THE Bulwark for April records some very important cases of conversion from the Church of Rome. It is stated that Lady O’Hagan, widow of the late Lord Chancellor of Ireland, her son and daughters have cast off their allegiance to the Papacy and adopted the tenets of the Plymouth Brethren. Her ladyship was a co-heiress to estates belonging to the Towneley family in England, and it is understood that she has given instructions for the pulling down of the Convent supported by this family for many generations. Lady O’Hagan belongs to one of the oldest Roman Catholic families in England, and this, it is said, is the first occasion that any member of her family has left the Romish Church.
“Another prominent secession from the Romish Church has taken place in Italy. All the Venetian and Lombardic papers give prominence to the letter written by Don Luigi Mizzi to the Bishop of Vicenza, in which he intimates his secession from the Church of Rome, and his union with the ‘Christain Evangelical Church of the Reform, because, studying the Word of God, doubts, that from the beginning of my ministry presented themselves to my mind, have become settled convictions that the truth of the Gospel is to be found, not in the Church of Rome, but in that of the Reform, which is nothing more than a reprisal of the religion of Christ, as taught by the Divine Saviour and by His apostles.’ Don Luigi Mizzi was one of the most popular and eloquent of Rome’s teachers and preachers in the north of Italy.”
The following secession is also announced by the New York Independent:—”In Rome, the Catholic Professor and Doctor of Theology, Filippo de Lorenzi, has become a Protestant. He has addressed a letter to the Committee of the Free Italian Church, in which he has given the reasons for this step. After stating that he was born in 1863, and had been a priest and professor of dogmatics in various colleges in Rome, he acknowledges that for years his heart had been filled with unrest, and states that he has found peace in the Evangelical Church, whose faith is based solely and alone upon the Word of God, and which lives in accordance with this Word.” This conversion is said to be welcomed with great joy by converts from the Romish Church in America.