taking a steady aim as we lay, we went crazy at once, leaped to our feet and blazed away wildly at six frightened antelope "rocketting" down the steep slope like so many jack-rabbits. Of course we missed everything, and, dropping our empty guns, drew our big six-shooters, and began popping at them as they dashed up the opposite slope of the narrow valley. Suddenly we noticed the biggest buck drop behind the others, and for a moment thought we had wounded him. To our astonishment, however, he turned and faced us, then ran a score of paces farther and turned again, and we saw what he was doing. He was defying us, to distract our attention until the does and fawns could make good their escape! The little herd soon reached the top of the ridge, plunged over, and were lost to view ; but their plucky champion stood proudly for several seconds on the summit, stamping his foot angrily at us, until a backward glance assured him that his family were out of range behind the hill, when, with a last toss of his head, he whirled, and was after them like a flash. For some reason or other we didn't think of reloading our rifles for another long-range shot, but took off our hats to him as he went over the ridge, and had the decency to be glad we had missed him.

WOODS HUTCHINSON.

FIVE LETTERS BY CARDINAL NEWMAN.

HE following letters of my uncle, the late Cardinal Newman, written in that is, the defensive-side of a correspondence which I had with him in the course of that year. I had ventured to put to him certain questions, to which he (as I felt sure would be the case) was willing to reply. I had asked whether the real conduct of the visible Church-i.e., in his view, of the Church of Rome--had been in accordance with that spirit of morality and goodness which should mark a divine example and a divine teacher. I pointed to facts in the history of the Church which appeared to me to be symptoms of a faulty nature. I referred to the condition of the countries most obedient to Rome-Spain under Philip II., France up to the first Revolution, Italy up to the middle of the nineteenth century-as exhibiting a tremendous total of misdoing, partly traceable directly to the influence of the highest authorities of Rome, partly permitted by them without protest or repudiation. How came it that the visible happiness and harmony of the several countries of Europe should be almost in the reverse proportion to the degree of their belief in the authority of Rome? How came it that the members of an organisation, to which the divine promises were believed to have been entrusted, should not only have committed such grave offences in the past, but should be so unwilling to confess them in the present, except as bare facts, and without any sense of the disrepute thereby attaching to themselves, and to the society they looked upon as divine?

The Cardinal's answers to the questions of which the above is a summary will certainly be found extremely interesting.

With respect to my own share in the correspondence I have but one regret; that, however, is a serious one: it is that in replying to the Cardinal's last letter (that dated December 3, 1875) I was overpowered by the magnitude of the subject, and perhaps also by the personality of my opponent in argument, and missed the true point. Hence, this was the end of continuous and sustained argument between us; though, of the letters which I had from him in later years, two certainly are of very high interest.

Let me, as far as is possible, repair my error by indicating the central point in the Cardinal's letter of December 3, 1875, from which, were the

opportunity ever to offer, the argument might be resumed. It lies in the following sentence: "The ethos of the Catholic Church is what it was of old time, and whatever or whoever quarrels with Catholicism now, quarrels virtually, and would have quarrelled if alive 1800 years ago, with the Christianity of Apostles and Evangelists."

The question, it will be seen, is this and truly it is an important onewhether the spirit of St. Peter and St. Paul can be shown to differ, in any material respect, from the spirit of the Church of Rome at the present day.

J. R. MOZLEY.

THE ORATORY,

April 1, 1875.

MY DEAR JOHN,

You open a subject too large to be dealt with in one letter; but I shall be able to get a certain way in it to-day.

I consider your letter to be addressed to me personally, as if you said, "I am perplexed and even curious to understand how a man like you, who have had time and opportunities for observation and thought, should be able to put up with a one-sided view of the Church of Rome-nay, with an abstract view and a paper representation of it, a mere conclusion, congruous or compulsory, from premises dependent on certain first principles, such as there must be a visible Church,' instead of going into the world of facts, and seeing and judging of the Roman Church by what it is seen to have been in history."

My reply to your objections, then, shall take the shape of accounting for my own insensibility to them as objections. But anyhow, as I can only answer you in my own way and from my own standpoint, the substance of what I shall say would be the same, whether I argued with you directly or explained to you the arguments which convince me.

First, then, I grant that I do assume certain first principles as the starting points from which my convictions proceed, and I don't see who can arrive at any conviction without making assumptions. I assume that there is a truth in religion, and that it is attainable by us: that there is a God, to whom we can approve ourselves and to whom we are responsible. On the other hand, I find, in matter of fact and by experience, that there are great difficulties in admitting this first principle; but still, they are not such as to succeed in thrusting it out from its supremacy in my mind. The most prominent difficulty of Theism is the existence of evil: I can't overcome it; I am obliged to leave it alone, with the confession that it is too much for me, and with an appeal to the argumentum ab ignorantia, or, In other words, with the evasion or excuse, not very satisfactory, that we have not the means here of answering an objection, which nevertheless, if we knew more, we should doubtless have the means of answering: that we can at least make hypotheses to help the difficulty,

and, though all those which we can make be wrong, still they open a possibility and prospect of other hypotheses as yet unknown, one of which may be the true explanation.

When I come to Christianity I find this grand difficulty untouched, yet fully recognised. This coincidence is to me an argument in favour of Christianity, if Theism be true, as falling under the argument from analogy. And, though Theism were not yet proved true, still, from the fact of the coincidence, an argument in some sort is to be drawn in favour of both systems, that is, supposing the coincidence is independent of themselves-I mean, if Theists and Christians have not borrowed their recognition and non-explanation of the fact of evil from each other.

Our Lord's death to destroy evil is as tremendous and appalling a confession of the (its ?) existence and of its power as can be conceived. From this central doctrine of the Gospel, the Atonement, may be drawn two contrary conclusions. The first is that from the moment of our Lord's death upon the cross all evil would be annihilated; or secondly, that since He did not in His own Person destroy it instantaneously, no wonder if He should take time in destroying it in the world or in His Church, The former of those conclusions is perhaps the more natural; but the interval of gloom and sadness which overwhelmed His followers on His death, and still more their history, as contained in the Acts of the Apostles, is sufficient to show that it is not the right conclusion.

I confess, then, that it was natural, very reasonable, to expect that an annihilation of sin and a millennium period would commence with our Lord's Sacrifice; but, unless we unravel our convictions and run back to belief in nothing, I must give this thought up, and must admit, on the contrary, the pregnant conclusion that evil will pass away from this world and from the Church very slowly-nay (if we are to imagine that the moral system advances after the analogy of the advance in the physical system of the universe), so slowly that one or two generations or centuries afford no available measure for calculating the rate of advance. I own I should have fancied, a priori, that the lamb and the lion would lie down together from the date of the Crucifixion; that at least that Elect Society which our Lord lett behind Him would show forth in its extension as a kingdom of righteousness from the first, simple and absolute holiness extending with its extension, whereas, in fact, the history of the Church contains in it the history of great crimes.

I allow, then (and for argument's sake I allow more than facts warrant), the existence of that flood of evil which shocks you in the visible Church; but for me, if it touched my faith mortally in the divinity of Catholicism, it would, by parity of reason, touch my faith in the Being of a Personal God and Moral Governor. The great

question to me is, not what evil is left in the Church, but what good has energised in it and been practically exercised in it, and has left its mark there for all posterity. The Church has its sufficient work if it effects positive good, even though it does not destroy evil except so far forth as it supplants it for good.

Of its greatest and best achievements it cannot, from the nature of the case, leave memorials, that "hidden man of the heart" of which I spoke in that former letter to which you refer. It is not necessarily seen in school teachers or in every specimen of a secular priest, even though, did you know them, you might find that your first impressions had been unjust to them. Nay, I have always laid great stress on St. Paul's words, "I endure all for the elects' sake"; they lead me to reflect that, even though there were no high religious fruits of the Church's special sacraments generally, ordinarily and prima facie visible to the world, that would not necessarily be a refutation of its claim to come from God. The Church would indeed, if it had no visible tokens at all, be a secret society; but, since it is a light set on a hill, I grant it must have visible tokens that it is divine, and, contrariwise to what you hold, I think that it and its tokens are visible for the very reason that God is invisible-viz., because they are to manifest Him. However, though I grant that there must be visible tokens of sanctity in the Church if the Church is to be considered divine, still, as the Spirit bloweth as it listeth, so its manifestation in works is according to no law and cannot be reckoned on.

As to the virtues of Catholics, I have lately been reading the following words of Lord Russell, an impartial witness, from his "Essay on the Christian Religion": "There is among Roman Catholics, in their relations to each other, a pure essence of affection which does not appear in the moral writings of Greece and Rome. The Roman Catholics, who have never practised or have relinquished the vices of erring youth, are humble, loving, compassionate, abounding in good works, kind to all classes of their fellow creatures, ever ready to say, 'God be merciful to me a sinner,' ready to give of their substance to the needy, ready to forgive others their trespasses, and kneel in humble devotion to their Maker." He speaks as if there were no middle class among us; but, if we were not living in sin, we were almost saints.

But leaving the highest and truest outcome of the Catholic Church and descending to history, certainly I would maintain firmly, with most writers on the Evidences, that, as the Church has a dark side, so (as you do not seem to admit) it has a light side also, and that its good has been more potent and permanent and evidently intrinsic to it than its evil. Here, of course, we have to rely on the narrative of historians, if we have not made a study of original documents ourselves. It would be a long business (assuming their correctness), but an easy business too, to show how Christianity has raised the moral