before" His Holiness" of Rome; all tongues would sing pæans to the tenant of the Vatican, or be plucked out by the roots; the crosier and the sword would beat the bones of heresy to dust; daring Galileos would sup in dungeons on horrors; emperors and kings, and, may be, presidents, would go a-toekissing, and perchance be glad to expiate some rebellious deed by a two days' shiver, en deshabille, in wintry weather, in a Pope's ante-chamber. Ah, there would be unity; the unity of hand-bound and tongue-tied slaves. Protest-ants would be hushed, even to the stillness of the grave. Then there would be a rare time for shaven monks an imperial field of plunder and rapine.

But let us believe that a counter spirit is awake, a part of whose business it will be to smite this religion, in so far as it has a political, anti-republican aspect, on the head-smite it surely and swiftly. No intelligent Catholic, priest or layman, can say that Roman Catholicism, unshorn, is compatible with liberty. He who is true to the last extremity to his obligations as a Catholic, cannot be equally true to the Constitution and institutions of this country. The matter can be narrowed down to just so small a point as this. There is a deep, universal, crafty and dangerous political spirit in connection with the Catholic religion, a spirit more threatening to the future of our Republic than any other. It must be hunted out, and brought into the light, and have its claws pared. Religion, purely, we would have divorced from politics, but politicoCatholicism can only be stripped as it deserves, in the free school-house, by the unmuzzled press, and at the ballot-box.