MORTARA, EnoAu, a Jewish boy, whose case recently attracted great and painful interest throughout Europe. The facts arc as follows: On June 23, 1855, signor Monto!c Mortara, a manufacturer and wholesale merchant of cloth in Bologna, and by rag ions profession a Jew, returning home about ten o'clock at night, found his ho :se in the possession of the police, who informed hint that they had orders from padre Fe'lead, inquisitor-in-chief at Bologna, to carry off his son, Edgar, who had been surreptitiously baptized into Christianity by a Roman Catholic maid-servant. The inquisitor was waited upon by some friends of the family a little after midnight, who implored delay. He informed them that he was acting under the orders of the archbishop of Bologna, but consented to silt procedure till "next evening." The archbishop, however, was " absent " from the city, and next evening the papal cabineers entered the house and tore the child out of his father's arms." They carded him to Route, where he was immured in a convent. The bereaved father immediately followed, obtained several interviews with cardinal Antonelli, and offered to prove that the servant who said she had baptized Edgar had turned out to be a worthless prostitute, iiving in sin with Austrian officers. The cardinal declined to interfere, on the ground that the case did not come under his jurisdiction, and recommended signor Mortara to apply to "the proper tribunals." After some weeks bad passed, the child was removed to Alatri, whither his father and mother also went, and saw-Edgar in a church among a number of priests, but had no opportunity of speaking to him. They returned to Rome, once more sought the presence of cardinal Antonelli, and prevailed upon him so far that he ordered the child to be brought hack to the city, and allowed his parents several times to con verse with him. These interviews are described as agonizing, and Edgar earnestly
entreated his father and mother to take hint home, but this of course was a hopeless request. He had been baptized, and baptism, no matter by whom administered, was an inviolable rite, which laid the Catholic church under the solemn obligation of protecting its son from the snares of parental infidelity. It dared not give him up. Signor Mortara and his wife had to go away without their child. The case soon became known through out Europe, and excited great indignation, more particularly in England. The evan gelical alliance drew up a protest, which was signed by the archbishop of Canterbury and above twenty other bishops, by a large number of peers, members of parliament, .reads of colleges, and ministers of the gospel, by upwards of a hundred mayors and pro vosts, and by many other influential laymen. It was presented to lord John Russell. The British Jews presented another. Nothing, however, was effected by these efforts. Edgar Mortara remained, of his own choice, the result would seem to prove, in the hands of the Roman Catholic church authorities. He was educated for the priesthood, became' an Augustine monk of the monastery Notre-Dame de Beauchene, and preached his first sermon in 1874. The narrative, which created such excitement as echoed this boy's name,over all the world, was at the time taken by the judicious as an ex porte statement; no authorized exposition of the facts, on the part of the Roman authorities, having ever been made public.