ciate the reasons which now make my disappointment greater. Your Grace will believe me then, when I say that no light cause would have made me deprive myself of so much pleasure, and disappoint so many kind friends, and frustrate so many kind intentions. I may also add, that no light cause would have made me even seem to be wanting in respect to your Grace, and the Bishops, and to the clergy and people of Ireland.

But in truth I had, as I wrote last week, no choice.

Our Provincial Council, which I thought would be over in ten or twelve days, took two and twenty; and, after it closed, it laid upon me many more days of work. The dedication of the church at Rathkeale was fixed for the 17th. I could not leave St. Edmund's College, where the Council was held, until the 16th. It was then impossible to reach Rathkeale in time, even if I could have travelled night and day; and I did not know till the work was over how completely unable I was to travel at all, still more to fulfil the promise I had made of preaching in Rathkeale, and in Dublin, and Armagh, and of accepting the many kind tokens of welcome which were, as I knew, prepared for me. Those who were then with me know that I do not often break promises of work. Between the conviction that I ought not to undertake any work at that time, and the pain of disappointing so many known and unknown to me, I was in real anxiety. I can, therefore, assure you that your Grace's kind and considerate letter, and one equally kind and considerate from his Eminence the Cardinal, have given me a sensible relief and consolation. I will now therefore go on to fulfil my promise to give you in print what I should have said in words. Your Grace need not be afraid lest I should send you the sermon I was to preach. My purpose is more merciful. I wish to write what I should have said about the Catholic Church in Ireland, and also in England, their mutual relations of co-operation and support; and somewhat about the witness we have to bear, and the work we have to do in our country, at this strange crisis of the Church in all nations of Europe.

I.

If I had been able to be among you, I should have expressed, so far as I could, some of the many motives of veneration with which I regard Catholic Ireland; for I know no country in the world more truly Christian, nor any Catholic people that has retained its faith and traditions more inviolate. The one only exception I know is indeed out of all comparison: I mean Rome. It is true indeed that the immutability of Rome is thrown out into higher relief by the fact that the city.

has been submerged, times without number, by every form of anti-Christian enmity; and that it has been the centre of all the warfare of the world against the Faith: but it has been sustained by its exceptional divine prerogatives, and therefore remains immovable. Ireland has not the special support of either “Tu es Petrus" or of " Ego rogavi pro te ;" nevertheless it remains to this day, for fourteen hundred years, as St. Patrick left it, unstained and inviolate in Catholic fidelity. I know of no other province in the Kingdom of our Divine Master of which this can be said. Every other country in Europe has had its heresy, and its periods of obscuration. Some have risen and fallen again, and have been restored once more; some, after centuries of light and grace, have apostatized utterly, and lie dead to this day; but Ireland is the Ireland of St. Patrick to the present hour. I am well aware what nibbling critics and historical scavengers may rake up from the twelfth or thirteenth centuries of Irish history; but this still more confirms my assertion. Even in those dark days the faith of Ireland never failed. It was Catholic and Roman as St. Patrick taught it. I note this, not only because it is a great glory which has been won by centuries of suffering even unto death-and Ireland may indeed be truly inscribed in the Calendar of the Church as both Confessor and Martyr-but I note it because it seems to me to be related to other great truths. If England had been less prosperous in this world, it might have been more faithful to the Kingdom of God. If Ireland has had an inheritance of sorrow, it has received, in the order of grace and life eternal, the recompense of a great reward. In this I see some explanation of the unexampled spiritual fertility of Ireland. What other race since the Apostles had so spread the Faith on earth? There is at this hour an Irish and Catholic population in England, Scotland, Canada, Australia, and the United States, double in number as compared with the whole population of Ireland. They are multiplying beyond all other races: founding churches and episcopates, building cathedrals, raising everywhere altars, schools, colleges, convents; and covering the surface of new countries-I may say new continents-with the Catholic faith, as fervent, fruitful, and pure, as in Dublin, Cashel, Tuam, and Armagh. I know nothing else like this in the world-I may say, in Christian history. When I remember how this faith. has been preserved, through what sorrows and sufferings, with what a prolonged martyrdom of generations, I must believe that our Divine Master has called the Irish nation to a great mission, and a great destiny. And this comes out all the more visibly in this age of national apostasy. The nations have fallen away one after another from the unity of the

Kingdom of God. Germany and the North fell first; France, and Italy, and Austria, and now Spain have followed. By anti-Christian revolutions and public rejection of the Vicar of Jesus Christ they have as nations ceased to be Catholic, and seem bent on ceasing to be even Christians; but Ireland in heart, and soul, and will, in its private life and public opinion, in its popular voice and political action, is Christian and Catholic; with a noble pride and manly indignation at the apostasy and cowardice of the nations who are hiding their face from the Redeemer of the world, and disowning His Vicar upon earth. With all my heart I love Ireland for this apostolic fidelity, for this chivalry of Catholic fortitude and Christian love. Your Grace is at this moment, while I am writing, surrounded by the Bishops and clergy of Ireland, dedicating the Cathedral at Armagh. I am consoling myself for my privation by writing these words: and praying that the promise made to St. Patrick may be abundantly fulfilled in all the world, and with a special benediction on the province of Ulster ; and upon the faithful, fervent, generous people of Ireland.

Edmund Burke said that, with some changes, the Catholic Church in Ireland, to his mind, bore the closest resemblance of any Church on earth to the Church of the Apostles. I fully believe this; for it is the most Pastoral Church in the world, where pastors and flock are in the closest bonds of confidence and love. Where this is, Christianity is, in its primitive purity of life. I am not going to dwell on these topics now. Ireland, its adversaries being both judges and witnesses, is at the head of the nations for purity of morals, and freedom from ordinary crime. For years I have declared my belief that Ireland is the most Christian country in the world. Its Christian traditions are universal and unbroken; its people know their religion; the intelligence of Ireland has been illuminated, quickened, enlarged by the inherited faith of fourteen hundred years; to your flocks Christian and Catholic are convertible terms. An Irishman without faith is a shame to his mother and to Ireland. The laity of Ireland, as I well know, are as prompt and clear when Catholic doctrine or principle are at stake, and speak as authoritatively and logically in defence of the Catholic religion, as if they had been trained in a seminary. The whole action of Irish homes, Irish public opinion, and the social life of the nation, moulds them, not by constraint and unwillingly, but insensibly and spontaneously, to the instincts and character of Christians. May God preserve this inheritance of His grace to you. In England it has been shattered and wasted; every year mutilates more and more the remaining Christian traditions of public life and opinion among us. We can test this comparative difference under our

own hands. The difference of Catholic formation between those who come to us from Ireland and those who are born of Irish parents in England is sadly marked. The atmosphere of Ireland unfolds and ripens the Catholic instincts of faith; the atmosphere of England, like untimely frost, checks and cuts them off.

II.

I could have wished also to say to my Irish brethren what, as one looks at Ireland from a distance, may perhaps be a mirage or an illusion; but it may also be a truth and reality, more promptly seen by those who look from a distance, than by those who live in the monotony of every day and the importunate presence of the common life which surrounds them. Perhaps no one is so quick to perceive the growth of the trees about a friend's house as a visitor who comes only from time to time. One conviction then is strongly impressed upon my mind. I do not believe that Ireland was ever so full of life, power, and resource as at this day. I can fully understand how the constant sense of the many evils and wrongs you daily see, may make it hard to realize this fact; but I believe it to be the simple truth.

I. First, was there ever any time in the history of Ireland when its people were so completely united? There have been in past times many interests of races, families, and classes, which have hindered the fusion of the people into one whole. At this day they are as solidly united as the people of Scotland or of Yorkshire. The moral importance of this fact will be estimated by all who know the past history of Ireland.

2. Next, it may with certainty be said that the people of Ireland were never so well or so universally educated as at this day. The College of St. Patrick's, at Maynooth, has now, since the beginning of this century, wrought its effects throughout the Catholic clergy; a number of lesser colleges throughout the provinces has powerfully affected the Catholic laity. The system of education which for the last thirty years has covered Ireland with national schools, has diffused education through the whole body of the people. Popular education in Ireland is more widely spread than in England. What was intended by some to undermine the Catholic religion in Ireland has turned to the confimation of the Faith. The mass of the people at this day are an intelligent and educated Catholic nation: all the more Catholic because all the more intelligent; and thereby able to appreciate explicitly the grounds of their faith, the notes of the Church, the history of heresy, and the emptiness of all anti-Catholic systems which, after ages of pretensions, are visibly dissolving

every day before their eyes. Firm, changeless, and invincible as Ireland has ever been in its faith, it is more so now than ever. Everything has been tried against it, from martyrdom and pitchcaps to soup and secular education: merges profundo pulchrior evenit. I am old enough to remember the high days of Exeter Hall, and Irish missons at Dingle and the like, and Priest Protection Societies, and the New Reformation in Connemara; of which the great public oracle of England declared that, if its progress should be long maintained, Roman Catholicism would one day be as extinct in Ireland as the worship of the Phenicians in Cornwall. But all these things have gone to the limbo of South Sea Bubbles ; and the Catholic people of Ireland are rising and consolidating every year in vigorous intelligence and immutable faith.

3. To this I may add one more sign of prosperous growth in Ireland. Since the day when its people were put out of their inheritance in the soil, there was never a time when so much land had returned again into Catholic hands. Famine and fever, and the exodus, have indeed done their mournful work, in assuring to those who survive or remain a better remuneration for their industry; but, apart from this, there never was, I believe, a time when more industry was at work in Ireland, when more capital was invested, more activity of production and exchange was in motion, and when, therefore, better returns were secured to the employers and better wages to the employed. Of this I lately had an unlooked for and trustworthy proof. A very intelligent Englishman, who had raised himself, as he told me, from the plough's tail, went over last autumn to Connemara, to see with his own eyes the material condition of the peasantry in Ireland. On his return he assured me that in abundance and quality of food, in rate of wages, and even in the comfort of their dwellings, the working men of Connemara are better off than the agricultural labourers of certain of our English counties. It is, therefore, to me beyond a doubt, that the Catholic population of Ireland is at this moment forming to itself a social organization, in all its conditions of industry and commerce, labour and capital; and filling up the unsightly chasm between the richest and the poorest with a gradation of social classes; which must every year indefinitely increase the resources and power of the country. I know, indeed, that the last census shows once more a diminished population: but when this descent has touched a certain point emigration will slacken, if not cease, and the population must increase again.

4. And, lastly, I must say that no one without a foresight almost prophetic could have foretold, in 1828 and 1829, to how high a share in the public life and power of the Empire