miration and respect of all classes of men; but he was detached from all temporal considerations, and we may indeed say he served his God.'

The essential purport of An Apology for the Separated Church of England' is no justification of schism, but only an additional plea on behalf of those whom the author was in the habit of terming his separated brethren, founded on the fact which Pugin wished to enforce, that the base compliance of the old Catholic hierarchy itself was the first cause which brought the English Church under the bondage of the State, and that they should be regarded by us rather as victims of Catholic degeneracy than the consequence of Protestant error. It is not for those,' as he has expressed it before, who have gained the ship of Peter, and ride securely in the storm, to mock the unwearied efforts of those good and earnest souls who yet man the shattered bark of England's Church, brought among Protestant shoals by its old Catholic commanders, and who still, amid mutiny and oppression, yet labour to guide her to a haven of safety: and I will say that, battered as is that old hull, it is a great breakwater between the raging waves of infidelity and Catholic truth in this land; that it has held so long together, under so many disadvantages and difficulties, must be a work of Divine Providence for some great end which remains to be developed. It is quite true that within her pale are arrayed the greatest opponents against whom we have to contend; that her pulpits are often prostituted to the unwearied repetition of the grossest

calumnies against the Catholic faith; but these sad anomalies are not peculiar to this age; they have existed in the Church of England ever since its separation from the communion of the Holy See. It contains contending elements of good and evil, of Catholic faith and Protestant error that were generated at the schism and which must go on till one or the other is triumphant. Either the Catholic element will prevail, and the body of the Church return to its mother; or, which is almost too sad to imagine, the Protestant element will expel all Catholic ritual, rubric, and practices, from her ordinals, drive from her pale every faithful child, and then what remains will collapse, like an expended balloon, and go out with a stench. But we will hope for better things; and, after all, the present state of affairs is certainly not worse, if not a great deal better than they were in the sixteenth century. At that period, as I have shown, the old priests, about whose orders there is not a shadow of doubt, were actually engaged in all the measures of the State, and in the destruction of our most glorious monuments and most sacred shrines. The four most Puritan bishops of Edward the Sixth's reign had all been superiors of monastic establishments, and had broken every vow they had ever made. These old clergy were married in violation of their solemn engagements; their successors never entered into them, and consequently are free from the scandal. The great churches are no longer mutilated, but everywhere restored and protected: surely, on the whole, the Church of England

under Queen Victoria is a great advance on the Church of England under Edward the Sixth; and, if the truth be spoken, after the first race of Elizabethan Puritans, the Anglican bishops have, on the whole, been respectable tenants of the sees. Some exhibited all the zeal of an olden time in restoring the ravages caused by Puritan ascendancy, and preserving the traditions of ancient architectural arrangement, when it had been abandoned throughout Christendom. We must not forget that many noble foundations and works of charity and piety, worthy of the brightest time of Catholic spirit, date from the seventeenth century; and when we consider that the prince-bishops of Liege and Germany were employing the vast resources of their dioceses in laying out terraces, forming artificial canals and fountains, and paganizing their palaces, while the towers of their cathedrals were stunted and incomplete, the names of Hacket and Cosin may awaken a grateful remembrance in a Catholic heart. It would be unjust to test the works of these men by those of preceding centuries. They lived at a period remarkable for debasement all over Europe. Had those countries which nominally retained the ancient faith exhibited a grand exception to the general degradation, and adhered to the noble ecclesiastical traditions of their forefathers, then indeed we should have a grand argument; but so far from this, the spirit of revived paganism flourished, and even commenced, among them, while here in England many of the ecclesiastical erections, though debased

in detail, exhibit great traces of the old traditions. What truly edifying and reverent works have been published on Catholic antiquities by devout members of her communion-by men who appreciated and set forth in most moving and pious language the noble works and lives of the founders of our cathedrals and abbatial churches. But for the labours of these men, every English Catholic antiquity would have fallen into oblivion, and their works are the standard of information to which we all refer.

'Let us then,' says Pugin, to quote the concluding words of An Apology for the separated Church of England,' 'let us then always speak and think with gratitude of the old bridge that has brought us over, and lend a pious help to restore her time-worn piers, wasted by the torrents of dissent and infidelity, and what is worse, internal decay by rotten stones, but which God in his mercy, beyond our human understanding appears yet to sustain, and to make it the marvel of some of the most zealous men that have appeared since the ancient glory of the Church in the pious early times. Pax omnibus. Amen.' These were the last words which Pugin wrote. The peace of mind he wished to others was denied to his own mind. His over-exerted brain gave way beneath the pressure of labour. His words of peace, his works of charity, his efforts of genius were all paralysed at one blow. His fine intellect was gone. The malady which for a time came over his mind was the forerunner of death.

CONCLUSION.

DEATH is always a surprise, even when it comes to close with gentle hand the wearied eye of the sufferer who has lingered hopeless for years, a living corpse on the bed of sickness; it is still a surprise when with sad and strange aspect it approaches at last to gather to the grave of his fathers the time-honoured man, soldier or sage, who, full of honours, for fourscore years and more has filled the world with the renown of his name; yet to whom should death be familiar if not to him who has outlived his day and already belongs to a past generation? But never is death so strange as when, like a thief in the night, it comes to snatch on the sudden from his incomplete work and from the unaccomplished number of his days its strong and unwilling victim. To the young in their first disappointment death is often not so bitter as to the man in the pride of life and in the vigour of intellect; for him to be smitten down in mid-career; for the light of his genius to be extinguished; for the rich treasures of his learning, gathered from ancient lore or from modern enlightenment, to be scattered and wasted, all the labour of years to be in vain the ripe mind, the pure taste, the correct judgment-is