that the Act was needed; it was argued all through as if it applied to Catholics only; and if it had been, as was Mr. Pope Hennessy's Bill, applicable to "Roman Catholic prisoners only, we firmly believe that it would not have been difficult to pass a measure that should have had a compulsory force in the case of the larger gaols. The only objection, so far as we observed, that was made to Mr. Pope Hennessy's Bill, was that it made the appointment of the Catholic chaplain rest with the Catholic bishop. We need not say that, if we are grateful for the Prison Ministers Act, we should have accepted with pleasure an Act like that proposed by Mr. Pope Hennessy, even though the appointment of the Catholic chaplain had been vested in the civil authorities.

In one respect, the Prison Ministers Act excels Mr. Pope Hennessy's Bill, for it applies, not only to England and Wales, but to Scotland also. That this provision was most necessary may be gathered from the numbers given in Lord Edward Howard's return, from which we learn that, out of 533 Catholics only 36 had been visited by the priest during the last three months of 1861.

We have no further duty to perform in introducing the Prison Ministers Act to our readers, than to express our conviction that, in spite of all its imperfections, they may yield it a hearty welcome. Its passing will render the session of 1863 memorable to Catholics. It is the first Act of Parliament that we can look upon as the result of a dispassionate consideration of the grievances under which Catholics labour, and of an honest desire to redress them. There were many, no doubt, who voted for emancipation in the same laudable spirit; but it was the fear of an insurrection in Ireland that produced the majority that carried it. The Reformatory and Industrial School Acts were measures new for Protestants as well as Catholics; and the fairness and impartiality of the Privy Council system in the distribution of the funds voted by Parliament for the education of the poor afforded a happy precedent, which was liberally followed when the State undertook to assist reformatory and industrial institutions. Departments of the Government have remedied particular grievances, and have introduced rules, as in the army and navy, and in the convict prisons, by the fair application of which we have largely benefited. But the Prison Ministers Act is the first legislative result of a statement to Parliament of hardships to which we are subject on account of our religion. When analogous questions are brought before the Legislature, we trust that our debt of gratitude, already no light one, for the poor Catholic prisoner's sake, may be largely increased by the consistent

and efficacious advocacy of our cause-which is the cause of justice on the part of Sir George Grey and Lord Palmerston, Mr. Disraeli and Lord Derby.

Here we should have laid aside our pen, leaving the reader to hope that in another year we may have an issue at least as satisfactory to narrate of the spiritual privations under which our Catholic paupers and their children labour, if it were not that there is one institution to which sufficient attention has not yet been drawn, and with which justice demands that Parliament should interfere. There is a large school at Feltham, called an industrial school, but in reality a reformatory, and established under a special Act of Parliament. It is under the sole management of the Middlesex magistrates. The authority of the Home Secretary does not extend to it, neither is it visited by the Inspector of Reformatories, and it is, therefore, not mentioned in his reports. In this school, we have good reason to believe, there are more than eighty Catholic boys who are being educated as Protestants. The sole recognition of any difference between a Catholic and a Protestant criminal boy is expressed in the following resolution of the visiting justices:

Extract from the Minutes of the Committee of 11th June, 1860. Resolved, that upon special request being made to the superintendent of the Middlesex Industrial School by any boy of a religious persuasion differing from that of the Established Church, or by the parents of such boy, that the latter should be visited by a minister of such persuasion, the request be immediately forwarded by the superintendent to such minister, who shall be allowed to visit the boy on Tuesdays and Thursdays, between ten and three o'clock; and that when any such request shall be made by a boy's parents who cannot write, their mark be made in the presence of, and witnessed by, a householder.

Now here, it is to be remarked, we have the "special request"-which Parliament has just declared shall not be required of the adult criminal-required of the juvenile criminal or his parents. Next, the class of people from whom the inmates of our reformatories generally come, have this request made more difficult for them by being obliged to find a householder to witness it, if they are themselves unable to write. Thirdly, the request must be addressed to the superintendent. A letter to a priest asking him to attend a boy in the school is not "a request" in the eyes of the Middlesex magistrates. Fourthly, no means are used to enable parents to know that, if they choose to make a request, it will in any way affect the religious treatment of the boy. What wonder then, that the request should have been made in the case of only 6 boys out of the 80

that are known to be in the school? And, after all, when the special request" has been duly made, the sole result is that the boy may be visited twice a week by the priest. He has still to attend the Protestant religious services; and he is still educated as a Protestant. This case is a very hard one, and is in most striking contrast to the provision made for the religious liberty of Catholics by the Reformatory Act, which was passed subsequently to the special Act under which the school at Feltham is maintained. We trust that the facts of this case will undergo a searching examination, and that an adequate remedy will be supplied in the next session of Parliament; for it never could have been intended that Catholic boys should be committed to this school, there to be taught Protestantism at the expense of the ratepayers of the county; neither can we believe that it would be found difficult so to classify the inmates that such among them as are Catholics might receive a Catholic education.

ART. IV. THE NEWLY DISCOVERED JEWISH CATACOMB AT ROME.

Cimitero degli Antichi Ebrei, scoperto recentemente in Vigna Randanini. Illustrato per Raffaele Garrucci, D.C.D.G. Roma: Coi Tipi della Civiltà Cattolica. 1862.

Vetri Ornati di Figure in Oro, trovati nei Cimiteri dei Cristiani Primitivi di Roma. Raccolti e spiegati da Raffaele Garrucci, D.C.D.G. Roma: Salviucci. 1858.

Letters from Rome to Friends in England. By the Rev. JOHN W. BURGON, M.A., Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. London: Murray. 1862.

MOST

OST of the recent historians of the Early Church have given a very prominent place to the investigation of its relations with the contemporary religions of the ancient world. Protestants have turned to this subject for confirmation of their favourite theory, which, from the days of the Magdeburg centuriators, traces to the influence of foreign religions all the alleged Roman corruptions of the Apostolic system. And although the prominence which this theory assumed in adverse hands had a certain effect among Catholics in creating a distrustful prejudice against the studies upon which it was based,

yet there has always existed a school of Catholic archaeologists who have confronted the adversary on what they felt to be at least a neutral ground. Many of our most learned writers have not hesitated even to assert our special claim, if not to be heard upon this subject, as being peculiarly our own, at least, instead of permitting the facts which it discloses to be distorted into mere weapons of party polemics, to discuss them calmly in their legitimate bearing, the scientific illustration of the history of Christian doctrine.

It is, indeed, a very narrow view of a great subject to regard every coincidence of the doctrine or the practice of a Christian church with those of a pagan religion, as a pagan corruption of Christianity. Few things not directly connected with the deposit of faith are plainer in the more philosophical of the writings of the Fathers than the principle that many of the parallelisms of Christianity and paganism in doctrine or in usage, are but evidences in the latter of the lingering memory of a primal revelation not yet entirely passed away-echoes of the Divine voice not utterly extinguished among them by the clamour of human passion, or travestied by the vain but impotent efforts of human intellect.

And this belief has long been a settled doctrine of the Catholic schools. Far from shrinking from the avowal of the parallelisms of "Popery and paganism," industriously traced out by Protestant historians, Catholic scholars have been found to elaborate more minutely the details of the coincidence, and even to eke out the occasionally scanty stores of hostile scholarship with their own more profound erudition. As regards the paganism of the Roman empire, this has ever been a favourite topic with the archeologists of Italy, and especially of Rome. There is hardly one, from Onofrio Panvini to Padre Garrucci, or Cavaliere de Rossi, who has not contributed to illustrate it; and Marangoni devoted a special volume,* of great learning and of exceeding interest, to a full examination of its various bearings. Frederick von Schlegel has done the same for the ancient religions of India; and Dr. Döllinger, in his work on Heathenism and Judaism,† has carried the inquiry not merely into all the leading families, so to speak, of the ancient religions, but also into the most minute varieties and subdivisions of each; and even into the several schools of philosophy which grew up within each religious system, and

Delle Cose Gentilesche e Profane, trasportate ad uso e adornamento delle Chiese. Opera di Giovanni Marangoni. 4to, Roma, 1744.

+ Heidenthum und Judenthum: thums. Von Joh. Jos. Ign. Döllinger.

Vorhalle zur Geschichte des Christen-
Regensburg, 1857.

into the modifications which these philosophies underwent through the influence of the national religion, or which they in their turn imparted to the religious system from which they drew their origin.

The relations of early Christianity with Judaism are equally important. They had acquired a prominence even in the days of the Apostles. Probably the very first occasion of discord in the infant Church was the mutual antipathy which the Jew and Gentile elements carried with them into the community in which they became incorporated; and the conflict of doctrinal predilections was not slow to follow the antagonism of race. One of the earliest recorded forms of error arose from the attempt on the part of the neophyte Jews to carry the Law into the Gospel. It is this Judaizing tendency that St. Paul combats with so much earnestness in his Epistles to the Galatians and the Romans; and although the decision of the Council of Jerusalem might seem to have set the question of the obligation of the Mosaic law at rest for ever, it is plain from numberless indications that the Judaizing theory long retained its vitality. For a time it seemed as if the ancient distinction which was maintained among the proselytes to Judaism-between the "proselytes of the gate," and the proselytes of righteousness"-was to be transferred to the new religion, and perpetuated therein; nor was it until after the Judaizing tendency had been carried to its full development, and had assumed a distinctly heretical form in the Ebionite and the cognate Judaizing sects, that we can recognise a complete amalgamation of the Hebrew and Gentile elements. in the Christian system.

Even before the destruction of Jerusalem, Jewish converts formed a considerable proportion of the Christian community in the several churches of the Roman empire. Perhaps, indeed, the new religion had progressed more rapidly among the Jews of the Dispersion than among the residents of Judea proper. And as nowhere in the western empire were the Jews so numerous as in the city of Rome, the Judeo-Christian element of the primitive Christian Church of that city was proportionally strong. There seems little doubt, indeed, that in the early Church of Rome the foreign members, if not more numerous, were at all events more energetic and more intellectual than the native or Latin Romans.* It is true, that among these

*This is sufficiently shown by Dean Milman, "Latin Christianity," i. 27, and following; although his inferences are more comprehensive than is warranted by the facts on which he relies.