In our own country, we have seen but a mild exercise of its spirit and power, yet enough to betray the hoary and profound despotism that lies concealed beneath its local, temporary inability. It has not, among us, dared, or rather, has not seen fit-for it is politic, and patient withal to re-thunder the motto of that Austrian bravo of the "Holy Alliance," who said "I will oppose a will of iron (steel?) to the progress of liberal principles; it has not ventured-save in petty instances to burn sacred or profane literature in our highways; it has not kindled the material faggot, nor raised the auto-da-fe; it has not denied all decent grave-space to “heretics." No; it is not bold and brave in defence of itself; it does not spurn time-serving policy, and unmask itself, at once, in all its hideous ugliness. The spirit is there, burning with hate and vengeance, as deeply as on Bartholomew's Day, or when the Bohemian expiated his Protestantism in fire, or the Emperor-monk of Yuste dabbled his crucifix in heretic gore ; but the time is not come to manifest it "in the flesh," and God grant that it never may come !

It has seized on strong

But it has done all it dared to do. elements of temporal power, grasping for its Pontifical head temples, and treasures, and graves, reared, and coined, and dug by its blind followers' sweat and blood. It has isolated and armed its herd-with one weapon or other against all hearty coalition with the people of the land. It has battled against free thought and free speech, and particularly against the education of the children of the land, free and in common. In the name of a religion which it dare not trust to the march

of mind and the progress of events, it has stood like a rock of flint in the way of liberty's watch-lights-free altars and free schools. It has opposed, secretly always, and openly when it dared, whatever tended to make a people more free and selfreliant.

If it has veiled the pageants and mummeries wherewith it has deluded and debauched in other lands, it is because the intelligence of the people at large would not tolerate them; or because, perhaps, it has found ample work for its genius and craft in attempting to stem the currents of intelligence, lest they should so widen, and swell, and burst, as to swirl down the Jesuitic Roman structure, stripping despotism of its mightiest stronghold, and ridding freedom of her deadliest foe. We have had the true programme of what Catholicism would do if it had the State in its clutches-as in Spain, or Naples, or Rome-sounded in our ears by an Archbishop's organ, "The Shepherd of the Valley." It would suppress free schools and common schools; it would crush or censor the press, and by any and every means drive back the people to the convenient barbarism of ignorance; it would make them serfs in mind, soul and body, and finally, by putting on the inquisitorial screws of an "infallible faith," have but one church, one fold, and no heretics.

We can fancy this

Beautiful and harmonious unity! consummation so devoutly labored for by "Shepherds of the Valley;"-honest shepherds, but belching the truth too soon;— it would not be different from the state of Christendom ere the Reformers arose; all knees would bend, or be broken,

before" His Holiness" of Rome; all tongues would sing peans to the tenant of the Vatican, or be plucked out by the roots; the crosir and the sword would beat the bones of heresy to dust; daring Galileos would sup in dungeons on horrors; emperors and kings, and, may be, presidents, would go a-toekissing, and perchance be glad to expiate some rebellious deed by a two days' shiver, en deshabille, in wintry weather, in a Pope's ante-chamber. Ah, there would be unity; the unity of hand-bound and tongue-tied slaves. Protest-ants would be hushed, even to the stillness of the grave. Then there would be a rare time for shaven monks-an imperial field of plunder and rapine.

But let us believe that a counter spirit is awake, a part of whose business it will be to smite this religion, in so far as it has a political, anti-republican aspect, on the head-smite it surely and swiftly. No intelligent Catholic, priest or layman, can say that Roman Catholicism, unshorn, is compatible with liberty. He who is true to the last extremity to his obligations as a Catholic, cannot be equally true to the Constitution and institutions of this country. The matter can be narrowed down to just so small a point as this. There is a deep, universal, crafty and dangerous political spirit in connection with the Catholic religion, a spirit more threatening to the future of our Republic than any other. It must be hunted out, and brought into the light, and have its claws pared. Religion, purely, we would have divorced from politics, but politicoCatholicism can only be stripped as it deserves, in the free school-house, by the unmuzzled press, and at the ballot-box.