to detect a flaw in the character of his friends, and nothing could induce him to comment disparagingly upon the conduct of those he loved. Indeed, charity of thought and word was the outgrowth of the gentle, kindly nature with which God endowed him.

If community of interests with the youth preserves youth under the accumulation of years, then may we question if Fr. Mullaly ever grew old. The personal pride which he took in the intellectual and athletic triumphs of our own boys of Holy Cross in the last decade was not less intense than the interest with which he followed similar achievements of the Georgetown boys, "just after the War," when the varying successes of the Stonewalls" and "the Quicksteps" divided the honor of our national game. In many a home, distant from Holy Cross and Georgetown, where the old boys have established themselves, the announcement of Fr. Mullaly's death will be received with genuine sorrow, and in the restricted circle of those whom he held as friends his death will be felt as a household sorrow and a personal loss.

"Vir prudens et justus" is the eulogy that Holy Church pronounces on her saintly dead. It is without exaggeration or infringement of truth that the same commendation can be bestowed upon the deceased. Just he was in all the relations of life, to God and his fellow man. Prudent, likewise, to a degree exceedingly rare even among men of circumspection and self-control. A tribute well worth winning was paid him, on the announcement of his death,

by a friend who knew him first in her girlhood days and retained his regard to the last. "He was," said this friend, "the most prudent priest I ever knew."

With this commendation of Holy Church upon his life, we ask in his behalf the last duties of affection from the friends who loved him. It is the request he would make of us, one and all: "Pray for my soul." Generous himself in life to those who died in the Lord, God will not permit him to tarry in purgatorial waiting, for want of holy suffrages so prized by those who pass from life.

"May he rest in peace and let perpetual light shine upon him!"

REV. JAS. A. DOONAN, S. J.

A CYCLE OF CATHOLICITY.

It would be difficult to select a period during the last nineteen hundred years, when the condition of the Catholic Church and its prospects were less promising, or the civilization of the so-called Christian world in so deplorable a condition as the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Ireland had then, indeed, her own parliament, consisting of a House of Lords and a House of Commons, but no Catholic might hold a seat in either house, nor could a Catholic hold an office of honor or profit under the government. So universal was the prejudice against Catholics that even in Boston the Charitable Irish Society, formed in 1737, expressly excluded Catholics from office by a constitutional provision; nor was this obnoxious feature removed until 1820.

France, by its departure from the salutary principles of true Christianity, by its expulsion of the Jesuits, and the encouragement given by that unfortunate country to secret societies, paved the way for the most savage and sanguinary revolution that the world has ever known. Religious orders were abolished, the authority of the Pope rejected, churches were pillaged, church property seized and confiscated, bishops and priests exiled or massacred. reign of blood and terror prevailed. The climax of impiety and sacrilege was reached when an

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infamous woman, enthroned on the altar of Notre Dame in Paris, was worshipped as the Goddess of Reason.

In Austria the authority of the Pope was repudiated and communication with the Holy See, without royal assent, forbidden to the bishops. In Portugal nobles and Jesuits alike became objects of royal enmity. Many of the nobles were put to death, and, notwithstanding the magnificent accomplishments of the Jesuits in Paraguay and elsewhere, they were banished from all the Portuguese dominions. The venerable and saintly provincial, Father Malagrida, was martyred-burned to death at the stake in the public square in Lisbon. There have been Christian, as well as pagan, Neros.

In Spain, the home of St. Ignatius and St. Francis Xavier, the Jesuits fared no better. In 1767 a royal despatch to all the authorities in Spain and Spanish America instructed them to conduct the fathers within their jurisdiction to the nearest port and place them on board ship. Six thousand Jesuits were thus, at a single blow, deprived of their rights, their liberty, and their property. The same outrage was perpetrated in Naples and in the duchy of Parma.

In 1773 the Jesuits drank the last drop in their chalice of bitterness, and the cause of religion and education suffered its rudest shock, when the holy father, coerced by the princes of earth, suppressed, by papal brief, all over the world, this, the grandest and noblest order in the Catholic Church.

When the eloquence of Pitt and Burke and Fox

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and Sheridan in the British parliament rivalled the eloquence of the best days of ancient Rome, the Catholic Church in England was only a recollection, while the state of society in general was about as low as it could be. Criminal law there was a Draconian code, and administered with Draconian severity. The pillory stood in the centre of London, and was in constant use. whipping post was a national institution. of fashion arranged pleasure parties to visit the penitentiaries and see wretched women whipped. Capital punishment was inflicted for more than two hundred offences, many of which would now be thought to be punished enough by one or two months' imprisonment, a small fine, or, in the case of minors, by a reprimand. Not only men, but women and children, even, were hanged for pilfering goods or food worth a few shillings. The jails were crowded with poor wretches whom want had driven to theft, and who were "worked off," as the saying was, on the gallows, every Monday morning, in batches of a dozen or twenty, in sight of jeering, drunken crowds who gathered to witness their death agonies. The slave trade was in full operation, and slave labor a source of great emolument. This is but a brief outline of the condition of the greater part of the civilized world at the beginning of the 19th century.

The three centuries of irreligion, tyranny, persecution and spoliation which followed, and grew out of, the great religious rebellion of the sixteenth century, dealt a stunning blow, not only at the Catholic Church, but at all those