stances, say, in case of the rapid accumulation of property in land in defiance of the laws of mortmain, which may warrant the State in checking the growth of the religious orders. Nor is it quite easy to see why, if denominational action is to be at all recognised in education, we should decline to recognise their services in this field, if the State will fix and maintain a standard of proficiency in secular education sufficiently high to thwart the designs of obscurantists, and will grant no exceptional advantages to religious communities. The new system of inspection under the English Education Act will necessarily secure a uniformity in the results of that education which is purely secular; and if the monks or nuns choose to impart in addition the most advanced lore of Ultramontanism, we cannot well object any more than we can object to any other phase of religious instruction imparted by the various sects in the Kingdom.12 If the religious orders fail to educate the Catholics to fill with ability the various callings of English life, the result will naturally be that their pupils will fall behind in the race, to the utter destruction of their social influence. There may be people who dread the influence of the Jesuits in politics, as likely to lead to the destruction of our liberties; but our political position is not, like the German, in process of consolidation; and as we crushed the Jesuits in the seventeenth century, we can do the same, if necessary, in the nineteenth. We have too much of the gallantry of Protestant hope to fear lest barely a million of English Catholics should overturn the liberties or the faith of twenty millions of English Protestants, even if we did not remember how the Jesuits have destroyed the Catholic cause in almost every other

The religious

country in Europe. orders are here, not directly, we believe, to undermine Protestantism, but to prevent or arrest, if possible, that fearfully rapid disintegration of Catholicism which is so conspicuous a phenomenon in Continental society. They are here to guard the Catholics of England against the attacks of Liberalism, which is making havoc of the Church everywhere else.

Perhaps, however, it may be asked, If you would not suppress these monastic houses, would you authorise their inspection by the State? This is a question that demands careful consideration. We care nothing for the arguments of certain Catholic dukes and noblemen, that convents ought to be as much secured against intrusion as a private house, for there is no private house in the Kingdom that is not really open to the law. The right of the State to inspect convents is unquestionable. But suppose Parliament were to-morrow to resolve, as it did resolve in 1853 and 1854, to inspect the religious houses, what would be the real value of such a resolution? In the first place, inspection would not diminish the number of such houses, for, if irregularities of any kind at present exist in them, the fear of inspection would only make them more regular. Secondly, would an inspection be of the slightest use? Suppose the inspectors were to visit the 235 nunneries in England and Wales, and to speak face to face with the 3,000 nuns-even with each nun apart-how could they get them to answer a single question? If they wanted to know the sources of income in each convent, with the view, perhaps, of discovering to what extent property was being accumulated in secret trusts, would the nuns give the slightest informa

tion? Mr. Harting, the solicitor who manages the legal affairs of 215 convents, refused to tell Mr. Newdegate's Select Committee in 1870 even where these convents were situated. Can Parliament devise any plan for getting information in cases where people sternly refuse to give it? Suppose, how ever, that there are nuns confined in these houses against their will-and we must remember that as nearly all the nuns of the United Kingdom are engaged in teaching or charity, they have always more or less frequent access to the streets, and could easily escape from their convents-does anybody suppose that these nuns, whether ill-treated or not, would disclose their grievances or their dissatisfaction to a Protestant Commission, or to a mixed body of Protestant and Catholic inspectors? The pride of Catholicism would keep them from compromising institutions they know to be hateful to Protestantism. Even Catherine Selby, who escaped from Colwich, would not utter a word to the two Protestants who visited her at Staplehill as to her treatment at the Priory, but kept a significant silence. She expressed at the same time her gratitude for their interference. Suppose, again, that the inspectors should have a suspicion that corporal penances of a very severe character are imposed in a particular convent-say, even that appliances such as the Times' correspondent found in the Rue de Picpus convent near Paris are used-would there not be ample opportunity, as the convents are jealously barred and guarded from within, for the removal of all such suspicious such suspicious

articles before the inspectors obtained admittance? We may be quite sure that Miss Saurin would not have been seen with the duster on her head in the Hull convent if there had been the slightest risk of a visit from inspectors. What, then, would inspectors really do, if they had the power of entering any one of the 235 convents of England at any hour of the day or night? We cannot see that the inspection would be of the slightest use in any way.13

But suppose a law were passed for inspecting nunneries, would there be no danger of its lying in abeyance? The exigencies of party politics might occasionally make it practically a dead letter. How does it happen, as M. Michelet says, that in France, where the mayors have the right of visitation, they are afraid to enter the convents? What, then, you will say, is to become of those unhappy nuns-they are exceptional cases, no doubtwho are nuns against their will? We answer, they have elected their vocation-they have made their bed, and they must lie upon it; and if they are bitterly disappointed with the result, they are in no worse position than thousands of other people in this world who take a wrong step in life and can find no way of retreat. If they are illtreated, like Miss Saurin, they can have their remedy at law, and the Lord Chief Justice of England has just been telling us that a little bit of paper from his Court is able to open any convent in the Kingdom. We can well understand that, with the sharp and suspicious eyes of Protestantism always upon them, the convents will be managed with

great circumspection; and if any flagrant case of injury or badness should ever arise, there is no saying but an English mob might, in a wild moment, imitate American example and pull down a convent about the ears of its inmates.

There are people, however, who object more plausibly to our law tolerating the accumulation of property under secret trusts, and they remind us of the time when the monastic houses in England possessed one-fifth of the Kingdom in spite of the laws of mortmain, passed in feudal times, when the State found that the accumulation of enormous property in monastic hands deprived it of the services of its subjects, and weakened the defence of the realm. No Government would ever think of repealing the laws of mortmain; but the difficulty is to apply them. There can be no doubt whatever, though Mr. Murphy tells us the convents are in debt to their builders, that the accumulation of trust property is going on at a rapid rate, regardless of the law, especially within the last twenty years. No inspection of the convents, however, can give us the required information concerning the secret trusts under which the property is held; and our only comfort is that the more rapid the accumulation, the greater the spoil when the inevitable day of disclosure arrives. Property held in secret trusts is always held at a risk; and so long as the legal disability exists, there will be some check to the indefinite multiplication of monastic or conventual houses. It is not to be denied that if these institutions are likely to become at all powerful among us, the country would demand, and rightly demand, their entire suppression. It is because the public are fully convinced they can never obtain any material importance, that the existing laws are allowed to become a dead letter. We would not, then, at present suppress either convents

or monasteries; we would not inspect them; for this would be to a certain extent to bring them under the protection of the State; and we would equally oppose Sir Colman O'Loghlen's proposal to legalise them. It is far better to keep aloof from them altogether, retaining our power of interference and our right of suppressing them if we think fit.

We believe, notwithstanding the fears of some Protestants, that their powers for mischief are greatly overrated. We know how the Jesuits, who direct all the educating orders, have brought ruin upon the Papacy, and have made a living Catholicism almost impossible in Continental society; and we have already seen that the monks and nuns, whom the Catholic States have cast out without one touch of remorse or pity, have left the masses of those countries without education, without piety, and without the faculty of self-government. Verily, as Döllinger says, 'The Jesuits have no lucky hand; on their undertakings rests no blessing: they build assiduously and indefatigably; but there comes a whirlwind and overthrows their building, or a torrent breaks in and washes it away, or the worm-eaten timbers fall to pieces in their hands.' It is the same eminent divine who reminds us that it was the Jesuits in England who caused the deep and lasting hatred of Englishmen to Rome, and for a century made the lot of the Catholics almost unendurable. We cannot believe, notwithstanding Mr. Murphy's enthusiastic laudations of the religious orders, which are more, after all, in the style of a Maynooth seminarist than of a Catholic man of the world, that they are destined to work any great transformation in English society, or even greatly elevate, socially or morally, the Irish masses in our great towns, who have so much yet to learn in the arts of education, refinement, and sobriety.

FEW

NEW historical characters have had harder measure dealt out to them than Archbishop Laud. He was unpopular in his lifetime; he died on the scaffold; and he has been unpopular with posterity. It will be information to almost every

Reading,

on

one of our readers that there occurred, some three months ago, what, in the jargon appropriated to such occasions, would be called the Laud Tercentenary. He was born at the 7th of October, in the year 1573. Whether the day was commemorated in Ritualist circles, as the birthday of one who, more veritably even than Charles I., lived the apostle and died the martyr of Anglicanism, we cannot tell; but there certainly was no such weeping or exultation in the camp of the Hebrews that the Egyptians heard it, and the busy England of to-day did not pause for an instant to recall the fact that three hundred years had elapsed since Laud was born.

Lord Macaulay's estimate of Laud as a driveller and a fool is best known, and it is apt to be accepted with unquestioning confidence for two reasons: first, that Macaulay, a kind-hearted man, was seldom bitterly contemptuous; second, that with manifest good faith and great literary adroitness he adduces in brief space what seems conclusive evidence that Laud was a ' superstitious driveller.' The evidence consists of a series of extracts from Laud's Diary.

We turn to his Diary (says Macaulay), and we are at once as cool as contempt can make us.

There we learn how his picture

fell down, and how fearful he was lest the fall should be an omen; how he dreamed that the Duke of Buckingham came to bed to him, that he saw Thomas Flaxney in green garments, and the Bishop of Worcester with his shoulders wrapped in linen. In the early part of 1627, the sleep of this great ornament of the Church seems to have

ary he saw a merry old man with a wrinkled countenance, named Grove, lying on the ground. On the fourteenth of the same memorable month he saw the Bishop of Lincoln jump on a horse and ride away. A day or two after this, he dreamed that he gave the King drink in a silver cup, and glass. Then he dreamed that he had turned that the King refused it, and called for Papist; of all his dreams, the only one, we suspect, which came through the gate of horn. But of these visions our favourite is that which, as he has recorded, he enjoyed on the night of Friday, the ninth of February, 1627. I dreamed,' says he, 'that I had the scurvy; and that forthwith all my teeth became loose. There was one in especial in my lower jaw, which I could scarcely keep in with my finger till I had called for help.' Here was a man to have the superintendence of the opinions of a great nation!

Here indeed! the reader exclaims, echoing Macaulay's ejaculation, and pausing to wonder how such a thing could be. The wonder becomes not less, but greater, if we extend Macaulay's clause so as to include two other indubitable facts concerning Laud. Here was a man to be the most powerful subject in England for fifteen years, and the trusted friend of Strafford ! Professor Masson, whose voluminous biography of Milton embraces a careful and elaborate study of Laud, sees that the hypothesis of imbecility will not cover the facts. A poor Oxford student without friends does not rise to be what Laud, became unless he is something very different from an imbecile. Perhaps it is,' suggests Professor Masson, that a nature does not always or necessarily rise by greatness, or intrinsic superiority to the element about it, but may rise by peculiarity, or proper capillary rela

6

When

standard, so much force and pungency among his contemporaries. To have hold of the surrounding sensations of men even by pain and irritation is a kind of power; and Laud had that kind of power from the first.' This is ingenious, but we have yet to learn that a much simpler solution cannot be given of the problem.

Laud may claim to be judged by his waking moments, not by his dreams, and Lord Macaulay, in writing him down an imbecile, is bound to render account of several things besides the jottings in his Diary. The world of dreams may with sufficient correctness be described as a region in which the incidents and sayings of waking life are transposed, distorted, turned topsy-turvy, and made the materials of an occasionally tragic but more frequently comic grotesquerie. It is as if a crew of mischief-making imps, with Queen Mab and Puck for master and mistress of the revels, got possession of life's stage when reason, the manager, was asleep, and followed up the graver entertainment of the day with broad farce or monstrous pantomime. In a scientific age the antics of the dream-imps, if the recollection of them is not washed utterly from the mind by the dews of morning, mix with the gossip and the clatter of cups and saucers at the breakfast table, and are then forgotten for ever. The man who in our day should put the record of his dreams upon paper except for purposes of amusement, or in the hope of throwing light upon some curious puzzle in psychology, would most probably be a fool. But in the time of Laud the ablest men, or at least a large proportion of able men, attached importance to dreams and omens. Clarendon devotes four pages to an account of a spectre which appeared three times at the dead of night, some months before the assassination of Buckingham, and gave warning of the dan

ger to which the Duke was exposed. And of remarkable men-of Wallenstein, of Hobbes, of Voltaire, of Goethe, of Napoleon-it will hold good that we shall form an erroneous judgment, in whatever age they lived, if the criterion we adopt of their general ability and character is some personal whimsicality or crotchet or perversity or absurdity. Wallenstein was a dreamer of dreams, or at least a believer in dreams, as well as Laud; Hobbes fiercely maintained that he had squared the circle; Voltaire was vain to an extent that would have been ridiculous in an Eton schoolboy; Goethe filled volumes with anti-Newtonian theorising about light; and Napoleon, to put it in the words of Macaulay himself, was 'not exempt from the influence of that most pernicious of superstitions, a presumptuous fatalism.' If the follies and weaknesses of eminent men are to be made the test of their strength, and to neutralise the positive evidence of their capacity, it will indeed be true that no one can be a hero to his valet.

But there is something more to be considered. Readers who derive their idea of Laud's Diary solely from Lord Macaulay are likely to form an incorrect notion of the document. The quotations are not false, but, from being thrown together, instead of spread over a number of pages, are apt to produce a false impression. There is no dream mentioned in the Diary till Laud is fifty years old; he lived rather more than twenty years longer; and we venture to say, on the strength of more than one careful examination of the piece, though without having made any express calculation, that Lord Macaulay has managed to find room in his halfpage for almost all that would strike a modern reader as peculiarly silly or ludicrous in the recorded dreamings of Laud. The Diary is a very curious production. The right