PETER'S PATRIMONY

Senator Hefflin's latest and most vigorour lunge at the Catholic windmill will probably no more add to the gayety of the nation, than it will disrupt the minority party. For the Democrats, with the exception of some Senators, mostly southern, who remained away from the caucus yesterday, repudiated the Alabaman by unanimous support of his opponent Robinson. And if the fathers of this country are turning in their graves because a senator in Congress questioned the right of a man to be president because of religious belief, they may reflect that Hefflin is no typical senator, even if such heated squabbles in Congress over party issues have historical precedent. Nor are the man's allegations concerning the Mexican plot more than the chimerae of one who sees priests behind trees, seditious sermons in running brooks, and Jesuit plots in everything. But isolated as he is among statesmen, Hefflin unfortunately holds the views of a very large proportion of the voting population.

By all present indications, Governor Smith will be nominated for president by the Democrats at Houston next summer. And after that, if the dam does not break before will come the deluge, a deluge to throw religion into relief, and overflow a hundred volumes of Americana, or Heffliana. Prohibition has been a sufficient bone of contention, but it may readily be seen that man can never be aroused to battle over his right to indulgance or his desire to forbid it, as he can be harried into charging blindly when an ingrained and unreasoning religious prejudice is invoked.

The mountain, feeling its mightiness, has refused to move. But in England, amid furious controversy, Mohamat is preparing to go to the mountain along the road to Rome. Last week the presumably infallible encyclical of the Pope declared that if there is to be a unified Christian church, it will be the unchangeable Catholic Church, with the sinners gathered back into the fold. The Church seeks temporal power in Italy; it deplores Mexico! it disapproves of Prohibition in the United States. All these things bring it to the attention of American Protestants. But the open letters and Theological explanations intended to allay fear of the primacy of the Church over the temporal affairs of its communicants have made few converts. No logic can move the man who says flatly that he will not elect for his president one who has kissed the Pope's ring, even, it may be supposed, if the one in question is the greatest governor New York ever had. The stupid assertions about drinking that have been made by drys who now oppose Smith, are incredible enough, but atatcks on Catholicism by religious enemies of the Governor, by the example of Mr. Hefflin, are now seen to present even greater possibilities.