary Lee wins over a Protestant girl "not by dosing her with dogmas, anathemas, and philosophy," but "by the mere example of her every-day life" (325, 324).

Thus post-1850 Catholic novelists, following a pattern similar to the one seen in the works of orthodox and liberal Protestant novelists, increasingly embraced quotidian example and noncontroversial piety, rejecting the more logically reasoned argumentation used by Pise and other priest-novelists before 1845.

In light of this movement toward the sentimental and anecdotal, it is not surprising that Orestes Brownson wrote several essays in 1847 and 1848 emphasizing the need for stricter logic in Roman Catholic fiction. The increasing use by Catholic novelists of the themes of love and adventure alarmed Brownson, who wished to reverse or at least retard the secularizing trend. But Brownson offered no real alternative to the writer of Catholic fiction. As we have seen, he could note that religious novelists "secularize the spiritual, while we would spiritualize the secular"; but how was such equivocal advice to be practically applied? He could declare that novelists "overlook the essential incongruity between nature and grace"; but how was intangible grace to be reproduced in fiction? He attacked J. D. Bryant's request for an adaptation to cultural tastes. Yet not only did he admit that the popular novel was "the most convenient form which can now be adopted," but he tempered his criticism of Anna Dorsey's Conscience (1856) by writing: "Let every man, every woman, old or young, that can write a passable book, write it. Even trash is better than nothing."²⁵ On the matter of religious fiction, Brownson was torn between the demands of culture and those of conscience, between popular appeal and doctrinal purity. Brownson's love affair with religious fiction was as painful as had been his infatuations with Presbyterianism, Unitarianism, socialism, and Transcendentalism—but it was much longer, as it began in the early 1840s and continued long after his conversion to Catholicism.

Both fascinated and repelled by religious fiction, Brownson made four efforts at writing fiction: Charles Elwood (1840), The Two Brothers (1847), "Uncle Jack and His Nephew" (1854), and The Spirit-Rapper (1854). In this fiction we see Brownson, first from a Protestant and then from a Catholic standpoint, struggling to locate a proper fictional voice. After mingling sentiment with argument in his first novel, he ascends to almost pure logic in his second and third tales, and then experiments with sensationalism in The Spirit-Rapper. The inconsistency in tone of these works suggests that even one of the most acute Roman Catholic thinkers in nineteenth-century America had extreme difficulty in discovering a fictional equipoise between religion and nature in the popular religious novel.

Many of Brownson's apprehensions are captured in his introductory apologia to Charles Elwood: "It may be objected that I have introduced too much fiction for a serious work, and too little, if I intended a regular-built novel."²⁶ His later novels and essays would constitute a prolonged attempt at deciding what was too much or too little fiction. In Charles Elwood Brownson essays a balanced combination of logic and emotion. He describes Elwood's painful passage from gloomy skepticism to piety as a result of his love for the dying Elizabeth Wyman and his intellectual dialogues with two progressive Protestants, Morton and Howard. Clearly Brownson in the novel is trying to expunge the frivolous in favor of the serious. He carefully records the cerebrations that lead Elwood from atheism to Protestantism. Basically, the argument is a fully developed version of the theme of most American Protestant novels of the period: that the religious sentiment beneath changeable creeds can be apprehended through free individual inquiry. Instead of resorting to indirect secular analogues like the Biblical novelist's Roman tyrant, Brownson directly attacks the "ecclesiastical tyranny" of Roman Catholicism and Calvinism, championing "individual reason" and every man's "right and power to form his own creed" (251).

And yet, despite this rational emphasis, Brownson does bend to the sentimental requirements of popular fiction. Branded a pariah by religionists, frustrated in love, finding no stoic or existential pleasure in life, Elwood before his conversion is a restless Wertherian seeker tailored to suit the romantic tastes of the reading public. He cries despondently over his disbelief and his lover's death and joyfully over his new-found faith. Even after his long talks with Morton and Howard, he is as much swayed by their benevolent example as by their logic. He can thus conclude: "As a general rule would you gain the reason you must win the heart. This is the secret of most conversions. There is no logic like love" (241).

In his effort to please both the sentimentalist and the logician Brownson pleased neither. Charles Elwood did not have popular success, and reviewers wrote contradictory evaluations of the book according to their doctrinal preferences. The Christian Examiner dubbed Brownson a "logic-grinder, without heart and soul, or at best with nothing but a gizzard."²⁷ The conservative Boston Quarterly Review, arguing that Brownson resorted to "a subtler influence than logic" in the novel, said precisely the opposite:

Abstract the personal interest taken in Charles himself, the aesthetic effect of his conversation with his betrothed, and of the moral beauty of Mr. Howard's life and generous friendship, and the life and force of the argument would be greatly impaired, and nearly all the efficacy of the work would be lost . . . Abstract the deep, earnest feeling, the passion even, that [Brownson] mingles with his arguments, to an extent perhaps little expected, and we apprehend his logic would be by no means remarkable.²⁸

Thus, Brownson included in Charles Elwood both too little and too much fiction to satisfy anybody.

After he was converted to Catholicism in 1844, Brownson went through a period, roughly between 1847 and 1851, in which the logical side of Charles Elwood was exaggerated to fuel an antipathy to anything tinged with secular sentiment. The kind of intellectualism used by Elwood's teachers to support Protestantism was transformed in this later period to expository defenses of Catholicism and attacks on Protestantism in Brownson's Quarterly Review.

It was at this time that Brownson wrote the aridly logical The Two Brothers; or, Why Are You a Protestant? (1847). The novel consists of prolonged debates between John and James Milwood, brothers who were raised as Presbyterians and who have made adult choices, respectively, for Catholicism and Protestantism. In the face of his brother's spurious, emotional argumentation, John coolly performs dizzying intellectual feats to prove that Protestantism is a confused array of nonreligions which change God into a liar. Protestants, John says, are wont "to assume a bold and daring tone, to make broad and sweeping assertions, and to forego clear and exact statements, and close and rigid logic"; Catholics, in contrast, "speak to sober sense, to prudent judgement, and aim to convince the reason, instead of moving the sensibility and inflaming the passions."²⁹ John's logic is pointed in the opposite direction from that of the Protestant thinkers of Charles Elwood. The individual creation of religion recommended by Howard and Morton becomes, in the eyes of Brownson's Catholic spokesman, the cause of religious anarchy and relativism. In Protestantism, says John, "there is a multitude of sects, indeed, sometimes arranged under one common name, but without any common faith of principles, except that of hostility to the [Catholic] church" (268). Brownson keeps romantic love out of his novel; the two brothers are sexless mouthpieces for an inductive refutation of Protestantism. Even the conventional happy ending is eschewed, as James remains a hardened Catholic hater and John enters a monastery at the end.

While trying to offer a model of disinfected fiction to the Catholic novelists he was attacking in his essays of 1847-48, Brownson nevertheless does use a subtler influence than logic even in this highly intellectual novel. He has gotten rid of profane love here, but domestic and deathbed sentiment remains in the person of the brothers' mother, who, while dying, is tearfully converted to Catholicism. John is given the emotional advantage from the beginning by receiving his mother's blessing and by acting on her last request that he reconsider his childhood Presbyterianism. Brownson borrows from other Catholic novelists not only the deathbed scene but also the device of placing vehement anti-Catholicism in the mouth of a Protestant straw figure. James's first defense of Protestantism is a self-parodying torrent of vitriol: "I am a Protestant because the Romish Church is corrupt, the Mystery of Iniquity, the Man of Sin, Antichrist, the Whore of Babylon, drunk with the blood of the saints, a cage of unclean birds, cruel, oppressive, tyrannical, superstitious, idolatrous" (248). The reader is prepared by this outburst to agree with the later statement that Protestants are "far abler demogogues than logicians" (263). Furthermore, Brownson cleverly creates a devil in the ranks in his portrait of Wilson, a Presbyterian friend of James's who comes to criticize his own religion even more sharply than does John. "The time is not far distant," admits Wilson to James, "when you will have no Protestantism to defend, but each man will have a gospel of his own" (267). In sum, even while writing what is possibly the most studiously reasoned religious novel in American literature, Brownson makes rhetorical use of characterization and sentiment.

If Charles Elwood had been treated roughly by the public and by reviewers, The Two Brothers suffered an even worse fate: indifference. There is little evidence that the novel had a readership outside of regular subscribers to Brownson's Quarterly Review, in which it appeared serially. Brownson could intellectualize at length about what elements religious fiction should and should not contain, but he was finding the writing of such fiction difficult. The problem was really one of genre: to be theologically successful Brownson had to restrict himself to the essay; but to be popular he felt compelled to attempt fiction.

Criticized or ignored by reviewers and unsure of himself artistically, Brownson decided in The Spirit-Rapper (1854) to defy his critics by leaping over the boundary of genre altogether: "If the critics undertake to determine, by any recognized rules of art, to what class of literary productions the following unpretending work belongs, I think they will be sorely puzzled. I am sure I am puzzled myself to say what it is. It is not a novel; it is not a romance; it is not a biography of a real individual; it is not a dissertation, an essay, or a regular treatise; and yet it perhaps has some elements of them all, thrown together in just such a way as best suited my convenience, or my purpose."³⁰ By now accustomed to both giving and receiving unfavorable reviews in his search for the ideal Catholic novel, Brownson invites his critics "to bestow upon the author as much of the castigation which, in his capacity of Reviewer, he has for many years been in the habit of bestowing on others, as they think proper" (1). The confident tone of the essays of 1847-48 has been replaced by a defensive, slightly cynical humor. The firm discrimination made in 1848 between the sentimental story and the grave religious discussion, between nature and grace, have given over to an ironic confession of literary puzzlement and possible failure. The issue is no longer a clear-cut conflict between too much and too little fiction; rather, it is a complex jugglery of genres and voices, none of which can be wholly accepted as the ideal ingredient of successful Catholic fiction.

As its preface indicates, The Spirit-Rapper is a potpourri of fiction, autobiography, history, satire, and theology. In several senses the book is notably different from Brownson's previous novels. Inductive logic has been replaced by flexible sentiment, a limited cast of characters by a multitude of religious voices, a nonadventurous plot by wide-ranging movement and even melodrama. Brownson's narrator, a liberal Protestant who is dabbling in mesmerism and spiritualism, meets the lovely Priscilla, a socialist despiser of despotic religions, who persuades him to join her World-Reform movement to overthrow the Catholic church. Along with Priscilla's husband, James, the two travel through Europe, where for six years they try to incite revolt against the Pope through a combined strategy of mind control and exhortation. Their attempts fail, as Pius IX causes a Catholic revival which crushes organized anti-Catholicism. Returning to America, the three reformers enter more troubled waters. The narrator becomes a gloomy atheist and is stabbed by James, who jealously suspects him of trying to steal his wife. The narrator becomes an invalid who is visited regularly by friends of various philosophical and religious outlooks. Meanwhile Priscilla, frustrated in love with the narrator, has been converted to Catholicism, which has been taught her by an erudite Franciscan monk whose brutal murder Priscilla later witnesses. The narrator follows a different road into the church. After trying to establish a rival religion to Christianity, a mixture of freethought and spiritualism, he at last espouses Catholicism because it is the only religion that distinguishes between "genuine and counterfeit spirit-manifestations" (191). Recognizing Satan, the narrator is forced to recognize Christ.

In this novel Brownson throws aside his earlier concern for strict logic and tightly regulated characterization and plot. He portrays many idiosyncratic characters who would have been banned from his previous fiction: Increase Mather Cotton, an Old Light Calvinist who mocks nineteenth-century liberalism's disbelief in devils; Edgerton and the American Orpheus, counterparts of Emerson and Alcott: Thomas Jefferson Andrew Jackson Hobbs, a populist demagogue; Rose Winter, a Jew who damns the New Testament; and various spiritualists, mesmerists, and radical reformers. Methodists are mocked as "so many bedlamites or howling dervishes" (11), and Joseph Smith is called "ignorant, illiterate, and weak" (99). In contrast to Brownson's novels and essays of the 1840s, this novel makes an allowance for profane love, borrowing from the popular sentimental novel the device of a love triangle that triggers a murder attempt. The narrator, despite his intelligence, is closer to the stormy, soul-searching protagonists of French romantic novels than to previous Brownson heroes such as John Milwood.

But the most thoroughly exploited area of sensationalism in the novel is spirit rapping and devil possession. Writing six years after the famous Fox rappings in New York, Brownson mentions not only the Fox sisters but also several other reports of spirit manifestations from modern and ancient historical records. Although Brownson's rather chaotic approach prevents him from fashioning a Catholic potboiler like William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist, Brownson anticipates Blatty's technique of positing an obverse spirituality through demon possession. One scene, in which Cotton orders a devil to leave a girl's body, presages the climactic moment of The Exorcist. Elsewhere, Brownson records instances of table lifting, violent body contortions, speaking in tongues, and Catholic exorcism. Brownson's goal is to destroy "the last infirmity of unbelief, the denial of the existence of the devil" (78). He cites Voltaire's exclamation, "Sathan! c'est le Christianisme tout entier; PAS DE SATHAN, PAS DE SAUVEUR," explaining that "if there was no devil, the mission of Christ had no motive, no object, and Christianity is a fable" (93). Thus, the narrator's conversion comes only when he is convinced that Satan is a powerful being who is best explained and most successfully opposed by the Catholic church.

In The Spirit-Rapper Brownson has followed the pattern of those previous Catholic novelists whose foibles he pointed out in his essays of 1847-48. The Spirit-Rapper bears a relation to Brownson's earlier novels similar to that which the works of the other post-1840 writers bear to Pise's novels. Like Cannon and the author of Father Oswald, Brownson replaces logical refutation of reasonable Protestant denominations with caricature of more floridly emotional sects. He exceeds the other writers in his range of dramatic portrayals, as he describes excitingly radical movements which even the popularly oriented Cannon neglected. The vindictive post-1840 device of containing anti-Catholicism through the depiction of misled Catholic baiters is expanded by Brownson to a complex plot involving Protestant reformers who scheme to subvert the Pope himself. The sentimentalism utilized by Huntington, Quigley, and Boyce is often invoked by Brownson, who heightens his religious dialogue with unrequited love, jealousy, revenge, and romantic ennui. All of these sensational tendencies are epitomized in Brownson's description of spirit manifestations. If Charles Elwood and The Two Brothers use a subtler influence than logic to endorse Catholicism, The Spirit-Rapper, like other Catholic novels after 1840, leaves behind cautious subtlety in favor of more explicitly combative and divertingly secular techniques.

The Spirit-Rapper is in part a sentimental dramatization of a central passage in Brownson's "Uncle Jack and His Nephew" (1854), a story that ran serially in the Quarterly Review during the months just prior to the publication of the novel. Among the arguments used by the Catholic uncle to his Protestant nephew is the following summation of Protestant history: "In religion Luther engendered Voltaire, in philosophy Descartes, in politics Jean Jacques Rousseau, in morals Helvetius. In religion you have ended in the rejection of the supernatural, in philosophy in doubt and nihilism, in politics in anarchy, in morals in the sanctification of lust."³¹ This condemnation of Protestantism, stronger and more sweeping than any indictment in Brownson's fiction previous to "Uncle Jack," shows Brownson stating expositionally ideas that would be enacted sensationally in The Spirit-Rapper. The sanctification of lust here criticized becomes Priscilla's passion for the narrator during her Protestant period. Anarchy surfaces in the portrait of Protestant revolutionists, doubt and nihilism in the narrator's loss of faith before his conversion to Catholicism. Uncle Jack's strongest charge—the rejection of the supernatural—is answered by Brownson's graphic accounts of supernatural occurrences in the novel.

Having completed his secularizing cycle in The Spirit-Rapper, Brownson retreated in his later writings to the more conventional genres of unfictionalized autobiography, Catholic essays, and history. Apologetic from the beginning about his fiction, Brownson experimented with various balancings of logic and sentiment only to discover that the most convenient form was also the most artistically elusive.

Brownson stopped writing fiction in 1854, but he continued to review fiction regularly for the next two decades. His views of Henry Ward Beecher's Norwood and modern realist novels were predictable: he declared that such non-Catholic works remained in the realm of unsanctified nature and paganism. His attitudes towards what he came to call "Catholic secular literature" were more complex. He continued to treat the Catholic novel as a high ideal rarely realized in practice.

As late as the 1870s, shortly before his death, Brownson was still struggling to define Catholic fiction in a series of essays in his Quarterly Review: "Mrs. Gerald's Niece" (1870), "Religious Novels, and Woman versus Woman" (1873), "Catholic Popular Literature" (1872), and "Women's Novels" (1875). In these essays Brownson supported the broadening interest in fiction among Catholics while he lamented the failure of most religious novels. In "Religious Novels" he repeated his argument of 1848 that a mixture of love and doctrine creates "a literary monstrosity, which is equally indefensible under the relation of religion and that of art." "There are," he noted, ". . . very few of our authors of religious novels, even when they know their religion well enough to avoid all grave errors in the serious part of their productions, who have so thoroughly catholicized their whole nature, consecrated their imaginations, and conformed their tastes, mental habits and judgements, sentiments and affections, to the spirit of Catholicity, that when they write freely and spontaneously out from their own imaginations, they are sure to write nothing not fully in accordance with their religion."³²

To be sure, the Catholic novel is, in Brownson's view, the best antidote to realism, that "most corrupting and infamous school of literature that has ever existed" (573). But in reality the antidote was becoming controlled by the poison, since post-1850 Catholic novelists were descending to realist secularism with disturbing frequency. In an effort to stem the secular tide Brownson reminded his readers: "The object of the Catholic novelist, or cultivator of light literature, is not or should not be to paint actual life, or life as we actually find it, but to idealize it, and raise it, as far as possible, to the Christian standard, not indeed by direct didactic discourses or sermonizing, which is out of place in a novel; but by the silent influence of the pictures presented, and the spirit that animates them" (572).

Instead of clarifying matters for the Catholic novelist, Brownson brought up an old paradox: there is no comfortable via media between direct didactic discourses and portraits of actual life for the Catholic author of popular fiction. Pise had tried to tip the fictional balance to the side of doctrine. Later novelists, such as Cannon, Dorsey, and the post-1850 authors, were more apt to find rhetorical reinforcements for doctrine in actual life.

Brownson himself had utilized first extreme logic and then extreme sensationalism before abandoning the writing of fiction for literary theorizing. By 1873 Brownson was sounding less like a prophetic elucidator of contemporary fictional tendencies than a reactionary purist in search of a genre that never did—and perhaps never could—exist.

¹Redwood, p. xv.

² For a summary of the biographies of these writers, as well as descriptions of representative plots and typical critical reviews, see Willard Thorp, "Catholic Novelists in Defense of their Faith, 1829-1865," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 78 (April 1968), 25-117.

³Works of . . . Brownson, XIX, 149.

⁴Father Rowland: A North American Tale (Baltimore: Fielding Lucas, Jr., 1829), pp. 64, 65.

⁵The Indian Cottage: A Unitarian Story (Baltimore: Fielding Lucas, Jr.), p. 125.

⁶Zenosius; or, The Pilgrim Convert (New York: Dunigan, 1845), p. 80.

⁷Father Oswald: A Genuine Catholic Story (New York: Casserly and Sons, 1843), pp. vii, viii. Father Clement (1823), an anti-Catholic novel by the Scottish Grace Kennedy, had gained wide circulation in America in the 1820s and 1830s.

⁸Harry Layden: A Tale (New York: Boyle, 1842), pp. iii-iv.

⁹The Cross and the Shamrock; or, How to Defend the Faith (Boston: Patrick Donahoe, 1853), p. 6.

¹⁰Father Oswald, pp. 23-24.

¹¹ Cannon, Harry Layden, p. 46.

¹²Mora Carmody; or, Woman's Influence (New York: Dunigan, 1844), p. 23.

¹³Father Felix (New York: Dunigan, 1845), p. 50.

¹⁴ Anna Dorsey, The Sister of Charity (New York: Dungian, 1846), p. 6.

¹⁵ Quoted in James J. Walsh, "The Oxford Movement in America," Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia, XVI (Philadelphia, 1805), 436.

¹⁶North American Review, 70 (January 1850), 233.

¹⁷Rosemary; or, Life and Death (New York: Sadlier, 1860), p. 162.

¹⁸The Forest (New York: Redfield, 1852), p. 169.

¹⁹Loretto; or, The Choice (Baltimore: Hedían and O'Brien, 1851), p. iii.

²⁰The Governess; or, The Effects of Good Example (Baltimore: Hedian and O'Brien, 1851), p. 251.

²¹Cross and Shamrock, p. 149.

²²Brownson 's Quarterly Review, 2nd Series, III (January 1849), 58.

²³Brownson's Quarterly Review, 3rd Series, I (April 1853), 279.

²⁴Mary Lee; or, The Yankee in Ireland (Baltimore: Kelly, Hedian, and Piet, 1860), p. 165.

²⁵Brownson's Quarterly Review, New York Series, No. 2 (April 1856), 272.

²⁶ From Charles Elwood; or, The Infidel Converted (1840) in Works of . . . Brownson, IV, 178.

²⁷Christian Examiner and General Review, 28 (May 1840), 180.

²⁸ "Charles Elwood Reviewed," Boston Quarterly Review (March 1842), in Works of . . . Brownson, VI, 318.

²⁹The Two Brothers; or, Why Are You a Protestant? (1847), in Works of . . . Brownson, VI, 285.

³⁰The Spirit-Rapper: An Autobiography (1854; rpt., Detroit: T. Nourse, 1884), p. 1.

³¹Brownson's Quarterly Review, 3rd Series, II (January 1854), 23.

³²Works of . . . Brownson, XIX, 566.