pours forth at this day, as she has done from the beginning, her swarms of holy contemplatives, or in that which, in the course of three hundred years, has had one family (that of good Nicholas Ferrar) devoted to perpetual psalmody; and, at this moment, has one religious house, not however contemplative, of very recent establishment, and consisting only of four or five members?

But you will say, that the destruction of these blessed institutions was no act of the Church of England, but, on the contrary, a fierce exercise of royal tyranny and oppression, of which she was the victim, and the effects of which she has no power to remedy, and that it is hard she should be upbraided with her calamity. But, my dear friend, if she were really Catholic, she could and would have remedied it long ago. The mere dissolution, in the reign of Henry VIII., of the religious communities then existing, though it involved the confiscation of their property, and the overthrow of their dwellings, could not have destroyed the monastic spirit. If those feelings and desires to which the conventual system alone supplies satisfaction, had not, from some cause, been annihilated at the same time, they would soon have re-appeared on the surface of your history, in the form of new or revived religious institutions. Consider the recent destinies of the Church in France. In 1790, the religious houses were dissolved, churches and abbeys destroyed, whole communities slaughtered, their goods confiscated, estates sold, and the very name of the Christian faith proscribed throughout the land: now, there are no less

than 35,000 monks and nuns,* once more discharging their conventual duties as zealously, and as fully according to the spirit of their respective institutes, as at any period prior to the Revolution: there are even a larger number, we are told, of the severer Orders than there were before: it is the same in Belgium, it would be the same everywhere throughout the whole Catholic world; even in our own country, in spite of the systematic oppression under which Catholics so long laboured, the spirit of selfdevotion has not been crushed out of them; several monasteries, and upwards of thirty convents, bear witness to its life.

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Surely these things, if true, are very important, and ought to be well considered, in weighing the respective claims of the Roman and English Churches to the note of sanctity:-if in every form of Christian holiness the saints in the Roman communion stand pre-eminent; if there be in that Church a spirit of self-devotion lacking to the other;-if, since England broke herself off from the rest of Christendom, the more excellent way" has been practically unheard of within her communion, while, during the same period, in the churches of the Roman obedience, hundreds and thousands, both men and women, have lived in prayer and contemplation, or have devoted themselves to the exercise of charity in every varied form;-surely we ought not long to hesitate in judging which of these two communions is the genuine representative of that family, of whom it is

*Catéchisme de Persévérance, tom. vi. p. 518.

written," the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul; neither said any of them, that ought of the things which he possessed was his own, but they had all things common."*

LETTER VI,

THE mention of the contemplative orders, with which my last letter concluded, naturally brings to the mind the subject of religious books, which I must not omit to notice, because the unquestioned superiority of the Roman to the English Church in this particular, is a fact deserving serious consideration.

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Why cannot any of you write with feeling and unction such as this?" asked James I. of his bishops, when he had read the "Introduction à la vie dévote," sent to him by Mary of Medici. "In contemplation and self-discipline," (i. e. in the whole of religion, practical and devotional, objective and subjective,)

*This, and all the other Scripture quotations which occur in the course of these Letters, are made from the Protestant version of the Bible, because the person addressed being a Protestant, could not be supposed to recognize any other as of authority.

† A translation of this work, "adapted to the use of the English Church," was licensed by Archbishop Laud's chaplain. See an interesting letter in Laud's Autobiography, p. 219.

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says a revered teacher of the English Church,* the spiritual writers of foreign churches have, as yet, some obvious advantages over our own;" and we know that many of the most excellent, both in this and other Protestant communions, have lived much in the study of these writers. The private devotions of Archbishop Laud borrow largely from the prayers of Catholics, the devotions of Hickes and Cosin are formed on their very model: some of the most valuable portion of Jeremy Taylor's works are "founded" on the " great moral writers of the Continental Church, using their very words and terms of expression, giving their advice and their cautions." In fact, the chapter on Meditation, of which this was especially said, is little more than an analysis of the scheme of the Spiritual Exercises, that all but inspired composition of St. Ignatius Loyola, which has been" wonderfully blest in the conversion of tens of thousands." Bishop Wilson recommended the use of the Spiritual Combat:-Thomas à Kempis has been edited even by one of the Evangelical party: and Fenelon and Pascal are almost as familiar to Protestants as to Catholics themselves. You know further, that the deeper longings after religious fervour and strictness, which have been recently awakened in this country, have led to an increased study of the Roman ascetic writers; so much so, that it has been found worth while to undertake a series of translations from their works, "adapted to the use of the

* Preface to Avrillon's Guide to Passing Lent Holily, p. 11. and Preface to "Year of Affections," p. 9.

English Church." Are the spiritual writings of Protestants thus valued among Catholics? Has a single instance been known of an "adaptation" from an English Divine for the use of the Catholic Church? But you will say that the superiority of Catholic writers is to be attributed to the spiritual training and other privileges afforded by the religious houses. This will not hold good altogether, because S. Francis de Sales, and others, whose works have been popular in this country, were secular; but were it true, it only brings out more distinctly the character of that body, in which such cradles of sanctity have been abolished and disowned.

Thus far we have spoken of sanctity only in its higher degree; and on that we might fairly rest the whole question, because, as Aristotle says, "that kind is altogether best, whose excellence or pre-eminence is best ;" but it may be more satisfactory to you if we pursue the comparison further, and consider the respective religious condition of the multitudes whose vocation lies in the world—that is, of the main body of each communion. It is obvious, however, that to enter into so vast a subject with anything like detail would be far beyond the compass of a letter, and would require much greater knowledge of facts than most men possess; I can but treat it here in a sketchy fragmentary way, noting down, as far as I am able, what happens to have come under my own observation.

The first thing which struck me when I began to frequent Catholic Churches was the intense devotion of the half-clad paupers, the very beggars, who are in