world which might arise from amid the chaos, if the next generation would wisely consider its ways. No reader can properly understand Gratry who does not realize the nature of the cataclysm of which he was watching the beginning; and few persons in his time had any adequate conception of what was coming on the intellectual world. The condition of confusion which he foresaw in prophetic vision, we know as an indisputable and terrible fait accompli. He wrote, therefore, rather for us than for his contemporaries; to them he brought, chiefly, a warning, unintelligible to the majority, of stormy weather ahead; to us he offers practical pilotage through an actual hurricane.
But, alas! how shall we persuade young men trained in "the newest methods," that an Oratorian monk of fifty years ago was a better logician than they? "Gratry? oh! no doubt he was very clever for his time. But—he had not read any of our modern authorities; what can he have known of our new methods?" The young teacher, who is preparing pupils for examinations by the help of the last new text-book, and who perhaps hopes to make a name for himself by compiling a still newer one, resents being told of one greater than the author most in repute. So it happens that the writer, who was hardly understood in his own day because he was so far ahead of the age, is shunted into oblivion, when the time comes when he could be understood,
because it suits the purposes of interested persons to believe that he is behind their age. The main cause of the chaotic condition into which our thought-life has fallen, is the feverish impatience of teachers, each of whom wants to make his own voice heard. But any
