"Not a May-game is this man's life, but a battle and a march, a warfare with principalities and powers. No idle promenade through fragrant orange-groves and green flowery spaces, waited on by the choral Muses and the rosy Hours: it is a stern pilgrimage through burning sandy solitudes, through regions of thick-ribbed ice. He walks among men, loves men, with inexpressible soft pity, as they cannot love him, but his soul dwells in solitude in the uttermost parts of creation. In green oases by the palm-tree wells he rests a space, but anon he has to journey forward, escorted by the Terrors and the Splendours, the Archdemons and Archangels. All Heaven, all Pandemonium are his escort. The stars keen-glancing from the Immensities send tidings to him; the graves, silent with their dead, from the Eternities. Deep calls for him unto Deep."--("Past and Present," page 249.) THE CATHOLIC CHURCH AND THE SOCIAL QUESTION. The Rev. Dr. Barry read a paper at the Catholic Conference on June 30th, 1890, from which I take the following extracts as illustrative of the rising feeling of this subject in the Catholic Church. The Rev. Dr. Barry began by defining the proletariat as those who have only one possession--their labour. Those who have no land, and no stake in the land, no house, and no home except the few sticks of furniture they significantly call by the name, no right to employment, but at the most a right to poor relief; and who, until the last 20 years, had not even a right to be educated unless by the charity of their "betters." The class which, without figure of speech or flights of rhetoric, is homeless, landless, property less in our chief cities-- that I call the proletariat. Of the proletariat he declared there were hundreds of thousands growing up outside the pale of all churches.