by four officials, called Vicars-Apostolic. Such was about the sort of knowledge possessed 30 of Christianity by the heathen of old time, who persecuted its adherents from the face of the earth, and then called them a _gens lucifuga_, a people who shunned the light of day. Such were Catholics in England, found in corners, and alleys, and cellars, and the housetops, or in the recesses 5 of the country; cut off from the populous world around them, and dimly seen, as if through a mist or in twilight, as ghosts flitting to and fro, by the high Protestants, the lords of the earth. At length so feeble did they become, so utterly 10 contemptible, that contempt gave birth to pity; and the more generous of their tyrants actually began to wish to bestow on them some favor, under the notion that their opinions were simply too absurd ever to spread again, and that they 15 themselves, were they but raised in civil importance, would soon unlearn and be ashamed of them. And thus, out of mere kindness to us, they began to vilify our doctrines to the Protestant world, that so our very idiotcy or our secret 20 unbelief might be our plea for mercy. A _great_ change, an _awful_ contrast, between the time-honored Church of St. Augustine and St. Thomas, and the poor remnant of their children in the beginning of the nineteenth century! It 25 was a miracle, I might say, to have pulled down that lordly power; but there was a greater and a truer one in store. No one could have prophesied its fall, but still less would any one have ventured to prophesy its rise again. The fall was 30 wonderful; still after all it was in the order of nature; all things come to naught: its rise again would be a different sort of wonder, for it is in the order of grace,--and who can hope for miracles, and such a miracle as this? Has the whole course of history a like to show? I must speak cautiously 5 and according to my knowledge, but I recollect no parallel to it. Augustine, indeed, came to the same island to which the early missionaries had come already; but they came to Britons, and he to Saxons. The Arian Goths and Lombards, 10 too, cast off their heresy in St. Augustine's age, and joined the Church; but they had never fallen away from her. The inspired word seems to imply the almost impossibility of such a grace as the renovation of those who have crucified to 15 themselves again, and trodden under foot, the Son of God. Who then could have dared to hope that, out of so sacrilegious a nation as this is, a people would have been formed again unto their Saviour? What signs did it show that it was to be singled 20 out from among the nations? Had it been