SOURCE: An introduction to The Brownson Reader, edited by Alvan S. Ryan, P. J. Kenedy & Sons, 1955, pp. 1-27.

[In the following excerpt, Ryan provides an overview of Brownson's Career as a journalist, examining the influence of his religious conversions on his writing and on his political beliefs.]

Brownson was born in Stockbridge, Vermont, September 16, 1803. He and his twin sister, Daphne, were the youngest among six children of Sylvester and Relief Metcalf Brownson. His father had come to Stockbridge from Hartford Country, Connecticut, where the Brownsons were among the earliest settlers, his mother from Keene, New Hampshire. Stockbridge was then a frontier town, having been first settled only twenty years before Orestes' birth, and had less than one hundred inhabitants. Orestes' father died when the boy was very young, and poverty forced his mother to send Orestes to live with foster parents in nearby Royalton, Vermont. Religious sects flourished here in this period of evangelical fervor—there were Congregationalists, Methodists, Baptists, Universalists, and a sect founded in 1800 which called themselves "Christ-yans." The stern Congregational morality of his foster parents made an indelible impression on the boy, though he was left to understand that conversion must come as a personal rebirth. His early schooling was acquired at home through his own reading of the Bible and the few English classics he found there or could borrow. The dominant impressions of his childhood were religious, and when very young he was imbued with the ambition to become a minister.

Moving at the age of fourteen to Ballston Spa in northern New York with his mother, he attended the local academy, and worked in a printing office as apprentice and then journeyman. At the age of nineteen he joined the Presbyterian Church, and for a time taught school in Stillwater, near Ballston Spa. Unable to reconcile himself to the doctrine of unconditional election, and convinced that to accept the Calvinistic teaching was to do violence to his reason, he rejected Presbyterianism and in 1824 became a Universalist. The next two years find him teaching school for a time near Detroit, Michigan, then in Elbridge, New York, where he fell in love with Sally Healy, one of his pupils in the country school. In the summer of 1826, in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, he was ordained a Universalist preacher. His marriage to Sally Healy occurred in June, 1827.

Brownson preached for short periods in New Hampshire and Vermont, then for longer periods in Ithaca and Auburn, New York. He first contributed to, and later edited, The Gospel Advocate, the chief publication of the Universalist society. It was soon apparent, however, that Brownson's Universalist career would not be long. The sensitivity to social injustice that makes his youthful diaries read so much like early Carlyle was quickened by his reading of William Godwin's Political Justice. Then, quite by chance, he heard Fanny Wright lecture in Utica, New York, in the fall of 1829. He was captivated by her eloquence and her Utopian schemes. She, in turn, saw in him a valuable ally. He became for a short time a contributing editor to the Free Inquirer, published in New York by Fanny Wright and Robert Dale Owen. For a brief period he was also a member of the Workingmen's party in New York, dedicated to social democracy. Brownson's socialistic enthusiasms did not please the Universalists. He was, in fact, preaching socialism rather than Christianity the last two years of his ministry, and later spoke of the years 1829—1831 as the most anti-Christian period of his life. His association with Fanny Wright had precipitated a crisis in his religious beliefs. Realizing that he no longer believed what he was expected to preach, he left the Universalists and in February, 1831, began preaching as an independent minister in Ithaca, New York. In his first sermon he declared: "I do not wish to be called a Universalist. Should I assume the name of any party, it should be Unitarian. . . . Unitarian discourses are mostly practical; their lessons inculcate charity, refined moral feeling, and universal benevolence."

Late in 1831, upon hearing a friend read to him a sermon by William Ellery Channing, the noted Boston Unitarian, Brownson's hitherto vague acceptance of Unitarianism was suddenly kindled to enthusiasm. In 1832 he applied for the Unitarian pulpit in Walpole, New Hampshire, and was accepted. The two years in Walpole were years of intensive study. He learned French, read the five octavo volumes of Benjamin Constant's Religion Considered in Its Origin, Its Forms, Its Developments, and found here confirmation of his own confidence in intuition. Thenceforth for many years French philosophy and social theory—Saint-Simon, Victor Cousin, Jouffroy—became one of his chief enthusiasms. Brownson's sermons and his intellectual vigor began to be recognized more widely. From Walpole he frequently traveled the ninety miles to Boston for Lyceum lectures, met Channing and George Ripley, with both of whom he exchanged pulpits, and so began to be known among the leading Unitarians around Boston. Ripley became his closest friend, and at Ripley's suggestion he moved to Canton, Massachusetts, in 1834 as Unitarian minister.

Brownson plunged into his work in Canton with prodigious energy. He often preached three or four sermons a week; he gave Lyceum lectures, and devoted especial attention to the situation of the workingmen around Boston. In fact, it was Brownson's earlier connection with the Workingmen's party that led Channing to believe him particularly fitted to win to Christianity the industrial workers of the city. In 1834, in The Christian Examiner, Brownson outlined his plan for his "Church of the Future," in which Christianity became essentially a doctrine of social reform. He was, as he said later in The Convert, working for "the progress of man and society, and the realization of a heaven on earth."

In 1836 he moved to Chelsea, across the Mystic River from Boston, where he would be even closer to the laboring men to whom he felt he had a special mission, and began to preach in the Lyceum Hall and the Masonic Temple. He also edited the Boston Reformer. "Even in Boston," wrote Harriet Martineau, "as far behind the country as that city is, a notable change has taken place. A strong man, full of enlarged sympathies, has not only discerned the wants of the time, but set himself to do what one man may to supply them." The reference is to Brownson's discourse on "The Wants of the Times," delivered in May, 1836, in which he declared the old churches to be failures. "All over the Christian world," Brownson declared, "a contest is going on . . . between the people and their masters, between the many and the few, the privileged and the underprivileged." In this contest, religion must ally itself with the cause of the people. Jesus is "the prophet of the workingmen." This was the doctrine of Brownson's "Church of the Future," and in July he established his Society for Christian Union and Progress as a beginning. In his first book, New Views of Christianity, Society, and the Church (1836), drawing heavily from Saint-Simon and Cousin, he attempted to show how the "Church of the Future" would combine the spirituality of Catholicism with the humanitarianism of Protestantism in a new synthesis. He was already, like so many of his associates, looking beyond Unitarianism.

This same year, 1836, saw the publication of Emerson's first notable work, the slim volume called Nature, and the appearance of Bronson Alcott's Conversations. In the fall at Ripley's home occurred the first meeting of the so-called Transcendental Club, or as Emerson always called it, for one of its members, F. H. Hedge, the "Hedge Club." Brownson attended several of the meetings, and some of them were held at his home in Chelsea. He was already recognized as one of the leaders of the new school, and his influence continued to increase in the next few years.

The establishment of the Club by no means signalized that the Transcendentalist group was thoroughly homogeneous. The movement assimilated myriad influences from Europe, while retaining its American flavor. Emerson, Alcott, Ripley, Brownson, F. H. Hedge, Convers Francis—each brought through personality, temperament, or background—a different emphasis to the movement. Dissatisfaction with the orthodoxy of Harvard Unitarianism was for many, at least, their point of departure. Emerson had left the ministry to become a lay prophet. Thoreau, who, after living with Brownson and tutoring his children for several weeks in 1836, had called these weeks "an era in my life—the morning of a new Lebenstag"—would go his way, and so of the others. They were more united in what they opposed than in what they professed. Philosophically, the enemy was eighteenth-century rationalism and the school of Locke, as it was with Coleridge and Wordsworth and many others of the English Romantic movement. Spiritual reality was deeper and richer than anything imagined by Unitarianism or by the rationalists.

Brownson's chief contribution to the movement was as the expositer of European philosophy and social thought, and as a leader in bringing religion to bear upon social problems. Whereas Emerson addressed the individual, and was suspicious of social reformers, Brownson became convinced that social institutions must be altered. In 1838 he founded the Boston Quarterly Review and for five years filled most of its pages with his own writing. Through these years Brownson's attempts to further his social ideals occupied nearly all of his energies. Religion was primarily a social evangel to be spread by independent Christians like himself who were dissatisfied with all existing churches. He became, much like Thomas Carlyle, whose influence on him during this period was pronounced, something of a lay prophet.

His essay on "The Laboring Classes" in the July, 1840, issue of his Review brought this phase of his thought to its climax. Carlyle's French Revolution had appeared in 1837. In it Carlyle had tried to show England an image of its own social conditions as in a glass, and to warn England of the imminent danger of revolution. Brownson had reviewed it enthusiastically. And when Carlyle's Chartism came out in Boston in 1840, Brownson made it the occasion of stating in the boldest terms his radical social doctrines. In England laboring men and factory workers were rioting; Chartism as a socialistic movement was short-lived but for a time threatened revolution. Carlyle in his pamphlet attacked laissez-faire economic theory vigorously, but saw no real solution in Chartism. Brownson, however, went far beyond Carlyle. He saw in the depression and panic of 1837 in America a parallel with what Carlyle called The-Condition-of-England-Question. The class war was entering an acute phase. Industrialism had brought on evils worse than those of slavery. "Wages," Brownson declared, "is a cunning device of the devil, for the benefit of tender consciences, who would retain all the advantages of the slave system, without the expense, trouble, and odium of being slave-holders." He ridiculed theories about freedom of opportunity in the factories and on the frontier. There was not even true laissez faire; the power had already passed to corporations. "The proletaries" must be emancipated, monopoly and privilege must go, the inheritance of property be abolished. On the positive side, what Brownson asked for was the restoration to the workingman of his dignity as a person, a return to genuine free competition, and the opportunity for every man to own shop or his own farm.

The essay created a sensation, coming as it did from an editor who had declared himself in this election year for the Democratic candidate, Van Buren. The Whig politicians used it skillfully as evidence of the socialistic leanings of the Democratic party, giving it wide distribution during the campaign.

Aside from the inadequacies of some of Brownson's positive suggestions, like Carlyle and Ruskin in England he saw early the gross injustices of the industrial system. Schlesinger calls the Brownson of this period "the nearest forerunner" of Marx in America. In the light of Brownson's conversion four years later, however, his indignation, if not his entire social theory, seems prophetic, for it should be remembered that neither in England nor in New England, where the factory system was developing most rapidly, had the Catholic Church yet developed any specific social program. The Catholic hierarchy was not even restored to England until 1850, and in New England Catholicism was still engaged in the vital mission of preserving the faith of immigrants who were beginning to come here in vast numbers to escape oppressive conditions in the Old World. But by 1874 Cardinal Manning was delivering such addresses as his "Rights and Dignity of Labor," claiming for labor "not only the rights of property but the right of unionization, the right to strike, and the right to have recourse to the civil authorities." Not until 1891, however, with Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum do we have a positive and explicit Catholic social doctrine.

With the outcry against his essay on "The Laboring Classes," Brownson began to re-examine his religious position. Both his Unitarian and Transcendental assumptions gradually gave way. His study of Leroux, he tells us, gave him the sense of hierarchy, which disposed him to look more favorably on the Catholic Church, and gave him also the doctrine of communion—that man lives by communion with realities outside himself, with nature, his fellow man, and God. For Brownson this meant a significant step beyond the subjectivism of his earlier religious views. It suggested to him, he says in The Convert, the Catholic doctrine of grace. Moreover, Leroux's treatment of the function of provindential men led him to a different view of the historical church. "The Mediatorial Life of Jesus" (1842) is further testimony to Brownson's rejection of Unitarian doctrine. He now saw that his efforts to establish a new church as the foundation for a renewal of society were presumptuous. He was trying to lift himself by his own bootstraps. Man was no church builder. By April, 1844, he had concluded that "either there is already existing the divine institution, the church of God, or there are no means of reform." Nothing is more characteristics of Brownson than this indication that his "passion for reforming the world," to use Shelley's phrase, should lead him to examine the credentials of the Catholic Church.

Brownson tells the story of his conversion in The Convert and elsewhere, but even his own account is not entirely satisfying. To reconstruct the complex processes by which he was led to the Church is extremely difficult. As Maynard says, "it was an ecumenical council composed of such queerly assorted figures as William Godwin, and Robert Owen, and Benjamin Constant, and Saint-Simon, and cousin, and Leroux—all presided over by Dr. Channing—that gave Brownson his faith, in so far as this came from natural sources."

During these years prior to Brownson's conversion he was by no means concerned solely with his personal religious situation. His friend George Ripley inaugurated the Brook Farm venture, and while Brownson was not an ardent supporter of the project, he showed a wary interest in it, and visited the Farm often. But Brownson's true feeling may have been expressed in a letter he wrote in 1843 to Isaac Hecker, later the founder of the Paulist Congregation in America. Commenting on Hecker's stay at the Farm, he remarked, "after all, these communities are humbugs." Yet he sent his son Orestes there, and Hecker himself had gone there at Brownson's suggestion.

This period was also one of stormy political debates for Brownson. The year 1842 saw the end of the Boston Quarterly and the start of Brownson's connection with J. L. O'Sullivan's Democratic Review, for which he wrote until he revived his own review, as Brownson's Quarterly, in 1844. His selection of metaphysical subjects for articles and his increasingly severe criticism of what he held to be myths as to the nature of democracy were no more pleasing to O'Sullivan, the editor, than was O'Sullivan's practice of appending objections to the essays to Brownson. And Brownson's admiration for John C. Calhoun and his states' rights doctrine was such that he was already working to insure the nomination of Calhoun as Democratic candidate for the presidency in 1844. In severing connections with the Democratic Review and establishing Brownson's Quarterly, he was able to put his own review behind Calhoun's candidacy.

Brownson saw Bishop Fenwick of Boston in the spring of 1844 and began taking instructions in the Catholic faith some time in May. The rapport between Brownson and the Bishop's coadjutor, Bishop Fitzpatrick, who gave him his instructions, was at first minimal. The steps by which Brownson had come to the door of the Church seemed of no interest to Fitzpatrick, who insisted that Brownson simply follow the traditional course of instruction. Difficulties were at length overcome, and Brownson was received into the Church October 20, 1844. Like Newman, whose conversion came a year later almost to the day, Brownson carried others with him, humanly speaking, into the Church. Isaac Hecker entered before Brownson, but largely because of his influence. Sophia Ripley, wife of George Ripley, the founder of Brook Farm, was another; and some others of the Brook Farm group owed their conversion to Brownson.

Though Brownson thought seriously of abandoning his review, now Brownson's Quarterly Review, and studying law, Bishop Fitzpatrick urged him to continue his work and as a Catholic journalist to bring Catholic principles to bear on the questions of the day. Brownson, a neophyte in the Church, without formal education in theology or philosophy, faced the prospect with misgivings. He was not prepared for such a task. Yet he became "a defender of the Catholic Faith, its champion in the printed word, two months after his conversion, without even a spiritual retreat in which to collect his thoughts."

Under Bishop Fitzpatrick's guidance, Brownson began an intensive study of St. Thomas, St. Augustine, and manuals of scholasticism. He virtually repudiated most of what he had written prior to his conversion, so intent was he to demonstrate his obedience. It is clear, however, that Brownson even then wished it might have been otherwise, and in retrospect he speaks of his attitude as mistaken. It was the Bishop who insisted that Brownson put aside all the thinking by which he had been led into the Church, and employ in his writing only the traditional arguments for belief. Thus Brownson tried, with the Bishop as censor of his theological articles, to make a new beginning. His old friends and readers saw no connection between his former and present opinions. In his Fable for Critics (1848) James Russell Lowell describes Brownson after Emerson and Alcott:

He shifts quite about, then proceeds to expound
That 'tis merely the earth, not himself, that turns round,
And wishes it clearly impressed on your mind
That the weathercock rules and not follows the wind;
Proving first, then as deftly confuting each side,
With no doctrine pleased that's not somewhere denied,
He lays the denier away on the shelf
And then—down beside him lies gravely himself.

Brownson had been, up to his conversion, in the main stream of American Protestantism, and a leading figure in the movement party of New England. He knew the Protestant mind as only one can who has himself passed through a series of religious crises on the road to Rome. It is not surprising, then, that immediately after his conversion he addressed himself to those outside the Church, and entertained great hope of leading them along the way he had traveled. What is surprising is the tone and the strategy of his appeal to Protestants. His tone was militant, his strategy was, in Schlesinger's words, to destroy "all the strongholds between atheism and Catholicity where Protestants might seek shelter." His method was chiefly logical, and his language was frequently the newly acquired terminology of scholastic philosophy, with which his readers were as unfamiliar as he had been a year earlier. He analyzed and refuted errors, often with devastating logic, when he might better have pointed out what Protestants held that was true. Years later, in 1856, he concluded in a letter to Father Hewit that his approach was mistaken. "My own conviction," he wrote, "is that our true policy in dealing with the American mind is to study first to ascertain, not its errors, but the truth it still maintains, and to show it that that truth can find its unity and its integrity only in the Catholic Church. . . . My own method, I believe, is the worst of all, that of logic."

His articles on Transcendentalism, brilliant and searching in many ways, failed to recognize that in many of those who still remained Transcendentalists there might be the same mental disposition of openness to the claims of the Catholic Church which was his own a few years earlier. In his criticism of Newman's Development of Christian Doctrine he charged Newman's theory with being "essentially anticatholic," insisting that Newman repudiate it now that he had embraced the Catholic Faith. Again, Brownson's interpretation of the doctrine "no salvation outside the Church" was frequently expressed in language that left little room for the necessary theological distinctions.

In all of this there was no effort on Brownson's part to say only what would please Catholics. On the contrary, his articles on Native Americanism and on the Know-Nothing party, while they opposed the injustice and bigotry of these movements in courageous fashion, succeeded in stirring up against him the wrath of many Irish Catholics. Henry F. Brownson suggests his father's situation under a crossfire of criticism during this period, when he says that Brownson defended against Americans his right to be a Catholic, and against Catholics, his right to be an American.

How much of Brownson's manner and method is to be attributed to his own judgment, and how much to Bishop Fitzpatrick's direction as censor of the Review is difficult to decide. Isaac Hecker in his articles after Brownson's death, and Brownson's son, Henry, in the biography, place much of the responsibility on the Bishop. Whatever the truth may be, Brownson had been requested to fulfill a most delicate function, and one for which he was not, nor could be expected to be, adequately prepared. He believed that on many issues it was his duty to present not his own ideas but rather the position of his Bishop, and as a recent convert he was not sufficiently aware that full acceptance of the teaching authority of the Church still left ample room for differences of opinion in the domain of prudential judgments. As he put it himself in 1862: "Having experienced the need of authority, having suffered more than we care to repeat for the lack of some infallible teacher, we thought, and could think, only of asserting authority in season and out of season." He had been for many years a liberal Christian in theology, and had virtually substituted a secular vision of the kingdom of God on earth for the supernatural life; his present harshness toward all merely secular reform programs was a repudiation of his own earlier social philosophy.

More important, Brownson saw, after becoming a Catholic, that while his own earlier social theories were neither inspired by nor tried to foment a hatred of the Catholic Church, these same theories on the continent of Europe were often so motivated. In his zeal to attack anti-Christian socialism, he seemed to lose sight also of what had once been his greatest hope: to bring Christian principles into a creative relation with the social problems of the time.

In the next ten years after his conversion, Brownson gradually regained for his Review a new reading public. A letter of general approbation from the American bishops for his work was signed in 1849, and appeared on the inside cover of the Review until 1855. Partly as a result of this recognition, and in spite of vigorous criticism of much that Brownson wrote, by 1853 his Review had a larger circulation than in 1845. In 1855, however, Bishop Kenrick of Baltimore, wishing to dissociate himself from some of Brownson's recent pronouncements, especially on the temporal power of the Church, suggested to Brownson that the Bishop's endorsement of 1849 be dropped, and later the Bishop of Pittsburgh asked that his name be omitted. Brownson complied, offended though he was by their attitude, and omitted the letter from subsequent volumes of the Review. As Maynard points out, the letter cut both ways in terms of Brownson's position. It set his Review apart from other Catholic publications, and probably aroused the jealousy of editors who were not so favored.

Favorable recognition came to Brownson from abroad. Late in 1853 Newman invited him to join the faculty of his new university in Ireland, though in the heat of the controversy in 1854 over Brownson's attitude on the issue of Native Americanism, Newman deemed it best to withdraw the invitation. An English edition of the Review began to be published in 1853, and in 1854 Pope Pius IX sent him his apostolic blessing for his work.

While Bishop Fitzpatrick was in Europe in 1854, Brownson's articles were censored by a substitute, but upon the Bishop's return, Brownson did not resume the practice of submitting his articles. The tension between them soon led him to reconsider Hecker's earlier suggestion that he move with his Review to New York, and in October, 1855, he did so. But soon he was having difficulties with his new Bishop, Archbishop Hughes. Brownson's articles of 1854 on the spiritual and temporal power of the Pope had not pleased Hughes, and he had written to Brownson on the subject. In 1856 Brownson published his essay on "The Mission of America," developing the thesis, later presented at the close of The American Republic (1866), that America has a providential destiny "far higher, nobler, and more spiritual" than the "Manifest Destiny" usually spoken of—"the realization . . . of the Christian ideal of society for both the Old World and the New." Brownson's implication, in Maynard's words, "that a new sort of leadership was necessary for the Church in the United States" irked the Bishop, who suggested to Brownson that he stop agitating the question of Americanizing the Church.

While a change in emphasis and direction is apparent in Brownson's whole attitude during the 1850's, it is difficult to ascertain the specific causes for the change. His son calls it a gradual change, while Maynard says it began "the moment that Bishop Fitzpatrick sailed for Europe in 1854." Brownson himself self said in retrospect that at about this time he began to reassert his own identity. Actually the causes are complex and to be looked for both in the movement of events and in the progress of Brownson's own thought. He began to feel that, his apprenticeship now being over, he could reassess his earlier attitudes. By 1857, when he wrote The Convert, he had come to believe that he had been wrong to repudiate so completely in 1844 the philosophical, religious, and social thought which had led him to the Church. Indeed, Maynard makes very convincing his thesis that Brownson wrote The Convert largely to assert the validity of his personal approach to the Church. Maynard's interpretation is borne out by much that Brownson wrote in the 1850's and early 60's. In essay after essay he insisted on the distinction between Catholic tradition and the traditions of Catholics, and on the danger of confusing "what is of religion and what pertains only to the social life, nationality, or secular habits, customs, and usages of Catholics." He finds many Catholics "not up to the level of the church," but "merely men of routine, creatures of the traditions and associations inherited from their ancestors, and which they seldom ever dream of distinguishing from their religion itself."

Brownson's sympathies during this period were increasingly with those European Catholic thinkers whose political views were liberal. Add to this the fact that he had begun to criticize scholastic philosophy as not being adapted to meet the real philosophical problems of the age, and had begun to speculate in a way that brought upon him the charge of ontologism, and it can be understood why he was under suspicion in certain quarters for his theological, political, and social thought. Finally, when in 1860 Brownson wrote on the "Rights of the Temporal" in a way that seemed to some of his critics as minimizing the temporal power of the Church, his writings on the subject were referred to the Congregation de Propaganda Fide. Cardinal Barnabo, the Prefect of Propaganda, gave Brownson an opportunity to explain his position more clearly. No grounds for condemnation were found, and the matter was dropped.

In these years up to 1864, Brownson ventured into very troubled waters. This was just the time when in England, in Ireland, and on the Continent, Catholic reviews were involved in the great struggle between the liberal and conservative forces within the Church that took place during the papacy of Pius IX (1846—1878). Brownson's position is best understood when seen in this larger context. To state in simple terms relationships that were often complex, the Dublin Review, the French publication Univers, and in Rome the journal Civiltà Cattolica represented the extreme conservative position, while Montalembert's Le Correspondant and the reviews with which Newman was associated in an advisory capacity and briefly as editor—The Rambler, and The Home and Foreign Review—were liberal. A single statement by the editors of The Rambler will indicate the direction of their thought: "Modern society has developed no security for freedom, no instrument of progress, no means of arriving at truth, which we look upon with indifference or suspicion." Newman, for example, like Brownson during this period, saw the need of a review in which Catholic writers could address themselves freely to the philosophical, social, and political problems which critical minds were bound to consider, and he strenuously opposed the attitude of publicists like W. G. Ward who wanted every question settled authoritatively from Rome. But at the same time Newman was aware of the recklessness of the extreme liberals. He, like Montalembert, Lacordaire, and Bishop Dupanloup favored the liberal reviews, but he tried without success to moderate their tone. Papal censure would have terminated The Rambler had its editors not discontinued it, and did terminate The Home and Foreign Review. It is one of the great tragedies of this period that men who tried to make Catholicism a creative and revivifying force in every field of activity were too often silenced because of their errors, instead of being given the positive guidance that they looked for. Even in 1882 Newman writes in a letter of "what may be called Nihilism in the Catholic Body and in its rulers. They forbid, but they do not direct or create."

Brownson was by 1855 well aware of this struggle in Europe. He was with those Catholics who, like Newman, might be called the moderate liberals, but he certainly never for a moment defended religious liberalism. In his essay on "Lacordaire and Catholic Progress" (1862) he declared himself an ally of Lacordaire and Montalembert. He wrote eloquently of their work and of that of Ozanam. "How often," he says of Lacordaire, "have we heard him traduced, denounced as a radical, a Jacobin, a socialist, concealing the bonnet rouge under the friar's hood. Yet he persevered, held fast to his integrity, held fast to his convictions, and continued on in the line of duty marked out for him, unshaken and unruffled, calm and serene. . . . "And referring to what Montalembert called the Catholic renaissance in France, Brownson says: "Our own country presents a fair and open field for this renaissance, for the union of religion with civilization, and that new Catholic development which will restore to the church the nations she has lost, give her back the leadership of human intelligence, and secure her the willing obedience and love of mankind."

I have tried to illustrate by these quotations the direction of Brownson's thought during these years; I could quote from a dozen articles: "Separation of Church and State," "The Rights of the Temporal," "Christian Politics," "Civil and Religious Freedom," and many others to indicate Brownson's position on the issues that were then so sorely dividing Catholic opinion. But Brownson's views were by now the object of widespread attack from ultraconservatives. The time was not right for such ideas, and there is no denying that Brownson was at times far too blunt in his manner. Yet it is well to remember that even Newman, a far more moderate and restrained controversialist than Brownson, was about this time "denounced in Rome, and even delated to the Holy See, as the most formidable agent of Catholic Liberalism in England."

Even though Brownson's essays on European politics and on the relation of Church and state were the chief targets of criticism from Catholic quarters, he did not confine himself to such subjects during this period. On the contrary, the domestic issues raised by the Civil War occupied much of his attention, and he called the 1864 volume of the Review the "National Series" to emphasize its concern with domestic problems. Though he had little respect for Lincoln's statesmanship, Brownson's allegiance to the Union had led him to support Lincoln and the Republican party in 1860, and he continued throughout the war to defend the Union cause and to attack those sections of the Catholic press which he believed were lukewarm in the struggle. Finally, in 1864, after at first deciding to support Lincoln for re-election, he switched to General John C. Fremont, whose withdrawal from the campaign left Brownson stranded. Later Brownson said in a letter, "My Review died of Fremont. . . . I stopped it because I had sacrificed my position, and had no party to fall back upon." The Fremont fiasco certainly influenced, if it did not determine, Brownson's decision to suspend the Review. Under the pressure of criticism, Brownson, now sick and weary, his eyesight failing, his two sons recently killed in the war, ended his Review with the October, 1864, issue.

A few weeks later, December, 1864, Pope Pius IX handed down the encyclical Quanta Cura and had the Syllabus of Errors published at the same time. In such condemned theses as No. 80 of the Syllabus: "The Roman Pontiff can and ought to reconcile himself to, and agree with, progress, liberalism, and civilization as lately introduced," Brownson's critics thought they read a condemnation of his work of the past several years. The conclusion was undoubtedly false, but Brownson saw that his influence was at least temporarily destroyed. Moreover, he himself seemed to interpret the Syllabus as a condemnation of his most recent thought. Instead of examining it with his usual capacity for making distinctions, instead of recognizing it for what it was, an index of references to the various encyclicals and allocutions of recent decades—as did Bishop Dupanloup and Newman—Brownson capitulated to the critics who had opposed him for years, and from 1864 to the end of his life continued to do penance for his "liberal period." Nothing, in fact, more clearly reveals Brownson's loss of confidence after 1864 than to compare his understanding of the Syllabus with Newman's, as expressed in personal letters in 1864 and later in his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk (1875). Newman, for example, saw immediately the harm that would be done by extremists, both within and outside the Church, through misinterpretation of the Syllabus, and refused to be stampeded. Brownson, on the other hand, in taking the Syllabus as a condemnation of his writings of recent years, was really accepting the interpretation of it sanctioned by his opponents.

In the period immediately after the suspension of his Review, Brownson planned a whole series of volumes in which he hoped to give systematic expression to his thought. Of these, only one, The American Republic (1866), was brought to completion. Work on the others was deferred in favor of numerous essays he contributed to The Catholic World, the newly established Ave Maria at Notre Dame, and the New York Tablet, to the latter of which he was a regular contributor. Brownson was, to the end, a journalist, and he was unable in advanced years to change the writing habits of a lifetime. Nor was he, now that he was no longer in the editor's chair, happy about the revisions to which some of his essays were subjected. He wanted one more opportunity to speak out in his own review. His wife's request, just before her death in 1872, that he revive Brownson's Quarterly Review, was all that he needed, and in 1873 he began the "Last Series."

In the first issue of the revived Review Brownson wrote:

I willingly admit that I made many mistakes; but I regard as the greatest of all the mistakes into which I fell during the last three or four years that I published my Review, that of holding back the stronger points of the Catholic faith, on which I had previously insisted. . . . I have no ambition to be regarded as a liberal Catholic. A liberal Catholic I am not, never was, save in appearance for a brief moment, and never can be. . . . What is most needed in these times. . . . is the truth that condemns, point-blank, the spirit of the age, and gives no quarter to its dominant errors. . . .

With this tone he carried on the Review for three years, until the autumn of 1875. As an affirmation of his orthodoxy and of his submission of all he had written to the judgment of the Church these last essays have some interest. But his best work had been done.

In the autumn of 1875, after the final number of his Review was finished, Brownson left Elizabeth, New Jersey, and went to live with his son Henry in Detroit, Michigan. He had been in poor health for more than fifteen years. Even as early as 1857 he had begun to suffer from gout of the eyes, and later his joints had been affected. Reading became difficult, and at times his hand was too crippled to hold a pen. He often had to dictate his articles, and in his last years even fell back on the re-publication of earlier essays to fill the pages of his revived Review. After moving to Detroit, Brownson was able to complete only one article, "The Philosophy of the Supernatural." From Christmas on into the spring the physical and intellectual energy that had sustained him through years of writing and lecturing waned rapidly. On Easter Sunday he received the Sacraments of Holy Communion and Extreme Unction. He died early the next morning, April 17, 1876, and was buried in Detroit.

Brownson had for many years known Father Edward Sorin, the first president of the University of Notre Dame. In 1862 Brownson had been invited to join the Notre Dame faculty, and though he declined at the time for reasons of health, his writings for the Ave Maria from 1865 to 1872 were the occasion of frequent correspondence with Father Sorin. In 1872, after the death of Brownson's wife, Father Sorin invited him to come to live at the University, but he had already decided to revive his Review, and felt it would be difficult to conduct it from there. Ten years after his death, Brownson's remains were removed from Detroit to Notre Dame, where they now repose in a crypt in the center aisle of the Brownson Memorial Chapel in Sacred Heart Church.

Brownson has been denounced by liberals for his conservatism; by conservatives for his liberalism. Liberals who acclaim his keenness of mind and courage in his early liberal period often look sadly upon his conversion as a retreat, and lament that one who was a "forerunner of Marx" in the 1830's should end as a reactionary Catholic. Conservatives who approve not only his American Republic (1866) but even his abandonment in old age of any interest in political and social reform seem too ready to place him among the ultra-conservatives within the Church whose influence he continued to oppose for nearly ten years prior to the publication of the Syllabus.

These, I believe, are gross oversimplifications. They ignore the whole context of Brownson's work: the hammering out of his thought in journalistic essays, the hazards and risks he took, perhaps too hastily at times, in laying before the public the very process of his own self-education, his development in the milieu of New England Protestantism, and then his entering the lists, so suddenly and so unprepared in many ways, as a champion of Catholic orthodoxy. More important, the isolation of what may loosely be called the two conservative or the two liberal phases of his thought from contemporary American and European movements makes his vacillations, as they are often called, far less understandable than they really are. The dialectic of Brownson's thought mirrors in many ways the intellectual dialectic of the middle half of the nineteenth century. And finally, to ignore the relation of Church history to these movements, and especially during the papacy of Pius IX, which, except for two years, covers Brownson's entire Catholic life, is at least to miss the drama of his intellectual changes.