“Who will not say,” says the _Dublin Review_, “that the uncommon beauty and marvellous English of the Bible is not one of the great strongholds of heresy in this country. It lives on the ear like a music that can never be forgotten, like the sound of the church-bell, _which the convert hardly knows how he can forego_. Its felicities often seem to be almost things rather than mere words. It is part of the national mind, and the anchor of national seriousness. The memory of the dead passes into it. The potent traditions of childhood are stereotyped in its verses. The power of all the gifts and trials of a man is hidden beneath its words. It is the representative of his best moments, and all that there has been about him of soft, and gentle, and pure, and penitent, and good, speaks to him forever out of the English Bible. It is his sacred thing, which doubt has never dimmed, and controversy never soiled. In the length and breadth of the land, there is not a Protestant with one spark of righteousness about him, whose spiritual biography is not in his Saxon Bible.” Action and reaction are always equal; and it is my own opinion that the hand of God is visible in the permission of the late scandals, and their sequel will demonstrate that He has been infusing into modern Romanism a spirit which will blow it to atoms. Among the beardless boys, who have swelled the numerical strength of the apostacy, there are some prodigals who will yet come to themselves, and remember their father’s house with penitent tears: and as to their leaders, the ex-Jesuit Steinmetz in his narrative of a residence at Stoneyhurst, introduces the following striking view of the case, which sustains my own impressions. “Though the men of Rome,” he says, “exult in this reaction (as they call it) which is making Oscott a _refugium peccatorum_, perhaps from among the very men whose captive chains clank in their triumphal thanksgiving, there will be shot the _lethalis arundo_, the deadly arrow that will pierce and cling to the side of their mother church in the appointed time. It is not children that they are receiving; but full-grown men, accustomed most pertinaciously to think for themselves. They began with being reformers, and it must be confessed with some of the boldness of reformers. Will they be content to change their skins? To become sheep, from having been, as it were, wolves? To smother the cunning and the clever thought, which seems so flattering to one’s own vanity, in the cold, dead ashes of papal infallibility? _We shall see._” This is reasonable, and consoling. We may not live to see it; but a rebellion against Truth must have its rebound, and Church and State will be stronger for such rebellions in the end.