The Sun. — 1857-09-28 (London, England)

MUTINIES.  Yesterday morning a pastoral letter from Cardinal Wiseman was read in all tha Roman CAholic places of worship in the metropolis, on the subject of the Indian mutinies, directing that next Sunday be set apart by the Roman Catholic body as a day of humiliation and prayer, and that a collection should be then made for the objects specified. His Eminence says : " When lately, dearly beloved i❑ Christ, our country was afflicted with war, we called upon you to pray to the God of Armies for yid ry and for peace. They came to ns in good time ; and, scarcely heeding these lesser wars which harassed our Eastern frontiers in Persia and in China, we believer? that we had before us a long period of national tranquillity, and of cansequent prosperity. "And now so soon again we have to invite you to call aloud to the God of mercies that He would spare us the afflicting and harrowing scones which have been, and ase probably still, acted on our own trrritories, of which those possibly dear to us, at least our own people, are the victims ; and that Be would once more give back order and quiet rule to the continent of India. " Who will attempt to de: cribs the terrible calamity which has overwhelmed us? 'Behold a litt►e cloud came out of the sea like a man's foot,' and while he who beheld it ' turned himself this way and that way, behold the heavens grew dark with clouds and wind, and there fell a great rain,' not, alas ! of refreshing waters, but of gore in battle, and blood i❑ massacre. For truly bad it had been merely war with its usual array of evils that we had to deplore—had there been suddenly commenced the conflict of brave men in honourable warfare, it would have been enough to ss.dden us and to direct our t houghts to supplication for peace. But here it has been the sudden rising of an inemense army, subject as much as our troops at home to the Crown of this realm,—armed, trained, clothed, and fed by the power which there represents it ; their rising by conspiracy, which has silently and darkly included tens of thousands, to break out openly like a plague in separated spots, under one law of cruel perfidy and treacherous brutality. Almost without exception, as you all have learnt, regiment after regiment has murdered the officers who had led them to battle, and who trusted in their fidelity, till the volley was fired or the thrust was made which laid at the feet of Cowards those who living had made them brave. Far, transformed by that deed of treachery into assassins, these hordes of sava.%e mutineers seem to have cast aside the commonest feelings of humanity, and to have not merely resumed the barbarity of their ancient condition, but borrowed the ferocity of the tiger in the jungle, to torture, to mutilate, to agonize, and to destroy. Nay, if we hal imagined to ourselves the unchecked excesses of .a fiendish fury by which legions of demons let loose against a tribe accursed of God would have marked their progress of devastation, the picture would have fallen short of what has been perpetrated, in a land that we called our own and thought that we had blessed wita earthly happiness, on those whom many around us know, whom some near us may have tenderly