reserves in regard either to our doctrine or our intentions, no esoteric and exoteric teaching. We present the Church and the faith as they always have been, in all times and places, one, universal, and immutable, in all their essential parts. {133} What the Church and her doctrine are is ascertainable by all who will take pains to inform themselves, and it would be impossible for us to conceal it if we were so disposed. All that we have to fear on this head is ignorance of the real truth concerning our principles, and the misrepresentation of them by those whose knowledge of them is superficial. The author of this lecture is one of this latter class, and has hastily and without due examination put forth his own impressions of our doctrines and practices, with which he is so completely unacquainted as not even to perceive that there is any thing in them which requires any careful study or thought. He says, p. 28: "I have heard several of these mission sermons preached. Most of them would undoubtedly be a _surprise_, and an agreeable one, to Protestant ears. There was a sermon on 'future punishment,' without one allusion to Purgatory." The sermon was on _Hell_, not on the whole subject of Future Punishment. We follow the laws of logic and rhetoric in our sermons, and confine ourselves strictly to the topic in hand; excluding all irrelevant matter. Any one who is surprised at a sermon like this, shows that he is entirely ignorant of the published sermons of our great preachers. One who supposes that the place of punishment for those Catholics who have sinned grievously, and have not truly repented before death, is Purgatory, is entirely ignorant of Catholic theology. "There was a sermon on 'Mortal Sins,' with scarcely a reference to absolution." For the same reason given above, that the preacher stuck to his subject, and the instructions on the Sacrament of Penance were given in the morning. "There was another, on the 'Close of Life,' which, from beginning to end, went to prove, in language that must have scorched every conscience not seared that listened to it--_contrary to all the common Protestant impressions of Romish instruction_--that there is no efficacy whatever in any or all of the Seven Sacraments _to save a wicked Roman Catholic from perdition._" {134} Indeed! Then these common impressions are all incorrect. The proposition which excites so much surprise is nothing but the commonest truism, familiar to every child that has learned the catechism. To admit, however, that the lecturer found himself to have been always mistaken, and Protestants generally to have been under the same mistake concerning Catholic teaching, would have been fatal. He has no such intention. There is couched, under the language of praise which he gives to the sermon, a concealed accusation that the doctrine of the sermons does not really mean what it seems, and that the old Protestant prejudice against "Romish instruction" is, after all, correct.