THE THREE KINGDOMS.

HIS Excellency Baron Haynau's appearance in London at a season when, according to Horace Walpole,
absolutely nothing abides in London but flabby mackarel and wooden gooseberry tarts, will probably be
thought by devout believers in "newspaper dispensations" attributable to nothing so much as that fact, and the
news-famine prevailing in consequence. Else he would surely have come at the season which extends its
welcome to all such visitors; and, feasting, flattered, and caressed, would have come and gone like any
other lion. As it was, he stayed but a very short time; and, grateful as news-writers may have reason to
be to him, it was difficult for news-readers to peruse "without a feelmg of vindictive pleasure" (as
Mr. Macaulay remarks of the mobbing and flight of Judge Jeffreys) the mobbing and flight of Baron Haynau.
In brutality to gentle women, and cruel ferocity to noble men, the General takes rank above the Chief
Justice; for Jeffreys never had an equal chance of glutting his thirst for blood. To have hanged thirteen
general officers at Arad, on the same day whose dawn at Pesth had witnessed his brutal murder of the
chief magnate of an ancient land, is a chance that falls to few, and perhaps the solitary deed by which
Haynau will be remembered. His biography will be easily written. When to the fact just stated it is
added that he flogged women for speaking ill of his emperor, and that after his emperor had rewarded
him with dismissal, he was pelted out of England in disgust by a parcel of brewers' draymen, history will
have closed its record, contemptuous but not unsalutary, of his Excellency the Baron Haynau. It will
hardly trouble itself to inquire whether he passed from his retreat in the dust-bin to the repentant arms of
his imperial master, and exchanged the drayman's broomstick for a marshal's baton. His flight from
Bankside will be the culminating point of his career.

Of other home incidents there are not many that call for remark, unless exception be made for another
batch of Popish converts, including a weak-minded lord, the relative and the sister-in-law of a protestant bishop,
two well endowed vicars, a richly-beneficed rector, and a few young sentimental lovers of Roman Catholic
fopperies. These Puseyite secessions to Rome are to be regarded with no feeling but of satisfaction by all
good Protestants. The danger is not from those who go, but from those who stay. The difference is
between a fair and a treacherous enemy; and, as the good Arnold says, we would honour the one and hang
the other. To take a notorious instance. Mr. Allies, the vicar of Launton, has only held his post in the
English church (to the disgrace of those who for the last four years have suffered his continuance there),
in the hope and with the purpose of betraying it; and there is really nothing in the fact of his now openly
joining Rome, but a gratifying confession of the failure of his treachery. The heart of the great body of the
English people was in our judgment never sounder in regard to all such matters than it is at present.
There would be more danger in the secession of one member of the sturdy, thinking, middle-class population, than in fifty such apostacies as those of the latest batch recorded. Our only desire is that people who
still remain in the English church with the hope of obtaining what they call self-government for it, may
follow their friends as fast as possible. Self-government means independence of state-control, and
independence of state-control means uncontrolled domination, and uncontrolled domination is popery.
"The system of mixed education," says the address just published by the Roman Catholic synod at Thurles,
with more candour than its writers probably intended, "may have been devised in a spirit of generous and
impartial policy; but the statesmen who framed it were not acquainted with the inflexible nature of our
doctrines." That is perfectly true. There is no middle course for the devout adherents of Rome, nor is
there any middle point of compromise for her Protestant admirers. There is no elasticity, no adaptability to
progress, in her doctrines or in her institutions. Poor Pio Nono tried it, and found them "inflexible;" and
now his Holiness sits in St. Peter's chair with his brain half shattered by the attempt. The big manly voice
that at the outset of his pontificate sounded like a new evangel, has dwindled back to the old childish treble
about miracles and mothers of mercy. His great acts since he resumed his seat have been three. He has
satisfied the doubts of true believers as to the immaculate conception, he has recognised the miracle of the
picture that winks its bare-faced eyes at Rimini, and he has denounced all education over which the Romish
Church shall not be suffered to sit supreme.

Very humiliating is it to have to add that the latter decision directly affects these islands. The Synod of
Irish priests at Thurles, becomingly presided over by a prelate-editor who had denounced the astronomy of
Galileo and Copernicus as an insult to the wisdom of Moses and the son of Sirach, has implicitly obeyed its
infallible Head, and the Queen's Colleges are condemned. It is said that the condemnation passed by a
majority of only one; and that one a substitute for an ailing bishop, craftily provided by Doctor M'Hale; but
in the present temper of the Pope this will matter little. The mischief is done, and is likely to get all
possible help and confirmation from the College of the Propaganda. Quantum valeat, the decision may be
taken as settled. The Irish Roman Catholics, then, are to be taught on Roman Catholic principles, or not to
be taught at all. Newton is to be filtered through Dens, Herschell through the learned primate Cullen, the
text of Plato through the glosses of M'Hale, and politics and history through the Index Expurgatorius.
Their science and astronomy, as well as their history and morality, are to be strictly orthodox: and what
this kind of orthodoxy means, a dispute now raging in France explains to us. The Archbishop of Paris,