The second month of the Vatican Council has seen no interruption of its labors, nor of the intense interest which these labors seem to excite on every side. In truth, the intensity of this interest, especially among those who are not friendly to the council, would be inexplicable, did we not feel that there is in reality a struggle involved therein between the cause of religion and the cause of irreligion. The meetings of the prelates are private and quiet. The subjects under discussion are, at best, only vaguely known outside. The names of the speakers may be learned. You may ascertain, if you persist in the effort, that one bishop has a fine voice, and was well heard; that another has an exceedingly polished delivery; that a third is remarkable for the fluency, and a fourth for the classic elegance with which he spoke in Latin. But all your efforts will fail to elicit a report of the substance of the speech of any prelate. These speeches are for the council itself--for the assembled fathers to whom they are delivered--and are not for the public at large, nor for Buncombe. They are under the guard of the honor of the bishops and the oath of the officials, and are to be kept secret until the acts of the council are lawfully published. And yet "own correspondents," "occasional correspondents," "special correspondents," and "reliable correspondents" from Rome have failed not, day after day, to fill the columns of newspapers--Italian, French, English, German, Belgian, and Spanish, and doubtless others also, if we saw them--with their guesses and suspicions, their tiny grains of truth and bushels of fiction. Ponderous columns of editorial comments are often superadded, as it were, to increase the amount of mystery and the mass of errors. Even the brief telegraphic notices seem to be often controlled or made to work in this sense. The telegrams from Rome itself ought to be, and we presume are, correct. The author of a flagrant misstatement sent from this city could be identified and held responsible. But it is said that, outside of the limits of the Pontifical States, there is a news-agent who culls from letters sent him for that purpose most of those wonderful statements about the council which the telegraph wires are made to flash over Europe, and even across the Atlantic to America. The result of all this on the mind of one in Rome is ofttimes amusing. During our civil war, we once found ourselves in a railway car with an officer who had lost an arm. "Colonel," asked some one, "in what battle were you wounded?" The colonel laid down the papers he had been reading, sighed heavily, as if wearied, at least in mind, and answered, "At the time, I thought it was at the battle of Chancellorsville; but since I have been reading these newspaper accounts of that battle, I have come to the conclusion that I was not there at all." The newspaper reporters of the council labor under far greater difficulties than did the army correspondents, and are