TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.

Ir has become an axiom, more especially since public and private enterprise have rendered the original records of our country so easily accessible, that no work which is not professedly and principally based upon their authority has any claim to be considered as a serious contribution to historical science. The glowing pages of a Froude or a Macaulay, which do but reflect the prejudices and prepossessions of their writers, and which leave the reader in doubt whether to admire more the felicity of their diction or the reckless audacity of partisanship which colours every paragraph, have long ceased to be regarded in the light of sober history.

The volumes now offered to the public have no pretensions to challenge competition with those masters of literary style. Their claim to favour rests upon the fact that they profess to lay before the reader a faithful picture of the progress and development of the Catholic religion in Scotland.

Such a picture has not yet been presented in its entirety before the eyes of our countrymen; and it is one which cannot fail to be of value to all who take a thoughtful interest in the history of their native land, in which Catholicism has played, and perhaps is destined to play again, so important a part.

"We are not sure," says an able writer in one of the leading Scottish journals,1 speaking of the progress of religion in the Highlands, "that Romanism has not a future before it in the North. When the Celtic people move at all, they move impetuously, rapidly, and conclusively. If once the idea of order, government, and authority in the Presbyterian Churches, weakened by lay agency on the one hand, and their own inefficiency on the other, dies out of the general mind, and if the Roman Church, taking advantage of this fact, were-by its zeal and skill in working on the springs of human thought and action -to produce a new wave of religious fervour, it might sweep before it all the divided and ill-disciplined forces of Protestantism, and re-establish among the Highlanders the impressive unity and persuasive authority of Rome. In religious as in natural history, we are inclined to adopt Darwinianism. Among conflicting forms and organisations the fittest will survive; and in the one sphere as in the other the strongest, wisest, and best adapted to its ends proves itself, as far as human 1 Glasgow Herald, September 1886.