Moreover, the property of the Catholics was confiscated, and the nobles of the land were reduced to poverty, because their consciences would not allow them to bow to the supremacy of the crown in religious matters. What shall we say of the ingenious system of penal laws, which, with Draconian cruelty, was enacted against Catholicity? A father was not allowed to give a Catholic education to his children; and the child of Catholic parents, if he became a Protestant, could disinherit his brothers, and reduce his father to beggary. Catholic education and Catholic schools were proscribed. A Protestant university was instituted and richly endowed with confiscated property, in order that it might be an engine for assailing Catholicity, and a bulwark of Protestantism. Charter schools were established for the purpose of infecting poor children with heresy. A court of wards was instituted, in order that the children of the nobility might be seized on, and brought up in the errors of the new religion. It was in this way that the Earls of Kildare and other noble families lost their faith. Catholics were excluded from all offices of trust; they could not be members of parliament, they had no right of voting at elections, and they were not even allowed to hold leases of the lands from which their fathers had been violently and unjustly expelled. Such were the _evangelical_ arts adopted to spread Protestantism in Ireland. What a contrast with the means employed by Providence to propagate the Gospel of Jesus Christ! Thanks be to God, the faith of the people of Ireland overcame all the agencies which were employed for its destruction, and is now producing wonderful works of piety and charity at home, and bringing the blessings of salvation to foreign lands that heretofore were sitting in darkness and the shades of death. However, active efforts are still made to propagate the religion of Henry VIII. and Elizabeth, and it is hoped that what those corrupt and wicked, but powerful and despotic, sovereigns could not effect by fire and sword, by cruel penal laws, and confiscation of property, may be compassed by a degraded and contemptible system of pecuniary proselytism, which consists in collecting money in England for the purpose of bribing poor Catholics to become hypocrites and to deny their faith, or of purchasing children from miserable or wicked parents, in order to educate them in the religion, whatever that may be, of the Church Establishment, or more probably in no religion at all.