needful is already on board. Past ages were wild and perilous, but the future bids fair to exceed them in violence, as a hurricane exceeds an ordinary storm. The times of the Council of Trent were tempestuous: but for these three hundred years the licence and the violence of free thought, free speech, and a free press which spares nothing human or divine, have been accumulating in volume and intensity. All this burst upon the Council of the Vatican. And in the midst of this, the Vicar of Jesus Christ, abandoned by all powers of the once Christian world, stands alone, weak but invincible, the supreme judge and infallible teacher of men. The Church has therefore its provision for faith and truth, unity and order. The floods may come, the rain descend, and the winds blow and beat upon it, but it cannot fall, because it is founded upon Peter. But what security has the Christian world? Without helm, chart, or light, it has launched itself into the falls of revolution. There is not a monarchy that is not threatened. In Spain and France, monarchy is already overthrown. The hated Syllabus will have its justification. The Syllabus which condemned Atheism and revolution would have saved society. But men would not. They are dissolving the temporal power of the Vicar of Christ. And why do they dissolve it? Because governments are no longer Christian. The temporal power had no sphere, and therefore no manifestation, before the world was Christian. What matter will it have for its temporal power, when the world has ceased to be Christian? For what is the temporal power, but the condition of peaceful
