Page:Tracts for the Times Vol 3.djvu/9



present Volume will be found to persevere in the change of plan adopted in the latter part of the Second, the substitution of Tracts of considerable extent of subject for the short and incomplete papers with which the publication commenced. The reason of this change is to be found in the altered circumstances under which they now make their appearance. When the series began, the prospects of Catholic Truth were especially gloomy, from the circumstance that irreligious principles and false doctrines, which had hitherto been avowed only in the closet or on paper, had just been admitted into public measures on a large scale, with the probability of that admission becoming a precedent for future. A great proportion of the Irish Sees had been suppressed by the State against the Church's wish, all parties who were concerned to resist the measure, acquiescing either in utter apathy or in despair. Scarcely a protesting voice was heard, and the attempt to remonstrate was treated on all hands with coldness and disapprobation. A sense of the dreariness of such a state of things naturally led to those anxious appeals and abrupt sketches of doc-