flame. A number of persons, one of them a boy in the dress of an acholyte, stood round the fire. They were kicking books, that were evidently small pocket Bibles, into the fire. One of these persons turned round and said, “_We are burning Bibles_,” and asked, “Have you any more to bring?” And then, to leave no doubt upon our mind, took up a portion of one out of the fire before our eyes and placed it in our hands. This fragment you now behold, and from its first page we have selected the text. Can evidence like this be disputed or set aside? Our next duty will be to consider, the _wickedness_ of the deed. In doing this we wish you to observe, that God threatens with severe punishment those persons who merely do not receive the truth in the love of it; still more severely such as will not hear, who turn away the shoulder or stop the ear; but most of all the men who dare to treat his commandment with contempt. Now we say that the act complained of was one that treated the Word of God with the utmost contempt possible. The burning of a book is every where, and from time immemorial has been, looked upon as the worst brand that can be stamped upon its character. In the times of the Apostles we read of some who, when converted from their evil practices, brought their curious books of occult arts and burned them as evidence of their detestation of the books and the sincerity of their conversion. The burning has been sometimes conducted by the hands of the common executioner. With the knowledge of these facts, and that the deed should be regarded in this light, the Holy Book of God was, in this nineteenth century of the Christian Era, committed to the consuming flame by the authority of the Redemptorist Fathers. It must not be pleaded, as any mitigation of the daring impiety, that it was the Protestant version that was burned: for many Roman Catholics of high authority have admitted this version to be the Word of God, and the difference between it and the Douay version, in all essential matters, is not such as to allow any candid man of either creed to hesitate to confess that either is the Holy Bible. This deed was done under the most aggravating circumstances. It would have been great rebellion against God to have burned his Word alone in one’s own chamber; but in that case the insult would not have been so emphatic or so daring. It was done before the face of many Protestants, and under such circumstances that it must come to the knowledge of all Protestants in the town, if not throughout the kingdom. It was an act not merely calculated to insult their creed, but to provoke them in the highest degree. The Book of God was burned in revolting association. To increase the ignominy of our Lord’s crucifixion he was placed between two thieves; malefactors who, according to their own admission, suffered justly. “He was numbered with transgressors.” On the same principle, to make the odium cast upon the