iety, and so a parcel of books, religious and secular, were sent off
to the telegraph station; but my attention once drawn to the French
soldiers and their reading, it was impossible not to follow a subject so
interesting and important. The regiment quartered in the town had but a
few Testaments. {112} By a little exertion about a hundred copies were
obtained and distributed. I saw the men reading these in the streets for
hours under the trees, and I sailed in a man-of-war carrying the regiment
to Mexico. Not one in five of these men survived that fearful campaign.

Priestly opposition to this giving of Testaments resulted in an appeal to
the General in command. He asked the priests if the book was a "bad
one," and when it was not possible to say "yes," he gave the book free
course. Inquiry was excited by this opposition, and 1500 Testaments were
received.

There was a remarkable contrast between the absence of public efforts by
French Romanists to disseminate their opinions at the Exhibition and the
unusual freedom for others, sanctioned by the late Archbishop of Paris.
Various causes were at work to produce this very unexpected state of
things, and they will not be alluded to here. But the points thus
noticed remind one forcibly of what actually occurred in 1851, when the
then Archbishop of Paris specially appointed the Abbe Miel, a learned and
able man, to go to London and to do his best to further Romanism here
during the Exhibition.

One of his first acts was to issue two small tracts on the supremacy of
the Pope and of St. Peter; and some hundred thousand of these,
beautifully printed, were distributed in London. A copy came to the
hands of a clever layman, well skilled in the Romish controversy; and he
saw immediately that this little tract, if not well answered, might do
much harm.

After careful study of the subject, he wrote to the Abbe, calling
attention to several important misquotations in the tract, which were
evident when it was compared with original documents in the British
Museum. The Abbe replied, that he was not responsible for the accuracy
of the extracts, but that they had been given to him by the late Cardinal
Wiseman.

The Protestant layman then wrote a series of letters in a well-known
English newspaper, _Bell's Weekly Messenger_, upon the subject treated in
the tract, and for the time the matter dropped. Years afterwards he
received a letter from the Abbe, stating that these news