Cardinal Manning, in laying on Tuesday the foundation-stone of a
new seminary for the education of young priests for the diocese of Beverley, made a remark on the re'filme of force which had succeeded to that pastoral authority of the Pope in Europe which was, at one time, sufficient to pacify and govern it. It was hardly a happy remark, a propos of a time when the Pope is openly giving out that he prefers the savagery and lust of Turkish barbarism to the bigotry of the rude Christian Slays, only because the former interpose fewer obstacles to the free celebration of Roman Catholic worship than the latter. "The age of iron," as his Eminence termed this epoch of mighty standing armies and rifled cannon, undoubtedly has its miseries and its sins ; but the "pastoral care" which would protect plundering Pashas and bloody Bashi-Bazouks, rather than endanger the perfect freedom of a few Roman Catholic Churches, will hardly shame the "age of iron" into piety and peace. The Cardinal accounts for the extreme passiveness of the Catholic community in relation to the horrible iniquities and cruelties of the Turkish policy, by pleading that they fear the
perils to Europe of bringing on a general war. If the Slays had been Catholics, or the Turks less contemptuously complacent towards Catholics, we should have heard a very different tale.
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