little dull. The Catholic public, also, need to be made to understand on what conditions, and on what conditions. only, they can have proper schools and colleges for Catholic children and youth. The colleges, themselves, need behind them a sound and healthy public opinion, and only on that condition can they do effectually their work.

Our readers can be at no loss to understand what has been our purpose in this article. We have aimed to show that the high-toned Papal doctrines, the strong assertions of the supremacy of the Church as representing the supremacy of the spiritual order, which they find in our pages, and which we trust they always will find, do not absorb the temporal in the spiritual, and deny all rights to the secular, or assert the exclusive right of spiritual persons in all things. We have heretofore vindicated the rights of the spiritual order. We have wished, in this article, to vindicate the right of lay society and laymen, and to set an example of their free use and application. We have wished, also, to provoke thought and free discussion within what we suppose to be the sphere of free opinion, on the greatest, the most exciting, and the most delicate topics: now before the Catholic public. That we have gone to our limits, is possible; but we hope we have not really overleaped them. We have for years fought the battles of authority, and at times have gone farther as many Catholics have believed, than we should, because we believed it necessary to its full and just vindication, and because we found it every where resisted or decried. We have this once done the same for liberty, for the temporal order, because, as regards ourselves, we would not have it supposed that we forget the rights of the temporal in asserting the rights of the spiritual, but chiefly because we believe that the interests of the spiritual, itself, require that there should, in our times, be a full and unreserved recognition and assertion of the rights the Church leaves to laymen and lay society, and there seemed to be no one who could more safely do it. If we have gone too far in this direction, it is through error of judgment, not through an irreverent, unbelieving, or insubordinate spirit.

We live in times when nearly all the old political and social arrangements are broken, or are breaking up, and throughout the world it is clear to us that the Church is destined to lose all the rights she acquired from secular society, and be thrown back on her naked rights and resources, as the spiritual kingdom of God on earth. There is no longer a christendom; and the Church can no longer expect any thing from civil society, but the simple legal protection she enjoys here in common with the sects. We respect those Catholics who live in their memories, and struggle bravely and heroically against what we believe can not be successfully resisted. Perhaps we sympathize heartily with them, and regret as deeply as they the changes which have taken or are taking place; but we can never war, with courage or energy, against the inevitable, or what seems to us the inevitable, and when we see the inevitable coming, we look round to see what we can retain, and what must be surrendered, and we try to prepare in the best way we can for it. Yet we do not believe that it is all over with the victories of the Church, or that we are not to hope for her in the future, days as bright and conquests as glorious as any in the past. The Popes made more conquests to Christ before they were temporal sovereigns, than being temporal sovereigns they have retained. We Americans have one advantage over our European brethren; we have . long since occupied the ground towards which they are tending, and been loosened from the old customs, and usages, bandages, and swathing clothes, they are now having rudely torn from them, and we see and know that it is possible to live without them, to live as free men, and yet to love our religion and obey our Church. All Europe is tending, not to democracy, but to the genuine American system, and the Church in the Old World will before long, be placed on the same footing she is with us. We believe the change necessarily involves many evils while it is going on, but when once effected and acquiesced in, will be found to be highly beneficial both to the spiritual society and to the lay society. We do not struggle against that change, we seek rather to prepare for it.

ART. IV. Our Future Clergy;-an Inquiry into Vocations to the Priesthood in the United States.

THERE are two ways of dealing with the question of vocations to the priesthood in the United States. One is, to avoid all mention of it, and let it take care of itself; the other is, to encourage such vocations and increase their number if it is in our power to do so. We Catholics have an easy way of leaving the interests of our Church to the care of Providence. But we should not forget the wisdom of the old adage: "Help thyself and God will help thee;" and really the stirring events of the age in which we live. go far to make us believe, that to very many well-meaning friends of right it may be said with equal truth: "If you do not help yourselves God will not help you." We think that there is room for much to be done, and that something can be done in reference to our subject, although we hardly hope just now to accomplish more than throw some light upon the matter, and place it fairly before our readers. Still, we shall offer nothing new. The want implied in this discussion is the constant theme of conversation among priests and laymen all over the country; the remedies we propose are recommended by the most venerable authorities of the Church.

The soil of this great republic has not certainly been prolific in ecclesiastics up to the present time. In last year's Catholic Almanac, where the alphabetical list of the clergy is given, we find the names of forty-eight bishops, two mitred abbots, and the names of priests cover fortythree pages. Of the prelates, twelve we are informed are natives of the country, thirty-six (or counting the abbots, thirty-eight), of foreign birth. The seven archbishops are by birth foreigners without exception. Of the priests, we should suppose by taking a page here and there at random as a guide, that scarcely fifteen out of every hundred were born in this country.

To explain this extraordinary condition of things, it is

sometimes said that there are no vocations among the youth of this country. But if such be the case, the fact adduced as an explanation is rather more strange than the fact sought to be explained. No vocations! There must be vocations to the priesthood wherever there are vocations to the faith. The Apostles were commissioned not only to plant the faith, but to provide all necessary and proper means to make it grow, and in point of fact, one of the first provisions they made for that purpose, was to ordain priests wherever they formed a Christian community. The Apostles and their cotemporaries never preached the evangelical law to a people without making known to them at the same time by word and example, the evangelical counsels. Where they proclaimed the law of Christ as obligatory for all, they proclaimed also the counsels of Christ as possible for some, nay, for many. Where a call was thus made, there was always grace given to follow it. Can we suppose that the divine economy would include a people in the call to perfection, and exclude them from that to the ministry? The inference is drawn merely from analogy. Granted; but it is an argument a majori ad minus, from a greater mercy to a less, the greater being not indispensable to eternal salvation, and the less being in God's ordinary providence essential to the preservation of the faith.

The Church is universal, and must be able to supply the spiritual wants of every country, and to make its people a Christian people. If we have hit at last upon the half of a whole continent, of which it can be said with truth, that it is unable or unfit to supply material for carrying on the ministry of the Church, what becomes of her universality? In point of fact, we do not believe that history furnishes the name of a nation in which the faith was fairly established and preserved for any length of time unless by the aid of a native clergy, with the single exception of Japan. We are familiar with the results of so unwonted a policy in that unhappy country. When the storm of persecution arose, it swept every vestige of Christianity out of the

length and breadth of the land only seventy-five years after it had been established there by the greatest missionary of modern times, the wonder-worker Saint Francis Xavier, accompanied by an army of heroes and martyrs. It was said that the Japanese were "not fit to be priests," that they were frivolous and worldly. Frivolous and worldly as they were, when the day of persecution came, hastened by the quarrels and dissensions of the foreign tradesmen, and the want of knowledge of the customs of the country on the part of the foreign missionaries, the Japanese Christians laid down their lives for the faith amid torments unequalled in the days of Nero, Decius, and Dioclesian. We cannot consent to throw the blame of our condition on Divine Providence by saying that there are no vocations to the priesthood among our youth. We will believe that he sends us the call, but that we either do not hear it, or hearing, we do not follow it.

If there were any radical or incorrigible defect in the youth of this land unfitting them for the priestly life, there would be no use in offering remedies for the evil. But we cannot admit any great inferiority in our natural conditions, or any very great difference, in fact, without being wanting in respect to our ancestry. We are the children, or grandchildren, of Englishmen, Frenchmen, Irishmen, and Germans. These nations have proved themselves equal to all the most exalted requirements of the priestly office, and to the discharge of all priestly functions.

In worldly matters, we have confessedly neither degenerated nor altered much from our fathers. Can it be that the conditions of faith and holiness alone have died out in one or two generations, and while man's physical stamina have stood successfully the test of new-world life, and have been, in some instances at least, improved by the rough and tumble of the trial, shall it be said that Grace alone has been unable to recognize in American nature, a fitting groundwork for her ennobling influences? Absit! away with so irreverent a supposition. The vocations, no doubt, exist, and the soil is not unfit for their taking root and thriving.