take, not to cut out, but to count and describe, the mere decorations which add nothing to the strength, the use, or the durability of Canterbury Cathedral or York Minster? Yet these are but two wondrous edifices out of many, that are to be seen throughout the country. On the outside of the Gothic Cathedral at Milan there are fifteen thousand small flowers of carved stone, no two of which are alike; and these are merely the minor decorations of greater ones. There, as with ourselves, it is clear that one of the subordinate ends of those who erected our old Gothic cathedrals, and the ten or twelve thousand parish churches, was to multiply all labour to the utmost extent where the Church of God was concerned.

Nor was it only in the architecture of their churches that their zeal for God's honour appeared. No cost, no labour, no sacrifice was spared in adorning the vestments worn by the priest who offered the holy sacrifice. The chalice was often of pure gold. Where it was not, it was of silver, gilt. Diamonds and other precious stones were made use of to decorate it. Nor did it satisfy them to stick these into the metal, as we often see them nowadays. The most elaborate devices of art of the highest class were employed to make them symbolize the mysteries of the faith. The artificers who did the work could only be classed with the sacred workmen appointed by Moses to decorate

the tabernacle he was commanded by God to erect in the wilderness; or with the men employed by Solomon for a similar purpose, in the great temple he was selected by God to build, "who were skilful to work in gold, and in silver, in brass, in iron, in stone, in wood, and in every manner of carving.' While they were doing all this for the glory of God's house and service, what they did for themselves presents a striking contrast. Their clothing was made of the coarsest material, manufactured by themselves, and such as was worn by the peasantry. Their food was of the simplest sort, the produce of their own labour. Except for the carver, knives there were none. And where their spoons were not of wood, they were of horn, and all home made. An inclined board was their usual bed where the floor of their cell was not preferred. So far their example told upon the common people and the higher classes around them. Their watchings and fastings and self-denial became a rule to both high and low. In point of architectural style and expenditure, the houses of the great, compared with the houses they built for God, were nothing—more like our modern farm-houses than noblemen's mansions, gentlemen's seats.

It is with no view of putting myself forward as an advocate of the Religious Orders that I say these things. They want no advocacy of mine. My object is simply to follow the track of the Church

as she has emerged out of the family into society, her third and final condition or stage in this world. If their works occupy a large place in my tract, it is solely because they occupy a large place in the formation and growth of Christ's kingdom, as it has come down to us in this country, since the landing of St. Augustine in Kent. In the execution of my task, I have found it impossible to form any tangible substantive idea of the Church, built by our Lord on St. Peter, that did not include the Religious Orders, with their monasteries and convents, and their various temporal and spiritual works. We know what Europe had, step by step, become through them at the close of the fifteenth century. We also know what England from that period became, after they were cast out. Ere long it will be seen what France, with atheism in their place, will become. It cannot fail to be with France as it was with England when they were suppressed and their houses destroyed. The fall of the Episcopate followed-then the Papal power, then the Church, and then a reign of terror. In England the Church could not live without them. Neither will she in France.

IV.

The protest of the English Church Union, signed by two thousand five hundred clergymen and fifteen

thousand laymen, presented to the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris a little time ago, besides the generous sympathy it breathes, ought to have special weight with the opponents of the Religious Orders. The signatories of the protest are nonCatholics. They prefer the royal supremacy to the supremacy of the Pope. Yet with that, they are advocates of Religious Orders. The enemies of Christ and of God in France are putting them down, because they are the pillars of the Papacy, and because the Papacy is the rock on which the Church in France, as everywhere else, stands. These good men, who have no idea of supporting the Papacy, or any other than their own national religion, come forward simply in the interests of monks and nuns, to make their protestation against a despotic outrage upon a great institution which has for fifteen hundred years been of immense benefit to mankind; and, above all, to the indigent and lower classes of society. The grave in a few years will end the sorrows and the wrongs inflicted on the persecuted monks and nuns, but not the loss, the incalculable loss, temporal as well as spiritual, inflicted on the poor of every city and town in France.

It might seem that the English Church Union, in taking this opportune step, from their standpoint discern, more clearly than we do ourselves, the consequences even to civil society in France, of the

assault that has been made upon the monasteries and convents. They have done, it seems to me, what the Catholics of all nations ought to have preceded them in doing. Our interests as Catholics in the matter are something more than international. When one member or one branch of the Church suffers, the whole body suffers with it. I take this opportunity of expressing my own individual gratitude to the members of the English Church Union for their generous act of sympathy towards our Catholic sisters and brethren in France. For a similar act of sympathy with the Catholic body of this country thirty years ago, the Protestant congregation of St. John's, Gravesend, were deprived of the services of their excellent clergyman, William J. Blew, his license being withdrawn from him by his bishop, because he had protested against the abusive bigotry which assailed Cardinal Wiseman on his return to England, when the Catholic Hierarchy was raised to life again after a sleep in the grave of three hundred years. It does not seem that a whisper has been breathed or a word spoken in the House of Lords, as was done in Mr. Blew's case, against any of the two thousand five hundred clergy who signed the address to Cardinal Guibert.

An impression, for which every sincere Catholic in the world will hope there is no foundation, has gone abroad, nay, has been for the worst of purposes circulated by the Freemasons in France, that