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under the positive and actual control and supervision of the priests; and should there be found any establishments objecting to this unqualified decree, they are to be broken up forthwith. The instruction afforded to the people, rich and poor, is to be of a nature the most bigoted and narrow; all that tends to enlightenment, all that tends to improve the mind and elevate the heart, and, above all, whatever tends to exercise the intellect and the thought, will be suppressed. To make up for this lamentable state of education, it is intended that all kinds of debauchery and vice, gambling and corruption, shall be winked at-nay, encouraged.. "The people's minds must be amused in some way," say the priesthood; "we deny them knowledge, and these things, called by the world crimes, are less dangerous."

Is it possible that any one, Protestant or Catholic, can be so sanguine as to imagine that Tuscany is, or will be, the only kingdom to be thus laid under the yoke? This remarkable passage occurred recently in a letter of the "Own Correspondent" of the Times, written from Turinand, be it remembered, that journal is no unnecessary alarmist: "I had a thing to say apropos of the late trials at Mantua, on the subject of Austrian prison discipline and the ordeal of confession as practised in Austrian Italy, but I fear being misunderstood. By-and-by, however, when, under Divine grace, by the exertions of our pious friends and our own apathy, we shall have the blessings of Popery and the Inquisition once more established among us, the British public will be better able to appreciate accounts of violence, which might now be attributed to prejudice or exaggeration."

The same feeling which prevented the Times' correspondent enlarging upon all he knew, likewise prevents me. I could tell you of facts now occurring in Catholic countries until this paper should be spun out to a length unprecedented, but I dare not; for I know that they would be put down as falsehoods or gross exaggerations. I could disclose tales connected with the lives led by the Catholic priesthood, and of the incredible enormities of the confessional, but these things are never pleasant for the pen to trace. And the crimes, the immoralities, the darkness that prevail in these countries, might be enlarged upon for ever, the utter absence of all efforts at improvement, and of everything compatible with Christ's religion. There is no peace or good government, no civil or religious liberty; and, for the people, there is neither security nor happiness. You hear these matters alluded to sometimes, but, living in England as you do, you are not prone to give credit to them. I know them to be facts, for I have lived in the midst of them for years—not in one part of the Continent, but in many.

Be not deceived: there will soon be a struggle for ascendancy over you-a struggle for universal power. Note well all the words and acts that have come from the Catholics since the establishing of their hier archy, as they call it, in England: little words and signs that perhaps have slipped out unconsciously in their exultation. Ponder them well; compare notes, one announcement, one paper with another, and you will read as I do. And if this struggle be not guarded against beforehand, and met with universal Protestant unity and resolution, the civil wars that disseminated this land some centuries ago, will inevitably be renewed.. Feb.-VOL. XCVII. NO. CCCLXXXVI.

You have the cause in your own hands. If you could throw off the Papal yoke when England's Popish prejudices lay thick around her, and her land was overrun with priesthood, to embrace and hold fast the Reformed Religion, you surely can maintain it now. Let these men pursue their own religion amongst you as heretofore; let them, if they will, exercise their sophistries in Catholic countries, and still lead by the nose their millions of deluded people; but give them to know, and unmistakably, that when England threw off their yoke some centuries ago, she threw it off for ever.

Great Britain justly boasts of the freedom she confers upon all who inhabit her soil: her religious tolerance is the wonder of neighbouring empires, and none can wish this tolerance lessened. But it behoves you who are still true to your faith, to watch and pray unceasingly, lest you be led into these dangerous errors. These Catholics, these Jesuits— these serpents, if you will-are scattered everywhere: one is but a duplicate of the whole. They know their work; it is carved out ready to their hands, and they perform it zealously. And it is your bounden, imperative duty, your duty to your God, to your children, and your country, to bestir yourselves, and grapple with this subtle enemy. Their encroachments have aroused the public ire in no common degree, as you well know; they have penetrated to England's self-love and to England's piety, and no one can say that there has been any lack of excitementmore especially was there not at the time when the Pope thrust his hierarchy upon England. There was much of talking, much of meeting, much of indignant discussion, but there was, and is, no effectual doing: and while you are supinely resting, the Papists are acting.

I would address these words to the Protestants of England: the Dissenters, as they are termed, will not mistake me, or suppose that they are here not included in the word, Protestant. But I will speak a few words to them exclusively.

And allow me the privilege. My youth was passed in the chief city of one of our midland counties, and I was frequently brought into contact, and mixed freely with many of your sects. I grew up among you; I learnt to respect you; and when I thus write to you, it seems as if I were addressing old friends.

But in this common cause you are not Dissenters. There are but two sects: the Roman Catholics, who would make these aggressions upon the nation; and the Protestants, you and ourselves. All minor differences are overlooked in this great contest. I believe the creed of the Romanists to be as repugnant to you as it is to us; and if few, or none, of your body have become apostates and gone over to Popery, it is because you are more united in yourselves, and have furnished these secret, undermining enemies less loopholes to creep in at.

Your faith, that of the greater portion of you, is the same as ours. You worship one God, you trust to one Saviour, you are comforted by one Holy Spirit. There may be a little difference in the worship, but there is none in the creed; and I, a member of our Church, declare to you openly my conviction, that the greater part of you would never have separated from her, but for the many abuses that have gradually crept into her since the Reformation, and which are still crying aloud—it would

seem unheard. It is believed that a crisis is approaching, one to demand every effort to meet it. Oh, let not this appeal be made in vain! Remain true to your form of worship, but be united with us in heart. Join cause and resolution, and together a moral force so great will be combined, that the Pope and his clergy will marvel how they could have entertained so wild a project as that of undermining England's Faith. The Pope regards us as heretics, you and ourselves alike, and he burns for the time to ripen when he may lay the whole kingdom under a ban, unless it shall bend to his authority. He deems himself the only accredited minister of Heaven, we know how mistakenly; and if we obstinately refuse to worship him as we would worship God, he condemns us to cruel miseries here, and to eternal damnation hereafter.

The Catholics, more especially those of our own land, Dr. Wiseman and his lot, begged us to believe that the new innovations and the hierarchy meant "nothing," and would lead to nothing. They entreat us to believe that these recently instituted persecutions are nothing. They waste their words-they waste their breath: the Protestants are gifted with penetration deep as theirs, though their cunning may be less; and these persecutions will do more to open England's eyes to the subtle and to-be-dreaded depth of their designs, than ever did the former encroachments, startling as they were..

Be united then, and repulse all secret schemes. Not by oppression: let the Papists be still free to follow their creed as heretofore. Only let them fully understand that they have made a wide mistake in opinion, and that so long as the faith of England retains its brightness, and Englishmen their truth, the endeavour to win her over to Popery must never be renewed. There are good and honourable Catholics in the land, numbers of them; men to be respected of all. I seek not to wound them in these remarks; but they will themselves concede, that if we sit tamely down, and submit to be thus drawn under the yoke of their Pontiff, we should be unworthy of our country and our faith.

And you, professed Protestants of the land, who are in your hearts half Papists, will any of you, after this, leave the pure spiritual worship of your forefathers for this creed of forms and persecutions? I cannot think that many of you who have gone over to Catholicism quite knew the religion you were embracing, as it is practised in its own countries.

Finally, Protestants, weigh well what is passing around you, and if you deem that these encroachments are creeping stealthily but surely upon you, deliberate how you may best resist them. From the Queen upon her throne to the poor man in his cottage, there ought to be common cause amongst you. You have one faith, one altar, one God. Defend them from these outward aggressions. Otherwise, what can you expect will be the fate of England? The Jesuits will have no mercy, no toleration, if they once get the upper hand. They have sworn to persecute and attack Protestants to the utmost of their power: can you doubt that they will keep the oath to its extreme letter as regards you, whom they have been reared to look upon as their bitter and dreaded rivals.

Let not the common idea that the day has gone by for Englishmen, in their broad enlightenment, to return to the errors and miseries of Popery, lull you to lethargy. For enlightenment, Great Britain does indeed

stand unrivalled, and her sons are gifted with envied intellect. And it is precisely because they are so gifted, that these dissensions and civil wars may come. Were they fitted to be a priest-ridden, abject people, the Jesuits might be able to mould and lull them to their will: they may, as it is, have little difficulty in doing so with many, and for those who resist, who would rather lay their heads upon the block than return to the crushed intellect and old state of soul-slavery, what will remain? Resistance. If the tokens of the changes seeking to be made are suffered to remain unnoticed and unheeded, if the stealthy encroachments of the Jesuits are encouraged rather than checked, whether that encouragement proceed from self-security or carelessness, until they attain to such a height and power that Great Britain will be roused like a lion from its lair, rely upon it, that civil war, with all its horrors and bloodshed, must return. It may not be until the hand who pens these lines, the eyes of you who read them, shall be set in death; but that it will come is inevitable, unless you guard against it.

The ancient truism, that prevention is better than cure, should have been remembered and acted upon. When Pope Pius IX. sent his "Bull" and his Cardinal to these shores, had they been immediately returned upon his holy hands, with a polite message from her Majesty declining the intended honour, I am much mistaken if the world would have heard of these recent persecutions. The thing lay then in a nutshell there was no difficulty, and need have been no debating; the nation's tranquillity would have remained undisturbed, and the Jesuits must, and would, have relinquished their ambitious schemes. England suffered it to be otherwise in spite of the storm of indignant protestations that echoed in her ears, the Cardinal, and all the rest of the accompaniments, were allowed to gain firm footing; and-you see the fruits. A few decisive words would have prevented their presence then: there might be both difficulty and danger in attempting to repulse them now. And it seems to me that should bloodshed, sooner or later, be the event, the ministers who then ruled the country will have much to answer for.

It is still in your power to avert whatever evil or danger may be impending; but you know not how soon the opportunity may be gone by. Let not this warning be unheeded: harm is impossible if you resolutely determine to defend your forefathers' faith, and uphold the rights of England. She is mighty in her strength: the nations of the world bow down before her power: how much more then must the clerical prince of a petty Italian state, and those who act under his orders? Oh, be true to yourselves! and never fear that God, who has brought you and your ancestors through so many difficulties and dangers in the cause of religion, will bring you in safety through these. May these impending fears serve to bring good out of evil, in causing many who have been vacillating between a true and false faith to see the error they are committing; may they be the means of uniting all bands of Protestants in the harmony they have not enjoyed of late years; and then the peace that Christ taught, and the security and tranquillity that must be its fruit, will once more reign in England.

NOVELS OF THE SEASON.

"LADY BIRD "* is a charming lady-like novel. Full of flowery sentiments and graceful descriptions, it is also at once fashionable, foreign, and profoundly Catholic. There is Lifford Grange-the most melancholy, the most damp and dull of all old-fashioned places-so repulsive that, in the words of the lady authoress, no daring tendril, or aspiring creeper, had invaded its walls. Then there is Mr. Lifford, with a family as ancient as his house, and his pride as lofty as his rooms-a most morose, forbidding personage-a disappointed manwedded, out of spite, to a fair, frail, and sickly Spanish grandee, who, transplanted like an exotic from sunny Andalusia to the gloomy old Grange, pines away through two and a half long volumes, till death relieves her and the reader from cushions and shawls, heavy clasped books of devotion, and large ivory crucifixes. There, also moving about in the same silent and solemn apartments, like a living ghost, is an uncle in holy orders-Father Lifford-who, educated in Spain, had there imbibed all the gravity and austerity of the severest monastic discipline; he had, as the narrative discloses, one or two particles of human nature in him, but even these were so trained to more unworldly habits, that their manifestations were rare to a degree; while, on the contrary, his habitual manners were so cold as to impart a chill to the very atmosphere in which he moved. Then there was Edgar, an only son and heir, of whom but little is made in the novel, except that, siding with his father in youth, he did not behave ill to his sister in distress; and last, but above all, is Lady Bird, the most precocious, the most fairy-like, the most intellectual, and the most wayward creation that ever graced novelist's pages. Beautiful, yet "foreign-looking," daring, and intractable in spirit, of a delicate, impressionable form and organisation, independent in thought and intellect, despising alike the grandeur, the formality, and the stateliness of Lifford Grange-not over-attentive to her Catholic duties, neglecting at times even confession-sarcastic even to wondering if the Apostles could prove sixteen quarterings-so regardless of social proprieties as to spend her time with Mary Grey and Mary's foster-brother, Maurice Redmond, children of a neighbouring village: Lady Bird is depicted at the onset as one who must inevitably go astray. Yet those pictures of early life are among the most pleasing, as they are also, with Lady Clara Audley's boudoirs, the only English things in the work. Lady Bird was the chief object, actor, and ruler in their childish pastimes, and her beauty, intelligence, and waywardness, exacted a sort of homage which all instinctively paid her. She was also the only little lady amongst them. But her mind was also as active as her spirit was restless. "A tendency to ennui," says our lady authoress, "joined to a craving for excitement, even of the most trivial description, is the disease of certain minds, and there is but one cure for it. Call it what you will; self-education, not for this world but for the next; the work of life understood; perfection conceived, and resolutely aimed at; the dream of human happiness resigned, and, in the same hour, its substance regained; the capital paid into the next world, and the daily unlooked-for interest received in this; such is the strange alchemy in which God deals, and

*Lady Bird. A Tale. By Lady Georgiana Fullerton. 3 vols. Edward Moxon.

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