The Irish Catholic Bishops have put out a very eloquent
address to the Catholics of Dublin on the subject of Judge Keogh's Galway charge. In it they do not deny, and by impli- cation almost admit, the religious interference of the priests with the votes of their flocks. "It is not our business to defend the political actions imputed to some of our clerical brethren, neither is it our right to sit in judgment on their conduct. Indiscreet seal may have carried a few of them beyond the line of decorum, but surely it is a question open for discussion which of the two is the more unpardonable, the priest in the heat of an angry con- tested election, in which he believed the independence of his flock was assailed—yielding to an impulse, if you will—or the ermined judge, in the delivery of a solemn judgment, surrendering himself to almost a paroxysm of vituperation. The cassock is judged to be defiled ; surely the ermine is not quite unstained." They admit the evil and mischief of altar-denunciations, but they elo- quently repudiate the notion that the Confessional ever has been abused for political purposes, or that more than one priest ever thought ot so abusing it, and they comment with a good deal of Iseverity on the career of the man who has thus attacked them. Of course, the address points out that, so far as the priests were drawn into partisanship, it was by the strong sympathy they felt with the freedom of their flocks threatened by the combination of the landlords. The address shows more than the usual tact of the Roman Catholic leaders in Ireland.
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