up the first weapon which came to hand, and have only cut our own fingers.  We have very nearly burnt the Church of England over our heads, in our hurry to make a bonfire of the Pope.  We have been too proud to make ourselves acquainted with the very tenets which we exposed, and have made a merit of reading no Popish books but such as we were sure would give us a handle for attack, and not even them without the precaution of getting into a safe passion beforehand.  We have dealt in exaggerations, in special pleadings, in vile and reckless imputations of motive, in suppressions of all palliating facts.  We have outraged the common feelings of humanity by remaining blind to the virtues of noble and holy men because they were Papists, as if a good deed was not good in Italy as well as in England.  We have talked as if God had doomed to hopeless vileness in this world and reprobation in the next millions of Christian people, simply because they were born of Romish and not of Protestant fathers.  And we have our reward; we have fared like the old woman who would not tell the children what a well was for fear they should fall into one.  We see educated and pious Englishmen joining the Romish communion simply from ignorance of Rome, and have no talisman wherewith to disenchant them.  Our medicines produce no effect on them, and all we can do is, like quacks, to increase the dose.  Of course, if ten boxes of Morison’s pills have killed a man, it only proves that—­he ought to have taken twelve of them.  We are jesting, but, as an Ulster Orangeman would say, “it is in good Protestant earnest.”

In the meantime some of the deepest cravings of the human heart have been left utterly unsatisfied.  And be it remembered, that such universal cravings are more than fancies; they are indications of deep spiritual wants, which, unless we supply them with the good food which God has made for them, will supply themselves with poison—­ indications of spiritual faculties, which it is as wicked to stunt or distort by mis-education as it is to maim our own limbs or stupefy our understanding.  Our humanity is an awful and divine gift; our business is to educate it throughout—­God alone must judge which part of it shall preponderate over the rest.  But in the last generation—­ and, alas! in this also—­little or no proper care has been taken of the love for all which is romantic, marvellous, heroic, which exists in every ingenuous child.  Schoolboys, indeed, might, if they chose, in play-hours, gloat over the “Seven Champions of Christendom,” or Lempriere’s gods and goddesses; girls might, perhaps, be allowed to devour by stealth a few fairy tales, or the “Arabian Nights;” but it was only by connivance that their longings were satisfied from the scraps of Moslemism, Paganism—­anywhere but from Christianity.  Protestantism had nothing to do with the imagination—­in fact, it was a question whether reasonable people had any; whether the devil was not the original maker