RETURNING TO THE FOLD.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXX, Issue 17, 24 April 1902, Page 3

RETURNING TO THE FOLD.

The St. Louis Church Progress reports the reception into the Church of Mr. William A. Hobbs, a well-known journalist and proprietor of the local ' Register,' on his deathbed. Mr. and Mrs. Lucas-Shad well have been received into the Church by Mgr. Merry Del Val in the ptivate chapel of a convent at Rome. Mr. Lucas-Shadwell was for some time member of Parliament for Hastings and is a Justice of the Peace ond Deputy Lieutenant for the County of Sussex. A report (says the Brisbane Age) has been current during the last two or three days that the Rev. P. G. Howes, one of the clergymen in Rockhampton, of the Church of England, was about to join the Roman Catholic Church. The report has been confirmed. Mr. Howes arrived in Brisbane the other day and ascepted an assistant mastership at the Christian Brothers' College, Nudgee. Mr. Howes, 8.A., Keble College, Oxford, was ordained in 1898 by the Bishop of Ely. He was curate at Huntingdon till 1899 when he was appointed curate of St. Saviour's, Croydon, but the same year he resigned that office on his acceptance of the position of curate of the Anglican Church at Longreach. He served there for some time, and then was appointed to Rockhampton where he had served since. Mr. Edward McFarlane, proprietor and owner of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands, died in the Auditorium Hotel, Chicago, recently. Mr. McFarlnne and hie brother, Frederick, a man also of great wealth and influence, were in Honolulu during the mission given by the Jesuit missionaries, Fathers Boarman and Magevney, of Chicago, and became deeply interested in the doctrines of the Catholic Church. Frederick was at once received into the Church. Within a month Edward married a Catholic lady of California and started on his wedding tour to Europe. A few days after reaching Chicago, Mr. McFarlane was taken ill with pleuro-pneumonia and sent for Father Boarman, who had arrived before him. The priest hastened to his bedside and finding him perfectly disposed received him into the Catholic Church and gave him the last sacraments. The recent death (pays the Boston Sacred Heart Review) should not pass unnoticed of the Rev. Henry Irwin, MA , Oxon., a Church of England minister in the far West, familiarly known as ' Father Pat,' an itinerant missionary, who was received into the Catholic Church before his death. A prieat relates the following anecdote illustrative of his goodness of heart : 'On one occasion he walked nearly forty mileß to reach a telephone, to call me to the bedside of a dying Catholic miner, though the dying man did not himself ask for the consolations of hia religion. After leaving the sick man, I met "Father Pat," and his joy was almost boundless when I told him I was in time to give all the last saciaments.' The Rev. Rudolf Altschul, formerly a minister of the Reformed Episcopal Church, was recently received into the Catholic Church with his wife and five children, in the Church of St. Paul the Apostle, New York. Mr Altschul and his wife are middle-aged. Their children, three girls and two boys, range in age from 22 to eight years. Mr Altschul moved a short time ago to New York from Philadelphia. Since going there he had devoted his time to lecturing, literary work, and preparation for entrance into the Catholic Church. The entire family were instructed at the same time. Mr Altschul, in reply to a newspapsr representative, said that he had studied the question for a number of jears before he made up his mind to abandon the Reformed Episcopal Church. Finally, he said, he called upon Archbishop Corrigan, who gave him a letter to the Paulist Fathers. He and his family were under instruction for a number of weeks. Speaking of the cause that led him to become a Catholic, he said : ' I found indifferentisin in the Protestant Church and a great disregard for the sacred truthi of Christianity. I also became satisfied that the Church of Christ can be ruled by only one visible head. Writing in reply to a letter sent by a Wesleyan minister to an English paper Mr Frank Banfield, M.A. (Oxon), says: — 'The Engglish Catholics in the United Kingdom in 1802 probably did not number 100,000. Since 1840 or thereabouts something approaching half a million of English people have come into the Church as converts, and they have married, many of them, and multiplied. Now, for a long time past, the Church has received about 10,000 converts a year. Many of them have been men of known reputation for talent and integrity. I will in this connection content myself with mentioning Newman, Manning, Faber, Pugin, Ripon, Coventry, Patmore, Bute, De Lisle, De Vere, and so on. lam a convert mybelf, and I have a very

large acquaintance, both Protestant and Catholic, but especially Catholic. I know personally many convert?. Speaking as a man of the world, my impression is that, taking our converts as a whole, they are about the average Englishman in ability, as they most distinctly are in earnestness, force of character, and religious knowledge. Such men and women exercise influence. . . . There i<», in fact, a large non-Catrolic population whose sympathies are with the Church, a population which is growing, a population much more sympathetic than some nominally Catholic populations. . . . No Catholic in the h^ur of death desires to become a Protestant, but the number of English non-Catholics who at that dread moment Eeek the harborage of the Catholic .Church is great as our priests know well.