as a strong supporter of creed and country.

I am old enough to remember hearing Mass in what was an interesting
relic in Liverpool of the Penal days. This was the old building known to
our people as "Lumber Street Chapel." Of course, the present Protestant
Church of St. Nicholas (known as "the old church") is a Catholic
foundation. Lumber Street chapel was not, however, the first of our
places of worship built during the Penal days, for the Jesuits had a
small chapel not far off, erected early in the eighteenth century, but
destroyed by a No-Popery mob in 1746. St. Mary's, Lumber Street, too,
was originally a Jesuit mission, but, in 1783, it was handed over to the
Benedictines, who have had charge of it ever since. Father John Price,
S.J., built a chapel in Sir Thomas's Buildings in 1788. I can recollect
this building since my earliest days, but Mass was never said in it
during my time.

Lancashire is the only part of England where there are any great number
of the native population who have always kept the faith. I once spent a
few weeks in one of these Catholic districts. My employer had an
alteration to make in the house of a gentleman at Lydiate, near
Ormskirk. I used to come home to Liverpool for the Sundays, but for the
rest of the week I had lodgings in the house of a Catholic family at
Lydiate.

There was an old ruin, which they called Lydiate Abbey, but I found it
was the chapel of St. Catherine, erected in the fifteenth century. The
priest of the mission had charge of the chapel which, though unroofed,
was the most perfect ecclesiastical ruin in Catholic hands in South
Lancashire. During the time I was at Lydiate there came a Holiday of
Obligation, when I heard Mass in the house of a Catholic farmer named
Rimmer. This was a fine old half-timbered building of Elizabethan days,
and here, all through the Penal times, Mass had been kept up, a priest
to say it being always in hiding somewhere in the district.

The priest in charge of Lydiate at the time I was there told me he was
collecting for a regular church or chapel, and hoped soon to make a
commencement of the building. Some years later he was able to do so. Our
church choir at Copperas Hill, Liverpool, was then considered one of the
best in the diocese. The choirmaster and organist, John Richardson, was
a distinguished composer of Catholic church music, and held in such high
esteem that, for any important celebration, he could always secure the
services