heavy burdens on your fellow-travellers and carrying none yourself, "compounding for sins you are inclined to, by damning those you have no mind to," flattering yourselves that you have done a noble deed, and testified to a perverse generation, when you have only anathematised people for attempting to do that which their conscience tells them they have a right to do; however well the sabbatarian controversy may illustrate this spirit, and incline thinking and fair-minded men to believe us when we complain of other indignities which we receive at the hand of the same party, though in these cases they may not be our fellow-sufferers; yet this was not the subject which we undertook to discuss in this article, but the peculiar instances of the hardships which Catholics have to endure. The Sabbath is but one of three great heavy-armed fortresses of English religion; but it is the only one which is at all able to annoy the camp or threaten the communications of the liberal party. Its two other positions, Bibleworship and hostility to Popery, do not interfere with any but Papists-nay, rather, all people who are not Papists are eager to join in their defence. Liberals are perfectly ready to confess that Christianity, whatever it may be, is contained in the Bible; that this book is, as it were, the tomb in which Christianity lies buried, the repository in which her bones are to be found.* They are glad to own that it is the duty and privilege of Christians to read that book and to rifle its contents; that the Bible, and the Bible only, is the religion of Protestants (for it is excessively convenient to profess a religion so completely impersonal and detached from self as to be easily carried in one's pocket, or left at home and locked up out of sight when not wanted). They cannot sufficiently condemn our fanatical folly in closing this book against uneducated Catholics, who would probably misunderstand it; and they furiously resent our brutal bigotry in destroying or burning a relic that is so venerated, rightly or wrongly, by the majority of the population. As for hostility to Popery, if the liberals are precluded from denouncing our religion on religious grounds, they amply indemnify themselves by their abuse of it on political considerations; they identify Catholicity with a great conspiracy to subdue the world to a sacerdotal despotism-in their eyes the greatest crime that man can be guilty of. They have a ferocious hatred to priestly supervision of all kinds; they would object to that of the Archbishop of Canterbury and Dr.

* "I," said a gentleman of this school to a friend of ours, while travelling the other day in a railway-carriage, "I carry my religion in my waistcoatpocket;" and therewith he pulled out a pocket Testament from the said receptacle, as a triumphant demonstration of his "creed!"

Cumming as much as to that of the Pope and Cardinal Wiseman; they say, with some reason, that any government presided over by the bench of bishops would be a regimen of old women, characterised by all possible feminine weaknesses and follies, at once indulgent and spiteful, simple and suspicious, blind and prying, careless and meddlesome, extravagant and unimproving; they would not relish making themselves slaves even to their own Church, which, as their organ owns, "does not at this moment possess any extraordinary amount of eloquence, hardly professes to be learned, eschews philosophy, lays little claim to those austere virtues which won the reverence of a simpler age, and does not even exhibit any of that practical good sense with which most men supply the want of genius, poetry, and romance" (Times, Feb. 19). With such ideas of their own Church, it is no wonder that they think even worse of ours. It is no wonder that in ecclesiastical questions, as well as in questions concerning the treatment of the Bible, they should be found on the side of the Evangelicals. It is only on the Sabbath question that their interests are identical with ours; it is only when irritated on this point that their ears and their sympathies can be gained for the wrongs we experience on the other two.

We have taken up so much space with our introduction, that we have only room to indicate in general terms the kind of tyranny which we have to endure; and in making out the list we will strictly confine ourselves to what has fallen under our personal observation within very narrow limits of time and place. The scene is an exemplary suburb of London, which we will designate by the name of Foolton. A Catholic paterfamilias wishes to take a house there. His first visit to the place is made in company with a priest wearing his Roman collar; they inspect a house, but having detected a bad odour in the drawing-room, they shake their heads at it. "It was

for me to refuse you," quoth the landlord; "I would never let my house to such people as you are." Such was the first indication of the animus of the place; they soon found that it was necessary, if they wanted to secure a house, to conceal their religion, and simply to refer to the Protestant lawyer. Paterfamilias obtains his house; but the temerarious landlord receives at least fifty letters from the pious inhabitants to tell him that he has brought ruin on the place, that he has sold his soul to the devil, and that he is little better than Judas Iscariot. Having once settled himself to his own satisfaction, the new-comer looks round for a place where he can see the papers and periodicals; and having found an eligible library and reading-room, he enters, and subscribes his three guineas,

which are returned to him in half an hour with "Mr. Higton's compliments, and he declines to receive your subscription." The boys of the neighbouring national school, under the supervision of the excellent clergy of the place, soon come to know the stranger, and to practise their duty to their (Catholic) neighbour by a continual running-fire of opprobious epithets at him and his servants, and of stones against his doors, walls, and roof, and occasionally against his windows; a great exacerbation of these paroxysms being always noticeable after any of the frequent anti-popery meetings at the schoolroom. He* has occasion to make some addition to his buildings, which he wants to light with gas; the main which feeds the parishchurch and schoolrooms runs close by; it would be a saving of twenty pounds to him, and of the same sum to the gascompany, if his pipes were joined to this main; the minister and churchwardens refuse simply on the ground of his being a Catholic, much to the disgust of the aforesaid company. But the rage of the suburb has been raised to the nth power by the establishment of a Catholic church, and even a convent, within its sacred precincts. In process of time a miserable girl calls on our paterfamilias, and tries to get money from him by a forged note from one of his tradesmen; the girl is taken before the police-magistrate, where the mother attends, and sobs out that her daughter has been ruined by the company she kept at the school of that horrid convent. Of course she was never there once in her life; but the next morning the woman's assertion appears prominently in the Times and all the papers, and is commented on in the Tap-Tub (which also takes the occasion of publishing an atrocious libel on the good nuns, and only to retract it when compelled to do so in a court of justice); but the contradiction of the lie is studiously kept from appearing. The rector of the parish is continually printing pastorals in the shape of letters to his parishioners, full of the most ludicrous misstatements of our religion, and of the most impertinent attacks upon our priests; the polemical thermometer is kept up to the boiling-point by the exhibition of broadsides, placards, and these rectorial epistles, in the shopwindows. It is found that one of our priests—a foreignerwhen he first arrived, celebrated a marriage, after due proclamation of bans and inscription of names in the registrar's book, but without the corporeal presence of that hymeneal official; the registrar was mulcted of his five shillings, so he has reason for some wrath; but why should the whole bumbledom of the parish move heaven and earth to prosecute the

* This incident is the only one that did not occur in the locality in question; it took place in the immediate neighbourhood.

case, and, failing in that because of the lapse of time, plaster the whole place with offensive placards headed "Clandestine Marriages," in which the circumstances are described, the names of the parties given, and the priest pronounced to be guilty of felony? A blatant fanatic, who dubs himself D.D., hires the cast-off shell of a congregational "church" that migrates to better quarters, and sets it up as a proprietary episcopal chapel. He can find no readier way to the hearts and purses of the Fooltonians than by treating them to a series of controversial sermons against the Papacy; accordingly every Lent he sends forth his advertising sandwiches, little boys crushed between two placarded boards, emblazoned with some such chivalrous challenge as this: "Jehovah honoured; the Cruciferant Fathers muzzled; Foolton protected, in a series of Sermons to be preached in St. Luke's Church, Bedlam, by Elymas Crow, D.D.;" the said sandwiches being instructed to present themselves (under the inspection of the police) at our church-doors while the congregation is pouring out, and ablebodied men being also employed to distribute handbills to our people. A tradesman settles in the place, and by the goodness of his wares soon gains a considerable connection; he is found to be a Catholic, and immediately the elect sisters of the suburb find that their proper occupation, during the absence of their lords at their warehouses and counting-houses in the city, is to make rounds of visits to all their acquaintance, and to employ themselves in touting for the non-employment of the unfortunate shopkeeper.

But these are the least of our evils; this is merely the external rind and bark of that tyranny whose bitter kernel is only to be tasted within the walls of the house and the circle of the family. What a state of things is suggested to us, when we know that there cannot be a row about Papal aggression, about Maynooth, about an Austrian Concordat, without literally hundreds of poor Irish maids-of-all-work being turned out to starve, or suffer worse things, in the streets of the metropolis! O Englishmen, if you have reason to take offence, wreak your vengeance on those who are in fault! attack our bishops, our influential men,-those who may possibly have had something to do with advising or defending the obnoxious measure; but these sheep, what have they done? Their opinion was not asked; they know nothing of the difference between bishops in partibus and a settled hierarchy; and yet it is on them, poor ignorant defenceless creatures, that the cowardly bigots make the weight of their vengeance to fall. And those poor women who are not turned into the streets, what tales could not be told of their sufferings, of

brutal insult, of studied plans to render it impossible for them to attend to their religious duties, of overwork and under-pay, of starvation, of consumption, the hospital, the workhouse, and the grave!

But the connection between the master and the servant is one purely voluntary, that may be severed at the shortest notice. The trials of the Catholic servant are as nothing in comparison to those of the son, the daughter, or the wife of a Protestant household, who attempts to hold communication with a priest, or succeeds in making submission to the Catholie Church. We have known of several such cases; and the tyranny that has come under our notice would be ludicrous if it had not been disgusting. Fathers and uncles alter their wills, and cut off the offending members with a shilling; they lock them up, and keep them prisoners for weeks; or they turn them out of house and home; or they badger them with parsons, and send for the family lawyer to enforce the claims of the Church by law established on their reason and their conscience; or they take away all Catholic books, and exact promises not to converse with Catholics. Some of the worst cases we have known have been where the wives of Anglican clergymen have been converted: here personal violence has not been wanting; fists have been shaken in the lady's face, blasphemies poured out which would make a believing devil shudder, cruelties exercised or threatened which have called for the interference of the lady's family in her behalf. We cannot allude more particularly to these cases; they are too rare not to make identification comparatively easy. They are instances of a tedious and cruel martyrdom, which invokes the sympathy of the whole Church of Christ. Deprived of their children, those who should be their protectors turned to be their rancorous enemies, who can interfere to mitigate those trials which the grace of God alone can enable these women to bear?

And yet, what is the judgment of their fellow-Protestants on the tyrants who oppress them? That they act as Christians ought to act; that they are the parties to be pitied; that it would have been little if their wives, their sons, or their daughters had turned infidels or atheists, Turks or Jews, horse-jockeys, blacklegs, or swindlers; but to see them turn Catholics passes the bounds of Christian endurance. We do not mean to insinuate that all Protestants treat the converts of their families in this way; we have known instances where the generosity and nobleness which have been exhibited have been quite as marked as the ferocious fanaticism we have been describing. Still more instances we have known where,