dren! that the volcano, and earthquake, and tornado, and pestilence and famine, are indications of his character temper; and passing heralds of coming horrors and sufferings not transient like these, but eternal in the largest meaning of the word, lasting as long as the life of God, or as long as His strength holds out for their infliction?

But we bring this paper to a close, and in doing so, we must be allowed to quote a passage from Dr. Whedon's notice of Prof. Townsend's book in the October Methodist Quarterly, for the purpose of showing our readers that we are not alone in our judgment that the chapter on the Divine Goodness and Severity is more helpful to the Atheist and Pessimist than to the Theist and Christian :

"The chapter on the Goodness and Severity of God' essays to maintain the doctrine of hell from the terrible analogies of nature, namely, the volcanoes, the diseases, the parasites and the armed monsters of the animal world. It thence becomes, to our view, an overdrawn condensation of pessimism, not properly counterbalanced by anything in the chapter or in the book. At the same time its analogy does not meet the Universalist's objection to eternal misery; for the latter can reply that all the evils of nature are temporary for the individual sufferer, and probably for the totality of sufferers. He can argue that life is so good that all love it and desire to enjoy and prolong it, even the pessimists themselves; and that death is a brief and probably painless process for each. In fact, the analogy only makes for the doctrine of annihilationism. Dr. Townsend quotes Ingersoll's terrible descriptions of the evils of the world in confirmation of his view. But Ingersoll would claim that Dr. Townsend was only playing into the hands of his own atheism.

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When Bishop Butler, in his Analogy,' defended the claims of the Bible on the ground that all the objections raised against the God of he Bible lay equally against the God of nature, he argued against deistical opponents who gloried in holding the God of nature to be a true and holy God. Against them the age concluded that his argument was conclusive. Says Huxley, He left them not a leg to stand upon.' Skeptics then said, If that is the case, that the God of nature is so bad, then the matter is worse, and we reject the God of nature, too, and turn atheist or agnostic. Such would be Ingersoll's reply to Dr. Townsend. He would say, I have argued, from the absurdities and cruelties of nature, that there is no God; if you add a world of eternal misery to it, you redouble a thousand times the force of my argument.' There does not appear anything in this volume to neutralize that reply. At the same time, for our single self, leaving all others to their own freedom of thought, we never read Edwards' sermon on An Angry God,' which Dr. Townsend largely and approvingly quotes, nor the younger Edwards' book on Eternal Damnation,' without a mental reaction against it. And our serious

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objection to Dr. Townsend's treatment of this subject is that he leaves it with a most unqualified impression of pessimism on the mind that an indignant atheism is master of the field."

Catholicism

Its Relations to Education and Morals.

Ar the time the Catholic Cathedral in New York was dedicated, one of the city papers improved the occasion to speak of the rapid growth of the Catholic Church in the United States. After saying that it is no longer the Church of the ignorant and unlearned, of the low and degraded, classes; no longer dependent for its increase on the Irish, German, and foreign elements, it ventures on the following statements, for the accuracy of which we are not responsible, but which certainly seem entitled to serious attention from all Protestants and Americans:

A single Jesuit priest, who is not yet a very old man, is known to have received more than eight thousand American Protestants into the Roman church, ten of whom were ministers of various sects. The order of Paulist Fathers, founded in 1858 by the Rev. Father Hecker, himself a convert from Protestantism, numbers thirty-four members, nearly all of whom are American gentlemen, who were born and educated Protestants. Many of the Jesuits - who have in the United States seven hundred and fifty members are Americans; the same is true of the Benedictines and the Christian Brothers, who together count one thousand members. The late Archbishop of Baltimore in five years confirmed two thousand seven hundred and fifty-two converts of American birth. The average annual number of adult converts in the city of New York is said to be about nine hundred. The Archbishops of Philadelphia and Milwaukee report that from five to seven per cent. of those they confirm are converts. The Bishop of Richmond says that thirty-five per cent. of the Catholics in North Carolina are converts, and that one parish in that State is composed wholly of converts."

Among the more prominent of these converts the following are mentioned, men of large intellect and scholarly attainments, whose subsequent activity and influence are supposed to have contributed to the conversion of others: Dr. Brownson, Dr. Ives, Archbishop Wood, of Philadelphia; Dr. Bayley, the late Archbishop of Baltimore ; Father Hecker, Father Hewit, Dr. James Kent Stone, formerly President of Hobart College; Father Walworth, Vicar-General Preston, Father McLeod, Dr. J. V. Huntingdon, and many other “learned and distinguished Americans." In passing we may add that this hurch has now in this country twenty-one theological seminaries,

with more than eleven hundred students; seventy-four colleges, and five hundred and twenty academies. This with a population of six millions, and some place it much higher, all owing a primary allegiance to a foreign hierarchy, gives weight to the Future of the Catholic question, whether considered in its religious or political aspects.

But these statements are not to be received without allowance for large discounts from the other side, as lately shown in these pages by the admissions of a correspondent of the Catholic Review. This writer, evidently a priest, locates himself in a town of 150 families entirely Catholic, and 450 "mixed families," as he terms them; that is, families coming of "mixed marriages" of Catholics and Protestants. Of these latter he says "400 have fallen away entirely and completely from the Church; of the 50 outwardly professing the faith, only 20 earnestly strive to raise their children Catholics. Thus 430 families are gone; count three children in each, and, including the parents, you have the round number of 1720 souls lost to the Church in less than twenty years." And then he adds, with strong emphasis, "All my successors within a hundred years will not bring as many converts into the Church as 430 careless parents within so short a time have sent out of the all-saving Bark of Peter.' Many of the parents in the mixed families referred to were themselves the results of mixed marriages, proving the every-day experience that the second generations of such union will always be an entire loss to the Church."

Now these statements by a Catholic of the losses of his Church to the Protestants, compared with those above by a Protestant of her gains from the Protestants, go far towards neutralizing each other. But both are probably exaggerated. The fact remains, however, that while the Papal church makes great gains from foreign immigration and not a few converts from the Protestant sects; she is every year losing her hold on large numbers of her people by constant daily contact with American politics and institutions, American schools, newspapers, libraries, religious opinions, and the people generally. It is therefore legitimate and logical that the Catholic priesthood, just in proportion to its loyalty to the Church, should be opposed to our public schools. And accordingly, as reported in the International Review for March, 1880, we find Cardinal Antonelli saying to Dexter A. 1 While writing this a despatch from Rome to the newspapers announces that the assembly of Cardinals is discussing the best methods of propagating the Catholic faith and strengthening the power of the Church in the Uhited States.

Hawkins of the New York Bar, "that he thought it better that the children should grow up in ignorance than be educated in such a system of schools as the State of Massachusetts supports. That the essential part of education was the catechism; and while arithmetic and geography and other similar studies might be useful, they were not essential." And according to the same authority, Cardinal Cullen, in his evidence before the educational committee, given in their report of 1870, frankly stated his opinion that education should be limited to the three R's, the reading of the Scriptures and the history of the Church. Too much education would make the poor discontented with their lot, and unsuit them from following the plough, using the spade, hammering iron, and building walls."

It is well known to our readers that the church authorities, alive to the danger, have already established parochial schools, and as fast as possible are withdrawing their children from our public schools. What kind of instruction will be given is indicated in the above citations, and what will be the probable results from such education may be seen by reference to Italy, Belgium, Mexico, and other countries where the rule of the Papal church has been supreme. But we need not go abroad to ascertain the results. Investigations and comparisons in our own land have already revealed the moral, educational, and political difference in results between Protestant enlightenment and Catholic ignorance, between our public schools and the parish schools of the Church; as the following will demonstrate with sufficient emphasis.

Mr. Hawkins has shown from the United States census of 1870 the comparative number of illiterates, paupers and criminals to every 10,000 inhabitants, produced respectively by the Roman Catholic parochial schools, the public schools in twenty-one States, and by public schools in Massachusetts. When thus arranged for comparison, it is easy to prophesy the effect on the civil, social and moral condition of our country should the priests succeed in withdrawing the threemillions or more of Catholic children from our public schools.

TO EVERY TEN THOUSAND INHABITANTS.

He also showed that in the State of New York the Roman Cath-

olic parochial school system turned out three and a half times as many paupers as the public school system.

These facts afford strong support to the charges often made that Roman Catholic schools certainly do not lessen, if they do not increase, ignorance, pauperism and crime; that they become dangerous to the stability of the State and society by increasing the numbers of the dangerous classes; that they burden the property of the people, and add to the expenses of government, by the necessity of increasing taxation to maintain our criminal courts and penal institutions.

If now in charity we assume that all this is incidental and accidental, and not a legitimate and natural fruit of the system, not the direct result of tho doctrines or morals taught, we are met with positive facts to the contrary, so far at least as the Jesuit influence and control are involved. From the time of Pascal to the present there have been witnesses who have accused the Jesuit body with teaching things contrary to good morals, and proved the charge by citing their own books. Litely a deputy in the Prussian Diet affirmed in print that a text-book by the French Jesuit Gury, was in use in seminaries for training priests for their work, which "justified the crimes of perjury, robbery, adultery, and the falsification of documents"; and he demanded in the name of religion and morals that it should be denounced by the authorities and expelled from the schools. A Catholic journal was foolish enough to call for the proof of this charge book, page and paragraph. The challenge was promptly accepted, and the original Latin and a German translation were given side by side in his pamphlet bearing the title, "Where in the Manual of Moral Theology by the Jesuit Gury, are robbery, falsification of documents, adultery, and perjury, declared to be allowable." And there the discussion seems to have ended.

Substantially the same thing occurred in France, in which M. Bert, "Minister of Public Instruction," in the Gambetta ministry, was the accuser. He had been constant in his endeavors to expel the Jesuits from the public schools of France. which of course brought upon him the wrath and curses of the entire Order, and he was denounced as the enemy of God, of the Church and the State, a blasphemer, liar, apostate, etc. Then came his reply; and he did not resort to secondhand evidence, nor take up with facts two centuries old, but showed what the Jesuits are teaching to-day, in 1875-80. A late number of Harper's Monthly gives the result in brief, from which it seems he selected the same works chosen by the Prussian Deputy, viz.; the Compendium Theologia Moralis, and the Casus Conscientiæ of John Peter Gury, S. J., the last edition of which appeared in 1875; and,