and systematic proselytism; that terrorism and coercion, the mean contrivances of bigotry, should be suffered to do their worst, without the strong hand of government intervening to lighten the blow, or provide means of protection"--pages 28, 29. All this is well said: nor is the author less happy in his description of the tyrannising temper which it fosters on the part of the Protestants. "And if the Establishment works ill as regards the Catholic masses, its effects on the privileged minority seem to us scarcely less disastrous. It engenders a tone of arrogant, violent, uncharitable bigotry, which happily is unknown in this country beyond the precincts of Exeter Hall and the columns of the 'religious' newspapers. Indeed, we have only to turn to 'Good News from Ireland', to assure ourselves of the detestable temper in which these modern Reformers set about the process of evangelisation, and of the extraordinary hardihood of assertion by which their ministrations are characterised. The creed of an Irish peasant may be superstitious--where is the peasant whose creed is anything else?--but religion in Ireland has at any rate, in the true spirit of Christianity, found its way to the wretched, the degraded, the despairing: it has refined, comforted, ennobled those whom external circumstances seemed expressly designed to crush them into absolute brutality. The Irish peasant is never the mere animal that for centuries English legislators tried to make him. He is a troublesome subject, indeed, and has a code of his own as to the 'wild justice' to which the oppressed may, in the last instance, resort; but in the domestic virtues, chastity, kindliness, hospitality, he stands, at least, as well as English or Scotch of the same condition in life. As regards domestic purity, indeed, Ireland, by universal confession, rises as much above the ordinary standard as Scotland falls below it: and as regards intemperance, there has been in Ireland of late years a marked improvement, for which unhappily no counterpart is to be found in any other part of the United Kingdom. Yet we are gravely invited to believe, on the testimony of a few hot-brained fanatics, that the whole Catholic system in Ireland is one vast conspiracy against piety, happiness, and civilisation....