We are no great admirers of the Jesuit Order or
of their system, educational or ecclesiastical, but we are delighted to see that Father Vaughan was successful in his libel action against the Rock newspaper, tried on Monday and Tuesday before Mr. Justice Wills, and obtained £300 damages. The notion of de- priving Jesuits of the protection of the law because of an obsolete statute of banishment is monstrous, and we are glad the Court made such short work of it. And now that Father Vaughan and his Order have had so excellent an example of English toleration, may we venture to remind them, in Cromwell's words, that liberty of conscience is a natural right, that he who claims it should yield it, and that, therefore, he and his Order should do their best to induce the Romani Church to be more tolerant of other communions? He may remember how the venerable head of his Church lately gave as an example of the oppression from which he imagines he suffers in being deprived of the temporal power the fact that Protes- tants were allowed " under our eyes, and in this holy city, which should be the inviolate centre of Catholicism," to take advantage " of the sad economic conditions of the country to corrupt the faith of our children in the name of the specious doctrine of judgment which pretends to leave each the right of interpreting in his own fashion the doctrine of Christ." There was far too much of the spirit of the Rock visible in that pronouncement, and we are glad to think that a Middle- sex jury has given the Pope so excellent a lesson in the virtue of toleration. It is so easy to fall into his error in regard to the duty of tolerance, and to talk about Roman Catholics having no right to exist or to carry on their propaganda in the central citadel of English Protestantism, or to take advan- tage of the "sad economic conditions" of, say, our slums to " corrupt" our children. That is the favourite convention of intolerance all the world over.
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