Church. And if we cannot find many other examples of the Church thus resorting to the Apocalypse for instruction, with regard to her position, the fewness of the records which have passed down to us of those times, may be the cause, even if there were not many other reasons, to which we shall hereafter refer. (To be continued.) Poetry. THE NATIVITY. [THE following beautiful lines have appeared in the Weekly Telegraph. The author also forwarded them to the Lamp.-J. B.] Four thousand years had pass'd since Adam fell. E'er pierc'd the gloom which hung o'er fallen man, Save the promise given of a Saviour To one chosen race. The powers of hell In great Jehovah's place, and was ador'd In molten forms, by God's own image-man. Proud reason peer'd-in vain—thro' the deep shade Of ignorance, for one bright glance into the world unseen. Earth seem'd to be the battle-ground 'twixt Heaven and Hell. As erst in Heaven when in wrath he dash'd Th' ambitious spirits who would mount His throne- Into hell's dismal, yawning, fiery depths? Did the Earth's fabric crumble 'neath His step Or ope in chasms, to devour alive The foes of nature's God? Ah! no, He came not thus. "The bruised reed He would not break, nor quench the smoking flax." He came not to destroy, but to save; To teach us meekness, mercy, peace, and truth; To triumph by his meekness, and to win Our hardened hearts by miracles of love! Ruler, of God's household-chosen guardian Of Heaven's bright Queen, Mary ever Virgin, "Hail, holy Joseph, hail!" proclaimed “the just ' Blessed Mother, the Immaculate! Before whose virtue glorious seraphs bend In joyous wonder. Holy guardian too Of the Eternal and Incarnate word. O, greatest of the patriarchal race, How lowly is thy train! Where, where the pomp Of Royal David's son? Thy courtiers where? Why comest thou alone in mercy's name Could we but see the angels thronging round Oh! say, is this the great etcrnal King, In Heav'n adored by countless multitudes Of the angelic host, who prostrate fall Before his throne, in ecstacies of love? Where sanctus, sanctus, sanctus ever new In safety from the strokes of wrath Divine, Glory to God on high, and peace on earth" Is heard around, in sweet unearthly tones. But no. This is our place of exile-far away From that bright home in which the just shall reigu. Our Lord has come to suffer-and to teach By his example, how to conquer hell, By meekness, patience, and humility, To tread the painful path of stubborn toil; And how to live and die-for God alone. Oh! boundless mercy of the Son of God, And feed it with Himself-the bread of life! His body, soul, and God-head all " he gives To sinful man. See then how much we owe? He gives us all He is, and all we have; And He demands that we repay His love, By loving one another for his sake. The hungry child that trembles at our door Is Jesus-and He cries to us for bread! JOHN CARROLL. 1. Frid. Great Fire at Quebec, 1854. 2. Sat. FLOWER GARDEN FOR FEBRUARY.-Keep up a succession of flowers by bringing hyacinths and other bulbs in pots or glasses every fortnight into the stove, or the window of a warm living-room. Rhododendrons, azalcas, kalmias, ledums, lilacs, roses, camellias, and hardy heaths in pots should now be brought into gentle heat to expand their blossoms. Almost all bulbous-rooted plants bear forcing well if the bulbs are large enough, and early flowering ligneous plants that form flower-beds before winter, as the rhodora and camellia, are to be selected for this purpose. To our Correspondents. The Lamp monthly part will in future be known by a green cover. THE Lamp will contain regularly a summary of PARLIAMENTARY NEWs, especially of topics of Catholic interest. The Queen's Speech will be given in full. AN interesting illustration in our next. M.-The Editor of the Lamp will gladly send to the Very Rev. Monsignore Virtue, Chaplain at Aldershot, any books intended for the soldiers which may be forwarded to Mr. Dolman. Several copies of the Lamp have been sent already. In order to make room for Catholic Intelligence (which has more frequently than we could wish been displaced by other matters), we have to postpone several letters and other contributions with which we have been favoured; also some answers and translations we had written, and several reviews of Catholic books. T. C.-Answer in our next. RECEIVED.-J. K. L.-The Ashton Report.-Notes of a Missionary Priest.-Thomas Hughes.-Jenny.-T. J. P.— X. (the Lamp goes to the United States for one penny). A CORRESPONDENT asks how the Lamp can be sent to New York. A penny stamp will take the Lamp (open at each end) to any part of the United States; but there must be no writing except the address. The very interesting account of Catholic proceedings in Flint, North Wales, will appear in our next. We have received the handbill from Chorley, and the letter respecting Gamin's attack on the Popes; but we would (with all respect and thanks to our zealous friend and correspondent) prefer not occupying our space with such contemptible stuff. It is for the local press in each case to expose such people as the Hull Advertiser so ably exposed Armstrong, whose ranting against "Popery" makes converts to "Popery." The Lamp. PEACE. RUSSIA has accepted the propositions of the Allied Powers, and we are probably on the eve of the termination of a war which, though just in its objects, has been desolating in its character. We say probably, for shortly before the Vienna negociations, peace seemed almost certain: and yet it vanished under the wily influences of diplomacy. We hope soon to be able to announce the return of the blessing of peace. THE services of the military surgeons have recently been the subject of much attention; and we hope that the national gratitude will not (as has too often been the case here; but not in France) reward all except those meritorious officers. We had intended to devote some space this week to the consideration of their claims (and some, as we will show hereafter, are peculiarly of Catholic interest); but the points have all been clearly put forward in the following, which we quote from the Daily News : EXTRACT from a letter of a surgeon serving in the Crimea, dated Dec. 21, 1855 : "Can you wonder that we surgeons, who have passed the greater part of the years 1854 and 1855 in the field, should be discontented? that what we have had to go through-I allude less to the fatigues and chances of war than to the neglect and obloquy we have had to endure-should be constantly uppermost in our thoughts? There are some of us here, and not a few, who, having entered the army service at ages varying from twenty-two to twenty-six years-the limits of age for entering in our time-having waited eleven years and upwards as assistants for promotion, came out as surgeons in charge of regiments, and have remained at our posts ever since, without quitting them for a day. We have seen honours, rewards, rapid promotion, increased pay and allowauces, lucrative appointments, given with no niggard hand to our companions; not one gift to us. Officers who joined from school have become our equals in relative rank after less than three years' service, have been made field officers in six years; and others who started for the East on a level with ourselves are now lieutenant-colonels, Companions of the Bath, and what not. Do not think we are jealous of this promotion when it has been obtained by distinguished service; but we who are on the spot know how often, for the Gazette phrase, distinguished family interest' might be substituted with propriety and justice. New military establishments on all sides, additions and extra aid to old establishments, have furnished situations for officers unattached,' or have provided others with staff pay and allowances in addition to their regimental pay. Commissariat officers draw war pay,' engineer officers double pay,' in addition to the field allowance common to all. None of these advantages have we surgeons had. The authorised complement of medical officers for the field has never been maintained, so that the deaths and other casualties which have occurred among us have not led to the proportionate promotion of the survivors. The introduction of the civil element' has shut out from us the appointments which have sprung into existence with the institution of the new medico-military establishments. Our exertions, our endurance, our persistence in the performance of our duties, have gone for nothing in vain have recommendations, from authorities medical or authorities military, been forwarded home: hitherto not one of us has received decoration or reward. Nay, those who have quitted their posts, and gone home, among the medical officers, have fared best higher situations have been found for them than they had in the scene of action which they quitted. When I remember all that occurred around me in Bulgaria, at Alma, and during last winter-that climax of misery, when half starved, half clothed, the sights I saw and the physical suffering I endured drove me at times almost in despair as I lay awake under the frail flapping canvas of my tent-I wonder that I did not quit too. Sick in heart and body, I could have done so had I chosen. Little do those medical officers who left before that time, or who have only come since, know what we underwent during those dreary nights and days, when men had to be forced into the trenches who were fit only to be patients in hospital-when patients in hospital wasted and died away, and we, for want of the commonest essentials for nursing and treatment, could do little to alleviate their sufferings. Yet now we learn that a Board of Medical Officers in London, half of whom served a couple of months or so in the Crimea, and then left it, the other half never having served in the campaign at all, have been called together to adjudicate upon our interests, and to offer advice to the Minister for War whether the service of medical officers in the field should count of more worth than service at home; and they advise that it should not! Medical officers in the field, say they, have the advantage of gaining experience in surgery. For whose advantage do military surgeons acquire this experience-only for their own private advantage, or for the benefit of the State? They imply the former; and therefore the risks of the campaign are balanced by the acquisition of professional knowledge." CARLISLE CATHOLIC LIBRARY ASSOCIATION. THE first of a course of lectures, in connection with the Catholic Reading-room and Library of this city, was delivered on education by Mr. M'Carron, the lecturer of the boys' school, in the schoolroom, on Monday, the 17th ult. to a numerous audience. The Rev. Luke Curry was in the chair. Among those present were, Rev. Geo. Fleet, Messrs. Alderman M'Gibbon, Robson, Mackell, Pattinson, Dunham, &c. The chairman, in a few appropriate remarks, having introduced Mr. M'Carron to the meeting, Mr. M'Carron said-Rev. Sir, Ladies, and Gentlemen,-I can assure you I am fully sensible of the awkward position in which I have placed myself in promising to address you on the most important subject of the age; a subject which has for a long time occupied, and continues still to occupy, the attention of the most learned and thoughtful men; a subject which possesses the deepest interest for every one having his own welfare, or that of his fellow-beings, at heart; a subject on which, I am sure, there is not one here present who looks with indifference-the subject of education. Were the subject of less importance, or my abilities less inadequate to its magnitude, I might then, perhaps, crave your indulgence; but, as it is, I would gladly shrink from the performance of the promised task, did I not think that you would even prefer the alternative of listening to me to that of being disappointed a third time. I trust you will, therefore, in consideration of the very short time which I have had to prepare, accord me that kind forbearance which I so much require. Many and various are the definitions given of education. Almost all agree, however, that it consists not in the attainment of a certain degree of proficiency in reading, writing, and arithmetic, but in the formation of the character, the expansion of the mind, and the development of its faculties. Human nature has been divided into three parts, viz. the spiritual, the intellectual, and the bodily. It is not to the spiritualthe best, the holiest, the godlike part-nor the bodily-the grosser part-but to the intellectual part that I would call your attention. God is the author of the mind as well as the creator of the soul. He has endowed the mind with certain faculties and powers. It is, then, the right and duty of every one to develope these faculties, to strengthen these powers. How can this be accomplished? By means of education. Education is, therefore, absolutely necessary for all classes of the community. The human soul without education is like a dark chamber, in which everything that is rare in nature and costly in art is collected and arranged to no purpose; admit the sun's rays, and you have a picture of the soul on which the light of knowledge has been poured. Utterly unknown to the uneducated man are the pleasures derived from the possession of knowledge. Flowers, trees, streams, fields, and forests possess for him only commonplace attractions. The golden sun shines merely to give him light to perform his daily task, in the midst of which, if there should come a sudden darkness of night, he stands in awestruck astonishment, unable to divine the cause.-He is ignorant of the various labours of the moon; Why flowing tides prevail upon the main, And in what dark recess they shrink again; What shakes the solid earth, and what delays The summer nights, and shortens winter days." Walking forth, the educated man is ravished with delight at the exquisite beauties of nature, which meet him at every step. Looking upwards, he admires the wondrous mechanism of the heavens, brilliant planets and maguificent starry skies; and, filled with a sense of the power, and glory, and admiration of nature's God, bows down in lowly admiration, exclaiming with Milton, "These are thy glorious works, Parent of good; Almighty Thine this universal frame." The uneducated man knows only the place with which his earliest associations are connected, or the small spot on which his lot has been cast by the changes incidental in life; the educated man is not a native of this or that place; he is a citizen of the world. The uneducated man knows only the persons with whom he has come in contact, or heard of through the ordinary channel of conversation; the educated man is intimately acquainted with all those who are or have been distinguished by the practice of heroic virtues, or the achievement of grand exploits. He can, as it were, hold familiar converse with the learned, the illustrious, the noble, and the good of his kind in all countries, who were and are not." He can witness at pleasure the bravery of Miltiades on 'The battle-field, where Persia's victim horde First bowed beneath the brunt of Hilla's sword." the overthrow of Darius at Arbela, or the defeat of Pompey at Tharsalia by him who was himself justly slain; listen to the philosophic strains of Plato and Aristotle, or become enraptured with the impassioned oratory of Demosthenes, or walk into 66 The Forum where the immortal accents glow, And the eloquent air still breathes--burns on Cicero," and hear from the lips of that brilliant orator his glowing denunciation of the tyranny of Verres, the oppressor of Asia Minor and Pamphylia. And, again, after having seen the new star appear in the East," and wept over the sufferings of the infant Church, to crush which the murderous edicts, devised by the ingenious cruelty of every imperial monster from Nero to Diocletian, were issued in vain, after having seen the sign of the persecuted Christian's hope--the sign of contumely and contempt-emblazoned on the banner of the greatest of the Caesars, and the imperial purple covering for a time the glorious wounds of the triumphant Church; after having seen the greatest of empires die to rise no more, he may mingle in the train of the saintly Leo, as he goes forth on his mission of entreaty to the savage Hun, and see the apparently helpless pontiff, by the exercise of a new power-a power infinitely greater than physical force-stay the arm of the merciless Attila, whose track was traced in blood, and who himself barbarously boasted that grass never grew where his horse had trodden. Or, in a more chivalrous age, feeling his heart glow with a holy enthusiasm, kindled by the indignant appeal of Peter, march under the banners of the crusaders, admire the impetuous bravery of Richard, and the noble heroism of a Godfrey, in their endeavours to rescue the land which was the scene of the sufferings of the Divine Son of the Immaculate Mary, from the descendants of the imposter of Medina. And all this he may do--all this he may witness, knowing with certainty what the real actors themselves could not even have anticipated, viz. the effect upon ages far remote. Let us now look at some of the disadvantages which he suffers who is deprived of education; unceasing toil from early to late without a hope of cessation; a desire to better his condition in the social scale checked by the conscious inability to sustain it; the miserable knowledge that he must plod on in the same track day after day, without being able to smoothen a little of its roughness. Amongst the advantages arising from education, not the least is that consciousness that we can discharge, or qualify ourselves for the discharge of the duties incumbent on us in our different states. The disadvantages are many; the loss is considerable. The advantages are great; the profit is greater. If, then, from education come so much profit, so many pleasures and advantages; if the opposites of these-loss, misery, and disadvantages arise from its absence, surely it were wise to avoid the loss, to secure the gain. Surely, then, parents, there is no more inestimable boon which you could bestow on your children than a good education. Leaving even the ties of conscience and duty aside, interest should compel you to do so to the best of your ability. And even the poorer among you, I would ask, is it not worth while making some little sacrifice to fulfil so noble a duty to those so near to you as your own dear little ones? Tines there were when you would not be called on to make much sacrifice. Those were the good old times wheu peace and happiness were not alone sought for in the possession of wealth; when men spent more time in the adoration of God, and less in the worship of Mammon; when men loved not their country less because they loved their God the more; when not only the education but even the temporal support of the poor was part of the common law. It was in these times that Christ Church Hospital and many other munificently endowed institutions of the same class arose. I need not tell you how rudely they have been wrested from the hands of her to whom they owed their birth-from her who alone could have preserved the our vitality of her offspring, because she alone understood the creations of her own holy genius-from our holy Church. Those good, holy, faith-loving times have passed away, and until their return you must bear the burden cast upon youa sweet and precious one after all. will say But you own education has been neglected, and if we try to secure for them the advantages of which we ourselves have been deprived, they will lose their respect for us-they will cease to love usaud, it may be, despise and contemn us." Believe me, your fears are groundless; they will love you more and more; they will think of the sacrifices you have made on their account; aud it may be, that in after years, when they find themselves occupying a position to which they could not have otherwise looked forward, they will say "We are indebted under God to our good parents for the places we at present fill." And if you are then removed from this scene of toils and struggles, the prayer which we, as Catholic children, have heard from the lips of our own parents, the beautiful requiescant in pace, will be fervently offered up for you, and the tears of gratitude will mingle with those of sorrow. I shall now, with your permission, address a few words to the younger portion of my audience. If, as I have been endeavouring to show, education is absolutely necessary for all; if youth is the season for acquiring knowledge; if your parents, fully alive to their own interests and duties, are most anxious to place within your reach the means of education; if they willingly consent to deprive themselves of the few luxuries they might command in order to accomplish this end, surely it will require few words from me to convince you that it is your interest and your duty to correspond willingly and cheerfully to their wishes. There are many material helps brought to bear upon education within the last few years, but they are merely helps. The teacher may do a little, your parents may do much more, but most of all depends upon your own diligence and application. There are electric, submarine, and magnetic telegraph lines, railway and atmospheric lines of communication to and from all parts of the world; but there is neither a telegraph nor a railway from ignorance to knowledge. No way but the same old road, a little academized to be sure, which must be gone over step by step--a road on which you must not lag behind, but keep going steadily forward. It will not do to walk briskly to-day, and rest for four or five days to come-to study with intensity to-day, and play to-morrow. Are we to be deprived of all amusement, of all recreation? you will ask. No; the bow must be unstrung to retain its elasticity, the scythe must be sometimes whetted to preserve the keenness of its edge. Incessant study would be dangerous; perpetual amusement criminal. But in the pursuit of knowledge do not seek to acquire it, merely because it will enable you to fill this or that situation with credit, or to elicit applause from those around you by its display. That would be an unworthy motive; this a petty ostentation. Seek to acquire it for its own sake, for the improvement it will make in your character. But there are those who will say my discourse will have a pernicious tendency, in so far as it will make those to whom it is addressed vain, conceited, proud, shallow, superficial, dissatisfied, &c.-in fact, that I wish to educate them above their position. Of what importance is it, say they, to the servant girl who requires to boil an egg for breakfast, to know that water boils at 212 deg. Fahrenheit, or that the piece of coal which she puts on the fire belongs to the animal, vegetable, or mineral kingdom, or to any of them? Of what use would the knowledge be to the little boy, who trudges with his donkey from Wheelbarrow Hall into town on a frosty morning, that the milk which his donkey carries is a compound body, or rather a double compound-the milk being a compound body before the water was put in, and the water which was put into the milk also a compound? Is it necessary that the lad who works in the factory at Headsnook should under stand that if the water of the cairn which supplied the motive power of the establishment fall upon the wheel, the quantity of work done, abating friction, is equal to the product of the weight of the water and the height through which it descends? In fine, would you make every boy a Newton, every girl a Madame de Staël? These and a host of other objections are brought by persons opposed to the extension of education among the poorer classes, and did they always proceed from persons of illiberal, narrow, and contracted minds, they night be treated with the consideration they deserve; but as they often proceed from persons otherwise remarkable for intelligence and benevolence, they cannot be left unnoticed. I shall not, however, attempt to answer the objections myself, but beg your undivided attention whilst I read for you an extract from a pastoral issued in 1849 by the learned Bishop, now the eminent Cardinal Wiseman, whom God preserve "We live no longer," says the illustrious Cardinal Archbishop, "in days when whatever was ignorant and corrupt fell, like dregs, to the bottom of society, and there stagnated, unseen, unheeded, and unfelt. The restless-the troubled spirit of our age will not allow this. There are many minds at work, active and reckless, in stirring up the waters and keeping every order of society in unceasing motion and agitation. It is not as the descent of the angel into the pool of Bethesda, which communicated to it power of healing. If that portion of society, which is no less necessary for its welfare than the wealthier and more refined, be allowed to remain as heretofore, thus degraded and untutored to good, its powerful action on the whole body, strong systematic agitation and spontaneous fermentation, will make itself felt here inevitably as it has done elsewhere, and lead to either that slow undermining and sapping the foundations of order, or that upheaving outbreak of revolution, which have prepared and effected the overthrow of so many states. When uo alternative is left us, our line of duty is clear. When there is a precipice on either side of us, our path cannot be mistaken. And such is our position in regard to the education of the poor. If we could leave them in what one may call honest ignorance,' some might think it well. If they could go on, as their fathers did of old, furnished and content, with a knowledge of religious truth and the practice of their duties-simple in their habits, satisfied with their state-this might to many appear enough. But this may no longer be. The poor must fall on one side or the other if you keep them not on the right way. The ignorance of the poorest masses of this metropolis, in particular, is the debasing, brutalising ignorance of vice and of depravity. Woe to the child that falls into this abyss, on one side, and woe to the society that allows it on the other. And if a better instructive feeling prevail, or the allurements of proffered education succeed, there yawns on the other side the pitfall of a false, a proud and conceiting, and a destructive science. In the one he is armed with the weapons of rude force, without principles to check their use; in the other he is furnished with the keeuer and more effectual arms of misdirected knowledge, with false principles to guide him to their abuse. Of both, the blows are directed against social order and public morality. You can by only one course save your poor from one of these evils. Keep them on that good old path which goes between the two ruinous extremes,-on that path from which Heaven is seen at every step-where the eye looks straight forward towards the end and object of its journey, that place of rest where poverty shall be enriched, and honest virtue practised in rags, crowned with light immortal. Give them in their hands that staff of religions principle, which will support them on their perilous path--will keep them in steady balance between the precipices on either side, and in the hour of severe trial will fix them firmly to the Rock of their salvation. Without further figure, educate your poor children in good, sound, religious knowledge; bring them up good Christians--and you will have contribated your share, at least, towards preserving the prosperity of your country, and bringing on it the blessing, which we now have to prize, of public order and tranquillity." These words, coming as they do from the highest ecclesiastical authority in England, ought, at least with you, to be conclusive on the subject. A few words now to the young men present, and I have done. It has been customary for many able and noble lecturers, when they have had occasion to speak of self-educated or self-made men, to hold up, for the imitation of their audiences, such examples as Wall, Brindley, Fulton, and Chantrey. These are extraordinary instances, and not applicable, I think, to ordinary cases. I shall merely ask you to look around you, and you will find many Wallaces and Dargans. But, to come nearer home, I am sure there are, in the very city in which you reside, many examples, with which you must be familiar, well worthy of imitation. Cultivate, then, young men, those habits of energy, industry, and perseverance, which are necessary to all who would succeed in their undertakings,-to the victor of the Malakhoff and the common soldier in the trenches-to the merchant and the humble shop-boy. In conclusion, I beg to say that I look upon myself in the light of one of those old clumsilyfashioned rough-keeled canal boats, which, in the days before railways were projected, were sent out in winter to break the ice in order to open a passage for boats carrying a valuable cargo. The ice is merely broken; the boats conveying the rich merchandize have yet to come. Mr. Alexander M'Gibbon, in a neat speech, proposed a vote of thanks to Mr. M'Carron, for coming forward at a notice so unusually short, to deliver the able lecture to which they had just listened.--Northern Times. A "SCOTCH MIST" is proverbially disagreeable to an Irishman; but when it brings down the black smoke of mills, factories, foundries, and some thousand chimnies of private houses, as in the large manufacturing town of it is worse to him than even the November fog that suggests a rope to the Londoner. So thought I, when compelled to resign book and fire, and prospect of dinner, to wade through filthy lanes in search of one who bore only the above uncertain or rather questionable name. Wet, weary, and halfsuffocated with chagrin at the laughter and sneers my inquiries had excited, as much as with the thick rank atmosphere of smoke and rain in which I was enveloped, I was left long rapping at the dark door of a dismal-looking house. What's your weell?" was at last demanded from the half-opened door, by a coarse rough voice from a grey-haired, red-faced, blear-eyed old woman,--such, at least, she appeared to me under the circumstances. "It is here, I am informed, a sick person lives they call Bessy of the Wynd?" 66 And wha may ye be that speers "I am a clergyinau for whom she has sent. Please open the door." $6 Bide a wee, elargy," she chuckled, as she proceeded coolly to close the door in my face: when a person, whom I had not hitherto observed, rushed past me, and, pressing against the door, angrily demanded: "Is it keeping the priest in the rain you'd be after, you ould sinner?" I had scarce time to recognise my old friend, “Jack the Cobbler," when his hat fell back, his hair was seized, the door flew open, and I saw him on the flat of his back, and a formidable old woman fastened on his chest. Before I had time to interfere, a side-door was opened—a tall, active young woman sprang out, turned one arm silently round the old one's waist, seized her hands in the other, "Wyud" is the Scotch for laue. |