Quite recently a case was chronicled in the daily press of a clergyman who went to visit a dying woman at her own request. She wished to make a last confession to him, and so unburden her soul of its secret misery before she passed away, trusting in God’s mercy for pardon and peace. The clergyman went accordingly, and heard what she had to say. When the unhappy creature was dead, however, he refused her poor body the sacred rites of burial! Now it surely may be asked what authority had he or any man calling himself a Christian minister to refuse the rites of burial even to the worst of sinners? Whatever the woman’s faults might have been, vengeance wreaked on a corpse is both futile and barbarous. There is nothing in Christ’s pure and noble teaching that can endorse so unholy a spirit of intolerance,--one too, which is calculated to give the bitterest pain to the living friends and relations of the so coarsely-insulted dead, and to breed in them a relentless hostility to the Church and its representatives. For the poorest erring human creature that ever turned over the pages of the New Testament, knows that such conduct is not Christ-like, inasmuch as Christ had nothing but the tenderest pity, pardon and peace for the worst sinner at the last moment. When death steps in to close all accounts, it behoves man to be more than merciful to his brother man. “For if ye forgive not men their trespasses neither will your Father forgive you your trespasses.” Still fresh in the minds of many must be the un-Christian conduct of the late Cardinal Vaughan in denying the rites of Christian burial to the venerable Dr. St. George Mivart. Dr. St. George Mivart was a man of science whose theories did not agree with the tenets of the Roman Catholic Church, and as he belonged ostensibly to that form of faith, one may call him, if one so chooses, a bad Catholic. But when it is remembered that within quite recent days, so-called “Christian” priests in Servia have given their solemn benediction to the assassins of the late King and Queen of that country, it is somewhat difficult to understand or appreciate the kind of “religion” that blesses murderers and regicides, yet refuses burial to a modern scientist who, as far as his intellectual powers allowed him, was working for the good and the wider instruction of the human race. At the time of the “inhibition” and subsequent death of Dr. Mivart, I ventured to address an “Open Letter” to Cardinal Vaughan on the subject. This Letter was published in March 1900, and though no doubt the great “Prince of the Church” never deigned to read it, a large majority of the public did, and I have had much cause to rejoice that in the timorously silent acquiescence of the Christian world in a deed which shames the very name of Christ, I, at least, as one of the humblest among the followers of the Christian faith, did have sufficient courage to speak out openly against the wicked intolerance which made the Church itself seem mere