MonWlarnbert M7 LETTER ADDRESSED TO A EEV. MEMBER OF THE CAMDEN SOCIETY, on the subject of CATHOLIC LITERARY SOCIETIES, ON THE ARCHITECTURAL, ARTISTICAL, AND ARCH«OLOGICAL MOVEMENTS OF .,^--" '^r-, THE PUSEYITES. "^^opS^ BY LE COMTE DE MONTALEMBERT. LIVERPOOL: BOOKEE & Co., 37, BANELAGH STREET. 1844. SEINTED BY BOOKEB AND CO., EANElASa STBEET, lITESroOl, A LETTEE, &c. "Funchal, (Madeira), February 20th, 1844. To THE Rev Member of the Cambridge Camden Society. "The Camden Society having done me the unsolicited and unmerited honour of placing my name among its honorary members, I feel not only authorized, but conscientiously obliged to speak out what I inwardly think of its efforts and gbject : and I am happy to be able to do so, in addressing my self, not only to one of its most influential members, but to one for whom I feel a most lively sympathy, on account of his talent, science, courage, and in deed, of every thmg except what the Church which I believe to be infallible, reproves in him. "I first thought thatthe Camden Society was merely a scientific body, pur suing an object which, like all branches of history, is of the utmost importance to religion, and to which all religious minds could associate, but like the French Comite historique, not setting up the flag of any special ecclesiastical denomi nation. On a nearer study of your pubUcations, I have perceived that they are carried on, with the professed intention of blending together the, interests of Catholic art and of the Church of England, and of identifying the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages iu England with the Anglican schism begun by Henry VIII. and Cranmer, and professed at present by all those who agree to the Thirty-nine Articles. Against this iutention, I, as an honor ary member of the said society, beg to enter my most earnest and most Catholic protest. First, and principally, I protest against the most unwarranted and most unjustifiable assumption of the name o{ Catholic by people and things belong ing to the actual Church of England. It is easy to take up a name, but it is not so easy to get it recognized by the world and by competent authority. Any man, for example, may come out to Madeira and call himself a Montmor ency or a Howard, and even enjoy the honour and consideration belonging to such a name, till the real Montmorencys or Howards hear about it, and de nounce him, and then such a man would be justly scouted from society, and fall down much lower than the lowliness from which he had attempted to rise. The attempt to steal away from us and appropriate to the use of a fraction of the Church of England that glorious title of Catholic, is proved to be an usur pation by every monument of the past and present; by the coronation oath of your sovereigns, by all the laws that have established your Church, even by the recent answer of your own university of Oxford to the lay address against Dr. Pusey, &c., where the Church of England is justly styled the Reformed Pro testant Church. The name itself is spurned at with indignation by the greater half, at least, of those who belong to the Church of England, just as the Church of England itself is rejected with scorn and detestation by the greater half of the inhabitants of the United Kingdom. The judgment of the whole indiffer ent world, the common sense of humanity, agrees with the judgment of the 4 Church of Rome, and with the sense of her 150,000,000 of children, tet &- possess you of this name. The Church of England, who has denied her mother, is rightly without a sister. She has chosen to break the bonds of unity and obedience. Let her, therefore, stand alone before the judgment-seat of God and of man. Even the debased Russian Church, that Church where lay des potism has closed the priest's mouth and turned him into a slave, disdains to recognize the Anglicans as Catholics : even the Eastern heretics, although so sweetly courted by Puseyite missionaries, sneer at this new and fictitious Catholicism. It is repudiated even by your own hero. Laud; whose dying words on the scaffold, according to the -uncontradicted version of contemporary history, •were, I die in the Protestant Faith, as bt law established (a pretty epitaph, by-the-bye, for the life of the future St. William of Canterbury!*) Consistent Protestants and rationalists are more Catholic, in the etymological sense of the word, than the Anglicans ; for they at least can look upon them selves as belonging to the same communion as those who, iu every country, deny the existence of Church authority, or of revealed religion ;, they have at least a negative bond to link them one with another : but that the so-called Anglo-Catholics, whose very name betrays their usurpation and their contra diction, whose doctrinal articles, whose liturgy, whose whole history, are such as to disconnect them from all mankind, except those who are born English and speak English ; that they should pretend, on the strength of their private judgment alone, to be what the rest of mankind deny them to be, will assured ly be ranked amongst the first of the follies of the 19th century. That such an attempt, however, should succeed, is, thank God, not to be expected, unless it should please the Almighty to reverse all the laws that have hitherto directed the course of human events. You may turn aside for three hundred years ta come, as you have done for three hundred years past, from the torrent of living- waters ; but to dig out a small channel of your own, for your own private in sular use, wherein the living truth will run apart from its ever docile and ever obedient children, — that will no more be granted to, you, than it has been to the Arians, the Nestorians, the Donatists, or any other triumphant heresy. "I therefore protest, first, against the usurpation of a sacred name by the Camden Society, as iniquitous ; and I next protest against the object of this society, and all such efforts m the Anglican Church, as absurd. When the clergy and Catholic laymen in France and Germany, when Mr. Pugin and the Romanists of England, labour with all their might to save andrestore the monu ments of their faith, — unworthUy set aside by the influence of that fatal spirit which broke out with the so-called reformation, and concluded with the French revolution, — they know that they are labouring at the same time to strengthen, in an indirect manner, their own faith and practice, which are emaotly, and iden- tieally the same as those followed by the constrilctors of those glorious piles, and by all the artists of Catholic ages : and this object sanctifies their labour. * See Sierologus. 'But is Ibis the -case with the members of the Camden Society ? Not iia the least. They are most of them ministers of the ' reformed Protestant Church as ty law established;' pledged under oath to the thirty -nine articles, which 'were drawn up on puiyose to separate England from Catholic Christendom,* and to protest against all the barbarous superstitions of the dark ages. By attempt ing to re-establish theii chalches, chalices, and vestments, in their original form, they are only setting under the most glaring light the contradiction which exists between their own faith, and that of the men who built Salisbury and York. Surely no man in his senses can [pretend that Dr. Howley and Dr. Mant profess the same faith, and follow the same discipline, and acknowledge the same spiritual head, as WilUam of Wykeham or Gondulph of Rochester : and no man in his senses can deny that Dr. Wiseman and Dr. M'Hale do at least profess to obey the same holy see, to preach the Same doctrines, and to practise the same spiritual rites and sacramenta, as all the English episcopacy of the middle ages. Let, then, the Camden Society.put itself under the autho rity of Dr. M'Hale and Dr. Wiseiftan, and then every thing wUl be right : but as long as they do not, and remain under Dr. Howley and Dr. Mant and their fellows, they are nothing but parodists, and iaconsistent parodists. If St. Dun stan and St. Anselm, St Lanfranc, St. Thomas of Canterbury, or Archbishop Chichely. could be called out of their tombs to resume their crosiers in any English cathedral, their horror would be great at seeing married priests reading English prayers in those desecrated edifices. But assuredly their horror would be much greater still, if ^they were to find, beneath copes [like their own, and at the foot of altars like theirs, and rood lofts with crucifixes, andjevery other exterior identity, these same married priests carrying in their hearts the spirit of schism, glorying in the revolt of their forefathers, and pledged by msu^or^nite to insult and deny that infallible see of St. Peter, from which all those great saints had humbly solicited the pallium, and for whose sacred rights they so nobly fought, and conquered the insular pride and prejudices of their time. " Catholic architecture, and Catholic art in all its branches, are but a frame for the sacred picture of truth. This one holy truth is beautiful and pure, even amidst the worthless clergy and decayed discipline of Funchal, even, and still more so, amidst the missionary dioceses of Polynesia ; although, both here and there, she is deprived of the frame which the humble genius of Catholic gener ations has worked out for her in western Europe. But without her, — or with her, defaced and adulterated by insular pride, — the most beautiful frame is fit for nought but for the antiquary's shop. Supposing the spirit of the Camden Society ultimately to prevail over its Anglican adversaries, — supposing you do • (It is asserted by modem High-Church Anglicans, that the Church of England never re jected the communion of Catholic Christendom, but merely threw off the usurped supremacy of the Roman Pontiff, This assertion is overthrown by the history of the Reformation. It was the unanimous opinion of the British Reformers that the visible Church had apostatized, that her chief bishop was Antechxist, and that communion with her was unlawful. The Homilies of the Church of England assertthis in the most decisive manner. (Vid. Third part of the sermon againstperilof idolatry, p. 324, ed. Oxon. 1831.) For testimonies of individued reformers, and other Anglican divines, see Essays on the Church, p. 323, ed. 1838. See also tbe Archbishop of Canterbury's charge just delivered. one day get every old thing back again, — copes, letterns, rood-lofis, candle sticks, and the abbey lands into the bargain, what will it all be but an empty pageant, like the tournament of Eglington Castle, separated from the reality of Catholic truth and unity by the abyss of three hundred years of schism ? The question, then, is — have you, Church of England, got the picture for your frame ? have you got the truth — the one truth — the same truth as the men of the middle ages.' The Camden Society says, yes: but the whole Christian world, both Protestant and Catholic, says, no : and the Cathohc world adds, that there is no truth but in unity, and this unity you most certainly have not. "Who is to judge between these conflicting assertions, on earth? Before what tribunal, before what assembly, is this most vital cause to be brought forward, to the satisfaction of those who have renounced the jurisdiction of the Holy See, and that of the last oecumenical council? I know of none; but one thing I know, that before whatever earthly tribunal it may be, as well as before the judgment-seat of God in heaven, against the Church of England and her so-called Anglo-Catholics, will appear in formidable array the seven millions of real Catholics, whom you call British and Irish Romanists, and who will thus arraign the Anglicans on the behalf of ten generations of their ancestors, and on their own : — 'For the love of unity and obedience, we have endured from the hands of these pseudo-Catholics every extremity of cruelty, of robbery, and of insult ; we have stood firm through every variety of military, legal, civil, and religious persecution ; in the holes and comers where these persecutors have confined us, we have kept true to every traditional beauty which they would fain now recover, We have nothing to restore, because we have never destroyed anything. We want no erudite quibbles, like No. 90 ; no dissertations on long- forgotten rubrics, to enable us to beUeve in justification by works, or in bap tismal regeneration, to honour the blessed Virgin, to pray for our dear departed. We have never doubted any article of Catholic faith, and never interrupted any practice of Catholic devotion. Here we are with our priests, our monks, and our bishops, and with the flame of Catholic unity, which we have fed with our substance, and with our blood. If these men, who after having robbed us of every temporal good, would fain now rob us of our name, are Catholics, tlim we are not ; then we have been mistaken fools, and not we alone, but thirty-five popes, and all the Cathohc bishops, and all the Catholic nations in the world, who have till now praised us, helped us, loved us, prayed for us and with us, as their brethren. If they are Catholics, then Catholicism is but a shadow and a name, and a paltry vestment, fit to be put on and off at the world's pleasure.' " To this language the Church has answered long ago, in the words of the Divine spouse : ' Oves mece vocem meam audiunt, et ego cognosco eas, et se- quuntur me ; et ego vitam ceternam do eis, et non rapiet eas guisquam de manu mea. " Does the Camden Society, that lays such a stress on history and tradition, think that these mines are closed to every body except itself, or that the world wiU not dive into them for any other purpose than for archaeological or archi- tectural curiosities ? Do the Anglo-Catholics think that the world is blind to their own history ? that the events of the Reformation in England are unknown abroad ? that the word apostacy is effaced from the dictionary of mankind ? " If you had pushed on a little further your Spanish tour, you would have found at Grenada, depicted by the pencil of a monk, the martyrdom of those holy Carthusians of London, who were hanged, disembowelled, and quartered, for having denied the supremacy of the author of Anglo-Catholic Reformation. What ! shall the tombs of unknown knights and burgesses be treated with the deepest reverence, and singled out for admiration and imitation, because they are in brass, or with a cross fleurie, or a dos d'Sne ? and shall the blood of our martyrs be silent, and their noble memory buried in darkness and'oblivion ? Believe it not ; such will not be the case ; no, not even in this world of sin and error, and how much less before the justice of God ? Believe not that we shall ever forget or betray the glory of Fisher, of More, of Gamett, of those abbots who were hanged before the gates of their suppressed monasteries ; of so many hundreds of monks, of Jesuits, of laymen, who perished under the' executioner's knife, from the reign of Henry VIII down to the palmy days of Anglican episcopacy, under the first Stuarts ? Were they not all Romanists ? did they not aU die for the defence of the supremacy of the see of Rome against the blood-thirsty tyranny of Anglican kings 1 Were they not the victims of the same glorious cause which St. Dunstan, St. Elphege, St. Anselm, and St. Thomas had struggled for ? and were they ours or yours ? I know that the modern Anglo-Catholics would attempt to throwback on the Puritans of 1640, most of the sacrilegious devastations that attended the Reformation ; but I know also that Pugin, in that article of the Dublin Review which you were good enough to lend me, has completely demolished that false pretence ; and irrefutably demonstrated, that every sacrilege committed by the Puritans had been inaugurated on a much larger scale by Cranmer and Elizabeth ; and I have looked in vain through all the publications of the Camden Society for one word of answer to this most damning accusation. Has for moral sacrilege, if I may so say, as for the surrender of spiritual independence and Christian free dom to the sanguinary pride of royal theologians, assuredly the Anglo-Catholic fathers of the sixteenth century have surpassed in that respect every example of the kind, both in Pagan and Christian times. That debauched and mur derous tyrant, called Henry VIII, could find his models amongst the monsters who reigned at Rome wMle the Church was in the Catacombs. But the slavish subserviency of the English apostate bishops, to this baptized monster's caprices, has remained'unequalled since their days, as it had been before them. Where was Latimer, that father and martyr of the Anglican Church, en the 30th of May, 1538? preaching at the stake where a Catholic friar was burning, for having denied the king's supremacy over the Church of which Latimer was a bishop ! Where were Cranmer and the other prelates, from whom the mo dem English bishops pretend to derive apostolical succession ? sitting at the council-board of the tyrant, voting in his parliament, helpmg him to butcher Hs wives, his principal nobility, his best and moiSt innocent subjects, and ao- •quiescing iu his judgment against St. Thomas of Canterbury ! Has not Cran mer come down to posterity branded with the monster's eulogium, ' that he was the only man who had loved his sovereign so well, as never to have opposed the royal pleasure?. (Yit. Cranra. MS. apud Legrand, ii, 103.^ "Is there anything, 'even in the annals of continental Protestantism, to be compared to this origin of a Reformed Church ? And has this Church pfurified the dark and bloody stain of its origin by its subsequent conduct ? Was there •ever a Church, except perhaps the Greco-Russian since Peter I, which has so basely acknowledged the supreme right of secular power, the absolute depend ence of spiritual jurisdiction on royal and parliamentary authority, from the days of Cranmer down to Archbishop Whately's last motion on Church govern ment, debated upon, as he says in print, ' with the tacit acquiescence of the whole espiscopal body ? * was there ever a Church, not even eioepthig the Russian, which so completely sacrificed the rights and dignities of the poor to the rich, as the writer of the History of Pues must know better than any one ? Was there ever, under the face of heaven, a more glaring focus of iniquity, oppression, and corruption, than the existence of the Church of England in Ireland, as denounced, not only by the groans of the Catholic victims, or by those foreigners who, like myself, have seen and cursed the abomination in its own den, but by your own authorities, such as Strafford's Correspondence with Laud, and Monk Mason's Life of Bishop Bedell ? Have not these pseudo- Catholic bishops been sitting for centuries as Lords spiritual in a parliament whence has issued that penal code against fellow Christians, the like of which has never been seen or imagined even under the reign of terror and atheism in France ? Have they not for centuries, and without ever lifting up a dissenti ent voice, witnessed, approved, and, for all I know, themselves taken those tremendous oaths against the most sacred mysteries of the faith of the whole Catholic world, both Greek and Latin, in that assembly ' where,' to use the words of an English writer, ' the Holiest of holies has been chosen as the favourite object of the profanest treatment, and pierced day after day by the jeer of the scoffer ; where alone denial of the blessed Eucharist has been made a public, a legal, a national, a royal act ; and where more impious blasphemies have been uttered, more sacrileges committed, more peguries pronounced, against the divine sacrament than in the whole world besides?' And shall these men, forsooth, be acknowledged by us as our brethren, or as our spiritual fathers ? Shall the perpetrators and inheritors of these unexpiated, imrepented, unforgiven sins, come in quietly and sit down among the Catholic churches and nations of the world, with bundles of tracts about hierurgical antiquities and monumental brasses under their arms : and shall we not one and all arise to reject and expel them ? God forbid that we should do otherwise ! There is a place in the Catholic Church for public penitents, whence many saints have risen on the wings of humility and contrition to the glorious eminence of an Augustine .: but there is no place for proud sinners, who would shake off the chams of isolated error, without confessing their guilt and that of their forefathers. " I dislike every mixture of nationality with Catholicity; and the fatal ex ample of England is well calculated to justify this dislike in every Catholic heart. But I causot, in this circumstance, refrain from reverting, -with legiti mate pride, to the difference between the conduct of the English bishops of the sixteenth century, and that of the French hierarchy, when exposed in 1790 to the fury of a, much more formidable tyrant than Henry VIII, to the whole French nation. The French bishops of that period were far from being saints or ascetics ; their high birth had been generally the only reason for their pro motion. They had to struggle, not like the English bishops, at the issue of long ages of faith, of devotion, of popular enthusiasm for the Church ; but after more than two long centuries of secular invasion and monarchial despotism. Their people were not, like the people of England, up in arms for their monas teries and their orthodoxy ; but, on the contrary, had been intoxicated during a hundred years by the poison of scepticism and philosophical scurrility. Last ly, the Gallican Church was not, like the Anglican, the immediate daughter of the see of Rome: she had not been founded by a papal legate in the sixth cen tury, but by St. IrensBus, St, Denis the Areopagite, and other disciples of the Apostles. The reformation whioh was imposed on her, was not obedience to a theological tyrant, but a pretended return to the primitive Church, giving the election of bishops to the people, and allowing them to communicate with the holy see. And yet, out of a hundred and thirty-six French bishops, four alone betrayed their tmst ; the hundred and thirty-two others gladly went forth to imprisonment, to exile, to death. When you go to Paris, pray visit the Carmes, an ugly, insignificant, low, square-built, modem chapel, without any vestige of archaeological symbolism, but where the pavement is still red with the blood of the bishops and priests, who were murdered there for having refused the oath to the civil constitution of the clergy.* There you will learn at what price a national Church can purchase the rights of talking about apostolical succession, and styling itself ' a branch of the Church Catholic' "But now let me suppose that the Camden Society and the new Anglo- Catholic school have both gained their point; that liturgy, architecture, and theology, are brought back precisely to the point they were, at the close of the reign of Henry VIII, when, as Dr. Lingard so justly says, ' to reject the papal creed was heresy, and to admit the papal supremacy was treason.' Supposing all this, what will you have gained after all ? Nothing at all, I should say, grounding myself on Mr. Newman's own words. Does he not say, ' We can not hope for the recovery of dissenting bodies, while we are ourselves alienated from the great body of Christendom. We cannot hope for unity of faith, if we, at uur own private will, make » fnith for our selves, in this our small corner of the earth. We cannot hope for the success among the heathen of St. Augustine or St. Boniface, unless, like them, we go * See the British Critic, No, LXIV., p, 286-288., 10 forth with the apostoUcal benediction. Break unity in one pomt, and the fault runs through the whole body.' (Sermons bearing on subjects of the day, 1843, pp. 149-50.) But when the work in which you are engaged shall be achieved, you will be as far from unity as ever, and you will only have alienated your Church, from the great body of Protestant Christendom, to which you were formerly accounted to belong, by that general feeling which led the poor king of Prussia to give you his Protestant money and Protestant sympathies, in order to endow Protestant bishoprics in Syria. But you vrill not have come one step nearer to unity, because, as Mr. Newman says; 'Break unity in one point,' &c. . . . The Greek Church has been at the point you aspire to ever since the eleventh century ; and can any thing be further from unity with the Latin Church than she in the nineteenth ? Every Catholic will repeat to you the words of Manzoni, as quoted by Mr. Faber : ' The greatest deviations are none, if the main point be recognized; the smallest are damnable heresies, if it be denied. That main point is, the infallibility of the Church, or rather of the pope.' The Coptic, Maronite, and Catholic Armenian Churches, although differing in every thing outward from the Church of Rome, are in unity, since they acknowledge her supreme authority. The Anglican Church, even brought back to the most Catholic externals, can never be in imity as long as she denies her legitimate mother. " One thing quite certain is, that individuals or Churches cannot be both Catholic and Protestant; they must choose between one and the other. In politics, in literature, transactions and compromises are advisable, and indeed are often the only tiling possible ; but in religion, in eternal truth, there is none. Notwithstanding Dr. Jelf, there will never be any via media between truth and error, between authority and rebellion, no more than there is between heaven and hell. If Fisher was right, then was Cranmer wrong; they cannot be both right, both the murderer and the victim. If Archbishop Plunkett was a mar tyr, then Archbishop Laud was not. If the Church of France is to be admired for having held out against schism through martyrdom and exile then, the Church of England must be blamed for having given way to schism. It is like the ostrich, that thinks it saves itself from the hunter by refusing to look at him, to say that the present English Church is a holy although less distinguished branch of the Church than that of Rome. If the Church of Rome, when she maintains that out of her pale there is no salvation, and that she alone has the power of governing the Christian world, is not infallibly right, then she is in fallibly wrong ; and so far from being a distinguished branch of truth, she is founded on imposture or error ; and in neither case can be a true Church. On the other hand, if the Church of England is not the only true Church on earth, then she is an apostate rebel. " There is only one sure way of passing from error to the one sure truth ; that which St. Remigius showed to the first Christian king of France. When baptizing him, he said, ' Bow thy head, proud Sicamber; burn what thou hast adored, and adore what thou hast burned.' 11 " It is trae that to reconciled and forgiven rebellion may be granted certain privileges, as conformable to the weakness of a fallen Church. The Anglican Church may demand what was granted in 1595 to the united Greeks of Poland — ^the degrading exception of married clergy, and the use of the national lan guage in the Liturgy. These concessions are not incompatible with the essentials of faith or authority; but they would make the re-united Church of England sadly different from what she was in the days of St. Dunstan or St. Anselm. " I am not a doctor, nor a minister of the Church ; I am only her soldier, faithful though unworthy. But I can fearlessly assert that among the millions who belong, like me, to the Church of Rome, there is not one who, being led by leizure or duty to consider attentively what is now going on in England, would arrive at a different conclusion from mine. Seeing the profound igno rance which reigns among even the best informed Anglicans (such as Mr- Faber) on the feelings and duties of churchman out of England — seeing also the furious prejudices which animate the new school against English and Irish Catholics, probably on the old pagan principle of Odisse quern laseris, I have presumed to think that it might not be quite useless to you to hear the opinion of a continental Catholic, than whom no one can be more interested in England's welfare, or more attentive to her present struggles. Fas est et ab hoste doceri . " Need I beg of you to acquit the warmth and asperity of my language of any intention of personal disrespect to you? No, surely not. I have much too high an opinion of you not to be certain that you will perfectly understand the motives that have dictated my words ; and I hope that you will see on the contrary, a mark of deep respect on my part for your turn of mind and your personal character. I have written to you as to a man who knows the value of truth and the value of a soul. I should certainly not have done so to most members of your schism. Although taught by conscience and authority to look upon the Church of England as one of the most awful forms of sin and pride that have ever appeared in the world, I have loved and esteemed several of her children. I feel a compassionate sympathy for those of her ministers who know the weight of their present degradation. But, at the same time, I feel a most legitimate "terror for the fate of their souls, when I see them, after having removed the rubbish which their forefathers had piled up to the very clerestory of the church, close their eyes against the light which, from the past and present, is now powering down upon them. They are thus losing that invincible ignorance, which is the only reason which the Church admits for not belonging to her ! This feeling has inspired me with the thought of thus writ ing to you. This feeling must plead my excuse, if I have wounded your feelings. Indeed, I wish I may have done so. Trath is a weapon intended to wound and destroy everything that is not truth. Non veni pacem mittere sed gladium. Convinced as I am that you do not belong, as you say I do, to a dis tinguished branch of the Church, but that you are in error, and that wilful error is mortal sin, I have spoken for the love of your immortal soul. If I have done so roughly, it is the roughness of love. Is there not more charity in 12 pulling roughly back a man who is on his way to perdition, than in bowing him civilly on to the brink of the precipice ? " This letter requires no answer. We are not called upon to carry on a controversy with each other. The ground on which we stand is unequal, and the odds between us would be xmeven. To convert you, as well as all heretics, is and must be my desire, but not my province. To convert me can neither be your province nor your desire. You cannot look upon me as being in a state of rebellion, as I do you. What would become of me, if I was to be convinced of the truth and right of the Church of England ? I must then immediately doubt the truth and right of the Church of France, which acts and teaches the very reverse; for what is true and right on the north of the Channel cannot surely be otherwise on the south. And yet, according to the principles laid down by Mr. Faber and the British Critic, supposing myself convinced of the error and misconduct of my own Church, I must wait till she recognizes it herself, before I have a right to act up to what I think true, and to save my ovra soul. Alas 1 what a lamentable nondescript sort of thing I shouldbe ! " Our position is, therefore, quite different. The faith I profess, the authority I obey, the holy sacrifice of mass at which I assist, the very prayers 1 daily say, are fitted for you, for me, for the Portuguese ox-driver who is passing under our windows as well as for the savage who is at this moment being baptized in Oceania. Your faith, yqur spiritual superiors, your liturgy, can be of no use but to those who are English bora and English bred. This shall be my last argument, for it would alone suffice to show which of us is the Catholic. You cannot, in conformity, with your own doctrine, wish me to be -whid you are. I can, and indeed I must, wish you to be what / am. Toyou I can say, like Paul to Agrippa, ' Opto apud Deum et in modico et inmagno. .