gust, 1860, and again the Prelates
spoke words of instruction, of which recent sad events in France have
furnished a new and most melancholy confirmation.

"As rulers of the Church of Christ, chief pastors of His flock,
religiously responsible to the Prince of Pastors for every soul
committed to our charge, it forms, as is obvious, our first and
paramount duty to attend to the pastures in which they feed--the
doctrines with which they are nourished. And surely if ever there was a
period which called for the unsleeping vigilance, the prudent foresight,
the intrepid and self-sacrificing zeal of our august ministry--that
period is the present. The alarming spectacle which the Christian world
exhibits at the present day, the novel but formidable forms in which
error presents itself, and the manifold evils and perils by which the
Church is encompassed, must be evident to the most superficial observer.
It is no longer a single heresy or an eccentric fanaticism, the denial
of some revealed truth, or the excesses of some extravagant error, but a
comprehensive, all-pervading, well-digested system of unbelief, suited
to every capacity and reaching every intellect, that corrupts and
desolates the moral world. Is not such the calamitous spectacle which
the continent of Europe offers to us at this moment? Education, the
source of all intellectual life, by which the mind of man is nurtured
and disciplined, his principles determined, his feelings regulated, his
judgments fixed, his character formed, has been forcibly dissevered from
every connection with religion, and made the vehicle of that cold
scepticism and heartless indifferentism which have seduced and corrupted
youth, and by a necessary consequence shaken to its centre the whole
fabric of social life. Separated from her heavenly monitor, learning is
no longer the organ of that wisdom which cometh from above, which,
according to St. James, is 'chaste, peaceable, modest, easy to be
persuaded, consenting to the good, full of mercy and good fruits,
without judging, without dissimulation,' but rather of that wisdom which
he describes as 'earthly, sensual, and devilish.'--(James iii. 15-17.)

"It is, we feel assured, unnecessary to observe to you, that of all
modes of propagating error, education is the most subtle and dangerous,
furnishing, as it does, the aliment by which the social body is
sustained, which circulates through every vein, and reaches every
member; and that if this