opinion injurious to himself or to society, without trying to instill a better. I am 'my brother's keeper,' and he is mine. And I honour Catholics and Protestants, and all, who, believing that they possess an ennobling idea, are zealous to propagate it. I am not angry with the Pope or his subordinates for their U. C. League. Know ing, as they do, no better, they give us the best they can.

Thinking that the enthralment of the intellect is for the good of the soul, they give us the decrees of Trent, with the anathemas affixed, to alarm us; and, half or whole-convinced that they alone know all things, feel themselves quite competent to undertake the education of the world.

This we Protestants dispute. We do not think them competent. We think that in the past they have shewn themselves to be failures; that they have retrograded in religion from the Christianity of Christ; that their philosophy, tethered to theology, rendered the darkness darker still; that their discipline was not such as to make us long for its recurrence; and that in science they made an awful mess of it.

In the programme of the future, too, we discover few indications of amendment. Roma semper eadem seems shining through every line and ringing in every sentence. What individual Orangemen may think I am not in a position to learn; but I do know that as a body-and growingly sothey do not wish to injure in person or estate, or to curtail the rights of, any Catholic. But Orangemen do, I think, fear, not that Catholics would. injure them, but that the doctrines of the church are such, that if a time should come when it would be no longer unsafe or inexpedient or startling to the general mind to avow it, the leaders of Catholicism might revert to the old policy of persecution, with a view to force Protestants within the fold, and thus render the world once again one huge Aceldama-one vast field of blood. They hope, they hope ardently, that this day may never come; but they wish, so far as their little organization is concerned, to meet it not wholly unprepared; and, with all their faults and infirmities (and they are many), they are men of stout hearts and steady resolution, who, like Cromwell's immortal Ironsides, would never disappoint the general that led them to the fray, and who might, in any crisis,

become the nucleus round which could rally, in defence of civil and religious liberty, the hosts, not of Protestantism only, but of protesting Catholics-for there are millions of such-Catholics who would tell the ecclesiastics that before they were Catholics they were men, that liberty was a boon too precious to be parted with for theoretic considerations, and that no man ought to be forced to lie to his conscience, or say that what he believed not, he believed.

But while we learn that a great, organized corporation, with its headquarters in the Vatican, and its ramifications throughout the civilized world; with its devoted missionaries in every city and town and village of the land, and of every land; with its keen and disciplined spirits to direct its movements to the one common end of putting everything at the feet of Rome-our religion, our institutions, our civilization, our liberties, and our laws, and of planing down all the diversities of intellect, sentiment, and aspiration to the one dead level of uniformity, to the destruction of all thought not in harmony with the thought of one man in Rome-one man who, sitting in the central office of the world, sends his mandates through a thousand wires to tell us what to do and how to think ;-is Protestantism to sit by with folded arms waiting to be devoured? This is the question, I suppose, that Orangemen ask themselves. And how can they avoid this feeling of uneasiness? In one way only,-by an authoritative declaration of a complete reversal of the whole secular policy of Rome! We have here to-day the Pope's Legate. Let him declare to his Holiness the wishes of these men and of ourselves. Let him tell him that he may call us schismatics, heretics, disturbers of the peace of the church, 'the tares' of Christendom, and the enemies of religion, and that he may assail our common Protestantism by every weapon in the armory of the Vatican, wielded by all the ablest and most practised officers of his church, if he will only pronounce it ex Cathedra as a principle, that no man ought to enforce religion by physical penalties, and that all persecution of every kind for theological opinions is immoral and inhuman. Then only will there exist any solid ground for peace.

That greatest of Parliamentarians.

porated in the Canon law. . . It appears in every reprint of the "Corpus Juris." It has It has been for 700 years, and continues to be, part of the Ecclesiastical law. Far from having been a dead letter, it obtained a new appli cation in the days of the Inquisition. . . . Pius V., the only Pope who had been proclaimed a saint for many centuries, having deprived Elizabeth, commissioned an assassin to take her life; and his next successor, on learning that the Protestants were being massacred in France, pronounced the action glorious and holy, but comparatively barren of results; and implored the king, during two months, by his nuncio and his legate, to carry the work on to the bitter end, until every Huguenot had recanted or perished.' In short, he argues that Protestants ought not to have been misled.

But why quote more, and worse, of what is utterly sickening, and which degrades Christianity into literal Thugism. If this had been written by an Orangeman, half the world and Sir Francis would cry shame,' and would feel bound to protest against it as an insult and most disgraceful caricature. Yet it is the statement of an able and courteous Catholic Nobleman. But is Sir Francis Hincks's indignation so wholly expended on Orangemen that he has none left for this? No swellings of indignation? No word of censure, or reproof? Yet what, compared with this, is our little Orange affair, even (say) with its ascendancy, and colours, and regalia? Is there not in it, Sir Francis, much to justify the utmost extravagance imputed to the most extreme Orangeman in his most excited moments? But I believe there are millions of Catholic people who repudiate these doctrines of ecclesiastics, and I cannot help hoping that the enlightenment which is gaining ground, the advanced statesmanship of the age, the pity of the human heart, the sense of justice that is born with us, the growing knowledge of the foundations of belief, the principles of toleration inculcated by Christ and by all the good and wise of every age, and the public conscience of Christendom, will present such a moral inertia of resistance to this mad fevermovement of Ecclesiasticism, as will save the world from the worst evil that can befall it—a government of priests. Do they imagine at Rome that the world is a toy for

them to play with? Do ecclesiastics forget that for evoking such a spirit the world would hold them responsible? that they would not be those who would suffer least or last? that reprisals and fearful vengeance would take the place of law and peace? and that society itself must cease to exist, were their theories to be reduced to practice?

But if Catholic Theologians think that some verse in the Bible leads to this stupendous and inhuman result, how much wiser, if driven to it, to believe that such isolated passage-not having any necessary connection with what goes before or follows after— had been inserted into the text, by mistake, from some marginal or interlined comment of an early copyist of a New Testament manuscript, and so had crept into general adoption; or even by design, in the interest of priest-power or of a foregone conclusion, as, beyond all reasonable doubt, some texts have crept in,-than to believe that God has handed over mankind, tied hand and foot, absolutely, unreservedly, for their belief and their conduct, their political institutions, and social and domestic arrangements, for their literature and their science-for it comes to that--to one man of a succession of men, some of whom were, acknowledgedly, foolish men, some indifferently good, and some bad men. is a notion so extraordinary that every man of strong sense rejects it as an absurdity in limine, no matter by whom or by what asserted.

I am no theologian. I only try to understand the meaning of a passage in the Bible as I would that of a passage in any ancient book-of Xenophon or Horace, say-by text and context interpreted by common sense, and in that way I have questioned the text hear the Church,' and tried to elicit its meaning. But I should like to put a question to the Pope. You Pius the 9th have much faith. Now a text of Scripture affirms that if you have only a grain of faith, you can remove a mountain (Matth. xvii, 20). Now-I drop the second person as seemingly irreverent-there are Vesuvius and the Himalayas-dont laugh; it is a subject more properly for tears-let him try his hand on them, for is it not a text as clear as thou art Peter.' There are many engineering difficulties in the world where it would be very convenient to employ this power. power. Let him transplant Vesuvius-the

farmers in its neighbourhood, I am sure, would not complain-into the deadly Pontine Marshes at his very door, and he will do more towards removing the Unbelief of the Orangemen in him than by a thousand musty tomes of bug logic in bog latin. Why spend his time in weaving moonbeams into arguments, when practical life lies before him, where he can be, if he has the tiniest grain of faith, of real assistance. But why all this? I reply, in order to shew how a theologian-and, a fortiori, a thousand theologians hair-splitting for a thousand years-lighting on a text of obscure meaning, can wring out of it any absurdity by hammering at it with a will; for if, after all, he can force nothing out of it, he can at least force something into it, and from thou art Peter' can prove that the Pope is divinely warranted to govern the outer and inner life of every man in the world. And because Orangemen have an inaptitude for such a belief, it only shews what stupid and bad men Orangemen must be; or even that they have forfeited the right to be at all.

I

Still I never favoured Orangism. thought that playing their party tunes hardly edified our Catholic fellow-citizens, that it did not exhibit Protestantism in its most amiable and winning form, and that it was provocative of counter displays. I thought it unnecessarily offensive, and therefore not in good taste; that some of the leaders were using their humbler brethren for political ends; and that their gatherings were at times accompanied by some of those baleful evils of social gatherings generally. But these are only accidental to such meetings, not essentials of the organization, and will, I have reason to hope, where wrong, be discontinued and improved. But when they celebrate among themselves 'the Battle of the Boyne;' when they talk of the brave deeds, and enduring fortitude, and resolute courage. and unflinching faith of the men, often their forefathers, who fought for their principles in that bloody fight, it is not in human nature for them not to feel the elation of the hour. It was a conflict pregnant with big consequences to them and to the world. But here I must go back a little.

The wars of religion (really of theology) in France and Germany, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, the Marian persecution

in England, the wholesale slaughter paying off old scores not a few in Ireland, had led Protestants to believe that public security was compatible only with Catholic disability to hurt. Catholics, on the other hand, bleeding under the persecutions of Elizabeth and the remorseless slaughter at Drogheda, the sufferings of their priests and the constant irritations and fearful hardships of penal laws, believed that their only hopes lay in victory and James; while the Protestants looked to William of Orange for relief from the despotism and cruelty of Jeffreys and James. Hearts and hopes beat high on both sides, while, shrouded in the darkness of the uncertain future, arose before the perturbed spirit many a spectre of possible despair. And when the battle was won a battle which, had it gone against us, might possibly have reversed the whole course of English history and the very currents of the world-is it any wonder that the memory of it should have burnt itself into the hearts and brains of the descendants of those who had risked life and all things on the issue of that fight? No: it is one of those things that men never can, and never ought to be expected to, forget.

And with what results to Catholics today? We have flung our fears to the wind, stripped ourselves of every special safeguard of the constitution, and ventured all on the open ocean of peril and the future, for the sake of putting every Catholic on the soil of Britain on a full footing of equality with ourselves. The seed sown then has grown into a tree of liberty for all, flowering and fruiting for Protestant and Catholic alike. So that, as an outcome of the whole, Catholics may listen, without too much discomposure, to the victory of the Boyne; and Orangemen, without being 'ruffians and blackguards,' may be allowed their thankfulness and their triumph. their triumph will, I hope, be tempered with that modesty of demeanor which sits so well on the truly manful soul. But 'Croppies lie down' belongs to another age, when the sword of final arbitrament is unsheathed and argument has ceased. It is offensive, and therefore wrong. Still, there were, I believe, few, if any, who knew the words or the import of the tune they played or heard. It must be remembered, too, that we are all of us only emer

Still