his subsequent attempts to re-enter his country. The judges and spectators pitied him, and said, "Poor young man! he has been in trouble from his childhood." But for all their compassion, they were not the less resolved to perform the king's command. Theirs was the choice of Pilate. Reason and pity availed nothing. Afterwards questioned concerning his doctrine, Andrew preached at length to them, when the judges replied, "Your religion is good, and so is ours.' 66 Why do you not, then, leave us to practise it in peace?" rejoined the prisoner of Jesus. They replied only by a silly laugh, to give him to understand that men in power were not required to give good reasons for their actions.

On the 16th of September, 1846, in the twenty-sixth year of his age, Andrew was led forth to die, condemned, like our martyred priests in England, as an enemy of the state. A file of soldiers, armed with muskets, marched to the place of execution, a league without the city. Immediately a discharge of musketry and the sound of the trumpet announced the arrival of a great military mandarin. Andrew was now brought out from prison, and borne to the place of his martyrdom in a straw chair, his hands pinioned behind him. A stake had been fastened in the ground, from the summit of which a banner waved. The soldiers formed a circle round it. Within this circle the prisoner was received, when the mandarin read to him his sentence to this effect that he was condemned to death for having communicated with strangers. When Andrew heard these words, he cried out with a loud voice, "If I have communicated with strangers, it is for my religion; it is for God; it is for Him I die. I am about to enter on an immortal life. Become Christians, if you wish to be happy after death; for God reserves eternal punishment for such as disown Him." Thus with his last breath did the gene-rous martyr endeavour to win souls to God.

They now stripped off part of his clothing, and pierced both his ears with an arrow, which they left suspended in them. They then threw water over him and a handful of lime; and two men, passing a stick under his arms, took him on their shoulders, and bore him quickly three times

round the circle. Then making him kneel down, they tied a rope to his hair, passing it through a hole bored in the stake. Meanwhile the martyr lost nothing of his heavenly calm. "Am I placed properly?" he said to the executioners; can you strike at your ease?" No; turn that way. Now that's right." "Strike, I am ready." O blessed. martyr! truly might he indeed say with St. Paul, "I am ready to be offered." Happy those who can truly say, "I am ready."

A dozen soldiers, armed with sabres, now skirmished round him in mock combat, striking the martyr's head as they passed by. His head did not fall till the eighth stroke. A satellite then placed it upon a small table, and presented it to the mandarin, who returned to report the execution

at court.

Three days after Andrew's triumph, eight generous martyrs followed, one of whom had previously apostatised from fear, as already stated, but consoled the heart of Andrew, previous to his own martyrdom, by repenting of his criminal weakness. Two others had failed also on former occasions, but now generously atoned for it. The chief, by birth, of the little band, Charles Hiem, had his head struck off like Andrew Kim. He received ten sabrestrokes. His father had been martyred in 1809; his wife and son had expired in prison; his sister had been beheaded. In him his family became extinct, all martyred for Jesus; but their blood pleads in heaven for the country they watered with it, and shall raise up fresh children to the Church.

The seven others were strangled in prison, after having nearly expired under the blows of an enormous plank-a cruel mode of punishment inflicted on prisoners previously to their strangling. One of them received as many as sixty blows. Among them was the father of the pilot of Andrew's bark, who, till then a pagan, was cast into prison on account of his son's arrest. The unhappy young man having refused the grace of martyrdom, God transferred it to his father. No sooner did he find himself in shackles, than he was seized with a burning desire to die for the gospel, with which his previous acquaintance was very

slight. The judge, surprised at this determination in one whom he knew to be a pagan, asked him if he was acquainted with the commandments of God; to which the old man answered, that he was ignorant of them. The judge observed, that if such were the case, he could not be a Christian; to which the generous disciple of the cross replied, that among the children of a family some were large and some were small; some had intelligence, some as yet lacked it; that the larger knew their father best, but that all loved him. "I," he said, am a child; I can scarcely babble: yet though I do not know God, I know He is my Father; this is why I love Him, and wish to die for Him." He had his desire. Andrew Kim instructed and baptised him in prison. At the moment of strangling he exclaimed, "O Jesus, my Master! I give you what I have-my soul and my body."

Four women were also martyred, one of whom received seventy blows of the plank. She was a slave, and had already been nearly beaten to death by her master for refusing to join in superstitious acts. How do such incidents vividly recall to us the early days of the Church! or rather may we not say, since the Church is ever young with an immortal youth, that the sword can never strike her, but we behold her suffer with all the fervour of her first love!

"The persecution," writes the holy Bishop, Dr. Ferreol, "has left us utterly bereft of able men; all our secrets are discovered, all the inlets are rigidly watched." Thus Corea looks desolate and robbed of those who could best serve her, and of him especially, her young, her zealous, her first priest. But it is not so. They are now where they can better serve her. Blessed Andrew Kim! and you, happy companions of his triumph, joined to the white-robed army, with the aureole of martyrdom encircling your brows, together you are now pleading for your country before the throne of God and of the Lamb. Such prayers cannot remain unanswered; but shall doubtless bring down abundant graces and blessings on the land of your birth and of your martyrdom!

The Albigenses.

A story is told of Sir Robert Walpole, that on one occasion when his secretary proposed to read to him some work on history, he declined, saying that he preferred hearing something that was true, whereas history he knew to be false. His knowledge of the affairs of life, of the real motives and causes which led to public events, and of the way in which those events are described and accounted for in works that are given forth to the world as histories, had led him to this general conclusion, that all histories are false. And it is a very common saying, that history is one vast conspiracy against the truth. Now without examining into the grounds of this charge generally, we may certainly say as much as this, that what the Protestant world calls history, and especially Ecclesiastical History, or the History of the Church, is neither more nor less than a conspiracy against the truth, a conspiracy against God's Church. It is a systematic attempt so to distort and misrepresent facts as to bring discredit upon the Popes and the Catholic Church. The war against the Albigenses, or the crusade against them, as it was commonly called, in the thirteenth century, is one of those facts which is thus habitually painted in false colours, and made the ground of accusation against the Church.

The Protestant version of this event in history runs thus: "although the corruptions of Popery crept into the Church in the very earliest times, insomuch that, as a Protestant Archdeacon once said, "primitive Christianity is nothing more nor less than modern Popery," yet there have never been wanting a few chosen witnesses to the