spread like a net over all England, the augury and presage of a "second spring"! Meanwhile, in the poorest quarters of our cities, a Catholic population grows up, and the English people have learnt to see in the dreaded Popish priest no foreign political agent, but only a quiet, hard-worked clergyman, with a definite work of mercy and love to fulfil, rewarded not by State emolument, but only by the gratitude and affection of his people. Poor they are, these Irish, and alas! too often not exemplary, nay, scandalous, if you will, in their lives; every workhouse and every gaol knows them, and the Protestant wealth and power and fanaticism of the nation buys the weak and breaks down the strong, in many and many an instance; but still, it is the great wave of Irish emigration, Irish faith, and love, and zeal, which has carried the Ark of God, His Name, His Priesthood, and His adorable Presence, to many a resting-place in town and country-side, where they had been unknown for three dreary centuries. Now, the reason why I couple these two emigrations together, is not merely because they synchronize—which is also a symptom of a Divine disposition to my mind-but because they resemble each other in the matter of causality so far as this, that neither of those causes to which they are referable-viz., the French Revolution in the one case, and Orange rule and corruption in the other-were placed by their respective authors, to say the least, with any intention or wish whatsoever to produce, however remotely, any results favourable to the propagation of the Catholic religion in England, or any

where else.

6. And if you will allow me but one other illustration of this sort of discrepancy between man's intentions and God's results, where can I better find it than in the history of that later stage of the religious movement of our times, to which so many of us directly owe the benefit of conversion to the Faith? Who, including the Right Honourable Edward Smith Stanley, M.P., and Orange Under-Secretary for Ireland in 1833, would have supposed that by the suppression and amalgamation of certain useless Protestant Bishoprics in Ireland, he and his Tory compeers, were evoking a spirit in certain quiet college precincts in Oriel and Merton Lanes, and thereabouts, which was so soon to rend their old garments with new patches, and burst their old bottles with new wine; a spirit as subtle as it is potent, a discerner of the thoughts and intents of so many hearts, past, present, and to come?

Space warns me to say but a very few words on some remaining topics, of which the first shall be the martyrdoms and sufferings of our Catholic forefathers. If we reflect merely on the undoubted fact that, as was said of old, "the blood of martyrs is the seed of the Church," it would seem that our land

which was so copiously watered with that fecundating dew, would certainly some day reap a great harvest from it; but I venture to think that a circumstance connected with the great majority of these martyrdoms gives us a special ground for hoping that this harvest of conversion would take a national or political form. I mean the circumstance that almost all the Elizabethan martyrs, and those of the succeeding reigns also, seem to have been inspired to express in their last moments ardent feelings of loyal adherence to the civil power which was so cruelly misused. No doubt this was a protest on their part against the false account which the persecutors tried to give of the cause of their sufferings. They were alleged to be traitors and to be suffering as such, and not as martyrs to the old faith, and so they loudly protested that this was a calumny, as indeed it was; but I look on it also as the registration before God and man of their willingness to suffer if their blood might by Him be accepted as crying from English ground for the conversion of the nation and polity in whose name and by whose ruler this wrong was being inflicted on them.

7. Next, as to conversions to the faith at the present time, I would remark that I am not disposed to think the number of conversions which we know are occurring at the present time, is such as to constitute a great ground of hope of the national return, merely from the point of view of number. Though absolutely considerable, relatively speaking to the whole population of the country, the number is but small; yet here again there is a circumstance not without significance. A "nation" is not constituted by a mere mob or aggregation of people without organization or ordered common life. To make the nation there must be a government, and whatever form it takes must be the result of the adhesion of the great moral corporation which embody the primary ideas and functions of civil order. Property, education, law, religion, legislation and administration, relations with other nations, and the means of repelling force by force, represent the chief characteristic interests of a civilized people, and find their expression in the great moral bodies or members of the State. If conversions not relatively numerous were confined to one or other only of these moral corporations, no doubt there would be so far no room for hopeful anticipations as to a national return to the faith; but if, on the other hand, such conversions, though few, were distributed through the whole of these interests or corporations, and form a group, as it were, of specimens of each and all, they put on another character and give just cause for other inferences. S. Thomas teaches that the test of a genuine national adhesion to, or rejection of, a given government, is not the test of mere numbers, but that of the mind of the great constituent moral members of the State.

Hence the existence of Catholics who are so, not by what is called the accident of birth, but by conviction and at the price of sacrifice have become Catholics, in any proportion in each of these members, is pro tanto an argument for the possible return of the whole. Now which of our classes in the hierarchy of civil order is quite free from the return of "Popery"? Neither the senate nor the house of knights and burgesses returned by shire or city or borough to Parliament, nor the established Church, nor the Universities, nor the bar and magistrature, nor the colleges of physicians, nor the army, nor the navy, nor the diplomatic service, nor any other branch of the public administration-all and each have paid and are paying Peter's pence in kind-the souls which his net is ever ready to gather out of the deep. It has been objected that, as some one put it, we have converted "Scottish duchesses but no English grocers," that is, that the middle and lower classes afford no contingent of conversions in proportion to their numbers. I grant it is so at present; but, on the other hand, I see that with a great show of independence, there are no people so accessible to aristocratic influence as the English, and no society in which a perpetual and wide process of natural selection from the lower strata goes on so constantly and rapidly. I see it in the past and I see more of it in the future. Thread your way through the carriages of the great to Mrs. Metals' afternoons in Park Lane, and you may see not one but many besides herself, whose genealogy is, if not forgotten yet forgiven, not only for their wealth's sake but for that of their real culture and refinement. They are recruits of the classes who recruit us, and their roots reach low down. Moreover, if it is true that hitherto these conversions are found only in the upper strata of our society, and as yet no signs appear of a mass movement-surely we must not forget that it was from above, from the noble and wealthy, that the ruin and decay of faith began, and unless (which is not alleged) our race and nation are completely changed in the last three centuries, it is by an analogous process that they are likely to be restored. Besides, it is not true that our converts are not only personally typical and representative, but also for the most part influential, so that scarcely one but can trace to his or her influence the further result of one or more other conversions to the faith. I say "her" because the influence of mothers is so wide and so enduring, and the proportion of female converts is said by our adversaries to be unduly large. I trust, and I thank God, that such is indeed. the case.

8. Next I would mention as a ground for hopes of a national return the instincts of the faithful in all countries. It is a well known maxim of the spiritual writers that when God wills to

bestow a grace He prompts holy people to ask it of Him by ardent and persistent prayer and mortification. I am not now speaking so much of that more external leading whereby He causes His elect to repay services rendered to Him by intercession; of this we all know many instances have been afforded by the devout cloistered and uncloistered souls in France, who repaid, and are still repaying, the hospitality of England during the Revolution by ardent prayer for her conversion-I mean rather to allude to those instances, of which the number is no doubt great though to us unknown, of holy men and women who had no personal knowledge or connection with our country, but yet were moved to pray all their life long for her return, such as were in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the holy nun, Maria Escobar, and the saintly lady Theresa de Carvajal in Spain, or in the last century Saint Paul of the Cross in Italy. Similarly I would refer to the instincts of the Holy See in such acts as the erection of the Hierarchy in 1850; or, again, in the nomination, unparalleled in all history, of three Englishmen to the Cardinalate at one time, and of no less than eight English-speaking Cardinals within our own memory. Whence are these promptings, and what can be the meaning of them?

Let me advert here to the objection urged from the present aspect of a very large section of the community who form what is called the extreme High Church, or Ritualist School of Anglicans. I grant that they present an aspect of apparently increasing hostility to the Catholic Church which is at first discouraging to our hopes, raised as they were some quarter of a century ago to a high pitch by the early results of the Tractarian movement; but, once more, the miraculous apart, how is it conceivable that the frozen soil, hardened by three centuries of neglect and error, should break forth into one vast garden of fruits and flowers in the course of less than one half-century of partial and uncertain thaw? To expect this seems to me to mistake the whole teaching of our history, and to substitute for the warranted and sober inference from facts, a heated, fanciful theory which it is as easy to demolish as it was pleasant to build up. If there is one truth which I seem to see broadly written on the past Reformation history of our religion and country it is this-that the wisdom and goodness of God are as conspicuous in regard to us as are His justice and chastisement and judgments for our national sins; and that in nothing are the former more evident than in the Divine attribute of patience as shown in the long waiting for us, both individually and collectively, to return to Him. No one alleges, either that the Almighty is bound to bring back our nation by miracle, or that He is actually doing it by that means. Now, whatever may be the destiny of individual souls

(of which we know nothing), it is certain that if a large number of the Ritualists, say some thousands, were at once to submit to the Church, the movement, whatever its final results may now be, would in that case, humanly speaking, end; for no conscientious adherent of Anglicanism would continue in a course which would thus have been demonstrated to lead directly to Rome. I believe that the hope of a national return is, on the contrary, wrapped up in a gradual, almost insensible, extension to the whole people of a knowledge of Catholic doctrine, so that when the hour of God's decree is come, and the conditions required are ready, they may yield themselves to the impulse of His illuminating and fostering grace, and that this extension can only be effected, as it is now being effected, by the instrumentality of causes operating for the most part and at present, outside the visible corporation of His Church.

9. And here let me call your attention to the fact, which I think is evident, that the direct influence of the Visible Church in England is remarkably absent in the various movements (especially those of a preparatory kind) on which we have touched. Even in the case of the emigrés it does not appear that they were what is called "proselytizers;" they contented themselves with letting the light of a fameless example shine before men, and they conquered, where they conquered at all, more by endurance of contradiction and outrage than by aggressive or demonstrative act or speech. I heard but the other day of an instance, in the person of a poor emigré priest who, being recognized by three fanatical youths as a foreigner and Papist, was by them actually put to death by drowning in the Thames, near Reading. As he disappeared beneath the waters, he raised his hands to Heaven and audibly prayed that God would not let his murderers die without knowing the truth. Two of them died soon after; but the third, to the amazement of his relations, insisted on seeing a priest on his death-bed, and then narrated to him these facts, and implored to be instructed in the Catholic faith, stating that the remembrance of his victim's meek end and prayer had never left him; and accordingly he was able to make his abjuration, and died a Catholic, and in the best dispositions. Other such instances may be known, but as a rule it is true to say, that all the modern conversions are owing to the immediate operation of the Holy Ghost on minds and souls, and that we have had but little or no direct impression made upon us by the Catholic Church in England. It would seem as if no person or persons were to be wholly credited with a work so eminently that of God's Holy Spirit. I do not overlook certain great names, chiefly of converts, who have had a direct influence on others, which must be in all our minds as exceptions to this statement: