onasteries, and
converts, with academies attached, 31; seminaries for young ladies, 30;
schools of the Sisters of Charity, 29; an academy for coloured girls at
Baltimore; a female infant school, and 7 Catholic newspapers.] Its great
field is in the West, where, in some states, almost all are Catholics,
or from neglect and ignorance altogether indifferent as to religion.
The Catholic priests are diligent, and make a large number of converts
every year, and the Catholic population is added to by the number of
Irish and German emigrants to the West, who are almost all of them of
the Catholic persuasion.

Mr Tocqueville says--

"I think that the Catholic religion has erroneously been looked upon as
the natural enemy of democracy. Among the various sects of Christians,
Catholicism seems to me, on the contrary to be one of those which are
most favourable to equality of conditions. In the Catholic church, the
religious community is composed of only two elements--the priest and the
people. The priest alone rises above the rank of his flock, and all
below him are equal. On doctrinal points, the Catholic faith places all
human capacities upon the same level. It subjects the wise and the
ignorant, the man of genius and the vulgar crowd, to the details of the
same creed: it imposes the same observances upon the rich and the needy;
it inflicts the same austerities upon the strong and the weak; it
listens to no compromise with mortal man; but, reducing all the human
race to the same standard, it confounds all the distinctions of society
at the foot of the same altar, even as they are confounded in the sight
of God. If Catholicism predisposes the faithful to obedience, it
certainly does not prepare them for inequality; but the contrary may be
said of Protestantism, which generally tends to make men independent,
more than to render them equal."

And the author of a Voice from America observes--

"The Roman Catholic church bids fair to rise to importance in America.
Thoroughly democratic as her members are, being composed for the most
part, of the lowest orders of European population, transplanted to the
United States with a fixed and implacable aversion to everything bearing
the name and in the shape of monarchy, the priesthood are accustomed
_studiously to adapt themselves to this state of feeling_, being content
with that authority that is awarded to their office by their own
communicants and members."

[The Rev Dr Reid