"high" Church-of-England colony, apart from what its promoters pleasantly called sectarian influences, was a self-evident absurdity. The last account we saw was, that the pious inhabitants had deserted their churches and run off to the Australian diggings. What else was to be looked for? Or can we doubt the truth of Colonel Mundy's prediction: “Long before the streets of the new town are laid out, some nonconformist Poundtext will be found mounted on a tree-stump in the market-place, and will not wait long for a flock!"*

In Australia (as in every English colony, we believe without exception) the Catholic religion alone seems to thrive; and one at least of the obvious reasons of this phenomenon, so ungrateful to British statesmen and Protestant divines, the Colonel is candid enough to record:

"In the Protestant church, on Sunday morning, I found about sixty grown-up persons, exclusive of the minister and an individual in a holland blouse and clarionet, personating the organ. The Roman Ca

tholics here, as generally in these colonies, appear to have increased in numbers and consequence at a much greater ratio than other denominations. The reason is obvious. Union is strength: the Romanists (!) are devoted to one set of tenets,-bound up in one common cause,-presenting the strongest 'formation' for resistance, if not for conquest. The Protestants are split into sects; every man must set up a creed for himself; and dissent appears to be the rule rather than the exception. A handsome stone chapel, neatly furnished, will shortly replace the present modest wooden edifice. The priest, it need hardly be added (!), possesses a most comfortable cottage, a clever hack, and a sleek exterior."

We may pardon the flippancy of this passage for the sake of its honest acknowledgment of a fact which most Protestant writers would certainly have concealed.

With reluctance we pass over the interview with Smith O'Brien a state-prisoner, on the most indulgent terms according to Colonel Mundy's account, in perhaps the most beautiful and salubrious island in the whole world; but we need hardly say that our author, being a staunch monarchist, has no sympathy with that expatriated gentleman. Like the Canterbury settlers, we too must hasten to the diggings. The Colonel having a few months at his disposal before returning to England, resolves upon a visit to the gold-fields, and, as in duty bound, even takes a turn at the pick and cradle for a few

*The author says in a note: "Towards the end of 1850 I was informed, that at this essentially Church-of-England plantation the only churchman present was a Roman Catholic priest, to whom all the children were taken for baptism and other rites."

hours on his own account.

We

may introduce the reader to

the Turon diggings without any ceremony:

"At length the main features of the country became more decided in character. Amid a chaos of minor swells it was easy to trace two leading sierras, dominating and marking the direction of a long and tortuous valley. This valley forms the bed of the river Turon, the Pactolus of the antipodes. Thin wreaths of bluish smoke indicated the position of the mines, far below and as yet invisible. As we topped a ridge, the last of a series I thought interminable, my companion suddenly said, 'Stop and listen." I pulled up my horse, and heard, as I imagined, the rushing of some mighty cataract. It is the cradles,' said he; and so it was, the grating of the gravel or rubble on the metal sifters of five hundred rockers! I shall not easily forget the impression made on me by this singular acoustic effect. Looking down into that wild mountain glen, it was almost incredible that this uniform and ceaseless crash could be produced by the agency of a crowd of human beings, not one of whom was visible, nor any sign of their existence. There was no pause nor the slightest variation in the cadence as it floated up to us on the still air; and I have no doubt that had we listened for an hour, not the slightest check in the monotonous roar would have been detected. Presently, as we descended upon the creek, tents and huts and every other kind of temporary tabernacle were descried dotting the slopes and levels up and down and on either bank of the stream, in indiscriminate confusion.'

Another point visited was "Golden-horn ;" and here the author takes a somewhat closer inspection of the process:

66

6

"I asked one of the diggers, whose head and shoulders just protruded from the grave-like hole he was digging, whether the ore was visible to the eye in the soil. Get in,' said he, laconically,-for the miners have no breath to waste in chattering. I turned in with him accordingly, and my black-bearded friend made me observe a delicate layer or stratum of yellow dust, like flour, in one corner of the hole. Without further ado, he shovelled dirt, gravel, and gold together into a sort of canvass hand-barrow, and two or three spadefuls seemed to have exhausted the precious vein, for it ceased to be perceptible. This was the only occasion on which I succeeded in detecting with the naked eye gold in its deposit, except indeed on the following day, when I saw a man pick a piece the size of a pea out of an old root in a dry gully."

"The upper stratum of the ground they were working upon was of gravel of every size, from a pumpkin to a pea, and of various materials, volcanic, silicious, slaty, &c. Then came a rich brownish soil; and in many spots a thick layer of clay was spread above the rock that formed the true bed or trough of the creek. All the superstrata are composed of mere detritus, washed down together with the gold by the mountain storms. The very finest atoms of the ore frequently find lodgment among the lighter soil or gravel. The

medium grains are caught and retained by the clay, whilst the heaviest particles work their way down to the rock."

Though the Colonel was not rewarded by a single speck of gold in his own attempt at digging, he purchased some 5007. worth at the miners' prices, which, at the Mint value in England, left about 90/. clear profit. It is fair to add, that he merely adopted this as a convenient means of remitting to England the proceeds of the sale of his effects on leaving Australia.

On the vexata quæstio of the contemplated gold-glut Col. Mundy wisely is silent: wisely, because no mortal man can possibly tell when the world at large will have so much gold, that it will begin to be less valued. Time was when the enormous deposits of copper at the Burra-Burra mines in Australia were thought likely to ruin the less productive English mines; yet within the last half-year copper has risen to twice its former value: a halfpenny now is literally equal to a penny then, according to market prices! As we now wonder how, not twenty years ago, the traffic of the country was conducted by coaches and wagons, and how people could contrive to transact business without electrict elegraphs and when every letter cost on the average a shilling for postage, so in a few years shall we wonder how the monied world contrived to pay its way the "few handfuls" of gold then in circulation. We may rest assured that the Providence which gave us coal and iron for our good will not give us either gold or silver for our hurt, apart from the evils naturally attendant on the abuse of wealth.

with

PROTESTANT ROSARIES.

Rosaries, compiled for the Use of the English Church.
London, Joseph Masters.

In the form of a small and prettily got-up volume, with rubrical edges, very slender and very flexible, attired in episcopal purple, and embossed (though almost invisibly) with the title "Rosaries," we have been presented with a new manual of devotion, which Protestants will regard with dismay, and which no Catholic can regard with respect. Yet it has two aspects, and may be looked upon either as imitation or as aspiration. Considered in the former point of view, it must meet with the disapprobation of the Catholic; not because it decks itself in borrowed plumes, or because the Church can suffer any diminution

when a fragment is snatched from her exhaustless stores, but because what is thus appropriated can tend only to keep up a dangerous delusion. This little book goes further than any we have yet seen in the way of turning Catholic devotions to the use of a school in the Protestant Establishment. It seems also to indicate, what indeed might have been expected, that since the Gorham case, all opinions, however opposed, are equally secure of toleration in the Anglican Church. To pass her line of latitude would apparently be an undertaking still more difficult than that of "finding the longitude." It is hard to say with what feelings, on the whole, such books should be regarded. There will perhaps, for several years to come, be found a class of readers, full of their own high aspirations, and ignorant of the actual state of things around them, who may profit by them, receive from them deeper impressions of Catholic truths, and be gradually led on from the shadow to the substance. As for their more learned compilers, we should have thought that recent circumstances had been plain enough to decide that Protestantism on stilts is not Catholicism; and that no imaginable amount of incubation can make a chicken come out of a piece of chalk mistaken for an egg.

The book consists of a series of Rosaries taken from ancient sources, but docked here and there, very irreverently, to suit not indeed the Church of England, but some section of some school in that body. "The Hail Mary' in its modern form," we are told in the introduction, "was never used in the English Church." No attempt is made to prove this statement; nor indeed does it appear that the compiler himself objects to the "Hail Mary' in its modern form," that is, in the form in which it is used by Catholic Christendom. That form is printed; and then comes a rather equivocal comment: "For this form, if objected to, may be substituted some other prayer, such as this: Hail, Virgin Mary, Mother of God, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, which gave birth to the Saviour of our souls.' The prayer to our Lady is supposed to be thus omitted; or rather a disputable case is raised as to whether the address, as it remains, be not in fact an interjection, not a prayer. "Our Prayer Book," continues the compiler, "fully sanctions the use of salutations, since we employ a whole string of similar addresses, e.g. in the hymn of Benedicite omnia opera." According to this reading, it will be an open question, whether the Salutation be really a prayer to her whom all generations call blessed, or whether she be only addressed in the same sense as, "O ye frost and snows fulfilling his word!" Another question, however, is likewise

left open, viz. whether, after all, it may not be quite as well to discard the hypothetical objection altogether, and condescend to use the "Hail Mary" as the Church uses it.

Another equally equivocal expression is to be found in the following comment on the Rosary: "These two concluding apocryphal mysteries (the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin and her coronation) form no unapt symbolism of the risen life in Christ, and the final triumphs of His Church." Whether this remark implies such a belief in the two above-named mysteries as Protestants accord to those books still read for "examples of life and manners," or whether they are regarded as among the superstitions of Popery, we are not informed. In the expurgated version of the Rosary here given, however, the fourth and fifth glorious mysteries relinquish their ancient titles, and pass under the alias of " the triumph of the Church. in the saints," and "the consummation of glory and the beatific vision." Here again we presume that a certain latitude is to be allowed to individual taste. Among those who use this Rosary there will be some who cannot but remark, that in the case of the other mysteries a profound symbolical meaning is borne in upon us in and with a great objective fact; and who will therefore see no sufficient reason for removing the objective statement in the case of the two concluding mysteries, and thus altering the general character of the devotion by a change as unharmonious, as if two figures were cut out of a picture by Raphael, and two corresponding figures from an engraving substituted in their place. We are told also that "it has been objected that in the Roman Catholic Rosaries, the devotions to the Blessed Virgin predominate over those to God, since there are one hundred and fifty Aves to fifteen Paters." Here again no hint is dropped enabling us to determine how far the compiler sympathises with this objection. An arithmetical, like a geographical solution for questions of theology, has difficulties as well as attractions of its own; and some fallacy must surely lurk in a calculus which would prove that the devotion of Catholics to the Blessed Virgin is precisely ten times what they feel for Almighty God. Neither can the compiler himself be deceived by this fallacy, since he knows that our Blessed Lord is the chief subject of meditation in almost all the mysteries, and indeed expressly says, that “the great argument in favour of the Rosary is, that it promotes prayer by way of meditation on the Crucified and the mysteries of the Gospel." Nevertheless, in deference to this objection, other prayers are substituted for those to our Lady with which each mystery ought to terminate. They are taken from Catholic sources, and are therefore unexceptionable; but of course