, like
smoking tobacco or drinking whiskey, cannot be given up all
at once. The ancient Egyptians, for many years after they
had lost every trace of the intellectual character of their
religion, yet worshipped and adored the ox, the bull, and
the crocodile. They had not discovered the art, as we
Catholics have done, of making a God out of bread, and of
adoring and eating him at one and the same moment. This
latter piece of sublimity or religious cookery (we don't
know which) was reserved for the educated and talented
clergy from the tenth up to the nineteenth century. Yet we
do not advise the immediate disturbance of this venerable
piece of rottenness and absurdity. It must be retained, as
we would retain carefully the tooth of a saint or the
jawbone of a martyr, till the natural progress of reason in
the Irish mind shall be able, silently and imperceptibly, to
drop it among the forgotten rubbish of his early loves, or
his more youthful riots and rows.

"There must be a thorough reformation and revolution in the
American Catholic Church. Education must be more attended
to. We never knew one priest who believed that he ate the
Divinity when he took the Eucharist. If we must have a Pope,
let us have a Pope of our own,--an American Pope, an
intellectual, intelligent, and moral Pope,--not such a
decrepit, licentious, stupid, Italian blockhead as the
College of Cardinals at Rome condescends to give the
Christian world of Europe."

This might be good advice; but no serious Protestant, at that day,
could relish the tone in which it was given. Threatening letters were
sent in from irate and illiterate Irishmen; the Herald was denounced
from a Catholic pulpit; its carriers were assaulted on their rounds;
but the paper won no friends from the side which it affected to
espouse. Every one felt that to this man _nothing_ was sacred, or
August, or venerable, or even serious. He was like an unbeliever in a
party composed of men of various sects. The Baptist could fairly
attack an Episcopalian, because he had convictions of his own that
could be assaulted; but this stranger, who believed nothing and
respected nothing, could not be hit at all. The result would naturally
be, that the whole company would turn upon him as upon a common foe.

So in politics. Perhaps the most serious and sincere article he ev