serves only to suggest vague and impracticable schemes of reform, and to convulse the world with rebellion and revolution, ending only in anarchy or despotism. Sentiment is almost sure, if indulged, to become lust, and to pave the way for wide-spread licentiousness and impurity. We have, therefore, to be extremely cautious, in these times, how we appeal to the natural sentiments of the human heart, and use words which the world will apply to them, though we may apply them in our own minds to truly Christian affections and virtues. Our great danger is from naturalism, and we must, therefore, be careful, in season and out of season, to insist on the supernatural affections of the Gospel.

The author, in this work, though by no means indifferent to exterior refinement and the supposed advantages of wealth and worldly cultivation, leaves an impression on the reader most favorable to the poor, and especially, Englishman as he is, to the Irish poor. In studying his sketches we feel of how little value is this world, and what pertains to it, even in relation to our positive comfort and enjoyment in this life. Faith, and piety, and trust, seem to have no little power in sustaining our physical as well as spiritual existence a power to multiply the widow's handful of meal and cruse of oil to an abundance far more precious than the rich in general possess. How these poor, pious people live is a marvel to us; yet they do live, and often render large assistance to others of their own class. They never repine, never murmur, and seem to live constantly in the presence of God.

It is the prayers of these poor Irish, perhaps of that poor apple-woman that sits meekly and uncomplainingly day after day, in all weathers, at the corner of the street, waiting almost in vain for a customer for her scanty supply of fruit, saying as it were her beads from morning to night, that will bring down the blessings of God upon our country, and make us a Christian people. We import rare and costly merchandise from all countries, but the most precious freightage our ships bring home is these poor, pious Irish men and women, who, if they have nothing else, are rich in grace, and have learned every thing worth learning, in having learned to pray.

We glanced the other day into a Protestant newspaper, The Christian Register, we believe, in which the editor was contrasting the little labor and large incomes of our clergy with the great labor and small incomes of Protestant

a

ministers. We would recommend him to read the sketch, "A Missioner's Sunday Work," and yet it is only an ordinary Sunday's work of many a Catholic priest in our midst. The Protestant minister hardly knows the meaning of " sick call," and rarely is he ever required or expected to visit his sick parishioners at unseasonable hours, or when fatigued by other labors, or weary with doing nothing. As for incomes, it is enough to say, that the Church of England alone has a larger revenue than the whole Catholic church throughout the world. The Protestant minister has, no doubt, to perform much hard work, and endure much wear and tear of mind and body, as well as of conscience; but it is so not because the work itself is much, but because the poor minister has to do it himself alone, without any of those gracious helps from above which render the heaviest labor light.

Our Protestant editor, in the same article, complains of our clergy because they visit their people mainly for spiritual purposes, and make more of providing for the soul than for the body. He is greatly scandalized that we have in Boston, for instance, so many poor Catholics, and that our clergy, in visiting them, look after their spiritual rather than their worldly interest. He is of opinion, that the first care of the priest should be to attend to the bodies of his people, remove their poverty, set them up, and help them to become well to do in the world, and look to their souls or spiritual interests, if at all, afterwards. He is displeased that our missionaries in China take so much pains to baptize children exposed by their parents, and near dying, instead of laboring to remove the poverty which causes the exposure. In all this we see that he is a true Protestant, and has a great concern for the body, and very little for the soul. If the body is only provided for, the soul, he seems to think, may be left to shift for itself. We wish he would tell us where our clergy are to get the means to remove all the poverty of the thousands flocking into the country, reduced to want by Protestant oppression and misrule in Ireland; and what our missionaries could do in China, where they have hardly ever been able to appear without being doomed to martyrdom, to improve the public and private economy of that over-peopled empire. But, after all, we do not remember that our Lord ever promised to remove poverty and want from the world, or that he ever gave his church a commission to make all men rich in this world's goods; we are not

aware that the Catholic clergy are under any special obligation to take care of paupers, or that they any more than Protestants can be called upon to relieve the bodily wants even of the Catholic poor. In olden times, when the public made the clergy their almoners, they took care of the poor, and they would do it now, and in this community, if it chose to entrust them with the means, and at a tithe of what it now costs. It is the duty of wealth to contribute to the wants of the poor, and the wealth of this community is in the hands of the Protestant ministers and their Protestant friends.

It is worthy of note, that, though the church has only a spiritual mission, and is charged especially only with the salvation of souls, yet in all countries where she is not oppressed or persecuted the wants of the poor are amply provided for. You will look in vain in Austria, Italy, or Spain, or even France, for such squalid poverty as meets you in London, Dublin, Glasgow, Boston, and New York. Protestants, even though attending primarily to the body, • and perhaps caring for it at the expense of the soul, are responsible for the greater part of the abject poverty of the modern world. The most frightful poverty to be met with is in countries ruled by Protestants. There may be much of this poverty among the Catholic subjects of Protestant governments, and if so, it is because those governments have never given them an equal chance with their Protestant subjects. The Catholic poor in this country were made poor before they came here, and most of them by the skill and energy, in oppressing and brutifying, of your boasted Anglo-Saxon race, or that "bulwark of the Protestant religion," Great Britain. And, after all, what does Protestantism do for the poor? In Ireland and in this country it is willing to do something for poor Catholics, on condition that they consent to become Protestants to sell their souls for a mess of pottage. But in general it has done nothing to increase the wealth or to diminish the poverty of the world. Great Britain and the United States have the appearance of being wealthy, because they have mortgaged posterity; but neither of them is wealthy enough to pay its public and private debts. Let credit be suspended, and there be no longer the means of taxing future generations for the support of the present, and let each be called upon to settle up its accounts with futurity, and they would both be found

insolvent, and Great Britain would be unable to transmit as much value to the next generation as she received from Catholic Europe. Both have borrowed more from the future than either has enhanced the capital it inherited. Your vast commerce, and your industrial establishments for the fabrication of luxuries, have done nothing to enrich you, and, in an economical point of view, have been worse than a dead loss. So much for neglecting the soul and living for the body.

But we are very free to confess that our clergy do labor for the soul rather than for the body of their flocks, and are far more attentive to their spiritual than to their bodily wants, for they are Christians, not heathens or carnal Jews, and they have a firm faith that, though a man should gain the whole world and lose his own soul, it would profit him nothing. Strange as it may seem to Protestant ministers, our clergy do not regard their ministry as a sham, and their services as useless. They believe that their ministry is from God, and that their services are really necessary in the divine economy of salvation. He who, by baptizing one exposed infant just ready to die, has secured the admission of a soul to the beatific vision of God, has thus gained for it an eternity of bliss, which infinitely outweighs all the worldly good of the whole human race from the beginning to the end of time. The loss of one soul is a greater loss than the loss of all the material wealth of the universe; and would you have our clergy devote themselves to the body at the hazard of losing the soul? Do not suppose, because you esteem the world as first, that therefore our clergy do or should.

Nevertheless, our clergy are not indifferent to the physical sufferings of their people, and do more than you can dream of to relieve and solace them. They would also thank you for what you do, if you would consent to aid them without insisting upon conditions destructive to the souls of our suffering poor. We have many children running about the streets, idle, vicious, criminal occasionally it may be, and we are sorry it is so; but they may retain something of the true faith, and one day be brought to penitence and be saved. Were we to intrust them to your charity, whatever they might gain in worldly respectability, they would be pretty sure to lose their souls. We would rather see them bad Catholics than even good Protestants; for the bad Catholic, as long as he retains a single spark of

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faith, has something to which the minister of God can appeal, has some relics of a conscience, and may one day be led to repentance and be saved; but if our children were taken from us and trained up Protestants, or as Protestants would insist on their being trained, there would be as good as no hope at all of their ever seeing God.

Here is the great reason why our clergy cannot do more to relieve the poverty from which many of their people suffer. They are themselves poor, and Protestants are not willing to aid them except on conditions that cannot be accepted. We who are Catholics have faith, and with us eternity is a reality. We must train up our children to live for God. We cannot always do it, indeed, and no training will always be sufficient; but we must do the best we can. Protestants have no faith; the world to come is to them a pleasant or an unpleasant dream, and the only reality they recognize is this world and what pertains to it. They therefore would educate, and do educate, for this world alone. They cannot come in contact with our children without exerting upon them a pestiferous influence, and hence we can hardly ever be grateful to them for their benevolent aids, their well-meant liberality. They can never consent to aid us in saving our children from the evil influences to which they are subjected, in our own way, and in accordance with our own religion; but they must get them away from us under the tuition and influence of their own ministers, who should be termed Skrälinger, or the Black Death. Hence we are frequently obliged to repulse their offers of assistance, and to prefer to see our children starve in the streets to their being relieved by Protestant liberality.

After all, it is necessary to be on our guard against the Protestant habit of coupling rags and dirt with vice. The Yankee identifies virtue with cleanliness and thrift, and wherever these are wanting he ean discover nothing but the seal of eternal reprobation. He has no conception that it is possible for virtue to have an unwashed face, to dwell in a dark court and a dirty tenement, or that a man who has no capacity for rising in the world can ever get into heaven. Yet we would rather take our chance with the dwellers in these filthy courts, and dirty garrets and cellars, than with the rich whose palaces front broad and spacious street, and who are externally so clean and neat. The pious poor are the jewels of the church; hardly shall the rich enter into