AN ASH WEDNESDAY LESSON.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XI, Issue 7, 8 June 1883, Page 23

AN ASH WEDNESDAY LESSON.

(From the Tuam News.) Whbbb I are our Government solicitors now ? Have they gone to England to prosecute those English intimidators ? If not, when, it may be aakei, do they intend to set out ? And hare they informed the Tuam News that while there they will kill the two birds with the one stone by also prosecuting to conviction the editor and the proprietor of the London Times for intimidation and libel? Xhii was the work to which Ash Wednesday was dedicated by that rirulent paper. It says :— m " The lower ranks of the priesthood have broken loose from the influence of their superiors in age and dignity, and it is even believed witn sorrow and shame by the better sort of their coreligionists that some priests have abandoned their sacred office to concoct false declarations of innocence by dying criminals with the design of castine discredit on the law ! Now, what is the '• design "of this infamous, coarse and malignant calumny? Does the London Times think that because some of its admirers and clients jn Ireland ride roughshod over the people, trample on liberty and law, according to their own coarse natures, that, therefore by such brutal and atrocious calumnies it can succeed in starring up the very worst passions of the Saxon and Irish hirelings and hangers-on of England to induce them to engage in a massacre of the Irish clergy ? The Crown Solicitor for Galway is, it is said, a prudent and learned man, and he knows that until the London Timea shall have been brought to trial, love or respect for English law is impossible in Ireland. But pending such prosecution, may we ask are those the London plotters who scud emissaries to Kome to blacken the character of the Irish Catholic clergy to the Holy Father so as to induce him to curtail their political aud personal liberty j O'Connell whenever praised by the same scurrilous and murderous print used always to examine his conscience to see in what he had sinned against his country or interests to entitle him to the good opinion of her unrelenting and unscrupulous foe. It would not be amiss if the Irish Catholic bishops and dignitaries should now follow O'Connell's example. The Irish peoplewill be anxious to know what has been done to earn the good opinion of that infamous organ of English Freemasons.