and therefore, if the author be a heretic, it must contain a secret poison which will prove at least hurtful to the purity and strength of the Catholic life. This same poison may be imbibed by a Catholic who lives and breathes in an heretical atmosphere, and be diffused through his works as well as through those of a Protestant, and will be none the less dangerous because he is a Catholic.

We all know that Protestantism at present predominates in this country. Those of our laity most likely to write for the people are those among us who are most exposed to its influence, and the most likely to be affected by it. They are not exactly scholars by profession; they have not received a thoroughly Catholic training; they are persons of general information and of general reading; but they are readers of modern, and chiefly Protestant, literature. They are, no doubt, firm Catholics, and would sooner die than knowingly depart from the faith; but, half Protestantized in their views of things in general, and taking it for granted that all the dif ference between Catholics and Protestants lies in the formal differences between their respective creeds, they write in a tone and spirit which can do no good, and which can hardly fail to do immense harm. We are not censuring them. They cannot make themselves other than they are, and they cannot write without writing themselves. No man can. We only say, they cannot write books which it is always safe to circulate among the people, and cannot create and build up a Catholic national literature. Their works have a natural tendency to lower the Catholic tone, to relax the Catholic spirit, and to sully, if not corrupt, the virgin purity of the Catholic soul. Hence, where their works circulate, we miss the high and lofty, stern and uncompromising, Catholic public sentiment which is needed, both for our own sakes and for the sake of those who are without. A low and half-compromising tone among Catholics is of the greatest disadvantage to Protestants, for it tends to confirm them in their fatal errors. When we were ourselves Protestant, we were accustomed to hear our friends remark on the character and spirit of Catholics in this country. "Catholics, here," they were accustomed to say, "live and breathe in a Protestant atmosphere. They may retain the forms of their faith and worship, but they soon lose the Catholic spirit. They become assimilated to us in tone and sentiment, and their grandchildren are sure to be absorbed in the Protestant community." Protestants are thus led to think only of seeing Catholics assimilating to them, and not at all of the necessity of their becoming Catholics. There is more foundation for their remarks than there should be, and our grandchildren will be more likely to be Protestants or infidels than Catholics, unless Catholics are on their guard against the fatal influences in the midst of which they live, and, for the present, must live. Their best protection, after placing themselves under that of God and his Holy Mother, is to dare be Catholics, and to assert and

maintain a free, high, and uncompromising Catholic spirit, to refuse all assimilation with Protestantism, to derive their ideas on all subjects from Catholic sources alone, and to distrust every thing, however harmless it may appear, that has an heretical origin. The truer, firmer, more devoted, more exclusive Catholics we are, the more influential we shall be, the more respect shall we command, and the more agreeable will be our social position. No man need lose caste in this country by being a Catholic. Let him be true to his Church, and no harm can befall him, even in his temporal life. We shall not be misunderstood. We do not contend that Catholics should, on all occasions and in all companies, obtrude their faith and Church. There is a time for all things. There are the common courtesies of civilized life, there are the reciprocal obligations and the kind offices of good neighbourhood, which, of course, are never to be neglected, a respect for the rights and the honorable feelings of others, which are always to be scrupulously observed. But what we urge is, that we remember always that the Church holds the first place in every Catholic's affections, and that all in life is to be subordinated to the one great end of pleasing God and gaining heaven. This should always be present to our souls, and influence or determine the spirit of all we do or say. In regard to literature, we do not ask that the Catholic always wield the tomahawk and battle-axe of controversy, that he be ever formally stating the claims of his Church, and denouncing all who are not within its pale. There is enough of all this in our literature as it is. But what we do want is the Catholic soul, the Catholic spirit, which shall unconsciously pervade all we write, and inform every sentence and word, so that whoever takes up one of our works, at whatever page he opens, shall feel that its author could have been none other than a Catholic. It is this which gives such power and unction to the writers of the ages of faith. They say little of the Church, little of religion, unless treating it professedly, make no professions of faith or piety, but every word betrays them, and the very servant-girls take notice that they have been with Jesus, and must have been genuine Catholics. It is this which makes them so precious and edifying to the Catholic, and so insipid or offensive to the Protestant. We would see this revived. Would that forty years of heresy had not forbidden us, personally, to hope to be able, before dying, to write, as a Catholic should write, out from a life that had never been sullied by a single Protestant association! But, alas! this cannot be. We can only stand as a beacon of warning to others. We can see and feel what should be; the power to produce it has been thrown away, and, for our punishment, is not to be recovered. But, how much so ever of our former Protestant life we may yet retain, we can clearly see that the Protestant life and the Catholic are of two distinct orders, and cannot and will not assimilate; that what is agreeable to the one will be of

fensive to the other; and that the man who makes up his mind to be a Catholic must make it up to be not a Protestant, and to take his stand in the Catholic world alone, for life and for death.

With these views of the present condition of the Catholic population in this country, of the influences to which we are necessarily exposed, the sort of literature we are able to produce, and of that which we need, or which alone could do us any good, we confess that any direct efforts to call forth a domestic literature, a popular literature, we mean, strike us as premature, and not at all desirable. When our colleges have got fairly into operation, and become colleges chiefly, if not exclusively, for Catholics, and have sent out one or two generations of scholars, trained from childhood under strict Catholic discipline, then we may do something; but till then, the most we can do to advantage will be to guard ourselves and others against fatal tendencies, to set forth and defend our faith, and prepare the way for the complete triumph of the Church. Other nations will supply us with books, and better books than we can write for ourselves.

But we have forgotten the little book before us. It is, we have said, a reprint of a recent English work. When we had read only a few pages, we thought it must belong to the category of books we have been censuring, and be written by some Puseyite, who, through mistake, had got into the Church without stopping to doff his Puseyism at the door; but as we read on, we became interested, and finally laid the book down with an impression much in its favor. In fact, though it reminded us, now and then, of Father Dominick's rhapsody in the London Tablet, on Littlemore, in which he exhorts the English Catholics to aspire to the sanctity of that heterodox establishment, or, at best, parody on a Catholic monastery, we were forced to like it, and we cheerfully commend it to our readers. It has one or two literary faults, common to most productions of the kind, such as efforts at fine writing, and wearisome descriptions of natural scenery and external objects, which are uncalled for, and only interrupt the narrative, and one or two opinions incidentally expressed, which are very questionable, and which might have been left unexpressed; yet it is one of the best little works, treating important matters in a popular manner, we have recently met. It is written with fair artistic skill, the characters are well sustained, and the controversy is managed with adroitness, delicacy, and success. The tone of the book is mild, gentle, but firm and uncompromising. The author writes without any fear of the English Establishment before his eyes. He does not allow it the merit even of being schismatic; for he does not allow it any church character at all. It has no orders, no altar, no sacrifice, no sacraments, but that of baptism, which may be validly administered even by a pagan. It is an empty form, and has no worth, no vitality, no connection with the Church of God. We like this; and,

after Charles Butler and Dr. Lingard's History of England, it is refreshing, and proves that the spirit of good Bishop Milner is not all extinct. It is such language as this in the mouth of English Catholics that leads us in very deed to hope for England's conversion. English Catholics have been proverbially timid and compromising, and, in more instances than one, have shown that they preferred their king or their queen to their God. If they had had a little of the old uncompromising Catholic spirit of their Irish brethren, England would have been converted long ago, nay, would have never ceased to be Catholic. But, God be praised, a better spirit is beginning to manifest itself among them; they are beginning to rise from the dust in which they have so long slumbered, to assume a bolder and a more truly Catholic tone, and there is clear evidence that Almighty God is visiting them in mercy. It does one's heart good to hear them tell the Establishment to her face that she is no church, no reality, that she is, as Carlyle would say, a mere sham; for it is the truth, and the sooner the Anglicans are told it, and told it in tones that ring through their very souls, the better will it be for them, and for all who speak the English tongue. There is joy in heaven when our good old Anglo-Saxon is made once more the language of Christians, and lends its rough energy to give force to truth and holy religion. Shame is it that so noble a tongue should ever have been spoken by the enemies of God and his Church!

The work before us is controversial, but it confines itself to the few, yet all-important, points of difference between us and the Anglo-Catholics, as they call themselves. It treats these deluded individuals with great tenderness, handles them softly, as though it felt they were made of frail materials; but, while recognizing frankly their Catholic tendencies, tells them plainly that they are less consistent than their Evangelical brethren, and place themselves in the most untenable of all conceivable positions. They are condemned by their own communion, while professing to love and obey it; they are condemned by the Church, because they refuse to enter her fold; are, indeed, condemned by all parties, can find support nowhere, and must balance themselves on nothing. Yet they are to be compassionated, not upbraided. They really see that there should be, somewhere, a reality; feel that sham will suffice neither for soul nor for body; and regret, deeply regret, that their fathers cast away the reality for the sham. This is something, and with the stronger of them it is not without result, as the large number of converts from their ranks who have so gladdened our hearts fully proves. But, having inherited the sham from their fathers, although they see and admit it to be a sham, they fancy that by one means or another it may be made a reality. Alas! their task is more hopeless than that which St. Anthony imposed upon his disciple, Paul. Sooner shall one plant dry sticks,

and, by watering, make them sprout and grow, than Anglicanism ever be made any thing but a miserable sham.

After all, we do not think the controversy with the Oxford party very important. Anglicanism itself is hardly worth opposing. Those of its members who awake to the importance of living a religious life soon discover that it is an empty form, and enter the Church or seek refuge with the Evangelicals. The real enemy, the only enemy in a religious guise, worth fighting, is Calvinism. It has, in some of its forms, a hold on the people, and sustains itself by the adhesive power of hatred. We should like to see our controversialists turning their attention more generally to this enemy of truth and justice, and attempting to rescue its followers from their fatal delusion. We know they are far gone; we know they are bound in terrible thraldom by their ministers; but we do not believe that they are wholly beyond the reach of truth. Calvinism demolished, Anglicanism is no more.

The author of the work before us, we have said, confines his controversy to the differences between us and the recent Oxford divines. He has the appearance of regarding the concessions made by these divines as concessions made by Protestants generally; but we cannot so regard them. They abridge the controversy between Catholics and Protestants only in the case of those who make them. Protestants are not one body bound together by com. mon principles, which all feel themselves alike under obligation to maintain. Each fights on his own hook, like the tall Yankee at the battle of Yorktown, and will acknowledge no concessions which he does not personally make. Tell him other Protestants have conceded the point, and he replies, "What then? I have not conceded it; and you must defeat me personally before I yield you the victory." Protestants are a heterogeneous mass of individuals, without any common principles or bond of unity. The refutation of one amounts to little, so long as there remains one who has not been personally refuted. The refutation of Jonathan will not be taken as the refutation of Obadiah, though both adopt precisely the same views. There is not a point in Protestantism which some eminent Protestant has not conceded, nor an article of the Church which some eminent Protestant has not defended; and yet the controversy goes on as ever, and over the same ground. If we drive Protestants from one principle, they fly to another; and if we drive them from that, they return without shame to the first. Refutation does not silence them,

"For e'en though vanquished they can argue still."

They are not fair and honorable opponents, and it were to be generous at the expense of justice to treat them as such. They disdain all the ordinary rules of controversy, and to adopt them in our controversy with them would be like the European generals