Billuart, however, asserts that, for the sacrament of penitence, full consciousness is necessary, as an act of penitence is an essential part of it; so that, though a man may be baptised who is insane or unconscious, such a man cannot be absolved. Marchantius, in his _Candelabrum Mysticum_, lays down that a man may be baptised when drunk, as well as when unconscious, or raving mad, if he had before shown a disposition to receive the sacrament. Practically, no doubt, moved by desire to assure the salvation of the patient, Roman Catholic clergy will charitably trust to there being a disposition, on very slight grounds. The following instance will show this, communicated to me by a learned English divine: “Some time ago a lady wrote to me for counsel, on this ground. Her father-in-law, a very aged man, a Unitarian, had died whilst she was helping to nurse him, and had been unconscious for some days before his death. A very well-known and distinguished Roman Catholic wrote a letter to her, which she forwarded to me to read, blaming her very severely for not having seized the opportunity for baptising him, on the ground that he _might_ have changed his views, and _might_ have desired baptism, and that the sacrament, so administered, would have been his passport to heaven. She consulted me as to her blameworthiness, and as to whether she had, in fact, to reproach herself with a failure of duty. I replied in the negative, and stated that the purely mechanical view of the sacrament taken by her correspondent was, to say the least, highly untheological. I do not give the names, but you may cite me as having supplied you with this fact, which happened this year (1875).” A case was brought before my notice also, of a man being baptised when dying in a condition of delirium tremens. To the English mind such a case is very shocking, but it is one provided for by Marchantius. In this case it was conjectured that the man had desired baptism into the Roman communion: he had previously been a member, though an unworthy one, of the English Church, and had shown no desire of secession. I cannot dismiss this part of my subject without dealing briefly with an accusation made against Mr. Hawker by certain correspondents in the papers. They did not shrink from charging him with having been for many years a Roman Catholic at heart, only holding on his position of the Church of England for the sake of the loaves and fishes it offered him. If I had considered there were grounds for this charge, his life would never have been written by me.