the celebrated historian of the Reformation, being a visitor to the Great Exhibition, is permitted by Mr. Dale
of St. Pancras to preach in French to a congregation of his countrymen, in one of the licensed episcopal
chapels of that parish; whereupon the tractarian Mr. Hope charitably suggests that Doctor d'Aubigné has
subjected himself to three months' imprisonment with hard labour in the House of Correction, for presuming
to thump the cushions of an episcopal pulpit, and the Bishop of London is strenuously urged to put the law
in force against the Genevan Doctor. Again, in the same parish, not many days after, one of the district churches
witnesses a very different scene. No doctor from Geneva ascends the pulpit, but a young and ardent zealot
from Cambridge, whose mission is to deliver the Church's "message to the poor," and who delivers it
accordingly. He takes for his text that chapter of Luke which describes the fate of Dives and Lazarus,
deduces from it the moral of what is called Christian socialism, attributes the miseries and vices of the poor
to the injustice and arrogance of the rich, and warns society of the retribution sooner or later preparing for
it. But hardly has the vehement denunciation been brought to a close, when the rector of the parish rises
in his seat from beneath the pulpit, arrests the benediction about to be pronounced, and tells the congregation
that the matter they have just heard is not only questionable in doctrine but pernicious in tendency
and untrue in fact, and, looking sternly up at the enthusiastic preacher, solemnly rebukes him for having
offered to the members of a Christian church exhortations of so dangerous a character. And so, "the two
regularly ordained clergymen having taken a defiant look at each other, one down from the pulpit the other
up from the reading-desk, the congregation were sent away in disgust and amazement to their homes."
Truly a scene fraught with so much instruction, that it might be quite as well worth a debate in the
House of Commons as the preamble to the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill.

That wearisome affair is at last approaching to its close, the Irish brigade who represent the Vatican
having saved Lord John from defeat by voting on his side in the last division; and the extreme Roman
Catholic newspapers are now full of eager exultation at the near prospect of having a law to snap their fingers
at and violate. How far this may be done safely remains to be seen, but it appears tolerably certain that the
experiment will be made. Meanwhile the same respectable organs of opinion indulge themselves with
comments- on the Great Exhibition, and matters connected with it, in the style most likely to be pleasing to
their priestly patrons. One of them, describing the Queen's ball (which he states to have been given with
the laudable intention of "doing honour to the great demonstration which the English nation is making in
order to prove that it can do very well without God and His particular providence over it"), takes the
liberty of reminding Her Majesty that "men were eating and drinking when the first drops of the deluge
descended;" that "there were great riots in Sodom on the last night of its revels;" and that "Baltassar the
Chaldean gave a great banquet to a thousand of his nobles, but before he recovered from his drunken fit he
was in another world." The same polite writer "thanks Almighty God" for having inspired the Pope to
denounce the godless colleges and defeat the administration of civil government in Ireland; and, remarking
on a recent vote in the House of Commons which he not without shrewdness interprets as the opinion of
the English constituencies on that papal rescript, and by which a small sum for the repairs of Maynooth
College escaped with but a narrow majority of two, the pious man resigns himself with the air of a
martyr to the prospect of those same constituencies, one day, consummating their guilt and wickedness by
"robbing Maynooth of its entire annual grant, and turning the whole establishment adrift to depend for
its support upon the people of Ireland, the Church of God, and the providence of the Almighty."

As our readers may perhaps remember, this was exactly what was anticipated in this 'Narrative' when it
was first authoritatively announced that the uses to which Maynooth shouid be turned, were to be no other
than the education of a body of men pledged in every possible way to obstruct all fair or conciliatory
government in Ireland, and to make every Romish School and pulpit a vantage ground for defiance and
insult to the Protestant faith and the English name. Some extracts have recently been published from the
diary of the late Bishop Copleston, in the course of which he remarks that while the wrongs of the Irish
Catholics have-been in a progressive course of redress for the last sixty or seventy years, nevertheless in
exact proportion to our good treatment has been their increased violence and rancour; and he characterises
it as not a generous but a servile spirit "to behave worse in proportion as we behave better and kinder"
If we wanted any direct illustration of this truth, the circumstances of the last ten years would abundantly
supply it; and those who remember the conditions and assurances with which the bill for Catholic
Emancipation was hailed and accompanied two and twenty years ago, will find it highly instructive to
contrast what is now demanded by that section of our Catholic fellow-countrymen who side with the
Romish priesthood. "For our part," it is frankly confessed by the trusted organ of Dr. Cullen,
Dr. Wiseman, and the rest of the ultramontane faction, "we will never cease our struggle until every vestige
of inequality is removed from the statute-book; until the coronation oath is so altered that the Monarch of these
realms is as free as the humhlest of her subjects to become a Catholic and profess the Catholic faith; until a
Catholic barrister is free to become Lord Chancellor; until the insolent domination of the Establishment
is broken to pieces for ever; and until nothing remains in the shape of a law or legal institution to entitle
any human being, because calling himself a Protestant, to arrogate precedence over a Catholic who occupies
the same station in society." Such is the grandiloquent programme of the new Roman Catholic agitation,
bearing date the twenty-first of the present month, and which the poor modest Protestant can only hope
and pray may turn out not quite so bad as it threatens. The "compromise" in the case of Metairie and
Wiseman opportunely brings him a little comfort. He there perceives that when a Roman Catholic priest
cannot get all he has set his heart upon, he is fain to be content with something less; and that, after
solemnly protesting it to have been exclusively in the interest of the soul of the poor French teacher that he
had interposed to devote seven thousand pounds of his savings to the charities of holy mother church, he
can yet see the prudence of yielding to necessity, and surrendering no less than four of the abstracted
seven thousand pounds for the chance of retaining the other three. An arrangement more scandalous than
this, in so far as the priestly defendants arc concerned, was probably never made in evasion of even the
delays and perils of our English Chancery.

Other public incidents of any interest during the month have been few. The protectionist shipowners
have been making Lord Stanley their mouthpiece for a complaint of the decline of commercial marine in
consequence of the repeal of the navigation laws, but Lord Granville promptly met the complaint with a
statement showing a largely increasing trade, a vast concourse of foreign shipping to the English harbours,