Presidents. The minority must have spoken their last word, and they have not done so yet. The interest of the Catholic Church requires that the Bishops should have the necessary time for forming and carrying out their resolutions, and that the crisis should not be precipitated by a catastrophe. The Council can do no good by the decrees fathered on it, but it has already done much good by the declarations of different sections of its members, by the speeches of individual Bishops, and the spirit manifested by a portion of them, and it will do much more very shortly. More than once have words been spoken there which have fired millions of hearts, have strengthened the bond of love and unity among Christians, and have openly indicated the real defects and the real remedies required for them. This seed of a better future in the Catholic Church will not be lost, but will bring forth abundant fruit. In each successive utterance genuine Catholic principles have come out more and more clearly, as the progress of the combat has forced them on the minority. The false problems, only hypocritically pre-arranged to be laid before the Council, disappear more and more. It becomes more and more clearly ascertained and acknowledged, that the contest is one of first principles, for the

maintenance of divine truths and institutions against arbitrary violence and impudent deceit.

New declarations on the rights of the State and the conditions of a really Ecumenical Council, directly condemning the new Roman system of the Syllabus and Infallibilism, may perhaps appear in a few days. While

in the highest degree critical and threatening for the Council, they might form the basis of sounder developments for the future. If particular States are to bring the matter to a decisive issue, it seems desirable that the Bishops should come forward with their resolutions designed to promote this end.

THIRTY-FIFTH LETTER.

Rome, April 12, 1870.-Veuillot says, in the Univers of April 2, that there are three great "devotions” in Rome, the Holy Sacrament, the holy Virgin, and the Pope. For the moment, and in regard to the Council and all that concerns the Curia, the devotion to the Pope is of course the chief affair. How that devotion may best be erected into the supreme law of religious thought and feeling-how to effect that henceforth, in all questions of the spiritual life, every one shall turn only to Rome and take his orders and look for certainty from thence alone--this is the task the Council has to achieve; all else is subordinate, or is merely the means to an end.

Next to the Jesuits Veuillot is unquestionably the man to whom infallibilism is chiefly indebted; and when it is made a dogma, a grateful posterity must give honourable place to his name among the promulgators of the new article of faith. He is much too

modest, when he says his rôle in the Church is only that of the door-keeper who drives out the dogs during divine service. Veuillot is much more to his readers than any Father of the Church. Continual dropping hollows out the stone, and for years past Veuillot has been familiarizing his readers, in numberless articles where the copious verbiage concealed the poverty of thought, with the notion that papal infallibility is the first and greatest of all truths. His journal is read even in Rome in the highest circles, and read by those who read nothing else, except perhaps Margotti's Unità Cattolica.

The Univers is very successful in the business of stirring up the inferior clergy against their bishops in the dioceses of Opposition prelates, and getting them to present addresses in favour of infallibilism. In the number of April 2, e.g., they are directed to get their petitions for the new dogma sent here through the Paris nunciature, and to take particular care that they are printed—" de plus, il importe de les publier." The Monde has invented a peculiar means of advancing the good cause. It announces that the Freemasons are the people who disseminate writings against papal infallibility, and then intimates to the Italian Bishops the

important fact that the minority of the Council are affiliated to Masonic Lodges.

The Unità Cattolica, the organ of Margotti, the Italian Veuillot, has 15,000 subscribers and 100,000 readers, and has more influence than all the 256 Italian Bishops put together. Their pastorals are powerless as compared with this daily paper, and they themselves are divided between their fear of the powerful Margotti and their regard for the judgment of the educated classes. But as most of these last are indifferentists, and give no moral support to a Bishop, the journalists carry the day, who treat every opponent of the pet Roman dogma as Veuillot does.

An Anglican clergyman named Edward Husband, who not long since became a Catholic, has again left the Church, because the dispute about papal infallibility and the extravagant cultus of Mary were too great scandals for him. It is only to the exasperation caused by proceedings at Rome, as an English statesman has written word, that we owe the passing in the House of Commons by a majority of two of a Bill for the civil inspection of Convents, which had always previously been rejected. The minority had done their best to avert it, but were overruled, and Newdegate-a person who