bestow a grace He prompts holy people to ask it of Him by ardent and persistent prayer and mortification. I am not now speaking so much of that more external leading whereby He causes His elect to repay services rendered to Him by intercession; of this we all know many instances have been afforded by the devout cloistered and uncloistered souls in France, who repaid, and are still repaying, the hospitality of England during the Revolution by ardent prayer for her conversion-I mean rather to allude to those instances, of which the number is no doubt great though to us unknown, of holy men and women who had no personal knowledge or connection with our country, but yet were moved to pray all their life long for her return, such as were in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the holy nun, Maria Escobar, and the saintly lady Theresa de Carvajal in Spain, or in the last century Saint Paul of the Cross in Italy. Similarly I would refer to the instincts of the Holy See in such acts as the erection of the Hierarchy in 1850; or, again, in the nomination, unparalleled in all history, of three Englishmen to the Cardinalate at one time, and of no less than eight English-speaking Cardinals within our own memory. Whence are these promptings, and what can be the meaning of them?

Let me advert here to the objection urged from the present aspect of a very large section of the community who form what is called the extreme High Church, or Ritualist School of Anglicans. I grant that they present an aspect of apparently increasing hostility to the Catholic Church which is at first discouraging to our hopes, raised as they were some quarter of a century ago to a high pitch by the early results of the Tractarian movement; but, once more, the miraculous apart, how is it conceivable that the frozen soil, hardened by three centuries of neglect and error, should break forth into one vast garden of fruits and flowers in the course of less than one half-century of partial and uncertain thaw? To expect this seems to me to mistake the whole teaching of our history, and to substitute for the warranted and sober inference from facts, a heated, fanciful theory which it is as easy to demolish as it was pleasant to build up. If there is one truth which I seem to see broadly written on the past Reformation history of our religion and country it is this-that the wisdom and goodness of God are as conspicuous in regard to us as are His justice and chastisement and judgments for our national sins; and that in nothing are the former more evident than in the Divine attribute of patience as shown in the long waiting for us, both individually and collectively, to return to Him. No one alleges, either that the Almighty is bound to bring back our nation by miracle, or that He is actually doing it by that means. Now, whatever may be the destiny of individual souls

(of which we know nothing), it is certain that if a large number of the Ritualists, say some thousands, were at once to submit to the Church, the movement, whatever its final results may now be, would in that case, humanly speaking, end; for no conscientious adherent of Anglicanism would continue in a course which would thus have been demonstrated to lead directly to Rome. I believe that the hope of a national return is, on the contrary, wrapped up in a gradual, almost insensible, extension to the whole people of a knowledge of Catholic doctrine, so that when the hour of God's decree is come, and the conditions required are ready, they may yield themselves to the impulse of His illuminating and fostering grace, and that this extension can only be effected, as it is now being effected, by the instrumentality of causes operating for the most part and at present, outside the visible corporation of His Church.

9. And here let me call your attention to the fact, which I think is evident, that the direct influence of the Visible Church in England is remarkably absent in the various movements (especially those of a preparatory kind) on which we have touched. Even in the case of the emigrés it does not appear that they were what is called "proselytizers;" they contented themselves with letting the light of a fameless example shine before men, and they conquered, where they conquered at all, more by endurance of contradiction and outrage than by aggressive or demonstrative act or speech. I heard but the other day of an instance, in the person of a poor emigré priest who, being recognized by three fanatical youths as a foreigner and Papist, was by them actually put to death by drowning in the Thames, near Reading. As he disappeared beneath the waters, he raised his hands to Heaven and audibly prayed that God would not let his murderers die without knowing the truth. Two of them died soon after; but the third, to the amazement of his relations, insisted on seeing a priest on his death-bed, and then narrated to him these facts, and implored to be instructed in the Catholic faith, stating that the remembrance of his victim's meek end and prayer had never left him; and accordingly he was able to make his abjuration, and died a Catholic, and in the best dispositions. Other such instances may be known, but as a rule it is true to say, that all the modern conversions are owing to the immediate operation of the Holy Ghost on minds and souls, and that we have had but little or no direct impression made upon us by the Catholic Church in England. It would seem as if no person or persons were to be wholly credited with a work so eminently that of God's Holy Spirit. I do not overlook certain great names, chiefly of converts, who have had a direct influence on others, which must be in all our minds as exceptions to this statement:

I only say they are exceptions, and that the usual mode of God's later dealings with this nation, has been like the building of a house not made with hands: and further, that I see in this mode itself, a ground of wider hopes, and greater confidence.

But to sum up. I have mentioned, I think, nine several grounds for entertaining a reasonable, if sanguine, hope of our being as a nation restored to the faith. 1. There is the upward tendency of official Anglicanism as a system, and as a history for the first epoch of its lapse. 2. There is the present marked increase of religious observance throughout the land, as contrasted with all previous times since the so-called Reformation. 3. There are the irregular but earnest religious movements of the last century. 4. There is the literary rehabilitation of the Christian and mediaval idea by our romantic poets. 5. There is the consequence of the French and Irish migrations into England. 6. The profuse martyrdoms and other sufferings for the faith, and their special character as State prosecutions. 7. The typical and influential character of the conversions of the latter years. 8. The instincts of the Church in prayer, and of the Holy See in provision, for a national conversion. 9. The absence of direct Catholic influence in most of the modern conversions, on the nation. Now I am not conscious of exaggerating the importance of these topics, but, of course, they are not all of equal importance, and I can quite understand that to some minds some will seem to have little or no weight. What, however, I conceive to be of weight is their collective force. For instance, take the direction of cumulation. The first five considerations seem to have this force visibly impressed on them as a series or whole. If Anglicanism had an upward tendency, it is not possible to disconnect it from an increase of religious observance as a fruit thereof: if that fruit exists it has an antecedent history which is supplied by the religious movements of the last century and of this, and if they later took that form of a reaction favourable to Catholic ideas which they now present, that reaction was rendered possible by the revival of the mediaval ideas in literature, and by the accidents of the French and Irish immigrations at the same time. Then, again, looking to the natural connection of cause and effect, we are struck by seeing an absence of such a connection in most of the subjects mentioned a bloody persecution of the Church and an infidel philosophy in one country, and a corrupt Protestant ascendancy in another, do not seem likely à priori to conduce to the advance of Catholicity in a third. Nor, again, would it seem probable that the first harbingers of a return on the part of many to truer and juster, and therefore kinder, thoughts of the Church, her ministers, her doctrines, and her practices, should be found in

the persons of a learned Protestant, a dreamy Germanized metaphysician, and a Scottish Presbyterian lawyer. Napoleon the First is said to have exclaimed, "Give me the making of a nation's songs and you give me the nation." you give me the nation." Our lake poets and Scottish novelists wrote our songs, and they turned out to be Catholic psalms, though they were written by the waters of Babylon. So again the recrudescence of Calvinistic fanaticism in the last age and in this, outside and inside the Establishment, would seem not likely to pave the way for the Oxford movement, which nevertheless it did. It is this kind of overruling of things to an end which seems quite foreign to their natural result which is embodied in so many proverbs like the French "l'homme propose, mais Dieu dispose," and which must be in the experience of every thoughtful person's interior consciousness as regards themselves.

As to my three last topics, they touch on other and higher grounds of confidence; for every martyrdom was a special grace of God, not only in the constancy of the martyr, but in each and all of its circumstances; so is each conversion, and so are the instincts of the Holy Church of God and of His Vicar. But in all and through all that I have so feebly attempted to recall to you I think I see the evidence of a great design-a merciful resolve in the inscrutable counsels of the Most High to lead us back as a nation to Him. It would be beside the object of this Paper were I to allude to the means within our reach for the furthering of this end; and, indeed, it may be said that the tendency of my remarks would be rather to encourage us to stand aside and see the work of God accomplished by Him without our intervention. My feeling, however, is not such; for surely that which is true of the progress of the spiritual life within each soul is equally true of the aggregate souls of a race or nation -viz., that whereas we should believe that it is God alone who can and will convert, and sanctify, and perfect, we should act as if all depended on our own activity and perseverance. Nor can I admit any contradiction or opposition between the two convictions-that God, who sweetly and strongly disposes all things according to His will, designs the ultimate conversion of our nation, and that we have our share to perform in the fulfilment of the same, however subordinate and limited the sphere of our co-operation. In conclusion, I will say that I think we must all agree that we can hardly conceive it possible that we should be destined to a national return without national humiliation. May it not be that the humiliation lies in this, that every trace and vestige of our old Catholic polity is destined to destruction before the new structure is to rise again? If, as I have tried to show, the building up is eminently Divine, the

destruction is eminently human, and, whether in motive or in result, such as no Catholic can consistently admire or take part in. It was an opposite course of action-forced, we may admit, by the circumstances of the time upon Catholics, which tended as much as anything to impair their influence on the upper classes of Protestants a generation or two ago. Even forty years ago Newman could enumerate among the reasons holding back good Protestants from sympathy with Catholics "as a church, the spectacle of their intimacy with the revolutionary spirit of the day" ("Essays," vol. ii. p. 71). I well remember that feeling, and I think we must deprecate giving any just cause for it now, though we may see in the acts of the destroyers just judgments of God, and the inevitable consequences of a national departure from His law.

What do we see about us at this moment? We see a Government which has subjected us as a nation to a profound humiliation, by forcing a professed and emphatic atheist and blasphemer into the national council, and, too probably, the nation accepting that humiliation. It was in that assembly that the rejection of Christ's Vicar and all his authority was made to be thenceforth the foundation of our national religion and law, three hundred years ago. We are indeed draining that cup to the dregs! In one sense it is the beginning of the end: we can go no lower. May it be so in another and happier sense! Amidst the ruin and wreck of our institutions, where the Christian character of the State, nay, even the basis of natural religion is compromised, and by a necessary consequence the national establishment of religion, the privileged classes, the landed proprietary, and hereditary rights, including the Crown and its succession, are piece-meal destroyed-all of which seems to be now visibly looming at no great distance in the future-may the right hand of God once more build up the walls of Jerusalem, and His light shine upon the island, sometime of His saints, as in the days of yore the days of Alfred and of Edward: "reposita est hæc spes in sinu meo!"

JAMES, BISHOP OF EMMAUS.