“3.  Some of the proceedings of these bishops confirm the assurance that there is now an Inquisition in activity in England. * * * The vigilance exercised over families, also the intermeddling of priests with education, both in families and schools, and with the innumerable relations of civil society, can only be traced back to the Inquisitors in partibus, whose peculiar duty, whether by help of confessors or familiars, is to worm out every secret of affairs, private or public, and to organize and conduct measures of repression or of punishment.  Where the secular arm cannot be borrowed, and where offenders lie beyond the reach of excommunication, irregular methods must be resorted to, not rejecting any as too crafty or too violent.  Discontented mobs, or individual zealots are to be found or bought.  What part the Inquisitors in partibus play in Irish assassinations, or in the general mass of murderous assaults that is perpetrated in the lower haunts of crime, it is impossible to say.  Under cover of confessional and Inquisitorial secrets, spreads a broad field of action—­a region of mystery—­only visible to the eye of God, and to those ’most reverend and most eminent’ guardians of the papacy, who sit thrice every week, in the Minerva and Vatican, and there manage the hidden springs of Inquisition on the heretics, schismatics, and rebels, no less than on ‘the faithful’ of realms.  Who can calculate the extent of their power over those ‘religious houses,’ where so many of the inmates are but neophytes, unfitted by British education for the intellectual and moral abnegation, the surrender of mind and conscience, which monastic discipline exacts?  Yet they must be coerced into submission, and kept under penal discipline.  Who can tell how many of their own clergy are withdrawn to Rome, and there delated, imprisoned, and left to perish, if not ‘relaxed’ to death, in punishment of heretical opinions or liberal practices?  We have heard of laymen, too, taken to Rome by force, or decoyed thither under false pretences there to be punished by the universal Inquisition; and whatever of incredibility may appear in some tales of Inquisitorial abduction, the general fact that such abductions have taken place, seems to be incontrovertible.  And now that the Inquisitors in partibus are distributed over Christendom, and that they provide the Roman Inquisition with daily work from year’s end to year’s end, is among the things most certain,—­even the most careless of Englishmen must acknowledge that we have all reason to apprehend much evil from the Inquisition as it is.  And no Christian can be aware of this fact, without feeling himself more than ever bound to uphold the cause of christianity, both at home and abroad, as the only counteractive of so dire a curse, and the only remedy of so vast an evil.”  Rev. Wm. Rule, London.

The Rev. E. A. Lawrence, writing of “Romanism at Rome,” gives us the following vivid description of the present state of the Roman Church.