a Catholic population; in like manner, there are
usages, customs, institutions, actions, often of an indifferent
nature, which will be necessarily mixed up with religion in a
Catholic country, because all things whatever are so mixed up.
Protestants have been sometimes shocked, most absurdly as a Catholic
rightly decides, at hearing that Mass is sometimes said for a good
haul of fish. There is no sin here, but only a difference from
Protestant customs. Other phenomena of a Catholic nation are at most
mere extravagances. And then as to what is really sinful, if there be
in it fearful instances of blasphemy or superstition, there are also
special and singular fruits and exhibitions of sanctity; and, if
the many do not seem to lead better lives for all their religious
knowledge, at least they learn, as they can learn nowhere else, how
to repent thoroughly and to die well.

The visible state of a country, which professes Catholicism, need not
be the measure of the spiritual result of that Catholicism, at the
eternal judgment seat; but no one could say that that visible state
was a note that Catholicism was divine.

All this I attempted to bring out in the lecture of which I am
speaking; and that I had some success, I am glad to infer from the
message of congratulation upon it, which I received at the time, from
a foreign Catholic layman, of high English reputation, with whom I
had not the honour of a personal acquaintance. And having given the
key to the lecture, which the writer so wonderfully misrepresents,
I pass on to another head.

7. The Economy

For the subject of the Economy, I shall refer to my discussion upon
it in my History of the Arians, after one word about this writer. He
puts into his title-page these words from a sermon of mine: "It is
not more than an hyperbole to say, that, in certain cases, a lie is
the nearest approach to truth." This sermon he attacks; but I do not
think it necessary to defend it here, because any one who reads it,
will see that he is simply incapable of forming a notion of what it
is about. It treats of subjects which are entirely out of his depth;
and, as I have already shown in other instances, and observed in the
beginning of this volume, he illustrates in his own person the very
thing that shocks him, viz. that the nearest approach to truth, in
given cases, is a lie. He does his best to make something of it, I
believe; but he gets simply perplexed. He finds that it annihilat