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POPE NIGHT.

"Lay up the fagots neat and trim;
Pile 'em up higher;
Set 'em afire!
The Pope roasts us, and we 'll roast him!"
Old Song.

The recent attempt of the Romish Church to reestablish its hierarchy in
Great Britain, with the new cardinal, Dr. Wiseman, at its head, seems to
have revived an old popular custom, a grim piece of Protestant sport,
which, since the days of Lord George Gordon and the "No Popery" mob, had
very generally fallen into disuse. On the 5th of the eleventh month of
this present year all England was traversed by processions and lighted up
with bonfires, in commemoration of the detection of the "gunpowder plot"
of Guy Fawkes and the Papists in 1605. Popes, bishops, and cardinals, in
straw and pasteboard, were paraded through the streets and burned amid
the shouts of the populace, a great portion of whom would have doubtless
been quite as ready to do the same pleasant little office for the Bishop
of Exeter or his Grace of Canterbury, if they could have carted about and
burned in effigy a Protestant hierarchy as safely as a Catholic one.

In this country, where every sect takes its own way, undisturbed by legal
restrictions, each ecclesiastical tub balancing itself as it best may on
its own bottom, and where bishops Catholic and bishops Episcopal, bishops
Methodist and bishops Mormon, jostle each other in our thoroughfares, it
is not to be expected that we should trouble ourselves with the matter at
issue between the rival hierarchies on the other side of the water. It
is a very pretty quarrel, however, and good must come out of it, as it
cannot fail to attract popular attention to the shallowness of the
spiritual pretensions of both parties, and lead to the conclusion that a
hierarchy of any sort has very little in common with the fishermen and
tent-makers of the New Testament.

Pope Night--the anniversary of the discovery of the Papal incendiary Guy
Fawkes, booted and spurred, ready to touch fire to his powder-train under
the Parliament House--was celebrated by the early settlers of New
England, and doubtless afforded a good deal of relief to the younger
plants of grace in the Puritan vineyard. In those solemn old days, the
recurrence of the powder-plot anniversary, with its processions, hideous
images of the Pope and Guy Fawkes, its liberal potations of strong
waters, and its blazin