Shrine-cures, as he calls them, he finds to have gone hand in hand with the absence of carpeted floors, and relic-worship with smoky chimneys, poor raiment, and unwholesome food. No doubt his far-seeing mind has been able to discover a necessary relation between those things which the ordinary judgment would pronounce most incongruous and dissonant. Draper not only refuses to recognize the long and laborious efforts of the church to ameliorate the condition of the masses, to lift them from the misery and insanitary surroundings into which they had sunk during the night of Roman decadence, and in which the internecine feuds of the robber barons and princes, of feudal masters and vassals, had left them, but he impudently charges the church with being the author of their wrongs and wretchedness. It is true the same charge has been made before by vindictive and passionate writers, and it receives no additional weight at the hands of Dr. Draper by being left, like Mahomet’s coffin, without prop or support. Since Maitland’s work first disabused Englishmen of the opinions they had formed concerning mediæval priest-craft and church tyranny, no writer has had the hardihood to revive the exploded slanders of Stillingfleet and Fletcher, till this latest anti-papist felt that he had received a mission to do so. Draper’s belief that the admitted possibility of miracles would tend to disturb the regular succession of natural phenomena is simply puerile; for miracles occur only under such circumstances as all men understand to preclude caprice and irregularity. Thus the daily-recurring mystery of transubstantiation still takes place upon our altars, and, so far as that tremendous fact is concerned, we might all cling to the idea of necessary, immutable law; for no order is disturbed, no planet fails to perform its accustomed revolution. As for its being impossible for Catholics to distinguish between real miracles and juggleries, it is very evident that, in keeping with his general opinion of believers in miracles, he must rate their standard of intelligence at an exceedingly low figure. A miracle supposes a derogation of the laws of the physical world, and is never accepted till its character in this sense has been thoroughly proved. A Protestant writer of high intelligence, who not long since was present in Rome at an investigation into the evidence adduced to prove the genuineness of certain miracles attributed to a servant of God, in whose behalf the title of venerable was demanded, remarked that, had the same searching scrutiny been employed in every legal case which had fallen under his observation, he would not hesitate to place implicit confidence in the rigid impartiality of the judge, the logical nature of the evidence, and the unimpeachable veracity of the witnesses. Dr. Draper, therefore, supposes, on the part of those whom he claims to be incapable or unwilling to discriminate between miracles, in the