Visit https://ebookultra.

com to download the full version and

explore more ebooks

Divided Friends 1st Edition William L. Portier

_____ Click the link below to download _____

https://ebookultra.com/download/divided-friends-1st-
edition-william-l-portier/

Explore and download more ebooks at ebookultra.com

Here are some recommended products that might interest you.
You can download now and explore!

Holidays on Display 1st Edition William L. Bird

https://ebookultra.com/download/holidays-on-display-1st-edition-
william-l-bird/

ebookultra.com

Solidarity Divided Bill Fletcher

https://ebookultra.com/download/solidarity-divided-bill-fletcher/

ebookultra.com

Slave Narratives after Slavery William L. Andrews

https://ebookultra.com/download/slave-narratives-after-slavery-
william-l-andrews/

ebookultra.com

The Secret of the Soul 1st Edition William L. Buhlman

https://ebookultra.com/download/the-secret-of-the-soul-1st-edition-
william-l-buhlman/

ebookultra.com
Improving Health through Nursing Research 1st Edition
William L. Holzemer

https://ebookultra.com/download/improving-health-through-nursing-
research-1st-edition-william-l-holzemer/

ebookultra.com

Modern Brazilian Short Stories William L. Grossman

(Editor)

https://ebookultra.com/download/modern-brazilian-short-stories-
william-l-grossman-editor/

ebookultra.com

The Sinking of the Bismarck William L. Shirer

https://ebookultra.com/download/the-sinking-of-the-bismarck-william-l-
shirer/

ebookultra.com

The Divided Mind John E. Sarno

https://ebookultra.com/download/the-divided-mind-john-e-sarno/

ebookultra.com

BIOS Instant Notes in Medical Microbiology 1st Edition

William L. Irving

https://ebookultra.com/download/bios-instant-notes-in-medical-
microbiology-1st-edition-william-l-irving/

ebookultra.com
Divided Friends 1st Edition William L. Portier Digital
Instant Download
Author(s): William L. Portier
ISBN(s): 9780813221656, 081322165X
Edition: 1
File Details: PDF, 2.48 MB
Year: 2013
Language: english
Copyright © 2013. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved.

Divided Friends, Catholic University of America Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 DIVIDED
FRIENDS
Copyright © 2013. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved.

Divided Friends, Catholic University of America Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 THE
CATHOLIC
UNIVERSITY
OF AMERICA
PRESS

Washington, D.C.
Copyright © 2013. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved.

Divided Friends, Catholic University of America Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 DIVIDED
FRIENDS
Portraits of the Roman
Catholic Modernist Crisis in
the United States
WILLIAM L. PORTIER
Copyright © 2013. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved.

Divided Friends, Catholic University of America Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Copyright © 2013
The Catholic University of America Press
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-0-8132-2164-9
The paper used in this publication meets the
minimum requirements of American National
Standards for Information Science—Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI
Z39.48-1984.
∞
Copyright © 2013. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved.

Photos on the cover and title page are reproduced

with permission as follows (clockwise from top
left): Denis O’Connell, from the Catholic Uni-
versity of America Archives; William L. Sullivan,
from the William L. Sullivan Papers, bMS 467,
Andover-Harvard Theological Library, Harvard
Divinity School, Harvard University; John R.
Slattery, from the Josephite Archives, Baltimore,
Md.; Joseph McSorley, from the Paulist Archives,
Washington, D.C.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication

Data available from the Library of Congress

Divided Friends, Catholic University of America Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 To Harry J. McSorley
in friendship and gratitude
for his learned and generous
example and direction

and

in grateful remembrance
of Rev. Lawrence E. Boadt, CSP
(1941–2010)
Copyright © 2013. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved.

Divided Friends, Catholic University of America Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
Copyright © 2013. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved.

Divided Friends, Catholic University of America Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 We are fairly challenged to
deny that a change of immense
import is coming over the face of
Catholicism; and that, as a great
deal of our old mental furniture
has been thrown aside, so the
things which remain will some
day have to be remodeled.
Joseph M c Sorley, CSP, 1905
Copyright © 2013. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved.

Divided Friends, Catholic University of America Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
Copyright © 2013. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved.

Divided Friends, Catholic University of America Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Contents

List of Illustrations xi
Acknowledgements xiii
Introduction xvii

Part 1: The Rom an C atholic Modernist Crisis

in the United States
1 The Cyclone of the Modernist Crisis 3
2 Who Are the Modernists? 16
3 The Burden of the Dead 38

Part 2: Sl attery and O’Connell: A Common Crisis?

4 John R. Slattery, 1851–1902: From Attorney to Presbyter 61
5 
John R. Slattery, 1902–1904: Between Presbyter and
Attorney 90
6 “Theological Privateer”: Slattery’s Denis O’Connell 121
7 John R. Slattery, 1904–1926: From Presbyter to Attorney 153

Part 3: M c Sorley and Sullivan: A Change of Immense

Import Coming over the Face of C atholicism
8 A Catholic Theological Culture in English, 1899–1907 199
Copyright © 2013. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved.

9 George Tyrrell and Joseph McSorley 228

10 William L. Sullivan’s Fictions 259
11 McSorley’s Response to Pascendi 290
12 
Holiness and History: From Americanism and Modernism
to Vatican II 325
13 McSorley’s Ressourcement: Saving the Hecker Tradition 347
14 Finding a Place to Stand 362

Selected Bibliography 371

Index 387

Divided Friends, Catholic University of America Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
Copyright © 2013. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved.

Divided Friends, Catholic University of America Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Illustr ations

Denis O’Connell 64
Courtesy of the Catholic University of America Archives

John R. Slattery 65
Courtesy of the Josephite Archives, Baltimore, Md.

Joseph McSorley 202

Courtesy of the Paulist Archives, Washington, D.C.

William L. Sullivan 203

Courtesy of the William L. Sullivan Papers, bMS 467,
Andover-Harvard Theological Library, Harvard Divinity
School, Harvard University

Reproduced with permission

Copyright © 2013. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved.

xi

Divided Friends, Catholic University of America Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
Copyright © 2013. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved.

Divided Friends, Catholic University of America Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Acknowledgements

This long-gestating book owes its existence to the help of many

people. I now have the happy task of thanking them. Dan Donovan’s
seminar in fall 1973 at St. Michael’s in Toronto introduced me to the
serious study of the modernist crisis. Fellow members of that seminar
were Ellen Leonard and Michael McGarry, whose subsequent work
appears in the notes. For welcoming me to the Josephite Archives
and introducing me to the Slattery Papers, I am grateful to the late
Fr. Peter E. Hogan, SSJ. No archivist could have been more hospi-
table. He read most of the Slattery chapters in draft and it would
have been a great pleasure to present this book to him. Thank you to
Mrs. Bernice Jones and the staff at the Josephite Archives. Profes-
sor Émile Poulat of Paris kindly answered my queries about Slattery
material in the papers of Albert Houtin. “Il y a un biographie,” said
one of his notes to me. When in 1985 my efforts to obtain by mail
a microfilm copy of the Biographie de J. R. Slattery from the Biblio-
thèque Nationale seemed doomed, Marie Anne Mayeski interrupted
her own research to visit the Services Photographiques on my behalf.
Thanks to her, a microfilm of the Biographie arrived a few weeks
later. I am grateful to the Cushwa Center for the Study of American
Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame for a Travel Research
Grant in 1986 and to Jay Dolan for his hospitality during my research
at Notre Dame’s archives and library. Fruits of that research are cen-
Copyright © 2013. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved.

tral to the chapters on Joseph McSorley in Part 3 of this book.

Thank you to George Gilmore who invited me into the com-
pany of scholars that was the Roman Catholic Modernism Group
at the American Academy of Religion. Ron Burke convened its first
meeting in 1977, and from 1986 until its untimely end in 1999, it was
my privilege to have a small part in its work. The group’s ongoing
collaboration is the context for this book. Thanks to Mike Kerlin
and Scott Appleby, who responded to earlier versions of papers that
became chapters and to Harvey Hill who helped to edit an earli-
er version of one. Thanks also to Larry Barmann, Darrell Jodock,
Paul Misner, John Root, and David Schultenover. Thank you to

xiii

Divided Friends, Catholic University of America Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Chuck Talar who, since 1999, has organized conference sessions and pub-
lishing projects in the best spirit of Friedrich von Hügel, and to Elizabeth
McKeown who wrote the history of the RCMG (U.S. Catholic Historian
20 [Summer 2002]: 111-31). Since the group last met at Boston in 1999, five
members have died: Ronald R. Burke, Michael J. Kerlin, Gary Lease, James
M. Livingston, and John D. Root. With Fr. Peter Hogan, requiescant in pace
et lux perpetua luceat eis.
With summer research grants, two sabbaticals, and the Henry J. Knott
Professorship, Mount Saint Mary’s College (now University) supported
much of the work in Part 2 of this book. I am grateful to the Mount and
to its Theology Department, long my academic home. This book began to
take its present shape when I moved to the University of Dayton, first as
a distinguished visiting professor in 1999 and then permanently in 2003.
Thank you to Mike Cuneo, who, back in 1999, helped me to cook up the
title and the structure for this book in the Denny’s on Main Street in Day-
ton. Marvin O’Connell’s Critics on Trial (1994) inspired the idea of in-
tertwined biographical portraits. Thank you to all my research assistants
at Dayton: Tim Dillon, Vernon Meyer, Jane Leukart, Justin Menno, Sue
Sack, Nick Mayrand, Adam Sheridan, and especially Tim Gabrielli who
helped me put together the first draft of this book.
In 2001 and 2008 I taught doctoral seminars on the modernist crisis. I
am grateful to my students, especially the 2008 crew, who read this book
in manuscript and offered valuable comments. I am also grateful to Fr. Jack
Lynch at the Paulist Archives; to Michael Connolly from whom I learned
of the Catholic World correspondence, which, at the time I wrote my dis-
Copyright © 2013. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved.

sertation, had been presumed lost; to Msgr. Robert Trisco for permission
to consult the John Tracy Ellis Papers; to John Shephard and the staff at the
American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives at
the Catholic University of America; to Gene McAfee and Fran O’Donnell
at the Andover-Harvard Theological Library; and to Joseph Casino and
the staff at the Philadelphia Archdiocesan Historical Research Center.
The Washington-area working group of historians, founded and chris-
tened as “Clio” by Chris Kauffman, read and discussed drafts of early
chapters. Thanks to longtime Clio members Elizabeth McKeown and Bill
Dinges and to Chris Kauffman for a maestro’s mentoring and for our din-
ners at Harryman’s. Long may they continue!

xiv  Ac kno w ledg m ents

Divided Friends, Catholic University of America Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Thank you to Bob Ayers who generously shared with me his work in the
papers of Franz Xaver Kraus, the pre-publication copies of his translations
of the correspondence of Kraus and Baroness Augusta von Eichthal, as
well as his copies of Eichthal’s correspondence with Denis O’Connell. He
read chapter 6 in draft and provided important corrections. Together we
visited the haunts of O’Connell, Kraus, and Eichthal at Rome. And thank
you to David Schultenover for English copies of Tyrrell’s letters to Henri
Bremond, to Chuck Talar for copies of McSorley’s letters to Lucien Laber-
thonnière, and to Philip Gleason, Patsy McDonald, and Bill Collinge, who
read the entire manuscript and gave me many pages of corrections.
Substantial parts of chapters 9 and 10 appeared in U.S. Catholic His-
torian, and parts of chapter 3 were published in Communio, International
Catholic Review. I am grateful to the editors of these journals for permis-
sion to use material that first appeared in their pages.
Thank you to Mary Ann Spearin whose generosity to the University of
Dayton makes my work possible. I am grateful to President Dan Curran
for his ongoing support and to Paul Benson, dean of arts and sciences, for
his generous support of this book. To my colleagues in the Religious Stud-
ies Department, I am grateful for intellectual companionship and more.
Sandra Yocum is an all-star department chair; her support made it possible
for me to complete this book. Thank you, Sandy. Thank you to Maria Mor-
row who typed the final version of the manuscript into electronic form.
For almost a decade, Larry Boadt encouraged me and worked with me on
this book—RIP. Thank you to Trevor Lipscombe for his interest in this
work and to the staff and anonymous readers at the Catholic University of
Copyright © 2013. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved.

America Press.
Thank you to Phil for valuable comments on chapter 1, to Thea for
making a special trip to Urbino to check for Slattery letters in Paul Saba-
tier’s papers, and to Thea and Laura for those technological consults. You
all make me happy and proud as a father could be. And finally, thanks to
Bonnie, John R. Slattery’s number-one fan and, despite her intimate famil-
iarity with my every foible, my true love for over forty years.
All remaining errors are solely mine.

William L. Portier
September 8, 2012

Ackno w led g m ents  xv

Divided Friends, Catholic University of America Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
Copyright © 2013. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved.

Divided Friends, Catholic University of America Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Introduction

The Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the

Church (Lumen Gentium) begins with a chapter on “The Mystery
of the Church.” Its opening line proclaims Christ the “light of all
nations.” The Constitution goes on to describe the church as “in
Christ as a sacrament or instrumental sign of intimate union with
God and of the unity of all humanity.” This theme of the church as
a kind of sacrament has characterized most Catholic ecclesiology in
the second half of the twentieth century. Lumen Gentium’s opening
emphasis on the church as sacrament (chapter 1) and the “People
of God” deferred discussion of the “hierarchical structure of the
Church” and the episcopate to chapter 3.
During debates on Lumen Gentium, in a speech on October 1,
1963, the Cardinal Archbishop of Palermo, Ernesto Ruffini, attrib-
uted the very idea of the church as sacrament to George Tyrrell,
excommunicated as a Modernist by Pope Pius X in 1908. Ruffini
was outraged at the proposal that the Council’s solemn teaching on
the church should begin in obvious Modernism. Monsignor Joseph
Clifford Fenton, Catholic University of America professor and a
Roman insider during the Council’s preparatory phase, believed
that “the teaching in the first chapter of the new schema on the
Church and the language are those of Tyrrell.” “May God preserve
His Church from that chapter,” he prayed. “If it passes, it will be a
Copyright © 2013. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved.

great evil.”1
Fergus Kerr uses the responses of Fenton and Ruffini to the draft
of Lumen Gentium to illuminate the reciprocal, mutually co-defining
relationship of neo-Scholasticism and Modernism in the first half of
the twentieth century. “The history of twentieth-century Catholic
theology,” Kerr writes, “is the history of the attempted elimination
of theological modernism, by censorship, sackings and excommuni-
cation—and the resurgence of issues that could not be repressed by

1. History of Vatican II, vol. 3, eds. Giuseppe Alberigo and Joseph Komonchak (Maryk-
noll, N.Y./Leuven: Orbis/Peeters, 2000), 30, citing from Fenton’s Diary, September 24, 1963.

xvii

Divided Friends, Catholic University of America Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 such methods.” To Fenton and Ruffini, Chapter I of Lumen Gentium rep-
resented the latest such resurgence. Fenton’s teacher, Reginald Garrigou-
Lagrange, OP, taught at the Angelicum in Rome for fifty-one years, from
1909 to 1960. He found an earlier resurgence of Modernism in the work of
fellow Dominicans, Marie-Dominique Chenu and Yves Congar, and the
Jesuit Henri de Lubac. Garrigou-Lagrange serves as Kerr’s “model Thomist”
during this period.2
George Tyrrell’s friend and literary executor, Maude Petre, would per-
haps have taken some wistful satisfaction at the consternation of Fenton
and Ruffini in 1963. “No one can live within the Church at present,” Petre
wrote just before her death in 1942, “without realizing that ‘Modernism’
has been absorbed as well as condemned.” Petre believed that it brought
about “a larger spirit” and that “much is said which could not have been
said had men like Loisy, Tyrrell, von Hügel not lived and spoken.”3 Going
further than Petre, one contemporary French historian calls the modern-
ist crisis the “intellectual matrix of contemporary Catholicism.”4 But what
does such language mean? What issues define the irrepressible resurgence
of which Kerr speaks? How have the issues raised by the thinkers involved
in the modernist crisis been absorbed as well as condemned, and how is the
modernist crisis our “intellectual matrix”?
In his encyclical of September 8, 1907, Pascendi dominici gregis, Pope
Pius X condemned Modernism as the “synthesis of all heresies.”5 The same
paragraph contains one of the most compelling passages of the encyclical,
speaking of sentiment and action as giving rise to “purely subjective truth.”
Copyright © 2013. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved.

2. Fergus Kerr, Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians: From Neoscholasticism to Nuptial Mysti-

cism (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2007), 4–5; on Ruffini and Fenton, 7; on Garrigou-Lagrange, 10. On
Garrigou, see also Aidan Nichols, OP, Reason with Piety: Garrigou-Lagrange in the Service of Catholic
Thought (Naples, Fla.: Sapientia Press, 2008).
3. Maude Petre, Alfred Loisy: His Religious Significance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1944), 53–54.
4. “La crise moderniste constitue la matrice intellectuelle du catholicisme contemporain, dans
la mesure précisement où elle se définit de relire le message fondateur à la lueur des connaissances sci-
entifiques du siècle dernier [The modernist crisis constitutes the intellectual matrix of contemporary
Catholicism precisely insofar as it is defined as a re-reading of the founding message in light of the
scientific forms of knowledge of the last century].” Étienne Fouilloux, Une Église en quête de liberté:
La pensée catholique française entre modernisme et Vatican II, 1914–1962 (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer,
1998), 10.
5. For the English text of Pascendi, see Claudia Carlen, IHM, ed., The Papal Encyclicals, 5 vols.
(Raleigh, N.C.: McGrath, 1981), 3:71–97, para. 39.

xviii  Introd u c ti on

Divided Friends, Catholic University of America Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 The encyclical pronounces such truth as “of no use to the man who wants
to know above all things whether outside himself there is a God into whose
hands he is one day to fall.” I am definitely one of those men. So was Regi-
nald Garrigou-Lagrange. The main English title of his key work is simply
Reality (1946). After a colon comes the subtitle, A Synthesis of Thomistic
Thought. One might read Garrigou-Lagrange and early twentieth-century
neo-Scholasticism sympathetically as a massive reassertion of objectivity
in the face of the perceived chaos of post-Kantian philosophy with its turn
to the subject and modern politics as represented by the French Revolu-
tion, the revolutions of 1848, and the Great War.
The problem with such an emphasis on unmediated objectivity is cap-
tured in a Scholastic maxim I heard often from my teachers: what is re-
ceived is received in the manner of the one who receives it. Or, to put it in
another way, it is human subjects who know reality and human subjects
who know God. Critical inquiry into the subjective conditions of know-
ing what is true is a big part of the intellectual inheritance of theology af-
ter Kant. And so, one year before Garrigou-Lagrange’s Reality appeared at
Rome, Roger Aubert published his own theological classic at Louvain, La
problème de l’acte de foi (1945).
In 1964, during the Second Vatican Council, in an essay on “The Con-
cept of Truth,” Edward Schillebeeckx referred to “Modernism” as “a failed at-
tempt to grasp the core act of faith,” a failure to overcome neo-Scholasticism’s
emphasis on unmediated objectivity or “conceptualism.”
Nonetheless, the Modernists did discover a real problem—that of the distinction
between truth in itself and truth as a spiritual possession of human beings. . . . The
Copyright © 2013. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved.

problem that Modernism was unable to solve—that is, the problem of the rela-
tionship between experience and concept—has continued to be a theological issue
until today.6

What Schillebeeckx wrote almost fifty years ago is still true. Most of the
resurgent issues that cannot be suppressed cluster around his distinction
between truth in itself and truth as a spiritual possession of human beings.
Whether we are talking about hearing scripture proclaimed, studying scrip-
ture or the history of the church, or liturgical or personal prayer, histori-

6. Edward Schillebeeckx, OP, Revelation and Theology, trans. N. D. Smith (New York: Sheed
and Ward, 1968), 2:13.

I ntro d uc ti o n  xix

Divided Friends, Catholic University of America Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 cally located human subjectivity is the key condition of our possession of
revealed truth insofar as we can possess it.
In elementary school, I learned from the Baltimore Catechism that
faith is a theological virtue by which we believe all the truths that God has
revealed on the authority of God revealing them who can neither deceive
nor be deceived. Later I learned that this definition of faith was based on
the third chapter of the First Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on
the Catholic Faith. It would be repeated in the Oath against Modernism,
promulgated by Pope Pius X in 1910. Such a conceptual definition under-
stands faith in terms of unmediated objectivity. As a child, I remember be-
ing troubled by this definition and wondering how I could ever get to this
“authority of God” of which my catechism spoke so easily.
Even the mediation of the church, which the catechism presumed,
must be subjectively appropriated. I take inquiry into the conditions of
the subjective appropriation of what the catechism called the “authority
of God,” whether we conceive those conditions in terms of experience, in-
terpretation, liberation, lived practice, action, life, etc., to be the main
task of twentieth-century Catholic theology from Karl Rahner and Ber-
nard Lonergan to Henri de Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar. This is our
unstable and only partially resolved inheritance from the modernist crisis
or, in Fouilloux’s words, the intellectual matrix of contemporary Cathol-
icism.
At the heart of the modernist crisis is the focus on the obvious fact that,
if there is indeed objective truth, it is only subjects who receive it. At stake
are questions about whether and how we can know God. For the authors
Copyright © 2013. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved.

of Pascendi, the currents of thought that they termed Modernist or “im-

manentist” left us in a chronic state of agnosticism about God and God’s
revelation. This is why the encyclical denounces “Modernism” as the “syn-
thesis of all heresies.” Those who came to be called “Modernists” insisted
that intellectual life after Kant required theologians in the West to address
questions about the subject’s constructive role in the process of human
knowing—even knowing God. They found the neo-Scholasticism of the
day inadequate to that challenge.
But concern about whether, in Pascendi’s words, “outside [myself ] there
is a God into whose hands [I am] one day to fall,” need not understand

xx  Introd u c ti on

Divided Friends, Catholic University of America Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 the spatial metaphor “outside myself ” for God’s reality and objectivity in
a heavy-handed way. The primordial condition of human knowing need
not be a subject confronted by an external object. Nor need our status in
relation to God be so conceived. Articulating a line of critique that marks
one of Catholic theology’s chief paths in the twentieth century, Maurice
Blondel called such flat-footed concern for the reality of God and God’s
revelation a form of theological “extrinsicism,” in which the “deposit of
faith” drops as an “aerolith” or “sacred stone” from on high.7
Drawing on St. Augustine and his heirs (as well as post-Kantian phi-
losophy) and appealing to the church’s traditions of contemplative prayer,
Blondel and other thinkers during the modernist crisis probed for larger
than intellectual ways in which to speak of God’s presence and the senses
in which human beings might possess God’s truth. The emphasis on gift
in contemporary theology reaches in the direction of such a post-Kantian
objectivity.
In the tragedy that was the modernist crisis, such legitimate concerns
about how we know and believe in God clashed in what Nicholas Lash,
drawing on Newman, called a “sort of night battle, where each fights for
himself, and friend and foe stand together.” Eschewing a “John Wayne’s Ar-
izona” approach with good guys and bad guys, Lash agreed in pronouncing
it “incontestable” that the modernist crisis was “a resounding catastrophe
for all concerned.”8 The modernist crisis and its long aftermath involved
personal suffering on a grand scale. The crisis had a profound effect that
continues to the present day on the intellectual life of the church, and often
divided friend from friend.
Copyright © 2013. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved.

Historians both of the modernist crisis and of Catholicism in the Unit-

ed States have generally assumed that all this turmoil had little effect in the
United States. Catholics here, as practical and sometimes as anti-intellectual
as their fellow citizens, were busy building an immigrant subculture. The

7. Maurice Blondel, The Letter on Apologetics and History and Dogma, ed. and trans. Alexander
Dru and Illtyd Trethowan (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1994), 226–31 on “extrinsicism”; 278
on the “deposit of faith” as “aerolith” or “sacred stone.” History and Dogma originally appeared in
1903.
8. Nicholas Lash, “Modernism, Aggiornamento and the Night Battle,” in Bishops and Writers:
Aspects of the Evolution of Modern English Catholicism, ed. Adrian Hastings (Wheathampstead,
Hertfordshire: Anthony Clarke, 1977), 51–53.

I ntro d uc ti o n  xxi

Divided Friends, Catholic University of America Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 state of biblical studies and theology was so elementary, if not primitive, that
the twin condemnations of Americanism (1899) and Modernism (1907) all
but wiped them out and sealed the fate of Catholic intellectual life in the
United States. Like all received pieces of wisdom, this picture has much to
recommend it. But at a time when the need for inculturated theology has
never been clearer, Catholic theologians in the United States find themselves
without a past and overly dependent on theologies sited in other parts of the
world.
Building on the prior work of such scholars as Margaret M. Reher,
Christopher Kauffman, and Scott Appleby, among others, on the relation-
ship of what are usually called Americanism and Modernism, and of Mi-
chael DeVito on The New York Review, Divided Friends revisits the ques-
tion of the effects of the modernist crisis in the United States. The issue
is reframed in terms of the question of the state of Catholic intellectual
culture in the English language at this time. George Tyrrell, for example,
about whose influence on Lumen Gentium Monsignor Fenton was so con-
cerned in 1963, was, by the late 1890s, well known in the United States.
Between 1899 and 1906, a significant number of his published articles ap-
peared in U.S. journals. By rough analogy with ressourcement (return to the
sources) in France, this study tries to take a long view and look for theologi-
cal paths through the modernist crisis and beyond.
But the book’s main purpose is to tell a related set of compelling sto-
ries about the personal effects of the modernist crisis in the United States,
about how the lives of a handful of the “first modern American Catholics”
dramatize the theological questions sketched in the previous pages more
Copyright © 2013. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved.

vividly and effectively than a conventional theological exposition.9 Along

the way, I hope to make a modest contribution to redeeming for Catholic
theology in the United States the time between 1910 to 1965.
This book has three parts. Part 1, chapters 1 through 3, introduces the is-
sues and the cast of characters of the modernist crisis in the Roman Catholic
church. Part 2 treats in four chapters the relationship between John R. Slat-
tery and Denis J. O’Connell. O’Connell is present in each chapter, but due
in part to the nature of the sources and in part to my own preferences, the

9. The phrase is from R. Scott Appleby, “Church and Age Unite!”: The Modernist Impulse in
American Catholicism (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), 3.

xxii  Introd u c ti on

Divided Friends, Catholic University of America Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 emphasis falls on Slattery. After opening chapters on the Catholic theologi-
cal effervescence in the United States between 1899 and 1907 and on Jo-
seph McSorley’s role as George Tyrrell’s literary agent, part 3 treats in four
chapters the relationship between McSorley and William L. Sullivan. As
with Slattery in part 2, McSorley receives more emphasis in part 3 and in
fact emerges as the book’s central figure.
Copyright © 2013. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved.

I ntro d uc ti o n  xxiii

Divided Friends, Catholic University of America Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
Copyright © 2013. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved.

Divided Friends, Catholic University of America Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Part 1

The Roman Catholic

Modernist Crisis in the
United States
Copyright © 2013. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved.

Divided Friends, Catholic University of America Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
Copyright © 2013. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved.

Divided Friends, Catholic University of America Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 1

THE CYCLONE OF THE

MODERNIST CRISIS
Nothing so violent or drastic as the recent curial document has appeared on
the part of the Vatican authorities since the days of the Inquisition. I can com-
pare the crisis to nothing but a cyclone during which people must simply make
for the cellar, or in other terms it resembles the recent financial panic in N.Y.

James F. Driscoll wrote these words to his friend Charles Au-

gustus Briggs on December 8, 1907. The “recent curial document”
to which Driscoll referred was Pascendi dominici gregis. Pascendi ap-
peared three months to the day before Driscoll wrote to Briggs. By
that time, the ecclesiastical whirlwind had crossed the Atlantic and
hit the shores of the United States.
Driscoll was president and rector of St. Joseph’s Seminary, Dun-
woodie, Yonkers, New York. Briggs was a Protestant biblical scholar
of international stature who taught at Union Theological Seminary
in New York and had invited Driscoll to speak at Union. During
Driscoll’s years as rector, beginning in 1902, such cooperation be-
Copyright © 2013. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved.

tween Dunwoodie and Union had become common. Now Driscoll

was telling his friend that it had to cease. He went on to say that
St. Joseph’s Seminary
has for some time been looked upon by certain invidious heresy hunters
in the Catholic Community as a brothel of liberalism or as it is now called
Modernism; furthermore The New York Review, edited by myself and a
couple of confreres is looked upon in the same light and it has been more
than once denounced to Roman authorities.
Now my sympathy with Modernism is pretty well known as well as my
intimate friendship with several of the most noted of its promoters and
so with all this you can readily understand that the Archbishop tho very

Divided Friends, Catholic University of America Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 well disposed towards me and some of my views is at present anxious lest he may
be obliged to remove me from my present position and suppress the publication of
the Review.1

Within a year, Archbishop Farley of New York did indeed remove

Driscoll as rector and appointed him pastor of St. Ambrose Parish in Man-
hattan. The New York Review, a journal devoted to joining the “ancient faith
and modern thought,” announced that it was being discontinued due to fi-
nancial difficulties. There is considerable evidence that it was suppressed.2
Driscoll’s metaphors say a lot about the effects of Pascendi in the United
States. The image of “invidious heresy hunters” denouncing a seminary as a
“brothel of liberalism” suggests the vehemence of the post-Pascendi crack-
down. Summoning pictures of seminary professors hiding in a storm cellar
or brokers running scared on Wall Street, Driscoll likens Pascendi’s effects
to a cyclone or a New York financial panic.
Noteworthy too is Driscoll’s sense that the term Modernism is an inno-
vation. It refers to attitudes and positions that Driscoll identifies as “liberal-
ism.” His letter highlights the need to move back behind Pascendi and its
aftermath in order to reconstruct historically, as best we can, what he and
others like him thought they were doing between 1899 and 1907. It does
not take Driscoll long to slip into using the term Modernism as a descrip-
tion of his own thought. But for a moment, the novelty of the term flashes
before us.
As Driscoll’s metaphors convey, the modernist crisis ripped through
Catholic intellectual life like a tragic storm. But its havoc cut to a level
deeper than the merely intellectual. Pascendi forced people to take sides.
Copyright © 2013. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved.

Agonized personal decisions put colleagues at odds and set friend against
friend. Censured priests questioned fellow clergy or pious laymen who es-
caped censure. Subsequent historical and autobiographical writing appor-
tioned the inevitable praise and blame.
This is a story about two such pairs of “divided friends.” Taken together,
these four priests represent the first two generations of American Catholics
1. Letter of James F. Driscoll to Charles A. Briggs, New York, December 8, 1907, The Archives
of the Burke Library (Columbia University) at Union Theological Seminary, Briggs Papers, Series 31,
Box 5, Ledger 12. Along with The New York Review, Driscoll’s life and thought will be treated exten-
sively in chapter 8.
2. See Michael J. DeVito, The New York Review (1905–1908) (New York: United States Catholic
Historical Society, 1977). See esp. Chapter 6.

4  The Ro m a n C ath oli c M odernist Cr isis

Divided Friends, Catholic University of America Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 to feel the full impact of critical historical scholarship with its attendant
philosophical difficulties. Each generation meets in the seminary. Later
they will live and work together in the comradery of priestly culture, but the
modernist crisis divides them. In each set of friends, one leaves the church
and one stays. The two who leave come to see their former companions as
fundamentally dishonest. To scholars trained to look first for ideas, the per-
sonal and ethical dimensions of the modernist crisis may appear forbidding
and elusive. Yet they fuel the drama of the crisis and help to account for its
continuing power. By intertwining two sets of biographical portraits, this
book brings to life the human complexities of the modernist crisis.

John R. Slattery and Denis J. O’Connell

John R. Slattery (1851–1926) and Denis J. O’Connell (1849–1927) met
as college seminarians and remained close friends in later years. Superior
General of the American Josephites, Slattery was American Catholicism’s
premier evangelist to African Americans and a widely published spokes-
person on the race question. But as a missionary, he grew increasingly dis-
illusioned with the church’s lack of support for his work. As a seminary
rector who taught church history, he eventually found the results of criti-
cal history impossible to square with the church’s contemporary under-
standing of itself. By 1904 he had lost his faith. He publicly renounced the
priesthood in 1906.
O’Connell was a protégé of James Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore. Gib-
bons sent him to Rome where he served as rector of the Pontifical North
Copyright © 2013. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved.

American College and an unofficial representative of the American bishops.

Both Slattery and O’Connell were partisans of the liberal reform movement
known as Americanism. From his Roman post, O’Connell promoted Amer-
icanist causes during the 1890s under Pope Leo XIII. Through O’Connell’s
international network of liberal Catholics, Slattery made his transatlantic
connections with Alfred Loisy, the French biblical scholar, and Albert Hou-
tin, the first historian of the modernist crisis. He corresponded with Loisy,
visited him whenever he passed through Paris, and even offered to have Lo-
isy’s L’Évangile et l’Église (1902) translated into English. Slattery collaborat-
ed with Houtin on various projects and his autobiography is preserved only
in Houtin’s papers.

Th e C yclo ne  5

Divided Friends, Catholic University of America Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 O’Connell took a different path. As anti-modernist rector of The Cath-
olic University of America in Washington, D.C., under Pope Pius X, he
battled biblical scholars as energetically as he had earlier pursued reform.
Recalling their travels together in Europe and what he termed their “com-
mon crisis,” Slattery pronounced O’Connell’s perfect orthodoxy “feigned.”
In 1903 Pope Pius X made O’Connell a bishop. Slattery went on to become
a wealthy attorney. Looking back on the difficult years of 1902 and 1906,
Slattery recalled that, among all his friends, only the Paulist Walter Elliott
had remained loyal.

William Laurence Sullivan and Joseph McSorley

As young men, William L. Sullivan (1872–1935) and Joseph McSorley
(1874–1963) both joined the Paulists, a religious congregation founded by
Isaac Hecker (1819–1888) with the hope of converting America to Catholi-
cism. While McSorley and Sullivan were still seminarians, the writings of
the Irish Jesuit George Tyrrell began to appear in the United States. Tyr-
rell affected both young Paulists deeply. McSorley served as Tyrrell’s liter-
ary agent in the United States, arranging for the publication of his articles
in U.S. Catholic journals. Eventually Tyrrell was excommunicated for his
open opposition to Pascendi. Despite his close association with Tyrrell,
McSorley avoided censure at the time of the modernist crisis.
When he was only twenty-seven years old, the Paulists named McSorley
their novice master. Sullivan, two years older, served as his assistant. During
the heady years between 1902 and 1907, they taught together at St. Thomas
Copyright © 2013. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved.

College at Catholic University. Both were heavily involved with the Paulist
organ, Catholic World, founded by Isaac Hecker in 1865 and edited during
most of the period under discussion by Paulist John J. Burke. Both McSorley
and Sullivan contributed to the short-lived The New York Review. In 1907
the Paulists abruptly removed McSorley as novice master and Sullivan re-
signed his teaching post. Two years later, Sullivan left the Paulists.
Sullivan published an anonymous set of Letters to His Holiness Pope
Pius X by a Modernist (1910), and an autobiographical novel, The Priest,
A Tale of Modernism in New England (1911). A few months before Sulli-
van’s Letters appeared, McSorley published his own indirect response to
Pascendi, The Sacrament of Duty (1909). He carried on his life as a Paulist.

6  The Ro m a n C ath oli c M odernist Cr isis

Divided Friends, Catholic University of America Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Sullivan married and became a Unitarian minister. McSorley continued to
write and publish but had broken off contact with Tyrrell who died in July
1909, months before The Sacrament of Duty appeared. Sullivan remained
convinced that “the illustrious McSorley” had abandoned Tyrrell and be-
trayed his own Modernist beliefs. McSorley lived to see the Second Vatican
council. He died on July 3, 1963, a month after the death of another near
casualty of the modernist crisis, Pope John XXIII. McSorley outlived Sul-
livan by almost thirty years.
As the narrative to follow makes clear, Slattery and Sullivan claim a cer-
tain moral superiority over O’Connell and McSorley. But as their stories
unfold, the high ground Slattery and Sullivan have staked out appears in-
creasingly hard to hold. This is especially true in the case of Sullivan’s in-
dictment of McSorley. McSorley is the key character. Despite the ethical
ambivalence of his own life, it does challenge the inevitability of the choices
that Slattery and Sullivan made. McSorley’s emphasis on holiness and his-
tory defined his path through the modernist crisis. It was a path not unlike
that of his slightly younger Italian contemporary, Angelo Roncalli. Both
McSorley and the future Pope John XXIII were young seminary professors
at the time of the crisis. Both felt the sting of ecclesiastical exile and found
a certain safe harbor in church history. Both had spiritual and emotional
constitutions that allowed them to continue moving, however obliquely at
times, toward the unsuspected ways in which their youthful visions would
be fulfilled.
Copyright © 2013. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved.

Political Dimensions of the Modernist Crisis

These four American priests were implicated in a larger drama that pit-
ted Catholicism against modernity. This conflict was fought out in Europe.
But even as they experienced a different modernity, Catholics in the Unit-
ed States felt the reverberations of this conflict.
After 1789 the Catholic church in Europe engaged in prolonged combat
with liberalism as embodied in modern secular states. In a self-conscious act
of intellectual anti-liberalism, Pope Leo XIII launched a revival of Thomism
in 1879. Aquinas redivivus would supply the intellectual resources necessary
to restore epistemological and political order to the chaos of a post-Kantian,
post-revolutionary Europe. With its massive objectivity, the neo-Thomism

Th e C yclo ne  7

Divided Friends, Catholic University of America Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 of Leo’s Aeterni Patris would counter the turn to the subject in modern phi-
losophy. In his contributions to Catholic social teaching, especially Rerum
Novarum (1891), Leo began to articulate an alternative social and political
order in traditional terms of goods and ends. From a contemporary vantage
point, it is well to keep in mind that Aeterni Patris and Rerum Novarum
were written by the same Pope as part of the same overarching project.
Since the sixteenth century, emerging nation-states in Europe had been
marginalizing the church as a social and political agent. This process of dif-
ferentiation eventually produced many undeniable goods. But it was not
the unambiguous good that a dominant Enlightenment narrative of uni-
versal emancipation from the power of an oppressive church taught us to
expect. Expansion of the states’ powers led to an increasingly sharp disjunc-
tion between the public and the private, thus confining “religion” to the
private sphere. Because of our historical distance from this conflict, Ameri-
cans often find it difficult to appreciate what was at stake.
At issue was the modern political ideal of liberty as expressed, for ex-
ample, in freedom of religion and freedom of inquiry. In his many writings,
Pope Leo XIII reflected on the nature of true liberty in church and state
and its relation to the authority of the church in teaching revealed truth.
Testem Benevolentiae, his 1899 censure that put an end to controversies over
“Americanism” in France and the United States, warned specifically against
introducing a certain liberty into the church in imitation of contemporary
secular civil societies.
Pope Leo’s Thomist revival was part of a larger cultural resistance to
developments that, in the name of liberty, quarantined the church and
Copyright © 2013. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved.

its truth to the private sphere. But it too was deeply ambivalent. The Ro-
man question, involving the ultimate fate of Rome and the Papal States in
a united Italy, was not resolved until the Vatican’s concordat with Musso-
lini in 1929. Between 1870 and 1929, the Roman question dominated Vati-
can policy and functioned as the primary lens through which the Vatican
viewed theological issues. In addition, the Thomist revival, itself a modern
phenomenon, too often succumbed to the rationalist excess that it opposed
in modern philosophy.
However, this ambivalence should not blind contemporaries to the fact
that devotion to the pope and the accompanying centralization of church
life on Rome that we have come to call ultramontanism, however alien it

8  The Ro m a n C ath oli c M odernist Cr isis

Divided Friends, Catholic University of America Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 may appear to later Catholic sensibilities, was a popular religious movement
and part of a transnational protest against the dominance of the church
by modern European states. The enormous circulation of Louis Veuillot’s
rabidly pro-papal newspaper L’Univers testifies to this popularity. Widely
embraced by lower clergy and people, ultramontanism involved more than
a displaced hierarchy’s will to power. Something of a sacramental church’s
incarnational role in ordinary life was at stake in its gradual banishment
from the newly created public sphere. Anti-clerical political rulers were
not the only ones who literally “secularized” church property and money
during this long struggle. Catholic kings and princes were also responsible.
This cultural conflict not only set the church’s face against modern liberal
states but also divided Catholics among themselves.
After 1907 the anti-modernist strategy that many church leaders ad-
opted to deal with this issue is often called “integralism.” They sought to
enlist coercive civil power in the service of religious truth. With a century’s
hindsight, this integralism and its anti-modernist repression appear as the
death throes of a doomed order. Integralists tried to establish out of time
an artificial likeness of a situation that was once culturally normative in Eu-
rope, that is, the church’s legally inscribed public role in pre-modern Euro-
pean social and political life. Within fifty years of the anti-modernist cam-
paign, the church in 1965 solemnly repudiated integralism and coercion in
the service of the truth. Modern states, cynics will say, dragged the church
kicking and screaming to this belated embrace of the emancipative ideal.
From the breach of Rome’s Porta Pia by the Piedmontese army in 1870
and the pope’s subsequent self-imposed status as “prisoner of the Vatican”
Copyright © 2013. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved.

to the French separation laws of 1905 abrogating the Napoleonic Concor-

dat and the privileges it gave to the church, developments leading up to
the modernist crisis left the church increasingly marginalized as a public
presence. It is often claimed that as modern states stripped the church of its
“political” pretensions, popes and bishops claimed increasing control over
the interior lives of Catholics. This is one way to look at it.
Another is that the popes and bishops were responding, however, awk-
wardly, to the introduction of a drastic disjunction between the public and
the private realms. This meant that the intellectual battles of this culture war
would be waged on a field of religious interiority now publicly proclaimed
as “private.” The stakes could be defined procedurally in terms of limitless

Th e C yclo ne  9

Divided Friends, Catholic University of America Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 freedom of inquiry rather than substantively in terms of the pursuit of the
true and the good. The church could not on principle accept the former
terms without qualification. The arguments leading up to the Declaration
on Religious Liberty at Vatican II recapitulate this struggle. Learning how
to promote the pursuit of the true and the good without recourse to co-
ercion or intimidation would be difficult. The fate of those denounced as
Modernists in the years after 1907 is a chilling reminder of how difficult a
lesson it was. The fact that no one had used the term Modernist to describe
themselves before 1907 meant that after Pascendi, anyone was fair game.
Just as Catholic princes and kings were among those who helped to
de-publicize the church and differentiate European social and political life
from religious life, so there were always Catholics who greeted these new
developments more in joy and hope than in fear. They did not think that
moving in the direction of voluntary church participation was necessarily
antiincarnational, though it could be. They tended to see it instead as an
opportunity for the spiritual renewal of the church. They dared to hope
that the church’s survival and flourishing did not depend necessarily on an
unseemly modern attempt to resuscitate Christendom. They found cause
for hope in the United States. They were struck by the contrast between
the relative health of Catholicism in the United States and its beleaguered
state in Europe. The United States constitutionally barred the church from
the legal status sought by Vatican policy in Europe. As the Americanist epi-
sode in France in the late 1890s made clear, the experience of Catholics in
the United States suggested to some Europeans that the church might de-
rive spiritual benefit from a new “freedom” from the state.
Copyright © 2013. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved.

Based on the threefold standard of 1789, “liberty, fraternity, equality,”

such Catholics came to be known as “liberals.” Both liberals and their more
integralist opponents associated the freedom that liberals advocated with
Wissenschaft, the scientific spirit and practice associated with German uni-
versities. To Vatican authorities, Loisy and Tyrrell, whose works appeared
in Italian in the years immediately preceding 1907, embodied Wissenschaft’s
invasion of the church. In their eyes, Wissenschaft had inevitable links to
liberal politics.
Loisy and Tyrrell represented the latest in a series of periodic political
and intellectual openings to the age that liberal Catholics launched after
1848. Such openings punctuated a larger Catholic struggle with modernity,

10  The Ro m a n C ath oli c M odernist Crisis

Divided Friends, Catholic University of America Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 primarily in its political form. However strange and unfortunate that strug-
gle may now appear to contemporary heirs of liberal Catholics, they would
be hard put to deny that, apart from the church’s resistance to the absolute
pretensions of modern states, there would be no Catholic social teaching.
The modernist crisis and the larger cultural struggle that framed it are hard
to translate directly into contemporary categories.
The most spirited of liberal openings to the age came at the close of the
nineteenth century. The ferment of history and evolution planted itself in
the midst of modern neo-Thomism’s systemic clarity. In the twentieth cen-
tury, this ferment began to bubble and grow. In France and Italy, Germany
and England, and even in the United States, Catholic thinkers appropri-
ated more “scientific” approaches to history. Resulting developmental
forms of thought strained against the confines of neo-Thomist categories.
New emphasis on the subjective conditions of knowing and believing truth
made neo-Scholastic notions of the church and even of revelation itself ap-
pear, to use Maurice Blondel’s term, extrinsicist, or imposed on the human
condition from without.
Hoping to correct for the exaggerated objectivity of revived Thomism,
George Tyrrell and Friedrich von Hügel (along with many others) turned
within, to the subjective mediations of theological truth, to what the pre-
Pascendi Blondel might have called a way of “immanence.” More ambigu-
ously, William James’s Gifford Lectures of 1901–02 called it “religious
experience.” This subjective turn fit well with Isaac Hecker’s apologetic em-
phasis on God’s revelation as responding to the questions of our souls and
the aspirations of our nature. To Americans in the Hecker tradition such
Copyright © 2013. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved.

as McSorley and Sullivan, the Paulist founder’s strong sense of the Holy
Spirit’s indwelling in the soul resonated with this new sense of immanence
in apologetics and spirituality.
In England and the United States, where people spoke Charles Dar-
win’s native tongue, there loomed behind all of this the specter of a form-
less maelstrom of material forces in which there could be no souls to
question and no Holy Spirit to dwell within them. Even before Pascendi,
Slattery’s spirit had dissolved into a vaguely scientific soup of blind histori-
cal and biological forces. His autobiography ends with strange reflections
on “ether.” Sullivan’s emphasis on “personality” and conscience reflect his
struggle to keep force from engulfing will.

Th e C yclo ne  11

Divided Friends, Catholic University of America Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 When he condemned Modernism in 1907 and mandated vigilance
committees and the Oath against Modernism, Pius X slammed shut this
particular opening to the age. Or at least this is how the story is most often
told. McSorley’s long life suggests alternative paths that preserved, adapted,
and transformed something of the intellectual and spiritual openings that
Catholics such as he experienced during the 1890s and especially between
1899 and 1907.
Pope Pius X excommunicated from the church the French biblical
scholar, Alfred Loisy, and the Jesuit apologist, George Tyrrell. As priests,
their lives were forcibly, even violently, changed. As laymen, Baron Fried-
rich von Hügel in England and Maurice Blondel in France were not con-
demned. Some would say they “escaped” explicit censure, though they sure-
ly deserved it. A sense of the heroic inevitability of the fates of Loisy and
Tyrrell pervades certain quarters of scholarship on the modernist crisis. In-
nuendo surrounds Blondel and Hügel. Why did they not bravely embrace
the fate of their clerical friends?
In justifying their own choices, Slattery and Sullivan try to pull their
readers in a similar direction, a direction that has a certain contemporary
resonance. Loisy and Tyrrell represent the typical fate of the honest Catho-
lic intellectual in the face of ecclesiastical repression, whereas O’Connell
and McSorely represent the pious frauds who cave in to the Vatican. The
feigned orthodoxy of Slattery’s O’Connell fits this familiar story. But un-
less we take Sullivan’s word that McSorley betrayed himself and his friends,
McSorley’s story must be forced anachronistically into this contemporary
narrative. Like Blondel, Hügel, and others who had participated in the par-
Copyright © 2013. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved.

ticular liberal opening to the age that led to the modernist crisis, McSorley
carried on his work in the church using the categories of history and inte-
riority. Like those of Blondel and Hügel, McSorley’s long life suggests that
contemporary scholars have sometimes ignored a longer view in favor of a
close-up on the years of the modernist crisis.

The Shape of This Book

Most theologians of my generation were schooled in a wilderness be-
tween manualist metaphysics, with its eighteenth-century intellectual norms,
and a more historically aware theology with intellectual norms that were

12  The Ro m a n C ath oli c M odernist Crisis

Divided Friends, Catholic University of America Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 closer to those of the nineteenth century. A signature focus of our genera-
tion has been on the subjective conditions of believing, the subjective and
historical mediations of religious truth. Thinkers of the modernist crisis were
among the first Catholics to raise such questions regarding the subjective and
historical mediations of theological truth.
However, this book does not come directly at these issues in the manner
of a systematic theology. Rather, it is thematically a work of history, made up
of two sets of intertwined biographical portraits based on traditional histor-
ical sources. In Part II, unpublished sources include the Denis J. O’Connell
Papers in the Archives of the Diocese of Richmond (on microfilm at the
University of Notre Dame) and the John R. Slattery Papers at the Josephite
Archives in Baltimore. Most important for Part II is the Biographie de
J. R. Slattery from the papers of Albert Houtin at the Bibliothèque Natio-
nale in Paris. Indispensable for Part III are the William L. Sullivan Papers
at the Andover-Harvard Theological Library at Harvard Divinity School,
especially Sullivan’s letters to Estelle Throckmorton, his future wife. Joseph
McSorley had most of his papers destroyed, though a small but useful col-
lection remains at the Paulist Archives in Washington, D.C. Fragments of
McSorley’s correspondence can be assembled from the Herman Heuser
Papers at the Philadelphia Archdiocesan Historical Research Center, the
Daniel E. Hudson Papers at the University of Notre Dame, the papers of
Lucien Laberthonière at the Bibliothèque Nationale, the John J. Burke Pa-
pers and Catholic World correspondence at the Paulist Archives, the John
Tracy Ellis Papers at Catholic University, and various collections at Notre
Dame assembled by Thomas T. McAvoy, CSC.
Copyright © 2013. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved.

Both the substantive concerns of the subjects of these biographical

studies and the fact that their author is a theologian combine to give this
history a strong theological flavor. In addition to being a work of history,
then, this book is also a theologian’s narrative meditation on the relation-
ship between theology and history. To the extent that it succeeds, it is also
a work of historical theology.
The narrative moves forward and takes its shape from these questions
regarding subjective and historical mediations of religious truth. It has
been constructed so as to suggest future directions for Catholic theolo-
gians in the United States. Rather than stemming from local theologies in
non-Western languages in which most U.S. Catholics have no competence,

Th e C yclo ne  13

Divided Friends, Catholic University of America Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 a more plausibly global future might lie in returning with new awareness to
interrupted and unfinished indigenous beginnings from the period of the
modernist crisis and that long and unredeemed time that stretches between
the condemnation of Modernism in 1907 to the end of the Second Vatican
Council in 1965. McSorley’s life lights the way.
Under the heading of the “modernist crisis,” the years between 1893 and
1910 have been subjected to intense scrutiny by scholars. The necessities of
scholarship require such focus on brief periods of time. But because such
focus can distract scholars from a longer view, this tendency can also be
unduly distorting. To correct for such distortion, this book will employ
two strategies. First, it approaches the modernist crisis through two sets of
intertwined biographical portraits. The lives of their subjects continue on
after the modernist crisis and help to illustrate it as a key part of a larger
story of Catholic theology in the twentieth century. For Slattery, Sullivan,
and even for O’Connell, the story ended with Pius X. And so it does for
many contemporary scholars. For some it is tempting to take the moralist
bait offered by Slattery and Sullivan and agree that those who remain in the
church are hopelessly compromised. But for McSorley, as for many of the
rest of us, the story continues.
Second, this book will treat the modernist crisis itself as part of a longer
story. In the chronicle of Catholicism’s protracted and ambivalent struggle
with liberal secular states, the modernist crisis emerges as one in a continu-
ing series of Catholic openings to the age. But it is the pivotal opening that
gives shape to twentieth-century Catholic theology. The stories of Slattery,
O’Connell, Sullivan, and especially McSorley, will help to clarify how this
Copyright © 2013. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved.

is so.
In the United States, but also in France, where the Americanist contro-
versy raged, and in Italy, where Americanism was condemned, the strategy
of locating the modernist crisis in a larger story means positioning it with
respect to the Americanism episodes of the 1890s. The title of Thomas T.
McAvoy’s still standard 1957 study of Americanism calls it The Great Crisis
in American Catholic History. In the United States, a long-dominant his-
toriographical tradition has insisted on separating this earlier American
Catholic crisis from the broader modernist crisis. This dominant trend
can be called “phantom heresy historiography.” Chapter 2’s preliminary
account of the “phantom heresy” tradition in historiography introduces a

14  The Ro m a n C ath oli c M odernist Crisis

Divided Friends, Catholic University of America Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 major presupposition of this work, namely, that the questions and concerns
of the Americanists are continuous with and, to a significant degree, ingre-
dients in the modernist crisis.
Social and political considerations did more than the real theological is-
sues at stake to drive the modernist crisis and help account for the special
vehemence of anti-modernism. As the following intertwined sets of biogra-
phies will show, modern political understandings of freedom were central to
both the Americanist and modernist crises. The connections between free-
dom in politics and freedom in intellectual life, as between the American-
ist and modernist crises, were clear to the Roman authorities who opposed
theological Modernism. Better than later American scholars who lived in a
long tradition of constitutional separation of church and state, they under-
stood that modern political freedoms tend to undermine not only traditional
social and political authorities but religious authorities as well. Slattery and
Albert Houtin were correct to connect Americanism and Modernism. Pierre
Colin’s identification of the key issue at stake in the modernist crisis holds
for the Americanist crisis as well, namely, “how to conceive the presence and
exercise of a spiritual power in a pluralist society.”3
3. Pierre Colin, L’Audace et le soupçon: La crise moderniste dans la catholicisme français, 1893–1914
(Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1997), 269.
Copyright © 2013. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved.

Th e C yclo ne  15

Divided Friends, Catholic University of America Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 2

WHO ARE THE MODERNISTS?

The Encyclical Pascendi

“Enemies of the cross of Christ,” those who seek to “overthrow
utterly Christ’s kingdom”—these enemies now “lie hid, a thing to
be deeply deplored and feared, in her very bosom and heart.” These
new enemies are not the rationalists and secularists one might ex-
pect, but rather Catholic laity and even priests. “Feigning a love for
the Church,” they are instead “thoroughly imbued with the poi-
sonous doctrines taught by the enemies of the Church.” They pres-
ent themselves as “reformers of the Church” but they do not spare
“even the person of the divine redeemer, whom, with sacrilegious
daring, they reduce to a simple, mere man.”1
With such language, Pope Pius X’s encyclical Pascendi dominici
gregis of September 8, 1907, introduces the threat of Modernism.
Seeming lack of system is only a “clever artifice” of these enemies
within. The encyclical’s author, therefore, structured it in such a
way as to alert the reader to the hidden system in a body of ideas
Copyright © 2013. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved.

that its Modernist authors deceptively present as scattered and di-

verse. Every Modernist, according to the encyclical, “is a philoso-
pher, a believer, a theologian, a historian, a critic, an apologist, and
a reformer.” Pascendi treats each of these identities in turn, but the
most important is clearly the philosopher.2
It is the Modernist’s “agnostic” post-Kantian philosophy, lim-
iting knowledge to phenomena and denying natural speculative
knowledge of God, that drives his or her subjectivist believing and
1. Pascendi dominici gregis, para. 2. For the English text of Pascendi dominici gregis, see
The Papal Encyclicals, ed. Claudia Carlen, IHM (Raleigh, N.C.: McGrath, 1981), 3:71–97
and attached bibliography.
2. Pascendi, paras. 4 and 5.

16

Divided Friends, Catholic University of America Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 symbolist theology. Rightly concerned with the objective reality of God’s
revelation and especially with the person of Christ as divine, Pascendi is
adamant that these realities cannot be approached immanently or through
“sentiment” in the manner of modern philosophy but rather only through
the objective categories of what it calls “Scholastic philosophy.” If the in-
tellectual elements of faith are only symbols, then God can no longer be
distinguished from human consciousness or sentiment.3
Immanentist philosophy sunders science from faith, history from theol-
ogy, state from church.4 Modernist history and criticism are “saturated” with
this agnostic, subjectivist philosophy. They present a “double Christ,” distin-
guishing the “real Christ” from “the one of faith, who never really existed.”
Modernist exegesis proceeds from “a philosophy borrowed from the nega-
tion of God, and a criterion which consists of themselves.” Such “Agnostic,
immanentist, evolutionist criticism” is a “boundless effrontery, . . . a pestilence
in the air which penetrates everywhere and spreads the contagion.”5
In the first book of the Confessions, St. Augustine had addressed to
God his rightly well-known dictum: “You have made us for yourself and
our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” This Augustinian apologetic
of the restless heart, key to such works as Isaac Hecker’s Questions of the
Soul (1855) and Aspirations of Nature (1857), had been at the literary center
of French religious sensibility at least since the time of Pascal in the sev-
enteenth century.6 During the modernist crisis, the chief representative of
this tradition of interiority or way of immanence was Maurice Blondel.
How the genuinely pious Blondel must have shuddered when he first
read Pascendi’s warning against “Catholics who, while rejecting immanence
Copyright © 2013. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved.

as doctrine, employ it as a method of apologetics.”7 Such an emphasis on

the interior dynamics of the human spirit as we find in Blondel’s L’Action
(1893) is implicitly dismissed by Pascendi as involving “a true and rigorous
necessity with regard to the supernatural [resting in God]” and not a mere
human “capacity or suitability” for the supernatural.8 Much of the drama
of twentieth-century Catholic theology is played out in the eventual vindi-

3. Ibid., para. 39. 4. Ibid., paras. 18 and 24.

5. Ibid., paras. 30, 31, and 34.
6. See Kathleen A. Mulhern, Beyond the Contingent: Epistemological Authority, A Pascalian Re-
vival, and Religious Imagination in Third Republic France (Eugene, Ore.: Wipf and Stock, 2011).
7. Pascendi, para. 37.
8. Ibid.

W h o A r e th e M o d ernists ?  17

Divided Friends, Catholic University of America Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 cation and even triumph of Maurice Blondel. But in 1907 such an interior
approach to God or way of immanence appeared to be authoritatively re-
jected by Pope Pius X.
Necessity required, the encyclical insisted, dwelling at such length on
the Modernist system because it “does not consist in scattered and discon-
nected theories but in a perfectly organized body, all the parts of which are
solidly joined so that it is not possible to admit one without admitting all.”
Thus Pascendi defined Modernism as the “synthesis of all heresies” because
its agnosticism led to the dissolution not just of Catholicism but of all re-
ligion into a muddle of experiences which can no longer be distinguished
from the reality of God.9
The cause of Modernism, according to the encyclical, is “perversion of
mind” due to curiosity and pride. Pride “sits in Modernism as in its own
house.” In their “amazing effrontery,” Modernists gain disciples by criticiz-
ing Scholastic philosophy, the Magisterium, and the authority of the Fa-
thers and tradition. Pascendi takes particular note of Modernist “hatred of
Scholasticism.” There is “no surer sign that a man is on the way to Modern-
ism than when he begins to show his dislike for this system.” Modernist
professors are said to teach from their “chairs of pestilence.”10
Chief among the remedies proposed by the encyclical is the study of
Scholastic philosophy. Pascendi warns theologians “who exalt positive the-
ology in such a way as to seem to despise the Scholastic” that they will be
identified as having Modernist tendencies.11 Paras. 48 through 56 outline a
series of “practical applications” for counteracting Modernism. The choice
of seminary rectors is crucial. Rectors cannot “be too watchful or too con-
Copyright © 2013. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved.

stant” in their choice of professors.” Candidates for orders are not to take
university courses that could be taken at their Catholic institutes. Pascendi
devotes three paragraphs to the need for “vigilance over publications.” The
Pope urges bishops to drive “pernicious books” out of their dioceses. But
hindering the reading of such books is not enough—bishops must also pre-
vent them from being printed. To this end, the role of censors is spelled
out in detail. Pascendi warns against gatherings of priests and prescribes the
establishment of diocesan vigilance committees or “councils of vigilance”
to identify Modernists. The encyclical mandates “triennial reports” from
9. Ibid., para. 39. 10. Ibid., paras. 40, 42, and 43.
11. Ibid., paras. 45 and 46.

18  The Ro m a n C ath oli c M odernist Crisis

Divided Friends, Catholic University of America Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 bishops on their implementation of its practical applications.12 It is not at
all clear that “councils of vigilance” and “triennial reports” were universally
implemented. Such, in any case, was the introduction of the term Modern-
ism into the lexicon of Catholic theology.

Defining Modernism and Modernists

“Who Are the Modernists of the Encyclical?” With this question in
the Ecclesiastical Review for May 1908, Sulpician Anthony Vieban began
his assessment of the post-Pascendi situation for American readers. Accord-
ing to Vatican custom, Pascendi had not attributed to anyone by name the
positions that it censured. Two years before the encyclical, in a seminal ar-
ticle in the inaugural issue of The New York Review to which we shall return
many times in the coming pages, Joseph McSorley challenged his readers
“to deny that a change of immense import is coming of the face of Catholi-
cism.” Referring to recent publications in French, German, Italian, and
English, McSorley noted the impression “that the present age has evolved
a new type of Catholicism.” For evidence he referred to “modern views on
such points as the principle of evolution, the origins of man, the extent of
the deluge, the character of inspiration, the relation of ecclesiastical and
civil powers.”13 It was to counteract just such developments as McSorley
described in 1905 that Pius X published Pascendi in 1907.
Vieban’s question was as necessary as it was difficult to answer because
none of the authors responsible for this “new type of Catholicism” thought
of themselves as Modernists or named what they were doing Modernism.
Copyright © 2013. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved.

Modernism is an outsider term. Though it appeared earlier, it gained cur-

rency among Italian bishops around 1905. Pascendi introduced it into
Catholic theological discourse.14
Alfred Loisy and George Tyrrell soon took the “Modernist” name for
themselves. Even as they protested its distortions, they recognized that Pas-
cendi was aimed chiefly at them. In the ensuing scramble, nearly everyone,

12. Ibid., paras. 50–53.

13. Joseph McSorley, CSP, “The Church and the Soul,” The New York Review 1 ( June–July
1905): 59.
14. During the controversy over the French adaptation of Walter Elliott’s Life of Father Hecker, the
term appeared fleetingly in France but does not appear to have gained currency. An article in Études
(July 4, 1898) accused American Catholics of “modernism.” See Colin, L’Audace et le soupçon, 108.

W h o A r e th e M o d ernists ?  19

Divided Friends, Catholic University of America Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 including future popes, became a potential suspect. Vieban’s question thus
anticipated interrogations by Pascendi’s “Councils of Vigilance.” It also ar-
ticulated the predicament of future historians. By the time they arrived on
the scene to study something called Modernism, they found that, because
of the novelty of the term, the question “Who Are the Modernists?” was
already a contested one.15
“The creator of Modernism is Pius X,” George Tyrrell wrote in 1909.16
Tyrrell’s posthumously published Christianity at the Cross-Roads (1909)
opens with a sentence defining Modernists: “The hope of a synthesis be-
tween the essentials of Christianity and the assured results of criticism is
very widespread nowadays and those who share it are commonly called
Modernists or Liberals.” But Thomas M. Loome has shown that Tyrrell did
not use the term Modernist of himself until after Pascendi had introduced
it. Before that he referred to himself as a Liberal Catholic.17 A century later,
Tyrrell’s dictum that Pius X created Modernism represents a near-consen-
sus among historians.
At the present time, the vast majority of historians of the modernist
crisis would hold that, as the kind of self-conscious system emphasized by
the encyclical, Modernism is largely a fiction, the creation of Pascendi. As
Alfred Leslie Lilley put it in 1908:
This supposed modernist system is but a perverse figment of the imagination of the
clever and inveterately scholastic theologian to whom Pius X entrusted the draft-

15. Anthony Vieban, SS, “Who Are the Modernists of the Encyclical?” Ecclesiastical Review 38
(May 1908): 489–507. Canadians had the same problem identifying the modernists of the encycli-
cal. See Katherine Murtha, “Modernism and English-Speaking Canadian Catholics: A Study of the
Copyright © 2013. Catholic University of America Press. All rights reserved.

Catholic Press in the Toronto Area at the Turn of the Century” (master’s thesis, University of St. Mi-
chael’s College, 1985), 73. In the newspapers Murtha studied, the term Modernism was not introduced
until October 1907. In addition to Loisy, Tyrrell, and Romolo Murri, two Americans are mentioned:
Edward Hanna, in connection with his article on “Absolution” in the Catholic Encyclopedia for the
suggestion that the Church was not conscious of the power of absolution from the beginning, and
Denis O’Connell.
16. Thomas Michael Loome cites this from Tyrrell’s Foreword to the 1909 German edition of
Through Scylla and Charybdis. See Liberal Catholicism, Reform Catholicism, Modernism: A Contribu-
tion to a New Orientation in Modernist Research (Mainz: Mathias-Grünwald-Verlag, 1979), 48n141.
17. See Loome’s discussion in Liberal Catholicism, Reform Catholicism, and Modernism, 28–58,
esp. 40, where he treats the first appearance of the term in Tyrrell’s correspondence. The Tyrrell quo-
tation is from Christianity at the Cross-Roads (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1910), xv. Tyrrell
goes on to say: “By a Modernist, I mean a churchman of any sort, who believes in the possibility of a
synthesis between the essential truth of his religion and the essential truth of modernity” (5). From
his analysis of Tyrrell’s usage of the terms Liberal and Modernist, Loome takes the fundamental in-
sight for his proposed reorientation in Modernist research.

20  The Ro m a n C ath oli c M odernist Crisis

Divided Friends, Catholic University of America Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central,
Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Usury; Or,
Interest, Premium and Discount
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it
under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this
ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the
United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where
you are located before using this eBook.

Title: Usury; Or, Interest, Premium and Discount

Author: S. H. Crittenden

Release date: June 23, 2020 [eBook #62459]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by deaurider, David E. Brown, and the Online

Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
(This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK USURY; OR,

INTEREST, PREMIUM AND DISCOUNT ***
 USURY:
OR
INTEREST, PREMIUM AND
DISCOUNT.

A LECTURE
DELIVERED
BEFORE THE STUDENTS
OF
CRITTENDEN’S
Philadelphia Commercial College,

BY
S. H. CRITTENDEN,
Attorney at Law,
CONSULTING ACCOUNTANT AND PRINCIPAL.

PHILADELPHIA:
RINGWALT & BROWN, STEAM-POWER BOOK AND
JOB PRINTERS,
Nos. 111 & 113 SOUTH FOURTH STREET.
1863.
 USURY:
OR

Interest, Premium and Discount.

A LECTURE[A]

DELIVERED BEFORE THE STUDENTS OF

CRITTENDEN’S PHILADELPHIA COMMERCIAL

COLLEGE,
BY

S. H. CRITTENDEN, Attorney at Law,

PRINCIPAL.

Our subject to-day is Usury.

We will first speak of this subject in its direct relation to Book-

Keeping. That is, as to its treatment under different forms, on the
Ledger, since this is in reality the phase in which it is of most
importance for us to consider it. Afterwards we will glance at the
matter in the view of utility, economy and legality.
The ledger titles which embrace this subject, are Interest, Discount
and Premium. These are all often, and indeed generally, embodied in
one account, headed Interest, yet they are radically different
divisions of the account, both in their nature and manner of
computation; although all tending to one point, when placed upon
the merchant’s books, viz: to add to his total gains or losses.
McCullock’s Commercial Dictionary has the following definitions of
Interest and Discount:
“Interest, is the sum paid by the borrower of a sum of money, or of
any sort of valuable produce, to the lender, for its use.”
“Discount, is an allowance made on account of an immediate
advance of a sum of money, not due till some future period.”
Premium, according to Webster’s Dictionary, is “a bounty, or
something offered or given for the loan of money, usually a sum
beyond the interest.”
These definitions, though not full, will yet serve as a foundation on
which to construct an explanation that may make these terms more
easy of comprehension. You perceive that in order to apply the
definition of Interest, which I have quoted, we must look upon every
person who is indebted to another, as a borrower; that is, as having
in his possession, certain property which belongs of right to that
other person; and for retaining the use of which he must pay him an
equivalent. If you consider in this light all transactions in which
Interest is demanded and paid, this portion of the subject will
perhaps be sufficiently plain without additional comment.
It is in relation to the second division of the account that most
confusion usually arises. There are not less than three distinct
transactions, which are all included in the usual language of business
men, under the single term Discount. They are:
1st. When a deduction is made for payment of a note or account
before due; 2d. When a per centage is taken off from a sale, in
consideration of ready money; 3d. When money is remitted from
one country to another, at an additional expense or at a loss.
If at an expense, it is sometimes called Premium.
For illustration, under the 1st division; suppose A holds a note
against B for $500 due in four months, and B comes to-day and
proffers payment; the custom is, for A to deduct the interest on
$500 for four months, from the face of the note; and to accept the
balance as payment in full: thus considering the use of the
remainder of the amount, sufficient to compensate for the deficiency
in the payment of the face of the bill. But this is manifestly incorrect,
if we take the existing law of this State, which declares the value of
the money to be but six per cent. per annum, to be founded on just
principles. For the interest on the remainder of the note, after
deducting the interest on the face of the note therefrom, is not
sufficient at the same rate per cent. to make up the original sum. So
that B, by paying thus in advance, secures a larger rate of interest
than is lawful. Yet this is the usage, and it is an old adage, and well
established, that usage makes law. This is what is termed Bank
Discount. True Discount, is such a sum, as, when deducted from the
original debt, the interest on the balance will just equal the amount
deducted. The method of ascertaining this is by proportion, or, as it
is called in arithmetics, rule of three. Thus we would say, as the
amount of $100. and interest for the given time and rate is to the
interest on $100. for the same time and rate, so is the total sum to
the amount of discount to be deducted therefrom. Stated thus,—
102.00 : 2.00 :: 500.00 : the answer.
2d. If C sells goods to D and within a certain limited time, usually
among the jobbing trade of our city 30 days after purchase, D pays
for them in cash, usage again allows him a deduction from the face
of the invoice of say 5 per cent. This is also called Discount, but it is
not properly such. For it is only a deduction of such a proportion or
per centage of the bill, on fulfillment of certain conditions; while
Discount is reckoned with reference to time to run, as well as rate
per cent.; in fine, Discount is simple Interest paid beforehand.
3d. The term Discount is also applied to that sum which is advanced
beyond or deducted from the amount of a debt, in remitting money
from one country to another.
Thus, if I wish to remit a sum of money to any foreign country, it is
needful for me to ascertain what is the difference of valuation at the
present time between money of the denominations used and
ordinarily obtainable here, and those in the country to which the
remittance is to be made. This valuation I suppose you all
understand is a merely arbitrary one, fixed at the will of the supreme
power in any State, and varying according to circumstances and the
ideas of the law makers. If, for instance, owing to the different
amounts of alloy used in coining pieces of corresponding value in
different countries, there is say 5 per cent. more precious metal in
the coin of that country to which I wish to remit than in that of our
own country, I must necessarily pay this difference in addition to the
original sum, in order to render the account of my correspondent
good according to the valuation in his country. If on the other hand
the intrinsic value of our coin is 5 per cent. the greater, then one
hundred dollars of our coin will pay one hundred and five dollars of
the other.
The proper term for this is Exchange, and if this name were
universally adopted, there would be far less of confusion in the ideas
associated with such transactions, in the minds of most persons.
We will now turn to a consideration of the peculiar nature of
Interest, or more properly Usury, and the reasons assigned for a
limitation of its rate by law. Formerly, the amount received in
payment for the loan of capital, was denominated Usury; that is to
say, rent for its use and enjoyment.
This is the correct term, for Interest is only the rent, or price paid for
the enjoyment of an object of value.
But this word has acquired an odious meaning, and is now
understood to express an illegal and oppressive rate of interest only,
the milder but less expressive term being substituted by common
usage.
In earlier times, before the advantage and utility of a reserve capital
was known and appreciated, the demand of a rent for its use by
lenders, was looked upon as an abuse of power, and an oppression
towards the needy. And, more still, it seems from the accounts
handed down to us by the writers of those days, that even that
frugality, without which capital cannot be amassed, was looked upon
as parsimony, and deemed a public injury, by the populace, who
looked upon all sums not spent by the great proprietors, as lost to
themselves. They could not comprehend that money laid by, as a
capital for some profitable employment, was to all intents equally
spent; and that to in a way far more beneficial to the poor. For a
laboring man is never sure of earning a subsistence save where
there is a capital in reserve for him to work upon. This inability to
understand its use gave rise to strong prejudice against rich
individuals, who do not spend their whole income as it comes in;
such a feeling still exists to a great extent: formerly it was universal.
Lenders themselves were infected by it, and were so much ashamed
of the part they were acting as to employ the most disreputable
agents in the collection of profits perfectly just, and highly useful to
society.
There have been from time to time various species and modifications
of statutes, and enactments for the promotion of public liberty, and
the advancement of happiness, both private and public.
Yet, though these ordinances have been provided in all good faith,
by the legislators, it is evident to every person who observes closely,
and compares causes and effects, that oftentimes their operation is
inefficient for the end aimed at; and often directly the reverse in
effect from the original intention of their makers. Especially, it seems
to me, is this the case in the matter of those laws relating to Usury.
There exists almost universally, a sort of hereditary prejudice against
the very name of Usury. Almost every one will plead guilty to such
feelings as these: “Usury is a bad thing, and as such ought to be
prevented; Usurers are a bad sort of men, a very bad sort of men,
and as such ought to be punished and suppressed.” Now, it is not
wonderful that men fall into such opinions, and become firmly
grounded in them, when they hear them handed down and repeated
by those to whom they are in the habit of looking with confidence
for correct ideas.
For it cannot be expected that the mass of mankind should find
leisure, even had they the ability, to examine into the grounds of a
hundredth part of the rules and maxims which they find themselves
compelled to follow and observe. The fact is, that wherever it has
been attempted to limit the rate of Interest, or to abolish it
altogether by law, there the practice of Usury has uniformly revived.
And, as might naturally be expected, the more severe the penalties,
and the more rigid their execution, the higher the rate of interest
was sure to rise. Because the risk being so much greater, the lender
must needs have a larger premium of insurance to tempt him to
incur it. It is a matter of history, that at Rome, during the
continuance of the republican form of government the rates of
interest were enormous. The simple and plain reason of this was,
that the debtors who were always plebeians, were continually
threatening their patrician creditors.
So also, in those Christian countries where Interest on loans has
been forbidden, or what is equivalent, where it has been placed by
law at so low a point as would not suffice to pay the risk of loss to a
lender, the practice has been made over almost entirely to the Jews;
while at the same time so great has been the extortion, oppression,
and humiliation to which this people were exposed that nothing
short of a very heavy rate of Interest could indemnify them for such
risks and repeated losses.
Thus in any case the ratio of the Premium of insurance, which
frequently forms the greater portion of what is called Interest, will
depend upon the degree of security presented to the lender. The
greater the risk, the higher will be the rate of Interest. When we
detach from the rate of interest all that is paid as a security to the
lender against the risk of partial or total loss of his capital, it remains
to consider that part which is purely and simply Interest: that is to
say, rent paid for the use of capital.
This is the point upon which many wise legislators have endeavored
to lay down laws as infallible guides, and many learned economists
have advocated such restrictive enactments, as even to this day
obtain in most civilized countries. The Romans seem, according to
Cato, to have considered an Usurer, as worse than a thief. For, says
he, “Our Ancestors, enacted in their laws, that a thief should be
condemned to pay double, but an Usurer, quadruple.”
Even that most learned commentator on law, Sir Henry Blackstone,
pronounces that a legal limit ought to be placed to this branch of
trade.
I will quote from Blackstone, on this subject. He says, when
speaking of the general points in the contract of hiring and
borrowing: [2 Com., p. 454,] “There is one species of this price or
reward, the most usual of any, but concerning which many good and
learned men have in former times very much perplexed themselves,
and other people, by raising doubts about its legality in foro
conscientie.
“That is, when money is lent on a contract, to receive not only the
principal sum again, but also an increase by way of compensation
for the use; which is generally called Interest by those who think it
lawful, and Usury by those who do not so; for those enemies to
Interest, in general, make no distinction between that and Usury,
holding any increase of money to be indefensibly usurious. And this
they ground, as well on the prohibition of it by the law of Moses
among the Jews, as also upon what is said to be laid down by
Aristotle, that money is naturally barren, and to make it breed
money is preposterous and a perversion of the end of its institution,
which was only to serve the purposes of Exchange, and not of
increase. Hence the school divines have branded the practice of
taking Interest as being contrary to the divine law, both natural and
revealed: and the canon law has proscribed the taking any, the least,
increase for the loan of money, as a mortal sin.
“But in answer to this it hath been observed, that the Mosaical
precept was clearly a political, and not a moral precept. It only
prohibited the Jews from taking Usury from their brethren, the Jews:
but in express words, permitted them to take it of a stranger; which
proves that the taking of moderate Usury, or a reward for the use,
for so the word signifies, is not malum in se, (a sin in itself
considered,) since it was allowed where any but an Israelite was
concerned. And as to the reason given by Aristotle, and deduced
from the natural barrenness of money, the same may with equal
force be alleged of houses, which never breed houses; and twenty
other things, which nobody doubts it is lawful to make profit of, by
letting them to hire.
“And though money was originally used only for the purposes of
exchange, yet the laws of any State may be well justified in
permitting it to be turned to the purposes of profit, if the
convenience of society, (the great end for which money was
invented,) shall require it. And that the allowance of moderate
Interest tends greatly to the benefit of the public, especially in a
trading country, will appear from that generally acknowledged
principle, that commerce cannot subsist without mutual and
extensive credit. Unless money, therefore, can be borrowed, trade
cannot be carried on: and if no Premium were allowed for the hire of
money, few persons would care to lend it; or, at least, the ease of
borrowing at a short warning, (which is the life of commerce,) would
be entirely at an end.
“And as to any scruples of conscience, since all other conveniences
of life may be either bought or hired, there seems to be no greater
oppression in taking a recompense or price for the hire of this, than
of any other convenience.”
For the taking of such recompense we have moreover, the very
highest authority in the words of our Saviour, who, in the parable of
the talents, censures the slothful servant in these words: “Thou
wicked and slothful servant, thou knewest that I reap where I sowed
not, and gather where I have not strewed. Thou oughtest therefore
to have put my money at the exchangers, and then at my coming I
should have received mine own with Usury.”
Dr. Adam Smith, in his work entitled “Wealth of Nations,” [Vol. 1, p.
429,] published in 1776, and which has been long a text book for
political economists, says: “A capital lent at Interest may, in this
manner, be considered as an assignment from the lender to the
borrower of a certain considerable portion of the annual produce;
upon condition that the borrower in return shall, during the
continuance of the loan, annually assign to the lender a smaller
portion, called the Interest; and at the end of it a portion equally
considerable with that which had originally been assigned to him,
called the repayment. Though money, either coin, or paper, serves
generally as the deed of assignment, both to the smaller and to the
more considerable portion, it is of itself altogether different from
what is assigned by it.” And again: “As such capitals are commonly
lent out, and paid back in money, they constitute what is called the
monied interest.” “In some countries the Interest of money has been
prohibited by law. But as something can everywhere be made by the
use of money, something ought everywhere to be paid for the use of
it. This regulation instead of preventing, has been found from
experience, to increase the evil of Usury; the debtor being obliged to
pay, not only for the use of the money, but for the risk which his
creditor runs by accepting a compensation for that use. He is
obliged, if one may say so, to insure his creditor from the penalties
of Usury.”
“In countries where Interest is permitted, the law, in order to
prevent the extortion of Usury, generally fixes the highest rate which
can be taken without incurring a penalty. This rate ought always to
be somewhat above the lowest market price, or the price which is
commonly paid for the use of money by those who can give the
most undoubted security.”
“If this legal rate should be fixed below the lowest market rate, the
effects of this fixation must be nearly the same as those of a total
prohibition of Interest.”
“The creditor will not lend his money for less than the use of it is
worth, and the debtor must pay him for the risk which he runs by
accepting the full value of that use. If it is fixed precisely at the
lowest market price, it ruins, with honest people, who respect the
laws of their country, the credit of all those who cannot give the very
best security, and obliges them to have recourse to exorbitant
usurers.”
“The legal rate, it is to be observed, though it ought to be somewhat
above, ought not to be much above the lowest market rate. If the
legal rate of interest in Great Britain, for example, were fixed so high
as eight or ten per cent. the greater part of the money which was to
be lent, would be lent to prodigals and projectors, who alone would
be willing to give this high rate of Interest. Sober people, who will
give for the use of money no more than a part of what they are
likely to make by the use of it, would not venture into the
competition. A great part of the capital of the country, would thus be
kept out of the hands most likely to make a profitable and
advantageous use of it, and thrown into those most likely to waste
and destroy it. Where the legal rate of Interest, on the contrary, is
fixed but a very little above the lowest market rate, sober people are
universally preferred as borrowers to prodigals and projectors. The
person who lends money gets nearly as much Interest from the
former, as he dare take from the latter, and his money is much safer
in the hands of the one set of people, than in those of the other. A
great part of the capital of the country is thus thrown into the hands
in which it is most likely to be employed with advantage. “No law
can reduce the common rate of Interest below the lowest ordinary
market rate at the time when that law is made. Notwithstanding the
edict of 1766, by which the French king attempted to reduce the
rate of Interest from five to four per cent., money continued to be
lent in France at five per cent.: the law being evaded in several
different ways.”
Puffendorf, whose treatise on the “Laws of Nature and of Nations,”
was published in England in 1710, says: “The arguments which are
brought against Usury are easily answered. It is urged that the loan
of a consumable commodity ought to be given gratis, because the
loan of all other things is so. But I answer that I have the power of
granting the use of my goods that are not consumable either gratis,
or for rent: whereof, the one is a loan, the other a letting. So what
should hinder me from granting the use of my money also, either
gratis, or for a certain recompense? When one man borrows to
increase his wealth, or improve his condition, why should another
lend to him for nothing? Nay, ’tis an unreasonable thing, when you
vastly improve your fortune with my money, not to admit me to
some share of the gain. For I, in the meantime, am debarred from
making that advantage which I might have otherwise expected, by
applying it to my own use. Besides, I have parted with something
valuable, which ought therefore to be considered: for in lieu of my
money, I have only an action against your person, which cannot be
prosecuted without some trouble. It may also happen by some
accident that the debt may be lost. Nay, sometimes the debtor must
be courted and caressed, that it be not lost. And some borrow on
purpose to make their creditors dependent on them. As, the
Marechal de Rochelause, when he was taxed by Louis XIII. with
taking part with the Duke of Mayenne, pleaded in excuse, that he
did not follow the Duke, but his money: for his debt would be in a
desperate condition if he did not stick close to his debtor.
“Besides, it is not seldom that we lend to persons who are utterly
unable to pay; and therefore some are of the opinion that it would
be for the advantage of the public, to allow none but merchants to
take up money at use; for this would make the poor industrious, and
force them to frugality, who, some of them, are not afraid to pay
Interest for money to maintain their extravagancies. And monied
men, rather than let their money lie dead, would either take to
merchandise themselves or would put out their money to those who
do: which would make trade flourish to the great benefit of the
commonwealth.
Grotius is of the opinion, “that the legal interest ought to be stated,
not according to the gains of the borrower, but the loss that thereby
accrues to the lender: as in buying and selling, and other contracts,
no regard is had to what the receiver may make of the commodity,
but what goes away from the seller.”
“And in this case so much goes away as every man in his own calling
might, and usually does, make of his money; allowance being made
for hazards, which in some cases are more, and in others less. With
this, I so far agree: that no man can complain, if his debtor makes a
vast and unexpected return of his money; but yet there is no doubt
but I may demand higher Interest of him that makes a very gainful
trade, than I can of another who drives a poor one.”
These are the opinions of men learned in the science of political
economy; and are entitled to weighty consideration; but it seems to
me, they do not, any of them, reach quite far enough into the
subject. All of them appeared to be fettered by the pressure of that
same generally recognized opinion to which I have before adverted.
The proposition I am inclined to favor on this much mooted point is
aptly expressed in the words of Jeremy Bentham. It is, “that no man
of ripe years, and of sound mind, acting freely, and with his eyes
open, ought to be hindered, with a view to his advantage, from
making such a bargain in the way of obtaining money, as he thinks
fit, nor, (what is a necessary consequence,) anybody hindered from
supplying him, upon any terms he thinks proper to accede to.”
There are but two definitions which can be given to Usury. One is,
taking a larger rate of Interest than the law allows; this is the legal
or, political definition. The other is taking more Interest than is usual
for other people to give and take; this is the moral one. And now, in
order that the law may touch the point, and actually prohibit Usury,
it is needful first that the law should supercede morals, or
conventional custom, and fix that point.
One thing is certain, that antecedently to custom, which has grown
to be established conventionally, there could not be such a thing as
Usury. For what rate of interest is more right than another? In one
land ten per cent. is the legal and therefore (as the advocates of
limitation would say) the proper rate; in an another five per cent. is
the utmost which the tender consciences of the legislators will allow.
Even in the same country, from time to time, the rates are and have
been varied as the wants of the community, the exigencies of the
times, or the whims of the legislators prompted.
It is, then, convenience which has produced whatever there is of
custom in the matter. “And what, (asks Bentham appropriately,) is
there in custom, to make it so much more deserving of observance
than convenience, which first gave it birth?”
It is convenient for me to give 8 per cent. for money. “No,” says the
law, “you shall not.” Why? “Because it is not convenient for your
neighbor to give more than 6 per cent. for it.” Can anything be more
absurd?
Then again, as to the opprobrious name. No appellation or particular
stigma of disrepute affixes to a man who being the owner of a
house, gets as high a rent for it as he can. Indeed this is the
common practice with such persons, and nobody is ashamed to do
so, or professes to do otherwise. Now, why a man who possesses
money, and takes as much as he can get for it, say 8, 10 or 12 per
cent. should be loaded with vile epithets, any more than if he had
bought a house with it, and then made the same profit from renting
the house, is more than I can see.
Another point, in which the good policy of the existing restrictive
laws upon this subject, seems doubtful, is that they operate in only
one direction. If it is wrong, and worthy of punishment, to take more
than the fixed maximum of interest for the use of money, why not
make it a penal offence to offer less than that amount, as well as to
accept more?
There are divers reasons given by the advocates of the laws
restricting the rates of Interest why they are beneficial and ought to
be enforced. Among these are: that they prevent prodigality, and
protect the poor and simple from extortion and imposition.
As to preventing prodigality: does not every one know that so long
as a person has money, or property of any sort, with which it is
possible for him to display prodigality, no Usury laws will stop him
from expending it; and, that after his property is gone and he has no
more to expend, none are more ready to promise the largest
Interest, providing he can thereby obtain additional money to
spend? for what he gets is clear gain, he having nothing to lose.
This, it would seem is a hopeless class, for whose protection or
advantage to legislate.
Besides prodigals, there are three other classes, to whose benefit
such restrictive laws are supposed by their authors to insure. They
are the indigent, the rashly enterprising, and the simple. That is to
say, those whose pecuniary necessities are so pressing, as to render
them willing to pay an Interest, above the ordinary rate, rather than
not to have the money; those who from rashness, may be disposed
to venture upon the giving such a rate without duly considering the
consequence; and those whose natural carelessness combined with
ignorance would lead them to acquiesce in it.
Let us look at the conditions of these classes a few moments. Here
is a small trader we will say, whose stock in trade consists of only a
small amount of property, combined with an, as yet, perfectly
untarnished reputation for punctuality in payments. This last, all who
know anything of business, will at once admit to be the principal,
and most important item of his stock. For with such a character, no
merchant will refuse to credit him for articles needful to carry on his
business; and thus all goes well with him.
But now his carefully cherished credit is in danger. He has been
disappointed in his expectations of a ready sale for some part of his
goods, or in obtaining money promised him for a debt, and finds
himself without the means to promptly meet an obligation falling
due to-morrow.
His position is such in the matter of property as not to render it
worth anybody’s while to lend him at the legal rate; in short he
cannot raise money to meet this obligation at that rate, and must do
one of two things—either lose his credit, which will ruin utterly his
prospects of making a comfortable subsistence for his family; or he
must obtain the means of saving this cherished treasure intact, by
paying somewhat more for the use of the money. We can at once
see what he, who has every motive and means for judging rightly in
the matter, would decide to be the wisest course, and the one
nearest the path of rectitude. As a matter of course, if he could
obtain the money at a low rate, he would not pay the higher one.
But now the legislator who knows nothing of any of these
circumstances, but whose heart overflows with prudence, and loving
kindness for the poor man, steps in, and says: “It signifies nothing;
you shall not have the money, for it would be doing you a mischief
to allow you to borrow on such terms.” There might be worse
cruelty, but not easily greater folly.
Next, in regard to the ignorant and simple, for whose protection
from imposition or fraud, these laws are enacted. First, could any
degree of simplicity or want of tact be greater or more evident than
that displayed in such a case as we have just spoken of; where a
legislator could confine a man under such circumstances, to a given
rate of Interest?
Second, suppose the wisdom of the legislator to be never so much
greater than that of the individual, no matter how weak that may be,
how useless is the exertion of it in this case only, while there
remains so many other occasions where the simplicity of the sufferer
would make him the victim of injustice, and where the legislator
cannot interpose to protect him. In every day affairs, in the matter
of buying and selling, whether with money, or on credit, such
persons are liable to be overreached; and yet none have thought
that for this reason, a legal price ought to be set upon all goods, of
whatever description. Nor, supposing that even this endless
undertaking were accomplished by the legislator, would it avail
anything unless he also should regulate the exact amount of each
article which each man should buy.
When matters arrive at this point, we find the person in the position
of those for whom the law provides entirely, as not being fit to take
care of themselves: such are usually denominated idiots.
And now, as we have considered at some length the needlessness
and inefficiency of such legislation, let us for a few moments, look at
some of its evil results.
We will speak at first of those who are by this means virtually
prohibited from obtaining money on loans. Consider for a moment,
what distress and inconvenience it would produce were the privilege
of borrowing denied to everybody. Just that inconvenience is
occasioned to those people whose security would, if they were
allowed to add a little of the rate of Interest, be sufficient to obtain
the needed funds, but is not sufficient for that purpose when such
liberty is denied. Thus the misfortune of not happening to be
possessed of that amount of property which is considered a
sufficient security, is made the ground, under such legislation, of
inflicting hardships upon a man, which those who are so fortunate as
to have such security do not suffer.
The only point of distinction between the two classes, is that the
necessity of one is greater than that of the other. For were this not
the case, they would not be willing, as we have supposed, to pay
more to be rid of it.
Another ill effect, is that of rendering the terms of obtaining money
so much the worse for many whose circumstances are such that
they are not altogether precluded from obtaining it, at some rate.
Those who cannot borrow, may get what they want, so long as they
have anything to sell. But, while out of loving kindness, or other
motive, the law precludes a man from borrowing, upon terms too
disadvantageous, it does not forbid him from selling at any, even the
most ruinous rates.
Everybody knows that forced sales are attended with loss: and to
this loss an amount of Interest, which would at first seem exorbitant,
would bear but a small proportion.
When a man’s goods are taken, and sold under an execution, it is
considered a good sale if the net amount reaches two-thirds what it
would take to replace them again. In this way the kindness of the
law, costs him directly 331⁄3 per cent. at least; supposing, what is
seldom the case, that no more property was taken than just enough
to satisfy the claim. Now, if he had been permitted to hire the
money at, say 12 per cent. per annum it would require nearly three
years for the same amount to accrue, as interest, while the
probabilities are that he would be able to pay off the whole debt
long before the expiration of that period.
To the laws prohibiting Usury, too, we may look, as the prime cause
of the establishment, and the strongest supporter of that branch of
business, which is ordinarily looked upon as so disreputable, and at
whose door are laid so many and grievious complaints of oppression,
&c., viz: pawn-broking:—a business based only on the unsatisfied
wants and necessities of that very class for whose protection from
imposition such laws are made.
So we might multiply cases and arguments, but perhaps sufficient
has already been said to lead those who think, to the conclusion that
is embodied in our proposition: viz: that every man ought to have
the same right to buy and sell money at a profit, as he has to do so
with merchandise or other property.
 CRITTENDEN’S PHILADELPHIA
COMMERCIAL COLLEGE.
Established, 1844. Incorporated, 1855.
 FOOTNOTE:
[A] Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1863, by S.
H. Crittenden, in the Clerk’s Office of the District Court, for the
Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Archaic or alternate spelling has been retained from the original.
 *** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK USURY; OR,
INTEREST, PREMIUM AND DISCOUNT ***

Updated editions will replace the previous one—the old editions will
be renamed.

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S.

copyright law means that no one owns a United States copyright in
these works, so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it
in the United States without permission and without paying
copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of
Use part of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG™
concept and trademark. Project Gutenberg is a registered trademark,
and may not be used if you charge for an eBook, except by following
the terms of the trademark license, including paying royalties for use
of the Project Gutenberg trademark. If you do not charge anything
for copies of this eBook, complying with the trademark license is
very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose such as
creation of derivative works, reports, performances and research.
Project Gutenberg eBooks may be modified and printed and given
away—you may do practically ANYTHING in the United States with
eBooks not protected by U.S. copyright law. Redistribution is subject
to the trademark license, especially commercial redistribution.

START: FULL LICENSE

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
 PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK

To protect the Project Gutenberg™ mission of promoting the free

distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work (or
any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full
Project Gutenberg™ License available with this file or online at
www.gutenberg.org/license.

Section 1. General Terms of Use and

Redistributing Project Gutenberg™
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg™
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree
to and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or
destroy all copies of Project Gutenberg™ electronic works in your
possession. If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a
Project Gutenberg™ electronic work and you do not agree to be
bound by the terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund
from the person or entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in
paragraph 1.E.8.

1.B. “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark. It may only be

used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people
who agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a
few things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg™ electronic
works even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.
See paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with
Project Gutenberg™ electronic works if you follow the terms of this
agreement and help preserve free future access to Project
Gutenberg™ electronic works. See paragraph 1.E below.
Welcome to our website – the ideal destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. With a mission to inspire endlessly, we offer a
vast collection of books, ranging from classic literary works to
specialized publications, self-development books, and children's
literature. Each book is a new journey of discovery, expanding
knowledge and enriching the soul of the reade

Our website is not just a platform for buying books, but a bridge
connecting readers to the timeless values of culture and wisdom. With
an elegant, user-friendly interface and an intelligent search system,
we are committed to providing a quick and convenient shopping
experience. Additionally, our special promotions and home delivery
services ensure that you save time and fully enjoy the joy of reading.

Let us accompany you on the journey of exploring knowledge and

personal growth!

ebookultra.com