We beg to be allowed to preserve our Catholic population and to keep them pure and faithful, at least until non-Catholics can offer something which will meet their own contingencies. If this demand be persistently disregarded and our honest attempt to save ourselves be misconstrued into an assault upon others, we will do the best we can, at all events. But, in the meantime, let all earnest men admit the reality of danger. Do not let attention be absorbed by particular manifestations of a disease which is universal. The evils which threaten our life will not be removed by retrenchment of government expenses, or by a temporary destruction of party tyranny, or by an ostentatious simplicity in official circles, or by “justification by faith,” or by pietistic feeling, or by acting out individual crotchets, or even by sound moral doctrine in an abstract form, but by the living truth of God, taught by him through human lips, applied by him with divine efficacy through the ministry of human hands. The truth which has saved the ancient world and has produced all that is desirable in modern civilization is alone able to preserve our nation in its future growth. A FRENCH NOVEL.[69] This title will prove a disappointment to those who only associate the idea of a French novel with that typical production of vicious and feverish literature to which the fiction-mongers of France have so long accustomed us, and whose corrupt influence has made itself felt far beyond the limits of the nation which gives it birth. Our present purpose is not to discuss one of those pernicious books, but to consider one which rises as far above their level by its artistic beauty and literary merits as by the nobler tone of its morality. A novel by a Catholic writer, impregnated from first to last with the spirit and principle of the faith, full of noble sentiments, and yet as amusing and as exciting as any “naughty” novel; a book where all the good people, even the holy people, are as charming, witty, odd, or fascinating as if they were anything but holy; a book that conveys in the characters and scenes it brings before us a great moral lesson, and which at the same time absorbs and excites us as powerfully as the cleverest novel of the sensational school, with its inevitable murders and forgeries and double marriages—the appearance of a novel such as this is surely an event that it behoves us to examine closely as the curious literary phenomenon which it is.