The value and importance of this great mission cannot be overrated. It is awful to think what would have been the condition of the English-speaking races, in a religious point of view, if Ireland had shared in the English apostacy. Scarcely a Catholic voice would be heard amongst those seventy or eighty millions now using that language, who occupy so large a portion of the Earth, and in another century, according to the ratio of their growth, may become two or four hundred millions, or even more. The very remnant that has continued faithful in England might have followed in the wake of their predecessors, had not the influence of Ireland caused the sword of persecution to be sheathed, and civil intolerance to cease at last, and thus the temptation to be removed which had proved fatal to so many. In that vast empire, or the empires that may rise out of its fragments—for, in more than one place are foundations of empires laid which would grow with giant growth, even though the power of the mother country were paralysed to-morrow—the holy sacrifice would not be offered up, and thus the prophecy not fulfilled, which foretold that a clean oblation would be offered from the rising of the sun to the going down thereof. That union of the Christian family for which the Saviour prayed before he suffered, and which he left as a mark by which men would know his followers, would not be exhibited to the world. Christianity would be confounded with the products of these latter ages of so-called “light”, and be thought, like the appliances of steam and the contrivances of machinery, to owe its power to the genius of the Anglo-Saxon race, instead of deriving it from Him who died on Calvary. For their Christianity, by its very name, would proclaim that the work of Christ had failed, until the press and the “march of light” had come to its aid. Religion, in a word, instead of being a divine institution, would appear and be amongst them but a brilliant work or invention of man, and, therefore, in the supernatural order, but a brilliant delusion, not an institution which the mercy of God transplanted from Heaven, and made to stand, and to grow, and to bless, and produce fruit, in every age and in every form of society.