On December 15th, 1839, in his eighty-fourth year, died Ignatius Fessler, Lutheran Bishop, at St. Petersburg, a man who had gone through several phases of religious belief and unbelief, a Hungarian by birth, a Roman Catholic by education, a Capuchin friar, then a deist, almost, if not quite, an atheist, professor of Oriental languages in the university of Lemberg, finally Lutheran Bishop in Finland.

He was principally remarkable as having been largely instrumental in producing one of the most salutary reforms of the Emperor Joseph II.

His autobiography published by him in 1824, when he was seventy years old, affords a curious picture of the way in which Joseph carried out those reforms, and enables us to see how it was that they roused so much opposition, and in so many cases failed to effect the good that was designed.

Fessler, in his autobiography, paints himself in as bright colours as he can lay on, but it is impossible not to see that he was a man of little principle, selfish and heartless.

The autobiography is so curious, and the experiences of Fessler so varied, the times in which he lived so eventful, and the book itself so little known, that a short account of his career may perhaps interest, and must be new to the generality of readers.

Ignatius Fessler was the son of parents in a humble walk of life resident in Hungary, but Germans by extraction. Ignatius was born in the year 1754, and as the first child, was dedicated by his mother to God. It was usual at that time for such children to be dressed in ecclesiastical habits. Ignatius as soon as he could walk was invested in a black cassock. His earliest reading was in the lives of the saints and martyrs, but at his first Communion his mother gave him a Bible. That book and Thomas À Kempis were her only literature. Long-continued prayer, daily reading of religious books, and no others, moulded the opening mind of her child. Exactly the same process goes on in countless peasant houses in Catholic Austria and Germany and Switzerland at the present day. No such education, no such walling off of the mind from secular influences is possible in England or France. The first enthusiasm of the child was to become a saint, his highest ambition to be a hermit or a martyr. At the age of seven he was given to be instructed by a Jesuit father, and was shortly after admitted to communion. At the age of nine Ignatius could read and speak Latin, and then he read with avidity Cardinal Bona's Manductio ad Coelum. His education was in the hands of the Carmelites at Raab. Dr. Fessler records his affectionate remembrance of his master, Father Raphael. Ignatius lounged, and was lazy. "Boy!" said the Father, "have done with lounging or you will live to be no good, but the laughing stock of old women. Look at me aged seventy, full of life and vigour, that comes of not being a lounger when a boy." From the Carmelite school Ignatius passed into that of the Jesuits. His advance was rapid; but his reading was still in Mystical Theology and his aim the attainment of the contemplative, ecstatic life of devotion. So he reached his seventeenth year.

Then his mother took him to Buda, to visit his uncle who was lecturer on Philosophy in the Capuchin Convent. The boy declared his desire to become a Franciscan. His mother and uncle gave their ready consent, and he entered on his noviciate, under the name of Francis Innocent. "The name Innocent became me well—really, at that time, I did not know the difference between the sexes."

In 1774, when aged twenty, he took the oaths constituting him a friar. All the fathers in the convent approved, except one old man, Peregrinus, who remonstrated gravely, declaring that he foresaw that Fessler would bring trouble on the fraternity. Father Peregrinus was right, Fessler was one to whom the life and rules and aim of the Order could never be congenial. He had an eager, hungry mind, an insatiable craving for knowledge, and a passion for books. The Capuchins were, and still are, recruited from the lowest of the people, ignorant peasants with a traditional contempt for learning, and their teachers embued with the shallowest smattering of knowledge. Fessler, being devoid of means, could not enter one of the cultured Orders, the Benedictines or the Jesuits. Moreover, the Franciscan is, by his vow, without property, he must live by begging, a rule fatal to self-respect, and fostering idleness. S. Francis, the founder, was a scion of a mercantile class, and the beggary which he imposed on his Order, was due to his revolt against the money-greed of his class. But it has been a fruitful source of mischief. It deters men with any sense of personal dignity from entering the Order, and it invites into it the idle and the ignorant. The Franciscan Order has been a fruitful nursery of heresies, schisms and scandals. Now old Father Peregrinus had sufficient insight into human nature to see and judge that a man of pride, intellectual power, and culture of mind, would be as a fish on dry land in the Capuchin fraternity. He was not listened to. Fessler was too young to know himself, and the fathers too eager to secure a man of promise and ability.

"The guardian, Coelestine, an amiable man, took a liking to me. He taught me to play chess, and he played more readily with me than with any of the rest, which, not a little, puffed up my self-esteem. The librarian, Leonidas, was an old, learned, obliging man, dearly loving his flowers. I fetched the water for him to his flower-beds, and he showed me his gratitude by letting me have the run of the library."

The library was not extensive, the books nearly all theological, and the volume which Fessler was most attracted by was Barbanson's "Ways of Divine Love."

In 1775, Fessler made the acquaintance of a Calvinist Baron, who lent him Fleury's "Ecclesiastical History." This opened the young man's eyes to the fact that the Church was not perfect, that the world outside the Church was not utterly graceless. He read his New Testament over seven times in that year. Then his Calvinist friend lent him Muratori's "Treatise on the Mystical Devotions of the Monks." His confidence was shaken. He no longer saw in the Church the ideal of purity and perfect infallibility; he saw that Mystical Theology was a geography of cloud castles. What profit was there in it? To what end did the friars live? To grow cabbages, make snuff-boxes, cardboard cases, which they painted—these were their practical labours; the rest of their time was spent in prayer and meditation.

Then the young friar got hold of Hofmann-Waldau's poems, and the sensuousness of their pictures inflamed his imagination at the very time when religious ecstasy ceased to attract him.

What the result might have been, Fessler says, he trembles to think, had he not been fortified by Seneca. It is curious to note, and characteristic of the man, that he was saved from demoralisation, not by the New Testament, which did not touch his heart, but by Seneca's moral axioms, which convinced his reason. The Franciscans are allowed great liberty. They run over the country collecting alms, they visit whom they will, and to a man without principle, such liberty offers dangerous occasions.

Fessler now resolved to leave an Order which was odious to him. "Somewhat tranquillized by Seneca, I now determined to shake myself loose from the trammels of the cloister, without causing scandal. The most easy way to do this was for me to take Orders, and get a cure of souls or a chaplaincy to a nobleman." He had no vocation for the ministry; he looked to it merely as a means of escape from uncongenial surroundings. On signifying his desire to become a priest, he was transferred to Gross Wardein, there to pass the requisite course of studies. At Wardein he gained the favour of the bishop and some of the canons, who lent him books on the ecclesiastical and political history of his native land. He also made acquaintance with some families in the town, a lady with two daughters, with the elder of whom he fell in love. He had, however, sufficient decency not to declare his passion. It was otherwise with a young Calvinist tailor's widow, Sophie; she replied to his declaration very sensibly by a letter, which, he declares, produced a lasting effect upon him.

In 1776 he was removed to SchwÄchat to go through a course of Moral Theology. His disgust at his enforced studies, which he regarded as the thrashing of empty husks, increased. He was angry at his removal from the friends he had made at Wardein. Vexation, irritation, doubt, threw him into a fever, and he was transferred to the convent in the suburbs of Vienna, where he could be under better medical care. The physician who attended him soon saw that his patient's malady was mental. Fessler opened his heart to him, and begged for the loan of books more feeding to the brain than the mystical rubbish in the convent library. The doctor advised him to visit him, when discharged as cured from the convent infirmary, instead of at once returning to SchwÄchat. This he did, and the doctor introduced him to two men of eminence and influence, Von Eybel and the prelate Rautenstrauch, a Benedictine abbot, the director of the Theological Faculties in the Austrian Monarchy. This latter promised Fessler to assist him in his studies, and urged him to study Greek and Hebrew, also to widen the circle of his reading, to make acquaintance with law, history, with natural science and geography, and undertook to provide him with the requisite books.

On his return to SchwÄchat, Fessler appealed to the Provincial against his Master of Studies whom he pronounced to be an incompetent pedant. At his request he was moved to Wiener-Neustadt. There he found the lecturer on Ecclesiastical Studies as superficial as the man from whom he had escaped. This man did not object to Fessler pursuing his Greek and Hebrew studies, nor to his taking from the library what books he liked.

The young candidate now borrowed and devoured deistical works, Hobbes, Tindal, Edelmann, and the WolfenbÜttel Fragments. He had to be careful not to let these books be seen, accordingly he hid them under the floor in the choir. After midnight, when matins had been sung, instead of returning to bed with the rest, he remained, on the plea of devotion, in the church, seated on the altar steps, reading deistical works by the light of the sanctuary lamp, which he pulled down to a proper level. He now completely lost his faith, not in Christianity only, but in natural religion as well. Nevertheless, he did not desist from his purpose of seeking orders. He was ordained deacon in 1778, and priest in 1779. "On the Sunday after Corpus Christi, I celebrated without faith, without unction, my first mass, in the presence of my mother, her brother, and the rest of my family. They all received the communion from my hand, bathed in tears of emotion. I, who administered to them, was frozen in unbelief."

The cure of souls he desired was not given him, no chaplaincy was offered him. His prospect of escape seemed no better than before. He became very impatient, and made himself troublesome in his convent. As might have been suspected, he became restive under the priestly obligations, as he had been under the monastic rule. It is curious that, late in life, when Fessler wrote his memoirs, he showed himself blind to the unworthiness of his conduct in taking on him the most sacred responsibilities to God and the Church, when he disbelieved in both. He is, however, careful to assure us that though without faith in his functions, he executed them punctually, hearing confessions, preaching and saying mass. But his conduct is so odious, his after callousness so conspicuous, that it is difficult to feel the smallest conviction of his conscientiousness at any time of his life.

As he made himself disagreeable to his superiors at Neustadt, he was transferred to MÖdling. There he made acquaintance with a Herr Von Molinari and was much at his house, where he met a young Countess Louise. "I cannot describe her stately form, her arching brows, the expression of her large blue eyes, the delicacy of her mouth, the music of her tones, the exquisite harmony that exists in all her movements, and what affects me more than all—she speaks Latin easily, and only reads serious books." So wrote Fessler in a letter at the time. He read Ovid's Metamorphoses with her in the morning, and walked with her in the evening. When, at the end of October, the family went to Vienna, "the absence of that noble soul," he wrote, "filled me with the most poignant grief." The Molinari family were bitten with Jansenism, and hoped to bring the young Capuchin to their views. Next year, in the spring of 1781, they returned to MÖdling.

"This year passed like the former; in the convent I was a model of obedience, in the school a master of scholastic theology: in Molinari's family a humble disciple of Jansen, in the morning a worshipper of the muse of Louise, in the evening an agreeable social companion,"—in heart—an unbeliever in Christianity.

A letter written to an uncle on March 12th, 1782, must be quoted verbatim, containing as it does a startling discovery, which gave him the opportunity so long desired, of breaking with the Order:—

"Since the 23rd February, I sing without intermission after David, in my inmost heart, 'Praise and Glory be to God, who has delivered my enemies into my hand!' Listen to the wonderful way in which this has happened. On the night of the 23rd to 24th of February, after eleven o'clock, I was roused from sleep by a lay-brother. 'Take your crucifix,' said he 'and follow me.'

"'Whither?' I asked, panic struck.

"'Whither I am about to lead you.'

"'What am I to do?'

"'I will tell you, when you are on the spot.'

"'Without knowing whither I go, and for what purpose, go I will not.'

"'The Guardian has given the order; by virtue of holy obedience you are bound to follow whither I lead.'

"As soon as holy obedience is involved, no resistance can be offered. Full of terror, I took my crucifix and followed the lay-brother, who went before with a dark lantern. Passing the cell of one of my fellow scholars, I slipped in, shook him out of sleep, and whispered in Latin twice in his ear, 'I am carried off, God knows whither. If I do not appear to-morrow, communicate with Rautenstrauch.'

"Our way led through the kitchen, and beyond it through a couple of chambers; on opening the last, the brother said, 'Seven steps down.' My heart contracted, I thought I was doomed to see the last of day-light. We entered a narrow passage, in which I saw, half way down it, on the right, a little altar, on the left some doors fastened with padlocks. My guide unlocked one of these, and said, 'Here is a dying man, Brother Nicomede, a Hungarian, who knows little German, give him your spiritual assistance. I will wait here. When he is dead, call me.'

"Before me lay an old man on his pallet, in a worn-out habit, on a straw palliasse, under a blanket; his hood covered his grey head, a snow-white beard reached to his girdle. Beside the bedstead was an old straw-covered chair, a dirty table, on which was a lamp burning. I spoke a few words to the dying man, who had almost lost his speech; he gave me a sign that he understood me. There was no possibility of a confession. I spoke to him about love to God, contrition for sin, and hope in the mercy of heaven; and when he squeezed my hand in token of inward emotion, I pronounced over him the General Absolution. The rest of the while I was with him, I uttered slowly, and at intervals, words of comfort and hope of eternal blessedness. About three o'clock, after a death agony of a quarter-of-an-hour, he had passed out of the reach of trouble.

"Before I called the lay-brother, I looked round the prison, and then swore over the corpse to inform the Emperor of these horrors. Then I summoned the lay-brother, and said, coldly, 'Brother Nicomede is gone.'

"'A good thing for him, too,' answered my guide, in a tone equally indifferent.

"'How long has he been here?'

"'Two and fifty years.'

"'He has been severely punished for his fault.'

"'Yes, yes. He has never been ill before. He had a stroke yesterday, when I brought him his meal.'

"'What is the altar for in the passage?'

"'One of the fathers says mass there on all festivals for the lions, and communicates them. Do you see, there is a little window in each of the doors, which is then opened, and through it the lions make their confession, hear mass, and receive communion.'

"'Have you many lions here?'

"'Four, two priests and two lay-brothers to be attended on.'

"'How long have they been here?'

"'One for fifty, another for forty-two, the third for fifteen, and the last for nine years.'

"'Why are they here?'

"'I don't know.'

"'Why are they called lions?'

"'Because I am called the lion-ward.'

"I deemed it expedient to ask no more questions. I got the lion-ward to light me to my cell, and there in calmness considered what to do.

"Next day, or rather, that same day, Feb. 24th, I wrote in full all that had occurred, in a letter addressed to the Emperor, with my signature attached. Shortly after my arrival in Vienna I had made the acquaintance of a Bohemian secular student named Bokorny, a trusty man. On the morning of Feb. 25th, I made him swear to give my letter to the Emperor, and keep silence as to my proceeding.

"At 8 o'clock he was with my letter in the Couriers' lobby of the palace, where there is usually a crowd of persons with petitions awaiting the Emperor. Joseph took my paper from my messenger, glanced hastily at it, put it apart from the rest of the petitions, and let my messenger go, after he had cautioned him most seriously to hold his tongue.

"The blow is fallen; what will be the result—whether anything will come of it, I do not yet know."

For many months no notice was taken of the letter. It was not possible for the Emperor to take action at once, for a few days later Pius VI. arrived in Vienna on a visit to Joseph.

Joseph II. was an enthusiastic reformer; he had the liveliest regard for Frederick the Great, and tried to copy him, but, as Frederick said, Joseph always began where he ought to leave off. He had no sooner become Emperor (1780) than he began a multitude of reforms, with headlong impetuosity. He supposed that every abuse was to be rooted up by an exercise of despotic power, and that his subjects would hail freedom and enlightenment with enthusiasm. Regardless of the power of hereditary association, he arbitrarily upset existing institutions, in the conviction that he was promoting the welfare of his subjects. He emancipated the Jews, and proclaimed liberty of worship to all religious bodies except the Deists, whom he condemned to receive five-and-twenty strokes of the cane. He abolished the use of torture, and reorganised the courts of justice.

The Pope, alarmed at the reforming spirit of Joseph, and the innovations he was introducing into the management of the Church, crossed the Alps with the hope that in a personal interview he might moderate the Emperor's zeal. He arrived only a few days after Joseph had received the letter of Ignatius Fessler, which was calculated to spur him to enact still more sweeping reforms, and to steel his heart against the papal blandishments. Nothing could have come to his hands more opportunely.

In Vienna, in St. Stephen's, the Pope held a pontifical mass. The Emperor did not honour it by his presence. By order of Joseph, the back door of the papal lodging was walled up, that Pius might receive no visitors unknown to the Emperor, and guards were placed at the entrance, to scrutinize those who sought the presence of the Pope. Joseph lost dignity by studied discourtesy; and Kaunitz, his minister, was allowed to be insulting. The latter received the Pope when he visited him, in his dressing-gown, and instead of kissing his hand, shook it heartily. Pius, after spending five weeks in Vienna without affecting anything, was constrained to depart.

Fessler saw him thrice, once, when the Pope said mass in the Capuchin Church, he stood only three paces from him. "Never did faith and unbelief, Jansenism and Deism, struggle for the mastery in me more furiously than then; tears flowed from my eyes, excited by my emotion, and at the end of the mass, I felt convinced that I had seen either a man as full of the burning love of God as a seraph, or the most accomplished actor in the world." Of the sincerity and piety of Pius VI. there can be no question. He was a good man, but not an able man. "At the conclusion he turned to us young priests, asked of each his name, length of time in the Order, and priesthood, about our studies, and exhorted us, in a fatherly tone, to be stout stones in the wall of the house of Israel, in times of trouble present and to come."

Before Pius departed, he gave his blessing to the people from the balcony of the Jesuit Church. "The Pope was seated on a throne under a gold-embroidered canopy. Fifty thousand persons must have been assembled below. Windows were full of heads, every roof crowded. The Pope wore his triple-crowned tiara, and was attended by three cardinals and two bishops in full pontificals. He intoned the form of absolution, in far-reaching voice, which was taken up by the court choir of four hundred voices. When this was done, Pius rose from his throne, the tiara was removed from his head, he stepped forward, raised eyes and arms to heaven, and in a pure ecstasy of devotion poured forth a fervent prayer. Only sighs and sobs broke occasionally the perfect silence which reigned among the vast throng of kneeling persons in the great square. The Pope seemed rather to be raised in ecstasy from his feet, than to stand. The prayer lasted long, and the bishops put their hands to stay up his arms; it was like Moses on the mountain top, with the rod of God in his hand, supported by Aaron and Hur, as he prayed for his people striving below with Amalek. At last this second Moses let his arms fall, he raised his right hand, and blessed the people in the name of the Triune God. At the Amen, the cannon of the Freiung boomed, and were answered by all the artillery on the fortifications of the city."

The Pope was gone, and still no notice taken of the petition. Molinari spoke to Fessler, who was very hot about reform, and had drawn up a scheme for the readjustment of the Church in the Empire, which he sent to some of the ministers of the Emperor. "My friend," said Molinari, "to pull down and to rebuild, to destroy and to re-create, are serious matters, only to be taken in hand by one who has an earnest vocation, and not to be made a means for self-seeking."

Fessler admits that there was truth in the reproach, he was desirous of pushing himself into notice, and he cared for the matter of "the lions," only because he thought they would serve his selfish purpose. Joseph now issued an order that no member of a monastic order was to be admitted to a benefice who had not passed an examination before the teachers of the Seminaries. The superiors of the Capuchins forbade their candidates going into these examinations. Fessler stirred up revolt, and he and some others, acting under his advice, demanded to be admitted to examination. His superior then informed him that he was not intended by the Order to take a cure of souls, he was about to be appointed lecturer on Philosophy in one of the convents in Hungary. In order to prevent his removal, and to force the Order to an open rupture with him, Fessler had recourse to a most unseemly and ungenerous act. Whilst in Vienna, he had made the acquaintance of an unmarried lady, the Baroness E. He had assisted her in her studies, giving her instructions usually by letter. His acquaintance, Von Eybel, had written a book or tract, which had made a great stir, entitled, "Who is the Pope?" Fessler wrote another, entitled, "Who is the Emperor?" He sent a copy to the publisher, but retained the original MS. Fessler now wrote under a feigned name, and in a disguised hand, a letter to Father Maximus, guardian of the convent, charging himself with carrying on a guilty correspondence with the Baroness E., and with the composition of an inflammatory and anti-religious pamphlet, "Who is the Emperor?" Maximus at once visited the Baroness, and showed her the letter. The lady in great indignation produced the entire correspondence, and handed the letters to him. Maximus put them in the hands of the Lector of the convent, who visited Fessler, and asked him if he acknowledged the authorship of "these scandalous letters."

"Scandalous, they are not," answered Fessler.

"Impius, cum in profundum venerit, contemnit," roared the friar. "They are not only scandalous, but impious. Look at this letter on platonic love. Is that a fit letter for such as you to write to a lady?"

In consequence of these letters, and the MS. of the pamphlet being found upon him, Fessler was denounced to the Consistorial Court of the Archbishop. He was summoned before it at the beginning of August, when he was forced to admit he had been wont to kiss the lady to whom he wrote on platonic love, and the Consistory suspended him from the exercise of his priestly functions for a month.

"I and the Lector returned to the convent silent, as if strangers. When we arrived, the friars were at table. I do not know how I got to my place; but after I had drunk my goblet of wine, all was clearer about me. I seemed to hear the voice of Horace calling to me from heaven, Perfer et obdura! and in a moment my self-respect revived, and I looked with scorn on the seventy friars hungrily eating their dinner."

Of his own despicable conduct, that he had richly deserved his punishment, Fessler never seems to have arrived at the perception. He was, indeed, a very pitiful creature, arousing disgust and contempt in a well-ordered mind; and his Memoirs only deserve notice because of the curious insight they afford into the inner life of convents, and because he was the means of bringing great scandals to light, and in assisting Joseph II. in his work of reform.

At the beginning of September, 1782, Fessler was the means of bringing a fresh scandal before the eyes of the Emperor. During the preceding year, a saddler in SchwÄchat had lost his wife, and was left, not only a widower, but childless. His niece now kept house for him, and was much afraid lest her uncle should marry again, and that thus she should not become his heir. She consulted a Capuchin, Father Brictius. Fessler had been in the SchwÄchat convent, and knew the man. Soon after, the niece assured her uncle that the ghost of her aunt had appeared to her, and told her she was suffering in Purgatory. For her release, she must have ten masses said, and some wax candles burnt. The saddler was content to have his old woman "laid" at this price. But, after the tenth mass, the niece declared she had seen her aunt again, and that the spirit had appeared to her in the presence of Father Brictius, and told her, that what troubled her most of all was the suspicion she was under, that her husband purposed marrying again; and she assured him, that were he so to do, he would lose his soul, in token whereof, she laid her hand on the cover of the niece's prayer-book, and left the impression burnt into it.

Father Brictius carried the scorched book all round the neighbourhood, the marks of thumb and five fingers were clearly to be seen, burnt into the wooden cover. Great was the excitement, and on all sides masses for souls were in demand. Some foolish pastors even preached on the marvel.

It happened that a Viennese boy was apprenticed to a tinker at SchwÄchat; and the boy came home every Saturday evening, to spend the day with his parents, at Vienna. He generally brought Fessler some little presents or messages from his friends at SchwÄchat. One day, the boy complained to Fessler that he had been severely beaten by his master. On being asked the reason, he replied, that he had been engaged with the tinker making an iron hand, and that he had spoiled it. Shortly after this, the rumour of the miraculous hand laid on the prayer-book, reached the convent. Fessler put the circumstances together, and suspected he was on the track of a fraud. He went at once to one of the ministers of the Emperor, and told him what he knew.

An imperial commission was issued, the tinker, the saddler's niece, and Father Brictius, were arrested, cross-questioned, and finally, confessed the trick. The tinker was sent to prison for some months, the woman, for some weeks, and the Franciscan was first imprisoned, and then banished the country. An account of the fraud was issued, by Government authority, and every parish priest was ordered to read it to his parishioners from the pulpit.

The Capuchins at Vienna, after this, were more impatient than before to send Fessler to Hungary, and he was forced to appeal to the Emperor to prevent his removal.

Suddenly, quite unexpectedly, in the beginning of October—seven months after Fessler had sent the Emperor an account of the prison in the convent, and when he despaired of notice being taken of it—some imperial commissioners visited the convent, and demanded in the name of the Emperor to be shown all over it. At the head of the Commission was HÄgelin, to whom Fessler had told his suspicions about the iron hand.

The commissioners visited all the cells, and the infirmary, then asked the Guardian thrice on his honour, and in the name of the Emperor, whether there was a prison in the convent. Thrice the Guardian replied that there was not. "Let us now visit the kitchen," said HÄgelin, and in spite of the protests and excuses of the Guardian, he insisted on being taken there. Beyond the kitchen was the wash-house. The commissioners went further, and found a small locked door. They insisted on its being opened. Then the Guardian turned pale and nearly fainted. The door was thrown open, the cells were unlocked, and the lay brothers ordered to bring the prisoners into the refectory. There the commissioners remained alone with the unfortunates to take down their depositions. It was found that three, Fathers Florentine, and Paternus, and the lay brother, Nemesian, were out of their minds. The "lion-ward" was summoned to answer for them. From his account, it transpired that Nemesian had gone out of his mind through religious enthusiasm; he was aged seventy-one, and had been fifty years in the dungeon. Father Florentine was aged seventy-three, he had been in confinement for forty-two years for boxing the Guardian's ears in a fit of temper. Father Paternus was locked up because he used to leave his convent without permission, and when rebuked would not give up his independent conduct. He had been fifteen years in prison. His confinement had bereft him of his senses. As the remaining two were in full possession of their faculties, the "lion-ward" was now dismissed. The lay brother Barnabas said he had been a shopkeeper's servant in Vienna, he had fallen in love with his master's daughter. As his master refused to have him as his son-in-law, out of despair he had gone into the Capuchin Order. During his noviciate, the master died; the master of the novices stopped the letter informing him of this, and he took the vows, to discover, when too late, that the girl loved him, and was ready to take him. In his mad rage, he flung his rosary at the feet of the Guardian, declaring he would never confess to, or receive the communion from the hands of a father of this accursed Order. He had been nine years in prison, and was thirty-eight years old.

Father Thuribius had been caught reading Wieland, Gellert, Rabener, &c.; they had been taken from him. He got hold of other copies, they were taken away a second time. A third time he procured them, and when discovered, fought with his fists for their retention. He had been repeatedly given the cat o' nine tails, and had been locked up five months and ten days. His age was twenty-eight.

The commissioners at once suspended the Provincial and the Guardian till further notice, and the five unfortunates were handed over to the care of the Brothers of Charity.

That same day, throughout the entire monarchy, every monastery and nunnery was visited by imperial commissioners.

At the same time, the Emperor Joseph issued an order that Fessler was on no account to be allowed to leave Vienna, and that he took him under his imperial protection against all the devices of his monastic enemies.

"Now came the sentence on the Guardian and the Provincial from the Emperor. They were more severely punished than perhaps they really deserved. I felt for their sufferings more keenly, because I was well aware that I had been moved to report against them by any other motive rather than humanity; and even the consequences of my revelation, the setting at liberty of a not inconsiderable number of unfortunate monks and nuns throughout the Austrian Empire, could not set my conscience at rest. Only the orders made by the Emperor rendering it impossible to repeat such abuses, brought me any satisfaction. The monastic prisons were everywhere destroyed. Transgression of rules was henceforth to be punished only by short periods of seclusion, and cases of insanity were to be sent to the Brothers of Charity, who managed the asylums."

If Joseph II. had but possessed commonsense as well as enthusiasm, he would have left his mark deeper on his country than he did.

Fessler laid before him the schedule of studies in the Franciscan Convents. Joseph then issued an order (6th April, 1782), absolutely prohibiting the course of studies in the cloisters. When Fessler saw that the Guardian of his convent was transgressing the decree, he appealed against him to the Emperor, and had him dismissed. Next year Joseph required all the students of the Capuchin Order to enter the seminaries, and pass thence through the Universities. But, unfortunately, Joseph had taken a step to alienate from him the bishops and secular clergy, as well as the monks and friars. He arbitrarily closed all the diocesan seminaries, and created seminaries of his own for the candidates for Orders, to which he appointed the professors, thus entirely removing the education of the clergy from the hands of the Church. When the Bishop of Goritz expressed his dissatisfaction, Joseph suppressed his see and banished him. The professors he appointed to the universities, to the chairs which were attended by candidates for Orders, were in many cases free-thinkers and rationalists. The professor of Biblical Exegesis at Vienna was an ex-Jesuit, Monsperger, "His religious system," says Fessler, who attended his course, "was simply this,—a wise enjoyment of life, submission to the inevitable, and prudence of conduct. That was all. He had no other idea of Church than a reciprocal bond of rights and duties. In his lectures he whittled all the supernatural out of the Old Testament, and taught his pupils to regard the book as a collection of myths, romance, and contradictions. His lectures brought me back from my trifling with Jansenism to the point I had been at four years before under the teaching of Hobbes, Tindal, and the WolfenbÜttel Fragments. I resolved to doubt everything supernatural and divine, without actually denying such thing.—Strange! I resolved to disbelieve, when I never had believed."

On Feb. 6th, 1784, he received the Emperor's appointment to the professorships of Biblical Exegesis and Oriental languages in the University of Lemberg. On the 20th Feb., on the eve of starting for Lemberg, for ever to cast off the hated habit of S. Francis, and to shake off, as much as he dare, the trammels of the priesthood, Fessler was in his cell at midnight, counting the money he had received for his journey. "To the right of me, on the table was a dagger, given me as a parting present by the court secretary, Grossinger. I was thinking of retiring to rest, when my cell door was burst open, and in rushed Father Sergius, a great meat-knife in his hand, shouting, Moriere hoeretice! he struck at my breast. In an instant I seized my dagger, parried the blow, and wounded my assailant in the hand. He let the knife fall and ran away. I roused the Guardian, told him what had occurred, and advised what was to be done. Sergius, armed with two similar knives, had locked himself into his cell. At the command of the Guardian six lay-brothers burst open the door, and beat the knives from his hands with sticks, then dragged him off to the punishment-cell, where they placed him under watch. Next morning I went with the Guardian, as I had advised, to the president of the Spiritual Commission, the Baron von Kresel, to inform him that Father Sergius had gone raving mad, and to ask that he might be committed to the custody of the Brothers of Mercy. This was at once granted; and I left the Guardian to instruct the fanatic how to comport himself in the hospital as a lunatic, so as not to bring his superiors into further difficulties."

The first acquaintance Fessler made in Lemberg, was a renegade Franciscan friar, who had been appointed Professor of Physic, "He was a man of unbounded ambition and avarice, a political fanatic, and a complete atheist." Joseph afterwards appointed this man to be mitred abbot of ZazvÁr. He died on the scaffold in 1795, executed for high treason.

The seminarists of the Catholic and of the Uniat Churches as well as the pupils from the religious Orders were obliged to attend Fessler's lectures. These were on the lines of these of Monsperger. Some of the clergy in charge of the Seminarists were so uneasy at Fessler's teaching that they stood up at his lectures and disputed his assertions; but Fessler boasts that after a couple of months he got the young men round to his views, and they groaned, hooted and stamped down the remonstrants. He published at this time two works, Institutiones linguarum orientalium, and a Hebrew anthology for the use of the students. In the latter he laid down certain canons for the interpretation of the Old Testament, by means of which everything miraculous might be explained away.

It was really intolerable that the candidates for orders should be forcibly taught to disbelieve everything their Church required them to hold. In his inspection of the monasteries, in the suppression of many, Joseph acted with justice, and the conscience of the people approved, but in this matter of the education of the clergy he violated the principles of common justice, and the consequence was such wide-spread irritation, that Joseph for a moment seemed inclined to give way. That Joseph knew the rationalism of Fessler is certain. The latter gives a conversation he had with the Emperor, in which they discussed the "Ruah," the Spirit of God, which moved on the face of the waters, as said in the first chapter of Genesis. Fessler told him that he considered "the expression to be a Hebrew superlative, and to mean no more than that a violent gale was blowing. Possibly," he added, "Moses may have thought of the Schiva in the Hindoo Trimurti; for he was reared in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, who were an Ethiopic race, which was in turn an Indian colony." Dr. Fessler's Ethnology was faulty, whatever may be thought of his Theology.

After having given this explanation to the Emperor, Fessler boldly asked him for a bishopric—he who loathed his priesthood and disbelieved in revealed religion!

Joseph did not give him a mitre, but made him Professor of Doctrinal Theology and Catholic Polemics as well as of Biblical Exegesis. This did not satisfy the ambitious soul of Fessler, he was bent on a mitre. He waited with growing impatience. He sent his books to Joseph. He did his utmost to force himself into his notice. But the desired mitre did not come.

Fessler complains that scandalous stories circulated about him whilst at Lemberg, and these possibly may have reached the imperial ears. He asserts, and no doubt with perfect truth, that these were unfounded. He had made himself bitter enemies, and they would not scruple to defame him. He boasts that at Lemberg he contracted no Platonic alliances; he had no attachements de coeur there at all.

The Emperor seemed to have forgotten him, to have cast aside his useful tool. Filled with the bitterness of defeated ambition, in 1788 he wrote a drama, entitled James II., a covert attack on his protector, Joseph II., whom he represented as falling away in his enthusiasm for reform, and succumbing to the gathering hostility of Obscurantists and Jesuits.

This was not the case, but Joseph was in trouble with his refractory subjects in the Low Countries, who would not have his seminaries and professors, who subscribed for the support of the ousted teachers, and rioted at the introduction of the new professors to the University of Louvain.

The play was put into rehearsal, but the police interfered, and it was forbidden. Fessler either feared or was warned that he was about to be arrested, and he escaped over the frontier into Prussian Silesia. Joseph II. died in 1790, broken in spirit by his failures.

Fessler, after his escape from Austria, became a salaried reader and secretary to the Count of Carolath, whose wife was a princess of Saxe-Meiningen.

After a while he married a young woman of the middle class; he seems to have doubted whether they would be happy together, after he had proposed, accordingly he wrote her a long epistle, in the most pedantic and dictorial style, informing her of what his requirements were, and warning her to withdraw from the contemplated union, if she were not sure she would come up to the level of the perfect wife. The poor creature no doubt wondered at the marvellous love letter, but had no hesitation in saying she would do her duty up to her lights. The result was not happy. They led together a cat-and-dog life for ten years. She was a homely person without intellectual parts, and he was essentially a book-worm. He admits that he did not shine in society, and leaves it to be understood that the loss was on the side of inappreciative society, but we can not help suspecting that he was opinionated, sour, and uncouth. All these qualities were intensified in the narrow circle of home. After ten years of misery he divorced his wife on the ground of mutual incompatibility. For a livelihood he took up Freemasonry, and went about founding lodges. There were three rogues at that period who worked Freemasonry for their own ends, the Darmstadt Court Chaplain, Starck, a Baron von Hundt, and a certain Becker, who called himself Johnson, and pretended to be a delegate from the mysterious, unknown head of the Society in Aberdeen. They called themselves Masons of the Strict Observance, but were mere swindlers.

After a while, Freemasonry lost its attractions for Fessler, probably it ceased to pay, and then he left Breslau, and wandered into Prussia. He wrote a novel called "Marcus Aurelius," glorifying that emperor, for whom he entertained great veneration, and did other literary work, which brought him in a little money. Then he married again, a young, beautiful and gifted woman, with a small property. He was very happy in his choice, but less happy in the speculation in which he invested her money and that of her sisters. It failed, and they were reduced to extreme poverty. What became of the sisters we do not know. Fessler with his wife and children went into Russia, and sponged for some time on the Moravian Brothers, who treated him with great kindness, and lent him money, "Which," he says, in his autobiography, "I have not yet been able to pay back altogether."

He lost some of his children. Distress, pecuniary embarrassments, and sickness, softened his heart, and perhaps with that was combined a perception that if he could get a pastorate he would be provided for;[22] this led to a conversion, which looks very much as if it were copied from the famous conversion of St. Augustine. It possibly was, to some extent, sincere; he recovered faith in God, and joined the Lutheran community. Then he had his case and attainments brought under the notice of the Czar, who was, at the time, as Fessler probably knew, engaged in a scheme for organising the Lutheran bodies in Finland into a Church under Episcopal government. He chose Fessler to be bishop of Saratow, and had him consecrated by the Swedish bishops, "Who," says Fessler, "like the Anglican bishops, have preserved the Apostolic succession." He makes much of this point, a curious instance of the revival in his mind of old ideas imbibed in his time of Catholicity. . According to his own account, he was a bishop quite on the Apostolic model, and worked very hard to bring his diocese into order. His ordination was in 1820. In 1833, the Saratow consistory was dissolved, and he retired to St. Petersburg, where he was appointed general superintendent of the Lutheran community in the capital. He married a third time, but says very little of the last wife. He concludes with this estimate of his own character, which is hardly that at which a reader of his autobiography would arrive. "Earnestness and cheerfulness, rapid decision, and unbending determination, manly firmness and childlike trueheartedness—these are the ever recurring fundamental characteristics of my nature. Add to these a gentle mysticism, to surround the others with colour and unite them in harmony. Sometimes it may be that dissonances occur, it may be true that occasionally I thunder with powerful lungs in my house, as if I were about to wreck and shatter everything, but that is called forth only by what is wrong. In my inmost being calm, peace, and untroubled cheerfulness reign supreme. Discontent, wrath, venom and gall, have not embittered one moment of my life."[23]

[22] He had, however, just received a pension from the Czar, so that he was relieved from abject poverty.