CONVERSIONS TO ROME.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."] SIR,—Will you allow me to assure "A Convert of Fifteen Years' Standing" that, without retracting a word of my former letter, I fully agree with him that Ireland also contributes much —perhaps more than Vaticanism with less cultured and logical minds—to arrest the stream of conversions ; and not in Eng- land only, but throughout the world, for the Irish are much the same in the Colonies as at home, as a Catholic friend in Australia wrote to me the other day, "the standing hindrance to conversions everywhere." Of that, too, I know something. But I will content myself here with citing one typical illustra- tion of the justice of your correspondent's remarks, from a story told me by a friend, himself at once a zealous convert and loyal Englishman, only suppressing names of persons and places. He had nearly succeeded, as he thought, in converting a young officer in the Army, when the latter's regiment was ordered off to Ireland. Some months later my friend again met him, in Ireland, when he at once said,—"I know better now, and shall never join your Church ; your religion won't wash." On being pressed to explain, he said that theft and murder were rife among Irish Catholics, "and your priests are all in with it." My friend protested that no one could condemn these unpleasant " Irish ideas" more strongly than he did, but that his Church condemned. them quite as strongly too, and he would procure unimpeachable proof of it. With this view, he obtained an intro- duction to the leading ecclesiastic in the place—one of the largest towns in Ireland—and called on him, explaining that he wanted. his authority for correcting his young neophyte's de- plorable misapprehension of facts. To his great surprise, the only answer he got was that "it was very hard on tenants to be evicted from their homes ;" this was, I think, not long after Lord. Leitrim's murder. " Be it so," said my friend ; "but you surely do not mean that evicted tenants are therefore justified in shooting their landlord ?" "Oh! my dear sir," was the prompt reply, "and would you be for expecting everybody to rise to the standard of Christian perfection ?" My friend naturally ventured to observe that he had not hitherto been accustomed to measure "Christian perfection" by abstinence from assassination even of your enemies. But it was no use. After two hours' talk, he could. extract nothing further out of the worthy padre, and of course had no further answer for his relapsed neophyte, who remains, no doubt, to this day under the conviction, formed and matured in Ireland, that "the Catholic religion won't wash."—I am, Sir, &c.,
A CONVERT OF THIRTY YEARS' STANDING.
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