1 JANUARY 1887, Page 33

The Loss of our Children. A Work for the Catholic

Protection and Rescue Society. By the Bishop of Salford. (J. Roberts and Sons, Salford.)—It is rather amusing to see how the Roman Catholics resent in others the proselytism which they have themselves so often practised. The parents of the famous "little Mortara" of twenty years ago, would read with something like satisfaction this wail of the good Bishop of Salford over the Protestant proselytism which, under the plea of charity, so often manages to steal Roman Catholic children and give them a Protestant education. However, we entirely agree that nothing can be more unjust than the practice here exposed,—and exposed in specific cases of which there seems to be definite evidence,—of bribing Catholic parents to let their children stay for a time under Protestant guidance, the result being too often that they never recover possession of them, and being too poor to prosecute legal proceedings to extremities, lose control of them for ever. The Bishop is quite right in complaining of such proselytism, and in organising resistance to it. But can be deny that his own Church has in her day been guilty of much more deliberate and organised proselytism of this kind, than even those Protestant missionary bodies which seem to move Heaven and earth to make one proselyte,—with perhaps the very result described by our Lord in the Gospels as the consequence of similar proselytism on the part of the Pharisees ? This little pamphlet is earnest and inter- esting, and we hope that the Roman Catholics may respond to the Bishop's appeal.