to humble her friends, and without meaning to endorse the severe judgment of the defender of the house of Lorraine, we must confess that we have never seen a valid excuse for the strange conduct of the cardinal in intervening against Ferdinand,-who, as far as we are informed, had done no injury and offered no insult to France, and was only engaged in a war in defence of the just rights of his empire and of the church, and forcing upon him a peace in which were sacrificed the Catholic interests of Germany, and, in some measure, of Europe and the world. Such intervention would be much more intelligible, to say the least, in a Protestant, than in the minister of a Catholic sovereign and a prince of the church. But though we have not seen it, we are not prepared to say that the cardinal had no valid excuse, and we do not doubt that if M. de la Tour had set himself as heartily at work to defend this able, though certainly not faultless statesman, as he has to defend the Lorraine prince, Joseph II. of Germany, he would have found it no difficult matter to soften very much the judgments he has rendered against him.

The author apparently sees nothing to commend in any thing French, and he has no mercy on a single French prince or statesman. If good has ever been done in France, it has always been done by a Lorraine prince, an Austrian princess, or by a Bas-Breton prince, princess, or nobleman. The author is a native of Bretagne, and has served in the Austrian army. This is too one-sided to be true. France has committed great faults, great wrongs, but we think a sharp eye might find some redeeming traits in her character, and that she has had some virtues derived neither from the Bretons nor from the Lotharingians. We find much to censure in Louis XIV., yet we are not willing, when pleading the interests of the true faith, to join with heretics in condemning him for his energetic treatment of rebellious Huguenots. The author, we hope, will forgive us, if we say that we have detected in him, as in several others of our good friends in France, whom we highly esteem, and with whom in most things we warmly sympathize, a slight tendency to the whimpering sentimentalism characteristic of our times, over the punishment of great criminals, and which is no mark of real benevolence of heart or of true Christian charity. If the Huguenots of France had demeaned themselves as loyal subjects, if they had been contented with holding and practising their heresy for them

selves, and had suffered Catholics in their neighborhood to practise unmolested the true religion, the state might have permitted them to damn their souls, as they insisted on doing; but when they abused the liberty secured to them by the Edict of Nantes, to disturb the peace of the state, to persecute Catholics, to sack and burn Catholic villages, to destroy Catholic churches and convents, to murder women and children, or carry them away captive, it was the right, it was the duty, of the civil authority to intervene, and reduce them to subjection; for the first duty of every civil government is to protect the church, and maintain the freedom of religion, of religion, we say, not of heresy and infidelity, which, as far as we could ever learn, have not, and never had, and never can have, any rights, being, as they undeniably are, contrary to the law of God. After providing for the freedom of religion, and fully securing to every one the right to profess and practise it without let or hinderance from any quarter, it may be wise, just, and even necessary, for the government to leave heresy and infidelity to take care of themselves, and to go for what they are worth. We are no friends to severity, and we are perfectly well aware of the folly of trying to force men into heaven. God himself forces no man to receive his bounty, but leaves all men to the freedom of their own choice, subject only to the penalty of eternal damnation for choosing wrong; but we should be wanting in common sense, if we did not recognize the right and the duty of the civil government, when heresy and infidelity undertake to propagate themselves by carnal weapons, by fire and sword, to intervene, and by physical force, if necessary, to coerce them into peaceable subjects and harmless neighbors.

But passing over French politics, we cannot assent in all respects to the author's unqualified praise of the Lorraine princes. We quite agree in his vindication of the noble Guises, and thank him for it; we think highly of the dukes of Lorraine, especially of the good Anthony and Charles V. The Austrian princes certainly have often deserved well, not only of their country, but of the church; yet we cannot say that they have always been loyal sons of the church, and always true to Catholic interests. Maximilian united with Louis XII. in calling the Council of Pisa to deposeJulius II.; his grandson, Charles V., labored to establish centralism in his Spanish possessions, was very lukewarm in suppressing the Protestant rebellion in Germany, was not

very Catholic in his bearing towards the holy Council of Trent, and it was he, we believe, who made war on Clement VII., and they were his troops, who, under the Constable Bourbon, took and sacked Rome, and from whom the Eternal City suffered more than it had in early times from the Goths and Vandals. Maria Theresa was a party to the infamous partition of Poland, a crime and a blunder which must make the sovereigns dumb before the crimes and blunders of the demagogues; and her son, the half-crazed Joseph II., was undeniably one of the worst enemies the church in modern times has had, and he all but threw the church in his hereditary dominions into schism. The wellknown Josephine laws, so called from him, were a scandal to Christendom, and far surpassed any thing attempted by Louis XIV., or any other monarch on the throne of St. Louis. In no country in Europe-in the world, we may almost say was the church less free than she was in Austria from his time down to the accession to the imperial throne of the present young emperor, who promises to revive the early glories of the house of Lorraine, and to rival the fame of the pious Godfrey of Bouillon. Personally, the Austrian princes have been, for the most part, pious and exemplary Catholics; and though in general less irreligious in their policy than most other princes of Europe, they have not escaped the besetting sin of all secular princes, that of seeking to subject the spiritual to the temporal, of treating religion as a civil function, and its ministers as a branch of the civil police. They have almost always insisted on religion, but pretty uniformly on having it under their own control. The sovereign pontiff has generally had as much to fear as to hope from them, for they have seldom been unwilling to take the administration of religion from his hands into their own. Not much more can be said against the kings of France.

M. de la Tour is an ultramontane, but he will pardon us, we hope, if we hint that his ultramontanism is not quite enough for us. He doubtless concedes the papal infallibility, and the pope's supreme authority in all ecclesiastical matters; but he does not seem to have very well understood that the secular order exists only for the spiritual, personified in the sovereign pontiff, and should in all respects be subjected to it. We We try all princes and secular powers by their relations to the spiritual order, and care not a fig for any of them any further than they serve it. The church is

all and in all to us, and she is to us only through the sovereign pontiff. Our Lord founded the church on Peter, and we are submissive to her only as we are submissive to Peter, in the person of his successors. The sovereign pontiff is, under God, the fountain of all the authority we respect on earth, and we have no praise for those who offer him insults, or withhold from him the loyalty of their hearts. The saddest page of all modern history is that which records the ingratitude of individuals and nations to the holy pontiffs who, for these eighteen hundred years, have ruled the church of God, and labored for the eternal welfare of mankind. They have borne the brunt of the battle; they have been the mark for every arrow; they have been the peculiar objects of the wrath of man and the assaults of hell; they have often been insulted by their own children; and scarcely one drop of consolation have they during these long ages been permitted to taste, except that consolation which is vouchsafed them by the interior visits of the Holy Spirit. O, how the world has wronged them, and how slow and how loath are we ourselves to make them some little reparation! O, let us away with our cold, half-heretical reserve, away with our ungenerous distrust, and let our hearts gush forth in warm and pure love to the vicegerent of God on earth, and never for a moment suffer a mere secular prince to weigh in the balance with him!

We do not pretend that the popes are personally impeccable, nor that every pope has been a saint; but we have yet to see full evidence that any one of them during his pontificate, has been a very bad man. Nearly all we read against some few of them is mere calumny, invented by men whose projects they had thwarted, or by party, political, or sectarian spite and vindictiveness. We are slow to believe any thing against a single pope, and we have little doubt that even Alexander VI., after he became pope, would be found, if the truth were known, to be, even as a man, worthy of our respect. We place no confidence in Italian lampoons and pasquinades, and when we find a pope painted in very black colors, we always take it for granted that there were very wicked men in his reign, whose schemes of wickedness he defeated, and whose pride and ambition he offended. With this feeling with regard to the popes, the cold respect or courtly patronage shown them by the house of Austria does not satisfy us. We can honor as a truly Catholic government only that government which recognizes cheerfully the su

premacy of the pope, obeys him as sovereign, and loves and reverences him as a father. Such a government Austria, let M. de la Tour say what he will, never has been, and in reality no secular government of much importance ever was or ever will be.

Yet we concede most cheerfully that, upon the whole, the princes of the house of Lorraine and of Lorraine-Habsburg are hononorably distinguished among the princes of Europe, and that Austria has been, for the most part, the least uncatholic of the great European powers, though, unhappily, always, while laboring to preserve her subjects Catholic, inclining to the policy of the Byzantine emperors, which finally destroyed the church in the East. There is no doubt that, at the present moment, she is the most reliable Catholic power of Europe, and about the only one to which the friends of social order and Christian liberty can now look with hope for the future. Spain has been distracted, impoverished, and weakened by her revolutionary struggles and anti-Catholic policy for the last thirty or forty years. Portugal, of whom it was first said, "The sun never sets on her empire," has become a mere dependency of Great Britain; France, with generous impulses and Catholic instincts, is drunk with demagogie; Sardinia is under the control of the demagogues, and her whole influence is thrown into the scale of heathenism; the other Italian states, no longer what they were in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, have at least as much as they can do to protect themselves from the ravages of red-republicanism; Russia, a schismatic power, advances slowly, but surely, as the representative of the old Byzantine despotism, or monarchical absolutism; and our own country, losing its constitutional character, advances as surely, and far more rapidly, as the representative of demagogical absolutism; and where, if not in Austria, is, under God and his church, the hope of the Christian freeman?

Speaking with an eye to the immediate future, there are but three great powers of the first order in the world,-the United States, Russia, and Austria. These are three great representative nations, each representing a distinct and peculiar political system. The other states of Europe and America, owing either to internal dissensions or to external weakness, become important in the political order only in the direct or indirect alliances they respectively form with some one or another of these three. Russia represents the