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 insert their explanations. Once or twice, however, notices of meetings have crept in at which the opinion has been maintained by priests that the Church is really losing, instead of making that miraculous progress which the average layman believes. Great numbers of Catholics imagine that as soon as the Church of England is disestablished and thus thrown directly upon the support of the people it will vanish almost immediately. I once heard Bishop Paterson explaining that it was undesirable to work for disestablishment just yet, because we Catholics really had not nearly sufficient accommodation for the vast flood of converts that would ensue; we should be quite disorganised.

In point of fact there should be now about a quarter of a million of Catholics in London. Throughout England the ratio of the Catholic population is about 1 in 20, but it is much higher in Lancashire, much lower in London and other places. In Cardinal Manning’s time the figures were vague and disputable. When Cardinal Vaughan came down in a hurricane of zeal a census was made of the archdiocese; but the exact figures only established the truth of the pessimistic theory. It was thought that Catholicism did not really know its strength, and that it would be well to proclaim its formidable statistics