east, and west, over land and sea, to the Successor of S. Peter. There were bishops from China, and the far east of Asia; from California, and the far west of America; from the far north of Tartary, and of Canada; from Australia and the islands of the Southern seas. There were present the chief pastors of at least thirty races and nations. No voice but one in all the world could have called together such an assembly—the voice of the successor of Peter, to whom the whole world was committed, of the Vicar of Him to whom 'all power in heaven and on earth is given.'
It is not, then, in the majesty and splendour which meets the eye that the magnitude and grandeur of this event is to be measured. Taken only as a demonstration of moral power, and of the superiority of the moral over the material order of the world, the assembly in Rome at this moment, in the face of all menace of wars and of revolutions, has surely a significance far wider and deeper than any event in our times. More than this: no event, since the last General Council was closed, has manifested so luminously to the intellect, and, I may say, so palpably to the sense, the unity, universality, unanimity, and authority of the only true Church on earth. I am not only bound, but glad, to acknowledge the truthfulness, justice, and candour of those who, though not of the Catholic Church, have written from Rome the description of what they saw. With one or two exceptions, not worthy of notice, their narratives
