as the church was open to adore the Blessed Sacrament. One day that he was at the château, they had to summon him three times to breakfast. The mistress of the house was getting impatient. At the third summons he left our Lord's presence, exclaiming, 'My God, cannot they leave one in peace to spend a moment with Thee?" and the Curé added, weeping, " He had been there since four in the morning. There are good Christians who could pass their whole lives thus lost in God. Happy they!"

He was himself of the blessed number. This sort of prayer is manifestly the only kind which human nature is capable of prolonging to any extent, and it is also the only kind by which we can acquire the habit of continually praying whilst otherwise engaged.

We cannot close our notice with a more opportune observation than the following:

The love of God in the Curé d'Ars produced another love, less understood, less known, and which, nevertheless, is the infallible fruit of the first in truly Catholic hearts-the love of the Church, that venerable Mother so dear to the children of God, the Spouse of our Lord, bought with His Blood, sprung from His Wounds, and in whom He lives by His truth, His word, His grace, His sacraments. This love in the Curé d'Ars included implicitly all that the Church, represented by her head, loves, accepts, and proposes. You had but to name Rome to him to elicit flashes of joy, or tears, or sighs, or regrets that he should die before beholding the native country of souls, the reliquary of the world, the tomb of apostles and martyrs.

We repeat our cordial wish to see M. Monnin's volumes translated in extenso. We have been compelled to restrict ourselves almost exclusively to one point, which we feel has been most inadequately treated, and have found room for few quotations. The work is not only most interesting, as a full biography of the most remarkable man of our day, but is a treasury of religious edification and instruction.

VOL. I.—NO. II. [New Series.]

2 B

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ART. III.-PRISON MINISTERS ACT.

An Act for the Amendment of the Law relating to the Religious Instruction of Prisoners in County and Borough Prisons in England and Scotland. London: Printed by George Edward Eyre & William Spottiswoode, Printers to the Queen's Most Excellent Majesty. 1863.

IT is our pleasant task to have to record a step taken in the right direction. Our legislators are employed in the very necessary work of freeing the statute-book from obsolete laws. Some such there are which, nominally at least, inflict disabilities upon Catholics; but whether they are included among those which are henceforth to disappear from the statute-book, we are unable to say. Neither is it a matter of any practical moment. For although they still hold their place in the records of Parliament and the written laws of the realm, they have long been a dead letter, and could not have been put in force against us. Their repeal, therefore, is to be desired rather with a view to removing a national disgrace than as conferring any actual benefit on us, whom they could never practically injure.

This, however, is not the step in the right direction to which we wish to draw our readers' attention. Unfortunately there are still laws in existence which are by no means obsolete, and the practical bearing of which on the social position of Catholics is of no light import. There are still certain points in which we Catholics are placed in an inferior social position to our fellow-subjects, and in which we are debarred from an appeal to the courts of law when we are not treated as Protestants are, and have a legal right to be treated. Such laws especially affect those of our co-religionists who occupy the lowest ranks in the community. The upper classes amongst us have fought the battle for themselves, and have obtained their liberation from almost every legal disability under which they lay, even far into the present century. But it is not until very lately that we have made our voice heard in behalf of those who, professing a common faith with ourselves, have none but us to plead for them and to defend their cause. is true that the laws to which we refer are not professedly penal laws. They do not speak of Catholics as such, nor do they solemnly provide that Catholics and Protestants shall not enjoy equal rights and privileges; but they were enacted when

It

our very existence was all but ignored. Thus, the laws relating to workhouses and prisons have hitherto almost assumed that there were no such people as Catholics amongst the classes for whom they were framed. Not that we were forgotten altogether; but clauses of such a character were introduced, regarding us simply as a possible exception, and such scanty provision was made in our regard, that the inequality of our position was rendered even more glaring by the little that was conceded to us, than, to all appearance, it would have been if we had been entirely overlooked. In the latter case it might have seemed that the Legislature would not have refused us the equality that was our right if we had been known to be at hand to claim it; but, instead of this, all that the law did for us was just enough to show that it recognized our existence, but was determined not to acknowledge us as the equals of those for whom its enactments were framed. In these laws, as we have said, Catholics were not mentioned by name; but a certain slight degree of liberty was granted to a pauper, or a prisoner, of absenting himself from the services of the National Church in case of his professing a religion differing from that by law established. In fact, we were ranked amongst the Dissenters; but as it happened that Dissenters took no interest whatever in the destitute or criminal classes, and have rather shown an inclination to disown all unfortunates who, by their misfortune or their fault, might come to the workhouse or the gaol, these provisions practically affected Catholics alone. Hence, in the recent debates in the last session of Parliament, during the discussions upon the Act the title of which we have prefixed to our present article, though the Bill apparently referred to all who were not members of the Established Church, it was admitted on all hands that in reality its enactments applied only to Catholics. Socially speaking, our difficulty has lain principally in this difference between Catholics and Dissenters, that we alone care for the poor, and that we have, while the Dissenters have not, a very large number of poor of our religion for whom we are bound to care. So that, in reality, paupers and prisoners are divided into only two classes, Protestants and Catholics; of whom the former are content enough with such religious ministrations as are afforded by the Established Church, so far as they care for any religious ministrations at all. On the one hand, this indifference on the part of Dissenters to all who are not in "respectable" circumstances tells in our favour thus far, that guardians of the poor and visiting justices need fear no irruption into the prisons or workhouses under their charge, of ministers of all or any of the various-we might almost say

innumerable dissenting sects; but, on the other hand, it has been disadvantageous to us in this respect, that we have had to fight the battle of our poor, not only unassisted, but labouring under the burden of an unpopularity the effect of which has been to blind people to the manifest injustice of which we have had so much reason to complain.

The readers of this REVIEW will recollect that on a previous occasion* attention was drawn at considerable length to the grievances to which the Catholic inmates of workhouses are subjected; seeing that while, by the existing regulations, ample provision is made for the religious wants of their Protestant fellow-countrymen, to themselves the exercise of their religion is encumbered with difficulties. An attempt was made at the same time to convey some idea of the scale on which the Poor Law had become a vast machinery for the proselytising of pauper Catholic children. Our present task is to place before our readers the spiritual condition of Catholic prisoners, and to show that, while the Prison Ministers Act is, as we have been glad to call it, a step in the right direction, it is yet but a step, and not that complete establishment of religious equality which we had hoped to secure. But before we enter into the necessary details on this subject, we will describe the present position of what is called amongst us, "The Workhouse Question," and state what has been done for the Catholic pauper since the appearance of the article to which we have referred.

Here, too, a step in advance may be said to have been made, though it is not as yet a step in legislation. All that is needful on our part as a preliminary to legislation has been done; for a full statement of our grievances has been laid before Parliament. An account of the way in which this has been effected will show how the matter now stands, and how it is that no results have as yet ensued from a proceeding that entailed so much labour and expense.

The boards of guardians throughout the country are subject to a central authority, of which they are extremely jealous. This department of the Government is called the Poor-Law Board, and its Chief Commissioner, or President, has a seat in the Cabinet. This Board has, curiously enough, no permanent existence, but its large powers are from time to time renewed by Act of Parliament. When in 1860 it had to come to Parliament for a fresh lease of authority, its opponents took advantage of this opportunity to strike a blow at its existence. They

* DUBLIN REVIEW, No. XCVI., August, 1860.

were so far successful that the five years for which the Govern ment asked were not granted, and the Continuance Act was passed for three years only, and that on the express understanding that a select committee of the House of Commons should during those three years make a full inquiry into all the complaints that had been brought against the Board. To that committee our petitions against the injustice of the working of the Poor Law were also referred, a very considerable number of petitions from Catholics having been presented to both Houses of Parliament.

The committee was fairly chosen from both Parliamentary parties, and it numbered among its members the President of the Poor-Law Board and the three English Catholics who have seats in the House of Commons. Evidence was taken during the session of 1860; and the committee was reappointed, and resumed the hearing of evidence through the sessions of 1861 and 1862. This it reported from time to time to the House of Commons in six blue books, of which the evidence relating to Catholics occupies the third. Eight Catholics in all were examined by the committee, of whom four were priests and four laymen. The Report also contains the evidence of four adverse Protestants, one of whom was the secretary of the Protestant Alliance; of the master of a metropolitan workhouse, also a Protestant, who had formerly been the master of a workhouse in the provinces, which was strongly in our favour; and of a poor-law inspector, whose evidence was rather for us than against us.

The committee spent eight of its sittings in receiving this evidence, and the volume contains the answers of the witnesses to more than three thousand questions. It will be seen, therefore, that the subject was thoroughly sifted, and it is a pleasure to be able to add that the Catholic witnesses were listened to by the committee and questioned by its members with the most perfect fairness and impartiality. The ultra-Protestant newspapers complained, but without any reason or justice, that a bias was shown in our favour; but they would have been sure to make the same complaint unless our witnesses had been browbeaten and our case suppressed. For that fair and equitable treatment our thanks are due to the committee, and to the Right Hon. C. P. Villiers, the President of the PoorLaw Board, who was its chairman. In the session of Parliament which has just closed, the committee was reappointed, having no work before it but to report to the House on the subjects on which it had taken evidence; but it met only once, and then resolved to advise the House to reappoint the committee in the next session of Parliament. Meanwhile, as the