light. Then slowly it faded again and so returned; faded and returned. The light had a curious effect, bringing out the cliff on which it stood in a spectral way, and flinging ghostly shadows over the ship's deck. A small schooner, with a light at her masthead, was creeping along the shore, and was sometimes revealed, and picked out as it were from the surrounding darkness, by the light from the revolving lantern.

Close by is Camperdown flagstaff, one hundred and sixty-eight feet above high water, from which arriving vessels are signalled to York Redoubt, the next signal station inwards. As we passed we could observe the lights going up in the profound darkness, signalling our arrival to the distant city. York Redoubt is an old fortification, situated on a steep granite cliff, giving it the appearance of an ancient castle at a little distance. It is named after the Duke of York, the brother of George IV. Another royal duke, the Duke of Kent, the father of the Queen, resided in Halifax at the be

ginning of the century, and held high revels there at what is still known as the "Prince's Lodge," on Bedford Basin. From York Redoubt arriving vessels are signalled to George's Citadel, which overtops the city, and from its lofty flagstaffs the flags or balls by day, or different colored lights at night, announcing the character and course of the incoming steamer, east or west, can be seen from every street and wharf.

It was within a few minutes of midnight. The red light on Maugher Beach opened ahead; a familiar sight from the city wharves. We entered the harbor, and passing McNab's Island and George's Island, with its Armstrong guns pointing out to sea and covering all approaches, the lights of the sleeping city came in view. We swung into the wharf a little after midnight. Some of the passengers who had friends waiting for them went ashore. The rest remained on board until morning, and then scattered to their various destinations.

WE are far from constituting ourselves judges in this question. We are simply jurors, whose attention is called to a notorious fact,-Europe has sinned, and is actually sinning greatly and multifariously. Another equally notorious fact presents itself to our observation, which we have no difficulty in discerning as the grand and palmary effect of the former, there is no peace in Europe. Not that the nations are in open warfare with each other; no, but because each suspects the other of foul and ambitious designs. Again, they suspect the people, and these in turn

the governments. Things are in a most abnormal condition, suspended in mid-air, as it were, and nations and individuals are ever on a torturing qui vive. There is neither peace nor war, but a gross disorder is everywhere prevalent. Philosophers and politicians excogitate theories, as numberless as senseless, to arrive at the cause of the disorder. But the Christian common-sense explanation of the whole matter is couched in God's own words: Non est pax impiis-there is no peace for the wicked. This is alike applicable to governments and individuals. A writer in

a recent number of the Civiltà Cattolica, reasons profoundly on this question. In the spirit of Christian philosophy, and guided in particulars by his lucubrations, we will review the transgressions of Europe summatim, intimating en passant, not ours, but the eternal judgments of God upon such prevarications. Against sinning governments God has written: "He will speak to them in his wrath, and in his fury will he disturb them" (Psal. ii, 5); and the sins of people reduce them to misery and wretchedness: "Sin makes people miserable" (Prov. xiv, 34). Europe has no longer peace, because in her directive, diplomatic, legal, or, as they say, official capacity, she has abandoned herself to irreligion, and has drawn a great portion of the people into apostasy. In this excess, which comprehends numberless others, Christian thinkers discern the principal cause of the actual state of things. State, did we say? No, chaotic perturbation is more to the point. Nothing is written or spoken of but arms, armies, fleets, alliances, dangers, probabilities, and possibilities of wars. Every nation seems to writhe in the throes of a mysterious flagellation, administered by God. Whether we gaze from the material and human standpoint, or from the moral and divine, we behold fear and confusion. The public powers tremble, individuals tremble, liberals tremble, Catholics tremble, the wicked tremble, the good tremble. The evidences of the overflowing of the cups of Babelic Europe, the civilizing, the progressive, and the enlightened, appear on all sides. That innate sentiment that the justice of God is at work, punishing socially, for the social crimes of governments and people, is aroused in the breast of every one, be he Christian or unbeliever. Well for our peace of mind were we certain that the heaviest blow of the chastisement had already fallen. But the peculiarity of the chastisement which is actually being

inflicted is, that terrible suspense, that certainty and uncertainty concerning the future-certainty that other punishments will come, uncertainty as to their nature and effects. Without touching upon the particular perversity of some states of Europe, which seem desirous of outsinning the foul demon himself, we will restrict ourselves to the solemn and public sins of Europe. The primary transgression, and root of all the rest, is the war against the Catholic Church, either waged directly, permitted, or at least regarded with indifference. There is not a nation in Europe which can say with truth, Innocens sum sanguinis hujus-I am innocent of the blood of this one. In this period of an age which calls itself singularly civilized, because singularly jealous of liberty, we are the witnesses of the abominable spectacle of the most unbridled license granted to every possible monstrosity in religion, and of the most inhuman tyranny exercised towards the Catholic Church alone. Indeed, legal or arbitrary injustice. towards the persons, things, and rights of the Catholic Church is regarded as the perfection of the civili- zation of the modern states of Europe; hence the more civilized are they the more they oppress Catholicity by their laws, vilify the hierarchy, impoverish the priesthood, throw obstacles in the way of worship, and render Catholic teaching odious. This so-called civilization simply resolves itself into antichristianity, which consists in separating everything which belongs to the civil order from the religious, politics from the gospel, public right from divine right, conscience from the Decalogue, the people from God, the faithful from the Church, and Christian society from Jesus Christ. All this is called secularizing the legislation, repristinizing, so to speak, the independence of the state and of the citizens, and restoring to Cæsar what belongs to Cæsar. Different states

sons and the laws.

Hence it is no unusual sight nowadays to behold this monstrosity,-every public outrage to the majesty of God is lawful, but woe betide the man who outrages the majesty of the ruling sovereign. For instance, in Germany, a horrible blasphemy against Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is regarded by the law as "an innocent witticism." But "an innocent witticism" pronounced at the expense of his Bismarckian celsitude, or his imperial majesty, is severely punished. In Italy, the man who laughs at the unity of God, is regarded as "a man of spirit," but the "man of spirit" who calls the unity of Italy into question, is imprisoned. From all this, blasphemy and profanity have become fashionable, and is to be noticed in the scientific and elegant world, among the laboring classes to an extent which excites the horror of our most ungodly Americans, and good round oaths of the most original coinage are not unfrequently heard in certain Parliaments. Add to all this the loathsome spectacle of public immorality, against which the governments of Europe not only take no measures, but they even vaunt their civilization in that they regulate it by sanitary laws, something unheard of in Babylon, in Nineveh, in Athens, and in Rome. And worse than all, in the country towns and villages, where immorality of this nature cannot thrive, the feasts and ceremonies of the Catholic Church are so hampered and restricted by the laws, that they may be considered as suppressed. This is done under the plea of providing for public order and decorum. In Italy, for example, the clowns of the Carnival are permitted to assemble in the public thoroughfares, but sacred processions are prohibited. The bust of the blasphemous Mazzini may be carried in procession through the streets, but not Jesus Christ in the Blessed Sacrament-forbid it decorum, and public health !

We pass

over the enumeration of the crimes

which are of daily and hourly commission. We would only remark that assassinations, robberies, and suicides are increasing frightfully.

Another great sin of the governments of Christian countries in Europe is the perversion of public instruction. Nearly every state has deprived the Church of her God-given liberty, and ignored her duty of educating the youth admitted within her 'pale by baptism. Where they have not taken this prerogative from her, they have hampered its exercise by odious laws. On the contrary, the most ample liberty is given to impious sectaries to convert the depositories of science into sinks of error and corruption. The secularization of instruction by the state has produced this effect, that materialism and atheism are taught publicly in the cathedra, and the young people are taught by teachers of government appointed, who are paid with the money of believing Christians, that God does not exist, that man differs but little from the brute, that the Gospel is only a legend, the faith of Jesus Christ superstition, that the immortality of the soul and its consequent happiness or misery in the world to come, a poetical humbug; that enjoyment here below is the end of life, and that the only divinity to which incense must be offered is the state. But God has beclouded the minds of these potentates, so that they cannot perceive that all this tends to the most absolute anarchy. We might say a great deal more about the manner in which elementary justice is doled out; about the liberty of conscience; about those abominable laws which are destructive of the domestic ties; about tributary systems and taxes which ruin patrimonies; about the taxes on blood, to wit, military conscriptions; about armies which reduce the people to the verge of starvation, and drink up the best blood of the nations; about articles in the civil and penal codes of laws which offend the most inviolable liberties

of man; but we pass on to the consideration of another of Europe's sins, not the least indeed, the violation and utter extinction of international law, that law which regulates the relations between one nation and another, and which our forefathers anatonomastically called, the Law of Nations, Jus Gentium. The secularization of politics in Christian states, and their separation from the eternal maxims of the Gospel, not only has made them lose the practical conception of the law, which, according to St. Ambrose, is founded in charity, and, according to St. Thomas, is reason existing in God, ratio in Deo existens, which is the mind of God, mens Dei, which is the supreme norma of human actions, but they have even lost the conception of the law of nature, of the essence of natural right, founded in sound reason, and which exists between man and man, between nation and nation. They have taken up another code, which they style the new, the supreme principle of which is interest, and the purpose is robberies, or to use the new phraseology, annexations, which St. Augustine calls great robberies, latrocinia magna, and the means of which are perfidy, deceit, betrayal, and brute force. Hence Bismarck's maxim, la force prime le droit, which is the juridical synthesis of modern civilization. The Viscount de la Guéronnière, one of the accomplices in the policy of Napoleon III, and who enthroned in Europe this diabolical policy, in a work written last year, a short time before his death, thus expresses his remorse at the extinction of international law, which he (falsely) says, perished in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. "The equilibrium of Europe, having left the long and patient labor of all the diplomatic traditions, has fallen under the tyrannical weight of the Treaty of Frankfort. Alsace and Lorraine, which were French for two centuries, have been detached from the nationality of which they had be

come integral parts. The national unity of France is wounded. The balancing power of the states is falsified. The independence of the weak is threatened. Liberty of alliance does not exist any longer. We must begin at the beginning, to do it all over again." But this famous intriguer had not the honest, common sense to perceive that the dissolution of international law had been commenced long before by his patron, Napoleon III, when he attempted to violate it against the Pope in the Congress of Paris, in 1856, and which he continued to do in the war of 1859. He forgot that the iniquities committed by the French Empire against the Roman Pontiff should, by a just judgment of heaven, be expiated in France, and by France, and that the political equilibrium of Europe was not lost in the Treaty of Frankfort, which took two provinces from France, but was destroyed in Rome, on the 20th of September, 1870, by the celebrated breach, without pretext, without provocation, which overthrew the august throne of the Pontiff, and constituted him in a state of moral imprisonment, and which the states of Europe should not have permitted. This act of the occupation of Rome, contrary to international law, was the seal which authenticated the death of public right in Europe, and was, at the same time, the title of a new debt which sinning Europe contracted with God. But she will pay even the last farthing of this debt, even as the first negotiator of it, Napoleon III, paid his quota in the humiliations of Sedan, and the exile at Chiselhurst.

That this debt shall be paid we have a pretty strong and consoling assurance in the life of Pius IX, whom Providence so visibly and wonderfully aids and protects. God, who in his infinite decrees established a temporal sovereignty of the Church, to insure the perfect independence of her chief pastor, permitted him to be