IN THE worst days of Protestant persecution in England there is no parallel to what has recently happened in Melbourne, Australia. St John’s Church in that city has for some time been a centre of Catholic teaching and worship; it has a large congregation, mainly composed of converts and emigrants from such well-known Catholic centres in England as All Saints’, Margaret-street, St Michael’s, Beckenham, St Cuthbert’s, Philbeach-gardens, St Silas’, Kentish Town, and others. Formerly, for sixty years, the parish, which contains twenty-two thousand souls, was in Protestant hands. Six years ago the church was nearly empty and the parish slumbering in indifference. Today — or rather yesterday — there was a well-attended daily Mass, the Blessed Sacrament reserved, over seven hundred children in the Sunday-schools and three hundred on the Catechism and kindergarten rolls. But all this splendid work, which has the whole-hearted support of the parishioners, is being brought summarily to an end. It appears that the parish priest, the Rev. Cyril C. Barclay, who was formerly of the North Queensland Bush Brotherhood, returned from furlough, spent in England to attend the Anglo-Catholic Congress, to find that advantage had been taken of the vacancy in the Archbishopric of Melbourne to sell the church and land to a city merchant for £35,000! This outrage was the act of the diocesan authorities, and was carried through in the face of protests of the vestry and congregation.