Far different from those loving Apostles, who through long ages, have in the Catholic Church, repeated in their deeds, the fullness of Love, which filled the breast of the Apostle John,--far different from the Fenelons and Paschals of the church,--this Prelate was a cold-blooded and practical Atheist. Love of women, love of wine, swayed him not. Lust of power was his spring of action--his soul. He may have at times, assented to Religion, but that he believed in it as an awful verity, as a Truth worth all the physical power and physical enjoyment in the universe,--the Prelate never had a thought like this. An ambitious atheist, a Borgia without his lust, a Richelieu with all of Richelieu's cunning, and not half of Richelieu's intellect, a cold-blooded, practical schemer for his own elevation at any cost,--such was the Prelate. Talk to him of Christ as a consoler, as a link between crippled humanity and a better world, as of a friend who meets you on the dark highway of life, and takes you from sleet and cold, into the light of a dear, holy home,--talk to him of the love which imbues and makes alive every word from the lips of Christ,--ha! ha! Your atheistical Prelate would laugh at the thought. He was a worldling. Risen from the very depths of poverty, he despised the poor from whom he sprung. For years a loud and even brawling advocate of justice for Ireland,--an ecclesiastical stump orator; a gatherer of the pennies earned by the hard hand of Irish labor,--he was the man to blaspheme her cause and vilify its honest advocates, when her dawn of Revolution darkened into night again. He was the pugilist of the Pulpit, the gladiator of controversy, always itching for a fight, never so happy as when he set honest men to clutching each other by the throat. Secure in his worldly possessions, rich from the princely revenues derived from the poor--the hard working poor of his church,--a tyrant to the parish priests who were so unfortunate as to be subjected to his sway, by turns the Demagogue of Irish freedom and the _Mouchard_ of Austrian despotism, he was a vain, bad, cunning, but _practical_ man, this Atheist Prelate of the Roman Church. "Now, what think you of our plans and our prospects?" said the Prelate, triumphantly--"can we not, using New York as the center of our operations, the Ballot Box, social dissension and sectarian warfare as the means, can we not, mould the New World to our views, and make it Rome, Rome, in every inch of its soil?" The Legate responded quietly: "I see but one obstacle--" "Only one; that is well--"