acts of lawless violence were not uncommon on this side of the Channel, and Richardson's Clarissa was read with a credulity which showed that abduction could be committed without being followed by punishment.

In parts of Ireland it was not an infrequent offence, and Froude collected some abominable cases, which he described in his picturesque way.* As examples of disregard for humanity, and contempt for law, he was fully justified in citing them.

But he endeavoured to throw responsibility for these outrages on the Roman Catholic Church.

"Young gentlemen," he says, "of the Catholic persuasion were in the habit of recovering equivalents for the lands of which they considered themselves to have been robbed, and of recovering souls at the same time by carrying off young Protestant girls of fortune to the mountains, ravishing them with the most exquisite brutality, and then compelling them to go through a form of marriage, which a priest was always in attendance ready to celebrate."+ This is a very serious charge, perhaps as serious a charge as could well be made against a religious communion.

It was an accusation improbable on the face of it; for while the Church of Rome in the course of her strange, eventful history has tampered with the sixth commandment, as Protestants call it, she has never underrated the virtue of chastity, and has always proclaimed a high standard of sexual morals.