the days of our fathers not a Catholic soul should have been left in Ireland, and then we should now have had no trouble with questions of Church, or land, or university education." The appearance of such public counsellors is a portent of evil. They distort the vision and heat the blood of men; they revive animosities and kindle old hates. They may be the forerunners of convulsions which would lay waste our public peace, if there be not calmer heads and juster hearts to repress their inflammatory declamation. The rise of an Empire is no cause of joy to men who love their country. It is the sign of the loss of true liberty. When local government, springing from mature national self-control, grows weak and impotent, then, and then only, it is that Imperial centralization becomes possible and necessary. France has tried it, and is expiating the fault by half a century of successive revolutions and a chronic instability. Germany is beginning to inflict upon itself a vengeance worse than France could wreak, by an Imperial despotism which legislates in violation of the religion and conscience of its subjects. Its present ecclesiastical laws have been hailed and heralded by our newspapers as the policy of Henry VIII. Till the other day no Englishman was found to glorify Henry VIII. Now he has received his apotheosis as a great Englishman and a wise king. Germany is applauded because it is persecuting the Catholic Church. The Imperial power is setting to us the magnanimous example of defying the Pope. Articles without end appear every week, all alive with sympathy for this ignoble tyranny, which violates liberty of conscience, of religion, of speech, and of action, in its most sacred sphere. And Englishmen, who have prated for three hundred years of the duty of private judgment, of the rights of conscience, of civil and religious liberty, are praising the German penal laws with all the fervour with which they used to denounce the fables of the Spanish Inquisition. V. I cannot say that I have much fear of an Imperial policy in Great Britain and Ireland. The day is past, and the work would be found too tough for our doctrinaires. My chief reason for this confidence is, that the people of these three kingdoms will not have it so. They mean to manage their own affairs with a great extension, rather than a hairsbreadth of diminution, in the freedom of local self government. They are willing, as I said, to live and to let live; not to meddle with others, nor to allow anybody to meddle with them: above all, in matters of conscience and of religion they will not be interfered with by any authority. They have no desire to interfere with the conscience or religion of their neighbours; and they do not mean to be used again as the tools or the weapons of any party, political or religious. Such is certainly the mind and will of the English people, as I believe I can undertake to say ; and I think your Grace would be able to add your testimony as to the people of Ireland. They have least of all any desire to meddle with the political or religious affairs of their neighbours; and they have no intention that any neighbours whatsoever should meddle with theirs. In this temper of mind I see the surest guarantees of our future peace; and of the healthful development of a local self-government over the three kingdoms, suited to the character, faith, conscience, traditions, and interests of each. We shall be thereby removed every day further and further from the dangers of "Imperial" centralization, which is everywhere, as it has been in France, the paralysis of all local and individual energy and life. In this expansion of our distinct and various national life and energy, I see also the bonds of mutual good will and justice which must assuredly draw us more closely together and hold us indissolubly united. I shall, therefore, hope that our Legislature will hereafter represent more adequately the legitimate will, conscience, and mind of Great Britain and Ireland: and that when certain politicians, who would vote for denominational education in England and mixed education in Ireland, because they exist by favour of the Orangemen of Ireland and the Anglicans in England, shall have put off their traditional narrowness and their anti-Catholic enmity; and when the so-called Liberals shall have repented of their sympathy with the German penal laws, and the Nonconformists shall have remembered that it is not for Free Churches to force the conscience of those who believe education without religion to be anti-Christian; when these recent mental aberrations shall have been rectified by certain of our legislators, and they will be rectified when the House of Commons truly represents the people of the three kingdoms, then, I believe, the university education offered to the people of Ireland will be such as a Catholic nation has a right to possess. Until then I hope both the Bishops and laity of Ireland will wait in patience. The policy of patience won for them unconditional Catholic emancipation fifty years ago; and it will win for them hereafter a true and pure Catholic University. VI. In the course of the late debates I heard strange utterances about the duty of Government to interfere to save the laity of Ireland from an Ultramontane priesthood. There are yet men alive, and in parliament too, who can harbour and utter such wild talk. This was the dream of those who set up the National Education of 1835. They fought Papacy "with their right hand tied behind them." The result was not encouraging. And now rather than confess their mistake they must try it again. It has failed with the poor, but it may prosper with the upper class; especially if there can be found anywhere the fear of being thought to be priest-ridden to work upon. I will confess that I had maliciously made up my mind, when I should be enjoying your hospitality, to hear what the laymen of Ireland would say to this benevolent purpose of their English protectors. As I have not seldom to converse with men who profess to know on the best evidence that the laity in Ireland are sighing for redemption from an Ultramontane and domineering priesthood, I thought it would not be amiss if I could give in this matter the result of my own experience. But in truth I have no need to go to Armagh, to know what the laity of Ireland would say to those who scatter imputations on their fidelity and would try to seduce them from their pastors; nor do I need any evidence to assure me that the handful of men, who in London or in Dublin mutter and whisper under the eaves of Governments against the Hierarchy of Ireland, do not represent or know the Irish people. VII. I am well aware how many questions there are bearing on the welfare of Ireland which demand attention; but I must take leave to say that in my judgment their is none that bears any comparison in vital importance to that of education. It is nothing less than this: Shall the posterity of Ireland be the children of St. Patrick, or the children of this world? Here is an issue in which I believe all Irishmen will be united. Even the Protestants and the Presbyterians of Ireland desire that education shall be religious and Christian. The whole Irish people, Catholic and Protestant, therefore, alike demand that the tradition of Christian education, unbroken hitherto, may be preserved, inviolate, and handed down as they have received it to their children's children. I rejoice to know that on the 12th of July no Catholic in Ulster raised his hand or his voice to hinder the freedom which his Protestant neighbours enjoyed: and that on the 15th of August no Protestant moved to disturb his Catholic neighbours. When these things can be done in Ulster, what may not be done in Ireland? I learned yesterday that on Sunday, while the Catholic Cathedral of Armagh was dedicated, the bells of Armagh rang a friendly greeting. God grant that their mingled harmony may be a prophecy of a future perfect unity of faith. It made me doubly sorry that I was not there to hear them. Whatever experiments, I was almost going to say tricks, the miserable political and religious contentions of England may force men to practise in this country, Scotland will have none of them. John Knox has just put his foot down, and while he gives freedom to others, he will have his own Bible and Catechism. Ireland will not fail to do what Scotland has done. St. Patrick will claim that the Christian Faith of the whole people shall be guarded in all its purity and freedom; and Irishmen will know how to make this national right known and felt at the next general election. I hope to see the hundred and five Irish members vote as one man against every attempt to meddle with the full freedom and purity of religious education in Ireland. And now, my dear Lord Primate, I have detained you too long; and if I were not to put some force on myself I should run on out of bounds. I hope my brethren, the Bishops of Ireland, will accept what I have written as an expression of my heartfelt regret at finding myself here alone while they were offering up the Holy Sacrifice in thanksgiving, in the new Cathedral of Armagh. The Catholic Church in Ireland. and in England has at this day a solid unity of mutual cooperation such as it never had since Armagh and Canterbury were founded. In the Vatican Council no Saint had so many mitred sons as Saint Patrick; and, wonderful are the ways of God, no power on earth had there a Hierarchy so numerous gathered from the ends of the earth as our own. These things are not without a future: and that future hangs in great measure on our close union and mutual help. In your brotherly invitation to Armagh I read the same meaning; and in this answer, in the name of the Catholic Bishops and Church in England, I accept and reciprocate the assurance of our alliance. Believe me, my dear Lord Primate, Your Grace's affectionate Brother and Servant, HENRY EDWARD, London, August 31, 1873. Archbishop of Westminster. PASTORAL LETTER OF THE ARCHBISHOP AND WE, THE ARCHBISHOP AND BISHOPS OF THE PROVINCE OF Health and Benediction in the Lord Jesus Christ. Fourteen years have now elapsed since the Third Provincial Council of Westminster was held. Nearly half a generation of men has passed away. Six of the thirteen Dioceses of England have carried to their last, it may be said their first rest, with noble testimonies of love and veneration, the laborious Pastors who in daily toil wore out their life for their flock. Westminster, and Beverley, and Hexham, Southwark, and Salford, and Liverpool, are represented in this our Fourth Council by other voices, bearing witness to the same faith and to the same authority. The Pastors come and go; the office and the fold remain the same for ever. If it be asked why fourteen years should have been allowed to pass without our meeting in Synod, it may be truly said that, of many causes which justified the postponement of our assembling to legislate for the Church in England, the chief cause is to be found in the completeness of the decrees of the three Provincial Councils already held. The First described and fixed the whole outline of the order, discipline, and worship, of the rising Church, which by the act of the Sovereign Pontiff had then come forth from its scattering and its captivity; the Second treated of its temporal administration; the Third of its ecclesiastical seminaries, and the training of its clergy. You may then ask, dearly beloved brethren and children in Jesus Christ, why we should again assemble; and what need of a Fourth Provincial Council. The law of the Church prescribes that such Synods be held every three years, unless by special permission of the Holy See this obligation be suspended. The Church does not wait till needs of new legislation shall force themselves upon us. It prescribes that we shall anticipate the pressure of necessity, and by constant vigilance prevent the abuses or disorders that demand correction. We give thanks to God that our meeting now is not for this need or purpose; there is another and more consoling reason for our assembling here. We meet, now, not to reform or to correct, but to unfold and to expand, our former legislation. The |