The Mother of Jesus

From the PREFACE. The English people holds perhaps naturally the favour of Heaven. Providence rules the world, and the country is evidently destined to achieve, and has actually achieved, a great work in the order of the Providence that rules the world. What is the future in store for it? Accordingly, no doubt, as it corresponds with the designs of that Supreme Ruler. But at least in the matter of religion, the English people dares not only to expect but to claim the divine...
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From the PREFACE.
The English people holds perhaps naturally the favour of Heaven. Providence rules the world, and the country is evidently destined to achieve, and has actually achieved, a great work in the order of the Providence that rules the world. What is the future in store for it? Accordingly, no doubt, as it corresponds with the designs of that Supreme Ruler. But at least in the matter of religion, the English people dares not only to expect but to claim the divine favor.
England is in the main without religion, without knowledge of God or of Christ; it has been so any time these 350 years; in origin of the time of Shaftesbury, in the time of Queen Caroline, in our own time. But that is in small degree the fault of the English people. Heresy is the willful choice of error, and the English people are accordingly no heretics. Their religion was plundered and demolished by a banded conspiracy of Machiavels; the people did not reject, no section of them rejected, Christ or Christianity, as could unhappily not be said of other nationalities then or later; they took up arms for their religion, they were masters of the field - and they were cajoled by perjury and the last degree of human depravity. The ministrations of religion were excluded by penal laws, the penalties being hanging and quartering. The press was muzzled. Every vestige of Missal or Catechism was hunted up and destroyed ; the printing and publishing of anything Catholic involved fine and imprisonment; the Catholic faith was stamped out by severe and organized repression. After two generations the bulk of the population, the people of England, were, it is true, not Catholic, because they had never heard of any such thing, they had no opportunities of hearing. And then, after all is done, in this nineteenth or twentieth century, there are poor purblind creatures who rail against the Catholic Church on the score of obscurantism, oppression, persecution; who denounce the Catholic Church in the name of freedom of inquiry, free speech and free writing! God bless my soul! if there had been this freedom observed in the past, England would be Catholic to-day. Or at least you cannot deny it, you who dragooned her into free- thought, forsooth; into unbelief, unbelief in God and Church attendance left to hypocrites and women! 'Moi,' exclaims a French country cobbler in our day, with enthusiasm, to the English tourist, 'moi, je suis Protestant aussi; je ne crois à rien!'