was the word responsibility, which has nothing to do with the matter, introduced into the sentence? The reason is plain: it was necessary to make us say that we refuse to answer for our correspondent. Now, far from refusing the responsibility of his assertions, we assumed it with the simple reservation necessary in every question of fact-of solid and evident proof being brought to the contrary.

:

The second rectification attributed to us, has little weight in itself, but is very serious in the intention of our opponent. He glories and triumphs in the idea that we have at last recognized a right in the Français to correct, in the name of France, the notices received from our correspondent concerning views, opinions, and events in France. It is not a little strange that such a point should be brought forward; for we should not have supposed that anyone ever doubted or could possibly doubt it. The point liable to discussion is rather, which of the various relations which may have been written on this subject, best merits the belief of men of sense. Thus, for example, it may be a matter of discussion whether the contrary opinion of M. Beslay ought to prevail over that of our correspondent; who may possibly by age, experience, position, and political wisdom be a better informed and more trustworthy witness than himself. If we have made a passing mention of such a claim on the part of our correspondent; it has been only in order to exclude the calumnious insinuation that some political or pontifical secret has perhaps been violated by him. To what purpose, then, were our words wrested and made the subject of a separate number, as if we had at first denied or questioned what we afterwards acknowledged to be true and just? Le besoin de la cause is a phrase which advocates have introduced into the French language, and it may be perhaps the fittest reply to this question.

We have refuted, not without some indignation, the charge that, by means of this correspondence, we have endeavoured to narrow the wide action of the Vatican Council to the definition of two dogmas only. And in this refutation we appealed to the good faith of our readers; reminding them of all which, for a long time past, we have been publishing concerning the magnitude of the evils to be healed, and of the blessings to be derived by the Church from the work of this august assembly. It would seem that on this point M. Beslay had a visitation of remorse, and desired to make us honourable amends. But he soon returns to his ordinary style; congratulating himself in his fourth number on having brought us to acknowledge our French correspondent's information to be incomplete, and of having thus rendered it full and entire. And by what argument does he prove this? Because the silence of our correspondent destroyed all the hopes excited by so many other demonstrations and so many other testimonies. Unhappy logic, when it falls into the hand of a sophistical rhetorician! Hitherto it has not been held to be a law of inevitable necessity to say everything that can be said whenever we open our mouth; it has been simply considered necessary to speak to the purpose, and to say nothing irrelevant to the subject in hand. For the future, to avoid incurring the suspicion and wrath of the writers of the Français, we should be cbliged, whenever we give any information or discuss any

point relating to the Council, always to begin from the beginning, and to repeat the same things over and over again. As we cannot make up our minds to do this, we must resign ourselves henceforward to incur their displeasure, without hope of reconciliation.

The fourth number is also devoted by Monsieur Beslay to a misrepresentation, of no great importance indeed in itself, but very cunningly devised. He had accused us of having assigned a very brief and insufficient time to the Council. We replied, that to assign to it a period, whether long or short, would be an audacity bordering upon insanity-an audacity of which assuredly we have not been guilty. Our French correspondent had spoken only of a persuasion rooted in the minds of many Frenchmen ; not of any limit, fixed either by them or by him. Now what does our crafty opponent say in his fourth article? "See," he says to us, "how much reason I had to make all this disturbance! As a Frenchman and a Catholic, I am bound to defend French Catholics from an accusation, which the Civiltà Cattolica itself calls a folly." What a wonderful mind must this writer possess! He constitutes himself a champion; creates an imaginary adversary and imaginary blows; returns them in his own fashion, thus wounding himself; then exclaims, "I have conquered."

In the fifth rectification attributed to us, Monsieur Beslay is still more ingenious than in the fourth. Speaking of the authority of the bishops in the Council, he does us the honour to say that we have "happily succeeded in rectifying the assertions of our correspondent by filling them up, extenuating, or modifying them." Any one reading this sentence would suppose that, having destroyed a heavy mass of accusations, we had deserved the praise of skilful defenders. Nothing of the sort. Our correspondent had never dreamed of infringing the rights of the bishops in the slightest degree. This accusation had been gratuitously brought against us by Beslay himself, with what justice any of our readers may judge. In refutation of it, we quoted what we had amply said and proved upon this point; we had nothing to rectify, to modify, or to explain. Our own words, quoted literally by Beslay to prove his assertion, demonstrate the contrary. "A man must be without the most distant acquaintance with the elements of theology," we said, "to be ignorant of this doctrine, and must be in some other place than Rome to be able to print it." These words say plainly, "We never thought what you supposed us to think, because we know a little theology; and if we had thought it, we could not have printed it, because we are in Rome." Is this to retract, to rectify, to modify, to extenuate? And could this be supposed simply by a mistake, or printed without an intention artfully to conceal the truth?

In the sixth number another rectification, or rather another blunder, is attributed to us. We ourselves, according to the Français, have given, in our own reply, the clearest proof of being ill-informed of what is passing in France. And why? Because we have adduced the testimony of M. Emile Ollivier as an authority, and claimed him as an ally. This is a little lesson for us as to M. Ollivier's authority in religious matters, and a kind warning against claiming him as an ally. But did we really quote him in that character?

The following were our express words :

"If our cautious observations concerning the observance of the canons in France have thus excited the bile of our accuser, and brought down so long a philippic on our heads, we wait with impatience for his reply in defence of the French Church to the recent work of M. Emile Ollivier. In the number of the 19th January he deplores in exaggerated terms the fact that the Church in France is governed as a city is governed in a state of siege."

Now where in these words is a shadow of authority attributed to Ollivier? Where is his alliance sought against the Français? Where is his testimony quoted? Is not the drift of our words opposed to all this? We here invited the Français to contradict the facts and figures brought forward by Ollivier, which, though we might believe them à priori to be greatly exaggerated, we could not contradict point by point: to us he was neither an authority nor an ally. This quotation was made simply to show, that it was no imprudence on our part to print in Rome our correspondent's cautious observations, when such lamentations were heard from the mouths of Frenchmen in France itself; and that if such lamentations were worthy of indignation, that indignation ought assuredly to be reserved for him who had expressed them so bitterly in the very midst of the clergy of France.

In his seventh number M. Beslay demands justice of us, for having accused him of fighting against us with unfair weapons, in bringing against us the words of the French Bishops, printed in the course of last Lent. "We said, we could have said nothing of the kind," says M. Beslay. We never asserted that he had professed to do this in explicit and formal words; we simply said that in placing, by a somewhat clumsy artifice, in juxtaposition with the calumnies attributed to us, certain passages of the Bishops' Pastorals, he had endeavoured to make it appear that the reproofs, therein addressed to certain calumniators of the Bishops and applied to certain suggestions of mischievous journalists, were directed against us. This he cannot deny. The first article of the Français concludes thus: "In our next we shall confront the rash allegations of the anonymous correspondent of the Civiltà by the authentic declarations of our Bishops." But this is not enough. The long article, which quotes several beautiful passages from the Bishops' Pastorals, opens by declaring the indiscretion of our correspondent in giving information concerning the feeling of France before the Bishops had spoken; and then proceeds as follows: "Therefore it is that Mgr. Chalandon, the Archbishop of Aix, has felt it necessary to put his flock on their guard against those indiscretions by these wise and well-weighed words." Nor was this enough. For, besides printing certain phrases relating to his accusations against us in italics, he here and there intersperses his quotations with bitter and malignant reflections, as if he wished to keep alive in the mind of his reader the idea, that all these weighty episcopal words were either directed intentionally against us, or, at least, were in their application opposed to our opinion. This is what we call a clumsy artifice,—these are what we called unfair weapons. We may have been severe, but we were

not unjust; and unfortunately the late reply addressed to us by the Français confirms us in our opinion.

On this occasion we have determined to speak our mind fully, that no one may be deceived by the artfiices of a writer, who mingles blows with genuflexions, and, under the pretence of defending French Catholics, attacks the Catholics of Rome. The Français belongs to that category of liberal Catholics, who desire reconciliation, but are the first to declare war against others; who claim the sweet gentleness of Evangelical charity for themselves, but reserve the gall and wormwood of party spleen for their adversaries; who defend the authority of the Pope and the Church so long as it supports their teaching, but cast it aside whenever it is adverse to them; who fear lest the Council should confirm doctrines distasteful to themselves, and exclaim against the indiscretion of those whose hope is different, because their belief is different, from theirs. It is no marvel therefore to us that they should exclaim so loudly against us, who know nothing of these base compromises between politics and faith; and who have on our lips, because we have in our hearts, but this one sentence-Catholics with the Pope now and for ever. As such, we always have the honour to receive the first attacks, which, although they appear to be directed against us, are for the most part aimed at what is far above us-even against the Catholic doctrine itself. This has ever been our consolation and our reward-a consolation and a reward which we hope our poor labours will never fail to deserve. By God's help we shall follow courageously our accustomed path according to the principles of truth and justice, and the rules of charity and Christian prudence; and if we meet with honest adversaries, we shall stretch forth our hands to them to draw them to that centre of truth to which we have the happiness to belong. As to adversaries who use weapons manifestly unfair, we shall simply unmask them, pointing them. out to the simple, that they may be aware of their dangerous arts and avoid them without delay.

Notices of Books.

Life of Mother Margaret Hallahan. By her Religious Children; with a Preface by his Lordship the Bishop of BIRMINGHAM. London: Longmans.

THE

HIS is a most refreshing book. It would be so if it were only the life of a very remarkable woman. We are all of us so cut and dried, so run into moulds, and so thoroughly conventionalized, that a picture of a real, racy nature, which has developed itself without the help of education into something remarkable, would in itself be refreshing. The book ought to be read by all Englishmen and women, Catholic or otherwise, if it were only as a study of character. Protestant and Catholic alike have read with the deepest interest the lives of Madame Récamier, Madame Swetchine, Eugénie Guérin, and the sweet Récit d'Une Sœur. We can promise all that in this book they will find a life, to take the very lowest ground, as full of thrilling interest as any of these. Here is one, who up to the age of forty was a poor servant in Belgium, who came over to England friendless, penniless, unknown, and who, without a farthing to start with, in the course of twenty-three years had founded five convents, with public churches attached to them. This was done without bazaars, lotteries, or begging-letters. The finding of money, when it did not exist, some may be inclined to think a miracle, to be ranked at least with healing the sick. Yet not only did she raise the material building, but she did more. She did not found an order, for she adopted S. Catharine of Siena's rule; yet she refounded it, for it had ceased to exist, certainly in England, and, we believe, at least in the same shape, everywhere. This she accomplished by a marvellous gift of attractiveness and a native nobleness of soul, felt by all, whether men or women, who approached her. All felt a power in the shy, yet frank and loving look of her eyes, in the perfectly natural dignity of her manner, and in the terse, and, not infrequently, humorous energy of her words. "How men love their kings!" is a dictum of a well-known writer. We may parody it, and say, "How men love their queens." This was a queen of God's own making. She collected around herself a hundred women, whose life she influenced as the sunbeams have power over nature. They were of all ranks, from her own lowly state to those who bore in the world the noblest names of England, old Catholics and converts of yesterday, those of the highest education, and those of the small culture of times of Catholic depression. There were no distinctions of grades amongst them; all cooked, scrubbed, washed, and peeled potatoes in turn. All talents were employed, painting, music, historical writing, fine needlework for churches, the teaching b-a ba to pottery children, tending the poor