arguments weak, have found it necessary to overstate
them. We have got angry, and caught up the first weapon which came
to hand, and have only cut our own fingers. We have very nearly
burnt the Church of England over our heads, in our hurry to make a
bonfire of the Pope. We have been too proud to make ourselves
acquainted with the very tenets which we exposed, and have made a
merit of reading no Popish books but such as we were sure would give
us a handle for attack, and not even them without the precaution of
getting into a safe passion beforehand. We have dealt in
exaggerations, in special pleadings, in vile and reckless imputations
of motive, in suppressions of all palliating facts. We have outraged
the common feelings of humanity by remaining blind to the virtues of
noble and holy men because they were Papists, as if a good deed was
not good in Italy as well as in England. We have talked as if God
had doomed to hopeless vileness in this world and reprobation in the
next millions of Christian people, simply because they were born of
Romish and not of Protestant fathers. And we have our reward; we
have fared like the old woman who would not tell the children what a
well was for fear they should fall into one. We see educated and
pious Englishmen joining the Romish communion simply from ignorance
of Rome, and have no talisman wherewith to disenchant them. Our
medicines produce no effect on them, and all we can do is, like
quacks, to increase the dose. Of course, if ten boxes of Morison's
pills have killed a man, it only proves that--he ought to have taken
twelve of them. We are jesting, but, as an Ulster Orangeman would
say, "it is in good Protestant earnest."

In the meantime some of the deepest cravings of the human heart have
been left utterly unsatisfied. And be it remembered, that such
universal cravings are more than fancies; they are indications of
deep spiritual wants, which, unless we supply them with the good food
which God has made for them, will supply themselves with poison--
indications of spiritual faculties, which it is as wicked to stunt or
distort by mis-education as it is to maim our own limbs or stupefy
our understanding. Our humanity is an awful and divine gift; our
business is to educate it throughout--God alone must judge which part
of it shall preponderate over the rest. But in the last generation--
and, alas! in this also--little or no proper care has been taken of
the love for a