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New Zealand Tablet, Volume XIII, Issue 46, 12 March 1886, Page 1

Current Topics

AT HOME AND ABROAD.

CATHOLIC DEVOTION.

We informed our readers last wee v that we were about to publish a pamphlet compiled from the volumes of the N.Z. Tablet for some years, and containii.g the testimony of Protestants and Freethinkers to the sanctity of the Catholic Church, as shewn by t tie deeds and sufferings of its numbers. We have been engaged during the week on the work in question, and, having found it even more interesting than we anticipated, we have resolved without further delay to place a specimen of it before our readers. It is that relating to the devotion of Catholics inspired by then holy religion, and following up its teichiog in their lives :— The Edinburgh Ihvieiv for October, 1878. contains an article entitled "The Jesuit Martyrs." from which we take the following :— The Bull of Excommunication found nailed to the door of the Bishop of London's palace on the morning of May 15, 1570, was considered a declaration of war on the part of Rome. An Act of Parliament was accordingly pissed making the exercise of the Catholic priest's duties in England, or the acceptance of his ministrations, a capital (ffence, The first priest appre" bended was Father Cuthbert Mayne, taken in 1577 at the house tf a Cornish gentleman, Francis Tregian ; he suffered the horrib'e penalties of hightrtason, and Tregian'B property was confiscated. The following Spring two more Seminarists (Priests of Douaj) were executed at Tyburn. An invasion of England was feared, and the Government was thoroughly alaimed ; in the Summer of 1378, during a royal progress through the country, more than one recusant was summarily dealt with. In 1580 a Jesuit mission came to Fngland, Parsons arriving on the 11th, and Campion on the 24th of June. llt would be hard to say that Parsons waa not a man of deep and earnest religion,' says the writer. ' All that we know of him proves the reverse. But he was et-sentially the political Jesuit. . . . Campion's Bule aim was, as he insisted on his trial, and as is proved by his whole career, to bring back to the Papal f Id all whom he could influence.' A year after his arrival in England, Campion was betrayed to the pursuivants at Lyford, in Berkshire, together with two other priests. Thence he and his companions were sent, under a strong guard, to London, being well treated on the way until they reached Colebrook, about ten miles from the metropolis, where their elbows, hands, and legs were bound in a cruel manner, and in Campion's hat was stuck a paper on which waa written 'Campion, the seditious Jesuit.' The Council afterwards ordered him to be tortured, and he was three times stretched on the rack, which, though illegal, was then commonly used in England. At his trial he was found guilty, and the Lord Chief Justice pronounced sentence of death, with all the fearful penalties of high treason. The sentence was carried out at Tyburn. Henry Walpole, who was converted by witnessing Campion's execution, afterwards joined the Jesuits, and, having already suffered much during an imprisonment as a priest in Flanders, he came to England, where he arrived in December, 1593 The laws against the Catholics were at that time being vigorously enforced — especially in Yorkshire, where every year saw one or more priests put to death, and where Margaret Clitherow, on being accused of h&rbouring priests and refusing to plead, had bsen condemned to suffer the princ forte ft dtirp, and was actually crushed to drath in accordance with the sentence. Walpole, under the infliction of repeated torture, waa weak enough to write a document betraying his cause; for this, however, he afterwards atoned. His confession did not save him. He was tortured terribly even after it was made, and at length he was brought to trial and condemned to death. Attempts were made by influential persons to save his life, but, on the President's desiring his friends to ask him whether if the Pope forbade him to pray for the Queen be would do bo, he answered ' he might not, nor would not.' Another priest, Father Alexander Rawling-j, also condemned to death, had accompanied him to the scaffold, and being executed first, his body was shown to Father Walpole, in the hope the sight might turn him from his resolution, but all to no purpose. Their last temptation was the question what he thought of the Queen's supremacy, to which he answered, ( She doth challenge it, but I may not grant it.' Then when he had said the Pat or Xoxtt r nd waa beginning the Av> Maria, thej put bini to death. The

T eviewer, alluding to "Me Rev. Dr. Jessopp, Head Master of King Edward Vl. 's School <rT Js^rwich, and to a book written by him concerning these Caf^ta martyrs, says, " We can well believe his assertion that, as the Npft proceeded, the England of Queen Elieabeth's days became to him an altogether different land from the England he had formerly imagined it to be : and that the conflict with Rome gradually unfolded itself aa a problem which must remain unintelligible to the merely political h!storianl"^-M. O^eniir d'Haussonville, in one of the 6eries of papers written by him in 1878 in the Revue d<'s Dcmx Mandea on Childhood in Paris, gives the following instance. It lelates to the house of the " Good Shepherd," conducted by the Sisters of St. Thonns do Villaneuve-a refuge for falkn women, burned by the Communists in 1871 :— " On May 23 it was seized by a band of furious wretches, wbo prepared to set it on fire. The Superioress caused the inmates to leave at once, and she herself stood at a narrow door through which they one by one passed, resolved, like the captain of a wiecketl skip, to be the last to quit the scene of danger. She saw the fire making rapid progress, and under her eyis one of the wild beasts tried to soak a Sister's clothes in letroleum in order to burn her to death. The flock, uttder the eire of their guardian nun*, wandered for two days through the town seeking an rsslum, find when at last they were reoeived into a prira'e bouse of the Faubouig St. GcrmaiD, rot one of them iqas found missing." In his concluding paper, published on April 15, 1879, M. d'Haussonville giws the following illustration of the devo'ion of the Sisters of Wisdom in the severe prison, known as the Central House, at Clermont :— " For example, there is a vast penthouse upon which open the kitchen and other offices of the priscn and through which the prisoners are frequently obliged to pass. As they are forbidden to speak to one another, a nun is stationed in this pent-house to keep guard over them, and there t-he stands motionless from five in the morDing until eight in the evening, exposed to all the variations of the weather. By this it may be judged how strictly the members uf the Order parform their duties." — During the yellow fever in the Southern States in 1878, the priests and nuns behaved splendidly. A correspondent of the New Yoik Sun, writing from Orenada on August 111, says, " I cannot omit mentioning the heroism of the Sisters of Charity. Their ministrations are tireleßS ; their temper is never ruffled in the least by sleepless nights, spare diet, and constantly attending to the pettish demands of the sick and witnessing the agouies of the dying. Where they sleep or eat I could not divine. I saw the same faces around day and night, and again at dawn. They carry medicines about with them, work like bees ia disinfecting housts, and have a magical faculty of raking up clean linen and bedclothes in out of the way places. I also saw several clergymen who were behaving in a very disinterested way, one of whom had not removed his clothes for three consecutive nights. It is not possible to describe the harrowing incidents of the fatal pestilence at Grenada. It is a blighted, forsaken and doomed town." Among the telegrams to the Press at the time were these :— " Among the deaths are Sister Loreto M'Kenzie and Sister Mary Keenan, at the Charity Hospital. Both have been unremitting attendants on yellow fever patients.'' " The Very Rev. Joseph Millet, Vicar-General of the Diocese of New Oilcans, is dangerously ill with the fever." " Fathers Bokel and Meagher at Memphis are dying. Two fathers and two brothers at the Franciscan monastery are down." '• Father Walshe, of St. Bridget's, and Father McGarvey of St. Peter's (Memphis), aredead." "Among the new cases at Memphis is the Mother Superior of La Salette. Father Martin is dead." (Father Millet also died.)-» The correspondent of the London Times, writing from Pietermaritzburg on July 17, 1879, speaks as follows :—" Upon the village-green of LaJy smith is the Dutch church at present devoted to the purposes of a central hospital. . . . Surgeon Major Babington has now about 60 patients under bis care. Only six of these are wounded men, the rest are suffering from various maladies, principally! thoagh, from fever. . . . Quietly and unostentatiously labouring to sootne and tend the sick are five Sisters of Mercy from Bloemfontein. Snrgeon-Major Babington spoke in terms of the highest praise about the assistance they had rendered him, and the benefit his patients derived from their cheering presence and womanly care."— From a private letter written by Mr. John Abbott of Holly Springs, to Major S. F- Power of Natchez, and published in the Natche* Democrat we take following extract, relating to the yellow fever in 1878 :— " Major, you know that of late years I have been tnqtfc

opposed to priests and preachers, but that beautiful feature in the Catholic Church, the Sisters of Charity, God bless them, has changed me. I hap witnessed so much goodness in their devotion to the tick in our hospitals, that I shall always love and respect them. I had the honour of serving them with their meals and mingled with them in their good work, and necessarily became acquainted with them. It is bat a few days since I followed Sister Laurentia, the sixth one to the grave, andscattered flowers over all. In strolling through i>he hospital, my attention was called to some writing on the wall. It was the tribute of a noble man R. M. Dr. Swearingham of Austin, Texas, then in charge to Sister Corinthia, who died on Oct* 2, 1878. I will give it to you. It speaks for itself. ..." Within this room, October 2, 1878. Sister Corinthia sank into the sleep eternal. Among the first of the Sisters to enter this holy realm of death, she was the last, save one, to leave. The writer of this humble notice saw her in health, gentle but strong, as she moved with noiseless step and serene smiles, through the crowded wards. He saw her when the yellow-plumed angel threw his golden shadows over the last sad soene, andjeyes unused to weeping gave the tribute of tears to the brave and beautiful Spirit « of Mercy/ "—The Riverside vieitor writing in Good Word*, at the end of 1879, tells us that " Many * (rood priest has been fatally stricken while doing duty in a " Little Ireland," that is an Irish settlement in some English town. — The Bey. author of " Untrodden Spain," an Anglican clergyman— ln writing of the lunatic asylum at Cadiz says, " I could but thank God that I had not to look upon such a sight every day. Yet one more thought arose. How noble, how devoted, how Christian-like, is the lite of these Sisters, some of them of tender age and gentle birth, who spend their whole lives among these, the unhappiest, the most effiicted, the most hopeless of all the human race, and that without reward | M — <" What struck me most in the whole of our excursion, he writes again, " was the uniform gentleness of the different Sister 8 of Mercy we met in the course of our visit, without exception, one and all brought a smile with them into the wards of the hospital, where sickness and death were struggling for the mastery— all had kind words for their self-imposed charges ; and every little child in the foundling, every poor creature in the mad-house, and every ■offering patient in the hospital, wore a smile on their faces when one of the Sisters approached. Thank God that there are such women, who, to help their suffering brethren, will leave all behind, and suffer themselves, as we know they must suffer ! May God reward them and bless them and their work." (Vol. 11., chap. IV.) — The Moniteur Orleanai* in the autumn of 1880, recounts the boldness of the Parish priest at Lunay, who confronted a raging maniac in a cabaret where he was doing all sorts of damage, no one daring to interefere with him.— The priest coming up entered the house fearlessly and calmed the unfortunate man. — Another prieat named Voisin, at Mereville plunged into the canal and saved a young man who was drowning. — The newspaper states that he is noted for his indefatigable labours during visitations of the cholera, typhus fever* smallpox, or any other disease.— A writer in the Revue des Devx Mondet of June 15, 1881, speaks thus of the Franciscans in Palestine : — "Nothing wearied them. They died by the hundred ; some of misery, some by the sword of the Turks there where Jesus died ; but, according as those in advance fell, new ones arrived, and the ranks of this peaceful army, which continually received wounds without eve r inflicting them, always remained c impact. . . . God only wai the witness of their noble actions : they had neither the consolation of glery, nor that of brilliant success ; but if to devote himself to a generous illusion, and sacrifice his life to a sublime madness . . . constitutes the true dignity of man, the last of the crusades, the unarmed crusade of the Franciscans, is the finest of all, and that which deserves to be celebrated with the most emotion. In the winter of 1879-80 the Roman correspondent of the Daily New* reported the rescue of a pirty of travellers in a siowstorm at night on the Alps by the monks of 8t Bernard, Fathers Ange'o and Eugenio'Carron, Rausis and Fellay. " Nothing," said the correspondent, " but the heroism of the poor monks of the hospice could have saved them." — A writer in a Protestant paper published at Bolton in 1881, refers as follows to the lepers in Trinidad :—": — " They are attended in the most devoted and loving manner by French Catholic Sisters of Mercy, who have given up a), friends, home, pleasures, everything, and have come out to an almost deadly climate to attend these poor creatures affected with the most horrible disease that it is pofsible to conceive. I cannot speak too highly of the devotion of these truly saintly woman. I feel it a duty and a pleasure to testify to the earnest, loving labour of the Roman Catholic Church in trie island of Trinidad, and especially would wish to say that mire complete self-sacrifice, more total aelf-forgetfuloess, more noble surrender to a painfully arduous duty cannot possibly be conceived than that shown by the Sisters of Mercy in the leper hospital of Trinidad." — Among the professors at Saint- Sul pice, of whom M. de R°nan speaks in his reminiscences of his youth, is to bo found M. Gottofrey who, he says, had all the qualities to make him an accomplished man of the world, but who had devoted his life with all the spirit of a martyr to religion. " For want of martyrdom," says M. de Renan, " he

•ourted death bo well that this cold bride, the only one he loved, finished by taking possession of him. He went to Canada. The cholera which ringed at Montreal in 1846 offered him a fine opportunity to satisfy bis thirat. He nursed the choleia patients with phrensy and died."— On March 1, 1880, the French Minister for the Navy stated in the Senate that Mgr. Duboin, Vicar- Apostolic of Senegal, who had been in Paris on sick leave, had left for Africa on learning that pestilence bad broken out there.— Six missionary Fathers and fourteen nuns died in attending on the plague-ttricken people.— ln May, 1880, the Otago Daily Times published the following from its special correspondent:-*' Another plague with which these (the Sandwich) islands are cursed is that of leprosy. To such an extent are its ravages felt that it has been found necessary to isolate the lepers in a small island. There are about 300 of these victims there now. No person affected is ever allowed to leave this quarantine until death releases him. . . . One noble Catholic priest lives in the island to minister to the spiritual needs of the •offerers. He volnnteered to go knowing that once there he would never be allowed to leave."— M. Victorien Sardou, the well-known dramatist, in reporting in JBBO on the distribution of the Montyon i prizes for virtue speaks as follows .— " M. L'Abbe Lambert has devoted himself to the moral instruction of deaf mutes. . . • Without letting himself be repulsed by the difficulties before which his predecessors had drawn back for more than fifty years, he composed and had printed a whole method of language by gesture. . . . He has besides published an entire special course fox the complete instruction of adult and illiterate deal mutes who could no longer b 3 admitted into the schools. . . . This giant's work. ... is not only the fruit of many years of reflection and work, but also of great pecuniary sacrifices. . . . In a word it may be said, that since the time of the holy Abbe de 1' Epee, nobody has done more for the moral elevation of deaf mutes than M. L'Abbe Lambert, who daring twenty-five years has applied himself, with a self-denial bjyond all praise, to complete the great work of bis immortal predecessor. The Academy has decreed to the Abbe Lambeit the Souriau prize of a thousand francs."— ln the Revue det Deux Mondet for January 1, 1880, M. Albert Duruy contrasts the usher of the Government Lyceum with the prefect of a Jesuit seminary. "In the Government colleges," he says, " there is no play, or only the lower Classes take part in it. With the Jesuits play is obligatory. . • The master is there to give the example, and for the time being to place himself on an equality with his pupils. He does not consider it derogatory to him. He is not an official as in the Government establishments. He is a friend advanced in age, and both loved and respected. And how should he not be loved ? He has entered the Company not by force or constraint, but by taste and vocation. Very often he is of good family, and had be remained in the world would have made his mark there. He bore a distinguished name, he had fortune, connections, a career before him. He could have advanced himself and grown rich in business. He preferred to don the soutane and devote himself to education."— M. d'Hßussouville writing in the Ittvue det Dtux Monde* of June 12, 1879, says :—" Who does not know with what self-denial the members of certain religious communities devote themselves to the rudest tasks. If the Minister of Public Instruction were somewhat more accustomed to his place he would know that it is not always possible to find male and female lay teachers who will go and take up their abode 1500 metres above the level of the sea ; in our Alpine and Pyrenean departments, for instance, the admiuistiation is never short of congregationists. They go there under »he snow, as they went under fire at the time of he siege to carry in the wounded. Self-devotion is their calling." — When in 1884 the cholera was raging in France, the Newcastle Chronicle published the following paragraph :— "I have seen aged Mussulmans, stern and hard of heart, shed great tears when they saw the coffins containing the corpses of the plague-stricken Sisters of Mercy pass by." Thus wrote Ahmet Vefiek Pasha in one of his despatches referring to the spring of 1878, when the typhus fever epidemic struck down two-and- twenty thousand of the wretched Mahommedans who had tied along the Valley of the Adrianople before Gourko and Skobeloff. The regular attendants fled in terror from the bospitils of Stamboul, thronged with sufferers ; but the daughters of St. Vincent de Paul remained in the halls of death, comforting the afflicted and smoothing the pillow of the dying. Of the three and twenty Sisters then attacked by the malady eleven diei. T.iis was by no means the first time that this order of heroic and devoted women put strong men to the blush by facing death in its most awful forms in the service of their Divine Master. Nor was it the last. It is computed that 15,000 inhabitants have fled before the scourge in Toulon. Strong men have run away ; but the Sister of Mercy remains in the chamber of sickness until death overtakes her patient, or she herself is overpowered, We had to report on Saturday that the Superioress of the Sistera of St. Maur has died of cholera. The London Ecc»ing Standard, referring to the same event, speaks thus :— " Those admirable women, the Sisters of Mercy » who have been driven from the words of Paris hospitals, who are continually attacked and insulted by the atheistical press, are to be met with now that an epidemic is raging betide the sick beds of the

cholera patients in the Tonlon and Marseilles hospitals, braving danger and forgetting injuries in their desire to alleriate the sufferIngs of their fellow-creatures. Three or four of them hare already toccumbcd to the disease, bat others take their places, and if they in tarn are carried off, others will replace them. Tho calm courage of the Sisters forms a striking contrast to tho almost childish panic which prevails througho.it Prance in face of the cholera visitation." An article in ihe Edinburgh Review, for July '85 entitled "The French in North America," deals with certain books lately published •t Boston by Mr. Francis Parkman :— •• If heroio courage" says the leYiewer, "and unselfish seal could command success, the Jesuits would taje Christianised North America. The missionary annals rival in deed of chivalrous daring, the tales of knight errantry or the legends or the saints with which Ignatius Loyola solaced his sickness. Ferrent in their Master's cause, strong in religious enthusiasm, they laboured in North America with all-embracing activity to advance the interests of their order, of the Papacy, and of France. Directed, disciplined, impelled, restrained, by one master-hand, yielding obedience as complete and unresisting as that of a corpse, they imprested on the world the tremendous power of their organisation. Hiavier alone has become the canonised saint of Christendom, many of his brethern were heroes of no common stamp. In China, J«pan, Thibet, Bra.il, Caifornia, Abyssinia, and Caffreland, they performed miracles of self-denying devotion. Above all in North America, men like Le Jeune, Jogues, Brebeuf, Gamier, Ohaumont braved famine, solitude, insult, persecution, defied intolerable and inezpiesnble torture, tasted day after day the prolonged bitterness of death in its most appalling forms. . . In 1642 the priests were without clothes ; they had no vessels for the altars, or sacrificial wine ; they had exhausted their writing materials. Father Jogues TOlunieered to accompany the Hurom fur-traders on a voyage to Qnebeo to procure supplies. On the return march the Iroquois •orprised the Huron canoes and carried off Jogues, with two young *wwUf of the mission as prisoners. They beat him senseless with their clubs, and, when he revived, tore away his finger-nails with their teeth and gnawed his hands like famished dogs. After an eight days march under a blazing sun, his captors reached their first camp. There be was made to run the gauntlet : bis hands were •gain mangled ; fire was applied to every part of his body ; and when at night he tried to rest, ' the young warriors came to lacerate his wounds and pull out bis hair and beard. 1 The march was resumed for five days longer, till the band reached the Mohawk town which was their goal. There for the second time Jogues passed through the narrow road of Psradise, 1 was unmercifully beaten and then tortured with such exquisite ingenuity that the greatest suffermg was inflicted without endangering life; At night he was stretched on his back, with hia hands extended, and ankles and wrists bound fast to stakes driven into the eartbern floor. The children now profited by the example of their parents and amused themselves by placing live coals on the naked bodies of their prisoners, who, bound fast and covered with wounds and bruises, which made every movement a t >rture, were sjmetimes unable to shake them off. For three consecutive days the torture continued ; in two other Mohawk towns they subsequently endured a repetition of their sufferings. Yet throughout Jogues enouraged his fellow•ountrymen, converted some of the Huron prisoners, and baptised them with his mangled hands. The sequel of his story and ultimate escape to France are well told by Mr. Parkman. Still Jogues hid the heroism to return to Canada. Four years later negotiations were opened with the Iroquois. He was chosen as the French emissary, to act as political agent, and to found a mission, prophetically called the ' Mission of the Martyrs. 1 For a moment he recoiled, but the weakness was transient. He set out with a presentiment of his death. « Ibo et non redibo,' he wrote in a farewell letter to a friend. His foreboding was realised. After once more undergoing torture h e was mercifully brained with a hatchet. In the heroism of his life and death he was before three years had passed equalled by more than one of his brethren." The writer gives still more horrible details of the torture and death of Fathers Lalemant and Brebeuf. Mr. W. H. Hurlbert writing in the Fortnightly Review for Sept. 1885 on the " Temporal Power of the Pope " speaks as follows :— " Nothing has of late years so stirred the public heart iv Italy as the gallant conduct of King Humbert during the terribla epidemic of 1884 at Naples, and nothing of that noble campaign of duty does the King more honour than the frank and soldier-like testimony he has neglected no opportunity to offer to the courage and devotion shown in those dark days by the Cardinal Archbishop of Naples."— Among the heroes of the times we may reckon the Rev. Father Reginald Collins, a chaplain with the forces at Suakiu. His exploit is described by th c correspondent of a London secular paper, as follows : " Here, I am sorry to say, I must somewhat qualify my previous praise of the 17th Loyal Poorbeahs— not however, in respect to their actual fighting, which, as I have said, was splendid, but they are sadly unsteady, and in thei excitment not amenable to that discipline the display of which was so conspicuous by the Marines. The bugles were repeatedly sounded for them to cease firing, but they did not heed the command, and con-

tinued firing at perilous random, especially to the little Bquare under Alton. As the bugles were ineff ect« ye, the Rev. Mr. Collins volunteered to cross the bullet-swept ground intervening, and convey the orderi to cease firing. Stepping forward, calm and collected in demeanour* the chaplain walked, his life in his hands, across to the Indians, to whom he gave the necessary orders, and then returned as calmly to the little square which he had just left. His reception must have been some compensation to the risks he had just run. The men, struck by his heroism, raise.! cheer after cheer, an.l sticking their helmets on their bayonets, frantically waived them in their enthusiasm." Father Collins, has been recommended for the Victoria Cross.— A south African secular paper published the following in 1885. The Monastery of Mariannhill, Natal, o* which the Rev. Pfanner will shortly be the first abbot, is one of the institutions founded by Bishop Bicards, and completed by Bishop Jolivet. TheTrappista in Natal number one hundred and thirty— all of whom work with their hands. They have nearly 2,000 native labourers, a great quantity of machinery, a very large stock of cattle, and are the first people in South Africa who have attempted the manufacture of woollen rtuff . The entire clothing for all belonging to the order is manufacturhd at Mariannville. Woollen goods, flannel, boots and shoes — ill are made, so to say, on the premises, and we undertake to say that visitors will be extremely surprised at the extent of the operations, not merely in agricultural, but in manufacture. Bince the establishment of this institution, there have been fifty natives baptised into the Roman Catholic Church, and there are at present thirty students and choristers training for ordination' There are four resident priests, and the motto laborare e*t orare rigidly adhered to. Everyone works— works with the head and with the hands. However much we differ from the Trappists in matters of faith, we cannot help admiring the spirit of industry and civilisation that animates them, and renders them colonists worthy of respect and, in so far as absolute progession goes, worthy of imitation.— M. Maxima dv Camp in the Remus des Detu: Mondes of July Ist, 1883, describes the hospitals in Paris of the Brothers of St. John of Ood. Concerning that for deformed and idiotic children, he speaks as follows. The Municipal Council held a discussion as to whether it would be possible to withdraw from the system the subsidy of 1500 francs granted to it, and the decision was negative because " No layman either for gold or silver would consent to perform a like undertaking." The sight of the inmates is such that it can hardly be endured* M. dv Camp gives us the instance of the Marquis de Lowce3tine, Governor of the Invalides.into whose presence the children were once brought. " He," says the writer, " lived in the middle of men mutilated in war. He had passed through more than one fight, and encountered many dangers ; when he saw the poor little ciooked fellows, deformed and always invalided from their infancy, he desired to speak to them, and broke out into sobs "— " to take care of these poor beings," adds the writer, " to keep them cloan, to endure their incoherencies, to calm their fits of unconscious anger, to amuse them, to put them to bed, to take them up, to make them eat, in order not to repudiate this task that would disgust many mothers, it is needful to have faith and to believe the word of Him, Who has said— the good that you do to the least of those who are mine, it is to me you do it." But as for the Brothers themselves, they are poorly lodged, and in cells that would make the convicts at Mazas discontented. •• They have made the vow of poverty,— that is evident, the vow of keeping nothing and giving all to the ailing. At four in the morning they rise, and they go to bed at ten. after having laboured all day. Every night a Brother keeps watch, and helps the children who may claim his care. The day passes quick, said a brother to me, we have no time to be weary."— The New Lexington Tribune reports that at the trial in 1884 of William Blakely for murder Colonel Jackson, Attorney for the State, paid the following tribute to the Sisters of Charity. " They are dead to this world except to care for the unfortunate. In that they know no race, no creed, and shrink from no suffering nor danger. Whether Russian or Turk in Crimea, whether Arab or French in Algiers, whether French or German in Lorraine, whether Rebel or Federal in our war, their gentle voices and hands were present to soothe and comfort sick and wounded soldiers. When the yellow fever raged at Memphis and New Orleans, when the cholera swept through the northern cities, Wuereever suffering, wherever epidemic, they came to nurse, and stayed with a fortitude that the bravest battalions never knew. And when th«y come to ask your pittance to as>sibttbem, give kindly and recall this occasion, where their pi<*ty has taught these children lessons of truth and right, that have made them more powerful in the vindication of the law than the sirong men defending. The mob might rage and murder, witnesses might be corrupted or intimidated, but the little boy or girl followed the teachings of the kind Sisters and told the truth intelligently, while it was convicting their father. 1 ' Canon Farrar preaching at Westminster in 1884 alluded to a certain Irish priest who by means of the utmost self-sacrifice and by the aid of poverty and celibacy had rescued from degradation an Irish population and had them provided with schools and churches. Tho preacher also recommended the introduction into the Church of Eng-

land of tertiary orders snch as those St. Franois, and St. Dominic united to their orders in the middle ages, and who carried into lay society blessiugs akin to those the religious enjoyed in their cloisters. The L'egister Call, in 1884, quotes the following letter written by Judge Belford to Col. J. S. Dormer, of the Denver, Colorado, Mint :- ♦'Our little daughter in out of daujei, and we owe it laigely to the skilful nursing of Sister St. OsmonJ, who was sent to me by Father Sullivan. ... A more faithful disciple never followed Christ than this Sister has been through this sickness of my child. You know that I have always been a freethinker,but I have come to believe in the divinity of these orders of Sisterhood whose loving kindness makes our homes in houra of distress blaz 2 with comfort. The?e is such a sof tness and sweetness about their manner, there is such a long patience and endurance, that.turbulent as we are, we feel quieted, and above all exceedingly grateful to the Church that has furnished them." The London Standard referring last year to the earthquakes in t^pain writes thus : —They write to us from Malaga that the clergy and all the religious bodies have shown great coolness in the midst of the general panic. They have calmed the fears of the people by their solemn processions, they have traversed the ruined streets, pi ay ing with the dying, succouring the wounded, and helping to release the unfortunate people from the midst of the debris of the houses. Many, in truth, have displayed an extreme bravery in the rescue of the victims. A parish priest at the risk of his life, saved seventeen children, although injured himself by the falling stones.' The U9ual devotion and heroism on the part of the Sisters of Mercy has been displayed during 1885 in the cholera infected districts of Spain. A correspondent of one of the London papers telegraphed that in the town of Aranjuez, the chemist, like most other business people, fled from the contagion, thereby depriving the inhabitants o f the stricken town of access to the medicines which could check l he ravages of the fearful malady. The Prefect of Madrid offered immense salaries to any regular chemists who would fill the places of those who had fled, but none could be found to undertake the duty, When this was announced in Madrid several Sisters of Mercy of tha t city immediately oifered their services in dispensing the ueccssary diugs, and proceeded at once to re-open the chemists' 6hops. -^eedlesa to say that the Sisters were also iound in the hospitals ministering to the plague-stricken.— By evei-j mail that reached the Colony fresh testimony was brought to a similar effect. Now we were told of the Cardinal Archbishop of Seville dead on what is to the Catholic ecclesiastic the familiar " field of honour " that is in assiduous atten. dance on his stricken people. Now we heard of the Archbishop of Granada, who sold all that he possessed in order to devote th« proceeds to the relief of his poor. And vow of a Bishop of a southern diocese, who, having nothing else left, cairied hi episcopal ring to the pawu-broker, that he might obtaiu a loan— th pawn-broker refusing the pledge, but lending the sum required Again the Madrid coircbpondent of the St. Jama's Gazttte wrote a follows.—" The Sisters ot Charity arc behaving splendidly ; they di in gnat nunibeie, and their places are immediately filled by others I cannot," he continued, •■ tell precisely the numbers of the Sisters who have died by the bedsides of the patients, smee the cholera began, but they can bj counted by scores. '—A coire-pondent of the Fall Mall Gazitti who gave a frightful de.-ciiptiou ot the cholera hospital in MaUui was another who boie testimony to th 0 augelical devotion of the nursing Sisters. "In this ward, "" he sa^s^ ' I had a chat with one of the Sisters, a bright, bonny woman, whose very presence must have been of— one would think— as much eflicac y as the physic. She told me that ihj Sisters come from Navarre. Cataluna, and Valencia. They are ladies by biith and give their services. In an ordinary hospital the duties which fall to a Sistei' a lot are unploasant enough, but here one bhuddeis to think what a lady must go through with the always dirty ignorant peasants who form the patients of a cholera hospital. All honour to these noble womeu who every moment place their lives in jeopardy for the benefit of tneir fellow-creatures ! No reward could bo too great for them."— Sail we sec how iv dome instances they are rewarded, at least by the world ot dirt, prurience, and rancour. The correspondentof the Scotsman writes :—'• In broad relief, amid the panic dismay, stands the conduct of the Catholic cler»y. There are bishops here| of the type of tho good cure described by Victor Hugo in ' Les Miserables, ' who have given up ail their i ;comes to the poor, and who, says the Globo of today's date -a sufficiently advauced Liberal paper, who^e liveliness is occasionally sobered by its suspension—' move day and nigbt by dyin,' beds. The Lord Bishop, Senor Don Juan Valero,' it continues, 'is the hero of the day ; there is no sick person whom he does, not visit, no misery he does not luuteu to succour, no tears that he does not endeavour to dry. By night nnd day he walks the streets, carrying words of comfort to "the Tick and to those who are left to perish ; and having expended his private resources in this good work, he has borrowed money in advance to relieve further necessities and h-is so aroused the feelings of the Chapter of his Cathedral that they have placet °a thousand dollars at his disposal, that he may be able to continue the generous work which doea him bo much honour.' " It 13 not only

from Spain, however, that we received testimony last year as to the value of the Sisters. The unwilling authorities of Republican France were obliged to recognise it, in decorating at Marseilles tho Mother Kt. Cypnen, Supeyioivjssof tne Sisters of Si. Augustine, u*io for 43 years had devoted her»elf to attending on th ■ sick it. every pestilence that hns scjurgol ttascit\ in quisUon. And iv the Jura three sisters were decorated for devotion to the bick, "during a vhulettf outbreak of smallpjx— Tho It)tnaa ooirjspondeut of the Times spoke of the devotion of the Sisteis of St. Anne to tho cholera patieuts in Sicily, and the anti-Catholic Press of Palermo, bore high testimony to the devotion of the clergy, especially the Capucins.

As we have given that portion of our coming anti-catholic pamphlet bearing on the devotion inspired by bullies and Catholic principles, we cannot do better than termagants, present our readers also with the character that is begotten by anti-Catholic rage, and which we also find described by Protestants and infidels :-M. Maxitne dv Campthe well-known man of letters-a member of the Frenci Academy and a Freethinker, writes in the Revue des Deux\Monde» for July 1 1879, an account of certain doings of the Commune. Among the rest he describes some people who were disgusted at the misconduct of the Catholic ecclesiastics and members of the religious orders. One of these people was, for example, Jean Louis Philippe Fenouill*, a wretch who had been the keeper of a house of which the police themselves, to preserve decency, only spoke by ra^ansof a number. At Bcrcy, during the last struggle, says the writer, his conduct had been horrible ; he ordered the women to boil oil with which to " water the Versaillais ' He set fire to the Maine and the church, and when they begged him to give time tD have the hous -a etnptiel of their inhabitants, he answered . " Every on- must bj burne<l." Fenouillas did not like the religious Orders, ami, therefore, together with some officials of his own type, he made an a i tack on the convent of th» Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Maiy, composed of two distinct hous 8, one occupied by monks the other by nuns-known irom their hab.ts as Us dames blanches. Tue mjnks were sent t) prison and a guard was placed over the nuns. "Tuc Communists then held a carouse in celebration of their victory ; but such was the ordinary proceeding at the time ; there would be no more to say about it if uyne interesting discoveries had not bgen made in tae nuns' convent. In a garrtt above the chapel among a lot of rubbish, there were discovered three or hopedic beds (surgical apparatus employed in certain cases) which had formerly been used by boarders whoso figures had grown crooked. Besides, in clean, well ventilated and well furnished rooms, there weie found three deranged women, who were provided with lodgings and taken care of in the house. It *as only what was natural ; they Uy everywhere to straighten the hump-b.icked and t, cure mad women. But Fenouillas and his oiew were enlightened by their revolutionary lamps. The oitiiupedic beds were instruments of torture destined to overcome obstinate viitue, the three sick women weie ' cloister d victims' immured in a cell either for fear of the revelations thjy cnild make, or bee iu ? e the nuns wished to obtain theflHvealth. This was not, Uwcvui, enough: excavations were made, in which th-y discovered hkdetous, an 1 the skeletons immediately became corpse. They had uuly to dig up the ground in this quarter to find bones;, for it w.,b heic that tl:c Commune of 1793 established a supplementary cemetery for the remains of the 'aristocrats ' whom they guillotined. These skeletons, then, easily represented the victims of clericalism. The duty of threading abroad this gross fable was left to the communistic journals, which acquitted themselves enthusiastically of it. Iron stays, prisoners, bones— what mateiial for a (sensation ! They did uot even forget a sjrt of child's toy, ft htt'e cradle that had bei>n used in the crib at Christmas. The nuns *eie scut to the prison of S.iiut-Lazaie and the Federates flocked to visit the convent where such mysteries had been exposed. It is impossible to understand how the less infamoas of the journals suffered all this to pass unquestioned. They should have remembered that these nujs kept a bjaiding school where more than one hundred and fifty little girls were assembled, and that they thus rendered daily and las' ing service-, to the population of the district of St. Autoine. It was, above ;dl, the daughter of the working men they injured rather than poor religious whose kingdom— may it not offend the pre-conceived opinions of revolutionary atheists— is but little of this world." Another expleit of even a worse kind is related by M. dv Camp respecting another anti-clerical, named Lyaz, afiiend of Fenouillas.— The scene of the outrage was the orphanage Kugene Napoleon especially dedicVod to the education of young wurk-women. The events are thus descnoeJ :— " Ou Apul 29, Lyaz took possession of the orphanage fitly uecodtercd. There werj there, three hundred orphan girls whom the Sisters watched over and protected as well as they possibly could. The order was given to the ndns tomnke themselves scarce iv all haste. The poor women prepared to obey ; and would have taken their pupils with tham, but that did not sun the reckoning of L>az, and be opposed it. Tne Sisters weie very ener geticand had an extremely lively altercation with the conqueior of the orphanage. They were driven away, and were forced to leave in

the fold, which was about to become a sty, more than a hundred poor little girls, whose lot was no longer doubtful. Lyaz, assembling bis friends, and at times even receiving Fenouillas, aoted as pacha of this harem. . . . TLe unfortunate little creatures, drunken and brutalised, became the piey of the Federates. When, after the defeat of the Commune, the Sisters hastened back to their polluted house, they uttered a cry of horror at seeing their pupils. Five of them were almost blind from ophthalmia, others were at the point of death, and the heads of forty-five were covered with a frightful disease." " Many similar facts," adds the writer, " have come to the fore, which mutt, through decency, be passed over in silence. The immoral side of the Commune can never be publicly unveiled. Everywhere there were acts so scandalous that allusion cannot be made to them. All that was ehameless, and all that was cruel, were paraded unrestrainedly. The women were more bare-faced than the men, and it was something inconceivable to hear these creatures speak with a shake of the head, of the morals of the clergy" The writer further tells us that the Sisters had for their chief foes those ladies who aspired to the post of lay-instructresses, and whose qualifications consisted in knowing how to smoke cigarettes, to toss off nobbleis of brandy, and other matters of still graver import. It was at their instigation chiefly that the daughters of St. Vincent de Paul were cast out of their schools and charitable houses." — In 1880 a letter from " Pastor " Chiniquy received by a friend of his in Dunedin, spoke as follows : " After that I intend (D.V.) to go to New York and unite my humble efforts to those of the five newly converted Irish priests whose burning eloquence is shaking to her foundation the Church of Rome in the United States." Meantime, the " converts " had been publicly exposed in New York. One of them, named Powers, confessed in the Police Court that he was no priest, but a Baptist minister degraded through perpetual drunkenness, and hired, with his associates, by a Jew named Fishblatt to personate a Catholic pervert. Of the others, one was a degraded Methodist, another was described by Fishblatt, who himself peached, as a " many- wived phenomenon," *nd only one persisted in declaring that he had once been a priest. He was, however, unable to name any parish in which be had ministered or any bishop under whom he had served. — A man named Henderson, who had been an ardent supporter of Chiniquy 's when that wretched old man visited Christchurch, a short time afterwards ran away from the woman who passed for his wife and her children with a girl who taught in the public schools, and committed suicide by taking strychnine at Wellington. He also endeavoured to make the girl who accompanied him commit a like crime. She recovered, however, from the effects of the poison. The famous Antonio Gallenga, some time conspirator and would-be assassin, and afterwards correspondent of the Times is hardly the man whom we should expect to find bearing much testimony in favour of the Catholic Church. In his recently published auto- biography nevertheless, there is at least one passage that by exhibiting in their proper light certain enemies of the Catholic faith, held in much esteem by the Protestant world, is likely to do some good. It runs as follows :—": — " There came in those days to London under the false category of political exiles, a number of runaway priests and monks, chiefly from the Papal States, men who had awful tales to tell of the martyrdom they had suffered in the dungeons of the Inquisition on a charge of heresy— their tales being in some cases absolutely false, in others mere exaggerations of the penalties they had endured in consequence of their immoral conduct. The first thing these unfrocked shavelings did was to declare themselves Protestants, or to express their readiness to embrace Protestantism. This at once wou them the goodwill of the Hon. and Rev. Baptist Noel, and other honest and zealous, but credulous Anglican divines, who took these worthies by the hand, provided them with dowered wives, matrimony being a kind of baptism to wash away the vows they had made on their Catholic ordination, and in every sense supplied them with profitable occupation. Some of them turned out arrant scamps and knaves. One of them, Dr. Achilli, lived a most scandalous life, until Dr. (now Cardinal) Newman openly denounced and annihilated him. Another, a Signor Raffaele Ciocci, who so won the goodwill of a pious old lady whom he chanced to meet at a dinner party that she left him a £12,000 legacy, abandoned himself to so desperate a career of profligacy that he was in the end brought into court, not as a thief, but as a recover of stolen goods on a large scale, and is even now in durance vile under sentence of fifteen years' penal servitude. A class of bad men, most of them, from which the occupation ot Rome by the Italians in 1870 has in a great measure delivered well-meaning but indiscriminating English society." Mr. Long, of 52 Jane-street, Glasgow, writes to the Press as follows concerning the eloquent and pious Widdows, who lately edified godly Presbyterians at Dundee :— " After long investigation of bis case, I pledge my reputation as a public man, that he is neither a rev., nor is named Widdows, nor was he ever a monk. He is as much named Widdows as Mr. Gladstone is Ewart. Widdows is his Christian name ; Nobbs his proper name. Herewith is enclosed his trial (for assault and robbery) at the Marylebone Police Court. This was thought so amazing that a million copies of it were issued. Of course

it can still bo found in the leading dailies of that date, February 18, 1869. After that he went to America, where he was charged with stealing from a telegraph office, but was dismissed through lack of evidence. Thereafter he was imprisoned in Toronto. I conducted service in two gaols in which he had been incarcerated. As I heard so much about his being persecuted into gaol because be bad turned Protestant, I asked of the governor, that no particle of doubt should remain on my mind. He courteously sent for his clerk, who brought the entry book and said, ' He was entered a Roman Catholic, and left that.' Think of my humiliation 1 At my fireside he rolled oil a series of anecdotes as to how he had acted when chaplain of Toronto Prison, and when I went thereto I found that he had simply been a convict. ... I hold myself in the interest of truth, and the Protestant party, ready to prove all I have said in his presence on any platform in Britain. ... He gave a lecture in my own hall on ' My Visit to the Holy Land in the Suite of the Marquis of Bate.' I heard it with admiration. I did not listen as a critic, but as a friend. I no more doubted his word than I did the words of my bousehold. I introduced him to Dundee, where he r«-delivered his lecture with great eclat. Certain parties wrote to the Marquis, who denied the whole thing, and when I critically analysed the reported lecture, it was soon seen not only that there were discrepancies between the dates therein and those given in hiß biography, but they were proved to be daringly contradictory." — The New York Sun, in which secular paper Edith O'Gor man's letters were first published, alluded to her, in the spring of 1871, as follows : — " She thought a convent a good and holy place till summoned by the ' Mother ' to come to Madison, in order to explain the circumstances , when she fled to Philadephia. After leaving the convent she obtained money, in the name of the Superioress, from Sadlief and Co., the Catholic publishers of New York, under false pretences. This certainly sustains her character as an honest woman. . . . From these letters it will be seen that the story of Miss. O'Gorman's wonderful escape from the nuns and the priests was a sort of ' Irish retiracy ' — that she was willing to submit to any humilation in order to be taken back — that she even left Philadelphia after writing the first letter above quoted, and went to the Sisterhood at Madison, then to Father McQuaid, then to the Bishop himself, humiliating herself, and supplicating to be taken back. After being refused a readmission into the Sisterhood, on account of what had transpired at Hoboken, Miss O'Gorman went down to Jersey City, and we next hear of her in the editor's office, where she was found by the editorial better-half . The incensed wife of the editor handled her roughly, notwithstanding the editor declared she was only helping him to read ' proof.' Miss O'Gorman lectures in Paterson this evening, and is making money oat of her vengeful campaign against a Sisterhood from which she has Often excluded forever." — But of the effects produced by the lying denuncia. tionsmadeby the bullies and termagants in question, the late Rev. Canon Eingsley, himself an extreme anti-Catholic bigot, informs us as follows :—": — " For the time we think for calling Popery ill names is past ; to abstainis certainly a sore restraint for English spirits. . . . But Romaniem has been exposed, and refuted triumphantly, every month for centuries, and yet the] Romish nations are not converted ; aad too many English families of late have found, by sad experience, that such arguments as are in vogue are powerless to dissuade the young from rushing headlong into the very superstitions which they have been taught from infancy to deride. The truth is, Protestantism may well cry, ' fciave me from my friends 1 " We have attacked Rome too often on shallow grounds, and finding our arguments weak have found it necessary to overstate them. We have got angry and caught up the first weapon which came to our hand, and have only cut our o*wn fingers. We have very nearly burnt the Church of England over our heads, in our hurry to make a bonefire of the Pope. We have been too proud to make ourselves acquainted with the very tenets which we exposed, and have made a merit of reading no Popish books but such as we were sure would give us a handle for attack, and not even then without the precaution of getting into a safe passion beforehand . We have dealt in exaggerations, in special pleadings, in vile and reckless imputations of motive, in suppressions of all palliating facts. We have outraged the common feelings of humanity by remaining blind to the virtues of noble and holy men, because they were Papists, as if a good deed was not good in Italy, as well as in England. We have talked as if God had doomed to hopelen vileness in this world, and reprobation in the next, millions of Christian people, Bimply because they were born of Romish, and not of Protettant mothers. And we have our reward ; we have fared like ths old woman who would rot tell the children what a well was, for fear, they should fall into one. We see educated and pious Englishmen joining the Romish communion simply from ignorance of Borne, and have no talisman wherewith to disenchant them. Oar medicines produce no effect on them, and all we can do i?, like quacks, to increase the dose. Of course if ten boxes of Morrison's pills have killed a man, it only proves that he ought to have taken twelve of them. We are jesting, but as an Ulster '.Orangeman would say. 'It is in good Protestant earnest.' " — (Miscellanies, Vol. 1., p.p. 235*6.)