their way to Rome to dethrone, not the Pontiff only, but Jesus Christ. God has not permitted the outrage to be perpetrated. While we were praying, day by day, in the Holy Mass, and before the most Holy Sacrament; while in Rome households were saying at the first hour of night the Litany of our Blessed Mother, with an invocation of St. Peter and St. Paul for the protection of the City; the head of the revolution, with its leader in all his prestige, was crushed and swept off the Patrimony of the Church by a blow so sudden and so complete that not a vestige, except the dead, wounded, and arms of the invaders remained on the field. Men will read this event differently. Some will see in it no more than a battle and a victory. We see in it also an answer to prayer, and an act of the power of God. It has once more saved the head and centre of Christianity from outrage and sacrilege; and they who gave their lives in the defence of Christianity may be numbered with the martyrs. But over that field of slaughter and of flight there hangs a gloom as of a funeral pall. The unhappy men who fell with weapons in their hands raised against the Vicar of Jesus Christ were regenerate in baptism, and once illuminated with faith, and members of the Holy Catholic Church. In boyhood they had made their first confession and first communion as you did. But some terrible illusion of Satan, and the snares of secret societies, blinded and entangled them. I would fain say, 'Father, forgive them, they know not what they do!' But how could they be ignorant of their sin? There is mourning for them in many homes, and we mourn over their misery;
