But we are not giving a devotional treatise: or attempting to propose any new form. Our country is dear to us, and, although it were too sanguine to hope that in the days of any now living the true faith will reach such a point that its influence will be marked on the public mind and heart, we cannot be insensible to the apparently formidable gathering of heathen elements in a section of country where the very climate seems to lend them new force in building up a great empire of paganism. A new impulse has been given to our Indian missions, which, owing, doubtless, to causes easy of explanation, have never received from the Catholic body at large in the United States the moral and temporal aid they so richly deserved. In fact, the missionaries labored on, almost ignored and forgotten, so that an attempt was made through the instrumentality of the federal government to crush them out altogether. This has roused Catholics to an interest in them, and this interest should be kept up. By prayer, by alms, by direct aid, we must help the missionaries and their coadjutors, the devoted religious women in the missions, to fight the good fight, and root out, so far as lies in us, the paganism of the Indian tribes, where still avowed or cloaked under an external show of Christianity. On another paganism, that of the Chinese, and on that of the Mormons, we cannot apparently act yet directly, but we can meet them by prayer, and in the regions infected Catholics should exercise the utmost vigilance that this pagan influence should never enter their households, lest their children, if not themselves, may at last imitate the wisest of kings, not in his wisdom, but in his idolatry. The great and festering sore of voodooism afflicting the negroes calls for all our zeal, as Catholics, to help the bishops and clergy in the South, and the English society which has entered this field, by prayer, by material aid, by earnest and sustained efforts to preserve the purity of faith among colored Catholics. The Church in the Southern States, crippled by the disasters of the late war, is entirely unable to cope single-handed with the new duty imposed upon it by the altered condition of affairs. She appeals to us, and as Catholics we cannot remain deaf to her call. ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI. O love! you lay the volume by That held you like a holy chime— _Life of St. Francis_—with a sigh Which says: “That was a pleasant time In old Perugia’s mountain-town On the Umbrian valley looking down— Flushed like an Eden in sublime Environment of mountains vast; And do not you, as I, recall What, morn and even, and first and last, Attracted most of all?