"My Dear Lord,--I hope I shall be doing right to explain to your lordship the real circumstances of the transaction which, you may perhaps have been told, has been adverted to in _The Times_ newspaper of Nov. 3, and some other paper since; which states, from the _Gazette de France,_ that I have been at Paris, with Mr. Ambrose Phillipps, busy in establishing an association of prayers for the conversion of England to the Roman faith. I am certainly ready to plead guilty on this charge; but I do not find cause to repent of it. However, a good thing may be done so out of place and out of time as to make it not worth much, and it may be necessary, therefore, that I should explain myself before I am approved of in what I have been {249} doing in Paris. In the first visit which I paid to the Archbishop on my arrival at Paris, I was saying, what I say continually, that what we want above all in England is good prayers; and that it would be a great benefit if the French would undertake to unite in prayer for us. I did not think of making any proposal for an actual arrangement of the kind till the Archbishop himself (then Monseigneur Quelin) encouraged, and almost obliged, me to do all I could by the zealous manner in which he took up the idea. He appointed that I should meet him after two days at St. Sulpice, where seventy or eighty of the clergy of Paris were to be assembled to offer him an address of thanks for a retreat which he had given them. After the business was concluded, he introduced me to them, and having explained how I came to be there, he proposed that they should undertake to pray for the conversion of England on every Thursday. The proposal was most favourably received, and I heard of its being acted upon by many offering their mass on the first Thursday. This encouraged me to go on. I obtained a circular letter of introduction to the superiors of religious houses, and visited about twenty of the principal. All of them undertook to offer their prayers as I asked them, and to write to their sister houses through France. The General of the Lazarists, and the Provincial of the Jesuits, undertook to recommend it to their brethren; but what I thought more satisfactory yet was, that all the Archbishops and bishops whom I could meet with in Paris promised to recommend the prayers in their dioceses and provinces; so that it appeared to me that there was reason to say that all France would soon be united in this prayer, and I trust other countries of Europe will follow their example. I remember, at the time when your lordship received me with much kindness at Halford House, on our speaking of the importance of prayers being regularly said for the conversion of England, and you told me of what had been done at Ushaw under your direction. I forget whether I said to you that I had then lately adopted the practice of offering my mass every