nnual Cyclopaedia_ for 1875, the Roman
Catholic Church has in the United States 1 cardinal, 8 archbishops, 54
bishops, 4872 priests, 4731 churches, 1902 chapels, 68 colleges, 511
academies, and a lay membership numbering over 6,000,000. This shows
a great and increasing prosperity of that Church in this country; yet
our institutions have nothing to fear from that prosperity unless
the principles of Catholicity support the "one-man power" against the
doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, the foundation-principle
of republicanism. Patriotic Catholic citizens claim that there is no
conflict. They love their Church and their country, and will labor to
preserve peace and harmony. Yet how can harmony be maintained while
a large and increasing number of our tax-paying citizens, accepting
their Church and its head as infallible, are forced by their spiritual
allegiance to send their children to Catholic schools, though at
the same time paying taxes to support those "godless" public schools
condemned by the infallible Church? To take the ground that these
two powers, the Catholic Church and our government, do not conflict,
because one is a spiritual and the other a civil power, is simply
absurd. We see that they _do_ conflict. The pope interferes with the
civil rights of our citizens when--as, for example, in his encyclical
letter of December 8, 1874--he commands all Catholics to treat the
liberty of speech, of the press, of conscience and of worship, the
separation of Church and State and the secular education of youth, as
"_reprobatas, proscriptas, atque damnatas_."

THE EARLIEST PRINTED BOOKS.

A recent lecture of the Rev. Dr. Storrs in New York, before the
Society for the Advancement of Science and Art, must have been very
interesting to an ordinary audience, but for one composed of professed
promoters of learning it could hardly have been sufficiently exact to
give general satisfaction if the newspaper reports of it were at all
correct. They represent the lecturer as saying that an immense number
of books date back to 1450. Now, the first printed book bearing a date
is the _Psalter_ of Fuest and Schoeffer, 1457. A _portion_ of the
Bible was printed by Gutenberg and Fuest in 1450, but the work was
so expensive and so imperfect that it was abandoned. In 1452, after
Schoeffer joined the firm, another Bible is supposed to have been
printed, but no copy of it is known to exist. Of course it is well
known that many