Let us see how the Herald acquired its ill name.  We shall then know why it is still so profoundly odious; for it has never changed, and can never change, while its founder controls it.  Its peculiarities are his peculiarities.

He came into collision, first of all, with the clergy and people of his own Church, the Roman Catholic.  Thirty years ago, as some of our readers may remember, Catholics and Protestants had not yet learned to live together in the same community with perfect tolerance of one another’s opinions and usages; and there were still some timid persons who feared the rekindling of the fagot, and the supremacy of the Pope in the United States.  A controversy growing out of these apprehensions had been proceeding for some time in the newspapers when this impudent little Herald first appeared.  The new-comer joined in the fray, and sided against the Church in which he was born; but laid about him in a manner which disgusted both parties.  For example:—­

“As a Catholic, we call upon the Catholic Bishop and clergy of New York to come forth from the darkness, folly, and superstition of the tenth century.  They live in the nineteenth.  There can be no mistake about it,—­they will be convinced of this fact if they look into the almanac....

“But though we want a thorough reform, we do not wish them to discard their greatest absurdities at the first breath.  We know the difficulty of the task.  Disciples, such as the Irish are, will stick with greater pertinacity to absurdities and nonsense than to reason and common sense.  We have no objection to the doctrine of Transubstantiation being tolerated for a few years to come.  We may for a while indulge ourselves in the delicious luxury of creating and eating our Divinity.  A peculiar taste of this kind, like smoking tobacco or drinking whiskey, cannot be given up all at once.  The ancient Egyptians, for many years after they had lost every trace of the intellectual character of their religion, yet worshipped and adored the ox, the bull, and the crocodile.  They had not discovered the art, as we Catholics have done, of making a God out of bread, and of adoring and eating him at one and the same moment.  This latter piece of sublimity or religious cookery (we don’t know which) was reserved for the educated and talented clergy from the tenth up to the nineteenth century.  Yet we do not advise the immediate disturbance of this venerable piece of rottenness and absurdity.  It must be retained, as we would retain carefully the tooth of a saint or the jawbone of a martyr, till the natural progress of reason in the Irish mind shall be able, silently and imperceptibly, to drop it among the forgotten rubbish of his early loves, or his more youthful riots and rows.

“There must be a thorough reformation and revolution in the American Catholic Church.  Education must be more attended to.  We never knew one priest who believed that he ate the Divinity