Its triumph can be but temporary, and last no longer than the heated passions which have given it birth. The Church will regain her power and her rightful supremacy, but probably not in a society modelled after that of the Middle Ages. She then worked through princes and nobles, hereafter she must work through the people; she then operated by diplomacy and force, she must hereafter operate through the intelligence and conscience of the people elevated to an effective power in the management of their own public af

fairs.

This is the belief of Count Montalembert as of ourselves, and hence his earnest, persevering, and consistent efforts for free or constitutional government. It has been with him a principal object in this very Letter to Count Cavour before us, to vindicate the Sovereign Pontiff from the charge of having, in his late Allocutions, declared the incompatibility of the Church with modern civilization or of Catholicity and liberty brought against him by the infidel and nonCatholic press of Europe, and owned and defended by the principal Catholic journals, and no small part of the Catholic clergy of Italy, France, Belgium, and Spain. We have good authority for saying the Holy Father has declared no such thing, and that whatever sympathies there may have been among Catholics at Rome or elsewhere with the old political order, now warred against almost everywhere by the irrepressible instincts of the human heart, there has been no committing and no intention of committing the Church, by her Supreme Chief, to its preservation or to its restoration. Nothing has been said, nothing is implied in what has been said, in condemnation or censure of those Catholics who, like ourselves, have maintained the compatibility of religion and liberty, who have steadily opposed Cæsarism, and sought the freedom of the Church in the general freedom of the citizen.

That the Court of Rome has lavished encouragements on those Catholics who have been foremost in the war against the political and other changes effected by modern civilization, we are far from denying, or that in this that court has not furthered the interests of religion, or taken the best method of winning back to their submission the world escaping from the control of the Church, we are just as far from doubting. Our Catholic duty binds us to obedience to all orders in relation to spirituals emanating from the supreme spiritual authority; but our Catholic faith does not bind us

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to believe that the Court of Rome, any more than any other court, is infallible in its political administration or in matters of mere human prudence. We are free to hold and to say that we think the Court of Rome has committed a mistake in not following up the liberal policy inaugurated by our present Holy Father on his accession to the Papal throne, and in encouraging such men as Louis Veuillot, or such journals as the late Univers, or the present Monde. These men and journals, in consequence of the encouragements they have received, have gained an undue influence in the Catholic world, which they have exerted, so far as we can see, only for evil. They have misled a large number of the bishops and clergy in France and elsewhere, alienated the affections of many of those who, from the noble stand taken by Catholics in 1848 and 1849, had been strongly attracted towards her, and have seemed to commit the cause of Catholicity irrevocably to Cæsarism. Deeply now do Catholic interests suffer from this, as we believe, mistaken policy. The cause of absolutism in Europe is everywhere falling; Austria abandons it and seeks to give herself a liberal constitution, and even the Emperor of France has judged it prudent to permit a freer expression of opinion and greater publicity on political subjects than were at first allowed in his empire, and has gained the adhesion of a large class of liberals whose support might have been obtained for the Catholic cause. But, notwithstanding this, the Church is not and cannot be committed to the cause of despotism, and Catholicity itself is still, as ever, the friend and the support of all true or desirable liberty.

We are well aware of the defects of modern civilization; but these are defects which cannot be supplied without religion. Both civilization and religion suffer when separated. Civilization without religion necessarily becomes low and materialistic, and religion, when it fails to animate and direct civilization, fails in an important part of its work. The great evil of our times lies in the fact of their separation, and though neither is the other or a part of the other, yet, for the perfection or complete actualization of each, both should act in union. We gain nothing for religion by standing aloof from modern civilization and denouncing it as low, earthly, and unchristian, for it is not in our power to arrest its tendency, or in its power, without the assistance of the Church, to correct its defects or elevate its character.

When God would redeem man and raise him to the plane of a supernatural destiny, he makes himself man, assumes flesh with all its infirmities, sin excepted. In this is the principle of all reform, the higher seeks the lower, the perfect completes the imperfect, the firm take up and heal the infirm. God did not wait for man to come to him; he descended to man. So must it be with regard to civilization. If we would redeem it, and give it an elevated tone and character, the Church must accept it, take it to herself, and breathe into it her own pure and divine spirit. There is no intrinsic and invincible incompatibility between modern civilization and our holy religion; the Church can exist and perform her functions in a free as well as in a despotic state; the Church can deal with republics as well as with monarchies, and the people can be made as efficient servants of God as princes and nobles. Railways, steamboats, and lightning telegraphs may be used by ministers of religion as well as by ministers of state, and nothing can better serve the interests of the Church than the general education and intelligence of the people. There is nothing in Catholic doctrine, nothing in the teaching of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, or in the canons and definitions of Popes and Councils that makes it less Catholic to travel in a railway car or a steamboat than in an ox-cart, a coach drawn by horses, on horseback, or in a ship propelled by sails, to spin cotton by the mule or jenny, than by hand; or to recognize the sovereign authority of a national assembly than of a prince "born in the purple." There is, then, no more necessary hostility between Catholicity and modern civilization, than there was between it and the medieval.

The republican movements of the day have generally assumed a character of hostility to the Church, we grant; but not because there was any inherent hostility between them and our holy religion, nor because republicans, as such, are unwilling to submit to its authority, but because they have found, or imagined they found, the power and influence of the Church directed against them and wielded in support of despotism. The Church has no doubt suffered much and must suffer still more during the transition from the previous political order to that which is now in process of establishment; but she has suffered no more, and is likely to suffer no more, than she suffered in the transition. from the imperial Roman system of the first centuries to the feudal system of the Middle Ages, or from the feudal

system of the Middle Ages to the monarchical system established in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the first she lost the greater part of the East; in the second fully one-third of the North and West; in the present transition she need lose no nation, and would lose but few individuals, if her children could be persuaded that the republican hostility is only accidental and not necessary, or could understand that the friends of constitutional government have hearts no less susceptible of religious influence than are the hearts of the friends of despotism. The evil lies in regarding what is accidental and temporary as inhe rent and permanent. If the ministers of religion would take as much pains to prove to the party of progress that they can have all the progress they desire without abaning the Church, that they do to prove to them that their progress without religion is no real progress and can have only a fatal result, the evil would, in great part, be removed, and religion and liberty be permitted to walk hand in hand. The great mistake is in supposing that the error is not mutual, but all on the side of the liberal movement. Unhappily the friends of religion and the friends of progress fall into precisely the same error, each hold that liberty and religion are mutually repugnant one to the other. Hence those in whom the passion for liberty predominates break from the Church and make war on religion, while they in whom religion predominates break with modern civilization and anathematize liberty. Each is alike hostile to the interests both of the Church and of civilization; both need to correct their views, for both lose sight of the real relations between the natural and the supernatural. True wisdom demands the conciliation of religion and liberty, so that there shall never be imposed on any one the terrible alternative of choosing between them or of sacrificing the one to the other.

Nevertheless there is something to be said in extenuation of the conduct of those Catholics who refuse to accept modern civilization and its changes, and in defence of the policy which for the last few years has apparently been pursued by the Court of Rome. Rome has been placed in a difficult position; she has been opposed and her very existence threatened by the democratic revolutionists, and has had only the despotic and arbitrary governments of Europe on which to rely for her defence against them. To have declared in favor of the liberal movement or to have

withheld her encouragements from those who combatted red-republicanism or socialism, even from the point of view of Cæsarism, might have been to throw away all the temporal support on which she could rely, and to have armed the governments as well as the mob against her; besides, Catholics are affected like others by their social position and human interests. They, no more than others, can see broken down or destroyed the order of things under which they have been born, grown up, and lived, without feeling that a great evil is threatened them or that they should do their best to resist it. Those Catholics in Europe who have resisted, and resist, the changes and revolutions still going on, have done, and are doing, no more than we who are loyal to the flag of our Union, and rapidly arming against the great Southern Rebellion, are ourselves doing. We believe it our duty and our interest to make the greatest efforts possible in defence of the institutions bequeathed us by our fathers and to preserve in its integrity and its efficiency the government we have inherited. We take our stand on the side of constituted order, of legitimate authority, of loyalty. European Catholics who resist the revolutionary movements of their respective countries do the same, and must be regarded as acting from as pure, from as high, from as noble, and from as disinterested motives as ourselves. They believe in neither the wisdom nor the necessity, in neither the justice nor the utility of the changes proposed to be effected, and therefore are fully justified in their own minds and in their own consciences in offering the most effective resistance to them in their power. Taking their stand-point, we cannot censure them, but, if we have any sense of loyalty, or honor, or chivalric sentiment in our natures, we must applaud them; for then we could see no more merit in the party they resist than we ourselves can see in our Southern rebels and traitors.

The complaint we make of them is not that they resist political and social changes in their capacity as loyal citizens or subjects, but that they attempt to bind the Church to the order they defend and to render her interests inseparable from its preservation, thus calling to their aid a power to which they have no right and committing the Church to an order which is passing away. They seem to us to continue their resistance in the name of religion when resistance has become vain. We resist firmly and with all our power the attempt of the rebels in our own country to dis