Not many weeks since, a friend of ours, a Protestant minister, was providently thrown into companionship with an intelligent and highly-educated gentleman belonging to a Roman Catholic family in Canada. A pleasant conversation sprang up between them. It was not long before our friend noticed a smile passing over the countenance of his Roman Catholic companion, who soon explained the cause by observing: "Sir, this is the first time I ever had any intercourse with a Protestant minister. My family would believe that I was lost forever, if they knew that I had talked with one." And then, looking earnestly at our friend, he added: "Pardon me, sir, but will you tell me: Is there any consolation in your religion? In ours, there is none." We need not recount the words in which the Protestant minister undertook to bring to this darkened mind the comforting words of the Gospel of free salvation by the merits of Jesus Christ our Lord, the glad tidings of a completed work, a sacrifice for sin needing no repetition upon any earthly altar, supplemented by no priestly or saintly intercession, and excluding the very notion of any future purgatorial fires. But what a confession of the unsatisfactory character of the faith in which he had been brought up, had this sincere and candid Roman Catholic made!—Sel.