has brought on contentions without end.  What seemed so solid once, is disintegrated.  It is dissolving by the internal action of the principle from which it sprung.  The critical unbelief of dogma has now reached to the foundation of Christianity, and to the veracity of Scripture.  Such is the world the Catholic Church Sees before it at this day.  The Anglicanism of the Reformation is upon the rocks, like some tall ship stranded upon the shore, and going to pieces, by its own weight and the steady action of the sea.  We have no need of playing the wreckers.  It would be inhumanity to do so.  God knows that the desires and prayers of Catholics are ever ascending that all that remains of Christianity in England may be preserved, unfolded and perfected into the whole circle of revealed truths, and the unmutilated revelation of the Faith.

“It is inevitable that if we speak plainly we must give pain and offence to those who will not admit the possibility that they are out of the Faith and the Church of Jesus Christ.  But, if we do not speak plainly, woe unto us, for we shall betray our trust and our Master.  There is a day coming, when they who have softened down the truth, or have been silent, will have to give account.  I had rather be thought harsh than be conscious of hiding the light which has been mercifully shown to me” (Temp.  Mission, etc., p. 215).

It would be well if all Catholics took to heart these noble words of the great English Cardinal, who was himself once an Archdeacon in the Anglican Church.  Real charity urges us to set forth the truth in all its nakedness and beauty.  This must be done, even though it may sometimes give pain and cause irritation.  If a man be walking in a trance towards the crumbling edge of some ghastly precipice, who—­let me ask—­acts with the greater charity, he who is afraid to interfere, and will calmly allow the somnambulist to walk on, till he fall over into the abyss; or he who will shout, and, if need be, roughly shake him from his fatal sleep, and so, perhaps, save him from destruction?  Surely, to allow a fellow-creature to follow a path of extreme danger, for fear of wounding his susceptibilities and incurring his anger, by candidly pointing out his peril, is the mark, not of a lover of his brethren, but rather of one who loves himself alone.

We will conclude with the warning of God, given through the inspired writer Ezekiel, the application of which, positis ponendis, is sufficiently plain:  “When I say unto the wicked, Thou shall surely die; and thou givest him not warning, nor speakest to warn the wicked from his wicked way, to save his life; the same wicked man shall die in his iniquity, but his blood I will require at thy hand.  Yet if thou warn the wicked, and he turn not from his wickedness, nor from his wicked way, he shall die in his iniquity, but thou hast delivered thy soul” (Ezek. iii. 18).

P.S.—­Among the authors quoted in THE PURPOSE OF THE PAPACY may be mentioned the following, as being easily obtainable by English readers:  Allnatt, Allies, Bonomelli, Capel, Castelplano, Dering, Deviver, Franzelin, Humphrey, Manning, Merry del Val, Meyer, Minges, Newman, O’Reilly, Rhodes, Ullathorne, Ward.