into intricate languages, with which they, after all, can possess only an imperfect acquaintance.*"

"It is on all hands admitted, that before a translation from one language into another be undertaken, it is absolutely necessary to possess an entire and thorough grammatical acquaintance with both. Now, where are the Europeans who possess so perfect a knowledge of the idioms of India? And again, where are the natives who possess the same advantage with respect to the European dialects? If persons of this description are to be found any where in this country, they are in very small numbers indeed. Some partial translations of the Scriptures are, it is true, to be found in the country; but in my humble opinion they have entirely missed their object. I have by me a copy of the New Testament, translated into Tamul, executed by the Lutheran missionaries; but the translators, by endeavouring to make it literal, have generally used such low, trivial, and, in many instances, ludicrous expressions, and the style is, besides, so different from that of the Hindoos, that persons unaccustomed to it, cannot (as I have witnessed in repeated instances) read over four verses without laughing at the manner in which the work is executed."

* Since writing these pages, I have learned with some surprise, that the missionaries at Serampore have surpassed the most sanguine expectations of the public, by translating the Scriptures, within the short period of nine or ten years, into no less than twenty-four Asiatic languages. This brilliant success has not in the least dazzled me, nor altered my opinions, or diminished my scepticism, on the entire inadequacy of such means to enlighten the pagans, and gain them over to Christianity, and I would not certainly dare to warrant that these twenty spurious versions, with some of which I am acquainted, will, after the lapse of the same number of years, have operated the conversion of twenty-four pagans. I have, on the contrary, every reason for apprehending that these low translations, if the natives could be prevailed upon to peruse them, (which in my opinion, will never be the case) will, by exposing the christian religion and its followlowers to the ridicule of the public, soon stagger the wavering faith of many hundreds of those now professing christianity, hasten the epoch of their apostacy, and accelerate the downfall of the tottering edifice of christianity in India." (To be continued in our nezt.)

PRINCE HOHENLOHE AND CATHOLIC MIRACLES.

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To the Editor of the Catholic Miscellany.

SIR,-The excessive soreness and irritability of our protesting and dissenting brethren at the bare mention of occuring miracles in these our days among catholics, cannot be accounted for except by their conviction, that, if the Almighty does distinguish any particular communion of christians by working his prodigies among them, he thereby testifies it to be his true Church. Every one who has read the gospels

knows that Jesus Christ constantly refers to his miracles in proof of his divine mission, nor can he be ignorant of the perverse nature of the Scribes and Pharisees, in sometimes, denying the most incontestible miracles; at other times in their ascribing these miracles to the agency of the devil; and lastly, in their madly contending with the acknowledged interposition of the Almighty, as when they sought to kill Lazarus, because Jesus had raised him from the grave. John xii. 10. In like manner, those persons who are versed in the writings of the holy fathers, doctors, and ecclesiastical historians, know that they, one and all, from St. Ignatius, the disciple of the apostles, down to Venerable Bede, and from Bede down to modern times, bear testimony to a succession of miracles, very frequently, and always exclusively occurring in the Catholic Church. The fact is expressly acknowledged by the celebrated Dr. Conyers Middleton, in his Free Inquiry into the Miraculous Powers, as well as the inference to be drawn from it in our favour; nor has he any other way of parrying off that inference except by charging all these fathers, doctors, and historians, with an uninterrupted system of imposition and lies, which charge goes to invalidate all human testimony, and Christianity itself. In vain did several learned writers of the last century attempt to set up a distinction between the miracles attested by the fathers of the three first ages, or of the four first or the five first ages, as they differently contended, and those of the subsequent ages for Middleton turned upon them all, and unanswerably proved, that if a single miracle be admitted to have taken place in the church since the time of the apostles, it is all over with the protestant cause, and the dreaded monster of popery, as he represented it, with all its doctrines and practices must be worshipped.

The writers of our time, and by names, the historian Gibbon, Dr. Paley, Dr. Cambel, Hugh Farmer, Le Messurier, and Bishop Douglas of Sarum, no less than Middleton, in their eager zeal to discredit catholic miracles, have fallen into numerous and palpable falsehoods, and the Bishop in particular has falsified the author he has quoted, Joseph Acosta respecting the miracles of St. Xaverus, which falsification has been adopted by almost all succeeding protestant writers, who have treated the same subject. This has been demonstrated,

beyond denial, in a late work, entitled, The End of Religious Controversy.*

The periodical writers of the present day, who are equally hostile to the continuation of miracles, with the theologians of the eighteenth century, but who are ignorant of the processes that are constantly carrying on in the Congregation of Rites, and this with a strictness still more severe than the discussion of evidence in our criminal courts, and even of the miracles which are proved to have taken place in our own country of late years,† direct all the shafts of their censure and ridicule at the supernatural cures, attributed to the prayers of Alexander Prince Hohenlohe. Among these writers, the most conspicuous and able is the one who drew up Article III. in the last Edinburgh Review. This writer, forgetful of the general candour and decorum of the work, as well as of its equity to Catholics, applies the most opprobrious terms and odious charges to one of the most illustrious names, and most benevolent as well as spotless characters in Christendom; merely because Prince Hohenlohe has prayed, and exhorted others to pray, for the relief of his afflicted fellow creatures. The Reviewer charges the Prince with being at once an Enthusiast and a Hypocrite. He roundly calls him an Impostor and a Chief Conjuror, who performs incantations at Bamberg, and appoints a day for curing all the diseased in Ireland. He even describes His High Reverence, or Right Rev. Highness, as he insultingly terms this humble Canon, as a Prince or a Priest who cozens people of their rights and possessions! Is his promise then to pray for those in Ireland, who have begged his prayers on a certain day, an appointment to cure all the diseased in that Island? And is his being satisfied with a poor canonicate, when he might pretend to the highest and richest benefices in the gift of his friend the

* It is now in its third edition, and has been translated into French and Italian. + Such as the instantaneous and permanent cure of Winefrid White, a resident of Wolverhampton, at Holywell in 1805, by the devotions she performed. Her disorder was a curvated spine and hemiplagia of several years standing. Such was the sudden and complete restoration of use to the hand of Mary Woods of Taunton, the muscles and nerves of which had been cut through by broken glass. Such also was the cure of Joseph Lamb's back, at Garswood, which had been broken by a fall from a hay-stack.

Emperor, and his spending the income of that canonicate among the poor, a cozening of people out of their rights and possessions?

The two most signal cures in Ireland, attributed through the bounty of God to the joint prayers of the Prince and the pa tients, have been successfully vindicated by the Right Rev. Doctors Murray and Doyle. That which made so great a noise throughout Europe, namely, that of the Princess of Schwartzenberg, followed by many others throughout Germany and France equally surprising and equally incontestible, has been published by the humble Prince himself, in his Letter to Pope Pius VII. dated Brucknau, July 16, 1820, and in his subsequent Declaration, which appeared a few days afterwards. These pieces, though published in England, as well as on the continent, must have escaped the notice of the Reviewer, or he would never have brought forward the greater part of his charges. He would have seen in particular, that the principal cures in question took place, not in convent-parlours, but in frequented palaces and crowded streets; that so far from dreading inquiry, and the examination of competent judges, he invited the local authorities to appoint proper persons for this purpose; that he practiced no incantation, or other art, in favour of the sick, but barely prayed for them, invoking the saving name of Jesus upon them, as the Apostles were accustomed to do on similar occasions; that in exhorting his patients to hope for acure, he never gave them an assurance of obtaining it, or any other relief, except as far as God should see it to be conducive to his divine glory and to their real benefit; finally, that so far from being elated with the favours of heaven, or the praises of men, he ascribed nothing to himself but his sins, and proved himself ready to prevent any assemblages of the people at the least intimation of this nature from the authorities in church or state, and even to withdraw himself totally from society should this be judged expedient.

Not being able to procure a sight of Dr. Badeley's work on the cure of Miss O'Connor, at the present time, I shall say no more of it or of its respectable author, than that the latter, to my knowledge, is at the head of his profession in the Eastern

Counties, that he is a most honourable gentleman and a most amiable member of society; but having the happiness to know and to correspond with the lady just named, I will here state the particulars of her disorder and its cure, as a corrective of the Reviewer's misrepresentations of them, accordingly as I have ascertained them to have taken place. On the last day of November, or the first of December, in the year 1820, the young lady in question felt a hard substance, accompanied with great pain in the palm of her right hand. These rapidly

encreased till the whole hand and arm became swollen to near three times their natural dimensions, the girth of her wrist when in health measuring six inches, and when diseased, sixteen inches. In short, the whole limb lost its shape and its colour as human flesh, emitting a fetid odour, and hanging like a huge lump of yellow tallow by the side of the patient. It was quite destitute of motion of every kind, and yet was excruciated with continual and severe pain. In this state she was regularly visited and treated by Dr. Badeley, the Physician of the house where she lives, and by Mr. Barlow, its surgeon. She was likewise visited by the celebrated anatomist, Mr. Carpue, who came to her from London at different times, to afford his advice, and by Dr. Blount, a physician of Hereford, who had a daughter in the house. Emolients and astringents of different kinds, the hot bath, the vapour bath, the cold bath, and the knife, were successively employed; the limb was pierced and gashed, sometimes to the depth of an inch, on different occasions, and at last that powerful searcher of the bodily system, mercury, was resorted to, which produced a copious salivation. But all this was to no purpose; the patient's limb became worse and worse, till the weight and pain of it became almost insupportable, and the medical men agreed that amputation, (the amputation of a right arm) was necessary, because, as the chief of them urged, however painful the operation was of cutting off a limb, it was transient, whereas the torture of the limb was continual and hopeless. In this opinion the surgeon joined, when they both visited her on the day before her cure, which was a year and half from the commencement of her disease. The ensuing day, however, May 3, 1822, was that on which the pious and