the air and lost in empty space, but a force stored away in the library, as the electric spark is stored away in the battery, ready to burst forth and do its work when it finds materials properly disposed. Rousseau's mad paradoxes, preserved in print, kindle revolutions in the boulevards of Paris; Proudhon's communistic maxims raise a storm in the haymarket of Chicago. True, they have been refuted a thousand times over. But all to no purpose. Let some demagogue repeat them to the hungry mob, and depend upon it that they will produce their necessary effect. Such as is the thought of a people, preserved in its literature, such, as a rule, will be its social, moral and religious condition. It is like an element in solution which you can neutralize, but which you cannot destroy.

Now, English thought, as expressed in literature, has been, and still is, mainly Protestant. 'We [Catholics] are but a portion of the vast English-speaking, world-wide race," again writes Cardinal Newman," and are but striving to create a current in the direction of Catholic truth, when the waters are rapidly flowing the other way. In no case can we, strictly speaking, form an English literature; for by the literature of a nation is meant its classics, and its classics have been given to England, and have been recognized as such long since. .... We must take things as they are, if we take them at all. . . . . We Catholics, without consciousness and without offence, are ever repeating the half sentences of dissolute playwriters and heretical partizans and preachers. So tyrannous is the literature of a nation; it is too much for us."

An ancient general is said to have conquered and almost annihilated a nation by poisoning the wells and water-courses of the country; so that, while the men fell upon the battle-field, the women and children wasted away with disease in their homes. In civilized warfare such a practice has long since been abandoned. But in English literature it has been systematically pursued up to a recent date. From the very beginning of the so-called Reformation, the English press and pulpit became the ready tools of royalty, and overflowed with falsehood, calumny and ridicule of everything that was most sacred to Catholics. They represented belief in the papal supremacy as treason to the country, construed recusancy into idolatry, and spiced their denunciations with blasphemous attacks upon the doctrine of transubstantiation, the "worship" of the saints, the "adoration " of relics and images, the sale of indulgences carried on by the "Popish " priests, and the license to commit sin granted by the "Romish" Church. Meanwhile Catholic works were excluded from the English realm by

1 Id. ibid., 1, 3.

royal order. An especial license of the pseudo-Archbishop of Canterbury was necessary, in order to import any "Popish book or pamphlet published beyond the seas"; and such license was granted "upon this condition only, that any of them be not dispersed or showed abroad, but first brought to him [the intruded archbishop] or to some of . . . . [the] privy council, that so they may be delivered, or directed to be delivered, forth unto such persons only as by them or some of them shall be thought most meet persons, upon good considerations and purposes, to have the reading of them."

In this manner English literature, during the period of its formation and development, was placed under exclusively Protestant influence. The "well of English undefiled" was poisoned, and its waters have come down to us impregnated with Protestant thought, Protestant views and Protestant principles of action. History, works of general information and education, philosophy and physical science, light literature and the newspaper, have all been enlisted in the service of error, and made to do battle against the Church.

II.

History, according to Cicero, is the "torch of truth"; but during the last three centuries, so far from answering to this definition, it has been, in the words of De Maistre, "a conspiracy against truth." Until recent years this was the case especially with English history. "It would seem," wrote an able critic in 1840, "as if the writers of England had acted under a sort of necessity of fate; as if their pen, like Anacreon's lyre, had a will of its own, independent and uncontrolled by the writer, and [had given] forth its voice but to a single theme, turned by a hidden instinct to the one subject, and made all others subject to it alone." History written from a Protestant standpoint-and scarcely any other was accessible to the English reader-was not merely fiction, but a tissue of lies manufactured out of whole cloth. Conjecture was offered instead of recognized authorities; coarse and scurrilous declamation was substituted for solid proofs; isolated facts, misconceived or misinterpreted, were made the basis of the crudest speculation.

Not only bigoted partisans, like Hume and Gibbon, but authors who are generally considered reliable, did not scruple, when treating of Catholic subjects, to pervert and distort facts, to garble and invent with more than poetic license. Thus, Hallam, whom the English "Quarterly Review" once denounced as "blindly partial to the Catholic party," writes, in his "Constitutional History":

1 Strype's Life of Archbishop Whitgift.

2 Dublin Review, as above.

"The saints, but more especially the Virgin, are almost exclusively popular deities of that religion (ie., the Catholic). All that Polytheism was swept away by the Reformers." Even Blackstone, in his "Commentaries on Law," by way of a little historical digression, entertained his readers with the "importation from Rome of the whole farrago of superstitious novelties engendered by the blindness and corruption of the monks-transubstantiation, communion in one kind, the worship of the saints and images." "Newfangled theories," he solemnly added, "were invented, and indulgences were sold to the wealthy for liberty to sin without danger. . . . penance was enjoined . . . . . and that penance was commuted for money . . . . men were taught to believe that founding a monastery a little before death would atone for a life of incontinence, disorder and bloodshed."2

Examples of this kind, which might be indefinitely multiplied, show what extravagant fables were related and accepted as historical truth. They are a sad commentary on the prejudice of the writers and on the credulity of the readers. At the same time they are very instructive, because they explain the mental attitude of the English-speaking public towards the Catholic Church. Fortunately, a feeling of honesty and fairness is beginning to prevail over narrow bigotry and partisan spirit. Since the state archives have been thrown open and state papers have become public property, history is being rewritten, and the unjust verdict of the past. is being reversed. German Protestant historians like Hurter, whose researches led him into the bosom of the Catholic Church. Voigt, and others, gave the death-blow to romancing in history, A German Protestant historian has vindicated the Church in the Galileo question, and an English clergyman of the Established Church has painted the characters of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth in darker colors than Catholic writers had ventured to do. But even before their day our own Catholic Lingard had led the way and partly disarmed prejudice by his publication of original documents. Within the last few years the learned Catholic historian, Janssen, and his continuator, Dr. Pastor, have shaken Protestantism, and especially Lutheranism, to its foundations in its very stronghold, by bringing to light the hidden things of darkness, hitherto carefully kept from the public gaze. In brief, the new critical school of historians, who are ransacking all the libraries and archives of Europe in search of original manuscripts, comparing texts, weighing authorities and sifting evidence, has already rendered great service to Catholic truth, and the probability is that it will render still greater service in future. Who now would

1 Vol. i., p. 93.

2 Italics are ours.

picture the Middle Ages as an unbroken night of ignorance and corruption? Who would represent the "Sicilian Vespers" and "St. Bartholomew's Day" as instances of wholesale butchery instigated by the sanguinary policy of Rome? Who would refer to the Inquisition as to a "tribunal of horrors," in which the cruel Church authorities condemned and wantonly tortured innocent men for maintaining their right to worship God according to the dictates of conscience? Who would write a book on the "Alliance of Popery and Heathenism," or on the "Apostasy of the Pope, the Man of Sin and the Child of Perdition "? Who would call the Popes "pageants or monsters that commonly owed their rise or downfall to crime," or represent St. Gregory VII. as the heartless Hildebrand, who made a great emperor go to Canossa and shiver in the cold of winter, for courageously defending his civil independence? Who would describe Henry VIII. as the "bluff and honest Hal," or Queen Elizabeth as the "good VirginQueen Bess," or Mary Tudor as "Bloody Mary," or Mary, Queen of Scots, as a "fiend in human flesh"? None but history-mongers, who make up by unblushing effrontery for want of research, and by a flippant style for want of fairness. Nothing but bad faith or gross ignorance can explain the rehearsal of tales which have been blown to the winds and burst like soap-bubbles. Most of the socalled "Controverted Points of History" are no longer controverted by writers who value their reputations as historians. Documentary evidence is so strongly in favor of the Catholic side as to remove all reasonable doubt.

A great change of tone is also noticeable in works of popular information, such as dictionaries, encyclopædias, miscellanies, libraries and school-manuals. It has not been many years since writers of that sort of books, instead of giving us correct definitions of Catholic terms or explanations of Catholic practices, went deliberately out of their way to malign the Church and represent her doctrines as "unchristian," " 'blasphemous," "corrupt," "absurd" and "monstrous."

Not only D'Israeli's "Curiosities of Literature," which used to serve the half-educated as a repertory of all sorts of scraps, odds and ends of learning," but also "Chambers' Encyclopædia," formerly kept on almost every bookshelf as a source of general

1 Subjects like these entered into the current literature of England and America, and were read as so much inspiration by devout Protestants scarcely more than a hundred years ago. Nowadays they are either wholly avoided or presented in less offensive language, and the attack is directed against Christianity in general almost as much as against Catholicity in particular. Thus, Draper, in his Conflict of Religion ana Science, while aiming his shafts mainly at the Catholic Church, would have us believe (p. 42) that even from the very earliest days there was an amalgamation of Christianity and paganism. Mr. Draper trips frequently upon history as well as upon logic.

information, and even the "British Encyclopædia," called with pride "a national work," indulged in ill-digested tirades against Catholics, and repeated nursery-tales as historical facts. "Transubstantiation" was called "that arch-legerdemain of the Romish priests." "The worship of the true God," we were informed, "was exchanged [by the Romanists] for the worship of bones, bits of wood (said to be of the true cross) and the images of saints." "The genuine religion of Jesus was utterly unknown." [In the opinion of Catholics] "an accumulation of crimes can be dissipated by a few orisons," and the "venal priest, claiming to hold the place of God, can traffic with the divine power at a very moderate price." The Jesuits, we were assured, had Monita Secreta (secret instructions) communicated to the leading men, but carefully kept from the public, and even from the common members of the order. The published constitutions, except for the fact that they made the rank and file blind tools of designing leaders, were fair enough; but the Secret Instructions were a mystery of cunning and iniquity. Cardinal Bellarmine (a Jesuit, of course) taught that, "if the Pope forbid the exercise of virtue and command that of vice, the Roman Church, under pain of sin, is bound to abandon virtue for vice." "The worship paid to the Virgin Mary in Spain and Italy exceeds that which is given to the Son or the Father"; so says D'Israeli, who goes on describing that worship in terms which a sense of propriety prevents us from quoting.

These are a few extracts from books, at one time regarded as standard works. That such things should have been written when bigotry had shut out the light of reason is not surprising. That some of them should have been reprinted in a recent edition of the "British Encyclopædia" needs no other explanation than that they were supplied by that most unreliable of authorities, the Rev. Mr. Littledale. That they should be believed, in the face of the evidence now accessible to all, argues a degree of credulity not reached even by those good folk who still persist in believing in the existence of "Diana Vaughan" and in her satanic revelations. In striking contrast with the books referred to is the "American Encyclopædia," whose articles upon Catholic subjects are mostly, if not exclusively, from the pens of Catholics.

What has been said of works of popular information may likewise be said of school-manuals and text-books. Time was when it was a part even of secular education to distort and pervert the language of Catholic devotion, and to ridicule the usages and ceremonies of the Church. Here are some specimens, familiar to every scholar. Campbell in his "Rhetoric," still in use as a book