imbued with divine faith sees, as Shakespeare did, the perfections of God reflected everywhere. The babbling brooklet, the wavelet murmuring on the sandy shore, and the sonorous cataract, repeat His mysterious name; enchanting scenes, which charm the eye and entrance the fancy, and flowers in wondrous varied species, arrayed in glory more than Solomon's, impress a sense of His inconceivable beauty; earth teeming with multiplied forms of life, and, amid warring elements, ever changing yet ever the same, and working by manifold laws unto one harmonious whole, proclaims His incomprehensible wisdom; the shrieking gale, the terrorstriking storm, the frenzied roar of untamed ocean, crashing thunders, quaking earth and smoking mountains, all give voice to His supreme and irresistible power; in fine, the aweinspiring structure, not made by human hands, whose floors are velvet green, whose walls are snow-capped mountains, whose dome is the ever changing firmament of heaven, "fretted with golden fire," is the grand palace made for man, whereof he is appointed king, and through its naves and aisles he hears re-echoing in tones as of an organ grand, a chorus of voices which chant the love, grandeur and sublime intelligence of its Architect. Everywhere the presence and activity of creatures and their necessary correlation with their Cause, uplift man's mind from self to the great Creator of them all. Every Christian holds with the "Angelic Doctor" that the Lord of nature is present in His universe in a threefold manner: He is present in all things by His power, because everything is subject to His sway; He is present in everything by His essence, because, creating and conserving all things, He co-operates in their activity; He is in all things by His presence, because He knows and sees all things. This Christian doctrine is as far from Pantheism as the finite creature is from the infinite Creator. The Pantheist, confusing matter with spirit, soul with body, and God with the world, St. Thom. "Summa Theologia", Pars. 1, Quest. VIII, art. 3. makes all one and the same divine substance; but the Christian, rejecting this confusion of thought, maintains a distinction real and essential between the Creator and His creatures. He believes in a higher and more sublime Pan-theism in as far as all things, though not one and the same with God, yet proclaim as effects the power and magnificence of their Maker. By His power, essence, and knowledge, He is present in all His works; for all things are of Him and by Him, and in Him and in Him we move, and live, and have our being.' Hence every entity of our universe proclaims His existence, and mirrors forth His perfections, each in its own degree. In this universe He lives and moves as a King in His palace, and, as the Monarch of His realm, directs and governs all things. These truths, and not the crude material Pantheism of Giordano Bruno, were accepted by Shakespeare as is clearly shown by the Christian principles which illumine his works. His views are voiced by a latter poet: "The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills and the Are not these, O Soul, the Vision of Him who reigns? can meet Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet. 998 In the sacred edifice at Stratford, rest Shakespeare's honored remains. There, though he be silent in death, the epitaph on his tomb still eloquently speaks the Christian belief in which he was reared, and in which he died' in the assured hope of a glorious immortality: "Good friend, for Jesus' sake forebear Blest be the man that spares these stones, 7 Acts 17, 28. Rom. 11, 16. This epitaph fulminates in the name of the Christ a dreadful curse against profaners, and as for centuries past, it has preserved his tomb intact, so for centuries to come, it will guard his bones against the desecrating hand of iconoclast and vandal. That Christian epitaph is the poet's voice from the dead, which with emphasis decries any attempt of Agnostic, or Positivist, or Pantheist, to attaint his memory with anti-Christian follies and vagaries. CHAPTER V Hamlet a Student of Philosophy Certain commentators assume that Hamlet studied phil. osophy at the Protestant University of Wittenberg. The assumption subjectively considered does not seem strange, since these annotators, as adherents of one or other of the religions which originated at the period of the "Reforma. tion," naturally desire the popular hero to attend a Protestant institution; but, if viewed objectively, it appears indeed surprising, because it has no support in the text. beyond dispute that Shakespeare places Hamlet, as well as the whole action of the tragedy in the early part of the eleventh century, about the year 1012, when the king of Denmark was suzerain of England; and it is no less clear that he meant the Prince to attend some school of philosophy of his day, and not one that began its existence only five hundred years later. There were many famous seats of learning in Germany in Hamlet's time, but not one university. That of Wittenberg was founded in 1502 by Frederic the Wise, a Catholic, and later fell under Protestant control. Though religious bias may prompt some annotators to charge the Poet with an anachronism of five centuries, we cannot suppose that a chasm so vast could have escaped his observant eye, especially as the error would confront him in almost every scene of the drama. He may, indeed, justly plead not guilty; for he sends his hero, not to a university at all, but, as expressly stated in the text, "to school at Wittenberg." That many philosophic schools flourished in Germany in the days of Hamlet is an historic fact so well established as to need no elucidation, save for the common misapprehension concerning education in the Middle Ages. Many histories in our common schools still pander to the unhistoric belief that the pre-reformation period was dark beyond description, and that Luther's "transcendent genius" awoke the world from its lethargic ignorance to a new life of eagerness for learning. To recognize the emptiness of such a view, it is only necessary to recall that the Renaissance with its great revival of classic literature, was in full swing more than one hundred years before the birth of Luther; and that at the time of his apostacy, as vouched for by non-Catholic authorities, there were 76 Catholic universities scattered throughout Europe: 20 in France, 15 in Germany, 15 in Italy, 7 in Spain, 3 in Scotland, 2 in Austria, Switzerland and England respectively. The false view of the state of education in the eleventh century has gained outside the Catholic world an almost universal credence; because, since the time of the "Reformation," English literature has been mainly the product of anti-Catholic writers. Protestantism has for the last three hundred years been singing in chorus the one song, burdened with the bold and reckless assertion, that modern civilization is the work of the "Reformation." During the same period, historians have, in their hostility to the Church, catered more to popular favor than to historic truth. Comte De Maistre, a French historian and philosopher, affirms that history for the last three hundred years has been a conspiracy against truth. His assertion has been reaffirmed by the Cambridge Modern History, in its first volume on the Renaissance, which further asserts that, if we are to get at the truth, we must go behind all the classic historians, and look up contemporary documents, and evidence, and authorities once more for ourselves. Only in recent times has this conspiracy against truth been discovered and decried by honest non-Catholic writers. With the disintegration of Protestantism under the persistent onslaught of Rationalism, men of every shade of opinion are |