have lavished upon it 'the moral support' of leading articles, and we shall reap the fruit of our labours.
It is a strange simplicity which pretends to wonder why France should ever have made a Convention when it withdrew its protection from the Holy See; and why it should have surrounded it with 'a moral cordon,' reserving to itself the right of intervention.
It did so because the Holy See is to France and to the Catholic world a centre in which they have supreme and vital rights; and it placed the security of the Holy See within the same defence which protects our persons and properties from burglars and murderers: the justice and conscience of Christian men, the public law of Christendom, backed by a supreme power which 'bears not the sword in vain.'
I have no doubt that they who counsel to Italy moderation 'for the present,' and hold out the hope of Rome in reversion when Pius IX. goes to his rest, sincerely believe themselves to be wise and equitable men. We are told also that the signs of the times are enough to show that Pius IX. is the last Pontiff who will hold a temporal sceptre. Some men will read even Holy Scripture backwards. They can also reverse the signs of the times. Those signs rather indicate that so long as there is a Christian world so long the Pontiff will be Sovereign. If the world should apostatise from Christianity, it then may be that God would scourge it by the fulfilment of its heart's desire.
But it is well for them to know that the Catholic world, neither now nor hereafter—neither at the
