here and there, who confound a small superstitious reaction in
England with the reverse of the fact all over the rest of Europe, may
persuade themselves, if they please, that the world has not advanced in
knowledge for the last three centuries, and so get up and cry aloud to
us out of obsolete horn-books; but the community laugh at them. Every
body else is inquiring into first principles, while they are dogmatising
on a forty-ninth proposition. The Irish themselves, as they ought to do,
care more for their pastors than for the Pope; and if any body wishes to
know what is thought of his Holiness at head-quarters, let him consult
the remarkable and admirable pamphlet which has lately issued from the
pen of Mr. Mazzini.[3] I have the pleasure of knowing excellent Roman
Catholics; I have suffered in behalf of their emancipation, and would do
so again to-morrow; but I believe that if even their external form of
Christianity has any chance of survival three hundred years hence, it
will have been owing to the appearance meanwhile of some extraordinary
man in power, who, in the teeth of worldly interests, or rather in
charitable and sage inclusion of them, shall have proclaimed that the
time had arrived for living in the flower of Christian charity, instead
of the husks and thorns which may have been necessary to guard it. If it
were possible for some new and wonderful Pope to make this change, and
draw a line between these two Christian epochs, like that between the
Old and New Testaments, the world would feel inclined to prostrate
itself again and for ever at the feet of Rome. In a catholic state
of things like that, delighted should I be, for one, to be among the
humblest of its communicants. How beautiful would their organs be then!
how ascending to an unperplexing Heaven their incense! how unselfish
their salvation! how intelligible their talk about justice and love! It
would be far more easy, however, for the Church of England to do this
than the Church of Rome; since the former would not feel itself hampered
with pretensions to infallibility. A Church once reformed, may reform
itself again and again, till it remove every blemish in the way of its
perfection. And God grant this may be the lot of the Church of my native
country. Its beautiful old ivied places of worship would then want
no harmony of accordance with its gentle and tranquil scenery; no
completeness of attraction to the reflecting and the kind.

But if Charity