has had great results already; it will have greater still. We are at a period of singular moment. The nineteenth century is more than half spent. It opened with a series of revolutions which for fifty years have been shaking, not Europe only, but the world. But there is a turn in the tide of events. The moral and intellectual power of the Catholic Church has been steadily rising in the public opinion of every country. Its action was never more wide-spread nor more kindly: witness its expanding influences in the United States, and in the colonies of the British Empire. At home it is, perhaps, less kindly viewed, less kindly dealt with. The tradition of the Tudor spirit, which survives the Tudor statutes, swept away though they be because now obsolete, and obsolete because too unjust to be put in execution; the historical prejudice, suspicion, fear, and hatred against the Catholic Church, into which we English are born, as into the fall of Adam;—all this still survives to keep up a religious bitterness which has been the disease and humiliation of our country. Nevertheless, a clearer sky is opening. These things are almost relegated now from the sphere of legislation and from public opinion to the haunts of moles and bats, to anti-Catholic factions, to sections of religious parties, or to knots of individuals who have dropped behind the spiritual and intellectual changes of our times.
But I cannot here do more than touch these things in passing. To do more would need a treatise. What has been said is enough to mark the importance
