of Europe would have immediately arisen to answer; for they were created and elevated to a civilized condition by the Church. France would have replied, formed, according to Gibbon's expression, by the hands of bishops. Spain would have replied, adapted to laws, as Guizot confesses, and civilly and politically fashioned by the decrees of councils. Germany and England would have answered, drawn, as it were, from nothing and worse than nothing, from barbarism itself by the zealous labors of monks, who becoming apostles introduced civilization with the faith, and dictated laws and established customs. Scandinavia and Russia would have answered, which received the first seeds of civilization, the one from the holy bishop Anscherius, the other from the holy bishop Ignatius. All civilized nations would have answered, who from the Greco-Roman corruption or the ferocity of barbaric hordes were regenerated to civil life through the indefatigable labors of the Catholic Church. and so

The suppression of slavery, a most ancient wound in the social body, inveterate as to be considered forever incurable; sovereignty reduced to its pure conception of a sacred ministry, ordained not for the glory of him that reigns, but for the good of the people, who are governed: the dependence of violent subjection converted into a decorous and meritorious obedience, because no longer given to man on account of man, but to man on account of God, whose place man holds upon this earth: the heroism of the Crusaders, in comparison with whom the most celebrated warriors of history and of ancient fable dwindle into insignificance: the liberation of Spain from the Saracen yoke after 800 years of obstinate fighting: the right of conquest abolished, unless a solid reason justified it: the centuries of conflict between Christian civilization and Ottoman barbarism, terminated by the definite triumph of the former: the discovery of the New World: the most useful inventions that the present age enjoys: the master-pieces of every kind of art and science: the most stately edifices, wonders not less of architecture and strength than of mind and hand: these and other such wonders, which no age will ever rival, not to say, surpass, are precisely the glories of that society, which was developed under the influences of the religion of Christ.

But now-a-days things are quite different. That powerful and magnificent progress was broken in the midst of its course. A great separation was brought about between society and the Church. The emancipation from the divine authority of this Church, proclaimed by the apostate of Wittemberg, has gone on enlarg ing itself by degrees, and from the religious sphere has passed into morals and science, and hence into the civil and political orders and, as it were, into all the relations of human life. Instead of the resplendent and undying torch of faith, the dim and flickering taper of human reason has been substituted. To the pontiffs and sacred doctors have succeeded the philosophers and philanthropists, to whom the supreme government and direction of ideas regarding the progress of nations have been given. The treaty of Westphalia uprooted and separated by one blow the political principle from the religious. From that time alliances, treaties, war and peace have been deprived of every spiritual element, and governments have no other laws for their deliberations than their exterior worldly interests. Princes have withdrawn their temporal authority from all dependence upon the spiritual, not thinking that they thus opened a way for its dependence upon the caprice of the multitudes. Laws of a vague and loose character have been introduced, having no other tendency than to promote mere earthly interests. The new assemblies that have taken the place of the old, are merely laic and political. Science is to be cultivated merely in the name of reason and under the direction of Vol. I.-No, 7.

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the state. Education is taken from the clergy and entrusted to the laity, who alone are proclaimed equal to the exigencies of the times and the depositaries of the new wisdom. Philanthropy has been substituted for charity, that is, the love of man for man's sake is substituted for the love of man for God's sake. Institutions of public beneficence are withdrawn from the hands of the clergy in order to subject them to the civil government. The Church has lost her influence upon industry by the abolition of the corporations of arts and trades. Every thing in fine has been secularized.

Not satisfied with this, the new reformers were ingenious in weakening the action of the Church even in the purely religious circle, by prohibiting the publication of the decrees and rescripts from Rome without the placet or permission of a kind of lay anti-pope; or by the obstacles thrown in the way of a free communication between the bishops and their supreme head; or by the impediments to the celebration of councils; or by the disesteem of the canon law; or in fine by the almost total withdrawal of the religious orders from the obedience of their general superior residing in Rome. And thus, after having deprived the Church of all influence in earthly affairs, and shut her up within the precincts of the temple to govern there the consciences of the devout, they have sought by a thousand clogs and incumbrances to diminish and weaken the hierarchy even in matters entirely religious, in order that her action may be curtailed as much as possible.

Now such being the separation and withdrawal of the civil and political order, and of all the social relations, from the religious, is it not clear that the world unjustly blames and condemns the Church, for not acting any longer in human affairs? If itself has removed and impeded her influence, what impudence on its part to tax her with doing nothing, when on the contrary it formerly nailed her to the cross, on the plea of her doing too much? What unexampled cynicism! Is it not adding insult to rebellion? Is it not a contempt and ridicule of common sense, or of that decorum which should be observed exteriorly, at least, if not further? Whoever is not mentally blind, must perceive, and whoever has not grown hardened to falsehood, must confess, that when this outrage had been perpetrated, there remained nothing else for the Church but to confine herself to her own sphere and devote all her energies to the prosecution of the duty assigned her by Christ, in the sanctification of souls. This the Church has done: and the world has no right to throw upon her the blame of its own defection, or to complain that she no longer obtains for it what by its rebellion from her it is unwilling to receive. As long as the Church continues the salutary work, which is her direct aim, so long does she labor for the cause of true civilization; because she saves its principal and vital elements, which are truth and virtue. As to the other parts of this civilization, which have a more immediate reference to material developments, she is compelled to leave them to their own care and to the purely natural evolution of the social faculties.

And here notice the admirable but terrible designs of divine wisdom. Exactly in this its fault did the world meet with its chastisement. The Church constrained to leave civilization to the world, in fact abandoned it: and by this abandonment alone it inflicts upon it the most terrible punishment, by giving it up to a reprobate She behaved in its regard, as God had already done with the wise men of paganism. As St. Paul teaches in his profound epistle to the Romans, they knew God, but did not glorify Him as God. The apostle shows us in consequence, that the just Judge in punishment permitted them to become "vain in their thoughts and their foolish hearts were darkened, For professing themselves to be wise, they

sense.

....

became fools. And they changed the glory of the incorruptible God into the likeness of corruptible man, and of birds, and of four-footed beasts, and of creeping things. Therefore God gave them up to the desires of their heart, unto uncleanness, to dishonor their own bodies among themselves. . . . to shameful affections being filled with all iniquity, malice, fornication, avarice, wickedness, full of envy, murder, contention, deceit, malignity, whisperers, detractors, hateful to God, contumelious, proud, haughty, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, foolish, dissolute, without affection, without fidelity, without mercy." Such is in part the magnificent panegyric, the noble sketch which the doctor of the gentiles has drawn of those ancient philosophers, so glorious, so bepraised in pagan history: and such the reproof he casts in their teeth, for not having been obedient to God. We know not what certain honey-mouthed men will say of this, who knit their brows and distort their countenances, when they hear some sprinkling of these invectives against other characters, more impious even than were the ancient pagans. Returning however to ourselves; a similar misfortune seems to have fallen on this worldly civilization in its rebellion against the Church. It had known the Church of the living God: and instead of venerating in her the incorruptible God, who established her as His city and kingdom, it turned away to adore corruptible man and invoke the aid of quadrupeds and serpents, as certainly some of the philanthropists and regenerators of these days could be called, in consideration of the folly of their doctrine and the poison of their practice. Well-by the just judgment of God, the Church has given it up to a perverse sense. Thus all may have a true experience of the value of human civilization, when the light and strength that come from above are refused to it: and whoever will not change his ideas, will be inexcusable.

To comprehend well this practical lesson, a few sketches will suffice: the limits of an article not permitting us to write more at length. We shall then only glance at the miserable condition of philosophy in Germany, politics in France, industry in England.

As to Germany, in what at last have ended all the gigantic efforts, the long meditations, the unmeasured erudition of the sublimest understandings? In forgetting the most elementary and obvious principles of right reason: in the loss even of common sense: in involving themselves in a labyrinth of vain formulæ, at one time idealistic, at another sceptic, at another still pantheistic, among which you seek in vain a path by which to extricate yourself. The pestilent gloom, void of all comfort and bringing only anguish and death, began to extend from the Northern clouds over the rest of Europe, threatening to pervert, to extinguish all light of the mind, every affection of the heart. And wo to us, if the Church, shining in the midst of us as an inextinguishable beacon, had not imparted to us her supernal light, or preserved by Catholic instruction the truths most essential to the moral life of man. Who can know into what an abyss of most pernicious errors we would now be tossed in the name of progress! Great are the evils of ignorance, but far greater are those of false science. It is a hundred times less harm to know nothing, than to be learned to the ruin of what is true and good. In France too, after so many theories and disputes about social and political right, the publicists of a country that deems herself the mistress of nations, saw themselves obliged to distil their brains in order to teach and defend, what? the first rudiments of civil society, property and the family, beset at the same time by the force of the populace and the sophisms of bearded universitarians. Unchained from the professor's chair and the arena of the schools that it might pass into the

street, the hydra of socialism and communism reduced the honest citizens of that generous nation, after having experienced all forms of government, to the brink of a social chaos, and forced them, through the hourly dread of robbery and assassination, to the cruel necessity of entrusting to the musket the guardianship of their property and life: a worse state than is found among the Bedouins of Asia or the Black Feet of America. And had not a providential man, more through a divine dispensation than through human thought or foresight, crushed by a masterly stroke the idol that threatened the extermination of its stupid adorers, we would have seen the savage state renewed in civilized Europe and every social element in a blaze.

And the new Tyre! Though the envied queen of the seas and almost the ruler of Asia, yet she has drawn no other fruit from her vast commerce, her long traffic and refined manufactures, than to reduce to the most lamentable indigence better than the third part of her population, and reproduce, in the midst of Christian civilization, a slavery, under certain aspects, more frightful than the ancient. In her caverns of fossil coal an immense crowd of adults are buried alive, to drag on a little while a life poisoned by the pestiferous exhalations of their mephitic abode: and in her noisy factories a crowd of youths stupefy their minds and ruin their health in casting a piece of cotton or wool between the swift woof, with no other advantage than that of not dying of hunger. And yet he who has read the history of his own times, knows to what inglorious shifts that government was obliged to have recourse during the late revolutions in order to prolong her political existence. These are the glorious and precious fruits of civilization emancipated from the Church.

Nor is this all. Withersoever we move our steps or turn our looks, we meet with the lurid speeches, the frightful images of social corruption. The increasing indigence of the masses: the multitude made the tool of cunning and factious demagogues: crowds of languid working men, crushed under the burthens of a brute to increase the profits of cruel and avaricious speculators: the lower orders restless, prone to crimes hitherto unheard of: eager for an earthly happiness, which they will never taste, and forgetful of a heavenly beatitude, which they might with certainty enjoy every where unbridled desires, ferocious hatred, and overboiling passions.

Lying philanthropists! Were these your magnificent promises? In vain do you flatter us, magnifying the external splendor of modern society, pointing out the facility of intercommunication, the ease and expedition of navigation, the political machinery so elaborately finished. In vain do you think to quiet us by showing us your machines, your founderies, your athenæums, your philanthropic institutes, your artifices of government. We ask you for life and you show us the grave. Break, cast down that wall, so beauteous apparently, and beneath you will see the nests, the filth of the serpent and every creeping thing. And of what will you glory? Of your colleges? But, if you remove the element of Christian education, they become houses of corruption, where the strength of the wicked is wasted even before it is developed. Of your universities? But entrusted to the government of mere reason, from abodes of wisdom they are transformed into hotbeds of revolution, nests of sectaries, that bring up youth in ignorance and immorality. Of your academies? But they present the image of Babelian confusion, if the horrible doctrines there imbibed did not paint in our minds something yet more horrible. The people educated by you become more miserable, ungovernable, without loyalty, without morals, and what is worse, without hope. The

asylums for beggary, the institutions of public beneficence, withdrawn from the care of those who served there gratuitously for the love of Christ, are converted into inheritances for office-hunters, who fatten on the tears and sufferings of the poor. Heaven forgotten, religion despised, crimes multiplied, a burning thirst for pleasures, equally pernicious when satisfied and not satisfied: minds puffed up with pride: souls hardened by egotism: such is the work of your hands.

Meanwhile, what are you doing? Laughing in your heart at all these wounds, with a theatrical compassion, you offer new promises, hoping still to find some who will believe your lies. Cease to mock our miserable humanity. You are incapable of producing any good. And do you know why? Because you want the spark of divine charity: and this must be necessarily wanting to you, because you want faith in God. Look at what you do, when you wish to be compassionate. You run to sound the trumpet, to write in some journal, what given by the right hand Christ desired should be unknown to the left. You do even more. Stunned by the clamors of the indigent and the hungry, if you resolve at last to give them some relief, you plan some party, a ball, a philanthropic feast, that the excitement of voluptuousness may be the principle and the companion of the purest among the virtues. Nor in truth can you act otherwise: because the pagan spirit, which you have raised up again, has no other way to work but in the voluptuous delights of the senses, as it has no other support for its belief than in the staggering dictate of human reason.

This is the sublime grade to which the reprobate world has led its civilization by its rebellion from the Church. God grant that things may stop here. But if a prompt and efficacious restitution of the union between civilization and the Church do not take place, subjecting it to her guidance and guardian care, we shall fall into evils yet worse and perhaps irremediable. It is not necessary to swallow the chalice of evil even to the dregs, in order to know the insidious poison. Our past experience is enough. For the rest, the sole reading of the works of these modern reformers, who speak without mystery, shows clearly to what an unhappy term they wish to lead us. They unveil the jargon of the deceitful language held by others, who believe it their duty yet to dissemble. These tell you openly, that when they promise to remove misery from the world, they mean by misery every restraint on their wicked desires and animal propensities. When they promise a perfect form of government, under this name they understand anarchy, which they enshrine and deify. When they affirm that the chains forged by despotism and fanaticism must be removed, by chains they mean the laws of justice, honor and modesty. When they promise a purer religion, they mean atheism, not only permitted, but commanded to each individual. We should be led too far, were we to continue this dark and atrocious exposition. He that loves to know more about them and to assure himself by authentic testimonials, can read the excellent work entitled: Sketch of Socialism: in which the original texts are reported at length. In the meanwhile let us conclude that the reproof against the Church of not being now a civilizer, proceeds not only from a distorted idea but from a forgetfulness of an historical fact. The subject well examined not only justifies the Church from the accusation, but besides convicts the world of dishonesty: and of a dishonesty not only censurable on account of its intrinsic guilt, but execrable too on account of the very grievous losses of which it is the sad source, by separating human progress from its true principle of life.