when the intention was first made known. It was when the two years of the Convention were expiring; when all human help was departing from him, and men thought the time was come for the downfal of the temporal power. The French armies were to be withdrawn in December 1866. Then it was that the Holy Father invited the bishops of the world to surround him in Rome in June 1867. Men of the world counted it to be madness. While they were prophesying revolution, anarchy, and I know not what, the Holy Father, with calm confidence in God, began to make preparations for celebrating the Centenary of S. Peter's Martyrdom over the tomb of the Apostle. The event has justified his confidence, and taught a lesson both to the world and to ourselves: to us, that we be more courageous, and to the world, that it be less pretentious in its prophecies. It has manifested, with an evidence which no one has dared to deny, the life and the power of the Catholic Church. We had been listening to daily discourses on the decline and fall of the Church as a power among the nations. At the moment when men were exchanging gifts and congratulations, as they believed, over its dead body, the Head of the Church spoke, and the bishops, literally from the four winds of heaven, assembled round him. It was not a command, it was not even an injunction; it was a simple invitation, an expression of his wish. Five hundred bishops, with a multitude of the priesthood and faithful of the Church, came up from north, south,
