a substantial, significant name, not retained merely because it was a family distinction, preserved, like the empty pageants of heraldry, of which the spirit is gone and the memory is forgotten. Know that the barren tree that beareth no fruit will be cut down and cast into the fire. Know that it is not everyone that will say: Lord! Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of Christ, but he that doeth the will of His father. And with regard to your conduct towards your dissenting neighbour, it may be comprised in the strict but comprehensive admonition of St. Augustine: "Love the men, destroy their errors." Do, my brethren, love them; they deserve your pity and your prayers. But let not your compassion for them fill you with presumption. He to whom much is given of him much shall be required. Your judgment will be severe in proportion to your lights.

To conclude, my brethren, I exhort you with the Apostle to walk worthy of the vocation in which you are called, with all humility and mildness, with patience, supporting one another in charity; careful to keep the unity of spirit in the bond of peace, that you may enjoy hereafter that eternal peace which Christ has promised to those who fulfil His commandments. Amen.

ON EDUCATION.

"Suffer the little children to come unto Me, and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of God."-S. MARK, X. 14.

WHAT a consolatory view is here given by our Divine Redeemer of the elevated destiny of children, who, until His merciful advent, were generally consigned to treatment the most careless and most cruel. Often the offspring of a licentiousness, in which a feeling of parental

duty but little mingled, or, at best, of a union of which the bond was but loose and arbitrary, the little children of the pagan world were looked on with coldness bordering on aversion, many cut off in the very blossom of life, the victims of unnatural neglect, whilst those who survived found themselves strangers to every domestic endearment, and ignorant of the relations of fathers, save in the despotic and absolute control which they exercised over their very lives. The domestic hearth, instead of being a secure seat of joy and innocence, was converted into a gloomy prison, where the parent was often seen a cruel executioner taking away the lives of his children whom he should have protected; and the State, far from interfering to check the revolting cruelty, gave it a full sanction, becoming a participator in this legal slaughter of thousands of helpless innocents. Such was the melancholy lot of the young portion of human kind even among the nations most abounding in wealth as well as in the arts and refinements of civilisation-a lot which made the world unto them more than a vale of tears and sufferings, when the merciful sentence of our Divine Redeemer was uttered, which thenceforward achieved in their regard the most astonishing revolution. The young and helpless have become since the most interesting portion of society; instead of being abandoned to capricious cruelty, they are embraced with tender and respectful regard, and all seem anxious to rival each other in doing becoming honour to young citizens whose august prerogatives were so long hidden, but who now appear revealed to the world as the royal and first-born heirs of that kingdom which our Divine Redeemer has purchased, nay, whom we must imitate in their innocence and simplicity before we can aspire to a share in their blessed inheritance. It is for the purpose of your earning the favour of those young heirs of

God's eternal kingdom I address you on this occasion, for by aiding in the great work of their education you will be promoting the best interests of society here, and co-operating in the great work of their and your own salvation.

On the importance of early education as the most. powerful agent in the advancement of society, it is unnecessary to occupy your attention long. It is a truth grounded on the evidence of those intellectual faculties with which man has been so profusely endowed by his Maker, and which is fully attested by the vast advantages of which their cultivation has been productive. It is a truth which is indelibly written in the records of the human race, and which fails not to strike every reader in those marked contrasts between savage and civilised life, that stand out so prominently in the history of ancient and modern times. To controvert the social advantages of what intellectual training has been productive, would be to controvert the judgment and experience of mankind, and to deny to the most powerful and polished nations of antiquity the social pre-eminence which their successful cultivation of the arts conferred on them. As well might you compare the rude and unshapen block, yet sleeping in the quarry, to the beautiful statue breathing the life and energy with which the cunning of the artist had formed it, as to compare man, emerging from the rudeness of savage life, with his compeer improved and adorned with those accumulated acquirements which belong to an intellectual state of society. Were you paradoxical enough to deny the benefits of education, you should, in all consistency, get rid of the social improvements that have followed in its train, again consigning your city to comparative darkness, by burying its brilliant lights in those mines from

* Preached in Liverpool, in the month of November, 1869.-ED.

which they were evolved, restoring the primitive canoe for piratical excursions along your coasts, and discarding those magnificent creations of your hands and intellects that are seen careering through the western waters, freighted with the produce that lay so long useless on the trees of another hemisphere, and converted by your skill into raiment of the richest dye and texture for millions whom the scanty fleeces of their own flocks could never have supplied. We are not, then, disposed to controvert or undervalue the advantages of the most enlarged scientific education. Far from wishing to arrest or retard its progress, the Catholic Church encourages its fullest development, and lends its powerful aid in leading the human mind to explore the hidden laws of creation. Yes, but a mere scientific education, however full and extensive, can never satisfy her loftier requirements nor the aspirations of an immortal soul. It is not, then, to the Catholic Church that labours to exalt education by associating with it religion, any narrowness of views should be imputed. It is to its adversaries such a reproach more appropriately belongs. Numbers who are loudest in the praise of education confine it to its influence on society alone, we extend it to the interests of an imperishable soul; they limit it to the fleeting -existence of time, we connect it with eternity; they look only to man's brief course on earth, and we to the same earthly career as exercising the most favourable or disastrous influence on his prospects of gaining heaven. What, then, is the fullest and most comprehensive system of education-the mere secular one of the modern materialists, or the moral and religious as well as scientific one of the Catholic Church-we leave to the decision of the dispassionate and impartial. Far from finding in the development of the laws of the material world any reason for deviating from the path which

she has hitherto pursued in the education of her children, the Catholic Church beholds but fresh manifestations of the triumphs of the spiritual principle, and fresh arguments for the necessity of providing for man's spiritual destination. Who could seriously contemplate those modern prodigies of art, of which the realities surpass the boldest imaginings of fiction, could ever bring himself to believe that those who mastered obstacles, hitherto deemed unconquerable, could perish with the material elements which they so entirely subdued? Who could seriously believe that the vigorous spirit which hung without substructions those vaulted roads more ponderous in their materials than the roads of the ancient Romans, and through which vehicles more huge and lengthy than the caravans of old are projected with the velocity of the spirits of the air, could be other than immortal? The religious element alone is wanting to complete and perfect the education of such men, to guide them, as well as the more lowly masses, to the attainment of the goal for which they were created. To all such who are exclusively occupied in the investigations of nature, and but little solicitous about their salvation, the Church addresses herself. As you have explored with such diligence and applied with such success the laws that have been framed for the preservation of the natural being, why not, with a consistent perseverance, ascertain and reduce to practice those higher and holier laws of the same Creator by which He has ordained to save your immortal soul? As you contribute to smooth man's brief passage through life by removing the obstacles that lie in the way through the means of stupendous contrivances hitherto unknown, why not exhibit similar solicitude in determining the path that leads to heaven, and, in the language of the Prophet, level the mountains and fill up the valleys that have rendered