We doubt not the literary alchemist _will_ come in time, and melt down the dull metals in his crucible, and pour out from it the shining compound which shall possess a popular value a hundredfold beyond that of the untransmuted materials. Nowhere, perhaps, will the labor be more amply repaid than in America. Nowhere will the collection of materials be less arduous and the result more brilliant. Our church history begins just when that of Europe is most perplexing, and to an investigator with time, patience, and a moderate revenue at his command, it offers no appalling difficulties. In a great part of America, the introduction of the Catholic religion is an event within the memory of men still living. The pioneers of many of the states are still at work. The first missionaries of some of the most important sees are but just passing to their reward. There are no monumental slanders upon our history to be removed; no Protestant writers have seriously encumbered the field with misrepresentations. Industrious students of our own faith have already prepared the way; scattered chapters have been written with more or less literary skill; the store-houses of information have been discovered and partly explored; and every year the facilities for the historian are multiplied. And certainly the theme is rich in romantic interest and variety. From the time of the monks and friars who came over with the first discoverers of the country down to the present year of our Lord, when missionaries are perilling their lives among the Indians of the great West, and priests are fighting for the faith against the cultivated Protestants of the Atlantic cities, the Catholic history of the United States has been a series of bold adventures, startling incidents, and contests of the most dramatic character. In the whole story there is not a really dull chapter. The Catholic annals of America abound also with that variety which the historian needs to render his pages really attractive; and among the great men who would naturally be the central figures of such a work, there is the widest difference of character, the most picturesque divergence of pursuits and personal peculiarities. Group together the most distinguished of the Christian heroes who have illustrated our chronicles, and you have what an artist might call a wonderfully rich variety of coloring. There are the simple-minded, enthusiastic Spanish Franciscans, following the armies of Cortez and Pizarro, and exploring the strange realms of the Aztecs and the Incas. There is the French Jesuit, building up his Christian empire among the Indians of the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes. There is the gentle Marquette, floating in his bark canoe down the mighty river with whose discovery his name will ever be associated, and breathing his last in the midst of the primeval wilderness. There are Jogues and Brebœuf, suffering unheard-of torments among the Iroquois; Cheverus,