church of iron refuses every such advance. Those who ask to be united to her, she receives with the robe and the ring and the joyous feast, but it is noted of her that she receives none at all unless they come like the prodigal, with the prodigal's humble cry. These hate her as they hate nothing else on earth, far more than they hate sin. They dread her far more than they dread Satan. Everywhere they find her. Put forth the strong hand of civil law and banish her from one land, she rises in another, buoyant, unflinching. Nay, banish her, and behold she fears neither law nor death. With or without disguise, cunning as serpents, when men fancied themselves rid of her, her priests are among them, where only yesterday they were driven from the land. Strange as the church they serve her servants are. The soldier, armed to the teeth, finds them unarmed among the Indian tribes; the savant meets them in his wanderings; they are side by side with, and often far in advance of the explorer and the adventurer. You cannot move them by the tender pleas which conquer other men; the name of wife or child is as nothing to them. Threaten them with loss of worldly goods, and they tell you that their very badge is poverty; send them to prison, and they count it honor; sentence them to death the most shameful, or load them with lifelong disgrace, and they thank you for a transcendent joy and glory which they declare they gain thereby. Talk of miracles as fairy tales! the things which her enemies say of her might rank in a like category, then, by their constant contradictions. She is tawdry and a sham, says one, and at the same instant another is bidding you beware of her exquisite beauty, her deadly charms. They accuse her of destroying Bible truth, yet have no choice but to grant that if they possess a true Bible at all today, it was she who preserved it for them during ages commonly styled dark ages, but which she regards as glorious with Divine light. They say she gives an undue honor to saint and angel, yet find nowhere else such passionate devotion to Christ the Lord. They call her ambitious, and behold, the poor are crowding round her altars; they call her a tyrant, and her slaves declare such bondage to be better far than freedom; they call her a foe to science, and her scholars stand up with earth's wisest and surpass them all. Poetry and art and music have lavished for centuries their choicest treasures at her feet; she is adorned with all that is most rare and precious; yet she is found in the haunts of sin and squalor, among the poorest and the vilest, taking with serenest patience the lowest place. beggar's son may win her highest honors, and emperors cannot escape her stern rebuke. A Men strive hard to silence her, to cast dishonor on her reputation, to tear her children from her arms and lead them into other folds, or leave them desolate with no abiding-place. They declare themselves her equals and superiors; claim that they too send forth missionaries, that they too have sacraments and ministers, that they too pray, praise and give thanks. But speak of miracles wrought continuously, with no breaks and no doubts, from the time of Christ even to this very hour, and something is found at last which compels them to change their mode of warfare. It would be a dangerous thing indeed for them to grant the truth of such marvels, for they would thus tacitly concede to the Church which they rank as evil a power for good and strength and healing, which would shine forth in strange contradistinction to these sects which have it not. And so They And so men calling themselves Christ's people do not shun to give her the lie; men saying week by week, and some of them day by day, "I believe in God... Almighty,' protest that the servants of the Almighty have no power now to do what Jews could do before the world's Redeemer came with grander might; men claiming that the Bible, and the Bible only, is their religion, read there of One whose promise was that greater works than his had been his followers should do, and then limit the words of the Omnipotent to a time that suits themselves. They have lost, God help them, the very meaning of the creed they often profess to hold. Refusing to hear the only voice that can guide us infallibly through the tangled maze of time, their minds comprehend no longer what their lips speak. They cannot fathom the depth of meaning, the glory and the strength of the last clause of the creed, the belief in God the Holy Ghost. Speaking to men unmistakably today as of old, speaking through a human instrument chosen by the Lord Himself, it is the unfailing and active presence of God the Holy Ghost that makes the Holy Catholic Church mistress and queen of nations, through honor and dishonor, through infamy and good name, dying, and behold, she lives, having nothing and yet possessing all things. She cannot be uprooted, in whom the very Lord and Giver of life dwells. She must work wonders when he is in her. Unabashed by the wild tumult round her, she puts forth her steady persistent declaration that she is "the Catholic Church of God, which he has established by innumerable miracles, and illustrated by the lives and deaths of innumerable saints." But men who will not receive this, men who claim that a visible unity is not needful, or who are striving to gain back by their poor human devices the unity they have parted from, but could not break, have lost, too, the practical belief in the Communion of Saints, and have little or no practical conception of what the Catholic Church is. The statesman of the time of Louis XIV would find his old ideas of statesmanship sadly out of place were he set down in the French cabinet of to-day, but he could a thousand times better undertake to guide the ship of state over those stormy seas, than Protestants can comprehend the animus and working of the Church of the Living God. She puts no limits to the power of her Supreme Master, sets no time when the signs of his omnipotence shall fail, deems it no marvel that miracles are wrought. To her great faith the only marvel she is capable of feeling, is that more are not wrought, and for this she never dreams of supposing that God is the cause, but while men are branding her with the stigma of gross superstition, or are calling her a liar, she is reproving her children with the Lord's tender reproof of old: "O ye of little faith, why do ye doubt?" She uses in her sciences another alphabet than man's. Communion of Saints implies a union with God, which wins the use of the very powers of God. His true Church lives upon His word. What has He not promised to faith? what has He denied to prayer? If leagues and mountains lie between His people and the accomplishment of His will, He who has made England and America talk together to-day as men talk face to face, shall make distance nothing, and bring mountains low at the prayer of faith. Her Do we count Plato a babbler because he knew nothing of steamboats and engines, or Euripides an idiot because he never heard of the telescope and telegraph? But a veil which hung before their eyes has been withdrawn for us. It is not that we have more genius than they; it is that more knowledge has been revealed to us. Electricity and steam existed through all the centuries; it is a special use of them which we are enjoying. What finite mind can know, or predict, or so much as fancy the hidden powers which an omniscient God still holds in reserve till He chooses to let us grasp them? He who made time and space, light and darkness, life and death, can do what He will with each and all. Had one ventured to tell the first settlers of Massachusetts, that a time was coming when across that ocean which they had struggled over wearily for weeks, a message would be sent in a moment, and men would read in their New England homes at night what had taken place in Old England only the night before, it is strongly to be suspected that he would have been denounced in Puritan meetings as a "light person," and a liar. Yet, that to them preposterous idea is an ordinary fact today. Shall the mind of God accomplish no more than His creature man can do, or shall He promise that whatever we ask we shall receive, and then fail in His promise because the usual human means have failed? The God in whom we trust is an Almighty God. One important point in regard to one subject demands attention from us as citizens of the United States. It is true that Protestants in general have lost faith in that which is implied by the Communion of Saints, but it is also true that there exists among them a vague, hungry sense of that loss, and a reaching after something to fill the void. Spiritualism is the fruit of this, but still deadlier fruits are ripening for the future. We are told again and again that ours is a marvellous time and land, but hear it as often as we may, we are not capable of grasping the awful extent of the marvel. through our South dwells a people among whom it is stated that the smouldering fires of their natural, Afric heathenism, are breaking out into a lurid flame. Upon our prairies, many red men, smarting with cruel wrongs, worship their Great Spirit still. Asia is sending her children among us, and the Chinese All joss-house is found in this land which in common parlance bears the name of Christian. We are seeing the dawn of a terrible day. Satan has greater knowledge than any scholar among us; he knows well that there is in the marvellous a mighty power for good or for ill; he has a patient cunning and a ready wit. Time and again he has striven to match himself with God; he is gathering his forces to try the deadly war again. When the hour comes that he "shall show great signs and wonders," what shall be able to cope with him except a Church that can, like Moses and Aaron in Egypt, and our blessed Lord and his disciples in Palestine, do works more wondrous? And how shall there be pointed out to discordant sects and infidels and heathens the only path that leads to truth? What shall avail to snatch them from error as brands from the burning, except a voice which is infallible and unmistakable, the very centre of unity, the present and unfailing instrument of God the Holy Ghost? The Chronicle of St. Antony bears on the page which corresponds to an ordinary dedication page a prayer of the saint, which later in the volume is translated thus: "O Light of the world, infinite God, Father of eternity, Giver of wisdom and knowledge, and ineffable Dispenser of every spiritual grace, who knowest all things before they are made, who makest the darkness and the light, put forth Thy hand and touch my mouth, and make it as a sharp sword to utter eloquently Thy words. Make my tongue, O Lord, as a chosen arrow, to declare faithfully Thy wonders; put Thy spirit, O Lord, in my heart that I may perceive, in my soul that I may retain, and in my conscience that I may meditate; do Thou lovingly, holily, mercifully, clemently, and gently inspire me with Thy grace; do Thou teach, guide, and strengthen the comings in and the goings out of |