obtained a bill of divorce, she well knew that the marriage bond could never be broken: and she suffered from the cruelty of the baron, who heaped indignities upon her whenever an opportunity offered; her only consolation was in the comforts of religion and in a correspondence which she now carried on with her son, who strongly pressed her to leave her native land, and to seek an asylum in that country where he was serving God in spirit and in truth. The proposal was pleasing to the baroness, but great difficulties stood in the way of its accomplishment; for were it to reach the ears of her husband, he would infallibly prevent her departure; and her own relations, she was well aware, would equally thwart her views in this regard. An opportunity, however, having offered, she stole away, accompanied by a single female servant, with very little money, and with nothing more than a few jewels and precious stones in her pocket. Her son was at that time in a convent at Lisle, whither she happily arrived: their first meeting, it may readily be conceived, was affecting in the extreme, and their feelings on this happy occasion may, perhaps, be conceived, but they cannot be described.

The decline of life of this virtuous character was as serene and placid as the morn and meridian of her days had been boisterous and rude. When she first arrived upon the continent, she was without resources, and was content even to receive alms from the charitable and compassionate; but a yearly pension from the king of Spain was soon granted to her, and she spent her last years in ease and in the enjoyment of the comforts of religion, and in following her sou to the different towns to which his superiors thought fit to send him.

When her strength decreased, and her health began visibly to decline, she was prevailed upon to fix her residence at Antwerp; at which town she at length sweetly slept in the Lord after she had received all the rites of the Church, at a good old age, in the year 1606. And it deserves to be noticed, that although her husband had treated her so outrageously while living, still he could not repress his feelings when he was informed of her death, but exclaimed: “O faithful and thrice faithful wife! O, my dear Margaret! art thou departed this

life after so many distresses and travels?" He himself paid the debt of nature in the course of the same year; but how prepared we have no right to judge, although our author says, he died as he had lived.

Second Letter to the Author of a Book called

"A COMPLETE EXPOSURE OF THE LATE IRISH MIRACLES." It might seem, Sir, from the hesitating manner in which you dissent from Hume's system of miracles, from your admission of his definition of them, and from your adopting his leading argument against them, that your belief on this subject is not far removed from that of the above-mentioned infidel, who absolutely denied the possibility of miracles; and of another infidel, Jean Jacques Rousseau, who declared that, if he saw a man raised from the dead, he would not believe his eye-sight; for says he, my senses may deceive me, but my reason never can. Certain it is that your declamations on the inviolability of the laws of nature, and the criteria you lay down for pronouncing on the reality of a miracle would be as conclusive in the mouth of Hume or Rousseau, against christianity at large, as they are in yours against the supernatural events we are speaking of. To prove this I will again quote some parts of your above-mentioned amplified period of two whole pages length, and will suppose that a Hume or a Carlisle were to declaim against the miracles of Christ nearly in your words as applied to the late prodigies: how I ask, could you answer him: "Can christian teachers, " and even, Mr. Exposer, have felt no shame, and unconscious "of any burning blush on their cheek, when they step for"ward, amidst the blaze of philosophical and religious light, "which now illuminates so great a portion of civilized Europe, to "teach their miserable and credulous flock, that the Almighty "superseding the laws of the moral and material world, those "laws by which he has not only chosen to govern the heavens "and the earth, but also to rule and turn the hearts of men, "has substituted the vicarious words of a Gallilean (our Sa"viour Christ,) at whose capricious order, without reference

"to the chain of things, or the order of Providence, disease is "to abandon its victims, and health assume its place; and all "this to prove to mankind, at the end of 4000 years (from the creation) that christianity is the exclusive religion of the God "of nature, by curing a fisherman's mother-in-law of a fever at 'Capernaum, and enabling a blind beggar at Jericho to see the "light!" It is difficult, Sir, to say, whether there is more impiety or absurdity in this declamation; still it is your chief argument against the late prodigies. It is plain, Sir, you have yet to learn that nature is an ideal being, believed by none to be real, except the French Jacobins, who personified it in a naked prostitute; and of course, that there are no laws of nature strictly so called, but only the laws of God, who generally, indeed, rules the world in an uniform manner, but who is at all times free to deviate from that course as he sees best, and who in fact, has at all times, on particular occasions, deviated from it since first he created the Universe.

I have already reminded you Sir, that the divinely-inspired history of the Almighty's dealing with mankind from Adam to our Saviour Christ, consists of one tissue of what Hume and yourself call violations of the laws of nature, but what well-instructed christians call special interventions of the Supreme Ruler. When he himself deigned to appear in a human form, eighteen centuries ago, he wrought so many and such various miracles, that a Hume might say, there were no laws of nature whatsoever, in the land of Judea, during his public life, admiting the truth of the gospel. So far from restraining these supernatural works to his own person and time, he generally promised as follows: Verily, verily, I say unto you, he that believeth in me, the works that I do he shall do also, and greater than these shall he do. John xiv. 12. Accordingly, we learn from sacred writ, that, not only the Apostles themselves, but also their converts, were enabled to work miracles of various kinds, among which that of curing diseases is specially mentioned. 1 Cor. xii. 9. Gal. iii. 5. Descending down the stream of the Holy Fathers, Doctors, and authentic historians, we trace with all the evidence that man's testimony can afford, an uninterrupted series of miracles in the Catholic communion, to the

formal exclusion of all others, from the Apostles down to the unhappy authors of the diversified changes in religion, improperly called The Reformation. At that period Luther himself bears testimony to the continuance of miracles in the Church, where he indignantly cries out, " Who denies that miracles are performed at the tombs of the saints?" In purg. quorumdam Artic. at the same time that as Erasmus reproached the reformers they could not so much as cure a lame horse.

Luther's contemporary, St. Xaverus, the apostle of the eastern world, performed so many and such splendid miracles, that as a competent witness writes, they might almost be compared with those of the apostles themselves.* The attested miracles, wrought through the intercession of a St. Francis of Sales, a St. Francis Regis, the blessed Liguorio, and hundreds of other eminent servants of God, and those demonstratively proved to have taken place, even in this country, in the persons of Winefrid White, Mary Wood, Joseph Lamb, &c. bring the chain of these events down to the supernatural cure of the Princess of Swartzenburg, daughter of the Generalissimo of the Austrian army in the late war, obtained by the prayers of Prince Hohenlohe and Michael Martin, a pious agriculturist. Since this event, Germany, France, Flanders, England, and Ireland have witnessed other miracles, equally signal and incontestible. You mention the cures of Mrs. Stuart and Mary Lalor, to malign them, but you do not even notice those of Miss Dowel, of Merrion-square, Miss Rork, &c. in Ireland, nor those of Miss O'Connor, Grace Shiel, &c. in England. To be brief, Sir, as it is not in the power of the Catholic Clergy, or Prince Hohenlohe, to command a miracle, so it is not in your power, nor in theirs to prevent such events when God, for his own wise purposes is pleased to grant them.

Your criteria of miracles, as might be expected, are calculated to support your system of unbelief, and to undermine those wrought by Jesus Christ in proof of his divine mission.

* Joseph Acosta, who nevertheless is brought in by Bishop Douglas in the Criterion, as denying this saints miracles! See an account of this falsification, and likewise a brief series of authentic miracles in the Catholic Church, in The End of Religious Controversy. Let. xxiv.

When the Baptist sent his disciples to ask Christ: Art thou he that should come, or do we look for another? Jesus answered and said to them: Go and shew John those things which you hear and see. The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised up. Mat. xi. 5. Now all the diseases here alluded to, are, absolutely speaking, curable by natural means; and even suspended amimation in the drowned and strangled is restored by medical art. Nay, bodies that have been consigned to the sepulchre have been taken from it alive. Whereas you, Sir, pronounce that," there can be no miracle in "the cure of Mrs. Stuart and Mary Lalor unless it can be "shewn, to the satisfaction of all who have seen, read, or heard

of them, that the disorders under which they laboured, were "such that the cure of them must have been beyond and above "the skill of medicine, and the power of nature." p. 18. You had just before laboured to prove through whole pages of your pamphlet, that the coincidence of the cure with the prayers offered up to obtain it, signifies nothing. Tell us then, I pray you, Mr. Exposer, how you will answer Carlisle, or any other deist, who should thus argue with you: admitting that Christ cured the blind, the deaf, and the lame: yet so do the doctors, and so nature sometimes does, without any doctor at all. Unless, therefore, you prove to my satisfaction, and that of all readers or hearers of the gospel, that blindness, deafness, and leprosy are disorders above and beyond the skill of medicine, and the power of nature, THERE CAN BE NO MIRACLES IN THESE CASES. What though Christ said to one of his lepers: I will, be thou made clean, and his leprosy departed from him. Mark i. 41. and though he cried to Lazarus in the monument: come forth and he came forth. John xi. 43. the coincidence of the words with the event signifies nothing: it so happened that the vis naturæ was to throw off the leprosy in one case, and to restore suspended animation in the other, without any miracle at all! Believe me, Sir, such EXPOSURES will blind none but Pharisees and infidels. All sensible and well disposed persons will continue to say on such occasions: He hath done all things well; he hath made the deaf to hear, and the dumb to speak. Mark vii. 37.

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