Dubois explains his tardiness in answering Purcell's letter because of the amount of work he has to do. Besides his work as bishop he has the duties of the ministry at all hours of the day and night. There are 30,000 Catholics in New York and he has only 6 clergymen to help him. He has two chaplains to share his bread but cannot use them because they have to attend above 800 people in the hospitals some 2 or 10 miles out of the city with their work of catechizing the children who were formerly neglected. In his old age he must trot over the city ten times a day so tired that he cannot sit up at night as he used to do at the Mountain. It is a second cause of grief that he could not claim Purcell to be a prop in his old age and could not see him when he came through the city to hear about his old friends in France and to talk about Purcell's brother whom he thought had changed Edward Purcell. Purcell is not to blame him for accepting this present burden which he had determined not to accept until it was forced upon him. Everything seems to go better than might have been expected. He found the church there enslaved. The first thing he did was to buy a church he owned. It is his castle. The trustees have been less ready to oppose him because of it. His visit over a part of the diocese in which he traveled over 3000 miles has convinced him of his need of workers and the evil of those who overran the state until they had achieved their booty. He is a cripple until he gets the tools he needs. One of his plans is to get missionaries besides the pastors to overrun the diocese like the missionaries in France to give the jubilee and then retreats. He will then have the advantage of enclosing Protestants in the nets. That is the way the Methodists entrap so many souls. Others would form a free missionary Catholic society but the laymen would try to get control of it. But he wants the church to go in untrammelled freedom. If Purcell has not seen his first pastoral letter he will send it to him with a new one addressed to the parishoners of his new church. :: II-3-o - A.L.S. - English - 3pp. 4to. 2