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Vol. VIL—No. 11.
‘THE CATHOLIC HERALD
IS PUBLISHED EVERY TAURSDAY BY
M! FITHIAN,
No. 61 North Second Street, Philadelphia.
Terms.—Three Dollars per annum, payable half year-
ly in advance. Five Dollars will be received for 2 copies,
or J copy for two years, Allarrearages must be settled prior
to ordering a paper to be discontinued. 11 Communica-
tions, except from Agents, or Subscribers enclosing remit-
aid, and addressed “‘I'o the Editor
of the Catholic Herald, ‘Philadelphia, Pa.”
Poetry.
HOPE.
BY T. K. HERVEY,
Again—egain she comes!—methinks I hear ¥
Her wild, sweet singing, and her rushing wings;
My heart goes forth to meet her with a tear,
, And welcome sends from all its broken strings,
Tt was not thus—not THus—we met of yore,
When my plumed soul went half way to the sky
To greet her; and the joyous soxg she bore
Was scaree more tuneful than the glad reply:
The wings are fetter’d by the weight of years,
And grief has spoil'd the music with ber tears.
~ She comes—I know her by her starry eyes,
I know her by the rainbow in her hair! ©
Wer vesture of the light and summer skies—
But gone the girdle which she used to wear
‘Of summer roses, and the sandal flowers
‘That hung enamored round her fairy feet,
When, in her youth, she haunted EARTHLY bowers,
And cull’d from all the beautiful and sweet,
No more she mocks me with her voice of mirth,
Nor offers now the garlands of the earth.
Come back, come back—thou hast been absent long,
Oh! welcome back the sybil of the soul, :
*°’ Who came, and comes ogain, with pleading strong,
° To offer to the heart her mystic scroll; °°"
Though every year she wears a saddet look,
And singsa sudder song, and every year
‘ ‘Some further leaves are torn out from her book,
And fewer what she brings, and far more dear.
As once she came—oh, might she come again,
With all the perished volumes offered THEN.
But come—thy coming is a gladness yet—
Light from the present o'er the future cast,
“That makes the present bright—but oh—regret
Is PRESENT sorrow while it mourns the rast,
, And memory speaks, as speaks the curfew bell,
To tell the daylight of the Leart is gone.
t Come like the seer of old, and with thy spell
t Put back the shadow of that setting sun
i ‘On my soul's dial; and with new born light
Lush the wild tolling of the voice of night.
Bright spirit, come—the mystic roll is thine
That shows the hidden fountains of the breast,
‘ And turns, with point unerring, to divine
The places where its buried treasures rest
Its hoards of thought and feeling; at that spell,
Methinks I feel its long-lost wealth revealed,
And ancient springs within my bosom swell,
‘That grief had checked, and ruin had concealed,
And sweetly swelling where its waters stray,
‘The tints and freshness of its earlier day.
as
She comes—-she comes—her voice is in mine ear,
Her mild, sweet voice, that sings, and sings forever,
Whose strains of song sweet thoughts awake to hear,
Like flowers that haunt the margin ofa river;
(Flowers, like lovers, only speak in sighs,
Whose thoughts are hues, whose voices are theif hearts,)
. Oh—thus the spirit yearns to pierce the skies,
Exulting throbs, though all save hope departs: ©
"Thus the glad freshness of our sinless years
Ia watered ever by the heart’s rich tears.
She comes—I know her by her radiant eyes,’
Before whose smile the Jong dim cloud departs ;
And if adarker shade be on her brow,
_ And if her tones be sadder than of yore,
Philadeliphia, Thursday, March 14, 1839,
And ifshe sings more solemn music now,
And bears another harp than erst she bore,
And if around her form no longer glow
The earthly flowers that in her youth she wore—
That look is lofiier, and that song more sweet,
And heaven's flowers—the stars—are at her feet.
EE
ONE HOUR'S REFLECTION.
Ten minutes I thought on the time I had wasted,
How sad was the retrospect, poignant with pain! ”
‘TEN MINUTES revised all the pleasures I'd tasted
In the vortex of folly, fallacious and vain.
TEN minutes I thought on my present condition,
Life’s growing meridian now clouded and past,
Ten minutes I sighed that hope not fruition,
My span of existence forever was cast.
‘Ten minores { gave to the dark, dreary future
That still was impending to mark my decline;
‘Ten minutes I wept, and devoted to nature,
Oh! what asad “ hour of reflection” was mine !
From the U. 8, Catholic Miscellany.
: COMMUNICATION
To the Central Council for the Propagation of the
Faith, at Lyons.--Sent from Reme, in the month
of September, 1836. 4
Continued from page 1. .
‘Thus, they who know any thing of American history
will perceive, that nothing can be more erroneous than
the notion, that, at the period of our revolution Maryland
was a Catholic The d u of Lord
‘Whole Number 323.
rapine, they would administer it for the bencfit of the
Catholic family that confided in their friendship, and
would re-convey itto the proper owners by sufficient
titles, when the law shéuld permit Catholics to become
proprietors. Several Protestants have honorably ful-
filled this sacred trust, and have thus‘ saved. much for
they sanctioned, be nota desecration of the name of
neering Irish persecutor this day holds the wealth, of
which he boasts, by a title thus infamously transmitted.
This vile code, also, gave at once to the child of any
Catholic, who at any age should apostatize, the whole
real property of the family, to the exclusion of the pa-
rents and of the other children, and Protestant trustees
were to be appointed to hold it for him, until he arrived
at the age of twenty-one years.
Nor was this all, Even personal property was sub*
jected, in a variety of ways, to plunder. Perhaps one
anecdote will be a sufficient specimen of the system.
I shall relate it, as I heard it, from the late venerable
Bishop of Cork, Doctor Moylan, who died in 1815.
It occurred in his boyhood, and is highly creditable to
the Protestant Bishop Browne, of Cork, at the time
when this system of robbery was in full force. Iam
not certain, whether it was not Timothy McCready
(called Rabagh, or as a lane where be lived in obscure
retreat, is now called Rawbuck by mistake.) was the
then Bishop of Cork, or his successor, Bishop Walsh.
By the aid of some of his flock he procured two horses,
to enable him to make the visitation of his diocess, ac-
Baltimore had abandoned their religion and the great
bulk of the population at the period of the declaration
of Independence was Protestant of one denomination
or other. A few, and but a very few of the Catholic
families had preserved their religion, and a portion of
their property ; and some of the Jrish servants, as they
were called, adhered to the creed of their fathers ; few
of them, however, had been able to have recourse to its
ministry, and still more few t@ transmit it to their de-
scendants. The difficulty of obtaining the aid of the
ministry was, in most places, exceedingly great, be-
cause the clergy being the special objects of the perse-
cuting code, and being very few, they were generally
concealed from the zealots who hunted after them from
bigotry, and the irreligious who chased them for mere
wantonness and sport, °
Upon a general principle, which, however correct in
theory, yet is frequently found to work mischievously
in practice, as these were colonies of Great Britain,
they were considered to be in charge of the Vicar-
Apostolic of the London district, when such ‘a prelate
had been established, and this dignitary being himself
surrounded by difficulties, exposed to persecution and
unable to aid them, was just. as litle Jikely to know
their wants or have power to apply remedies to their
evils, as was the Khan of Tartary,
Such was the situation of what began asa Catholic
colony under the auspices of the crown of Great Britain,
‘| and with the promise of royal protection.’ Such were
the returns made by their Protestant neighbours to those
Catholics who first established religious liberty upon
the shores of America, ‘This ig but a faint outline of
that party which taunts Catholics with bigotry, and il-
liberality, and which boasts of the great edifice of civil
and religious freedom, which they alledge, was raised
in our republics by the genius of Protestantism! Such
is an imperfect sketch of the way, in which their wealth
was obtained by the progenitors of those men who re-
proach the Irish and the American Catholics with their
poverty 2 [shall add but one other detail to the reci-
tal. In doing so, I shall exhibit another way in which
the wealth of several of the Irish nobility and. landed
gentry has heen accumulated ; nor is America. alto-
gether free from the taint,
Some of the Irish, and a few of the American Catho-
lics sought, through the friendship and honor of their
Protestant neighbours, to preserve at the same time
their property and their faith. ’ They gave absolute
tides of their lands, by a legal transfer, to their Pro-
testant friends, who undertook privately, by a pledge of
honor, which was all they could give, that whilst their
ostensible ownership covered it from confiscation and
f J by one of his priests, orto fly from his pur-
suers as the case may require. "The law forbade any:
Catholic to possess a horse of the value of more than
of five pounds, to take ‘away, for,himself, any horse’
to inform him that his horses would probably to be de=
manded under this law, their value was more than six
times the amount. , Whilstthey were yet devising how
to gave the horses, an agent from the Protestant Bishop
entered, paid down ten pounds, demanded the horses,
in a short time afterwards, another similardemand was
made, but the horses were no longer there.- A note
was sven received from the Protestant Bishop, inform-
ing the Catholic prelate, that being quite aware of the
determination of several Protestants to secure for them-'
selves the horses, under the provisions of the law, he
had sent early to secure them for himself,- and having
taken them intu his possession, he now sent them back
to their former owner as a loan to be kept and used until
they should be sent for, ‘This was not the only in-
stance in which the benevolence of even the dignitaries
of the Protestant church mitigated the provisions of this
atrocious code. In America, equally as in Ireland were
the Catholics emaciated in numbers and in property by
its operation; and thus Maryland was made one of
those colonies in which, though some Catholics were
left, still the spirit of hostility to Catholics was made
most manifest.” Andin Maryland, asin Ireland, if we
find evidence of Protestant croelty and oppression, we’
also find many noble instances of Protestant generosity,
of Protestant friendship, and of Protestant protection.
1 have mentioned Pennsylvania as a colony, in*
dom. , Its legislature adhered to this principle, and as
it bordered upon Maryland, when the persecution be=’
came vigorous in this colony, several Catholics retired
from Maryland into Pennsylvania, but they had scarce-
ly any opportunity of seeing a priest, nor was the term
Quakers tocomprehend Catbolicity. Itis true, that
they neither hanged, whipped, banished nor fined the
members of our church for their faith, nor did they tax
themas /rish servants ; but there is that solemn, cis-
tant, cold, Systematic avoidance which proclaims, in a
way sufficiently intelligible, the dislike and condemna-’
tion Which one avoids to express by words. I know
of no better description of this conduct, than is con+
tained in a common story told of a Quaker's conduct
toa dog which he disliked. Looking at him.as he
saw. some persons approach, he thus soliloquised,
T shall neither hang thee, nor shoot thee, nor strike
the victims of the law, if the outrageous robbery which .
law :—but, for others, the temptation was too great.to
be resisted; and many a high-headed, jitled and domix
51., and authorised any Protestant upon the payment -
that a Catholie owned. _ A-person calfed on the Bishop °
insisted upon their delivery, and carried them away; ,
which, no laws were enacted to restrain religious frees -!
“religious liberty” sufficiently understood by the .
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