notion which has given rise to the unmeasured obloquy which has been showered upon the Church; but I know also that I am free to use the language I have just used, and that in doing so I only prove myself a dutiful and prudent son of the Church.

B. Rather of the synagogue of Satan, you mean, young man. The spirit with which you speak is Satanic; but what you say is partly true and partly false, though even the true becomes false in the connection and for the purpose you say it. O. We thought so, and were sure you would get a rebuke from the Catholic side.

F. I have great regard for our venerable friend; but he is young as a Catholic, and has not yet lost the zeal and intolerance of the recent convert. I do not, he will permit me to say, recognize him as an authorized expounder of Catholic faith and theology. I was born and bred a Catholic.

B. I thought you, like the rest of us, were born an infidel and child of Satan.

F. I am not, and never was, an infidel. I have always been a Catholic, and my father and mother were Catholics before me, and so were all my ancestors, as far back as the time of St. Austin and his forty monks, sent by St. Gregory the Great to convert the Anglo-Saxons. There has never been an infidel or heretic in the family, that I have ever heard of.

B. There may, however, have been some not very good Catholics, and it is possible that the stock has degenerated. Yet you are mistaken in saying you were always a Catholic. You were born as is every one, excepting always the Blessed Virgin, and those sanctified in the mother's womb, as was the prophet Jeremiah and St. John the Baptist—an infidel and child of Satan, and you became a Catholic only in holy baptism. We who grew up in heresy, and spent the vigor of our lives in the service of Satan, are not meet, I grant, to be called Catholics, to be treated as children; but it is hardly meet in you who have been orthodox from your infancy to tell us so; you should rather rejoice over our conversion, for you know that there is joy in heaven with the angels of God over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety-and-nine just persons that need no repentance. I claim not to be an authorized teacher; I am but a simple layman, and know very little of Catholic theology. I only know what I am taught, and all that is not censurable in me is that I do not take it upon me to teach my teachers, nor to boast over those who may chance to be less instructed than myself. It is for youth to be proud and

arrogant, to fancy it knows all things, and possesses all virtues ; it is for old age, looking back upon a painful experience, to be modest and humble, to deplore its ignorance and bewail its short-comings.

F. Forgive me.

spectful.

I did not mean to be assuming or disre

B. Of course not. You but spoke as it is the fashion for young men now-a-days to speak, -out from the fulness of your own self-confidence, and in utter unconsciousness of the attitude you assume, or the bearing of your speech.

F. You are severe.

B. Kindly so, if I am, as you will yourself feel, long before you are as old as I am; for I do not think you are one of those who are incapable of profiting by experience. But enough of this. I am a convert, I grant, and you are not. You have to thank God that you had Catholic parents, who brought you up in the Church, and early instructed you in what you should believe and in what you should do; and I have to thank him no less, nay, still more, that he has had the ineffable goodness to call me from error and sin, and make me in my old age a member of his Church. In your case and mine, all the glory is due to him, and to him alone. Neither of us has wherein to glory but his grace, and neither has wherewithal to boast over the other. The point to be considered is, not which of us is greatest, but what is the truth on the question raised which we both, as Catholics, must hold.

My young friend, if as well instructed in Catholic doctrine as he would persude us, knows that one may utter some things which are censurable as heresy, others as simply erroneous, others as rash, others as scandalous, others as ill-sounding, and others as offensive to pious ears. Now, supposing he can say all he has said without absolutely falling into heresy, he may still be obnoxious to some of the other notes of censure. What he says is disrespectful to the Church, to the Holy Father, and the clergy, and, to say the least, sounds bad and is offensive to pious ears, and, as it may well lead some to sin, it is scandalous. Aside, then, from the correctness or incorrectness of the particular propositions he utters, he has no right to say what he says; for a man may be guilty at common law of a libel, though he utters only the truth, by uttering it in a malicious spirit for a malicious purpose, and in this sense, it is sometimes said, the greater the truth the greater the libel. So much must be said as to the animus of his remarks.

As to the matter itself, I agree that the Church is to be honored and obeyed only in her place; but who, according to Catholicity, is the judge of what is her place? And how can a Catholic, who, if a Catholic, believes without doubting that she is infallible, commissioned by Almighty God to teach us what we are to believe, and to command us what we are to do, ever make the supposition that she does or can get out of her place? I have been taught that our Lord is himself supernaturally present with the Church all days unto the consummation of the world, and that he assumes to himself the responsibility of keeping her in her place, and preventing her from going astray or encroaching upon the rights of any individual, community, or interest. As my young friend claims to be well versed in Catholic doctrines, he will set me right if I have been wrongly taught.

F. I do not pretend that you are wrong in this. I hold the Church is infallible and holy; but I do not therefore hold that popes, cardinals, ambitious prelates, and priests are infallible and impeccable.

B. Fair and easy, young man. Mind the categories, or you may get into a category yourself, as Captain Truck would say. That popes, cardinals, prelates, priests, are personally impeccable, nobody pretends; so that matter we can pass over. That cardinals, prelates, and priests, teaching out of their own hearts, are not infallible, are as fallible as other men, I concede; but that they are fallible when teaching what the Church has taught them, or commands them to teach, I deny, and so must my young friend himself, if a good Catholic. Personally they are fallible, but when teaching in the communion of the Church their teaching is infallible. As to the Holy Father, when speaking as a private doctor, he is in the condition of any other private doctor; but when he teaches as Pope, officially, as the visible Head of the Church, and defines faith or morals for the whole Church, you cannot say he errs, for you are bound, under pain of excommunication, to believe, ex animo, that his definition is true, and you are no more at liberty to impugn a doctrinal definition, formally, judicially, given by a pope, than you are to impugn a doctrinal definition given by an ecumenical council. The mere speculative denial of the infallibility of the Pope is not formal heresy, and he who makes it may be absolved; but the practical application of this speculative denial to any particular doctrinal definition made by the Pope, or the denial of the truth of any doctrine

the Pope defines to be Catholic doctrine, is heresy, and, if persisted in, excludes from the Catholic communion. This being so, you are not held to be a heretic because you say the Pope may err, not, indeed, because what you say is not false, but because, being obliged to believe he never does err, it is a harmless absurdity, which the Church has never considered it necessary to condemn, and which she overlooks in compassion for the logical weakness of those who make it. I do not, then, by any means concede to you that a definition of faith or morals for the whole Church by the Sovereign Pontiff can be erroneous, and the moment you select any one and pronounce it erroneous, I shall pronounce you a heretic.

F. That you may indeed do, if the definition has been accepted by all the pastors of the Church.

B. I shall make no inquiry whether it has been so accepted or not; because the definition binds me in conscience the moment that I know the Pope has made it, as is evident from the fact, that, if I should refuse to believe it ex animo, or dare to reclaim against it, I should incur, ipso facto, excommunication. You are not by any means at liberty to withhold your obedience till you have consulted all the pastors of the Church, and ascertained whether they agree that it is due or not.

F. Well, be that as it may; if the Pope should command me to make war on my country, or bid me encroach on the rights of the temporal power, I will say, what I have heard even from Catholic pulpits, I would scorn his command; I would refuse him obedience, and resist him to the utmost of my ability.

B. Very likely you would. But there is very little Catholic piety in abusing the Pope hypothetically, and if he has been so abused from Catholic pulpits, so much the more share. But it is for us to leave the incumbents of those pulpits to answer to those who have received authority to call them to account for their conduct. We will say nothing of them, only, if they have done what their religion does not warrant, we will take care not to imitate them. Indiscreet men, no doubt, sometimes occupy pulpits; men who, in endeavouring to throw off one charge brought against the Church by her enemies, incur another not less dangerous. When one treats disrespectfully the Vicar of our Lord, and makes use of expressions that diminish our reverence for those the Holy Ghost has placed over us, we know he has forgotten himself, and is not acting in accordance with the instructions he has received.

Thus

The supposition you

far I own I am not bound to follow him. make is absurd and impossible, and it is idle to say what we would or would not do in case it should happen. Wait till the supposition becomes possible, before you make up your mind what you will do.

0. But is not a man's first duty to his country?

B. No, Sir.

C. As I thought. I always believed the Catholic religion incompatible with patriotism and the rights of the civil power; and this is the reason why, as an American and a republican, I, who am no bigot, and respect the rights of conscience in every one, deprecate its spread amongst us.

R. The Catholic owes allegiance to a foreign potentate, and therefore can never be a good citizen or a real patriot.

F. It is to prove that you are wrong that I have taken the ground I have, and which our venerable friend here, with his Ultramontanism and old world notions, attempts to controvert. Verily, I am half inclined to think he has just been disentombed from the Dark Ages, and supposes the world is now what it was then, and that he can safely revive old, obsolete ideas. Don't believe a word he says. He has, saving his presence and begging pardon of his years, no discretion, and neglects entirely the cardinal virtue of prudence.

M. I am, nevertheless, inclined to believe that you are wrong, and that he is a better expounder of Catholicity than you are. I should despise your Church, indeed, if she were what you would make her.

F. You say that because you despise her already, and delight to have her presented in the most odious light possible. I am not willing to hang a millstone round the neck of my religion; and he who represents her in the light to which I object 1 must regard as her

enemy.

B. Keep cool, my young friend, and do not let your zeal for your religion, which I perceive is very ardent just now, hurry you into rash judgments. Zeal, to be commendable, must be according to knowledge. I have said, and I repeat it, that my first duty is not to my country, and I will add that I do not find patriotism ever mentioned as a virtue at all. Nay, as far as I have studied the history of the Church, I have found an overweening patriotism, or nationality, among the very worst enemies religion has had to struggle against. It has been the fruitful cause of all, or nearly all, the schisms which have rent the seamless robe of our Lord, and among the most active causes