Page:Church and State.djvu/13

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as a Roman Catholic Christian of the highest and purest type, and occupied such intimate relations to Monseigneur Dupanloup, the great and good Bishop of Orleans, and to the Grallican Clergy of France, that his words must carry much weight with his kinsmen by race and religion in Canada. He says in writing to Dr. Von Dollinger praying him to attend the Vatican Council, and oppose the Ultramontane party:

Now, I am your friend, and one whose voice comes to you, as it were, from the other world. I have already lain down alive in my coffin, but the coffin is not yet closed. That is the place whence I observe, with the disinterestedness and impartiality of a dead man, all that passes in this world, and it is thence that I can speak with the authority of a dead man, to those who are still willing to hear me. In my eyes, no consideration would justify your absence from this Council, if you have the means of being present at it, and if, as Mgr. Dupanloup tells me, Cardinal Schwarzenberg has insisted, and still insists with the Roman authorities, that you should be summoned, no obstacle ought to prevent you from complying with this desire.

I swear to you that if I could espy any means whatever for myself, a simple layman, to be admitted to the Council, nothing should stop me. Wretched as my health is, I should strive to drag myself to Rome, even if I were to die upon the road, and supposing once I got there, I could not get an opportunity of speaking, I should go if it were only to protest by my presence, by that sad and steady look of which Bossuet speaks, against the rascalities which are going to be enacted, and are likely to triumph.

And I, I am nothing, I never have been anything in the Church, but you, who are unquestionably the first man in the Church of Germany, how could you refuse the mission of defending her, and representing her in this formidable crisis? God has bestowed upon you a blessing whose value you can never know, in granting you not merely a long life, which is a very small thing, but an old age without debility. It is your duty in return to consecrate this priceless gift to the glory of His Church and the defence of the truth.

The sense of coming evil must have been overwhelming in the mind of this eminent man, when he