And his one dream was of that land unknown;
His waking thought was of it still;
He yearned to see the Gospel seed there sown,
E'en though his lifeblood he did spill.

And oft he prayed that God might intervene,
Nor leave his work rest thus undone;
But might send him to make dry wood the green,
And gather it in with his own.

Death came, and still his prayer was unfulfilled,
And much he grieved to find it so;
When God, to show him his designs, now willed
That his co-laborers might know.

And as they prayed with fervor round his bed, His eyes in ecstasy did look:

His features brighter grew; he raised his head, And spake as though he read in book:

God speed thee, bark!

In angels watchful keeping,

May' st sail through wave-crests leaping, While whirlwinds harmless sleeping, Unheed thee, bark!

Be with her now!

Jesu, Maria, guiding:

She bears hearts strong, confiding, Your every beck abiding;

O lead her prow!

Save them, O save!

The tempest-ridden ocean

Its stormy dread commotion-
For your sweet names' promotion,
They boldly brave.

"Now, Fray Geronimo, what seest thou?” "O brother, I see glorious views;

A mission-bearing bark hath turned her prow, To bring the Red Man Gospel news.

"The harbor's found; the bark safe anchored rides ;
By Christian feet the sands are trod;
While up the vale another band now glides,
To conquer precious souls to God.

"Assisi's sons now plant the Holy Cross,
Upon that land I yearned t'explore,
And they reap souls a thousandfold our loss
Upon its western golden shore.

"O God! times are thine own; all I behold
Is more than mortal ever dreams;
The dust these good men tread is turned to gold,
And glory o'er the country gleams.

"Another mighty people still I see;
Around the Holy Cross they stand;
Not red men those; but white, like you or me,
With generous heart and open hand.

"Rejoice, O brothers! for a harvest ripe
And rich God gathers to himself,

And golden peace I see, where now is strife
Of wicked men for power and pelf."

Exhausted on his pillow now reclines
Geron'mo with hard-heaving breath;

A peaceful smile upon his countenance shines,
As he lies still in the arms of death.

L'ENVOI.

O San Franciscans! be your hearts thrilled
With joy that the vision is fulfilled.
Remember, Assisi's name you bear;
Remember, that name is your welfare;
And that from his home beyond the sky,
He looks on you with a patron's eye.
Remember, that on your fertile soil
Did Juniper Serra fervent toil;
Bethink ye that just one hundred years
Have rolled around since with joyful tears
First he, with his zealous mission band,
In prayer knelt on your western land;
And from that day, the blessings of God
Bedew each spot of ground that they trod.

It needs no very acute observation to recognize the fact, that Freemasonry is struggling with a fiercer and a more determined energy than ever against the liberty, nay, against the very existence, of the Catholic Church. The old pretences with which the body sought to cheat the world as to the real purposes of the organization are being daily abandoned, and its chiefs make now but little effort to conceal what was all along felt by the Church to be a certainty, that its deadly warfare is with Catholicity-its doctrines and its morality-its spiritual head on earth-and those members of it who

practice its precepts. There was a time, and not so long ago, when there were many who looked upon Masonry as a harmless, if a somewhat bibulous and nonsensical association, in which men met together for purely social purposes, and dressed themselves, on gala nights, in triangles, and aprons, and compasses, and squares, and yards of glaring silk, and constellations of glaring decorations. It is a matter of no small moment that such vain imaginings are are fast disappearing from the minds of Catholics, and that our people have awakened to the stern, if somewhat painful, con

viction, that Freemasonry, even amongst ourselves, where it does not dare to put itself forth in all its native deformity and abominations, means nothing less than a battle against Catholicity. The doings of the fraternity in Belgium, in Germany, in Switzerland, in Italy, in Brazil, have put beyond the possibility of doubt the nature and the end of the results at which it aims, and without travelling outside boundaries with which we are all of us more familiar, we may say that there are proofs and indications nearer home of the spirit and the principles that animate the sect.

That Masonry has lost nothing of its old spirit of active propagandism, is abundantly evidenced by the zeal, the earnestness, and the perseverance with which it is being spread throughout Great Britain and on the Continent. We learn that at the close of last year there were no less than eight millions of Freemasons in the world-acting in concert, as far as concert was neededand leagued together by the fearfully blasphemous oath that enshrouds "the secret of the organization. Of course, it is not to be assumed that each one of these eight millions is equally responsible for the infamies of the fraternity in the sense that each one of them is equally well instructed in the purposes, the proceedings, and the mode of action of the sect. To a certain extent they cannot, it is true, be held irresponsible for the anti-Catholic and antiChristian excesses perpetrated in various countries by the agencies of Freemasonry. But the number of those to whom the secret, mysterious ordinances of the governing body, in movements connected with the revolutionary and infidel projects of the organization, are communicated, or whose co-operation in council or in execution is invited, is exceedingly small. In fact, one of their own recognized authorities, the Monde Maconique, of August, 1866,

tells us that the number of "active members" is little more than five hundred thousand. And even of these, not all of them are admitted to a knowledge of, or a participation in, the hidden wire-pulling which sets in motion, checks, precipitates

in fact, governs the secret policy of the party of revolution in the world. This tremendous power for evil is confined to a very few, and the profoundest caution is exercised in the selection of agents for carrying it into effect. The eight millions of ordinary initiated members know but little of the doings of the chiefs of the organization; but they furnish a wide field out of which to choose the trusty, crafty, reckless, unprincipled, impious men who are to be elevated into the companionship of the five hundred thousand, from out of which again the ablest, the most daring, the most desperate, the most abandoned, and the most defiant of God and man are to be picked for the iniquitous and ruthless execution of the imperative obligations of the sect.

It is clear from what we have said, that every individual Mason is not to be accounted a bad or an unbelieving man. There are Masons who give themselves but slight concern as to the inner workings of the craft. There are men amongst them who would not be trusted with this knowledge, and who, if they were asked to have participation in the peculiar operations of Masonry, would shrink with horror from association in a body that could contemplate such ends, and use such means for their attainment. From men such as these (and of course we are now speaking of non-Catholics, whose religious code does not forbid, much less condemn, Freemasonry) the genuine leaders of the fraternity carefully conceal their projects and their plans, and humor them with feasting and merriment, and a specious show of benevolence and mutual good fellowship. But, at the same time,

it cannot be forgotten that even these men bind themselves in this alliance by the solemn taking of a fearful oath, which pledges them, by the invocation of God's holy name, to a blind obedience to an authority of which they know nothing, and to a mysterious secret which, for aught they know, may be the very incarnation of infamy or blasphemy. On what ground can they justify such conduct? Is there a single affair of their existence about which they would act in a similar manner? If about any conceivable business or engagement of life they were asked to thus blindly bind themselves to a (to them) irresponsible authority, or to a course of conduct of which not even the faintest outline was vouchsafed to them, they would look upon the man who would ask them to do so either as an idiot, or more likely as a rogue and a scoundrel, fit for the attentions and punitive administration of the nearest policeman. Yet this is precisely to what the oath of Masonry pledges every man who takes it. For what is that oath? Here it is: "I swear, in the name of the Supreme Architect of all worlds, never to reveal the secrets, the signs, the grips, the pass-words, the doctrines, or the customs of the Freemasons; and to preserve with reference to them an eternal silence. I promise and swear to God never to betray any of them either by writing, by word, or gesture; never to cause them to be written, lithographed, or printed; never to make public any thing of that which has now been confided to me, or of that which shall be confided to me in the future. I pledge myself to this, and submit myself to the following penalties if I fail in keeping my word. They may burn my lips with a red-hot iron, they may cut off my hand, they may pluck out my tongue, they may cut my throat, they may hang up my dead body in a Lodge till the admission of a new brother, as a Scourge for my faithlessness, and as

a terrible warning to others. Then they may burn it, and cast its ashes to the winds, to the end that there may not remain a single trace of the memory of my treason. So help me God, and his holy Gospel. Amen."

Surely this is not such an oath as the heads of harmless organization ought to exact of candidates seeking for admission to it; neither is it an oath which a candidate could seriously take without feeling that it meant either a hideous and revolting blasphemy, or a screen for some unholy mystery-an impious mummery, or a solemn surrender of his free will to a despotic conspiracy. We use the word "seriously," for we assume that no educated Christian is unaware that if an oath, such as that we have quoted above, be taken otherwise than seriously, it amounts to a criminal profanity; and, therefore, if he takes it seriously, he must take it with a full and present consciousness of the act he is doing. If "the secrets" which he swears he will never divulge, be, as Masons are fond of saying they are, no "secrets" at all, why is it that the name of the great God is dragged down to be polluted by contact with profane surroundings which mean nothing? If, on the other hand, the secret be a something which means nought but good, which aims at no purpose less praiseworthy than individual benevolence and social brotherhood, why is it that the sanction of an awful oath should be considered essential in order to guard its inviolability? Why need, or why should, a man be asked to swear that he will not reveal the working principle of a system that breathes and lives only for the common weal? It looks simply a gigantic juggle— the effort to persuade the world that Masonry and its secrets are only pleasant fictions, to keep alive and intensify the curiosity of those not enrolled upon its mysterious records.

We say again, that we do not hold

every individual Mason directly conscious of, and therefore directly responsible for, the irreligious and revolutionary excesses that have stamped with execration the doings of the craft throughout Europe and in portions of the Western Continent. We wish to guard ourselves against the imputation of such an exaggeration. But we maintain that these excesses, notorious as they now are, and admitted, as they are, to be the result of Masonic agencies, ought of themselves to be a sufficient indication of the real purposes of Freemasonry, and to make it clear that, shroud them as they may, the heads of the organization have but two grand objects ever steadily before their gaze-the annihilation of Catholicity, and the overthrow of legitimate authority. How else can we explain the operations of the secret societies, avowedly all in union with Freemasonry, in France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and Brazil? It is true that a Catholic may become a Mason, and the Masons will be glad to get him; but what is the meaning of a Catholic becoming a Mason? It means that he puts his Church at defiance; that he sets at nought its sacred ordinances; that he casts away from him the priceless gifts and blessings of grace it mercifully stretches out to him; that he laughs its infallible authority to scorn, and loads his soul with the infamy of an atrocious perjury. To be sure, a Catholic may become a Mason, and Masonry will rejoice; for, if we could by possibility suppose every Catholic to be a Mason, we might not be unwarranted in believing that God had proved faithless to his Church, and that, in truth, the gates of hell had prevailed against it. And in such a (thank God!) impossible event, would there not be exceeding exultation in Masondom, and would it not feel that it had accomplished at least one portion of its supremely malicious commission!

But it is idle to speak of the pos

sibility of genuine Catholicity coexisting with Masonry, and therefore it is that Masonry, in every sphere and in every fashion that it can, places itself as a barrier to the growth and the influence of Catholicity. In fact, to all intents and purposes, directly on the Continent, directly as far as it can in these countries, but still more so indirectly by continued affiliation with the avowedly anti-Christian organizations in various parts of the eastern and western hemispheres-Freemasonry is a huge anti-Catholic association, striving for the enslavement, the degradation, and, if possible, the destruction of God's holy Church on earth.

Almost without any effort at concealment, or rather with a boastful parade of its atheism, the organs of Masonry put forth the rejection of a Divinity, such as all Christians are supposed to recognize, as almost the foundation of the Masonic Institute. It talks in an incoherent, jabbering, maundering sort of way of a "Supreme Architect," a "Jehovah," a "Great Being," and condescends, in its oaths and travesties of religion, to use the phrase "God;" but it is the "God" of the godlessness of Voltaire, of Rousseau, of Mazzini, of Strauss, and of Renan, not the God of the Christian's faith, the Christian's hope, and the Christian's love; not the God of all mercy, the beneficent and patient ruler who bears so enduringly the infamies of an infamous sect, and shortens his right arm, even though iniquity calls so loudly for its avenging stroke. Thus we find, according to the Gazette des Francs Macons of December 15th, 1866, that the German lodges agreed to the following declaration: "The Deist Freemasons are above religious divisions. Not only is it necessary to put ourselves away beyond the different religions, but even beyond belief in any God whatsoever." And the Monde Maconnique, of September,