My Fathers and Brothers, _you_ have seen it on one side, and some of us on another; but one and 5 all of us can bear witness to the fact of the utter contempt into which Catholicism had fallen by the time that we were born. You, alas, know it far better than I can know it; but it may not be out of place, if by one or two tokens, as by the 10 strokes of a pencil, I bear witness to you from without, of what you can witness so much more truly from within. No longer the Catholic Church in the country; nay, no longer, I may say, a Catholic community; but a few 15 adherents of the Old Religion, moving silently and sorrowfully about, as memorials of what had been. The "Roman Catholics,"--not a sect, not even an interest, as men conceived of it,--not a body, however small, representative of the 20 Great Communion abroad,--but a mere handful of individuals, who might be counted, like the pebbles and _detritus_ of the great deluge, and who, forsooth, merely happened to retain a creed which, in its day indeed, was the profession of a 25 Church. Here a set of poor Irishmen, coming and going at harvest time, or a colony of them lodged in a miserable quarter of the vast metropolis. There, perhaps an elderly person, seen walking in the streets, grave and solitary, and strange, 30 though noble in bearing, and said to be of good family, and a "Roman Catholic." An old-fashioned house of gloomy appearance, closed in with high walls, with an iron gate, and yews, and the report attaching to it that "Roman Catholics" lived there; but who they were, or what they did, 5 or what was meant by calling them Roman Catholics, no one could tell--though it had an unpleasant sound, and told of form and superstition. And then, perhaps, as we went to and fro, looking with a boy's curious eyes through the 10 great city, we might come to-day upon some Moravian chapel, or Quaker's meeting-house, and to-morrow on a chapel of the "Roman Catholics;" but nothing was to be gathered from it, except that there were lights burning there, and some 15 boys in white, swinging censers; and what it all meant could only be learned from books, from Protestant Histories and Sermons; and they did not report well of the "Roman Catholics," but, on the contrary, deposed that they had once had 20 power and had abused it. And then, again, we might on one occasion hear it pointedly put out by some literary man, as the result of his careful investigation, and as a recondite point of information, which few knew, that there was this 25 difference between the Roman Catholics of England and the Roman Catholics of Ireland, that the latter had bishops, and the former were governed